The Physics of Guinness Beer Demystified

in Physics | December 13th, 2012

Over the years the physi­cists behind the YouTube chan­nel Six­ty Sym­bols have answered some big ques­tions — like what hap­pens if you stick your hand inside the Large Hadron Col­lid­er? Or do physi­cists believe in God? But now these fine sci­en­tists from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham have brought physics to a lev­el that I can per­son­al­ly appre­ci­ate. They’ve hit the streets of Dublin to demys­ti­fy what goes into the finest of Irish liba­tions, the per­fect glass of Guin­ness Beer. Their inquiry starts with the most obvi­ous ques­tion: What cre­ates that thick beige froth that sits ele­gant­ly atop the dark brown stout? It sounds like a mun­dane ques­tion. Until you real­ize it’s not. The dynam­ics of Guin­ness foam can be explained part­ly by work done by the Irish physi­cist Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) long ago. But oth­er aspects of Guin­ness foam are still being hot­ly con­test­ed by physi­cists today. Take for exam­ple this paper, Waves in Guin­ness, pub­lished in 2008 in the jour­nal Physics of Flu­ids. Now we’ll let Six­ty Sym­bols explain the rest.…

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Physics of Cof­fee Rings Final­ly Explained

Free Online Cours­es Online about Physics from Great Uni­ver­si­ties

Physics from Hell: How Dante’s Infer­no Inspired Galileo’s Physics

Ein­stein for the Mass­es

The Wonder, Thrill & Meaning of Seeing Earth from Space. Astronauts Reflect on The Big Blue Marble

in Astronomy, Life, Religion | December 12th, 2012

On Decem­ber 7, 1972, the Apol­lo 17 crew took a pho­to­graph of earth that became known as “The Blue Mar­ble” because of the whor­ling clouds above the con­ti­nents. Not the first image of the earth from space, it remains one of the most arrest­ing. To com­mem­o­rate the for­ti­eth anniver­sary of “The Blue Mar­ble,” Plan­e­tary Col­lec­tive, a group of visu­al artists, philoso­phers, and sci­en­tists, released the short film Overview (above) at a screen­ing at Har­vard this past Fri­day. Overview takes its title from author Frank White’s phrase for the per­spec­tive of the earth as seen from space: “The Overview Effect.” White’s book of the same name uses inter­views and writ­ings from thir­ty astro­nauts and cos­mo­nauts to build a the­o­ry about the psy­chol­o­gy of plan­e­tary per­spec­tives.

The film is a pre­lude to a fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary called Con­tin­u­um, and it intro­duces many of that project’s themes: the inter­de­pen­dence of every­one on earth, the neces­si­ty of adopt­ing a plan­e­tary per­spec­tive, and the meet­ing of cer­tain reli­gious expe­ri­ences with the sci­ences. Through a selec­tion of inter­views with five astro­nauts and philoso­phers asso­ci­at­ed with think tank The Overview Insti­tute, one gets a thrilling and vic­ar­i­ous expe­ri­ence of what it’s like to see Bucky Fuller’s “Space­ship Earth.”  Across all of the respons­es emerge the cen­tral themes of Earth­’s uni­ty, and its fragili­ty: we’re all in this togeth­er, or else, the film con­cludes.

Espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing is the inter­view with Apol­lo astro­naut Edgar Mitchell; he comes to see his expe­ri­ence in mys­ti­cal terms, as a kind of intense med­i­ta­tive state known in San­skrit as savikalpa Samad­hi, a union with the divine. Dr. Mitchell’s attempts to inte­grate sci­en­tif­ic prac­tice and human con­scious­ness par­al­lel those of Plan­e­tary Col­lec­tive and The Overview Insti­tute, all of whom seek in their own ways to help the human race achieve a shift in per­spec­tive sim­i­lar to what the astro­nauts expe­ri­enced, a shift so well artic­u­lat­ed by Carl Sagan in his Cos­mos doc­u­men­tary series and his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot. Inspired by anoth­er icon­ic image of the earth from space, Voy­ager 1’s pho­to from 4 bil­lion miles out, Sagan’s mus­ings took a mys­ti­cal turn, but nev­er left the ground of sound sci­en­tif­ic rea­son­ing. His “Pale Blue Dot” has become a metaphor for a sim­i­lar per­spec­tive as White’s “overview effect,” albeit one con­sid­er­ably more detached. Watch Sagan’s words brought to life below by ani­ma­tion stu­dio ORDER.

via @kirstinbutler

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.

