Thanks to Mayeul Akpovi, we’ll always have Paris.…
via Devour
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Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk Radio Show Podcast Tackles the History of Video Games
Neil deGrasse Tyson has a podcast. I repeat, Neil deGrasse Tyson has a podcast. If you’re unfamiliar (and you shouldn’t be), Tyson is Astrophysicist-in-residence at New York’s Natural History Museum and Director of its Hayden Planetarium. He’s also the most prominent advocate for a revitalized U.S. space program. Okay, back to the podcast. As an avid consumer of every science-based podcast out there, I can tell you that the StarTalk Radio Show (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) has quickly risen to the top of my list. The very personable Tyson is the big draw, but he has also made the wise decision to include “comedian co-hosts, celebrities, and other special guests.” In the episode right below, Tyson and comedian Eugene Mirman (whom you might recognize as the voice of Gene from Bob’s Burgers) mix it up with video game designer Will Wright and author Jeff Ryan.
Ryan’s Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America—and the history of video games more generally—is the topic of the show. Despite the less-than-stellar audio quality, this is not to be missed. The conversation is rapid-fire: Mirman interjects hilarious inanities while Wright and Ryan speed through the fascinating history and Tyson throws knuckleball questions and enthuses (at 4:30) that the “first real video game,” Space Wars, was about, what else, space. We also get the history of the unforgettable Pong (at 5:59), the original Star Wars game (at 8:17), and, naturally, Donkey Kong (at 3:19), designed by the now wildly famous (in Japan, at least) Shigeru Miyamoto–who also invented Mario, and who had never designed a game in his life before Donkey Kong. All this and some classic 8‑bit video game music to boot.
StarTalk in general has much to recommend it. Tyson is the “nation’s foremost expert on space,” and is probably instantly recognizable from his hosting of NOVA scienceNow and his bestselling books. He is the public face of a scientific community often in need of good press, and he has the rare ability to translate abstruse concepts to the general public in a humorous and approachable way. Previous guests/co-hosts have included Janeane Garofalo (in the “most argumentative Startalk podcast ever”) and John Hodgman (of the Daily Show and the “Mac vs. PC” ads). But above all, c’mon, it’s Neil deGrasse Tyson. The man deservedly has his own internet meme, inspired by his dramatic gestures in this video discussion of Isaac Newton from Big Think.
Enough said.
Watch the full Big Think interview with Tyson here. And don’t forget to subscribe to the StarTalk Radio Show (iTunes — Feed — Web Site).
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
The Benefits of Being Awestruck
In December 1972, astronauts aboard the Apollo 17 spacecraft snapped a photograph of our Earth from an altitude of 45,000 kilometres. The photograph, known as “The Big Blue Marble,” let everyone see their planet fully illuminated for the first time. The picture, showing the Earth looking isolated and vulnerable, left everyone awestruck. And “The Big Blue Marble” became the most widely-distributed image of the 20th century. Now, less than a half century later, pictures of our planet barely move us. And we hardly bat an eyelash at videos giving us remarkable views from the International Space Station.
We’re losing our sense of awe at our own peril, however. The title of a new Stanford study tells you all you need to know: Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being. Apparently, watching awe-inspiring vidoes makes you less impatient, more willing to volunteer time to help others, more likely to prefer experiences over material products, more present in the here and now, and happier overall. (More on that here.) All of this provides filmmaker Jason Silva the material for yet another one of his “philosophical shots of espresso,” The Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck. It’s the first video above.
Find more awe in our collection of Great Science Videos.
Star Trek Celebrities, William Shatner and Wil Wheaton, Narrate Mars Landing Videos for NASA
NASA and Star Trek — they’ve been joined at the hip for decades. Back in 1972, when NASA launched its very first space shuttle, they called it the Enterprise, a clear nod to the starship made famous by the 1960s TV show. In 2011, NASA brought the space shuttle program to a close, and they fittingly asked William Shatner to narrate an 80 minute film documenting the history of the audacious space program. (Watch it here.)
Now we’re one week away from another NASA milestone — the landing of the rover Curiosity on Mars — which can mean only one thing. William Shatner’s back, and he’s previewing the action that lies ahead. First the Curiosity’s difficult landing, the so-called Seven Minutes of Terror. And then the rover’s mission on the Red Planet. Shatner’s clip will give geeks north of 40 a little nerdgasm. For younger geeks (said affectionately), NASA has Wil Wheaton, the star of Star Trek: The Next Generation, reading the same script. You can watch it below.
