The Birth and Decline of a Book: Two Videos for Bibliophiles

in Books | April 5th, 2012

If you’ve ever spent any time with old books, or stepped into the right used book­store, you’ve encoun­tered that dis­tinc­tive smell. Pro­duced by Abe’s Books, and draw­ing on research from chemists at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege, Lon­don, this video looks at the sci­ence behind the aro­ma of used books — at what hap­pens when chem­i­cals and organ­ic mat­ter con­front heat, light, mois­ture and time.

When you’re done watch­ing the video, you might want to spend time with a sec­ond clip that deals with anoth­er part of the life­cy­cle of the book — the birth of a book. Shot by Glen Mil­ner at Smith-Set­tle Print­ers in Leeds, Eng­land, this short film lets you watch first­hand a book — Suzanne St Albans’ Man­go and Mimosa — being made with old school print­ing meth­ods. Enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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 ( None ) |

The Universal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learning to Play Jazz & The Creative Process

in Creativity, Film, Music | April 5th, 2012

Bill Evans was one of the great­est jazz pianists of the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry. His play­ing on Miles Davis’s land­mark 1959 record, Kind of Blue, and as leader of the Bill Evans Trio was a major influ­ence on play­ers like Her­bie Han­cock, Kei­th Jar­rett and Chick Corea. “Bil­l’s val­ue can’t be mea­sured in any kind of terms,” Corea once said. “He’s one of the great, great artists of this cen­tu­ry.”

Evan­s’s approach to music was a process of analy­sis fol­lowed by intu­ition. He would study a prob­lem delib­er­ate­ly, work­ing on it over and over until the solu­tion became sec­ond nature. “You use your intel­lect to take apart the mate­ri­als,” Evans said in 1969.

“But, actu­al­ly, it takes years and years of play­ing to devel­op the facil­i­ty so that you can for­get all of that and just relax, and just play.” In the book Jazz Styles: His­to­ry and Analy­sis, music writer Mark C. Gri­d­ley describes his play­ing:

Evans craft­ed his impro­vi­sa­tions with exact­ing delib­er­a­tion. Often he would take a phrase, or just a ker­nel of its char­ac­ter, then devel­op and extend its rhythms, melod­ic ideas, and accom­pa­ny­ing har­monies. Then with­in the same solo he would often return to that ker­nel, trans­form­ing it each time. And while all this was hap­pen­ing, he would pon­der ways of resolv­ing the ten­sion that was build­ing. He would be con­sid­er­ing rhyth­mic ways, melod­ic ways, and har­monies all at the same time, long before the opti­mal moment for resolv­ing the idea.

Evans dis­cuss­es his cre­ative process in a fas­ci­nat­ing 1966 doc­u­men­tary, The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans. (You can watch it above, or find it in mul­ti­ple parts on Youtube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.) The film is intro­duced by Tonight Show host Steve Allen and fea­tures a reveal­ing talk between Evans and his old­er broth­er Har­ry, a music teacher. They begin with a dis­cus­sion of impro­vi­sa­tion and the nature of jazz, which Evans sees as a process rather than a style. He then moves to the piano to show how he builds up a jazz impro­vi­sa­tion, start­ing with a sim­ple frame­work and then adding lay­ers of rhyth­mic, har­mon­ic and melod­ic vari­a­tion.

“It’s very impor­tant to remem­ber,” Evans says, “that no mat­ter how far I might diverge or find free­dom in this for­mat, it only is free inso­far as it has ref­er­ence to the strict­ness of the orig­i­nal form. And that’s what gives it its strength. In oth­er words, there is no free­dom except in ref­er­ence to some­thing.”

The struc­ture of this process of improvisation–the mas­ter­ing of a thing explic­it­ly pre­scribed in order to burn it into the sub­con­scious for use lat­er in cre­at­ing some­thing new–echoes the pro­gres­sion of Evan­s’s devel­op­ment as a musi­cian. He says it took him 15 years of work from the time he first start­ed impro­vis­ing, at age 13, until he was ready to cre­ate some­thing tru­ly valu­able. The thing is not to get dis­cour­aged, but to enjoy the step-by-step process of learn­ing to make music.

