Now we take you back to 1965, when Kurzweil wasn’t yet a futurist. Only 17 years old, he was a wunderkind, a high school student immersed in artificial intelligence who tinkered away, and eventually figured out how to program a computer to produce original musical compositions. When the producers of I’ve Got a Secret discovered his talents, they brought the young Kurzweil on the show. And the rest you can watch on the videotape above.
You might know Errol Morris from his documentaries like Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, on emergent systems in topiary gardens and naked mole-rat colonies; The Fog of War, on the shadowy career of Robert McNamara; and Gates of Heaven, on competing pet cemeteries (which no less a critical authority than Roger Ebert has called one of the greatest films of all time). You might remember Morris’ interview-driven television series First Person with fondness — and, given its episodes on serial-killer groupies, cryonic head-freezers, and professional high-school students, perhaps a dash of disbelief. If nothing else, you’ve almost certainly seen Morris’ commercials for the likes of PBS, Volkswagen, and Miller High Life. In the last few years, he’s put out a new film, Tabloid, a book on the relationship of photography to reality, Believing is Seeing, and many a post on his New York Times blog. For Errol Morris fans, these are hearty times indeed.
As the newest addition to this Morissian abundance, the ten-minute documentary El Wingador profiles five-time Philadelphia Wing Bowl champion eater Bill “El Wingador” Simmons. To win the Wing Bowl, you must simply eat as many chicken wings as possible in the shortest amount of time. Such a mandate stretches the definition of “eat” to its breaking point; the trick, as Simmons tells Morris, is to train your jaw and esophagus not to chew, per se, but to bite and swallow, bite and swallow, bite and swallow — “don’t worry about choking.” For a man like El Wingador, eating, like any everyday activity taken to the level of elite competition, makes demands that would strike outsiders as grotesque: consuming eleven pounds of food per day, putting in hours-long sessions with baseball-sized wads of Tootsie Rolls, shoveling down handfuls of searing-hot pizza cheese, gnawing on rawhide bones meant for German Shepherds. And sometimes even insiders seem flummoxed by it all: asked if he would really consider his regimen an eating disorder, Simmons replies, “It’s gotta be a disorder, ‘cause it’s crazy, man.”
As a seemingly marginal subculture with its own rules, customs, hierarchies, and personalities, competitive eating would seem to comfortably inhabit Morris’ wheelhouse; it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d opted to make a feature-length documentary about it. But even in the brief minutes with Simmons El Wingador offers us, we glimpse enough of this world and its leading lights — the young hotshot Joey Chestnut, the eerily skinny Sonya Thomas and Takeru Kobayashi — to suspect that the substantive differences between competitive eating and “real” athletics may amount to less than we’d assumed. One might make a solemn point here about starvation in the developing world even as the Philadelphia Wing Bowl puts decadent ancient Rome to shame. But it gives me just as much pause to ponder the unsettling lack of differences between cramming chicken wings down your throat in the center of a roaring stadium and most other forms of human endeavor.
Today is the 110th birthday of writer John Steinbeck, whose great novel of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath, gives an eloquent and sympathetic voice to the dispossessed. In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.” You can watch him deliver his Nobel speech above.
And for insights into how Steinbeck reached that pinnacle, you can read a collection of his observations on the art of fiction from the Fall, 1975 edition of The Paris Review, including six writing tips jotted down in a letter to a friend the same year he won the Nobel Prize. “The following,” Steinbeck writes, “are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.”
1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person–a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it–bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue–say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
“As you write,” Steinbeck says, “trust the disconnections and the gaps. If you have written what your eye first saw and you are stopped, see again. See something else. Take a leap to another image. Don’t require of yourself that you understand the connection. Some of the most brilliant things that happen in fiction occur when the writer allows what seems to be a disconnected image to lead him or her away from the line that was being taken.”
What a sight to behold. Earlier this month, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) beamed back stunning images of the sun’s plasma moving violently around the star’s magnetic field for 30 some hours, creating a tornado as large as the Earth itself, with gusts reaching up to 300,000 miles per hour. That’s according to Terry Kucera, a solar physicist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. NPR has more on the makings of solar storms. Find more awe-inspiring footage in our collection of 125 Great Science Videos.
How about some hors d’oeuvres meant to accompany the main course, the 2014 Academy Awards? We scouted around the web and found 36 Oscar-winning (or nominated) films from previous years. The list includes many short films, but also some long ones, like Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic version of War & Peace. Sit back, enjoy, and let us know if we’re missing any other Oscar winners…
A Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass Double Feature — Free — A precursor to modern music videos, this Oscar-winning animated film by John & Faith Hubley is set to the music of two popular songs recorded by Herb Alpert. (1966)
A Story of Healing — Free – Won Academy Award for best Documentary Short Subject. Follows a team of volunteers in Vietnam. (1997)
Churchill’s Island — Free – WWII propaganda film chronicling the defense of Great Britain. Won the very first Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. (1941)
Der Fuehrer’s Face – Free – Disney’s anti-Nazi propaganda movie featuring Donald Duck. Won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. (1942)
Every Child – Free – Eugene Fedorenko’s animated short about an unwanted baby cared for by a homeless men. Won 1979 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film.
