Andy Samberg Announces Death of Liberal Arts, Coolness of Science Majors at Harvard Class Day

in Comedy, Graduation Speech, Harvard | May 27th, 2012

Every time Har­vard Class Day rolls around, you can expect a few good laughs from a come­di­an. In years past, Sacha Baron Cohen (a Cam­bridge grad), appear­ing as Ali G, offered some words of non­sen­si­cal wis­dom to Har­vard grads. Amy Poehler and Will Fer­rell have done the same. This year brings Andy Sam­berg, a Sat­ur­day Night Live cast mem­ber and co-star in var­i­ous com­ic films. The high­lights?

• 4:29 mark: Announces that His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture, any­thing relat­ed to Art, and any­thing that ends with “Stud­ies,” are offi­cial­ly use­less.
• 5:12 mark: Declares that Math and Sci­ence majors are cool .… final­ly.
• 9:13 mark: Reads poem by WB Yeats in his own, nov­el way.
• 10:20 mark: Impres­sions begin.
• 14:07: Awk­ward­ly comes on to all the moth­ers in the crowd.
• 15:04: Awk­ward­ly comes on to all the fathers in the crowd.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

‘This Is Water’: Com­plete Audio of David Fos­ter Wallace’s Keny­on Grad­u­a­tion Speech (2005)

Conan O’Brien Kills It at Dart­mouth Grad­u­a­tion

J.K. Rowl­ing Tells Har­vard Grads Why Suc­cess Begins with Fail­ure

Bill Murray Stars in Playful, Slo-Mo, Mock Trailer (and More Culture from Around the Web)

in Film | May 26th, 2012

As Wes Ander­son­’s new film with Bill Mur­ray hits the­aters this week­end, a fun video star­ring the actor has sur­faced on the web. Here’s the quick back­sto­ry. Last year, a crew work­ing on a com­mer­cial shoot with Bill Mur­ray got some­thing bet­ter than an auto­graph. They got to appear in a slow-motion scene with him, all set to music by The Kinks. The Wes Ander­son-style shoot was then turned into a short “trail­er” for a faux film, Les cinéastes, and it’s now online for your enjoy­ment. via @protoncharging

Now dis­cov­er more cul­ture from Around the Web (all links orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our Twit­ter Stream): 

Home Record­ing of 5‑Year-Old Sofia Cop­po­la Being Inter­viewed by Her Father

Bob Dylan, the Beat Gen­er­a­tion, and Allen Gins­berg’s Amer­i­ca. Essay by Sean Wilentz in The New York­er

John Waters Tries Some Des­per­ate Liv­ing on a Cross-Coun­try Hitch­hik­ing Odyssey

Gertrude Stein’s Posthu­mous Alpha­bet Book. Writ­ten in 1939, Final­ly Pub­lished with Illus­tra­tions in 2011

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty’s Lec­ture Series on Great Writ­ers and Why They Inspire (iTunes)

Young Girl Writes Ein­stein  and Asks, “Do Sci­en­tists Pray?” And He Replies (1936)

Entre­pre­neur Tells Techies to Get a PhD in the Human­i­ties

Frank Zap­pa Lec­tures at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty, 1975

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Reads “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster” (Added to our list of Free Audio Books)

Video: Woody Allen Reads “Not A Crea­ture Was Stir­ring”

Inten­sive Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence from Har­vard (Added to our Free Online Course Col­lec­tion)

How David Byrne and Brian Eno Make Music Together: A Short Documentary

in Music | May 25th, 2012

On Mon­day, we post­ed the Artist Series, short pro­files of var­i­ous aes­thet­i­cal­ly-ori­ent­ed cre­ators by the late Hill­man Cur­tis. Today, please enjoy what feels like the jew­el in the Artist Series’ crown, despite not offi­cial­ly being part of it: Cur­tis’ pro­mo­tion­al doc­u­men­tary on Bri­an Eno and David Byrne and their col­lab­o­ra­tion on 2008’s Every­thing That Hap­pens Hap­pen Will Hap­pen Today.

Cur­tis inter­views Eno and Byrne in their sep­a­rate work­spaces, cap­tures their con­ver­sa­tions about parts of their songs, and even — pre­sum­ably in keep­ing with the album’s do-it-your­self pro­mo­tion­al spir­it — lets them pho­to­graph one anoth­er. He also shows them doing what they do best when not cre­at­ing: cycling, of course, in Byrne’s case, and look­ing pen­sive­ly through win­dows in Eno’s.