“Most peo­ple just don’t real­ize the immen­si­ty of the prob­lem,” Evans says, “and either because they can’t con­quer imme­di­ate­ly they think they haven’t got the abil­i­ty, or they’re so impa­tient to con­quer it that they nev­er do see it through. But if you do under­stand the prob­lem, then I think you can enjoy your whole trip through.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

Clas­sic Jazz Album Cov­ers Ani­mat­ed, or the Re-Birth of Cool

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Google Gives 360° Tour of the White House

in Google, Politics | April 5th, 2012

Ear­li­er this week, we men­tioned the expan­sion of Google Art Project, which now gives you vir­tu­al access to 30,000 works of art from 151 muse­ums world­wide. What we did­n’t men­tion is that the expand­ed Art Project also includes a 360 degree walk through the White House — the same one vis­i­tors expe­ri­ence when they take a pub­lic tour of the man­sion. The White House tour was made with Google Street View tech­nol­o­gy, which oth­er­wise lets you take a jour­ney to the Ama­zon Basin, the Swiss Alps, and var­i­ous oth­er his­tor­i­cal sites (Pom­peii, Stone­henge and Ver­sailles).

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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 ) |

Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

in Books, Writing | April 4th, 2012

Like fel­low genre icon Stephen King, Ray Brad­bury has reached far beyond his estab­lished audi­ence by offer­ing writ­ing advice to any­one who puts pen to paper. (Or keys to key­board; “Use what­ev­er works,” he often says.) In this 2001 keynote address at Point Loma Nazarene Uni­ver­si­ty’s Writer’s Sym­po­sium By the Sea, Brad­bury tells sto­ries from his writ­ing life, all of which offer lessons on how to hone the craft. Most of these have to do with the day-in, day-out prac­tices that make up what he calls “writ­ing hygiene.” Watch this enter­tain­ing­ly digres­sive talk and you might pull out an entire­ly dif­fer­ent set of points, but here, in list form, is how I inter­pret Brad­bury’s pro­gram:

  • Don’t start out writ­ing nov­els. They take too long. Begin your writ­ing life instead by crank­ing out “a hell of a lot of short sto­ries,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it sim­ply isn’t pos­si­ble to write 52 bad short sto­ries in a row. He wait­ed until the age of 30 to write his first nov­el, Fahren­heit 451. “Worth wait­ing for, huh?”
  • You may love ’em, but you can’t be ’em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, con­scious­ly or uncon­scious­ly, to imi­tate your favorite writ­ers, just as he imi­tat­ed H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.
  • Exam­ine “qual­i­ty” short sto­ries. He sug­gests Roald Dahl, Guy de Mau­pas­sant, and the less­er-known Nigel Kneale and John Col­lier. Any­thing in the New York­er today does­n’t make his cut, since he finds that their sto­ries have “no metaphor.”
  • Stuff your head. To accu­mu­late the intel­lec­tu­al build­ing blocks of these metaphors, he sug­gests a course of bed­time read­ing: one short sto­ry, one poem (but Pope, Shake­speare, and Frost, not mod­ern “crap”), and one essay. These essays should come from a diver­si­ty of fields, includ­ing archae­ol­o­gy, zool­o­gy, biol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, pol­i­tics, and lit­er­a­ture. “At the end of a thou­sand nights,” so he sums it up, “Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff!”
  • Get rid of friends who don’t believe in you. Do they make fun of your writer­ly ambi­tions? He sug­gests call­ing them up to “fire them” with­out delay.
  • Live in the library. Don’t live in your “god­damn com­put­ers.” He may not have gone to col­lege, but his insa­tiable read­ing habits allowed him to “grad­u­ate from the library” at age 28.
  • Fall in love with movies. Prefer­ably old ones.
  • Write with joy. In his mind, “writ­ing is not a seri­ous busi­ness.” If a sto­ry starts to feel like work, scrap it and start one that does­n’t. “I want you to envy me my joy,” he tells his audi­ence.
  • Don’t plan on mak­ing mon­ey. He and his wife, who “took a vow of pover­ty” to mar­ry him, hit 37 before they could afford a car (and he still nev­er got around to pick­ing up a license).
  • List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. Then write about the for­mer, and “kill” the lat­er — also by writ­ing about them. Do the same with your fears.
  • Just type any old thing that comes into your head. He rec­om­mends “word asso­ci­a­tion” to break down any cre­ative block­ages, since “you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.”
  • Remem­ber, with writ­ing, what you’re look­ing for is just one per­son to come up and tell you, “I love you for what you do.” Or, fail­ing that, you’re look­ing for some­one to come up and tell you, “You’re not nuts like peo­ple say.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

