Philip Glass, Lou Reed Speak At Occupy Lincoln Center

Last night, two Amer­i­can icons lent sup­port to the Occu­py Wall Street move­ment, speak­ing at a protest held out­side of Lin­coln Cen­ter in New York City.  After a per­for­mance of Satya­gra­ha at the Met, Philip Glass spoke to demon­stra­tors. Accord­ing to Alex Ross, the music crit­ic for the New York­er, Glass recit­ed the clos­ing lines of Satya­gra­ha (see around 3:00 minute mark in the video above), which come from the Bha­gavad Gita:

When right­eous­ness with­ers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take vis­i­ble shape, and move, a man among men, for the pro­tec­tion of good, thrust­ing back evil and set­ting virtue on her seat again.

He repeat­ed the say­ing sev­er­al times, and the “human micro­phone” ampli­fied the mes­sage for him.

Lou Reed was also in atten­dance and helped some­one crawl over a police bar­ri­cade at one point, then said: “I was born in Brook­lyn, and I’ve nev­er been more ashamed than to see the bar­ri­cades tonight. The police are our army. I want to be friends with them. And I wan­na occu­py Wall Street. I sup­port it.” A not-so-clear audio clip appears below:

via Gothamist and The Rest is Noise

More Occu­py Videos:

Noam Chom­sky at Occu­py Boston

Slavoj Zizek Takes the Stage at Occu­py Wall Street

Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig at Occu­py Wall Street

David Cros­by & Gra­ham Nash at Occu­py Wall Street; Echoes of Wood­stock

The Denali Experiment: A Test of Human Limits

How does the say­ing go? It’s the jour­ney, not the des­ti­na­tion, that counts?

The short film above, The Denali Exper­i­ment, doc­u­ments the gnarly expe­di­tion of some rock star skiers. Their goal? To sum­mit Denali, the high­est moun­tain peak in North Amer­i­ca, and then ski down its steep slopes. The beau­ti­ful­ly-shot film by Jim­my Chen focus­es almost entire­ly on the jour­ney up the moun­tain, a big 20,320 feet. For the skiers, the high alti­tude moun­taineer­ing was the hard part, the test of human lim­its. Not the trip down. Sit back and enjoy the jour­ney.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Extreme Pho­tog­ra­phy: Shoot­ing Big Climbs at Yosemite

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Stanley Kubrick’s Photographs: Browse Them or Own Them

In 1945, a young Stan­ley Kubrick grad­u­at­ed from high school and almost imme­di­ate­ly start­ed work­ing for LOOK Mag­a­zine as a pho­to­jour­nal­ist, becom­ing the youngest staff pho­tog­ra­ph­er in the magazine’s his­to­ry. It’s dur­ing this peri­od that Kubrick began to mas­ter his visu­al craft and pro­duced some stun­ning images. Now, more than 65 years lat­er, you can pur­chase … or sim­ply browse through … Kubrick­’s pho­to­graph­ic work for the first time.

Work­ing with cura­tors from the Muse­um of the City of New York, VandM.com has select­ed 25 images to show­case (out of a larg­er col­lec­tion of 10,000 images). Pho­tos include prize­fight­er Wal­ter Carti­er in the cor­ner between rounds; the ele­gant actress Bet­sy Von Fursten­berg read­ing in a win­dow; street scenes from New York City; and a young woman walk­ing down a steep set of stairs while car­ry­ing a pile of books, all rather pre­car­i­ous­ly.

You can browse the full col­lec­tion here, or vis­it anoth­er set of Kubrick images, all tak­en in Chica­go, here.

