John Lurie is a musician, actor and artist. He’s also a horrible fisherman.

As saxophonist and leader of the punk-jazz group the Lounge Lizards, Lurie emerged as a cult figure in New York’s downtown arts scene in the 1980s, and the deal was cemented with his surly, straight-faced performances in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law. As writer Tad Friend put it in a 2010 New Yorker article, “Between Fourteenth Street and Canal–the known universe, basically–he was the man.”

In 1991 Lurie ventured outside that universe, into the middle-American realm of the TV fishing show. With backing from Japanese investors, he assembled a film crew and invited some famous friends–Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Willem Dafoe, Dennis Hopper and Matt Dillon–on a series of improbable fishing trips. Fishing with John, as the series is called, builds on the deadpan, journey-to-nowhere sensibility of Stranger than Paradise: nothing much happens.

But that’s the point. As a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times said, Fishing with John is “like Waiting for Godot on water.” The pleasure is in observing people so utterly out of their element. It’s like watching Marlin Perkins or Curt Gowdy wander into a SoHo performance art happening.

In the episode above, Tom Waits doesn’t believe his ears when a Jamaican fishing guide tells him what time to get up in the morning: “Five o’clock?” Waits reportedly didn’t speak to Lurie for two years afterward. “I dunno why I ever let you talk me into this,” he grumbles. “It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

In addition to the Waits episode, you can watch the Jim Jarmusch segment online or own the entire series (six episodes, 147 minutes) on the Criterion Collection DVD, which includes commentary by Lurie. And to learn about what Lurie has been up to since the series was made–his struggle with the neurological effects of Lyme disease, his hiding out from an alleged stalker, his new focus on painting–be sure to read Larson Sutton’s 2011 interview with Lurie at Jambands.com. H/T Biblioklept

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Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski

Tom Waits Makes Comic Appearance on Fernwood Tonight (1977)

Tom Waits Fishing with John Lurie: ‘Like Waiting for Godot on Water’ is a post from: Open Culture

In 2009, Brooklyn-based Web developer Casey Pugh was looking for a new way to explore the potential of crowd-sourcing when he hit upon an idea of galactic proportions. He took the original 1977 Star Wars film (later known as Episode IV: A New Hope in the chronologically ordered six-part series) and chopped it into 15-second pieces, inviting fans from around the world to choose a piece and re-create it in whatever medium they liked: live-action, puppetry, animation, you name it. Three years and one Emmy Award later, Pugh and his team have put the best pieces together and (with the blessing of Star Wars creator George Lucas) released the finished film, Star Wars Uncut: The Director’s Cut. It runs a fun two hours and five minutes. You can watch the complete movie above and learn more on the official website.

Related Star Wars Goodies:

Star Wars as Silent Film

Star Wars the Musical: The Force is Strong in this One

Darth Vader’s Theme in the Style of Beethoven

Kurt Russell Auditions for Star Wars

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978): It’s Oh So Kitsch

Star Wars Uncut: The Epic Fan Film is a post from: Open Culture

This video shows Yosemite National Park in all of its glory. Watch as darkness descends over Half Dome after a gorgeous sunset. Then, looking to the heavens, we observe the brilliant sky and the millions of stars visible. It’s Yosemite like you’ve never seen it before.

The video was created by Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty, who share an interest in time-lapse photography and found each other via Vimeo. The result, after numerous visits to Yosemite, was this completed project. All time-lapses were shot on the Canon 5D Mark II with a variety of Canon L and Zeiss CP.2 lenses. The music accompanying the video is “Outro” from the new album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming by electronic band M83.

One of the scenes from this video is of El Capitan, a vertical rock formation that’s twice the height of the Empire State Building. Wall: The Journey Up tells the heroic story of Steve Wampler’s quest to become the first person with Cerebral Palsy to climb El Capitan. The inspiring video/film trailer is worth watching.

Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.

Yosemite National Park in All of Its Time-Lapse Splendor is a post from: Open Culture

In this video created by the Guardian, writer and award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris talks about the nature of truth, art, and propaganda in photography. He draws examples from the photographs of Abu Ghraib and the Crimean War, both cited in his book Believing is Seeing, and he asks the viewer to consider a most fundamental question: how does a photograph relate to the physical world? Unlike a verbal or written statement, a photograph cannot be true or false. It simply is.

Then comes another argument worth considering — the idea that all photographs are posed. By way of example, Morris cites an instance where a photographer (in this case Roger Fenton) omits an elephant standing outside the frame. And it leads Morris to suggest  that we shouldn’t take photos at face value. Rather we should do our due diligence to find out whether there isn’t always a metaphorical elephant looming beyond the frame. As Morris states, a photograph decontextualizes everything. It reveals to us a two dimensional reality that’s “been torn out of the fabric of the world.”

This video is part of the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” series, in which the world’s top thinkers, newsmakers, and people with stories to tell are interviewed. For more meditations on photography, give some time to Errol Morris’ speech at the Harvard Bookstore. Find the transcript here.

Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.

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Werner Herzog Loses a Bet to Errol Morris, and Eats His Shoe (Literally)

“They Were There” — Errol Morris Finally Directs a Film for IBM

Errol Morris: Two Essential Truths About Photography is a post from: Open Culture

The construction began in the year 2000, and over the years, Miniatur Wunderland, located in Hamburg, Germany, has staked its claim as the largest model railway in the world. Watch as you take a ride across the seven sections: Harz, the fictitious city of Knuffingen, the Alps and Austria, Hamburg, America, Scandinavia, and Switzerland.