20 Animations of Classic Literary Works: From Plato and Dostoevsky, to Kafka, Hemingway & Bradbury

in Animation, Film, Literature, Poetry | December 12th, 2012

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured Piotr Dumala’s 2000 ani­ma­tion of Fyo­dor Dostoyevsky’s clas­sic nov­el, Crime and Pun­ish­ment, and it remind­ed us of many oth­er lit­er­ary works that have been won­der­ful­ly re-imag­ined by ani­ma­tors — many that we’ve fea­tured here over the years. Rather than leav­ing these won­drous works buried in the archives, we’re bring­ing them back and putting them all on dis­play. And what bet­ter place to start than with a foun­da­tion­al text — Pla­to’s Repub­lic. We were tempt­ed to show you a clay­ma­tion ver­sion of the sem­i­nal philo­soph­i­cal work (watch here), but we decid­ed to go instead with Orson Welles’ 1973 nar­ra­tion of The Cave Alle­go­ry, which fea­tures the sur­re­al artis­tic work of Dick Oden.

Stay­ing with the Greeks for anoth­er moment … This one may have Sopho­cles and Aeschy­lus spin­ning in their graves. Or, who knows, per­haps they would have enjoyed this bizarre twist on the Oedi­pus myth. Run­ning eight min­utes, Jason Wish­now’s 2004 film fea­tures veg­eta­bles in the star­ring roles. One of the first stop-motion films shot with a dig­i­tal still cam­era, Oedi­pus took two years to make with a vol­un­teer staff of 100. The film has since been screened at 70+ film fes­ti­vals and was even­tu­al­ly acquired by the Sun­dance Chan­nel. Sep­a­rate videos show you the behind-the-scenes mak­ing of the film, plus the sto­ry­boards used dur­ing pro­duc­tion.

Eight years before Piotr Dumala tack­led Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment, Dumala pro­duced a short ani­mat­ed film based on The Diaries of Franz Kaf­ka. Once again, you can see his method, known as “destruc­tive ani­ma­tion,” in action. It’s well worth the 16 min­utes. Or you can spend time with this 2007 Japan­ese ani­ma­tion of Kafka’s cryp­tic tale of “A Coun­try Doc­tor.” And if you’re still han­ker­ing for ani­mat­ed Kaf­ka, don’t miss Orson Welles’ Nar­ra­tion of the Para­ble, “Before the Law”. The film was made by Alexan­der Alex­eieff and Claire Park­er, who using a tech­nique called pin­screen ani­ma­tion, cre­at­ed a longer film adap­ta­tion of Niko­lai Gogol’s sto­ry, “The Nose.” You can view it here.

The ani­mat­ed sequence above is from the 1974 film adap­ta­tion of Her­man Hes­se’s 1927 nov­el Step­pen­wolf. In this scene, the Har­ry Haller char­ac­ter played by Max von Sydow reads from the “Trac­tate on the Step­pen­wolf.” The visu­al imagery was cre­at­ed by Czech artist Jaroslav Bradác.

In 1999, Alek­san­dr Petrov won the Acad­e­my Award for Short Film (among oth­er awards) for a film that fol­lows the plot line of Ernest Hemingway’s clas­sic novel­la, The Old Man and the Sea (1952). As not­ed here, Petrov’s tech­nique involves paint­ing pas­tels on glass, and he and his son paint­ed a total of 29,000 images for this work. (For anoth­er remark­able dis­play of their tal­ents, also watch his adap­ta­tion of Dos­to­evsky’s “The Dream of a Ridicu­lous Man”.) The Old Man and the Sea is per­ma­nent­ly list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Oscar Win­ning Films Avail­able Online and our col­lec­tion of 700 Free Movies Online.

