January 29, 2014 Video & Multimedia Key West Karaoke By Dan Piepenbring While we’re on the subject of the Florida Keys, here’s Annie Dillard, Laurent de Brunhoff, Robert D. Richardson Jr., and Phyllis Rose singing the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” in Key West, circa 1995. If the sheer infectiousness of Dillard’s dancing doesn’t get you, maybe the nineties-era video effects will. This is Rising Star Video Karaoke, after all—not amateur hour.
December 23, 2013 Our Daily Correspondent, Video & Multimedia Darkling I Listen By Sadie Stein All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays! Herewith, Benedict Cumberbatch reads John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”
December 17, 2013 Video & Multimedia Updike on Free Parking By Sadie Stein Check out this nifty video, produced by Blank on Blank and PBS Digital Studios, to accompany audio from a 2002 interview with John Freeman.
December 3, 2013 Video & Multimedia A Downright Incantation By Sadie Stein Old Belgian river station on the Congo River, 1889. Everyone knows that Heart of Darkness was adapted as Apocalypse Now, but have you ever listened to the 1938 radio version Orson Welles did with the Mercury Theatre? The sound quality is poor, but it’s compelling nonetheless.
November 26, 2013 Video & Multimedia An American in Paris By Sadie Stein While book trailers don’t always feel logical, the video made for Nancy Miller’s memoir Breathless is an exception. The project began as a graphic book. As a result, Miller, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, had a wealth of cartoons she had never used, and which subsequently became the trailer. Watch it below.
November 21, 2013 Video & Multimedia It Involves Breaking Stuff By Sadie Stein Scott McClanahan’s readings are always highly memorable. As he wrote me about this, the video of his avowed final such reading ever, “I’m quitting. Yep, I’m just straight up quitting. It’s in Ohio which will make you want to quit anything—including LIFE. It involves breaking stuff.” Apologies to Buckeye readers.