Setting aside just one day for the Louvre is a classic first-time Paris visitor’s mistake. The place is simply too big to comprehend on one visit, or indeed on ten visits. To grow so vast has taken eight centuries, a process explained in under three minutes by the official video animated above. First constructed around […]

At a time when much of animation was consumed with little anthropomorphized animals sporting white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a completely different direction. His work is all about dancing geometric shapes and abstract forms spinning around a flat featureless background. Think of a Mondrian or Malevich painting that moves, often in time to the […]

Throughout the years, we’ve featured performances of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a large amateur choir from Toronto that meets weekly and sings their hearts out. You’ve seen them sing Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” (to honor Chris Cornell) and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” If you dig through their Youtube archive, you can also revisit performances of two Talking Heads […]

Even if you’ve never read Frank Herbert’s Dune, you may well have encountered its adaptations to a variety of other media: comic books, video games, board games, television series, and of course films, David Lynch’s 1984 version and Denis Villeneuve’s two-parter earlier this decade. But before any of those came Dune, the jazz-funk album by […]

When they make their first transoceanic voyage, more than a few Americans choose to go to England, on the assumption that, whatever culture shock they might experience, at least none of the difficulties will be linguistic. Only when it’s too late do they discover the true meaning of the old line about being separated by […]