Ita­lo Calvi­no, one of Italy’s finest post­war writ­ers, pub­lished Ital­ian Folk­tales in 1956, a series of 200 fairy tales based some­times loose­ly, some­times more strict­ly, on sto­ries from a great folk tra­di­tion. Upon the col­lec­tion’s pub­li­ca­tion, The New York Times named Ital­ian Folk­tales one of the ten best books of the year.  And more than a half cen­tu­ry lat­er, the sto­ries con­tin­ue to delight. Case in point: in 2007, John Tur­tur­ro, the star of numer­ous Coen broth­ers and Spike Lee films, began work­ing on Fiabe ital­iane, a play adapt­ed from Calvi­no’s col­lec­tion of fables. The ani­mat­ed video above fea­tures Tur­tur­ro read­ing “The False Grand­moth­er,” Calvi­no’s rework­ing of Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood. Kevin Ruelle illus­trat­ed the clip, which was pro­duced as part of Fly­p­me­di­a’s more exten­sive cov­er­age of Tur­tur­ro’s adap­ta­tion. You can find anoth­er ani­ma­tion of a Calvi­no sto­ry (The Dis­tance of the Moon) on YouTube here.

Emi­ly Dick­in­son’s poet­ry is wide­ly cel­e­brat­ed for its beau­ty and orig­i­nal­i­ty. To cel­e­brate her birth­day (it just passed us by ear­li­er this week) we bring you this lit­tle film of her poem, “I Start­ed Early–Took My Dog,” from the “Poet­ry Every­where” series by PBS and the Poet­ry Foun­da­tion. The poem is ani­mat­ed by Maria Vasilkovsky and read by actress Blair Brown.

E.B. White, beloved author of Char­lot­te’s Web, Stu­art Lit­tle, and the clas­sic Eng­lish writ­ing guide The Ele­ments of Style, died in 1985. Not long before his death, he agreed to nar­rate an adap­ta­tion of “The Fam­i­ly That Dwelt Apart,” a touch­ing sto­ry he wrote for The New York­er. The 1983 film was ani­mat­ed by the Cana­di­an direc­tor Yvon Malette, and it received an Oscar nom­i­na­tion.

Shel Sil­ver­stein wrote The Giv­ing Tree in 1964, a wide­ly loved chil­dren’s book now trans­lat­ed into more than 30 lan­guages. It’s a sto­ry about the human con­di­tion, about giv­ing and receiv­ing, using and get­ting used, need­i­ness and greed­i­ness, although many fin­er points of the sto­ry are open to inter­pre­ta­tion. Today, we’re rewind­ing the video­tape to 1973, when Sil­ver­stein’s lit­tle book was turned into a 10 minute ani­mat­ed film. Sil­ver­stein nar­rates the sto­ry him­self and also plays the har­mon­i­ca.

Dur­ing the Cold War, one Amer­i­can was held in high regard in the Sovi­et Union, and that was Ray Brad­bury. A hand­ful of Sovi­et ani­ma­tors demon­strat­ed their esteem for the author by adapt­ing his short sto­ries. Vladimir Sam­sonov direct­ed Bradbury’s Here There Be Tygers, which you can see above.  And here you can see anoth­er adap­ta­tion of “There Will Come Soft Rains.”

The online book­seller Good Books cre­at­ed an ani­mat­ed mash-up of the spir­its of Franz Kaf­ka and Hunter S. Thomp­son. Under a buck­et hat, behind avi­a­tor sun­glass­es, and deep into an altered men­tal state, our nar­ra­tor feels the sud­den, urgent need for a copy of Kafka’s Meta­mor­pho­sis. Unwill­ing to make the pur­chase in “the great riv­er of medi­oc­rity,” he instead makes the buy from “a bunch of rose-tint­ed, will­ful­ly delu­sion­al Pollyan­nas giv­ing away all the mon­ey they make — every guilt-rid­den cent.” The ani­ma­tion, cre­at­ed by a stu­dio called Buck, should eas­i­ly meet the aes­thet­ic demands of any view­er in their own altered state or look­ing to get into one.

39 Degrees North, a Bei­jing motion graph­ics stu­dio, start­ed devel­op­ing an uncon­ven­tion­al Christ­mas card last year. And once they got going, there was no turn­ing back. Above, we have the end result – an ani­mat­ed ver­sion of an uber dark Christ­mas poem (read text here) writ­ten by Neil Gaiman, the best­selling author of sci-fi and fan­ta­sy short sto­ries. The poem was pub­lished in Gaiman’s col­lec­tion, Smoke and Mir­rors.

