Freddie Mercury & Rami Malek’s Live Aid Performance: A Side-By-Side Comparison

All Hollywood musicals need a big final set piece, one final rousing number to bring all the narrative threads back together, and provide redemption to our fallen hero. Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 biopic about Freddie Mercury and the band Queen, uses Live Aid as its final number. We’ve written elsewhere about how this was not really the final hurrah for the band, nor was this some kind of triumphant return after years in the Wilderness. (“Radio Gaga” and “I Want to Break Free” had been in the charts just over a year previous.) Neither was it their biggest concert of the 1980s. That would be the Wembley concert of 1986, where they would fill the exact same stadium used for Live Aid, but this time it was just for them.
But Hollywood cares not for that, so instead lets look at how faithfully Rami Malek and his fellow actors (along with what might have been Bryan Singer as director or possibly Brendan Fletcher, the man who replaced him after events we’d rather not go into, look it up) faithfully recreate those 20 glorious minutes. After all, it was one of the most watched events in the summer of 1985. There is video evidence!





I’ll leave it up to you out there to debate over Malek’s performance, which is going to suffer no matter what he does in a side-by-side with the real thing. Instead, notice how the filmmakers use certain parts of the performance to complete the narratives of the film. We get a cutaway to Brian May (Gwilym Lee) with a “by George he’s actually got it” look on his face—relief that Mercury finally got it together for the performance. There’s no equivalent shot in real life. The kiss that Mercury blows to somebody off camera is received by his mother and sister back at his childhood home.
After Mercury’s call-and-response with the teeming audience, the band dives into “Hammer to Fall” and the film cuts to a montage to show Live Aid’s phones ringing off the hook, anxious viewers wanting to donate even more because of Queen’s performance. This is again Hollywood hokum, as donations only really stepped up after Bob Geldof got in front of the cameras a little after Queen brought the house down and harangued viewers.
Still, you have to hand it to the movie for having the stones to indulge in the full 20 minute set, despite silly moves like cutting away to the movie’s “you’ll never go anywhere” record executive for the line “no time for losers” during the final song. (D’oh!)
YouTube user Juan Dela Cruz, who assembled this side-by-side, has made two other comparison videos using existing footage and the film: Part One is here, and here’s Part Two.
Related Content:
Watch Queen Rehearse & Meticulously Prepare for Their Legendary 1985 Live Aid Performance
Watch 16 Hours of Historic Live Aid Performances: Queen, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young & Much More
Bob Geldof Talks About the Greatest Day of His Life, Stepping on the Stage of Live Aid, in a Short Doc by Errol Morris
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Freddie Mercury & Rami Malek’s Live Aid Performance: A Side-By-Side Comparison is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The Strangest Books in the World: Discover The Madman’s Library, a Captivating Compendium of Peculiar Books​ & Manuscripts

If you are a frequent reader of Open Culture, or the many blogs we tend to read — especially those concerned with the rare, unusual, and obscure — it’s likely you’ve encountered some of the books in The Madman’s Library, Edward Brooke-Hitching’s fantastic new volume of literary oddities. If not, you’re probably familiar with a few of the categories he identifies under his subtitle, “The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History.” These include “Books Made of Flesh and Blood,” such as a Qur’an written in 50 pints of Saddam Hussein’s blood. If such artifacts don’t qualify as “literary curiosities,”  it’s hard to know what does.
Brooke-Hitching grants the designation “curiosity” is subjective, and culturally determined, “but after nearly a decade of searching through catalogues of libraries, auction houses and antiquarian book dealers around the world,” he writes in his introduction,” works of undeniable peculiarity leapt out.”





Or as he tells Smithsonian in an interview, “the more books you see, the more your radar is sensitive to something that pings with its strangeness.” He pulls out the first book in his bag as an example: a self-published collection of poetry by Charlie Sheen.

Perhaps few other people have laid eyes on such an enormous collection of oddball bibliographic treasures. These are not only books made of strange — and even deadly — materials; they are also books whose contents or histories are just plain weird.
The chapter ‘Curious Collections’… features similar projects of obsessive dedication, from medieval manuscripts of fantastic beasts, and guides to criminal slang of Georgian London (with plenty of lascivious highlights provided), to Captain Cook’s secret ‘atlas of cloth’ and the unexpectedly homicidal story of the origin of the Oxford English dictionary. Elsewhere, ‘Literary Hoaxes’ presents the best of the ancient tradition of deceptive writing–lies in book form–whether it be for satire, self promotion or as an instrument of revenge.
Of the latter, Brooke-Hitching cites Jonathan Swift’s series of pamphlets written under a pseudonym, “a successful campaign to convince all of London of the premature death of a charlatan prophet he despised.” In a chapter titled ‘Works of the Supernatural,’ Brooke-Hitching gives us the example of W.B. Yeats’ wife George, who transcribed “4000 pages of spiritual dictation in the first three years of their marriage.” Her automatic writing was published in a compilation called a A Vision in 1925, but “through seven editions it was only Yeats’ name” on the title page.