In none of these nine min­utes do Byrne or Eno per­form any­thing. Cur­tis does­n’t need them to; he taps instead into the com­bi­na­tion of artic­u­la­cy, clar­i­ty, and idio­syn­crasy that has earned them near­ly forty years of sta­tus as cere­bral pop­u­lar music icons. Just as the ear­ly eight­ies’ nascent sam­pling tech­nol­o­gy gave Byrne and Eno a new frame­work with which to think about music when they record­ed My Life in the Bush of Ghosts togeth­er, the abil­i­ty to send sounds over the inter­net and exten­sive­ly mod­i­fy absolute­ly any record­ing after the fact shaped the con­struc­tion of Every­thing That Hap­pens Will Hap­pen Today.

The result­ing pro­duc­tion legit­i­mate­ly earns the crit­i­cal­ly abused adjec­tive “dream­like” — have a lis­ten to the track “I Feel My Stuff” above — and the feel of Cur­tis’ video aligns with the feel of the album, using unblink­ing gazes and drift­ing track­ing shots that would­n’t feel out of place in an Apichat­pong Weerasethakul film. If you still want to see these guys actu­al­ly play some­thing, watch Ride, Rise, Roar (trail­er here, clip below), Cur­tis’ con­cert film of the Songs of David Byrne and Bri­an Eno Tour.

Relat­ed con­tent

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

David Byrne: From Talk­ing Heads Front­man to Lead­ing Urban Cyclist

Sketch­es of Artists by the Late New Media Design­er Hill­man Cur­tis

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-Winner, Tweets New Story with The New Yorker

in Books, Literature, Twitter | May 25th, 2012

In March, Jen­nifer Egan (A Vis­it From the Goon Squad) paid a vis­it to Google and was asked to sum up her year since win­ning the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. She said: “I am still not used to the idea that I won it. Maybe I will final­ly real­ly grab hold of that idea when some­one else wins it. I will say ‘No, I want it!’ ” Lit­tle did she know that just a few weeks lat­er the Pulitzer Prize judges would decline to name a suc­ces­sor, leav­ing her in men­tal lim­bo for yet anoth­er year. She seems to be han­dling it pret­ty well — well enough to pub­lish a new short sto­ry on The New York­er’s Fic­tion twit­ter stream. Yes, you read that right, its Twit­ter stream.

Start­ing last night, The New York­er began tweet­ing her new sto­ry, “Black Box,” and the sto­ry will con­tin­ue to unfold over nine more night­ly install­ments. It’s a gim­mick, you’re think­ing, right? Well, for Egan, it’s not. She explains on The New York­er web site:

I’d also been won­der­ing about how to write fic­tion whose struc­ture would lend itself to seri­al­iza­tion on Twit­ter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the inti­ma­cy of reach­ing peo­ple through their phones, and because of the odd poet­ry that can hap­pen in a hun­dred and forty char­ac­ters. I found myself imag­in­ing a series of terse men­tal dis­patch­es from a female spy of the future, work­ing under­cov­er by the Mediter­ranean Sea. I wrote these bul­letins by hand in a Japan­ese note­book that had eight rec­tan­gles on each page. The sto­ry was orig­i­nal­ly near­ly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to con­trol and cal­i­brate the mate­r­i­al into what is now “Black Box.”

If you’re a Twit­ter user, you can catch the live stream between 8 and 9 P.M. EDT. (And you can also fol­low our live­ly Twit­ter stream here.) If micro-seri­al­ized fic­tion isn’t your thing, then you can always fol­low the sto­ry on The New York­er’s “Page Turn­er” blog.

Leonard Susskind, Father of String Theory, Warmly Remembers His Friend, Richard Feynman

in Physics, Stanford | May 24th, 2012

Leonard Susskind — he’s the father of String The­o­ry, some­one who won the black hole wars with Stephen Hawk­ing, and a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who likes to bring physics to the broad­er pub­lic. (Find his 6‑course intro­duc­tion to Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics in the Physics sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.) Last year, Susskind head­ed to Cal­Tech to talk about Richard Feyn­man. Of course, he’s the late, great physi­cist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on Quan­tum Elec­tro­dy­nam­ics (find his pub­lic lec­tures on that here). He also shared Susskind’s enthu­si­asm for pop­u­lar­iz­ing sci­ence, cre­at­ing mem­o­rable shows like Fun to Imag­ine, a tele­vi­sion series for the BBC, and The Plea­sure of Find­ing Things Out. In this warm talk, Susskind remem­bers his men­tor and friend, a com­plex per­son few got to know very well. Feyn­man was many things — a great sci­en­tist, a show­man, a philoso­pher, drum­mer, teacher, a bit of an ego­tist who could co-exist with oth­er big egos, and much more.