The Shape of A Sto­ry: Writ­ing Tips from Kurt Von­negut

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 33 ) |

Art for the One Percent: 60 Minutes on the Excess & Hubris of the International Art Market

in Art, Economics | April 4th, 2012

In 1993, CBS 60 Min­utes jour­nal­ist Mor­ley Safer ruf­fled a few feath­ers in the art world with a piece called “Yes…But is it Art?” The pro­gram fea­tured works made up of things like vac­u­um clean­ers, emp­ty canvases–even a can of human feces, which the artist had labeled “Mer­da d’artista.”

On Sun­day, Safer returned with a report on the excess and hubris of the inter­na­tion­al art mar­ket. The seg­ment (above) was taped in Decem­ber at Art Basel Mia­mi Beach, a gath­er­ing billed as “the most pres­ti­gious art show in the Amer­i­c­as,” where exhibitors pay $150,000 to show their wares to a clien­tele of mil­lion­aires and bil­lion­aires who fly in for the event on pri­vate jets.

Safer­’s report, “Art Mar­ket,” is more an exer­cise in social crit­i­cism than art crit­i­cism. Nat­u­ral­ly some peo­ple took it per­son­al­ly. “Now that Andy Rooney has gone up to that big grumpy­cham­ber in the sky,” wrote Stephanie Murg on the Media Bistro “UnBeige” blog, “Mor­ley Safer has tak­en over the role of iras­ci­ble clean-up hit­ter for the dod­der­ing team of Bad News Bears that is 60 Min­utes.”

In a piece on the “Arts Beat” blog head­lined “Safer Looks at Art but Only Hears the Cash Reg­is­ter,” crit­ic Rober­ta Smith called Safer­’s return vis­it to the art world “a rel­a­tive­ly tooth­less, if still quite clue­less, exer­cise”:

Mov­ing down the aisles he uttered some dis­mis­sive phras­es like “the cute, the kitsch and the clum­sy” while the cam­era passed often incon­se­quen­tial work that was left uniden­ti­fied. Men­tion was made of per­for­mance and video art. Occa­sion­al­ly he mus­tered fee­ble attempts to be recep­tive. There was a respect­ful pause in the asper­sions as the cam­era passed a can­vas by Helen Franken­thaler, although her name was not men­tioned. Kara Walk­er was referred to as a “tru­ly tal­ent­ed artist.” At the Metro Pic­tures booth it was hard to know whether he liked the work of Cindy Sher­man, but he not­ed that her pho­tographs sold for $4 mil­lion (gloss­ing over the fact that only one did).

At one point on Safer­’s stroll there is a chilly encounter with art deal­er Lar­ry Gagosian, who has gal­leries on three con­ti­nents.

“At least say hel­lo,” says Safer.

“Hey Mor­ley,” says Gagosian, with­out get­ting up from his chair or offer­ing the 80-year-old man a seat. “You always look so dap­per. I love that.”

Regard­less of whether you love the art Gagosian sells at his gal­leries in Bev­er­ly Hills, Paris, Gene­va and at least eight oth­er cities around the world, you have won­der at the eco­nom­ic real­i­ty Safer­’s report expos­es. At a time when unem­ploy­ment in Amer­i­ca is still well above 8 per­cent, when more than one in five mort­gage hold­ers have neg­a­tive equi­ty in their homes, when the top one per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion is pock­et­ing 93 per­cent of the gains from a glacial eco­nom­ic recov­ery, Safer­’s piece does what a work of art should: it opens the eyes.