This col­lab­o­ra­tion between film­mak­er Spike Jonze and hand­bag design­er Olympia Le-Tan does­n’t bring a par­tic­u­lar lit­er­ary tale to life. Rather this stop motion film uses 3,000 pieces of cut felt to show famous books spring­ing into motion in the icon­ic Parisian book­store, Shake­speare and Com­pa­ny. It’s called  Mourir Auprès de Toi.

Are there impres­sive lit­er­ary ani­ma­tions that did­n’t make our list? Please let us know in the com­ments below. We’d love to know about them.

Ghosts of History: Dutch Artist Eerily Superimposes Modern Street Scenes on World War II Photos

in History, Life, Photography | December 11th, 2012

We all have our fas­ci­na­tions. Some of us are enam­ored of a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal era. If I had to pick a time peri­od I’d want to vis­it, I’d say the 1930s—after the Depres­sion, before World War II—a “tween­er” decade if there ever was one.

Jo Hed­wig Teeuwisse takes her inter­est in the 1930s to extra­or­di­nary lengths. She wears vin­tage cloth­ing and attends 1930s-theme par­ties. She is also a his­tor­i­cal con­sul­tant and expert on dai­ly life from 1930–1945.

Teeuwisse lives in The Hague but once, while vis­it­ing Ams­ter­dam, she stum­bled upon a trea­sure on the street. It was a box filled with old pho­to­graph­ic neg­a­tives. Some had iden­ti­fy­ing notes but most did not. A his­to­ry nut, Teeuwisse went to work imme­di­ate­ly try­ing to sort out where the shots were tak­en and, if pos­si­ble, the iden­ti­ties of peo­ple in the retro pho­tos.

The results are an impres­sive and amaz­ing archive Teeuwisse calls Ghosts of His­to­ry. More than sim­ply fig­ur­ing out which build­ing is fea­tured in a pic­ture, Teeuwisse cre­at­ed pho­to mash-ups by com­bin­ing ele­ments of a vin­tage image with an image of her own tak­en in the same place today.

We see mem­bers of the under­ground press march­ing down a main Ams­ter­dam thor­ough­fare in June, 1945 along­side shop­pers and tourists strolling down the same street today.

In a pow­er­ful jux­ta­po­si­tion of then and now, three Dutch scouts risk their lives cross­ing Amsterdam’s Dam Square in the after­math of a Nazi attack just two days after Ger­many sur­ren­dered. Note the hats left behind by peo­ple who had fled for their lives, and the con­tem­po­rary stu­dents walk­ing non­cha­lant­ly on.

This image shows the same scene, but with the Nazi recruit­ment office sign promi­nent in the back­ground.

What is so potent about Teeuwisse’s work is that it is so qui­et. She doesn’t have to point out irony because it is so imme­di­ate­ly evi­dent: Those same cob­bles that so many have trod on the way to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Muse­um are scuffed by the boots of sol­diers, fam­ished vic­tims of war aus­ter­i­ty and ordi­nary work­ing peo­ple on their way to the fac­to­ry.

Some make it more plain than oth­ers that his­to­ry is all around us all the time.

There are still many World War II images from that box that remain uniden­ti­fied. Teeuwisse loaded them all up to her flickr site. Take a look. Maybe you’ll find a famil­iar face from your own past.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.

Europa Film Treasures Digitally Preserves 194 Films From 1890s to 1970s

in Film | December 11th, 2012

At the heart of Mar­tin Scorsese’s visu­al­ly stun­ning Hugo lies the painful loss of so many Georges Melies mas­ter­pieces. Not long before Hugo’s release, Fritz Lang’s 1927 futur­ist-Chris­t­ian-social­ist para­ble Metrop­o­lis saw re-release as “The Com­plete Metrop­o­lis,” with 25 addi­tion­al min­utes restored from a film can­is­ter found rot­ting in a Buenos Aires clos­et. Both these fic­tion­al­ized and real restora­tions pro­vide high-pro­file exam­ples of the frag­ile state of so much clas­sic cin­e­ma pri­or to dig­i­tal projects like Europa Film Trea­sures.

