Michael Shainblum released a new timelapse film this week called “Into the Atmosphere,” which is his visual tribute to California’s beautiful deserts, mountains and coastlines. Even if you’ve seen your fair share of timelapse films before, as I’m sure many of you have, you might be interested in this other newly-released film called “The Art of The Timelapse.” Produced by The Creators Project, the short film gives you a glimpse of what goes into making a timelapse — the requisite gear, the favorable lighting conditions, the ideal landscape, and more. Shainblum is your guide. You can find an archive of his films here.
If you’d like to dig deeper into the art of making timelapse films, we’d recommend checking out The Basics of Time Lapse Photography with Vincent Laforet, a four-part video series, on Canon’s education web site. The first episode appears below.
At least since that 17th century architect of the scientific revolution, Sir Francis Bacon (who was mostly right), people have been making predictions about the technologies and social advancements of the future. And since Bacon, scientists and futuristic writers have been especially in demand during times of great change and uncertainty, such as at the turn of the last century. In 1900, civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. in Ladies’ Home Journal claimed to have surveyed “the most learned and conservative minds in America… the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning.”
Specifying advances likely to occur 100 years thence, “before the dawn of 2001,” Watkins culled 28 predictions about such things as travel and the transmission of information over great distances, biological and genetic mutations, and the domestic comforts of the average consumer. Several of the predictions are very Baconian indeed—as per the strange list at the end of Bacon’s science fiction fragment New Atlantis, a text obsessed with altering the appearance of the natural world for no particular reason other than that it could be done. Watkins’ list includes such predictions as “Peas as Large as Beets,” “Black, Blue, and Green Roses,” and “Strawberries as Large as Apples.” Some are Baconian in more sinister ways, and these are also a bit more accurate. Take the below, for example:
There will be No Wild Animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. They will be unable to run faster than the fattened hog of to-day. A century ago the wild hog could outrun a horse. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all of their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected.
I would defer to ecologists and meat industry watchdogs to confirm my intuitions, but it does seem that some of this, excepting the extermination of vermin and horns, has come to pass or is very likely in regard to several species. Another prediction, this one about our own species, is laughably optimistic:
Everybody will Walk Ten Miles. Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.
We’re much closer to the future of Pixar’s Wall‑E than anything resembling this scenario (unless you live in the world of Crossfit). Another prediction is both dead on and dead wrong at once. Claiming that there will be “from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in the Americas and its possessions by the lapse of another century” did in fact turn out to be almost uncannily accurate—current estimates are somewhere around 300,000,000. The “possessions” alluded to, however, display the attitude of blithe Monroe doctrine expansionism that held the nation in its sway at the turn of the century. The prediction goes on to say that most of the “South and Central American republics would be voted into the Union by their own people.” A few more of Watkins’ predictions, some prescient, some preposterous:
Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world.
Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles.
Hot and Cold Air from Spigots. Rising early to build the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times.
Ready-Cooked Meals will be Bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of to-day [see the above Wall‑E reference]
There will be No C, X, or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.
Aeriel War-Ships and Forts on Wheels. Giant guns will shoot twenty-five miles or more, and will hurl anywhere within such a radius shells exploding and destroying whole cities.
How Children will be Taught. A university education will be free to every man and woman.
Ah, if only that last one had come true! To read all of Watkins predictions in detail, click on the image above for a larger, readable, version of the full article.
As an arts major who doodled my way through every required science course in high school and college, I am deeply gratified by filmmaker Michel Gondry’s approach to documenting the ideas of Noam Chomsky. Having filmed about three hours worth of interviews with the activist, philosopher, and father of modern linguistics in a sterile MIT conference room, Gondry headed back to his charmingly analog Brooklyn digs to spend three years animating the conversations. It’s nice to see a filmmaker of his stature using books to jerry-rig his camera set up. At one point, he huddles on the floor, puzzling over some sequential drawings on 3‑hole punch paper. Seems like the kind of thing most people in his field would tackle with an iPad and an assistant.
Gondry may have felt intellectually dwarfed by his subject, but there’s a kind of genius afoot in his work too. Describing the stop-motion technique he used for Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, he told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, “I have a lightbox, and I put paper on it, and I animate with Sharpies, color Sharpies. And I have a 16-millimeter camera that is set up on a tripod and looks down, and I take a picture. I do a drawing and take a picture.”