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Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei: A Short Documentary
The work of dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is monumental, as is the man’s fearless and outspoken personality. Recently, while standing under the circular display of massive bronze animal heads in Ai’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads at Washington, DC’s Hirshhorn Museum, I found myself wishing I could meet him. The next best thing, I guess, is to see candid footage of his life and work, which is what you find in Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei, the short documentary (above) from PBS’s Frontline.
Begun in 2008 by 24-year-old filmmaker Alison Klayman, Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei captures the artist immediately before his principled and costly stand against the Beijing Olympics (which he helped to design) and the oppressive police state he claimed it represented. Klayman followed Ai for two years and shot 200 hours of footage, some of which became the short film above. The rest has been edited and released as a feature-length film called Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which has picked up prizes at Sundance, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.
Ai is unique among his contemporaries in the art world for his willingness to confront social issues not only through visual media but also through media commentary. As Klayman puts it, “Weiwei the artist had become as provocative with his keyboard, typing out a daily diatribe against local corruption and government abuses” on his blog. Ai claims his political involvement is “very personal.” “If you don’t speak out,” he says above, “if you don’t clear your mind, then who are you?” He has written editorials for English-language publications on why he withdrew his support from the Beijing Games and what he thought of last Friday’s opening ceremony in London (he liked it). And, of course, he’s become a bit of a star on Twitter, using it to relentlessly critique China’s deep economic divides and suppression of free speech.
But for all his notoriety as an activist and his well-known internet persona, Ai’s sculpture and photography speaks for itself. Unfortunately, due to his arrest and imprisonment by Chinese authorities in 2011, he was unable to attend the opening of Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads in LA, and he is still under constant surveillance and not permitted to leave the country. But, true to form, none of these setbacks have kept him from speaking out, about his politics and his art. In the short video below, he discusses the significance of Zodiac Heads, his most recent monumental vision.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Voyage in Time: A Portrait of the Filmmaker in Exile
By 1982 Andrei Tarkovsky’s battles with Soviet censors had reached the point where he could no longer work in his native country. This rarely seen documentary shows the great Russian filmmaker treading unfamiliar ground as he travels across southern Italy in search of locations for his first film in exile, Nostalghia.
Voyage in Time (Tiempo di Viaggio) is less about the Italian countryside than Tarkovsky’s inner landscape, as he struggles to express his views on filmmaking and art to Tonino Guerra, his co-writer on Nostalghia. Guerra, who died earlier this year, was a legendary Italian screenwriter. He collaborated with Michelangelo Antonioni on many of his greatest films, including L’Avventura, La Notte, and Blow-Up, and with Federico Fellini on several of his later films, including Amarcord. The 63-minute film was produced for Italian television and completed in 1983, the same year as Nostalghia, with Tarkovsky and Guerra sharing the directing credit. Voyage in Time has been added to our collection of Free Tarkovsky Films Online.
Note: If you don’t automatically see subtitles, click CC at the bottom of the YouTube window.
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Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Student Films, 1956–1960
Wim Wenders Creates Ads to Sell Beer (Stella Artois), Pasta (Barilla), and More Beer (Carling)
Few would call Wim Wenders, the auteur behind Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, The Buena Vista Social Club, and last year’s documentary Pina, a “commercial” director. Yet he has, now and again, put in time as a director of commercials — advertisements, that is, for beer, food, and cameras. His personal hymn to Leica’s craftsmanship aside (“As a boy,” he narrates, “I looked at my father’s Leica like a sacred object”), these spots don’t immediately betray the identity of the man at the helm. Even if you’ve seen many of Wenders’ feature films, you might not guess that he made these commercials if you just happened upon them; you would, though, feel their difference in sensibility from the ads surrounding them. The Stella Artois clip above includes several attention-drawing television tropes like a picturesque European coast, fast cars and motorcycles, vintage musical instruments, alcohol, and femininity, but it approaches them in a nonstandard way — one that, consequentially, actually stands a chance of drawing your attention.
