The Texas-based artist and videographer Jeremiah Warren mounted a wide angle lens camera on some fireworks to give us the fireworks’ angle on their own brief, bright trajectory. Not surprisingly, the very cool two-minute video — equal parts Strangelove, Pynchon, and vertigo — went viral over the weekend.
For more information about Warren’s camera set-up, check out his Flickr page.
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.
A few days ago, The Guardian published its list of the 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books of all time. The collection spans biography, art, philosophy, history and several other hefty categories, and, for the most part, there’s not much for anyone seeking light summer reading, unless you’re the sort who regularly brings Kant, Hume, Herodotus, and Pepys down to the seaside. (Note: The Guardian published Friday The Best Holiday Reads, which goes heavy on vacation-worthy fiction.)
Several years ago we asked you to tell us about the books that changed your life, and you delivered. (Your first choice by a wide margin was George Orwell’s 1984.) This time around, we want to hear your favorite non-fiction books, and we’ll both post your choices and — of course — let you know if they’re available for free online.
We’ll kick it off with a few personal favorites:
The Possessed, by Elif Batuman. A delightful reminiscence by a recovering graduate student, in which she treats, among other things, Russian novelists, doomed love affairs, academic conferences, Turkic poetry, and mostly, the pleasures and perils of loving books just a little bit too much.
The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam and Glenn Stout. You don’t even need to know or care about sports, because like all great literature, these essays aren’t really just about what they’re about. The subject may be sports, but the stories are America.
Your turn! Feel free to add your favorites to the comments section below…
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.
We didn’t have cell phones [during my days at Northwestern]. If you made plans to meet someone in a snow storm and they didn’t show up, you just assumed that they were devoured by wolves and went on with your life. And we couldn’t text, and we certainly couldn’t sext each other. If you wanted to send someone a picture of your private parts, you had to fax it. That’s how Kinko’s got its name!
Best Advice:
In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because service is love made visible. If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. If you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself and you will have only yourself… Try to love others and serve others, and hopefully find those who will love and serve you in return…
Ophir Kutiel, aka Kutiman, burst onto the digital scene with The Mother of All Funk Chords in 2009. Now he has resurfaced with a new video. This time, it’s a musical journey through Jerusalem, a mashup that weaves together the sounds of local musicians, creating a visual/aural composition that lets you tap into the unique sound of a city that lives partly in the past, partly in the future, always wavering between optimism and despair.…
But, no matter, you have to separate the philosophy from the person … or so many acolytes of flawed thinkers have argued. Right fans of John Edwards? All three of you? So here you have it, The Selfish Path to Romance, a love manual based on Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. The video almost screams parody, but it’s apparently not. You can snag a copy of the book on Amazon here…
The stars shined upon the Ivy League schools this graduation season. Tom Hanks at Yale, Amy Poehler at Harvard, Denzel Washington at U Penn. These kids have it good, but nowhere near as good as the Dartmouth grads. This weekend, Conan O’Brien rolled into Hanover, New Hampshire and dished out plenty of jokes:
Parents, if your child majored in fine arts or philosophy, you have good reason to be worried. The only place where they are now really qualified to get a job is ancient Greece. Good luck with that degree.
You know, New Hampshire is such a special place. When I arrived I took a deep breath of this crisp New England air and thought, “Wow, I’m in the state that’s next to the state where Ben and Jerry’s ice cream is made.”
To this day I cannot help but wonder: What if I had gone to Dartmouth? If I had gone to Dartmouth, I might have spent at least some of my college years outside and today I might not be allergic to all plant life, as well as most types of rock. If I had gone to Dartmouth, right now I’d be wearing a fleece thong instead of a lace thong… If I had gone to Dartmouth, I’d have a liver the size and consistency of a bean bag chair. Finally, if I had gone to Dartmouth, today I’d be getting an honorary degree at Harvard. Imagine how awesome that would be.
And a little wisdom for life, which, honestly, holds entirely true.
For decades, in show business, the ultimate goal of every comedian was to host The Tonight Show. It was the Holy Grail, and like many people I thought that achieving that goal would define me as successful. But that is not true. No specific job or career goal defines me, and it should not define you. In 2000—in 2000—I told graduates to not be afraid to fail, and I still believe that. But today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality.
Many of you here today are getting your diploma at this Ivy League school because you have committed yourself to a dream and worked hard to achieve it. And there is no greater cliché in a commencement address than “follow your dream.” Well I am here to tell you that whatever you think your dream is now, it will probably change. And that’s okay. Four years ago, many of you had a specific vision of what your college experience was going to be and who you were going to become. And I bet, today, most of you would admit that your time here was very different from what you imagined. Your roommates changed, your major changed, for some of you your sexual orientation changed. I bet some of you have changed your sexual orientation since I began this speech. I know I have. But through the good and especially the bad, the person you are now is someone you could never have conjured in the fall of 2007.
This week, U2’s 360° Tour hit the west coast of the US, stopping first in Seattle, then Oakland and next Anaheim. Though critics have offered mixed reviews (this v. that), we had ourselves a ball, horrendous traffic jams aside. And we were particularly touched by one moment with a poignant backstory.
During the show, the audience gets beamed up to Mark Kelly, an astronaut on the space shuttle Endeavour, who happens to be married to Gabby Giffords, the US representative shot this past January in Arizona. To the 70,000 onlookers, Kelly says “Tell my wife I love her very much she knows” – the same lines delivered by Major Tom, the fictional astronaut, made famous by David Bowie’s Space Oddity: And, with that, U2 breaks into “Beautiful Day,” the song that served as a wake-up call for the Endeavour crew, at Gabby Giffords’ personal request. How’s that for a nice touch?
P.S. Yes we know that Endeavour returned to earth last week. But we have nothing against the willing suspension of disbelief.
How do you adequately portray life in a high-rise building? London filmmaker Marc Isaacs found a rather unconventional answer to this question. He installed himself inside the lift/elevator of a high rise on the East End of London. And for ten hours a day, over two months, he would ride up and down with the residents, with his camera pointing at them. It is fascinating to see how the residents react to him being there — some are suspicious or even hostile at the beginning. Others open up about their personal lives and their daily life in the building. And then others bring him something to eat, a chair to sit down on, or even little presents. The result is a moving and “quietly fascinating meditation on the mundanities of London life.” Writing about the film, the Times Online put it best: “Isaacs has an astounding gift for getting people to open up to him and he uses film the way a skilled artist uses paint. The result is beautiful, heartbreaking and profoundly humane.”
Here’s some bonus material: a review of “Lift” and Isaacs’ two other short documentaries “Calais” and “Travellers,” a Sunday Times article entitled “Marc Isaacs on his documentary art,” and an interview with Mark by The Documentary Filmmakers Group dfg.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
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