Celestial Lights: Spectacular Auroras Move Across the Scandinavian Skies

in Astronomy, Film, Photography | April 20th, 2012

Nor­we­gian pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ole C. Salomon­sen has cre­at­ed a stun­ning time-lapse film of the auro­ra bore­alis over rugged Nordic land­scapes.

Salomon­sen lives in the city of Trom­sø, 200 miles north of the Arc­tic Cir­cle, where the sun does­n’t rise above the hori­zon between Novem­ber and Jan­u­ary. Trom­sø is con­sid­ered one of the best (inhab­it­ed) places on Earth to see North­ern Lights. This past win­ter the light show was par­tic­u­lar­ly intense, as the sun moved clos­er to the peak (expect­ed in ear­ly 2013) of its 11-year cycle of elec­tro­mag­net­ic activ­i­ty.

The pho­tog­ra­ph­er went to extra­or­di­nary lengths to cap­ture these images, trav­el­ing across north­ern Nor­way, Swe­den and Fin­land over a half-year peri­od begin­ning in Sep­tem­ber and end­ing ear­li­er this month, when the day­light hours grew too long. “I have dri­ven thou­sands of km between loca­tions up here in the arc­tic this sea­son,” Salomon­sen writes on his Vimeo page. “I was run­ning between 2–3 cam­eras like a mad­man.” He esti­mates he shot about 150,000 expo­sures to get the 6,000 or so frames used in the four-and-a-half-minute video above. He writes:

The video is a merge of two parts; the first part con­tains some more wild and aggres­sive auro­ras, as well as a few milky way sequences, hence either auro­ras are mov­ing fast because they are, or they are fast due to motion of the milky way/stars. Still, some of the strait up shots are very close to real-time speed, although auro­ras most­ly are slow­er, she can also be FAST! The sec­ond part has some more slow and majes­tic auro­ras, where I have focused more on com­po­si­tion and fore­ground.

The music is by Nor­we­gian com­pos­er Kai-Anders Ryan. To learn about the tech­ni­cal aspects of Celes­tial Lights, and to see the film Salomon­sen made dur­ing last year’s auro­ra sea­son, vis­it his Vimeo page. And to see his beau­ti­ful still images, vis­it Salomon­sen on Face­book and Flikr.

via Uni­verse Today

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Clive Owen & Nicole Kidman Star in HBO’s Hemingway & Gellhorn: Two Writers, A Marriage and a Civil War

in Books, Film, History | April 20th, 2012

On the 28th of next month, HBO will air Hem­ing­way & Gell­horn, a fea­ture-length dra­ma based on the tit­u­lar writ­ers’ five-year mar­riage. Direct­ed by well-known adapter of lit­er­a­ture and his­to­ry Philip Kauf­man — he of The Right Stuff, Hen­ry & June, and Quills — the film roots itself in the peri­od of 1936 to 1945, begin­ning with the cou­ple’s first encounter in Flori­da and fol­low­ing them into the Span­ish Civ­il War, which pro­vid­ed both of them with vivid mate­r­i­al indeed. Amer­i­cans and Euro­peans — and no doubt much of the rest of the read­ing world — need no intro­duc­tion to Ernest Hem­ing­way, author of such oft-assigned nov­els as The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Ris­es, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. As the quin­tes­sen­tial high-liv­ing, sav­age­ly artis­tic, and aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly respect­ed fig­ure movies love, he’s under­gone a great many cin­e­mat­ic res­ur­rec­tions this last decade and a half: Albert Finney played him in Hem­ing­way, The Hunter of Death; Vin­cent Walsh played him in Hem­ingway: That Sum­mer in Paris; Corey Stoll played him most vis­i­bly in Woody Allen’s Mid­night in Paris; and Antho­ny Hop­kins will play him in next year’s Hem­ing­way and Fuentes. Movie-star buffs must have all kinds of expec­ta­tions for “Papa” as embod­ied in the ever-ris­ing Clive Owen, but some­thing tells me they’ll have even more to say about Nicole Kid­man’s turn as Martha Gell­horn.

If you can’t imme­di­ate­ly place the name of Martha Gell­horn in the life of Ernest Hem­ing­way, it’s per­haps because she, her­self, helped ensure that. After she divorced him in 1945, Gell­horn specif­i­cal­ly request­ed that her inter­view­ers nev­er so much as bring up Hem­ing­way’s name. Though it counts as no fail­ure to fall under Hem­ing­way’s shad­ow in the pub­lic lit­er­ary imag­i­na­tion — most writ­ers do, after all — Gell­horn carved out her own siz­able place in the his­to­ry of for­eign cor­re­spon­dence, report­ing on war not only from Spain but from Eng­land, Hong Kong, Viet­nam, Fin­land, Sin­ga­pore, Ger­many, Czecho­slo­va­kia, Bur­ma, Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, and the Mid­dle East. Hem­ing­way & Gell­horn, whose trail­er you can watch above, seems like­ly to fill in plen­ty of bio­graph­i­cal details that many of Hem­ing­way’s read­ers, and even many of Gell­horn’s, don’t know. But you can’t yet watch it on the inter­net, or on DVD — or in any form at all, for that mat­ter — until after May 28th. Then, pre­sum­ably, you can see exact­ly how Martha Gell­horn inspired For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Remem­ber­ing Ernest Hem­ing­way, Fifty Years After His Death

