In a new effort to establish another home for intelligent conversation on the web, the Intelligent Channel went live on YouTube this week. Launched as part of YouTube’s new original channels initiative, the Intelligent Channel presents luminaries from the educational, arts, and cultural worlds in intense conversations.
The channel will kick off with three strands of original video programming produced by the channel’s parent company Intelligent Television in New York:
On “The Paul Holdengräber Show,” the renowned founder, director, and host of “Live from the New York Public Library” interviews award-winning writers and artists about their work and other passions. Holdengräber’s first guest – the show premieres today – is Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin. (You can watch the conversation above.) Holdengräber’s next guest is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the bestselling Eat, Pray, Love.
In “Richard Belzer’s Conversation,” the star of “Law & Order SVU” and “Homicide” interviews actors, comedians, directors, musicians, and writers. Belzer’s opening guest is comedian Gilbert Gottfried, who discusses the implications of comedy after September 11th and in the face of tragedy more generally. His next guests will include Dick Cavett and Emmy-award winning writer-producer Tom Fontana.
In “Enlightenment Minutes,” the famous and the even more famous speak to the audience about their moments of enlightenment, personal transcendence, and growth.
The Intelligent Channel also features the new “Ed Archive” – video, film, and oral histories from universities, museums, libraries, and archives that have yet to hit the web. “Enlightenment Minutes” and the “Ed Archive” will premiere in February 2012.
The Learning Channel has disappeared, the Discovery Channel gives us less to discover than it did, and the History Channel has hardly any history any more! The Intelligent Channel’s guests come on because they love enlightenment.
Literary critic Harold Bloom once called Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) “the best and most representative American poet of our time.” In this video from Boston College’s Guestbook Project, Bloom recites a poem from Stevens’s first book, Harmonium, which was published in 1923:
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself.
What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
“The palaz of Hoon is sky and space seen as a gaudy and ornate dwelling,” writes Bloom in Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate; “to have tea at the palaz is to watch the twilight while conversing with the setting sun, who is hardly lonely since all the air is his and since all directions are at home in him. He is himself when most imperial, in purple and gold, and his setting is a coronation.”
The video concludes with Bloom reciting the opening stanza from a later poem by Stevens that echoes the earlier one, a poem regrettably titled “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery”:
In the far South the sun of autumn is passing Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore. He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him, The worlds that were and will be, death and day. Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end. His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.
“Whitman, like Hoon,” writes Bloom, “both contains everything else and is an idea of the sun, not as a god but as a god might be. Hoon is himself the compass of the sea whose tides sweep through him; Walt encompasses worlds but himself is not to be encompassed.”
Give John Green 40 weeks, and Green will give you a playful and highly visual crash course in world history, taking you from the beginning of human civilization 15,000 years ago through to our modern age. If you’re not familiar with him, Green is a bestselling author of several young adult books (Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns). He’s also part of the popular vlogbrothers and an active Twitter user with more than 1.1 million followers — that’s about 22 times what we have, to put things in perspective.
The series starts with The Agricultural Revolution (above) and the Indus Valley Civilization (below). New video installments will be released throughout the year here. And more university-level history courses can be found in our big collection of 400 Free Courses Online.
A little food for thought. The Guardian talked with a palliative nurse who has recorded the most common regrets of the dying. It’s worth giving the top five regrets a read, especially if you’re at risk of ending up in the same penitent place. Here, the nurse lists the misgiving most commonly cited by men: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.
In the mid-1990s, Stephen Fry, the British actor and comedian, had a moment of crisis. He recalled in 2006:
Eleven years ago, in the early hours of the morning, I came down from my flat in central London. I went into my garage, sealed the door with a duvet I’d brought and got into my car. I sat there for at least, I think, two hours in the car, my hands on the ignition key. It was, you know, a suicide attempt, not a cry for help.
Fry didn’t end up killing himself. We know that. Instead, he left the country, heading first to Europe, then to the US where he sought treatment and, at the age of 37, received a diagnosis explaining “the massive highs and miserable lows” he had experienced his whole life: manic depression.
Once he learned to live with manic depression, Fry decided to talk publicly about his struggle and break the taboos around the condition. So, in partnership with the BBC, Fry helped produce the 2006 documentary Stephen Fry: The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive. Originally aired in two parts (find Part 1 above, Part 2 here), the program puts Fry’s personal experience center stage. But it also brings Fry to talk with other celebrities (Richard Dreyfuss & Carrie Fisher) and everyday people living with bipolar disorder.
Upon the documentary’s release, the BBC published a helpful companion booklet that explores what it means to live with and manage bipolar disorder. You can read it online here. You might also want to watch this related video coming out of Stanford: Robert Sapolsky Breaks Down Depression
Today is the birthday of James Joyce, born in Dublin 130 years ago, who wrote in his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
To celebrate his life, we present an August 1929 recording of Joyce reading a melodious passage from the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter of his Work in Progress, which would be published ten years later as Finnegans Wake. The recording was made in Cambridge, England, at the arrangement of Joyce’s friend and publisher Sylvia Beach. “How beautiful the ‘Anna Livia’ recording is,” wrote Beach in her memoir, Shakespeare and Company, “and how amusing Joyce’s rendering of an Irish washerwoman’s brogue!”