Father and Daughter – Free – Michaël Dudok De Wit’s heartbreaking short won the 2000 Academy Award for Animated Short Film. (2000)
Flamenco at 5:15 – Free – Oscar-winning short film about a flamenco dance class given to senior students. (1983)
Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life - Free — Directed by Peter Capaldi, the Oscar-winning short film shows Kafka, on Christmas Eve, struggling to come up with the opening line for his most famous work, The Metamorphosis. (1993)
Glass - Free — Directed by Bert Haanstra, this short documentary about the glass industry won the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1959. (1958)
Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty- Free – 6 minute animated black comedy. Shortlisted for the 2010 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. (2008)
Logorama – Free – François Alaux and Herve de Crecy’s 17 minute film, Logorama, won the Oscar for Short Film (Animated) in 2009.
If You Love This Planet – Free – Oscar-winning short film on the need for nuclear disarmament. (1982)
I’ll Find a Way – Free – Oscar-winning documentary presents Nadia, a 9‑year-old girl with spina bifida. (1977)
Is It Right to Be Always Right? — Free — Narrated by Orson Welles, this Oscar-winning film directed by Lee Mishkin is a parable that comments on divisions in the United States. (1970)
J’attendrai le suivant – Free – A French film nominated for an Academy Award for the Best Short Film in 2002.
Madame Tutli-Putli – Free – Oscar-nominated animated short film by Montreal filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski. (2010)
Neighbors – Free – Norman McLaren animates live actors with techniques normally used to put drawings/puppets into motion. Oscar winner. (1952)
Ryan – Free – Oscar-winning animated short from Chris Landreth based on the life of Ryan Larkin, the influential Canadian animator. (2004)
Special Delivery – Free – Hilarious story won 1978 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film.
Superman – Free – Max Fleischer’s short animated movie. Nominated for the 1942 Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons. (1941)
The Cathedral — Free — “The Cathedral” is the title of a sci fi short story by Jacek Dukaj. It was turned into a short animated movie by Tomasz Bagiński and nominated in 2002 for the Academy Award for Animated Short Film. (2002)
The Critic - Free — Mel Brooks 1963 animation features an old Yiddish watching abstract animations. Hilarious film won Oscar. (1963)
The Danish Poet — Free — Animated short film written, directed, and animated by Torill Kove and narrated by Liv Ullmann, won the Academy Award in 2006.
The Dot and the Line - Free — Chuck Jones’ animated film celebrates geometry and hard work. (1965)
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore — Free — Oscar-winning film by Moonbot Studios pays homage to a bygone era when elegantly printed books inhabited our world. (2011)
The Hole – Free — A 15-minute animated film by John Hubley and Faith Hubley that won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1962. Features the voice of Dizzy Gillespie. (1962)
The Last Farm – Free – Short Icelandic film nominated for Oscar in 2006.
The Lunch Date – Free – Adam Davidson’s commentary on race in America. The short film won an Oscar and a prize at Cannes. (1989)
The Man with the The Golden Arm – Free — Directed by Otto Preminger. Starring Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak. Nominated for three Academy Awards. (1955)
The Old Man and the Sea – Free – Aleksandr Petrov won the Academy Award for Short Film for this film that follows the plot of Ernest Hemingway’s classic 1952 novella. Made of 29,000 images painted on glass. (1999)
The Red Balloon — Free — A short fantasy film directed by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse. Won Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956.
The Sand Castle – Free – Short animated film about the sandman and the creatures he sculpts out of sand. 1977 Oscar-winner for Best Animated Short Film.
Tin Toy – Free – John Lasseter created this Oscar-winning short film in 1988 at Pixar. It was the beginning of the company’s transition into being a premier animation studio.
Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom – Free – Disney’s music education film. First cartoon released in widescreen CinemaScope. Won 1954 Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons). (1953)
Walking – Free – Oscar-nominated animated short film by Ryan Larkin. (1969)
War & Peace — Free — Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk turns Tolstoy’s great novel into what Roger Ebert calls “the definitive epic of all time.” Won Academy Award – Best Foreign Language Film in 1969. (1965–1967)
Why Man Creates - Free- Saul Bass’ Oscar-winning animation on the nature of creativity. (1963)
Remember The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore? The short film we featured a month ago? Well, it won an Oscar tonight for best animated short film, and we’re bringing it back for one more showing, plus adding it to our list of Oscar films available online.
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore offers a modern tribute to an old world. Made with an animation style that blends stop motion with computer animation and traditional hand-drawing, the silent film pays homage to a bygone era when elegantly printed books inhabited our world. The 15-minute short is the first made by Moonbot Studios, a fledgling animation shop in Shreveport, Louisiana. For their efforts, Moonbot’s founders (William Joyce, Brandon Oldenburg and Lampton Enochs) received an Oscar-nomination this week (Best Animated Short), putting them in competition with two other films featured on Open Culture: Sunday and Wild Life.