There are ‘Books that aren’t Books,’ such as a skull inscribed with a prayer and a collection of autobiographical fragments embroidered on the linen jacket of an incarcerated seamstress; there are ‘Cryptic Books” like the Voynich Manuscript and poetry written in code. Part literary detective story, part bibliographic odyssey through time, part literary curiosity all its own, (though more of the coffee-table variety) The Madman’s Library, is a feast for bibliophiles and oddballs of all kinds. Pick up a copy here and see several more of exceptionally curious books over at Smithsonian.

Related Content: 
Explore Online the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript: The 15th-Century Text That Linguists & Code-Breakers Can’t Understand
A Medieval Book That Opens Six Different Ways, Revealing Six Different Books in One
Wonderfully Weird & Ingenious Medieval Books
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

The Strangest Books in the World: Discover The Madman’s Library, a Captivating Compendium of Peculiar Books​ & Manuscripts is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Indie Animation in a Corporate World: A Conversation with Animator Benjamin Goldman on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #88

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_88_3-20-21.mp3
In the perennial conflict between art and our corporate entertainment machine, animation seems designed to be mechanized, given how labor-intensive it is, and yes, most of our animation comes aimed at children (or naughty adults) from a few behemoths (like, say, Disney).
Your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt are joined by Benjamin Goldman to discuss doing animation on your own, with only faint hope of “the cavalry” (e.g. Netfilx money or the Pixar fleet of animators) coming to help you realize (and distribute and generate revenue from) your vision. As an adult viewer, what are we looking for from this medium?
We talk about what exactly constitutes “indie,” shorts vs. features, how the image relates to the narration, realism or its avoidance, and more. Watch Benjamin’s film with Daniel Gamburg, “Eight Nights.”
Some of our other examples include Jérémy Clapin’s I Lost My Body and Skhizein, World of Tomorrow, If Anything Happens I Love You, The Opposites Game, Windup, Fritz the Cat, Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation, and Image Union.
Hear a few lists and comments about this independent animation:

Some history from Wikipedia
“How Independent European Animation Is Taking on the US Studios” by Geoffrey Macnab
“The 20 Best Indie Animation Features of the 2010s” by Vassilis Kroustallis
“Oscars Predictions: Best Animated Short – Netflix’s Look at the Aftermath of School Shootings is the One to Beat” by Clayton Davis
“Oscars Predictions: Best Animated Feature – Can Anything Beat ‘Soul’ at the Oscars?” by Clayton Davis

Follow Benjamin on Instagram @bgpictures. Here’s something he did for a major film studio that you might recognize, from the film version of A Series of Unfortunate Events:







Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion that you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.
Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

Indie Animation in a Corporate World: A Conversation with Animator Benjamin Goldman on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #88 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The Letterform Archive Launches a New Online Archive of Graphic Design, Featuring 9,000 Hi-Fi Images

An online design museum made by and for designers? The concept seems obvious, but has taken decades in internet years for the reality to fully emerge in the Letterform Archive. Now that it has, we can see why. Good design may look simple, but no one should be fooled into thinking it’s easy. “After years of development and months of feedback,” write the creators of the Letterform Archive online design museum, “we’re opening up the Online Archive to everyone. This project is a labor of love from everyone on our staff, and many generous volunteers, and we hope it provides a source of beautiful distraction and inspiration to all who love letters.”

That’s letters as in fonts, not epistles, and there are thousands of them in the archive. But there are also thousands of photographs, lithographs, silkscreens, etc. representing the height of modern simplicity. This and other unifying threads run through the collection of the Letterform Archive, which offers “unprecedented access… with nearly 1,500 objects and 9,000 hi-fi images.”





You’ll find in the Archive the sleek elegance of 1960s Olivetti catalogs, the iconic militancy of Emory Douglas’ designs for The Black Panther newspaper, and the eerily stark militancy of the “SILENCE=DEATH” t-shirt from the 1980s AIDS crisis.

