I DON’T WANT YOU TO PANIC OR ANYTHING BUT YOU ARE ON A LOT OF...

I DON’T WANT YOU TO PANIC OR ANYTHING BUT YOU ARE ON A LOT OF...:

I DON’T WANT YOU TO PANIC OR ANYTHING BUT YOU ARE ON A LOT OF ACID RIGHT NOW.

Art Book Bonanza

Art Book Bonanza: A few days ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art published online 368 full text titles also downloadable as pdfs. They range from major exhibition catalogues such as the 1983 Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomical Drawings from the Royal Library or the 1992 Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain, exhaustive lists of holdings (European Post-Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volumes I and II), art books like Degas: The Artist's Mind or The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints, facsimile editions such as The Cloisters Apocalypse: An Early Fourteenth-Century Manuscript, social history titles covering subjects such as fashion or dance, technical manuals for those wanting to know how The Care and Handling of Art Objects works and much, much more.

'R is for Rhonda consumed by a fire'

'R is for Rhonda consumed by a fire': Edward Gorey's gothic tales from the vault: '
Edward Gorey's arch eccentrics are on display in two reissues and a never-before-published story.'

Three Gorey titles have just landed on bookstore shelves. From Pomegranate Press comes "Thoughtful Alphabets: The Just Dessert & the Deadly Blotter" (64 pp., $14.95), previously published only in obscure, limited editions, and "The Osbick Bird" (32 pp., $12.95), a Gorey classic unavailable for four decades, except in poor quality in "Gorey's Amphigorey Too" anthology, but now restored to a clarity so sharp-nibbed it almost hurts the eye.



Bloomsbury is also in on the act with "Saint Melissa the Mottled" (48 pp., $12), an unpublished story that Gorey never got around to illustrating, supplemented here with images from the Gorey archive, some never before published.

Columbia University put on a Gorey exhibit last summer, after a large donation by Andrew Alpern.



A Treasure Trove of Edward Gorey

Gorey's work tends to combine whimsically grim storylines with dour yet dancerly protagonists. Whether they are Edwardian ladies, fur-coated gentlemen, ill-fated children, or unusual animals, his characters are almost always on some kind of journey. His stories often unfold in wallpapered rooms, on barren estates, or among statues, beast-shaped topiaries, and urns. "Few seem to return from the borders to which I've sent them," he wrote to Peter Neumeyer, with whom he collaborated on three children's books in the late 1960s. (Their correspondence has recently been collected in an absorbing, elegantly illustrated book, Floating Worlds.) Perhaps this is what gives Gorey's work its talismanic power: his books and drawings, which are so often about imagined deaths and disasters, turn into lucky charms for his readers.

LARB, again: "Consider "The Osbick Bird": It's a sweetly melancholy surrealist fable about Edwardian eccentric Emblus Fingby's odd (but fond) friendship with the even odder bird of the title. Gorey, an only child and lifelong solitary, was famously an odd bird himself — tall, long-legged and gawky like the bird in the book, with the luxurious beard of a Victorian literatus and a sense of style that ran to fur coats and tennis shoes."



The Osbick Bird, in video (youtube)

The Deranged Cousins, video.

The Deadly Blotter, video.

Flickr album of some of Gorey's illustrations. He also illustrated the cover for Kafka's 'Amerika'.



Previously on Metafilter: What if Edward Gorey Illustrated ..., How To Dress Like Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds: Letters Between Gorey and Neumeyer

Wax Tailor/Dusty Rainbow from the Dark

Wax Tailor/Dusty Rainbow from the Dark: Trip-hop/downtempo DJ and producer Wax Tailor (autoplay media) just released Dusty Rainbow from the Dark (album trailer), a narrated concept album about childhood, melancholia, and escapism. Two videos Time to Go (featuring Aloe Blacc) and Heart Stop (featuring Jennifer Charles) have been released. The album combines vocal collaborations with movie-line heavy compositions constructed through the turntable and sampler. (An earlier example is I Don't Know from Tales of Forgotten Memories.)

(Personal opinion: It's not a perfect album but one worth checking out.)

The Rijksmuseum Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

The Rijksmuseum Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art:

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is one of the grand European museums. Home to many of the Dutch masters (Rembrandt’s Night Watch, which seems to glow from its center, and Vermeer’s Milkmaid, to name just a few), the museum is located on the city’s Museumplein, surrounded by the smaller Vincent Van Gogh museum and modern Stedelijk.
All those masterpieces are now available for close-up view online at the Rijksmuseum’s digitized collection. Users can explore the entire collection, which is handily sorted by artist, subject, style and even by events in Dutch history. The new digital archive has all the same great learning potential as any other online collection. It’s searchable, as is the museum’s library.
But the Dutch are a whimsical people, so it seems right that, in digitizing its collection, the museum went a step further than further. Not only can users create their own online galleries from selected works in the museum’s collection, they can download Rijksmuseum artwork for free to decorate new products. (Note: users will need to create a free account to get started.)
By visiting the museum’s Rijksstudio, art lovers can create their own “sets” of Rijksmuseum works. Sets can include images of just flowers (think of the luscious roses and tulips in Dutch still life paintings of the 1600s), faces appearing in portraits, or paintings of Amsterdam itself through the ages. Just select a work of art and drop it into your own image collection. Then use these selected images to create your own personalized products. From tattoos to wallpaper to scooters (yes, scooters) to smart phone skins. Unusual yet everyday items of all shapes and sizes can now bear the image of gorgeous art. The art is free and the object could be as simple as a T-shirt.
All of this can be done with the blessings and support of the museum, which provides links to sites that offer various forms of printing on demand.
What better way to make the collection accessible to the public? Some might say it is sacrilege to put Rembrandt’s face on the side of a van; the Rijksmuseum encourages it. None of the artists are alive anyway to claim copyright infringement, now are they?
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16th-Century Amsterdam Stunningly Visualized with 3D Animation
Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Read more of her work at katerixwriter.com and thenifty.blogspot.com.
The Rijksmuseum Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Learn New Languages (From Arabic to Yiddish) with 150+ Free Podcasts