We recommend watching The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore on YouTube, or downloading it for free in HD from iTunes. iPad owners will also want to consider buying the related app ($4.99) that turns the film into an interactive narrative experience.
About a month back, we featured George Harrison’s long lost guitar solo on “Here Comes the Sun,” and you went gaga for it. Little did we know that George Harrison’s son, Dhani, was just about ready to unveil a new iPad app called The Guitar Collection: George Harrison. It runs $9.99, and it’s only available on the iPad, which hardly makes it an instance of Open Culture. But we love The Beatles around here, and the app does something fairly special. It gives you a high-tech introduction to seven George Harrison guitars, using 360° images, sound files, videos, and lots of text and factoids. The video above offers a quick tour of the app. In the video below, Dhani Harrison explains how the the app came together on the Conan O’Brien Show. Thanks for the heads up Liz.
In the early 1970s, Jim Henson was worried that the Muppets were becoming typecast as children’s entertainment. So in December of 1974 he produced a pilot episode for The Muppet Show and gave it a name that was about as far away from Sesame Street as you could get: “Sex and Violence.”
The half-hour pilot was first broadcast on ABC in March of 1975. It’s a fast-moving series of vignettes, featuring a motley cast of characters–many of whom would become familiar in later years–appearing and reappearing throughout. Sam the Eagle, Sgt. Floyd Pepper, The Swedish Chef, Statler and Waldorf, and a wrestler named The San Francisco Earthquake all make an appearance. At one point, Kermit the Frog propositions a female with the line, “I might be able to get you a job on an educational show for kids.” The story, to the extent there is one, centers around preparations for a “Seven Deadly Sins Pageant.” Alas, the pageant never quite gets off the ground. As Sam the Eagle sagely asks: “Do we really want to get into a ‘deadly sins’ situation?”
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Almost two years ago, Spanish filmmaker Cristóbal Vila shot an exquisite little film, Nature by Numbers, which captured the ways in which mathematical concepts (Fibonacci Sequence, Golden Number, etc.) reveal themselves in nature. And the short then clocked a good 2.1 million views on YouTube alone.
This week, Vila returns with a new film called Inspirations. In this case, the inspiration is M.C. Escher (1898–1972), the Dutch artist who explored a wide range of mathematical ideas with his woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. Although Escher had no formal training in mathematics beyond secondary school, many mathematicians counted themselves as admirers of his work. (Visit this online gallery to get better acquainted with Escher’s art, and be sure to click on the thumbnails to enlarge the images). As Vila explains, Inspirations tries to imagine Escher’s workplace, “what things would surround an artist like him, so deeply interested in science in general and mathematics in particular.” It’s a three minutes of unbridled imagination.
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In 2011, Theo Gray (co-founder of Wolfram Research, Popular Science columnist, and element collector) won the ACS Grady Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public. And here you can see why. In this clip, Gray introduces you to his DIY masterpiece — the world’s first “periodic table table.” Yes, we’re talking about a hand-carved wooden table that brings to life the Periodic Table, and lets you play with the elements. The project began back in 2002, and now, a decade later, Gray puts it on display in a video produced by the American Chemical Society.
Just when you think you’ve seen everything Jean-Luc Godard has ever shot, something like this surfaces. If you’re only now considering tucking into the feast that is Godard’s filmography, don’t let his abundance of uncollected odds, ends, clips, and shorts intimidate you. Not only do they promise a little thrill down the road when you’ve already digested his major works, but they offer quick bursts at any time of the revolutionary cinematic zest with which the filmmaker took on the world. With the man alive and working, I should perhaps say “the revolutionary cinematic zest with which the filmmaker takes on the world,” but that gets into one of the most fascinating conversations that swirls around him: has Godard still got it?
Some say yes, that his latest picture Film Socialismepresents the logical continuation of all Godard has ever represented; some say no, that the Godard to watch remains the scrappy star of the 1960s’ French New Wave. In his study Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, New Yorker film blogger Richard Brody somehow makes both claims.
In the chapter “Revolution (1968–1972)” he describes Godard’s improvised method of shooting a 1968 Jefferson Airplane concert:
He took over from the specialists and operated the camera from the window of Leacock-Pennebaker’s office on West Forty-fifth street, shooting the band on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel across the street. (Pennebaker recalled him to be an amateurish cameraman who could not avoid the beginner’s pitfall of frequent zooming in and out.) The performance took place without a permit, at standard rock volume: as singer Grace Slick later wrote, “We did it, deciding that the cost of getting out of jail would be less than hiring a publicist…”
Amateurish or not, a piece of the footage has surfaced on YouTube. Listen to the Airplane perform “The House at Pooneil Corners,” watch Godard’s dramatic swings of focus and zoom as he attempts to convey the spectacle of the band and the spectacle of countless surprised Manhattanites at once, and think for yourself about this peculiar intersection of two bold lines in the era’s alternative zeitgeist. As Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner said in a 1986 interview, “Just for a while there, maybe for about 25 minutes in 1967, everything was perfect.” But these seven minutes in November 1968, from opening shouts to inevitable arrest, don’t seem so dull themselves.
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