A pretty apt summation—watch him in action above—but the curiosity and humanity so evident in such features as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mindand The Science of Sleep is a magical ingredient here, too. He attributes biological properties to his Sharpie markers, and takes a break from some of Chomsky’s more complex thoughts to ask about his feelings when his wife passed away. He doesn’t seem to mind that he might seem a bit of a schoolboy in comparison, one whose talents lie beyond this particular professor’s scope.
As Chomsky himself remarks in the trailer, below, “Learning comes from asking why do things work like that, why not some other way?”
Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? is available on iTunes.
Ayun Halliday puts her lifelong penchant for doodling to good use in her award-winning, handwritten, illustrated zine, The East Village Inky. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov… someone could design a personality test around which great 19th century Russian writers turned readers on to that most brooding and intense of national literatures. For me it was first Dostoevsky, with an obligatory high school reading of Crime and Punishment, whose ending I hated so much that I had to go on and read The Idiot, The Possessed, Notes From the Underground, and nearly everything else to find out what went wrong. And the mischievous fantasist Gogol I preferred even to Kafka as a young reader, so I’d probably score high on existential angst and absurdist tendencies on whatever we’re calling our literary Meyers-Briggs.
But we would have to include the 20th century successors: Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov, Pasternak. The dissenters and exposers of Soviet cruelty and corruption who took on the traditions of stark, brutal realism and darkly comic allegory. All of these are traditions that literary gadabout Stephen Fry rightly points out “changed the literature, and particularly the literature of the novel, the world over.” Yet somehow, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it’s a literature we seemed to stop hearing about. However, “just because we stopped reading,” says Fry as host of the documentary above, Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin, “doesn’t mean the Russians stopped writing.” Produced by Intelligent Television and Wilton films and premiering online today (and on PBS on December 28), the film profiles six new Russian writers most of us haven’t read, but should.
Perhaps a particularly iconic figure for the Putin age, we first meet the controversial and somewhat macho novelist Zakhar Prilepin, whose nostalgia for the Soviet past has earned him the ire of liberals. Prilepin freely admits that his happy, “wonderful,” childhood explains his sympathy for the Soviet state. Despite these warm psychological origins, literary critic Alexander Gavrilov calls Prilepin’s first novel, 2005’s Pathologies, “an aggressive terrorist attack of a book,” for its harsh portrayal of the war in Chechnya. The book draws on Prilepin’s experiences as a veteran of two Chechen wars. His second novel, Sankya was shortlisted for the Russian Booker and National Bookseller prizes in 2006, and yet aside from a few short stories, Prilepin’s work has yet to be translated into English.
What has fascinated Westerners about Russia in the past is in part its deep veneration for its writers. In every age—Golden, Silver, or blood red—Russian writers held places of cultural prominence, or infamy. Lenin was a great writer of history and polemic. Even Putin soft-pedals his backing for the Syrian regime in a genteel open letter. To be a recognized writer in Russia means being a celebrity, or as Prilepin says, it’s “a kind of show business.” Russia’s Open Book narrator Juliet Stephenson quotes poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “In Russia, a poet is more than a poet.”
And then we meet contemporary Russian “activist, journalist, teacher, novelist, critic, and poet” Dmitry Bykov, a dead ringer for an earlier vintage of Saturday Night Live’s Horatio Sanz. His genial appearance hides deeply serious intent. A romantic inspired by the vibrancy of Russia’s political fight for “the dignity of all its citizens,” Bykov tells us “Before I went to the first protest, I’d stopped writing. Afterwards, I wrote a whole volume of lyric poetry. No politics, it’s all roses and rhymes.” Bykov’s 2006 Living Souls—which does exist, abridged, in English—takes up the great Russian tradition of the political fable. Other writers, like the boldly outspoken novelist (and former geneticist) Ludmila Ulitskaya, are much more ambivalent about political engagement. “But in some situations,” says Ulitskaya, “you can’t remain silent….”