Learn New Languages (From Arabic to Yiddish) with 150+ Free Podcasts:

I spend a great deal of time visiting unfamiliar cities, spending days walking, cycling, or riding trains and buses through them. Sometimes the people of these cities speak languages I know; sometimes they speak languages I don’t. Either way, during all these hours in motion, my personal soundtrack comes from an iPod loaded with language-learning podcasts. If you’d like to engage in this delightfully mentally stimulating practice yourself — and I highly recommend it — you can get started by browsing Open Culture’s collection of Free Language Lessons available online. The list covers no fewer than 40 tongues, and many of the lessons come in podcast form. Should you find yourself in need of shows offering Bulgarian survival phrases, instruction in Swedish expressions and culture, or Polish in one minute a day, here is the list you want. From my efforts in studying Spanish, Korean, and Japanese, I can personally (and strongly) recommend several of its offerings.
Coffee Break Spanish and the more advanced Show Time Spanish, both produced by the Radio Lingua network (out of Scotland, of all places) start you off from an absolute zero of presumed knowledge and proceeds to get you up to “cruising altitude,” which I call the point in language acquisition at which you become able to learn from real, untranslated speech. You might then consider downloading a show like Notes in Spanish, and especially the conversationally focused Notes in Spanish Gold. For Japanese, few language podcasts cater to a wider variety of proficiency levels at once than does JapanesePod101, which I supplement with Japanese national broadcaster NHK’s lessons (which also come taught in quite a few languages besides English.) And for Korean, the language that first cultivated in me this whole intellectually and socially thrilling learning addiction, you can do no better than Hyunwoo Sun’s Talk to Me in Korean, quite possibly the most thorough, frequent, slick, and entertaining language-instruction podcast of any kind. Listening to these shows has convinced me that every moment spent not acquiring a new language is a moment wasted. But even if you don’t believe anything that extreme, it’s still a lot of fun. And doing it through these free podcasts, you certainly can’t argue with the price.
Here’s our collection once again: Learn 40 Languages for Free: Spanish, English, Chinese & More
Related Content:
375 Free eBooks: Download to Kindle, iPad/iPhone & Nook
450 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free
530 Free Online Courses from Top Universities
500 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Learn New Languages (From Arabic to Yiddish) with 150+ Free Podcasts is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Ishu Patel’s Oscar-Nominated, Animated Films Reveal a Singular, Handcrafted Vision

Ishu Patel’s Oscar-Nominated, Animated Films Reveal a Singular, Handcrafted Vision:
I’m happy to date myself and say this: in the days before computer graphics, when animators worked painstakingly by hand (yes, I know, computer rendering is painstaking), animated films just seemed… I don’t know, prettier, more impressively artful. I’ll take the heat for saying so and give you two short films as evidence, both from innovative animator Ishu Patel. Originally from Gujarat, India, Patel has made only a handful of short films in his twenty-five year career, most of them for the National Film Board of Canada. But six of those films won top honors at international film festivals and two—Paradise and The Bead Game—were nominated for Academy Awards.
Paradise (above), made in 1984, uses hand-drawn designs and so-called “under-the-camera” animation techniques such as cut-out, back-lit plasticine, sand, and painted glass to render an exotic and shimmering world. Each frame is a work of art on its own; in fact, Patel includes stills from the films on his site, some showing preliminary sketches. Much of Paradise takes place inside a palace that resembles an intricate chalk drawing. There, a lone monarch watches as a flamboyant bird (of paradise?) transforms itself into a dazzling succession of colorful forms. Outside, in a landscape right out of Henri Rousseau, a solitary black bird lurks, attempting to rival the other bird’s beauty, with little success. The original score by Gheorghe Zamfir (yes, Zamfir, of the pan flute fame) conjures Ennio Morricone.
In 1977’s The Bead Game (below), Patel’s first animated film, the setting is much sparser—a solid black background and a spare, percussive soundtrack by J.P. Ghosh. But the activity is unrelenting as a collection of beads evolve from single cells, to epithelial folds, to a series of creatures, each one devouring the previous until humans arrive. Once we do, we develop progressively more destructive ways to kill each other. The finale is a psychedelic tour-de-force. One can only imagine the amount of time and care that went into stop-motion animating these hundreds of beads. The effect is simply stunning and results in a singular vision one rarely sees in CGI-only work. Again, I’ll take the heat, but I stand by it: animation by hand produced work that no computer-generated image has yet rivaled.

Patel’s films will be added to the Animation section of our list of 500 Free Online Movies.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Ishu Patel’s Oscar-Nominated, Animated Films Reveal a Singular, Handcrafted Vision is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.