Back during the 1920s, Claude Friese-Greene, an early British pioneer of film, shot The Open Road, “a series of ten-minute travelogues of Britain,” which were meant “to be shown before the main feature in cinema programmes,” according to the British Film Institute. Clips from that series have appeared for years on the BFI’s YouTube Channel. But, in recent days, the hive mind of the internet has focused on these five minutes of footage showing 1920s London in rare moving color. What draws us to this footage? Perhaps one Vimeo commenter put it best, saying: “Profoundly moving somehow. All those ghosts on film, foreshadowing our footsteps through the same city. Parts of London remain startlingly unchanged. The megalopolis was less corporate then, more imperial, certainly less suspicious of the camera. But, those pastel shades of people are shown dodging the traffic in the same way as we do, perhaps showing us a way through the labyrinth.” It’s hard not to stop and take notice when the past seems distant, yet so close and familiar.
The volume of data in our age is so vast that whole new research fields have blossomed to develop better and more efficient ways of presenting and organizing information. One such field is data visualization, which can be translated in plain English as visual representations of information.
The PBS “Off Book” series turned its attention to data visualization in a short video featuring Edward Tufte, a statistician and professor emeritus at Yale, along with three young designers on the frontiers of data visualization. Titled “The Art of Data Visualization,” the video does a good job of demonstrating how good design—from scientific visualization to pop infographics—is more important than ever.
In much the same way that Marshall McLuhan spoke about principles of communication, Tufte talks in the video about what makes for elegant and effective design. One of his main points: Look after truth and goodness, and beauty will look after herself.
What does Tufte mean by this? That design is only as good as the information at its core.
For those of us who aren’t designers, it’s refreshing to consider the elements of good visual story-telling. And that’s what the best design is, according to the experts in this video. Every data set, or big bunch of information, has its own core concept, just as every story has a main character. The designer’s job is to find the hero in the data and then tell the visual story.
So much of the information we encounter every day is hard to conceptualize. It’s so big and complicated that a visual rendering represents it the best. That’s because human brains are wired to take in a lot of information at once. Good designers know that decision-making isn’t linear. It’s a super-fast process of recognizing patterns and making sense of them.
Information may be more abundant but it isn’t new, and neither is data visualization. In the video, Tufte talks about stone maps carved by early humans and how those ancient graphics form the template for Google maps.
What comes across in PBS’s video is that data visualization is an art, and the simpler the better. Tufte seems to argue that good data guides the designer to do good work, which leads to the question: Is the medium no longer, as McLuhan famously commented, the message?
Dylan Thomas’s drinking was legendary. Stories of the debauched and disheveled Welsh poet’s epic drinking binges have had a tendency to drown out serious discussion of his poetry.
It’s a legend that Thomas helped promote, as this pencil sketch he made of himself attests. The undated self-caricature was published in Donald Friedman’s 2007 book, The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers. It depicts a teetering, goggle-eyed figure with tumbler in hand, happily surrounded by bottles.
Thomas would sometimes tell his friends he had cirrhosis of the liver, but his autopsy eventually disproved this. As legend has it, the poet literally drank himself to death on his American tour in the fall of 1953, when he was 39 years old. In fact, it appears Thomas may have been a victim of medical malpractice. He went to his doctor complaining of difficulty breathing. The doctor was aware of the poet’s reputation as a drinker, and had been informed by Thomas’s companion of his now-famous statement from the night before: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.”
So the doctor treated Thomas for alcoholism and didn’t discover he was suffering from pneumonia. He gave Thomas three injections of morphine, which can slow respiration. Thomas’s face turned blue and he went into a coma. He died four days later. When Thomas’s friends investigated, they determined he had likely consumed, at most, eight whiskies. That’s still a large amount, but the poet’s exaggeration appears to have led his doctor astray. In a sense, then, Dylan Thomas was killed not by his drinking, but by the legend of his drinking.
Everyone on the internet knows the bitter disappointment of clicking on lists that sound more interesting than they turn out to be, just as enthusiasts of American history have grown weary of hearing claims about what has or hasn’t “changed America.” (Last year, comedy writer Alison Agosti elegantly smacked down both trends in one tweet.) But I have a feeling that PBS and station WTTW’s new series Ten Buildings that Changed America can pull the combination off with snappiness and insight. Hosted by Geoffrey Baer, television personality and noted enthusiast of Chicago (an American built environment if ever there was one), the show promises a look at, among other architectural windows onto the American spirit, “a state capitol that Thomas Jefferson designed to resemble a Roman temple, the home of Henry Ford’s first assembly line, the first indoor regional shopping mall,” and “an airport with a swooping concrete roof that seems to float on air.”