Bill Murray Introduces Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (And Plays FDR In December)

in Film | May 24th, 2012

Excit­ed Wes Ander­son fans: do you need one more watch­able to tide you over before Moon­rise King­dom enters wide release tomor­row? Wes Ander­son-neu­tral film­go­ers: do you need a lit­tle help cut­ting through the fans’ cloud of antic­i­pa­tion so you can make out what Moon­rise King­dom actu­al­ly is? Both groups could ben­e­fit from a tour of the film by comedic super­star and unlike­ly Ander­son reg­u­lar Bill Mur­ray. The film, a sto­ry of two young sweet­hearts on the run in 1965 New Eng­land, fea­tures Mur­ray in the role of the girl’s father. Or, in his own words: “I play a, um… a man in the film.” He goes on to describe the direc­tor (“a nice guy, he’s made some good movies”), his co-stars (“Bruce Willis, play­ing a police­man — type­cast, I guess”), and the pro­duc­tion’s sim­ple accom­mo­da­tions (“we had tents — like, pup tents”). He even cross­es a wall from one set to anoth­er, echo­ing his tour of the Bela­fonte in The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­sou, three Ander­son movies back. Whether you need the excite­ment inflat­ed or deflat­ed, leave it to Mur­ray, mas­ter of the dead­pan mul­ti­ple mean­ing.

If you fol­low Mur­ray’s craft and the some­times unex­pect­ed chal­lenges to which he applies it, keep your eyes open this awards sea­son for Hyde Park on Hud­son, a dra­ma built around Mur­ray as for­mer Unit­ed States Pres­i­dent Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt. Can’t envi­sion it? Then give the trail­er above a watch. The pic­ture comes from direc­tor Roger Michell, best known in the last decade for Venus, and Not­ting Hill in the decade before that. This new peri­od piece rep­re­sents not a break from his usu­al Eng­lish ter­ri­to­ry and sen­si­bil­i­ty so much as a recon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of it: it takes place dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar week­end in 1939, the first time a British monarch made the trip to Amer­i­ca, when Roo­sevelt enter­tained the King and Queen at his upstate New York home. The Wes Ander­son faith­ful will note a reunion of sorts between Mur­ray and Olivia Williams, who near­ly four­teen years ago played Miss Cross in Ander­son­’s Rush­more. Her role in Hyde Park on Hud­son? Eleanor Roo­sevelt.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fact Check­ing Bill Mur­ray: A Short, Com­ic Film from Sun­dance 2008

Wes Anderson’s New Com­mer­cials Sell the Hyundai Azera

Rare Footage: Home Movie of FDR’s 1941 Inau­gu­ra­tion

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The First Films of Great Directors: Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Tarantino & Truffaut

in Film | May 23rd, 2012

Great direc­tors — unless they’re Orson Welles — rarely start off mak­ing mas­ter­pieces. Their craft evolves, remind­ing us that great film­mak­ing (like every­thing else) takes tal­ent, but also hard work. In case you’re doubt­ful, we’re pre­sent­ing the first films by five icon­ic direc­tors, all fea­tured here before, but nev­er brought togeth­er into one place. Some first films are down­right chop­py; some are work­man­like; some are more refined. But none exact­ly soar to cin­e­mat­ic heights. Above, we start you off with Quentin Taran­ti­no’s 1987 debut film My Best Friend’s Birth­day, a chop­py pro­duc­tion that has some­thing unmis­tak­ably Taran­ti­noesque about it, accord­ing to Col­in Mar­shall.

In some sense, [My Best Friend’s Birth­day] bears an even deep­er imprint of Tarantino’s per­son­al­i­ty than his sub­se­quent films [Pulp Fic­tion, Reser­voir Dogs], since he stars in it as well. To behold the ear­ly-twen­tysome­thing Taran­ti­no por­tray­ing the good-heart­ed and aggres­sive­ly enthu­si­as­tic but jit­tery and dis­tractible rock­a­bil­ly DJ Clarence Poole is to behold the Quentin Taran­ti­no pub­lic per­sona in an embry­on­ic form, a dis­tilled form — or both.

Long before Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la shot Apoc­alpyse Now and The God­fa­ther in the 1970s, he made his real direc­to­r­i­al debut with a 75-minute, black-and-white psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror film called Demen­tia 13 (1963). He had made a cou­ple of small-time nudie films before that. But this was his first main­stream, legit effort.