The films of David Lynch seem anything but “commercial.” Disturbing, incomprehensible, they shine a flashlight into the darkest regions of the subconscious mind. When you walk out of a theater after watching a David Lynch film you feel like you just woke up from a vivid and unsettling dream.
But Lynch has been leading a double life. While making uncompromisingly artistic works for the movie theaters, he has been directing commercials for television and other media on the side. Why does he do it? “Well,” Lynch told Chris Rodley in Lynch on Lynch, “they’re little bitty films, and I always learn something by doing them.”
Lynch began receiving offers to make commercials after the critical success of Blue Velvet in 1986. His first project was a series of four 30-second spots for Calvin Klein’s Obsession fragrance in 1988, each with a passage written by a famous novelist. The ad above quotes Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. You can also watch commercials featuring F.Scott Fitzgerald and D.H. Lawrence, but the fourth one, featuring Gustave Flaubert, is currently unavailable.
Lynch has completed many advertising assignments over the years, always managing to retain something of his unique vision in the process. We’ve selected some of the most strikingly “Lynchian” of the commercials. Scroll down and enjoy.
When Lynch was asked a few years ago how he felt about product placement in movies, his videotaped answer went viral on YouTube: “Bullshit. That’s how I feel. Total fucking bullshit.” So it’s strange to think that Lynch once agreed to place the entire fictional world of one of his most famous creations, Twin Peaks, at the service of a Japanese coffee company. But that’s what he did in 1991, for Georgia Coffee. In Lynch on Lynch, the filmmaker was asked whether he was concerned about what the commercials might do to the Twin Peaks image. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m really against it in principle, but they were so much fun to do, and they were only running in Japan and so it just felt OK.”
The four commercials, each only 30 seconds long, follow FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) as he solves the mystery of a missing Japanese woman in the town of Twin Peaks, all the while managing to enjoy plenty of “damn fine” Georgia Coffee. Alas, the Japanese commercials were not as successful as the American TV series. “We were supposed to do a second year, and do four more 30-second spots,” Lynch said, “but they didn’t want to do them.”
You can watch the first episode, “Lost,” above, and follow the rest of the story through these links: Episode Two: “Cherry Pie,” Episode Three: “The Mystery of ‘G’” and Episode Four: “The Rescue.”
In 1991 Lynch made one of the creepiest public service messages ever (above) concerning New York City’s rat problem. The cinematography is by Lynch’s longtime collaborator Frederick Elmes.
“Who is Gio” (above) was shot for Georgio Armani in Los Angeles in early 1992, right when several Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King–a verdict that sparked mayhem in the streets. “We were shooting the big scene with the musicians and the club the night the riots broke out in LA,” Lynch told Chris Rodley. “Inside the club we were all races and religions, getting along so fantastically, and outside the club the world was coming apart.”
Of all his early advertising clients, Lynch said, Armani gave him the most freedom. The two-and-a-half-minute version above is an extension of the originally broadcast 60-second commercial.
One of the most bizarre of Lynch’s commercials is his 1998 contribution (above) to the “Parisienne People” campaign. The Swiss cigarette maker Parisienne invited famous directors to make short commercials for screening in movie theaters across Switzerland. To see how others handled the same assignment, follow these links: Roman Polanski, Robert Altman, Jean-Luc Godard (with wife Anne-Marie Miéville), Giuseppe Tornatore, and Ethan and Joel Coen.
Lynch’s surreal 2000 commercial for Sony Playstation (above), called “The Third Place,” is wide open for interpretation. Writer Greg Olson takes a heroic stab at it in his book, David Lynch: Beautiful Dark:
For sixty seconds we proceed through a labyrinth of Lynchian themes and motifs visualized in black and white, thus signifying the bifurcation of the world into two polarities. A man in a black suit and a white shirt encounters eerie passageways, sudden flames, barren trees, factory smoke, a woman who won’t speak her secrets, a wounded figure wrapped in bandages. The man meets his own double, and a man with a duck’s head. A sourceless voice asks, “Where are we?” The dualistic duck-man, who synthesizes animal instinct and human learning, knows: “Welcome to the third place.”
Ants never cease to amaze. They navigate the world with internal pedometers. They can build a life raft in 100 seconds flat. And, further demonstrating the remarkable powers of de-centralized intelligence, they can tunnel into the earth and produce sprawling underground colonies, structures equivalent to humans building the Great Wall of China. This clip comes from the documentary Ants: Nature’s Secret Power, which appears below in full. H/T BoingBoing.
Last night, Philip Glass celebrated his 75th birthday at Carnegie Hall, attending the US premiere of his Ninth Symphony. His long and illustrious career continues. But today we’re bringing you back to 1979, when Glass wrote a composition to accompany “Geometry of Circles,” a four-part series of animations that aired on the beloved children’s show Sesame Street. A strange detour for an influential composer? Not really. Not when you consider that Glass came out of a 1960s tradition that made modern music more playful and approachable.
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About Us
Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