An online film muse­um, Europa is open to all, thanks to sev­er­al pub­lic and pri­vate donors and a net­work of over 30 Euro­pean film archives (laid out in this nifty inter­ac­tive map). It “hous­es” 194 films from the late 19th cen­tu­ry to the 70s, each accom­pa­nied by an “explana­to­ry book­let.” Con­tem­po­rary musi­cians have com­posed orig­i­nal scores for many of the silent films, and there is even an inter­ac­tive work­shop where users can cre­ate sound­tracks of their own or test their knowl­edge of film­mak­ing tech­niques.

As the dra­mat­ic pro­mo­tion­al teas­er above says, Europa is a “con­stel­la­tion,” a huge­ly diverse range of films, some famous, most total­ly obscure and from “rel­a­tive­ly unknown film indus­tries.” Vis­it­ing Trea­sures for the first time can be a lit­tle daunt­ing because of the sheer num­ber of gen­res, peri­ods, and coun­tries of ori­gin. So to give you an entry­way, here are a few ran­dom nodes in the archival con­stel­la­tion of Europa:

1. From Deutsche Kine­math­ek comes “Super­tramp Por­trait 1970,” fea­tur­ing a small quar­tet called Dad­dy (lat­er Super­tramp) in their first filmed per­for­mance at hip Munich spot the PN Club. The band does a seri­ous­ly jazzy ten-minute ren­di­tion of “All Along the Watch­tow­er.”
2. From Fil­mote­ca Espanola comes “Barcelona en tran­via” (Barcelona by Tram), from 1908. The title says it all; in this short film, a cam­era mount­ed on a city tram records a bustling, turn-of-the cen­tu­ry scene where bicy­cles are over­tak­ing hors­es. Titles announce the street names as the tram twists and turns through the metrop­o­lis while pedes­tri­ans and run­ning chil­dren gawk and wave at the cam­era. The arpeg­gio-rich piano score by Anto­nia Cop­po­la lends pathos and a wist­ful air.
3.  1967’s exper­i­men­tal film “A Kind of See­ing”—from the Scot­tish Screen Archive—juxtaposes a gloomy church-organ score against slow-mov­ing shots of Tech­ni­col­or Scot­tish flo­ra and oth­er “rur­al tableau,” offer­ing a med­i­ta­tion on “the dynam­ic between the visu­al and the aur­al.”
4. Open­ing with a title card that promis­es “ten min­utes of medieval hocus pocus,” the 1933 silent “L’Apprenti sor­ci­er” (The Sorcerer’s Appren­tice), gives us dancer Jean Weidt’s  ago­nized inter­pre­ta­tion of the Goethe tale, per­formed, we are told, as an expres­sion­ist act of protest against the rise of the Third Reich. This one comes via the Archives Fran­cais­es du Film.
5. Final­ly, an Amer­i­can classic—also redis­cov­ered by the Archives Fran­cais­es du Film—1917’s “Buck­ing Broad­way,” by John Ford. A fea­ture-length adven­ture, the film fol­lows the jour­ney of Wyoming cow­boy Cheyenne Har­ry to the Big Apple to res­cue his fiancé, who’s been kid­napped by horse­traders. The sepia-toned adven­ture stars one of silent film’s first super­stars, dash­ing Har­ry Carey.

That should get you start­ed.  Have fun, and don’t blame us if you end up on a long, mean­der­ing tour of obscure and redis­cov­ered cin­e­mat­ic trea­sures that takes up the rest of your day.

via @ubuweb

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.

Watch PBS’ American Masters Documentaries (Including Scorsese’s Homage to Kazan) Free Online

in Television | December 11th, 2012

Each new Amer­i­can Mas­ters broad­cast, when it debuts on tele­vi­sion, tends to receive a hero’s wel­come. The poten­tial for hero­ism on the part of a bio­graph­i­cal doc­u­men­tary may, of course, seem lim­it­ed, but their astute­ness and atten­tion to detail does put them on a lev­el above. Pro­duced by New York City’s Thirteen/WNET and dis­trib­uted by the Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing Ser­vice, the show has for 26 years told the life sto­ries of cre­ators of all types, Amer­i­can-born and oth­er­wise, who have made an impact on U.S. cul­ture. Last month, we fea­tured Woody Allen answer­ing thir­teen unusu­al ques­tions from Robert B. Wei­de, direc­tor of the series’ recent Woody Allen: A Doc­u­men­tary. That episode stirred up quite a flur­ry of admi­ra­tion, as did the more recent Invent­ing David Gef­fen, a por­trait of the enter­tain­ment indus­try titan direct­ed by Amer­i­can Mas­ters cre­ator Susan Lacy — which you can watch free at PBS.org.