You can watch the debut episode of Ten Buildings that Changed America online. It begins the cross-country architectural road trip in Richmond, Virginia, where Baer visits future President Thomas Jefferson’s state capitol building. “As a founding father of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was passionate about America’s independence from Britain,” says the show’s page on the building. “He was no fan of the king of England and, by extension, no fan of the Georgian architecture that bore the kings’ name,” an inclination which got him looking toward France for inspiration. Subsequent episodes will examine other striking, innovative, influential, and oft-imitated American buildings: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Baer’s beloved Chicago, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York City, and even Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, the still-controversial new icon of the downtown Los Angeles where I type this very post.
There’s not much left to say about Jimi Hendrix’s last days. The endless stream of commentary surrounding his life and death threatens to bury the man and his music in music-press fetishization, urban legend, and fawning mythology. When I’m able to totally tune out the hype, Hendrix’s polished work stands the time-test, and some of the more raw releases—the bootlegs and demos that appear every few years—at least document musical roads not taken and preserve moments of stunning genius, if not fully-realized compositions.
And Hendrix’s intriguing persona—revealed in casual interviews and conversations—still captivates, with his offhand lyricism and fractal imagination, qualities on full display in his final press interview, to NME’s Keith Allston, on September 11, 1970, just seven days before the artist’s death. (Listen to the YouTube audio above, or Soundcloud below.) Hendrix is breezy, contemplative, a little evasive, revealing his own sense of being between things, not sure where he’s headed next. As all those late-Hendrix bootlegs and demos testify, he could have done anything and made it work with the right band and a bit more time…
But enough what-ifs. Nobody’s better on Hendrix than Hendrix, so listen to the interview. You can find a full transcript and much more Hendrix-on-Hendrix and music-press chatter in a recent (and quite inexpensive) Kindle publication called Jimi Hendrix: Interviews and Reviews 1967-71. Ultimate Classic Rock calls the final interview the “most interesting thing about the book from a historical standpoint,” and this may be true.
Finally, if you don’t make it all the way to the end of the audio, Hendrix leaves on this vivid and quite funny note:
ALTHAM: Do you feel personally that you have enough money to live comfortably without necessarily making more as a sort of professional entertainer?
HENDRIX: Ah, I don’t think so, not the way I’d like to live, because like I want to get up in the morning and just roll over in my bed into an indoor swimming pool and then swim to the breakfast table, come up for air and get maybe a drink of orange juice or something like that. Then just flop over from the chair into the swimming pool, swim into the bathroom and go on and shave and whatever.
ALTHAM: You don’t want to live just comfortably, you wanna live luxuriously?
HENDRIX: No! Is that luxurious? I was thinking about a tent, maybe, [laughs] overhanging … overhanging this … a mountain stream! [laughter].
Right now, you can find 1,520 TED Talks compiled into a neat online spreadsheet. That’s a lot of TED Talks. And the most popular one (in case you’re wondering) was delivered by Sir Ken Robinson in 2006. If you regularly visit our site, then chances are you’re among the 20 million people who have viewed Robinson’s talk on why Schools Kill Creativity. There’s also a good chance that you’ll want to watch his newly-released TED Talk, How to Escape Education’s Death Valley. Filmed just last month, this talk takes aim at America’s test-centric educational system, a system that increasingly treats education as an industrial process and bleeds creativity and curiosity out of our classrooms. You get that problem when you put technocrats and politicians, not teachers, in charge of things. And you’re only going to get more of it (sorry to say) as computer scientists start putting their stamp on America’s educational future.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and share intelligent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.
So everyone knows Hemingway was a bruiser. Some of the best stories of his macho posturing involve fellow writers. There was, of course, that time he and Wallace Stevens slugged it out in Key West. I’ve been told Stevens asked for it, drunkenly telling Hemingway’s sister Ursula that her brother wrote like a little boy. I don’t know whose version of the story this comes from, but by all accounts, Hemingway knocked the bear of a poet down several times. The two made up soon after. Then there’s the story of Hemingway and James Joyce; the diminutive Irish writer apparently hid behind his pugnacious friend when trouble loomed.
