Online content can seem endless — but great, affordable content can be hard to come by. In this age, when everyone from your Pinterest-crazy significant other to your fantasy-sports-posting uncle claims to be a “curator,” it can be tough to see the thoughtful, informed forest for the know-nothing poseur trees.
Thankfully, there’s Open Culture — the free-for-all arts and culture education site dedicated to lifelong learning. Open Culture aggregates the smartest, coolest and funkiest bits from across the web, and enhances that content with free courses from top universities; instant access to thousands of movies, audio and e-books; language-learning resources; kids’ stuff; and more. Nobody wants quarantine life to go on forever, but if I could only have one website while weathering the global pandemic, I might choose Open Culture.
Below is a short tasting menu to get you started.
Great Courses Plus: Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature
Maybe you believe there’s an opportunity to build a better world on the other side of social distancing, fighting with your landlord and scouring the web for the cheapest wine delivery options. Open Culture has bundled up 94 free video lectures from the Great Courses Plus subscription video service. One of the most fascinating — and most relevant — talks is this breakdown on how H.G. Wells helped create both science-fiction and utopian philosophy as we know them today. It’s worth noting that the 1918 influenza pandemic hit right in the middle of Wells’ five-decade writing career, and even though his best-known works were published before World War I, his striving for a better world — as he saw it — never abated.
Ninja Death Trilogy
Open Culture corrals links for almost 1,200 films, from Oscar winners to silent classics to a dedicated section of Andrei Tarkovsky films. If you’re a serious student of cinema, there’s a lot to love at Open Culture. That said, these movie selections are as democratic as the rest of Open Culture’s curating, and a little curiosity and a bit of browsing can uncover gems like the Ninja Death Trilogy. There’s almost no online information to be found about this delightfully bonkers kung fu epic, but it appears to be a single four-hour film chopped into thirds for release on bargain-bin compilations. Most listings date these works to the 1980s, which was a golden age of ninja-inspired cinema. There are no titles, no credits, and the voice actors supplying the English dialogue abruptly change for unintended comic effect. The Ninja Death Trilogy looks like a movie that ran out of funds before heading straight to the home-video market. But this story about a kung fu student/bouncer and his hermit master defending a brothel from a hoard of menacing ninjas makes up for its rough presentation with comic-book gore, quick-kicking martial arts action, femme fatale swordswomen, and loads of so-bad-it’s-good charm.
Sun Ra Lecture and Reading List From The Black Man in the Cosmos
Nothing cushions the confines of quarantine life like perspective, and Open Culture’s illuminating Great Lectures section includes talks from big-picture thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, Carl Sagan, Michel Foucault and Margaret Atwood. But the next time your cabin fever flares up, I recommend a dose of cosmic consciousness in the form of visionary musician/composer Sun Ra’s The Black Man in the Cosmos. Ra (Herman Blount) was a college dropout, but he served as an artist-in-residence at UC-Berkeley in 1971 and offered this lecture during the spring semester. This talk is jammed with “intricate, bizarrely otherworldly theories, drawn from his personal philosophy, peculiar etymologies, and idiosyncratic readings of religious texts.” The accompanying reading list is bizarrely varied and full of strange and beautiful rabbit holes for the restless.