Ernest Hem­ing­way Reads “In Harry’s Bar in Venice”

Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea Ani­mat­ed Not Once, But Twice

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Martin Scorsese Captures Levon Helm and The Band Performing “The Weight” in The Last Waltz

in Music | April 20th, 2012


Born in Arkansas in 1940, Lev­on Helm grew up lis­ten­ing Elvis Pres­ley, Lit­tle Richard, John­ny Cash and Jer­ry Lee Lewis. By the 1960s, he began putting his per­son­al stamp on rock ’n’ roll. Dur­ing those years, Helm and gui­tarist Rob­bie Robert­son joined Bob Dylan’s ever-so-con­tro­ver­sial elec­tric band and played togeth­er dur­ing the infa­mous­ly tumul­tuous 1966 tour. Then, Helm and Robert­son decid­ed to form their own band — The Band. Robert­son wrote or co-wrote most of their songs, while Helm often gave voice to them. And so things went until they did­n’t.

In 1976, The Band broke up, but not before they played an epic final con­cert that Mar­tin Scors­ese doc­u­ment­ed for pos­ter­i­ty in his film, The Last Waltz. Decades lat­er, many crit­ics con­sid­er it “the great­est rock con­cert movie ever made.” And although the film con­sist­ed most­ly of live footage from their farewell con­cert in San Fran­cis­co, Scors­ese filmed one of The Band’s mem­o­rable songs, “The Weight,” on an MGM sound­stage. You can find the per­for­mance above, and Lev­on Helm singing soul­ful­ly on drums. The scene also fea­tures a guest appear­ance by Mavis Sta­ples, along with her father and sis­ters in The Sta­ple Singers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jean-Luc Godard Films The Rolling Stones Record­ing “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il” (1968)

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

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The Geometry of Sound Waves Visualized

in Video - Science | April 19th, 2012

Turn down your speak­ers …  but not all of the way off. Now see what sound waves look like when they’re visu­al­ized and the geo­met­ric pat­terns they make. They’re called Chlad­ni pat­terns, and they get their name from Ernst Chlad­ni (1756–1827), a Ger­man physi­cist and musi­cian whose work earned him the title, “The Father of Acoustics.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Visu­al­iz­ing WiFi Sig­nals with Light

Mag­net­ic Fields Made Vis­i­ble

Futur­ist Arthur C. Clarke on Mandelbrot’s Frac­tals

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and now Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

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Roger McGuinn, Frontman of The Byrds, Curates Folk Den, Lets You Download Free Folk Music

in Music | April 19th, 2012

Roger McGuinn of the Byrds was one of the most influ­en­tial singers and gui­tarists of the 1960s. Although his own influ­ences range from Ravi Shankar to John Coltrane, McGuin­n’s roots are in folk music. The Byrds were among the first to fuse folk with rock and roll. “I’ve always con­sid­ered myself a folksinger,” McGuinn told Neal Conan this week on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, “even though we strapped on Rick­en­backer gui­tars and played pret­ty loud. But I was a folksinger at heart because we always loved folk music. I loved the melodies and the sto­ries.”

In the mid 1990s McGuinn was lis­ten­ing to a Smith­son­ian Folk­ways record when it occurred to him that he was­n’t hear­ing tra­di­tion­al songs played any­more, even in folk clubs. “So I thought, ‘What’s going to hap­pen when Odet­ta dies?’ Well, as you know, she just passed away. And Pete Seeger’s, what, he’s 92, 93. He’s get­ting up there. So I thought I’d do some­thing about it.”

McGuinn had always been an ear­ly adopter of new tech­nolo­gies. He owned a mobile tele­phone in the ear­ly 1970s and bought his first per­son­al com­put­er in 1981. So in 1995 he got the idea of estab­lish­ing Folk Den, a web­site ded­i­cat­ed to pre­serv­ing the tra­di­tion­al folk music that he loves. On the first day of each month, McGuinn posts a new song.  There are now almost 200 MP3 files online, avail­able for free down­load. In some of the record­ings McGuinn is joined by his wife, Camil­la. To get the fla­vor of what’s avail­able, here are three quick exam­ples:

But you real­ly must vis­it the Folk Den Web site, which includes lyrics, chords, visu­al mate­r­i­al and a lit­tle intro­duc­tion to each song writ­ten by McGuinn. And to hear McGuin­n’s Talk of the Nation inter­view, which includes musi­cal per­for­mances, vis­it the NPR Web site.