Relat­ed Kubrick Con­tent:

Mak­ing The Shin­ing

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange: Mal­colm McDow­ell Looks Back

Post-Apocalyptic Cover Art Created in Amazing Time-Lapse Film

Dei Gaztelu­men­di is a young Span­ish artist. He was com­mis­sioned recent­ly to cre­ate a cov­er illus­tra­tion for the com­ic book mag­a­zine Xabiroi, and decid­ed to make a time-lapse video of the process. The result is a fas­ci­nat­ing look at how the artist begins with a rough sketch on paper and then builds lay­er upon lay­er of detail using the Adobe Cre­ative Suite soft­ware. Thir­ty hours of work are com­pressed into 11 min­utes. “A lot of emo­tion went into this paint­ing,” Gaztelu­men­di said on his blog, “since I made it as a gift to one of my bud­dies, who trag­i­cal­ly lost a leg in a motor­bike acci­dent about a year ago.” Gaztelu­men­di was born in San Sebas­t­ian, Basque Coun­try, Spain in 1987, and began illus­trat­ing chil­dren’s books as a teenag­er. He stud­ied ani­ma­tion at Sheri­dan Col­lege in Ontario, Cana­da, where his the­sis film was a whim­si­cal tale called Earlth & Moonch. Since grad­u­at­ing with high hon­ors last year, Gaztelu­men­di has been work­ing as a com­mer­cial illus­tra­tor, spe­cial­iz­ing in crea­ture and char­ac­ter art. You can see more of his work at Deisign.com.

A Brief Visual Introduction to Saul Bass’ Celebrated Title Designs

Title sequences begin and end every movie. They can be “engag­ing or wild­ly enter­tain­ing … or sim­ply drop dead beau­ti­ful.” They can “ooze with visu­al poet­ry and sophis­ti­cat­ed imagery.” And they can put the audi­ence in the right mood for the movie, or close it in the right way, says the web site For­get the Films, Watch the Titles.

When it comes to title design, no one did it bet­ter than Saul Bass (1920–1996). Dur­ing his long career in Hol­ly­wood, Bass designed sequences for Otto Pre­minger’s The Man with the Gold­en Arm (full movie here), Scors­ese’s Good­fel­las and Cape Fear, Kubrick­’s Spar­ta­cus, and sev­er­al films by Alfred Hitch­cock. And that’s just begin­ning to scratch the sur­face.

Cre­at­ed by Ian Albinson, the mon­tage above offers a brief visu­al his­to­ry of Bass’s most cel­e­brat­ed work, stitch­ing togeth­er designs from 25 films. (Find the full film list here.)  If this whets your appetite, you’ll want to check out the new­ly-pub­lished book Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design and this web site ded­i­cat­ed to Bass’s title design. And don’t miss our big col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

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!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

All Together Now: Every Beatles Song Played at Once

The idea is sim­ple, real­ly. Take every Bea­t­les tune, all 226 of them, and play them togeth­er, sequenc­ing them so that they end at the exact same moment. And here’s what you get. The Bea­t­les as you’ve nev­er heard them before … and may nev­er want to hear them again.

h/t kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Bea­t­les’ Rooftop Con­cert: The Last Gig

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of Kash­mir

The Bea­t­les Com­plete on Ukulele

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

Beware of the Big Brinicle of Death

The Brini­cle of Death. It has nev­er been cap­tured on film … until now. And it’s all on dis­play cour­tesy of the BBC series Frozen Plan­et.

In a nut­shell, a brini­cle forms when cold, dense brine comes into con­tact with warmer water. It all starts on the ocean’s sur­face, and then the emerg­ing brini­cle (oth­er­wise known as an ice sta­lac­tite) starts to move down­ward, form­ing some­thing of a sub­merged tor­na­do, until it even­tu­al­ly hits the ocean floor and freezes every­thing in its path. The video above takes a 5–6 hour event and reduces it to a crisp, kind of hair-rais­ing two min­utes.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Iron Mike Tyson Sings “The Girl From Ipanema”

Once beau­ty, now farce. h/t @opedr

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Getz and Gilber­to Per­form ‘The Girl from Ipane­ma’

The World’s Highest Artificial Tornado

The Mer­cedes-Benz Muse­um in Stuttgart, Ger­many, is a remark­able struc­ture. Designed by Ben van Berkel and Car­o­line Bos of the Dutch firm UN Stu­dio, the build­ing received rave reviews when it opened in May of 2006. Influ­enced by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggen­heim Muse­um in New York, the build­ing was described as “jet-age baroque” by The Guardian archi­tec­ture crit­ic Jonathan Glancey. “It twists and turns with breath­tak­ing com­plex­i­ty,” Glancey wrote in 2006, “clever as a con­jur­ing trick.”

