Archive for November, 2006
November 30, 2006 at 2:46 pm
· Filed under Cool items
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November 29, 2006 at 4:54 pm
· Filed under Cool Movies ·Tagged cooking shows
We have lots of cooking shows on the archive, but some are more entertaining than others.
My current favorite is Cibi Alterati, in Italian with English subtitles. They’ll (sort of) teach you to make Polenta with Ragu, Pasta Puttanesca, and Salad Dressing. In costumes, and with live musical guests.
Some other interesting choices include Cooking in the Nude, the Trailer Park Cooking Show with Jolene Sugarbaker, Cooking With Love Makes Pozole, an unneccesarily dangerous method for cooking sausage, and Cooking With Tom where he teaches you how to make napalm (not really).
If you’d like to learn how to actually cook something, try one of these:
If you’d like to see more cooking shows, do a search for keyword “cooking” on archive.org.
– Alexis
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November 22, 2006 at 8:16 pm
· Filed under Cool Audio
As days grow shorter and winter evenings stretch out ever longer, the contemplative voice of a solo piano can be quite soothing. The Archive has some wonderful selections to accent tea or wine-sipping evenings spent at home:
In addition to more traditional piano music, the Archive has a number of recordings of music for toy piano performed by Len Tan and presented by Other Minds:
Enjoy!
– Renata
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November 21, 2006 at 9:57 am
· Filed under News
Robert Altman has died at 81.
He began his career working at Kansas City, Missouri’s famed industrial film factory, the Calvin Company. As one of the Archive’s knowledgeable posters, “Mr.,” states, he made a number of sponsored films before his first feature, The Delinquents.
The Magic Bond, his 1955 film for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, is downloadable from the Archive. Does the first sequence remind you of a certain movie about the Korean War?
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November 20, 2006 at 2:03 pm
· Filed under Cool Movies
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November 17, 2006 at 5:25 pm
· Filed under Cool Audio, Cool Movies ·Tagged poetry
Audio
Texts
Videos
- Icons of Black Poetry, iconic poems read by 4th graders and acommpanied by images of their artwork
- Tatlin, a puppet animation of the life & work of Vladimir Tatlin, the constructivist artist, with an accompanying poem by Velimir Khlebnikov.
– Alexis
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November 16, 2006 at 3:53 pm
· Filed under Cool Audio, Cool Movies
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November 15, 2006 at 1:53 pm
· Filed under Cool Movies ·Tagged blues music
Today I ran across a great show from 1955 called Rhythm and Blues Revue with performances by Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole, Cab Calloway and Bill Bailey, among others. My favorite moment in the video comes about halfway through while Sarah Vaughan is singing “Perdido.” The camera pans over to the drummer who is obviously being forced to wear a ridiculously ruffly calypso shirt, and the look on his face is just priceless. The other highlight for me is Nat King Cole singing “Calypso Blues” about 3/4 of the way through.
I started looking around for some other good blues performances on the Archive, and found this gem as well: Eva Cassidy Live at Blues Alley.
A few other items you might enjoy:
– Alexis
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November 10, 2006 at 4:21 pm
· Filed under Cool Movies ·Tagged machinima
Machinima movies are made with real-time, 3D virtual environments, often appropriated from existing video game engines. The Archive has hundreds of machinima videos in the Machinima Collection, but here are a few of our favorites:
– Alexis
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November 8, 2006 at 9:40 am
· Filed under News
Sid Davis, chronicler of childhood menace and jeopardy, has died at 90.
Sid was one of the most distinctive independent filmmakers who entered the nontheatrical film field following World War II. Throughout his career, he expressed concern for the safety and wellbeing of children and teenagers, making some 150 films (the exact total is hard to determine) that rank among the most compelling cautionary works of the 20th century. Though he was a Hollywood insider and worked as John Wayne’s stand-in, he was a self-taught filmmaker, and his films look quite unlike anyone else’s.
There are 25 of his films online at the IA.
His obituary is here and here, and a Metafilter post here.
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November 7, 2006 at 10:07 am
· Filed under Cool Movies
While you wait for the results, check out two films from the Prelinger collection:
Tuesday in November (1945), a U.S. Office of War Information production, shows the election process and argues that American democracy is so robust that we can put on a free and highly contested election even in wartime. John Houseman made this film with Nicholas Ray’s assistance. Unfortunately not well known, this film is a landmark of idealist documentary film. Our copy is made from a beat-up 16mm distribution print and could be better, but the good news is that plans are afoot to preserve this film once and for all.
Behind the Freedom Curtain (1957) is a promo for the Automatic Voting Machine Co. of Jamestown, N.Y., explaining how mechanical voting machines count every vote fairly and make it impossible to steal elections.
U.S. residents, vote early and often!
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November 3, 2006 at 4:47 pm
· Filed under Cool Audio
Here are a few choice audio items to lighten up your Friday afternoon:
– Alexis
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November 2, 2006 at 1:03 pm
· Filed under Education Collection
The Archive’s Education Collection provides free university courses and lectures (usually videotaped). The newest collection in the Education Collection is the University Channel Public Affairs Lectures. Watch guest speakers such as Kofi Annan, Condoleeza Rice, Robert Rubin, Cornel West, Hans Blix, and Bill Gates as they address audiences at Harvard, Princeton, Middlebury College, and other academic institutions.
Note: the Education Collection works a bit differently from other parts of the Archive. To view all the available files for an item, click on “FTP” or “HTTP” next to the words “View all files” in the left-hand column of the item page. Then right-click the file you want to download and save it to your computer.
– Renata
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November 1, 2006 at 11:05 am
· Filed under New Audio Collection
Afropop Worldwide is a collection of radio programs that touches on the music and culture of Africa and people of African descent. This public radio program is hosted by Georges Collinet, and is heard throughout Europe, Africa, and the United States. Check it out, the music is great and you’ll probably learn something too!
– Alexis
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If you’ve been nosing around the Web looking for free maps, the Archive’s new collection of nearly sixty thousand digital raster graphic (DRG) maps from the USGS is nothing to sneeze at. These maps are in the public domain, but getting access to them usually costs money. The Archive provides them for free thanks to the work of Jared Benedict of the Libre Map Project and donations from over 100 map liberators. For best results, the maps should be viewed with global positioning software or a map viewer.