And that’s not the only one. Any self-respect­ing fan of Amer­i­can cin­e­ma will want to watch the pro­gram above, A Let­ter to Elia. It show­cas­es a qual­i­ty often cit­ed as one of Amer­i­can Mas­ters’ great strengths: its match­es of sub­ject and doc­u­men­tar­i­an. In this case, we get the life of Elia Kazan, direc­tor of clas­sic pic­tures like On the Water­front and East of Eden, as described by Mar­tin Scors­ese, direc­tor of such promis­ing can­di­dates for clas­sic sta­tus as Taxi Dri­ver and Rag­ing Bull. The doc­u­men­tary exam­ines not only Kazan’s life and work but Scors­ese’s rela­tion­ship to it, and from there, any young artist’s rela­tion­ship to art itself. PBS has also made freely avail­able their broad­casts on John­ny Car­son, Jeff Bridges, Charles and Ray Eames, and quite a few oth­ers besides. If the cul­ture of a coun­try as vast and young as the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca remains dif­fi­cult to pin down, it cer­tain­ly isn’t for Amer­i­can Mas­ters’ lack of try­ing.

Var­i­ous episodes have been added to our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Alfred Stieglitz: The Elo­quent Eye, a Reveal­ing Look at “The Father of Mod­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy”

Ein­stein Doc­u­men­tary Offers A Reveal­ing Por­trait of the Great 20th Cen­tu­ry Sci­en­tist

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

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment Presented in a Beautifully Animated Short Film

in Animation, Film, Literature, Philosophy | December 11th, 2012

In this dark­ly poet­ic ani­ma­tion, the Pol­ish film­mak­er Piotr Dumala offers a high­ly per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tion of Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky’s clas­sic nov­el, Crime and Pun­ish­ment. “My film is like a dream,” Dumala said in 2007. “It is as if some­one has read Crime and Pun­ish­ment and then had a dream about it.”

Dumala’s ver­sion takes place only at night. The sto­ry is told expres­sion­is­ti­cal­ly, with­out dia­logue and with an altered flow of time. The com­plex and mul­ti-lay­ered nov­el is pared down to a few cen­tral char­ac­ters and events: In the Russ­ian city of Saint Peters­burg, a young man named Raskol­nikov lies in his dark room brood­ing over a bloody crime.

He mur­ders an old woman with whom he had pawned his watch. When her younger sis­ter comes home unex­pect­ed­ly, he mur­ders her too. He con­fess­es to a saint­ly young woman named Sonya. The sin­is­ter eaves­drop­per Svidri­gailov knows of Raskol­nikov’s love for Sonya, and of his sins. In the end Svidri­gailov takes a pis­tol and “goes to Amer­i­ca” by killing him­self.

Dumala com­plet­ed his half-hour film of Crime and Pun­ish­ment (Zbrod­nia i Kara) in 2000, after three years of work. He has a unique method: He takes a white plas­ter pan­el and coats the sur­face with glue. He then paints over it with a dark col­or and lets it dry. He uses a knife and sand­pa­per to engrave his image, cre­at­ing a hatch­ing effect that gives it a feel­ing of tex­ture. To add dark­ness to a light area, he adds more paint with a brush.

It’s a form of “destruc­tive ani­ma­tion.” Each image exists only long enough to be pho­tographed and then paint­ed over to cre­ate a sense of move­ment. It’s a process that some­times makes Dumala sad. “I think some­times when I do a draw­ing in my film, I want to keep it,” he told Melis­sa Chi­movitz of Ani­ma­tion World Net­work in 1997, “but I must destroy it because this is the tech­nique I use. I must destroy every frame to put in its place anoth­er one, the next one, to have move­ment. This way, some­times I think it is too much suf­fer­ing, to destroy all the time what I am doing.”