The archi­tects need­ed a bit of mag­ic to bring the muse­um’s open plan into com­pli­ance with fire codes. Like in the Guggen­heim, the inte­ri­or is one con­tin­u­ous­ly unfold­ing space that spi­rals around a cen­tral atri­um. As a con­se­quence there could be no fire doors to con­tain smoke if a blaze broke out in one sec­tion of the build­ing. To solve the prob­lem, UN Stu­dio hired the engi­neer­ing firm Imtech to design a sys­tem that would draw smoke away from all areas of the muse­um, allow­ing peo­ple to escape.

The result is the world’s largest man-made air vor­tex, a 112-foot-high tor­na­do that auto­mat­i­cal­ly acti­vates in the event of a fire, draw­ing smoke into the cen­ter of the atri­um and mov­ing it upward through an axi­al fan in the ceil­ing. An array of 144 out­lets in the sur­round­ing walls emit pow­er­ful jets of air to gen­er­ate a cen­tral region of low pres­sure, just like in a real tor­na­do. Imtech engi­neers per­fect­ed the design using com­pu­ta­tion­al flu­id dynam­ic (CDF) sim­u­la­tions and lab­o­ra­to­ry mod­els.  The firm has cre­at­ed sim­i­lar sys­tems for air­ports in sev­er­al Ger­man cities, includ­ing Düssel­dorf and Ham­burg. You can watch the tor­na­do at the Mer­cedes-Benz Muse­um in action above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The DIY Tor­na­do Machine

 

To Infinity and Beyond: A Mind-Bending Documentary from the BBC

Infin­i­ty. It’s a puz­zling con­cept. Is it real, or a math­e­mat­i­cal fic­tion?

Aris­to­tle believed infin­i­ty could only be poten­tial, nev­er actu­al. To speak of an actu­al infin­i­ty, he argued, is to fall into log­i­cal con­tra­dic­tion: “The infi­nite turns out to be the con­trary of what it is said to be,” Aris­to­tle wrote in the Physics. “It is not what has noth­ing out­side it that is infi­nite, but what always has some­thing out­side it.”

Aris­totle’s log­ic rest­ed on com­mon sense: the belief that the whole is always greater than the part. But in the late 19th Cen­tu­ry, Georg Can­tor and Richard Dedekind turned com­mon sense upside down by demon­strat­ing that the part can be equal to the whole. Can­tor went on to show that there are many orders of infinity–indeed, an infin­i­ty of infini­ties.

But what rela­tion does the Pla­ton­ic realm of pure math­e­mat­ics have to the phys­i­cal world? Physics is an empir­i­cal sci­ence, but that has­n’t stopped the­o­rists from imag­in­ing the mind-bog­gling con­se­quences of an infi­nite uni­verse. To Infin­i­ty and Beyond, a one-hour BBC Hori­zon spe­cial fea­tur­ing inter­views with lead­ing math­e­mati­cians and physi­cists, is an enter­tain­ing explo­ration of a sub­ject which, by def­i­n­i­tion, you won’t be able to wrap your mind around.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dan­ger­ous Knowl­edge: 4 Bril­liant Math­e­mati­cians & Their Drift to Insan­i­ty

Futur­ist Arthur C. Clarke on Mandelbrot’s Frac­tals

Math­e­mat­ics in Movies: Har­vard Prof Curates 150+ Scenes

A Day in Venezia

3,000,000 tourists move through Venice each year. The flood starts dur­ing the spring and peaks in sum­mer, then recedes dur­ing the cool­er months, giv­ing the local res­i­dents a lit­tle peace. True, the city, made up of 124 islands, 183 canals and 438 bridges, is radi­ant dur­ing the sum­mer. (Just watch below.) But the “Queen of the Adri­at­ic” takes on a dif­fer­ent beau­ty in the win­ter, some­thing that a tourist, who sim­ply goes by FKY, cap­tures in an art­ful video above. Enjoy, and if you want to know more about the archi­tec­tur­al won­ders of this 1500-year-old city, don’t miss How Venice Works.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |


  • Great Lectures

  • Sign up for Newsletter

  • About Us

    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.


    Advertise With Us

  • Archives

  • Search

  • Quantcast