As Col­in, our res­i­dent film crit­ic has not­ed here, “To watch Demen­tia 13 now is to wit­ness Coppola’s con­trol of ten­sion and dark­ness in its embry­on­ic — but still impres­sive — form. Nobody involved in the pro­duc­tion could have delud­ed them­selves about its goal of shoot­ing a few max­i­mal­ly grue­some axe mur­ders as quick­ly and cheap­ly as pos­si­ble, but even such strait­ened cir­cum­stances allow for pock­ets of artistry to bub­ble through.”

When you think Cop­po­la, you think Scors­ese too, anoth­er direc­tor who put his stamp on 1970s and 1980s cin­e­ma with Mean Streets, Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull, and Good­fel­las. We recent­ly revis­it­ed Scors­ese’s NYU film school days dur­ing the ear­ly 1960s, when he first cut his teeth as a direc­tor. We showed you sev­er­al of his ear­ly shorts (find them all here), but high­light­ed one of his ear­li­est works, What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This (1963). Scors­ese would lat­er describe the film as “nine min­utes of visu­al non­sense,” while also say­ing “it had no depth at all, but it was a lot of fun. And it won me a schol­ar­ship, so my father was able to use it for the tuition for the next year.”

Where­as Mar­tin Scors­ese went to NYU and leisure­ly stud­ied the his­to­ry and aes­thet­ics of cin­e­ma, Stan­ley Kubrick, a poor stu­dent, skipped col­lege, start­ed work­ing as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er for Look mag­a­zine, and even­tu­al­ly began mak­ing movies to eke out a liv­ing. In the ear­ly 1950s, Kubrick start­ed shoot­ing news­reel doc­u­men­taries, hop­ing to turn a tidy prof­it. And here you’ll find his first effort, Day of the Fight, a 1951 noirish doc­u­men­tary on mid­dleweight box­er Wal­ter Carti­er and his match with Bob­by James. It’s a work­man­like film, yes. But not exact­ly an obvi­ous pre­lude to 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clock­work Orange. Mike Springer has more on Kubrick­’s ear­ly doc­u­men­taries here.

The 1957 film, Les Mis­tons (The Brats), was tech­ni­cal­ly François Truf­faut’s sec­ond film but the first that ever sat­is­fied him. Sens­es of Cin­e­ma has else­where called it “the director’s first short film of any real con­se­quence.” Rel­a­tive to the ear­ly efforts of oth­er direc­tors, this short demon­strates a more mature set of film­mak­ing skills, the kind that would be on dis­play two years lat­er when Truf­faut released Les qua­tre cents coups (The 400 Blows), one of the defin­ing films of French New Wave cin­e­ma. Col­in Mar­shall takes a clos­er look at Les Mis­tons right here.

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!

Seven Questions for Stephen Hawking: What Would He Ask Albert Einstein & More

in Physics, Science | May 23rd, 2012

If Stephen Hawk­ing could talk with Albert Ein­stein, what would he say?

“I would ask him why he did­n’t believe in black holes,” says Hawk­ing in this video from Time mag­a­zine. “The field equa­tions of his Gen­er­al The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty implied that a large star or cloud of gas would col­lapse in on itself and form a black hole. Ein­stein was aware of this but some­how man­aged to con­vince him­self that some­thing like an explo­sion would always occur to throw off mass and pre­vent the for­ma­tion of a black hole. What if there was no explo­sion?”

The famous cos­mol­o­gist, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist and author of the best­seller A Brief His­to­ry of Time made the remark in late 2010, when he agreed to take part in the Time’s “10 Ques­tions” series. The mag­a­zine invit­ed read­ers from around the world to sub­mit ques­tions for Hawk­ing, but because of the sci­en­tist’s disability–he is ful­ly par­a­lyzed due to motor neu­rone dis­ease and has to painstak­ing­ly com­pose his answers using a sin­gle cheek mus­cle to oper­ate his word processor–the inter­view was pared down to sev­en ques­tions.