If you appre­ci­ate Dumala’s take on Dos­toyevsky, you won’t want to miss his 1992 treat­ment of Franz Kaf­ka.

Dumala’s films are housed in our list of Free Movies Online. Dos­toyevsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment appears in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks col­lec­tions.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­­sion­al­­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer 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!

Relat­ed con­tent:

Albert Camus Talks About Adapt­ing Dos­toyevsky for the The­atre, 1959

Kafka’s Night­mare Tale, ‘A Coun­try Doc­tor,’ Told in Award-Win­ning Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

John Hodgman Presents a Survival Guide for the Coming Apocalypse

in Comedy, Current Affairs | December 10th, 2012

How can we all sur­vive the apoc­a­lypse pre­dict­ed by the Mayan cal­en­dar and make it to the oth­er side of Decem­ber 21?  John Hodg­man (you know him from The Dai­ly Show and Apple TV ads) has it all fig­ured out. Hope­ful­ly it’s not too much of a spoil­er to say load up on mayo and urine while you still have time.… h/t Devour

Catch us on Face­book and Twit­ter and spread qual­i­ty cul­ture through your social world!

Toni Morrison Dispenses Sound Writing Advice: Tips You Can Apply to Your Own Work

in Books, Literature, Writing | December 10th, 2012

Image by Angela Rad­ules­cu via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It is some­times the case that a favorite writer isn’t ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing when it comes to talk­ing shop.  This has nev­er been so with the self-reveal­ing Toni Mor­ri­son, whose pub­lic appear­ances and inter­views often dupli­cate the expe­ri­ence of read­ing one of her novels—her voice draws you in, and before you know it, you’re part of a world all her own that she has giv­en you the priv­i­lege of join­ing for a short time.

This is the expe­ri­ence of read­ing her inter­view with Elis­sa Schap­pell in the Paris Review. Mor­ri­son dis­cours­es on sub­jects rang­ing from her per­son­al rou­tine and his­to­ry, to her iden­ti­ty as a writer and a woman, to the larg­er his­to­ry of slav­ery and the black lives she writes about. Woven through it all are obser­va­tions about her art that may or may not be of any use to bud­ding writ­ers, but which will cer­tain­ly make lovers of Mor­ri­son read her work a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. Some of her obser­va­tions are below:

• Write when you know you’re at your best. For her, this hap­pened to be the ear­ly morn­ing, pre-dawn hours, before her chil­dren woke up, since she worked full-time and feels she is “not very bright or very wit­ty or very inven­tive after the sun goes down.” Mor­ri­son describes her morn­ing rit­u­al this way:

I always get and make a cup of cof­fee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the cof­fee and watch the light come.

• “There’s a line between revis­ing and fret­ting” It’s impor­tant for a writer to know when they are “fret­ting,” because if some­thing isn’t work­ing, “it needs to be scrapped,” although in answer to whether she goes back over pub­lished work and wish­es she had fret­ted more, Mor­ri­son answers, “a lot. Every­thing.”
• A good edi­tor is “like a priest or a psy­chi­a­trist.” Mor­ri­son worked as an edi­tor for Ran­dom House for 20 years before she pub­lished her first nov­el. She observes the rela­tion­ship between writer and edi­tor by say­ing that get­ting the wrong one means that “you are bet­ter off alone.” One of the marks of a good edi­tor? She doesn’t “love you or your work,” there­fore offers crit­i­cism, not com­pli­ments.
• Don’t write with an audi­ence in mind, write for the char­ac­ters. Know­ing how to read your own work—with the crit­i­cal dis­tance of a good reader—makes you a “bet­ter writer and edi­tor.” For Mor­ri­son, this means writ­ing not with an audi­ence in mind, but with the char­ac­ters to go to for advice, to tell you “if the ren­di­tion of their lives is authen­tic or not.”
• Con­trol your char­ac­ters. Despite the ever-present and clichéd demand to “write what you know,” Mor­ri­son stu­dious­ly tries to avoid tak­ing char­ac­ter traits from peo­ple she knows. As she puts it: “mak­ing a lit­tle life for one­self by scav­eng­ing oth­er people’s lives is a big ques­tion, and it does have moral and eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions.” And as for keep­ing con­trol of her char­ac­ters, Mor­ri­son says “They have noth­ing on their minds but them­selves and aren’t inter­est­ed in any­thing but them­selves. So you can’t let them write your book for you.”
• Plot is like melody; it does­n’t need to be com­pli­cat­ed. Mor­ri­son sums up her approach to plot in Jazz and The Bluest Eye by say­ing “I put the whole plot on the first page.” Rather than con­struct­ing intri­cate plots with hid­den twists, she prefers to think of the plot in musi­cal terms as a “melody,” where the sat­is­fac­tion lies in rec­og­niz­ing it and then hear­ing the “echoes and shades and turns and piv­ots” around it.
• Style, like jazz, involves end­less prac­tice and restraint. Speak­ing of Jazz, Mor­ri­son tells she has always thought of her­self like a jazz musi­cian, “some­one who prac­tices and prac­tices and prac­tices in order to able to invent and to make his art look effort­less and grace­ful.” A large part of her “jazz” style, she says, is “an exer­cise in restraint, in hold­ing back.”
• Be your­self, but be aware of tra­di­tion. Of the diver­si­ty of African-Amer­i­can jazz musi­cians and singers, Mor­ri­son says “I would like to write like that. I would like to write nov­els that were unmis­tak­ably mine, but nev­er­the­less fit first into African Amer­i­can tra­di­tions and sec­ond of all, this whole thing called lit­er­a­ture.”

