First Meeting Between Papua New Guinea Tribesmen & Outside World

in Film, History | June 24th, 2011

Before clicking on this extraordinary video — which shows a meeting of civilizations that may never happen again on our planet — be sure to turn the sound off and spare yourself the awful soundtrack. The expressions on the faces of the Toulambi tribesmen are enough anyway, and even though history tells us that these parties end badly for the team with the fewest toys, you can’t help feeling a certain amount of awe and joy while watching the encounter.

This footage was shot in Papua New Guinea by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux, a Belgian filmmaker and activist perhaps best known for his Academy Award-nominated 1979 documentary Raoni: The Fight for the Amazon. You can visit Dutilleux’s web site to get more photos and a little more backstory on the Toulambi. Have a good weekend…

via Metafilter

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

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Darwin’s Personal Library Goes Digital: 330 Books Online

in Literature, Science, Video - Science | June 24th, 2011

When Charles Darwin finished reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, a book suggesting that there are clear limits to the variation of species, he wrote in the margins: “If this were true adios theory.” It’s a great piece of marginalia. And it’s just one of many comments that adorn books in Darwin’s personal library, and help illuminate his intellectual path to writing On The Origin Of Species (1859).

Thanks to Cambridge University library and several partners, 330 of Darwin’s most heavily annotated texts have now been digitized and made available online at the website of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. More will come in due time. You can begin your tour here.

Related Content:

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

Darwin’s Legacy

via Cambridge News (with thanks to Kirstin Butler and BrainPicker)

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Open Culture No. 5: The Best Culture Links of the Week

in Beat & Tweets | June 23rd, 2011

These cultural goodies (and others) flowed through our Twitter stream during the past week. Find us at @openculture … or Like us on Facebook get more intelligent media delivered daily.

Sources: @eugenephoto,  @boingboing,  @pbkauf ,  @coudal,  @LAReviewofBooks,  @stevesilberman,  @kottke,  @brainpicker,  @webacion

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The Joy of Easy Listening, BBC Documentary Online

in Music | June 23rd, 2011

A quicks heads up: If you like Herb Alpert and Engelbert Humperdinck, then this BBC doc is definitely for you. Here’s what you get in 90 minutes:

In-depth documentary investigation into the story of a popular music that is often said to be made to be heard, but not listened to. The film looks at easy listening’s architects and practitioners, its dangers and delights, and the mark it has left on modern life.
From its emergence in the 50s to its heyday in the 60s, through its survival in the 70s and 80s and its revival in the 90s and beyond, the film traces the hidden history of a music that has reflected society every bit as much as pop and rock – just in a more relaxed way.
Invented at the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll, easy listening has shadowed pop music and the emerging teenage market since the mid-50s. It is a genre that equally soundtracks our modern age, but perhaps for a rather more ‘mature’ generation and therefore with its own distinct purpose and aesthetic. Contributors include Richard Carpenter, Herb Alpert, Richard Clayderman, Engelbert Humperdinck, Jimmy Webb, Mike Flowers, James Last and others.

You can watch Part 1 above, and the remaining ones here: Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

via BoingBoing

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The Best Magazine Articles Ever, Curated by Kevin Kelly

in Literature, Media | June 23rd, 2011

A few days ago, we asked you to send us your favorite non-fiction titles. We’ll be posting your many excellent suggestions soon, and, in the meantime, we thought we should offer something in return — more specifically, yet another list of excellent non-fiction compiled by someone other than ourselves.

Kevin Kelly, web-pioneer, co-founder of Wired Magazine, former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, and one of the best all-around living arguments for ditching college and traveling the world instead, has put together a crowdsourced list of the best magazine articles from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s, almost all of them available on the web. He’s also gathered the top 25 of all time (based on the number of votes received) on one thrilling page.

The list includes pieces like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, and Gay Talese’s legendary 1966 Esquire cover story, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. It’s an invaluable resource, whether you’re an aspiring journalist or novelist, a history buff, or just a person who wants to enjoy the evolution of the past 60 years of the English language.

You may already be familiar with the sites Instapaper, Longreads, and Longform. All three can help you find great reading material on the web, organize it, and download it to your Kindle, iPad, or tablet. Enjoy.

Get more classics from our collection of Free eBooks.

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

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Man as Industrial Palace: Famous 1926 Lithograph Brought to Life

in Animation, Art | June 23rd, 2011

In 1926, Fritz Kahn, a German gynecologist and anatomy textbook author, produced a lithograph called Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace) that depicted the human body as a factory (see here), a chemical plant of sorts. Kahn’s body came complete with mechanical lungs, a rock-sorting stomach, gears for a throat, and a switchboard for a brain, and it illustrated rather metaphorically the degree to which industrialization had taken over Western life, creating deep anxiety for some and curiosity for others.

More than eighty years later, Henning Lederer, a German artist, has brought Kahn’s mechanical body to life with some gifted animation. This dynamic version is currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of the “Health for Sale” exhibition. To learn more about Lederer’s project, you will want to spend more time on IndustriePalast.com and particularly with this helpful PDF. Other animation by Lederer appears on Vimeo. Many thanks to Elliot for sending this along.

Don’t miss our new collection of 235 Cultural Icons, which presents footage of great musicians, writers, filmmakers and thinkers.

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Renata Salecl: The Paradox of Choice

in Current Affairs, Psychology | June 22nd, 2011

With freedom come choices. Every choice is an opportunity to select the best possible outcome, the one that would make us happiest. More choices lead to more happiness, right? Of course we find the opposite to be true. As choices increase, so does anxiety. In the latest installment of the RSA animated lecture series, Slovenian social and legal theorist Renata Salecl argues that this anxiety, coupled with the capitalist ideal of the self-made person, leads to a kind of social paralysis. “Today’s ideology of choice,” says Salecl, “actually pacifies people and makes us constantly turn criticism to ourselves instead of organizing ourselves and making a critique of the society we live in.” The animated feature was adapted from a lecture Salecl gave last summer in London. (You can watch the entire lecture here.) It draws on ideas presented in her book, Choice.

Other RSA Videos:

Sir Ken Robinson: A Creative Education

Good Capitalist Karma: Zizek Animated

Smile or Die: The Perils of Positive Psychology

Steven Pinker: How Innuendo Makes Things Work

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The Elements of Creativity

in Art, Creativity, Technology | June 22nd, 2011

The Elements of Creativity. They come down to this: Copy. Transform. Combine. Nothing is truly original. Everything is a remix, more or less.

Director Kirby Ferguson first traced this idea through literature and music, then through filmmaking. Next up? Technology, computers and user interface. Above we have the third and penultimate installment in the “Everything is a Remix” series. (You can watch it in large format here.) Look for the final segment to appear this fall, and consider supporting the project here.

Nice work Kirby and h/t BrainPickings.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.