It’s difficult perhaps for Westerners to appreciate the contemporary situations of these new Russian writers, given how little we seem to understand Russia’s internal political state (and given the relative absence of a viable U.S. foreign press service). After all, it’s no longer an existential necessity that we know our sworn enemy, as in the Cold War, nor is Russia treated any longer as Europe’s distinguished first cousin, as in its Imperial 19th century past. But the writers profiled in Russia’s Open Book make us keenly aware that the country’s literary culture is thriving, and deserving of our attention. To learn more about the makers of the film and the six contemporary writers profiled, visit the Russia’s Open Book website. And to expand your appreciation for Russian literature in general, spend some time at the Read Russia 2013 site here, a new initiative “to celebrate Russian literature and Russian book culture.” We also have many Russian classics in our Free eBooks and Audio Books collections.
Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin will be permanently listed in our collection of 600 Free Movies Online.
Heavy metal music enjoyed the pleasures of excess in the 1980s, an era when, if you believe certain biographers, writer-actor-auteur Orson Welles did the very same. Though some describe the life of the man who made Citizen Kane as having by then fallen into a final period of great decadence, he still managed to leave his mark on a number of unusual projects. Many of my generation fondly remember his performance as the man-made planet Unicron, eater of worlds, in 1986’s Transformers: The Movie, but those slightly older may have first encountered Welles’ late work on Battle Hymns, the debut album by sword-and-sorcery-minded metal (technically, “epic metal”) band Manowar, for whose track “Dark Avenger,” below, he provided suitably epic narration: “And they placed in his hands a sword made for him called Vengeance, forged in brimstone and tempered by the woeful tears of the Unavenged.” Who but Welles (or maybe Christopher Lee) could sell a line like that?
Five years later, Manowar would return to the Welles well for their fifth album Fighting the World, whose track “Defender,” below, features a posthumous appearance originally recorded as a demo during the Battle Hymns sessions. Fighting the World, incidentally, appeared as the first ever digitally recorded and mixed heavy metal album, an achievement unshyly declared on the band’s web site.
There you’ll also learn that Manowar not only included fantasy imagery in both their lyrics and on their covers before their colleagues did, but that they also designed and built their own speaker cabinets and guitars first, recorded songs in 16 languages first, and collaborated with “Germany’s bestselling fantasy author, Wolfgang Hohlbein” first. They also declare themselves “the loudest band in the world (a record they have broken on three separate occasions),” but give a place of even higher honor on the list to their distinction as “the only band ever to record with Orson Welles” — epic metal, metal, or otherwise.
The great British empiricist Francis Bacon once remarked that Johannes Gutenberg’sprinting press “changed the whole face and state of the world.” Although Gutenberg did not independently devise the press, he invented a mass-production process of moveable type and concocted an oil-based ink which, when combined with the wooden press, revolutionized the flow of information. Books could now be published in vast quantities, at only a fraction of the time required previously.
For his first seminal printing, Gutenberg picked the Bible — an obvious choice for a Christian, and in retrospect, perhaps the only book whose historical significance rivals that of Gutenberg’s invention. Produced in 1454 or 1455, the few surviving copies of Gutenberg’s Bible remain exemplars of the printer’s forethought and craftsmanship; the page dimensions, it is believed, were devised by Gutenberg to echo the golden ratio of Greek aesthetics. The first page appears above.
On October 10th, Canadian writer Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature. And if you’re not familiar with her work, we suggest that you spend time reading the 18 Free Short Stories we gathered in our celebratory post.
Traditionally, recipients of the Nobel Prize travel to Sweden to accept the award in mid December. But the 82-year-old writer, citing poor health, decided to stay home and forego making the customary acceptance speech in Stockholm. (See past speeches by Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, V.S. Naipaul and others here.) Fans of Munro weren’t left empty-handed, however. From the comfort of her daughter’s home in Victoria, British Columbia, Munro sat down for an informal, 30-minute interview and talked about many things: how she first began writing and telling stories; how she gained (and lost) confidence as a writer; how she mentally maps out her stories; how she has become a different writer with age; how the writing life for women has changed over the years; and much more. You can watch the complete Nobel interview above.
I believe it was Jacques Derrida, though I don’t recall exactly where, who said that some of the most revealing text of any work can be found in the footnotes. In documentarian Errol Morris’ recent photo-essay series on Lincoln for The New York Times, footnotes, chronologies, snippets of interview, and endlessly recursive references continuously intrude on the stories he tells. In this way, the series, called “The Interminable, Everlasting Lincolns,” enacts the tension Morris identifies as “the push-pull of history,” a contest between several ways of approaching the past: “Facts vs. beliefs. Our desire to know the origins of things vs. our desire to rework, to reconfigure the past to suit our own beliefs and predilections. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this than two radically different predispositions to objects—the storyteller vs. the collector.”