“There’s a certain amount of objects that men like a lot,” says Wenders in a short documentary on the making of the commercial, “and they like them so much that they give them their girlfriends’ names.” We see first a motorcycle named Sophie, then a convertible named Victoria, then a guitar named Valerie, then a beer — Stella. We never see any actual women, or, for that matter, any men; just places and things. Wenders imbues the sequence with humanity through the camera’s gaze, and the behind-the-scenes footage shows it as no easy task, requiring take after precisely lit take shot with cameras mounted on elaborate mechanical arms that look more expensive than the treasured objects themselves. (It also requires the director to issue instructions in no fewer than three languages, though I understand that as business as usual on a Wenders set.) For an entirely different perspective on beer, watch his spot for Carling that involves bicycling over a waterfall. For a more epic take on the relationship between mankind and machinery, watch what he put together for food conglomerate Barilla’s 125th anniversary.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The Strawberry Fields Forever Demos: The Making of a Beatles Classic (1966)
In 1966, John Lennon found himself in Almería, Spain working on Richard Lester’s film, How I Won the War. Between shots, he began writing Strawberry Fields Forever, a song Lennon later called “psychoanalysis set to music” and “one of the few true songs I ever wrote.” Although the song became one of the Beatles’ most refined and intricate recordings, it started off simply, with Lennon trying out lyrics and chords on his acoustic guitar, then recording solo demos upon his return to England. Listen above.
Once the Beatles started recording the song in November, 1966, the band spent at least 45 hours, spaced over a month, working through new versions. Around and around they went, tweaking, polishing, recording new takes, trying to get it right. Eventually the song, as we know it, came together when George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, pulled off the “Big Edit,” a technological feat that involved speeding up one recording and slowing down another and fusing them into the song we know today. (Amazingly, the two tracks were recorded in different keys and tempos.) Strawberry Fields Forever was released as a double A‑side single in February 1967 along with Penny Lane, and it was accompanied by a promotional film, a precursor to music videos we know and love today. You can watch it below.
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Leni Riefenstahl Captures Jesse Owens Dashing Nazi Dreams at the 1936 Olympics
Jesse Owens, the son of a sharecropper and grandson of slaves, went to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and upset Hitler’s visions of Aryan supremacy. He did it not once, but four times, winning gold medals in the 100-meter dash, 200-meter dash, the long jump and the 4 x 100 meter relay. The first race was captured by the German filmmaker/propagandist Leni Riefenstahl in her famous film documenting the 1936 Games, Olympia. It’s all queued up above and ready to go.
Now the cruel footnote to this story: after his four victories, Owens returned to the U.S. and immediately confronted the cold racist attitudes of his countrymen. There was no pause, no reprieve, even for an Olympic gold medalist. Later, he recalled:
When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either.
New York City did hold a ticker-tape parade in his honor. But when he attended a reception at the Waldorf-Astoria, he was forced to ride the freight elevator. And he didn’t make it to the White House until Eisenhower named him an “Ambassador of Sports” in 1955. FDR and Truman never bothered to extend an invitation to the Olympic hero. Stephen elaborates on all of this below:
Celebrate Harry Potter’s Birthday with Song. Daniel Radcliffe Sings Tom Lehrer’s Tune, The Elements.
Some child actors are unendearing, snarky types (think Selena Gomez or a young Dakota Fanning). Others, you root for because even if they’re cloying they seem real (Haley Joel Osment comes to mind).
Daniel Radcliffe, who was most certainly a child when he was cast as Harry Potter at 11, may fall more into the second camp. He’s as hapless and earnest as Harry, and it turns out that he’s endearingly nerdier in real life than Harry himself could ever be.
Radcliffe, who celebrated his 23rd birthday this week, sealed his fate as a bit of an anorak when he appeared on the BBC’s Graham Norton Show and nervously sang Tom Lehrer’s song The Elements.
Maybe Radcliffe’s best subject at Hogwarts would have been potions. On television he admits to being a little nervous before launching into the homage to Lehrer, explaining that he’d stayed up all night trying to memorize the song. One of Lehrer’s classics, it actually sets the periodic table of elements to music. In the best versions, Lehrer accompanies himself on piano while reciting all of the chemical elements known at the time of writing (1959) to the tune of a Gilbert and Sullivan melody.
Harry Potter’s birthday is next week (July 31), the same day author J.K. Rowling celebrates hers. Perhaps Potter fans could cook up a birthday celebration for Potter involving a song about lawrencium, which was added to the periodic table two years after Lehrer wrote his song. As he cleverly noted himself at the end of the tune,
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha’vard,
And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discavard
Good stuff. Worthy of the boy who survived.
Kate Rix is an Oakland-based freelance writer. See more of her work at .
Conan O’Brien Writes Chicago Blues Songs With School Kids
Here’s a little something to end your week with a smile: Conan O’Brien improvising the blues with a group of first graders. The segment was taped in Chicago–home of the electric blues–during the Conan show’s one-week stand there last month. O’Brien and his bandleader, Jimmy Vivino, brought their guitars to the Frances Xavier Warde elementary school on the city’s Near West Side to investigate what a group of six- and seven-year-olds might be blue about. The result is the sad, sad, “No Chocolate Blues.”
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