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Alfred Hitchcock Adapts Joseph Conrad’s Novel of Terrorism in Sabotage (1936)

in Books, Film | April 19th, 2012

Just like most of you Open Cul­ture read­ers, I’m a suck­er for cul­tur­al inter­sec­tions, the places where music meets paint­ing, poet­ry meets com­put­ing, lan­guage meets archi­tec­ture, and so on. I feel an even greater thrill when two respect­ed cre­ators team up to accom­plish this; the more unlike­ly and inad­ver­tent the com­bi­na­tion, the bet­ter. The film above, which you can watch free on Archive.org, rep­re­sents not just the inter­sec­tion of cin­e­ma and lit­er­a­ture, but the inter­sec­tion of Alfred Hitch­cock and Joseph Con­rad, titans of their respec­tive forms whose lives only briefly over­lapped. In 1907, Con­rad pub­lished The Secret Agent, a polit­i­cal nov­el of late nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Lon­don. (Find it in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion) In 1936, Hitch­cock turned it into the pic­ture Sab­o­tage, also known as The Woman Alone (but not, I should note, Secret Agent, an entire­ly dif­fer­ent Hitch­cock-direct­ed film of that year). Con­rad’s book, a tale of ide­ol­o­gy and ter­ror­ism, saw very fre­quent cita­tion in the after­math of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001. Lat­er that decade, Quentin Taran­ti­no cit­ed Hitch­cock­’s film to illus­trate a vital plot point in his own Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds. Both works, it seems, have retained a cer­tain rel­e­vance.

While Hitch­cock and com­pa­ny tai­lored Con­rad’s source mate­r­i­al to fit their sen­si­bil­i­ty, their times, and their medi­um, both the movie and the nov­el cen­ter on a busi­ness­man named Ver­loc. (Spoil­er alert, we talk about the plot here.) Caught in the unen­vi­able posi­tion of belong­ing to a bomb-chuck­ing anar­chist soci­ety and work­ing as an agent provo­ca­teur for a coun­try some­where in shad­owy East­ern Europe, Ver­loc uses his unsus­pect­ing young broth­er-in-law Ste­vie to car­ry out an attack meant to osten­si­bly fur­ther the anar­chist agen­da but to secret­ly strike a blow for the nation that employs him. When the bomb­ing goes awry and takes Ste­vie with it — a death that Hitch­cock report­ed­ly regret­ted includ­ing, though the inevitabil­i­ty with which his plot deliv­ers it strikes me as entire­ly Hitch­cock­ian — Ver­loc finds him­self not at the mer­cy of the anar­chists, nor of the spies, nor of Scot­land Yard, but of his own enraged wife. Even after hav­ing under­gone cin­e­mat­ic sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, Con­rad’s tale eludes almost any posi­tions or mes­sages read­ers would ascribe to it. “Con­rad dis­trust­ed gov­ern­ments as much as he scorned those who sought as a mat­ter of abstract prin­ci­ple to over­throw them,” writes Judith Shule­vitz in a Slate piece on the nov­el­’s post‑9/11 pop­u­lar­i­ty. “He nei­ther advo­cat­ed one kind of state over anoth­er nor proph­e­sied the ongo­ing war against ter­ror­ism, except inso­far as he saw indus­tri­al­ized soci­ety as for­ev­er at odds with the anar­chic human heart.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

21 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

We Were Wan­der­ers on a Pre­his­toric Earth: A Short Film Inspired by Joseph Con­rad

Truffaut’s Big Inter­view with Hitch­cock (MP3s)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall

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The Art of the Book Cover Explained at TED

in Art, Books, TED Talks | April 19th, 2012

Give this one a minute to get going, to get beyond the schtick. And then you’ll enter the world of Chip Kidd, asso­ciate art direc­tor at Knopf, who has designed cov­ers for many famous books. As he will tell you, his job comes down to ask­ing: What do sto­ries look like, and how can he give them a face, if not write a short visu­al haiku for them? In the remain­ing min­utes of his TED Talk, Kidd takes you through his work, reveal­ing the aes­thet­ic choic­es that went into design­ing cov­ers for books by Michael Crich­ton, John Updike, David Sedaris, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, and oth­ers.

When you’re done, we rec­om­mend check­ing out these relat­ed items:

Vladimir Nabokov Mar­vels Over Dif­fer­ent “Loli­ta” Book Cov­ers

Spike Jonze Presents a Stop Motion Film for Book Lovers

Books Come to Life in Clas­sic Car­toons from 1930s and 1940s

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Coursera Adds Humanities Courses, Raises $16 Million, Strikes Deal with 3 Universities

in Online Courses | April 18th, 2012

Dur­ing the past two months, two ven­tures offer­ing free MOOCS (Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es) have spun out of Stan­ford. One is Udac­i­ty run by Sebas­t­ian Thrun. And the oth­er is Cours­era, which announced a slew of big news today.

To start with, it raised $16 mil­lion in fund­ing from ven­ture cap­i­tal firms Klein­er Perkins Cau­field & Byers and New Enter­prise Asso­ciates.

Next it announced agree­ments to offer cours­es by Prince­ton, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan (in addi­tion to Stan­ford).

And final­ly it has added human­i­ties cours­es to its upcom­ing fall cur­ricu­lum — a depar­ture from the MOOC norm of only offer­ing cours­es in com­put­er sci­ence & engi­neer­ing. Cours­es include:

The cours­es will get start­ed in the Fall. In the mean­time, don’t miss our col­lec­tion of 450 Free Cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Stan­ford, MIT, Yale, Har­vard, Oxford and beyond.

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