One read­er asks if Hawk­ing thinks civ­i­liza­tion will sur­vive long enough to extend itself into deep space. “I think we have a good chance of sur­viv­ing long enough to col­o­nize the Solar Sys­tem,” says Hawk­ing. “How­ev­er, there is nowhere else in the solar sys­tem any­thing like as suit­able as the Earth, so it is not clear if we would sur­vive if the Earth was made unfit for habi­ta­tion. To ensure our long-term sur­vival we need to reach for the stars. That will take much longer. Let’s hope we can last until then.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Brief His­to­ry of Time: Errol Mor­ris’s Film of Stephen Hawk­ing

Stephen Hawk­ing’s Uni­verse: A Visu­al­iza­tion in Stars and Sound

Stephen Hawk­ing: Aban­don Earth or Face Extinc­tion

Ridley Scott Demystifies the Art of Storyboarding (and How to Jumpstart Your Creative Project)

in Art, Film | May 23rd, 2012

Some film­mak­ers put sto­ry­boards, those com­ic book-look­ing shot plans you some­times glimpse in mak­ing-of doc­u­men­taries, at the cen­ter of their cre­ative process. Ter­ry Gilliam, he of Brazil and 12 Mon­keys, has described sto­ry­boards as the one thing he can safe­ly “lock onto” dur­ing the com­pli­cat­ed, ever-shift­ing shoot­ing process. Oth­er film­mak­ers, such as the hearti­ly impro­vi­sa­tion­al Wern­er Her­zog, have dis­missed sto­ry­boards as the tool of “cow­ards,” of “those who lack imag­i­na­tion,” of “those who are bureau­crat­ic and noth­ing else on the set.” Hav­ing spent sev­en for­ma­tive years in art school, Alien and Blade Run­ner direc­tor Rid­ley Scott devel­ops his films by think­ing as much through the frame­work of visu­al art as through that of cin­e­ma. In the video above, a laid-back Scott, cig­ar in hand, dis­cuss­es how sto­ry­boards, sketch­es, and oth­er pieces of hand-drawn imagery help him make movies.

Telling how he’s found loca­tions, envi­sioned scenes with­in them, and used draw­ings to build those scenes, Scott offers an insight into the look and feel of his own work and use­ful advice to fel­low cre­ators, whether or not they work in a visu­al medi­um. His inspi­ra­tion begins with an activ­i­ty as sim­ple — but nonethe­less a source of “great enjoy­ment” — as look­ing at indus­tri­al land­scapes out the win­dow of a car. Some­times he even begins thumb­nail sketch­es then and there, in tran­sit. Not only does his draft­ing back­ground enable him to do that, but it leads to clos­er work­ing rela­tion­ships with his pro­fes­sion­al sto­ry­board artists. Con­fer­ring with them men­tal­ly pre­pares him to “hit the floor” and shoot the scene. He reveals that, whether you’re direct­ing a $120 mil­lion motion pic­ture, paint­ing a paint­ing, or even writ­ing a blog post, you face the same chal­lenge: “Get rid of the white can­vas. Get some­thing right across the can­vas. Oth­er­wise you’re always look­ing at that area of white, which is like a blank sheet.” He notes that his meth­ods have led to some call­ing his films “overde­signed and over-thought out,” but admits that, at this point, “I’ll prob­a­bly just stay with the plan.”

via @webacion

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mak­ing of Blade Run­ner

Rid­ley Scott Read­ies a Pre­quel to Alien; Guy Pearce Gives Its “TED Talk”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Sigmund Freud’s Home Movies: A Rare Glimpse of His Private Life

in Psychology | May 22nd, 2012

Not long ago we post­ed the only known record­ing of Sig­mund Freud’s voice. Today we present rare home movies of the founder of mod­ern psy­chol­o­gy, cap­tured dur­ing the last decade of his life.

The scenes are nar­rat­ed by Freud’s youngest daugh­ter Anna, who allowed the footage to be shown only with­in the psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic com­mu­ni­ty before her death in 1982. The first scenes in the clip above were filmed in 1932 at Freud’s sum­mer home in Pöt­zleins­dorf, a sub­urb of Vien­na. He is shown vis­it­ing with his old friend Emanuel Löwy, an archae­ol­o­gist, and pet­ting his dog Jofi. The next sequence was shot between 1934 and 1937 at Freud’s lat­er sum­mer home in Grinz­ing, now a dis­trict of Vien­na. It shows Freud relax­ing with a book while his wife Martha and her sis­ter, Min­na Bernays, do their sewing. The movies were made by Freud’s friend and patient Mark Brunswick, hus­band of the psy­cho­an­a­lyst Ruth Mack Brunswick, a close asso­ciate of Freud’s.

You can watch the com­plete 24-minute film from which these scenes were tak­en on YouTube. And you can view or down­load a series of anno­tat­ed clips at the Freud Muse­um Web site.

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!