The way story after story inevitably nests within each historical artifact seems to be Morris’ overarching theme as he charts the history of Lincoln iconography by reference to a single image, a photo of Lincoln by Alexander Gardner that exists in only one known original print, called O‑118 after collector of Lincoln photography Lloyd Ostendorf (see the retouched version above, the original print below). This print, along with 13 others, was made either four or five days before Lincoln’s assassination.
Morris’ fascination with this photograph is as variously motivated as the number of different views he adopts in examining its provenance, its history, and its meaning. For one thing, O‑118 is supposedly the last photograph taken of Lincoln alive. In 1922, The New York Times published the original print (above) with text by James Young, who wrote:
Probably no other photograph of Lincoln conveys more clearly the abiding sadness of the face. The lines of time and care are deeply etched, and he has the look of a man bordering upon old age, though he was only 56. Proof that the camera was but a few feet away may be found by scrutiny of the picture…. The print has been untouched, and this picture is an exact likeness of the President as he looked in the week of his death.
The photo’s caption also included information that Morris makes a great deal of: “The Cracked Negative Caused it To Be Discarded. It Has Only Once Before Been Published, and Then in a Retouched Form.” For one thing, Morris seems to associate the photograph with what Walter Benjamin called “aura”; The print, it seems, was the only one Gardner was able to make before the cracked negative became useless and mass production from the source impossible. Un-retouched, the print shows a “fracture cutting through the top of Lincoln’s head.” For the storyteller, writes Morris, “the crack is the beginning of a legend—the legend of a death foretold. The crack seems to anticipate the bullet fired into the back of Lincoln’s head at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday, April 14, 1865.” Using the rhetorical term for “a figure of anticipation,” a narrative feature that foreshadows, foretells, or prophesies, Morris calls this “the proleptic crack.”
His winding narrative, replete with the antiquarian minutiae of collectors, moves from the day—February 5, 1865—that Lincoln and his son Tad walked to Gardner’s studio on 7th Street in Washington, DC for the photo session, through the use of photography as an aid to Lincoln painters and sculptors, to the meaning of Lincoln for such diverse people as Leo Tolstoy, Marilyn Monroe, and our current President. Morris’ series ranges far and wide, visiting with historians and collectors along the way, and telling many a story, some freely speculative, some wistful, some tragic, and all somehow circling back to O‑118. Like much of Morris’ documentary work, it’s an exercise in collage—of the methods of the scholar, the essayist, and the archivist—and like its subject, it’s a fractured, but everlastingly fascinating meditation. Follow Morris’ entire series below.
Every creative writer gets asked the question at least once at a social event with non-writers: “Where do you get your ideas?” To the asker, writing is a dark art, full of mysteries only the initiated understand. To the writer—as Neil Gaiman tells us in an essay on his website—the question misses the point and misjudges the writer’s task. “Ideas aren’t the hard bit,” he says.
Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you’re trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.
Sometimes hardest of all is the “simply sitting down” and writing when there’s nothing, no ideas. The work’s still got to get done, after all. Gaiman used to treat the question facetiously, answering with one of a few waggish and “not very funny” prepared answers. But people kept asking, including the seven-year-old classmates of his daughter, and he decided to tell them the truth, “I make them up, out of my head.” It’s not the answer most wanted to hear, but it’s the truth. As he inarguably shows, ideas are like opinions: “Everyone’s got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.” And they can come from anywhere.
Gaiman, feeling that he owed his daughter’s classmates a thoughtful, detailed answer, responded with the below, which we’ve put into list form.
Ideas come from daydreaming. “The only difference between writers and other people,” says Gaiman, “is that we notice when we’re doing it.”
Ideas come from asking yourself simple questions, like “What if…?” (“you woke up with wings?… your sister turned into a mouse?.…), “If only…” (“a ghost would do my homework”) and “I wonder….” (“what she does when she’s alone”), etc…. These questions, in turn, generate other questions.
Ideas are only starting points. You don’t have to figure out the plot. Plots “generate themselves” from “whatever the starting point is.”
Ideas can be people (“There’s a boy who wants to know about magic”); places (“There’s a castle at the end of time, which is the only place there is”); images (“A woman, sifting in a dark room filled with empty faces.”)