The site was built around the ideal of “radical accessibility,” with the aim of capturing “a sense of what it’s like to visit the Archive” (which lives permanently in San Francisco). But the focus is not on the casual onlooker — Letterform Archive online caters specifically to graphic designers, which makes its interface even simpler, more elegant, and easier to use for everyone, coincidentally (or not).

The graphic design focus also means there are functions specific to the discipline that designers won’t find in other online image libraries: “we encourage you to use the search filters: click on each category to explore disciplines like lettering, and formats like type specimens, or combine filters like decades and countries to narrow your view to a specific time and place.”

From the radical typography of Dada to the radical 60s zine scene to the sleek designs (and Neins) found in a 1987 Apple Logo Standards pamphlet, the museum has something for everyone interested in recent graphic design history and typology. But it’s not all sleek simplicity. There are also rare artifacts of elaborately intricate design, like the Persian Yusef and Zulaikha manuscript, below, dating from between 1880 and 1910. You’ll find dozens more such treasures in the Letterform Archive here.

Related Content: 
Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Museums, and Free Books from University Presses
The First Museum Dedicated Exclusively to Poster Art Opens Its Doors in the U.S.: Enter the Poster House
Discover Isotype, the 1920s Attempt to Create a Universal Language with Stylish Icons & Graphic Design
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

The Letterform Archive Launches a New Online Archive of Graphic Design, Featuring 9,000 Hi-Fi Images is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The Rules of 100 Sports Clearly Explained in Short Videos: Baseball, Football, Jai Alai, Sumo Wrestling, Cricket, Pétanque & Much More

When you get down to it, every sport is its rules. This leaves aside great historical weight and cultural associations, granted, but if you don’t know a sport’s rules, not only can you not play it, you can’t appreciate it (the many childhood afternoons I thrilled to televised 49ers games without having any idea what was happening on the field notwithstanding). What’s worse, you can’t discuss it. “There is a shared knowledge of sports in America that is unlike our shared knowledge of anything else,” as Chuck Klosterman once put it. “Whenever I have to hang out with someone I’ve never met before, I always find myself secretly thinking, ‘I hope this dude knows about sports. I hope this dude knows about sports. I hope this dude knows about sports.'”







Klosterman is a cultural critic, a position not at odds with his sports fanaticism, and he surely knows that his observation holds well beyond the U.S.: just consider how deeply so much of the world is invested in football. Despite its relative simplicity, many Americans never quite grasped the workings of what we call soccer. But thanks to a Youtuber called Ninh Ly, we can learn in just over four minutes.





Ly’s explanation of association football/soccer is just one of nearly 100 such videos on his channel, each of which clearly and concisely lays out the rules of a different sport. An American who watches it immediately becomes not just able to understand a game, but prepared to engage with the cultures of football-enthusiast countries from Mexico to Malaysia, Turkey to Thailand.







Though British, Ly just as cogently explains sports from the United States, even the relatively complicated ones: basketball, for instance, or what most of the world calls American football (as well as its arena, Canadian, and twice-failed XFL variants), a game whose devoted fans include no less acclaimed-in-Europe an American novelist than than Paul Auster. Previously on Open Culture, we featured Auster’s correspondence with J.M. Coetzee on the subject of sports, wherein the former probes his own enthusiasm for football, and the latter his own enthusiasm for cricket. “If I look into my own heart and ask why, in the twilight of my days, I am still — sometimes — prepared to spend hours watching cricket on television,” writes Coetzee, “I must report that, however absurdly, however wistfully, I continue to look out for moments of heroism, moments of nobility.”







Anyone can enjoy such moments when and where they come, but only if they know the rules of cricket in the first place. Ly has, of course, made a cricket explainer, which in four minutes fully elucidates a sport as obscure to some as it is beloved of others. He’s also covered much more specialized sports, including fencing, curling, pickleball, jai alai, axe throwing, and sumo wrestling. (Unable to “ignore the overwhelming demand,” he’s even explained the rules of quidditch, a game adapted from the Harry Potter books.) After a couple of hours with his playlist (embedded below), you’ll come away ready to ascend to a new plane of appreciation for sportsmanship in all its various manifestations. If you’re anything like me, you’ll then revisit your earliest education in these subjects: Sports Cartoons.

