Last Tuesday, the residents of Poznan, Poland set a world record when they released 8,000 Chinese lanterns into the sky to mark the shortest night of the year — or what’s otherwise called Midsummer Night. The video above lets you see the lanterns in full flight. The image below offers a close-up view of a lantern before heading into the night sky…
via @pourmecoffee
Peter Falk made his career playing a quirky detective in the 1960s and 70s television show Columbo. But the art world will remember a moment when Falk played himself in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film, Wings of Desire. In the credits, he was listed simply as ‘Der Filmstar.’ This is our 1:46 tribute to Falk, who passed away Friday at age 83. H/T @SteveSilberman
Related:
In 1982, Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth directed 66 Scenes from America, a film that stitched together a series of lengthy shots, each a visual postcard from a journey across America. And, taken together, you have a tableau of the American experience.
Along the way, the pop artist Andy Warhol makes his appearance. The man who coined the expression “15 Minutes of Fame” takes four minutes to eat a hamburger, mostly without saying a word. And simply because of his fame, we watch … and watch. About this scene Leth gives a few details:
[Warhol] is told that he has to say his name and that he should do so when he has finished performing his action, but what happens is that the action takes a very long time to perform; it’s simply agonizing. I have to admit that I personally adore that, because its a pure homage to Warhol. It couldn’t be more Warholesque. That’s of course why he agreed to do it.
This was presumably not a paid placement by Burger King.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Related Content:
Warhol’s Screen Tests: Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper, Nico, and More
Three “Anti-Films” by Andy Warhol: Sleep, Eat & Kiss
Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ of Bob Dylan: A Classic Meeting of Egos
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.
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:
via Cambridge News (with thanks to Kirstin Butler and BrainPicker)
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
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.
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
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.
Last week, Citigroup admitted that hackers exposed the private financial data of more than 360,000 customer accounts. Meanwhile, in an unrelated attack, Lulz Security managed to bring down the CIA website, and this week they’ve declared war on government agencies around the world.
Now might be a good time to beef up on your knowledge of malware, cybercrime, and cyberwarfare, starting with Stuxnet, a computer virus that was launched against Iranian nuclear infrastructures in 2010 (most likely by the U.S.). For a quick primer on Stuxnet, check out Anatomy of a Computer Virus. It’s only three and a half minutes long, but you’ll learn enough to decide whether or not to set your laptop on fire, sell everything you own, and run screaming for the Yukon.
For a more detailed exploration of the virus, watch Cracking Stuxnet, A 21st-Century Cyber Weapon, a TED talk by cyber-security expert Ralph Langner. Disclaimer: It won’t necessarily put you at ease — the presenter closes by thanking Mr. Langner for “scaring the living daylights out of us.”
Via PopTech and Hungry Beast
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.
Bestselling writer Jonathan Lethem — author of one of my favorite contemporary novels Motherless Brooklyn — has a new short story featured in the summer edition of the Paris Review. The story is called “The Empty Room,” and, once again, the background, childhood, moves to the foreground. It begins:
Earliest memory: father tripping on strewn toys, hopping with toe outraged, mother’s rolling eyes. For my father had toys himself. He once brought a traffic light home to our apartment on the thirty-somethingth floor of the tower on Columbus Avenue. The light, its taxi yellow gone matte from pendulum-years above some polluted intersection and crackled like a Ming vase’s glaze where bolts had been overtightened and then eased, sat to one side of the coffee table it was meant to replace as soon as my father found an appropriate top. In fact, the traffic light would follow us up the Hudson, to Darby, to the house with the empty room. There it never escaped the garage.
Another memory: my playmate Max’s parents had borrowed, from mine, a spare set of china plates. I spent a lot of time visiting with Max and, when he let us inside his room, Max’s older brother. So I was present the afternoon my father destroyed the china set. Max’s family lived in a duplex, the basement and parlor floor of a brownstone, a palace of abundance . . . Max and his brother had separate rooms, and a backyard. All this would pale beside the spaciousness of our Darby farmhouse. That was the point.
You can read the full text here. And please note: the Paris Review has just launched its first digital edition, letting you read the famous literary journal on your computer, iPad or mobile device. More on that here. H/T Biblioklept
Related Content:
The Paris Review Interviews Now Online
Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
©2006-2026 Open Culture, LLC.
All rights reserved.
