As Cartoon Brew explains it: “Wolfgang Matzl remade Inception with vintage paper cut-outs, shot frame-by-frame on his digital camera, for the Done In 60 Seconds competition (where entrants recreate a movie in no more than a minute). His film was one of the 10 finalists in Berlin, Germany.” You can watch other shortlisted films here…
via Boing Boing
The jazz vocalist and ten-time Grammy winner Bobby McFerrin turns 61 today. To celebrate, we’re posting this clip from the 2009 World Science Festival, in which McFerrin leads an impromptu audience sing-a-long in order to demonstrate the power of the pentatonic scale. We bet you’ve never seen music theory taught quite like this.
McFerrin, by the way, is sharing the stage with several scientists, including Daniel Levitin, McGill professor and author of the book This is Your Brain on Music. If this clip happens to awaken your inner crooner instead of your inner neuroscientist, you can also check out a short singing lesson with McFerrin on Qtv.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Here are a few basic truths: life is essentially meaningless; your hard work won’t dictate where your life goes; you will be struck down by death; and your loved ones and your achievements will whither and turn to dust. A grim way to look at things perhaps. But a long line of philosophers, starting with the Stoics, have seen wisdom in taking a dim view. As Alain de Botton points out, a pessimistic outlook reduces our expectations, our envy, our disappointment, and it creates room for emotional upside and healthier life decisions. The talk (which features a sing-along to Elton John at the 29 minute mark) runs 38 wisdom-filled minutes, and it’s presented online by The School of Life, a London-based institution co-founded by de Botton in 2008. A big thanks to Miguel for sending this our way…
Related Content:
Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness (also by Alain de Botton)
NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has released an animated video showing the tsunami originating off the coast of Japan, and then spreading across the Pacific. Dramatic, to say the least.
Last year, NOAA also produced an animation that visualized the tremors from the big Chilean quake as they worked their way across the globe. Catch it here.
A quick news bulletin: Japan was struck by a massive 8.9 earthquake today, followed by some devastating tsunamis (see clip below). Al Jazeera is providing live coverage (in English) on the web. Start watching here. Or find another live stream from NHK in Japan. What’s more, The Wall Street Journal has a live blog dedicated to the earthquake, and Google has set up a people finder for those living in the country. Our best wishes to the people of Japan…
Tsunami:
Couldn’t let this one pass by…
Andersen M, a London design studio, crafted a rather amazing stop motion video to accompany an excerpt from Maurice Gee’s novel, Going West. The short film was produced on behalf of the New Zealand Book Council, and you can only imagine, as one of our readers points out, the craftsmanship, patience, and effort that went into the making this.
Thanks Dalel for sending this our way, and please don’t miss another one of our favorites: Books Savored in Stop Motion Film…
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The Smithsonian Institution has launched Smithsonian WILD, a new web site that lets you search through its collection of over 202,000 images culled from seven ongoing wildlife studies. Researchers in remote locations across the globe have set up “camera traps” – automated cameras triggered by motion sensors – and left them to record whatever wildlife passes by. The resulting images, be they of giant pandas in China, barking deer in Thailand, or roughed grouse on the Appalachian Trail, aren’t nearly as pretty or clear as those we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in nature magazines and HD primetime specials. But their rawness is part of their appeal: Clicking through these galleries imparts a sense of real-time excitement, as if we too have been crouched in the jungle for hours, waiting to catch a glimpse of something wild.
via Boingboing
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Taking a page from the RSA playbook, the New York Public Library has uploaded to its YouTube Channel a series of illustrated talks. John Waters, Jay‑Z, Werner Herzog – they’re all there. And so too is Mark Twain “reading” from his own work – work that was first published in 2009 within a volume called Who is Mark Twain?. Flash Rosenberg provides the art (see her work on Vimeo); John Lithgow does the voice.…
In this hilarious conversation, originally published in the short-lived ECHO Magazine in 1960, Salvador Dalí tries to teach Irish-born actor Edward Mulhare how to articulate English words in a more Dalían way. When this clip was recorded, Mulhare had already spent three years playing the role of Professor Higgins in the Broadway version of My Fair Lady. And as you’ll recall, it was Higgins’ job to teach Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl, to speak as a proper English lady. How successfully does Dali manage to put some surrealist cool into this rather conservative Englishman? You can listen here to find out. And don’t forget to catch Salvador Dalí’s classic appearance on What’s my line?
MP3 via UbuWeb Sound.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
In case you missed it, this New York Times Sunday Magazine story offers a great example of How We Live/Dance/Film/Self-Finance these days.
What we have here is a seven minute collaboration between director Jacob Krupnick and classically-trained ballet refugee Anne Marsen. Shot guerilla-style on the Staten Island Ferry, the video features Marsen’s giddy pastiche of hip hop, ballet, modern and jazz dance. The soundtrack is also a pastiche of sorts, an excerpt from mashup DJ Girl Talk’s new album, “All Day.”
Grupnick posted the clip above as a teaser on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter in January, hoping to raise enough money to make it into a full-length dance film. He met his fundraising goal within 6 days, and the team starts shooting in April.
A note: It takes about two minutes for the action to really kick in, and if you’re listening to it from an office, be sure to turn the volume down first.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
We take you back to another era when funding for public broadcasting was in doubt – to 1969, when Richard Nixon planned to cut PBS’ funding from $20 million to $10 million. Here Fred Rogers, the gentle creator of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, gets six short minutes before Senator John Pastore, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, and makes his pitch for publicly-funded educational television. In those 360 seconds, Rogers gets the gruff senator to do a complete 180 – to end up saying “It looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars.” And, indeed, it turned out just that way. Those were the days…
via @webacion
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