Related Content:
Jack Kerouac Was a Secret, Obsessive Fan of Fantasy Baseball
Albert Camus’ Lessons Learned from Playing Goalie: “What I Know Most Surely about Morality and Obligations, I Owe to Football”
Monty Python’s Philosopher’s Football Match: The Epic Showdown Between the Greeks & Germans (1972)
Read and Hear Famous Writers (and Armchair Sportsmen) J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster’s Correspondence
Jorge Luis Borges: “Soccer is Popular Because Stupidity is Popular”
The Weird World of Vintage Sports
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The Rules of 100 Sports Clearly Explained in Short Videos: Baseball, Football, Jai Alai, Sumo Wrestling, Cricket, Pétanque & Much More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

On “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” and the Female Buddy Comedy–Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #87

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_87_3-13-21.mp3
The buddy comedy is a staple of American film, but using this to explore female friendship is still fresh ground. Erica, Mark, Brian, and Erica’s long-time friend Micah Greene (actor and nurse) discuss tropes and dynamics within this kind of film, focusing primarily on Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, the 2021 release written and starring Kristin Wiig and Annie Mumolo as a couple of middle aged near-twin oddballs expanding their horizons in a surrealistic, gag-filled tropical venue.
While male pairings of this sort (Cheech and Chong, Bob and Doug McKenzie, Beavis and Butthead et al) stick to silly jokes, Barb and Star base their antics around their evolving relationship toward each other. As with the 2019 film Booksmart and many TV shows including Dead to Me, PEN15, and Grace and Frankie, the trend is toward dramedy as the dynamics of friendship are taken seriously. We also touch on Bridesmaids, Sisters, The Heat, BAPS, I Love You Man, and more.
A few relevant articles:

“The Rise of the Female Buddy Dramedy” by Jen Chaney
“Sorry Bros, But Ladies Actually Do The Buddy Comedy Better” by Allee Manning and Kaitlyn Kelly
“Where Are All The Buddy Comedies For Black Women?” by Jazmin Kopotsha
“Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo on ‘Bridesmaids’ and ‘Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar’” by Dave Itzkoff
“‘Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar’ Is Silly in All the Right Ways” by Rachel Syme
“It Takes Two: Top 25 Best Buddy Comedies” from Rolling Stone
“10 Female Buddy Comedies Better Than ‘Like A Boss,’ According to Rotten Tomatoes” by Rocco Thompson

Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion that you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.
Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

On “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” and the Female Buddy Comedy–Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #87 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Prof. David Harvey Makes 5 Courses on Marx’s Capital Available for Free

Geographer and Marxist scholar David Harvey did not set out to become a Marxist. He didn’t even know what a Marxist was. He simply started to read Marx one day, at the age of 35, because all of the other social science methods he had applied in his study of the housing market and social unrest in US cities “didn’t seem to be working well,” he says in a Jacobin interview. “So, I started to read Marx, and I found it more and more relevant…. After I cited Marx a few times favorably, people pretty soon said I was a Marxist. I didn’t know what it meant… and I still don’t know what it means. It clearly does have a political message, though, as a critique of capital.”
The word “Marxist” has been as much a defamatory term of moral and political abuse as it has a coherent description of a position. But ask Harvey to explain what Marx means in the German philosopher’s massive analysis of political economy, Capital, and he will gladly tell you at length. Harvey has not only read all three volumes of the work many times over, a feat very few can claim, but he has explicated them in detail in his courses at Johns Hopkins and the City University of New York since the 1970s. In the age of YouTube, Harvey posted his lectures online, and they became so popular they inspired a series of equally popular written companion books.
Why study a dead 19th-century socialist? What could he possibly have to say about the world of AI, COVID, and climate change? “I think Marx is more relevant today than ever before,” says Harvey. “When Marx was writing, capital was not dominant in the world. It was dominant in Britain and Western Europe and the eastern United States, but it wasn’t dominant in China or India. Now it’s dominant everywhere. So, I think Marx’s analysis of what capital is and its contradictions is more relevant now than ever.”
To illustrate, and exhaustively explain, the point, Harvey announced by tweet recently that he’s made 5 courses freely available online as videos and podcasts. Find links to all 5 courses below. Or find them in our collection: 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
Reading Marx’s Capital Volume 1 with David Harvey – 2019 Edition

Reading Marx’s Capital Volume I with David Harvey – 2007 Edition

Reading Marx’s Capital Volume 2 with David Harvey

Reading Marx’s Grundrisse with David Harvey

Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason

Related Content: 
Marxism by Raymond Geuss: A Free Course 
A Short Animated Introduction to Karl Marx
David Harvey’s Course on Marx’s Capital: Volumes 1 & 2 Now Available Free Online
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Prof. David Harvey Makes 5 Courses on Marx’s Capital Available for Free is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.