Ideas can come from two things “that haven’t come together before.” (“What would happen if a chair was bitten by a werewolf?)
Granted some of Gaiman’s examples may be more intriguing or fantastic than what you or I might propose, but anyone can do these exercises. The idea, however, is just the starting point. “All fiction,” he writes, “is a process of imagining.” So what comes next? “Well,” says Gaiman, “then you write.” Yes, it is that simple, and that hard.
Tell us, readers, do you find any of Gaiman’s idea sources helpful? Where do you get your ideas?
I had an adolescent fascination with Ed Wood. I mean that literally: I spent a sizable chunk of my adolescence watching the films of, reading about, and even reading the books by writer-director (and occasional cross-dresser) Edward D. Wood Jr. What, I asked, could have driven the man to make, and keep on making, the films that would ultimately define the category, quite popular during my teen years, of “so bad it’s good” cinema? None of his numerous, all unabashedly low-budget pictures have done more for that form than 1959’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, a breathless, nearly budgetless tale in which Wood throws together aliens, zombies, looming nuclear annihilation, and Bela Lugosi. Well, he almost throws in Bela Lugosi: as depicted in Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood, he characteristically spliced in existing footage of the by-then deceased icon of horror film, cast his wife’s chiropractor (instructed to hold a cape over his face) as a double, billed Lugosi as the star, and hoped for the best.
You can watch the fruit of that and other highly unorthodox filmmaking efforts on the part of Wood and his faithful bunch of long-suffering collaborators at the top of the post. Just below, we have a clip from Ed Wood, which in large part deals with how its indefatigable protagonist, played by a wholesomely gung-ho Johnny Depp, came to make Plan 9 in the first place. This montage recreates the shooting of sequences Wood’s fans will have long since burned into their visual memory: George “The Animal” Steele as Swedish ex-wrestler Tor Johnson rising ineptly from the grave, Bill Murray as would-be transsexual Bunny Breckenridge affectlessly giving his henchman orders to execute the title plan, a trio of toy flying saucers lowered on fishing wire into a model Hollywood. In 1980, Michael and Harry Medved dubbed Plan 9 “worst movie ever made,” initiating its ascent from decades of obscurity to the status of, as John Wirt puts it, “the ultimate cult flick.” Critics tend to regard Ed Wood as a “good” movie, and Wood’s projects, especially Plan 9, as “bad” movies, yet both entertain at very high levels indeed, making us ask an important question, another one I asked myself in the thick of my Wood period: what makes a movie “good” or “bad,” anyway?
The French refer to the decade between 1920 and 1929 as les Années folles, “the crazy years,” which is apt when you consider how the French middle and upper classes generally loosened their brassieres and defined modern bohemia, à laCoco Chanel.
But the American moniker — the Roaring 20s — fits too. Nearly everything about that decade roared: cars, jazz, manufacturing, construction.
Din, in fact, came to define the age, particularly in big cities and especially in New York. An unnamed Japanese visitor was quoted upon his visit to that city in 1920: “My first impression of New York was its noise. When I know what they mean, I will understand civilization.”
A Princeton history professor took that challenge at face value, while capturing a broader industrial era. The Roaring Twenties is an audio (and to some extent video) archive of what New York City sounded like from 1900 to 1933. Professor Emily Thompson and designer Scott Mahoy have created a lovely site that’s fun to explore. The archive includes a beautiful 1933 map of New York City loaded with links to noise complaints (screenshot at top), complete with documentation. New York had long been a place where people from all over the world lived on top of one another, but noise levels were shifting—getting louder and more varied, that is—and the city was inundated with complaints about ferry whistles, radio shops, street traffic, the clatter of restaurant dishwashing, and all manner of construction.
Sensitivity to the city’s volume was high. The city’s Noise Abatement Commission measured the “deafening effect” of sound in Times Square. The women’s cafeteria in the New York Life Insurance building was designed with state-of-the-art acoustics to keep the noise of the city out and the sound of office workers in.
Cortlandt Street in lower Manhattan was lined with radio shops, each broadcasting different music. Don’t miss that video, which you’ll find by scanning the Space tab map.
You can also move through time on the site, listening to the city’s cacophony from the early 1900s up to the 1930s, or browse a menu of noise sources from home sounds to the noise of the harbors and rivers. Again, you can visit the The Roaring Twenties site here.
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