Ken Burns' New iPad App Turns U.S. History Into Beautiful Mixtapes

The app, simply called “Ken Burns,” allows the user to surf an overarching timeline year by year, seeing how clips from each film line up chronologically with – and, as Burns says, “speak to” – each other. Zoom in on 1869, for example, and a cloud of clips from The Civil War, The West, and The National Parks orbit in parallax formation around one another; swipe to 1930, and it’s clips from Jazz, Prohibition, Baseball, Huey Long, Thomas Hart Benton and The Dust Bowl. You can also watch its six playlists straight through – they range in length from 20 minutes to an hour long – or select individual clips à la carte.
 

The concept came out of a conversation Burns was having two years ago with MacKinnon, who is the music entrepreneur behind Hear Music and has known Burns since they worked together on music components for 2001′s Jazz.

“Ken and I were talking about how his films were in the search engines of iTunes and Netflix, and they’re always the top-rated thing when they run on PBS, but there wasn’t a digital place where all of his films were presented as one thing, as an integrated body of work,” says MacKinnon. “Then he paused for a second, and looked at me and said, ‘I really love my iPad.’”

Download the app but only if you are prepared to lose your day to it. 

Neil Gaiman Reads Dr. Seuss

Entertainment Weekly's On The Books section points us to this gem:

Don’t you wish that Neil Gaiman was your kooky uncle? He would sneak you into the circus and you’d get to hold the Biggest Amazonian Python That Ever Lived (whose name is Lucille). He’d help you put frogs in your sister’s bathtub. He’d keep secrets for you, like that time that you accidentally buried your dad’s favorite watch in the park. He would agree that pirate treasure is only good if it’s buried. To help you cement the fantasy that Gaiman is your favorite uncle, here he is reading Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham.

Icons, A Short Film Of Iconic Cultural Images

Promoting The Sunday Times’ Culture section refresh, the short film “Icons” by creative agency Grey London and directed by Us, features a shifting series of iconic cultural moments from Oscar-winning film Forrest Gump to Auguste Rodin‘s sculpture The Thinker.

Love this, short but really effective at conveying the breath and depth of culture. Here is the making-of, once again, let's celebrate the crew:

Photographer JR and New York City Ballet Collaborate For Art Series

An Unexpected Way to Experience a Night at the Ballet

Following the inaugural 2013 installation LES BALLETS DE FAILE, New York City Ballet is proud to collaborate with the French artist known as JR for the second annual Art Series.

Exhibiting freely in the streets of the world, JR catches the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. His largest project to date, INSIDE OUT, was born in 2011 when JR won the TED prize and called for the creation of a global art project with the potential to change the world. Transforming messages of personal identity into public works of art, more than 172,000 people have taken part in nearly 8,600 locations around the world.

JR will share his Art Series installation during three special performance evenings — January 23, February 7, 13 — when every seat in the house is available for just $29. On these evenings, every audience member will receive a takeaway created specifically for this event.

Absolutely love this collaboration. More please. NYC Ballet should have a ballet with sets designed by JR. 

Arts and Cultural Production Account for 3.2 Percent -- $504B -- of GDP in 2011

National Endowment for the Arts’ Sunil Iyengar discusses a government report on the value of arts and culture. He speaks with Adam Johnson and Trish Regan on Bloomberg Television's "Street Smart."

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and National Endowment for the Arts Release Preliminary Report on Impact of Arts and Culture on U.S. Economy:

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released prototype estimates today from the new Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA). This is the first federal effort to provide in-depth analysis of the arts and cultural sector's contributions to current-dollar gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the final dollar value of all goods and services produced in the United States. According to these new estimates, 3.2 percent -- or $504 billion -- of current-dollar GDP in 2011 was attributable to arts and culture. In comparison, BEA's estimated value of the U.S. travel and tourism industry was 2.8 percent of GDP.