Safer­’s 1993 report:

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea Animated Not Once, But Twice

in Film, Literature | April 4th, 2012

Ernest Hem­ing­way wrote The Old Man and the Sea in an inspired eight weeks in 1951. It was­n’t a long nov­el, run­ning just a lit­tle more than 100 pages. But it car­ried more than its weight. The nov­el, Hem­ing­way’s last major work, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fic­tion in 1953. It con­tributed to Hem­ing­way receiv­ing the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture in 1954. And it soon entered the Amer­i­can lit­er­ary canon and became a sta­ple in class­rooms across the Unit­ed States and beyond.

A good 60 years lat­er, the novel­la still cap­tures our imag­i­na­tion. Just this week, a Ger­man artist Mar­cel Schindler released “ein Stop-Motion-Film” inspired by The Old Man and the Sea. The ani­ma­tion bears some sim­i­lar­i­ty to the art­ful videos released by RSA dur­ing the past two years, and per­haps some­what appro­pri­ate­ly it’s all set to the tune “Sail” by AWOLNATION. It works if you’re being lit­er­al about things.

Of course, you can’t talk about ani­mat­ing The Old Man and the Sea with­out refer­ring back to Alek­san­dr Petro­v’s 1999 mas­ter­piece that won the Acad­e­my Award for Short Film. To make the film, Petrov and his son spent two years paint­ing pas­tel oils on a total of 29,000 sheets of glass. Below, you can see how the 20 minute film (added to our Free Movies col­lec­tion) turned out.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Google Art Project Expands, Bringing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Museums to the Web

in Art, Google, Museums | April 3rd, 2012

Last Feb­ru­ary, Google launched Art Project, which lets users take a vir­tu­al tour of 1,000 works of art from 17 great muse­ums — from the MoMA and Met in New York City, to the Uffizi Gallery in Flo­rence, to the Van Gogh Muse­um and Rijksmu­se­um in Ams­ter­dam. Now comes news that Art Project has great­ly expand­ed its cov­er­age, giv­ing users access to 30,000 high-res­o­lu­tion art­works appear­ing in 151 muse­ums across 40 coun­tries. The vir­tu­al tour includes paint­ings but also sculp­ture, street art and pho­tographs. And you can now explore col­lec­tions (see all) from the Nation­al Gallery of Mod­ern Art in Del­hi, the Musée d’Or­say in Paris, the Muse­um of Islam­ic Art in Qatar, the Museu De Arte Mod­er­na De São Paulo in Brazil, and the Tokyo Nation­al Muse­um. This is all part of Google’s effort to bring cul­tur­al arti­facts to the broad­est pos­si­ble audi­ence. Just last week, the folks at Google­plex helped launch the Nel­son Man­dela Dig­i­tal Archive and, before that, a high res­o­lu­tion ver­sion of The Dead Sea Scrolls. All we can say is keep it com­ing!

via Google Blog

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Views from Hitchcock’s Rear Window in Timelapse

in Film | April 3rd, 2012


Alfred Hitch­cock shot many great films. (Watch 21 of his films online here.) But, if you ask the crit­ics, they’ll often say Rear Win­dow, his 1954 clas­sic star­ring Jim­my Stew­art and Grace Kel­ly, was his finest. We won’t rehearse the plot, except to say that it’s an incred­i­ble study of voyeurism and it all revolves around a pho­tog­ra­ph­er con­fined to a wheel­chair who spends long days look­ing out of his rear win­dow, sur­veilling the apart­ments around his court­yard. Now film­mak­er Jeff Des­om has tak­en this footage — all the footage look­ing out­side the Rear Win­dow — and stitched it into a great lit­tle time­lapse film. The order of events is the same seen in the movie, and the music, a re-arrrange­ment of Brahms’ Hun­gar­i­an Dance No. 5, is pro­vid­ed by Hugo Win­ter­hal­ter… via metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitch­cock Recalls Work­ing with Sal­vador Dali on Spell­bound

François Truffaut’s Big Inter­view with Alfred Hitch­cock (Free Audio)

Hitch­cock on Hap­pi­ness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.