There are many other such yarns, I’m sure, but one I’ve just learned of shows us a much more passive-aggressive side of Papa H. As the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library blog informs us, Hemingway once sent F. Scott Fitzgerald a typescript of A Farewell to Arms. Fitzgerald sent back ten pages of edits and comments, signing off with “A beautiful book it is!” You can see Hemingway’s first reaction above (signed EH). In later drafts, it seems, he took some of Fitzgerald’s advice to heart.
In the final months of his short life, Bruce Lee wrote a personal essay, “In My Own Process” where he said, “Basically, I have always been a martial artist by choice and actor by profession. But, above all, I am hoping to actualize myself to be an artist of life along the way.” If you’re familiar with Bruce Lee, you know that he studied philosophy at The University of Washington, and even when he auditioned for The Green Hornet in 1964 (and showed off his amazing kung fu moves), he took pains to explain the philosophy underlying the martial arts.
Lee wasn’t just a philosopher. He was also a poet and a translator of poetry. In the book, Bruce Lee: Artist of Life, John Little has published 21 original poems found within Lee’s personal archive. The poems, Little writes, “are, by American standards, rather dark — reflecting the deeper, less exposed recesses of the human psyche… Many seem to express a returning sentiment of the fleeting nature of life, love and the passion of human longing.” Above, you can see Shannon Lee, the daughter of Bruce Lee, read a poem published in Little’s collection. It’s called “Boating on Lake Washington.” Immediately below, she reads ”IF” by Rudyard Kipling, a poem her father loved so much that he had it engraved on a plaque and mounted on the wall in his home.
Finally, we leave you with Lee’s translation of another favorite poem, “The Frost” by Tzu Yeh. The video features pieces of his handwritten translation.
Brooklynites, be apprised: Big Sur Brooklyn Bridge, Williamsburg’s week-long celebration of all things Henry Miller, began yesterday and will run until May 19th. If you can’t make it out there, I suggest you instead sit down to watch The World of Henry Miller: Reflections on Writing (part two, part three, part four). Shot in the late sixties by the documentarian Robert Snyder, otherwise known for his award-winning films on Michelangelo and the world of insects, the film follows Miller, entering his final decade, as he retraces his steps through the literary places he’s known, and has reminiscence-intensive conversations with the literary people he’s known, reflecting all the while on how both shaped his writing.
Alexander Nazaryan’s New Yorker post, “Henry Miller, Brooklyn Hater,” written for the occasion of Big Sur Brooklyn Bridge, goes into some detail about the Tropic of Cancer author’s loathing for his birthplace. Though he would ultimately find a kind of peace in Big Sur, only on the move in the thirties—especially as an expatriate in France, where he worked for the Chicago Tribune‘s Paris edition, and Greece, where he stayed with British novelist Lawrence Durrell—did his writing take its true shape. Miller himself tells it that way in Reflections on Writing, to friends like Durrell, famed diarist Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Clark Powell, the UCLA librarian Miller thought “representative of all that is best in the American tradition.” Though Snyder also includes footage of Miller reading his work aloud, you can see a bit more in the clip of a Black Spring reading just above, and hear half an hour more of the book here.
Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the most admired and influential architects of the 20th century. He was a flamboyant, unabashedly arrogant man who viewed himself from an early age as a genius. Others tended to agree. In 1991, The American Institute of Architects named Wright the greatest American architect of all time.
Wright believed that the adage “form follows function” was something of a misstatement. “Form and function should be one,” he said, “joined in a spiritual union.” A sense of spiritual union ran all through Wright’s work. He identified God with Nature (which he spelled with a capital “N”) and strove to design buildings that were in harmony with their natural surroundings. “No house should ever be on a hill or on anything,” Wright wrote in his 1932 autobiography. “It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.”
Wright spoke about life and the creativity of man in mystical terms. In this rare recording from June 18, 1957, a 90-year-old Wright describes his philosophy. “Man is a phase of Nature,” he says, “and only as he is related to Nature does he matter, does he have any account whatever above the dust.”
Get updates as soon as they go live, via RSS feed, email and now Twitter!
Follow on Twitter
Get the latest from our Twitter Stream.
Facebook
Why can't we be friends?
Suggest a Link
Got a link we should post? Send it our way!
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.
Open Culture receives about 2.8 million visits per month and has over 275,000 social media and rss followers. Get your message in front of our smart, savvy audience today.