As the video attests, it took more than 500,000 working hours to create this massive miniature world. The most recent addition is the Knuffingen airport, located on 150 square meters, and boasting 40 airplanes that can taxi, take off, and land.

Miniatur Wunderland is constantly evolving: the final phase of the project is slated to be completed in 2020, by which time the model area will grow to nearly 25,000 square feet. No wonder Miniatur Wunderland is Hamburg’s most popular attraction.

via Gizmodo

Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.

Miniatur Wunderland: The World’s Largest Model Railroad is a post from: Open Culture

In early October of 2009, Malcolm McLaren was nearing death but didn’t know it yet. He showed up at the 2009 Handheld Learning conference feeling fatigued, but managed to deliver a provocative and heartfelt speech titled, “Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s the Txt Pistols,” in which he reflects on his life growing up in post-World War II England and expresses dismay over the rise of what he called “karaoke culture.”

“All popular culture today,” said McLaren, “goes to great lengths to promote the idea that it’s cool to be stupid.” He championed instead the “messy process of creativity” in which struggle, failure and the acquisition of skill and knowledge are valued above instant fame. You can watch the complete speech above. A few days after it was given, McLaren went into the hospital and learned that he had cancer. He died six months later, on April 8, 2010. The next day Handheld Learning founder Graham Brown-Martin  wrote:

The talk from Malcolm at the Handheld Learning Conference 2009 will, I believe, stand the test of time. The speech doesn’t elaborate about the period of the Sex Pistols, New York Dolls, Vivienne Westwood, his impact on design, fashion and music culture and many other important achievements of Malcolm’s life that will be reported in obituaries over the coming days. Instead and in keeping with the theme of the conference, Malcolm discusses in his inimitable style–his life, learning, authenticity vs karaoke culture and what we gain from the experience of failure. Ironically, failure was something Malcolm never achieved. The talk was anything but ordinary, it polarised our audience and instantly trended globally on Twitter but what else would you expect?

via TED/Best of the Web

Malcolm McLaren: The Quest for Authentic Creativity is a post from: Open Culture

Next up: a lovely film about a lonely desk toy that longs for adventure. Observing the space around him, a robot finds a toy car and heads off on a road trip across the United States, guided only by Google Maps Street View. We start on the Brooklyn Bridge and finish on the Pacific Coast Highway in California. Parts of the video look like sequences from a Pixar film, they are so well made. In reality, the film was produced, animated, filmed, lit, edited and graded by one person: Tom Jenkins.

A great treat to start the week.

via Flowing Data

Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.

Address is Approximate: A Lovely Animated Film Made with Google Maps is a post from: Open Culture

This past weekend, Pete Seeger marched through the streets of Manhattan with the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was a spritely 92. It was the latest in a lifetime of political engagement by Seeger, dating all the way back to his youthful support of the Spanish Civil War. Today we bring you a film of Seeger when he was only 27 years old: To Hear Your Banjo Play. Released in 1946, To Hear Your Banjo Play is an engaging 16-minute introduction to American folk music, written and narrated by Alan Lomax and featuring rare performances by Woody Guthrie, Baldwin Hawes, Sonny Terry, Brownee McGhee, Texas Gladden and Margot Mayo’s American Square Dance Group. To Hear Your Banjo Play is included in our collection of Free Movies.

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Legendary Folklorist Alan Lomax’s ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’

Pete Seeger: To Hear Your Banjo Play is a post from: Open Culture

In 1941, director Dave Fleischer and Paramount Pictures animators Steve Muffati and George Germanetti produced Superman: The Mechanical Monsters — a big-budget animated adaptation of the popular Superman comics of that period, in which a mad scientist unleashes robots to rob banks and loot museums, and Superman, naturally, saves the day. It was one of seventeen films that raised the bar for theatrical shorts and are even considered by some to have given rise to the entire Anime genre.

More than a mere treat of vintage animation, the film captures the era’s characteristic ambivalence in reconciling the need for progress with the fear of technology in a culture on the brink of incredible technological innovation. It was the dawn of the techno-paranoia that persisted through the 1970s, famously captured in the TV series Future Shock narrated by Orson Welles, and even through today. Take for example books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

Superman: The Mechanical Monsters is available for download on The Internet Archive, and Toonami Digital Arsenal has the complete series of all seventeen films. Find more vintage animation in Open Culture’s collection of Free Movies Online.

Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and DesignObserver, and spends a great deal of time on Twitter.

The Mechanical Monsters: Seminal Superman Animated Film from 1941 is a post from: Open Culture

Paola Antonelli — Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the MoMA, longtime proponent of humanized technology, self-described “curious octopus” — has arguably done more for the mainstream infiltration of design literacy than any other individual in contemporary culture. In her recent opening keynote at the unequivocally titled media and ideas conference The Conference in Malmö, Sweden, Antonelli pulls the curtain on her curatorial process and, with her signature on-stage charisma, takes a revealing look at how her shows go about the incredible balancing act of being both beacons of the bleeding edge of design and an approachable education platform for instilling in the general public a basic understanding of the fundamental importance of design — something she describes as “push[ing] design down from the realm of art and up from the realm of decoration and prettification into real life.”

“What designers do is they take revolutions that happen maybe in science or technology or politics, and they transform them into objects that you and I can use, that you and I can feel some familiarity or at least some curiosity about, so we can be drawn in and we can start a new life and a new behavioral pattern. And this idea of designers as the interface of progress, between progress and humanity, is what I try to stay with.” ~ Paola Antonelli

Antonelli’s excellent new show, Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects, is on display at the MoMA through November 7.

Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and DesignObserver, and spends a great deal of time on Twitter.

Paola Antonelli on Design as the Interface Between Progress and Humanity is a post from: Open Culture