Most read­ers of Morrison’s work would argue that’s exact­ly what she’s done her whole career. Read the entire inter­view here and be sure to vis­it the com­plete archive of Paris Review inter­views online.

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:

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Ray Brad­bury Offers 12 Essen­tial Writ­ing Tips and Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture Saves Civ­i­liza­tion

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

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.

Nate Silver (Sporting a Cookie Monster T‑Shirt) Talks Serious Stats with Conan O’Brien

in Media, Politics | December 10th, 2012

Even if you hate or fear sta­tis­tics, you’ve sure­ly become more than aware in recent months of one par­tic­u­lar sta­tis­ti­cian: Nate Sil­ver. The young pro­fes­sion­al num­ber-crunch­er has made the news in a big way for a legit­i­mate­ly impres­sive sta­tis­ti­cal feat: pre­dict­ing the win­ner of all fifty states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia in this year’s Unit­ed States pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. He came near­ly as close back in 2008’s elec­tion, pre­dict­ing the win­ner in 49 states. In between those coups, Time named Sil­ver one of the world’s hun­dred most influ­en­tial peo­ple, and the New York Times has giv­en their offi­cial impri­matur by host­ing his blog FiveThir­tyEight. Now he’s received what some would con­sid­er an even high­er hon­or: an invi­ta­tion to sit down with Conan O’Brien for the bet­ter part of an hour on Seri­ous Jib­ber-Jab­ber.

“Elec­tions are prob­a­bly the most dra­mat­ic moments in the his­to­ry of our coun­try,” O’Brien says to Sil­ver. “The­se’s a dan­ger,” he then dead­pans, “that you’re tak­ing the fun out of it.” We jumped on O’Brien’s new long-form inter­view web series last month, fea­tur­ing his con­ver­sa­tions with pres­i­den­tial his­to­ri­an Edmund Mor­ris and “com­e­dy mas­ter­mind” Judd Apa­tow. Sil­ver, the pro­gram’s third guest, per­fect­ly con­tin­ues its short but strong tra­di­tion of per­son­al­i­ties who bring both zeit­geist rel­e­vance and intel­lec­tu­al sub­stance. The choice also taps into a well of pub­lic curios­i­ty — a great many of us know of Nate Sil­ver with­out quite under­stand­ing why we do — and finds a reserve of goofi­ness to match O’Brien’s own. (If you doubt this, behold Sil­ver’s Cook­ie Mon­ster t‑shirt.) So think hard when you watch this con­ver­sa­tion about polit­i­cal echo cham­bers, media frag­men­ta­tion, data’s rela­tion­ship to instinct, and math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el­ing. But do feel free to laugh at the jokes.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Conan O’Brien Plays Char­lie Rose, Talks Pres­i­den­tial His­to­ry with Edmund Mor­ris

Celebri­ty Sta­tis­ti­cian Nate Sil­ver Fields Ques­tions from Data Wiz­ards at Google

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