An Animated Ray Bradbury Explains Why It Takes Being a “Dedicated Madman” to Be a Writer

The good folks at Blank on Blank have been breath­ing new life into long-lost record­ed inter­views with cul­tur­al icons by turn­ing them into ani­mat­ed shorts. In the past, they have made films fea­tur­ing the likes of Janis JoplinDavid Fos­ter Wal­lace, Jim Mor­ri­son and Dave Brubeck. For their most recent release, they do Ray Brad­bury, the beloved sci-fi author and mono­rail enthu­si­ast. You can watch it above.

In 2012, Lisa Potts found a cas­sette tape wedged behind a dress­er. It con­tained an inter­view she did with Brad­bury back in 1972 when she was a stu­dent jour­nal­ist. Potts and fel­low stu­dent Chadd Coates talked to the author in the back of a car while they were mak­ing their way from Bradbury’s West L.A. home to Chap­man Col­lege in Orange Coun­ty where he was slat­ed to give a lec­ture.

In the inter­view, Brad­bury expounds on a wide range of top­ics – from the impor­tance of friends – “That’s what friends are, the peo­ple who share your crazy out­look and pro­tect you from the world” – to his fear of dri­ving – “The whole activ­i­ty is stu­pid.”

But the area where he seems to get the most pas­sion­ate is, not sur­pris­ing­ly, about the act of cre­at­ing. Accord­ing to Brad­bury, you don’t need a fan­cy, over­priced MFA to write. He nev­er went to col­lege after all. His school was his local pub­lic library. What you real­ly need to be a writer is an obses­sive love of writ­ing, friends who are will­ing to nour­ish your obses­sion and a will­ing­ness to be a lit­tle crazy.

I am a ded­i­cat­ed mad­man, and that becomes its own train­ing. If you can’t resist, if the type­writer is like can­dy to you, you train your­self for a life­time. Every sin­gle day of your life, some wild new thing to be done. You write to please your­self. You write for the joy of writ­ing. Then your pub­lic reads you and it begins to gath­er around your sell­ing a pota­to peel­er in an alley, you know. The enthu­si­asm, the joy itself draws me. So that means every day of my life I’ve writ­ten. When the joy stops, I’ll stop writ­ing.

For any­one sweat­ing blood in a cof­fee shop over a stub­born screen­play or nov­el, lines like that are balm for the soul. The whole inter­view has this same infec­tious joy of cre­at­ing. Brad­bury, by the way, wrote up until he died at the age of 91.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

A Day in the After­life: Revis­it­ing the Life & Times of Philip K. Dick

Ani­ma­tions Revive Lost Inter­views with David Fos­ter Wal­lace, Jim Mor­ri­son & Dave Brubeck

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Hear Dziga Vertov’s Revolutionary Experiments in Sound: From His Radio Broadcasts to His First Sound Film

The doc­u­men­tary form, like every oth­er kind of onscreen sto­ry­telling, is a very recent devel­op­ment in human his­to­ry. Yet we tend to take for grant­ed the way in which it con­structs our sense of reality—from not only much-maligned real­i­ty TV, but also end­less loops of cable news and Net­flix chan­nels. But the man wide­ly cred­it­ed with the inven­tion of doc­u­men­tary film, Dzi­ga Ver­tov, made decid­ed­ly anti-sto­ry movies, par­tic­u­lar­ly his Man With a Movie Cam­era (watch it online here)—a film that jars con­tem­po­rary sen­si­bil­i­ties. With no nar­ra­tive to speak of, the movie con­tains rough­ly 1,775 sep­a­rate shots from three cities, shot over four years time, and edit­ed togeth­er by his wife. Its view­ing is indeed a dizzy­ing expe­ri­ence, and its direc­tor Vertov—born David Kaufman—truly illus­trates the aes­thet­ic of his pseu­do­nym, which means “spin­ning top.”

Vertov’s rad­i­cal exper­i­men­ta­tion did not begin and end with Man With a Movie Cam­era or his oth­er avant-garde doc­u­men­taries and ani­ma­tions. (Find eight of Ver­tov’s films here.) Once a psy­chol­o­gy stu­dent in Pet­ro­grad, the future film­mak­er start­ed his artis­tic career as a writer of futur­ist poet­ry and sci­ence fic­tion. Entranced by emerg­ing record­ing tech­nol­o­gy and com­mit­ted to dis­rupt­ing tra­di­tion­al forms, in 1916 Ver­tov began, writes Mono­skop, “exper­i­ment­ing with the per­cep­tion and arrange­ment of sound.”

He cre­at­ed “sound poems,” and pro­duced “ver­bal mon­tage struc­tures.” Of his audio art, Ver­tov remarked, “I had an idea about the need to enlarge our abil­i­ty for orga­nized hear­ing. Not lim­it­ing this abil­i­ty to the bound­aries of usu­al music. I decid­ed to include the entire audi­ble world into the con­cept of ‘Hear­ing.’”

After the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, Ver­tov embraced Bol­she­vist agit-prop; his “Kino-Prav­da,” or “truth films,” cel­e­brat­ed indus­tri­al­iza­tion and the Russ­ian work­er. His first sound film, Enthu­si­asm! The Don­bass Sym­pho­ny (1930)—a “paean to coal and steel workers”—integrates his exper­i­ments with sound record­ing in an entire­ly nov­el way. Ubuweb describes the film and its accom­pa­ny­ing sound­track as “Vertov’s most rev­o­lu­tion­ary achieve­ment: a sym­pho­ny of abstract indus­tri­al noise for which a spe­cial­ly designed giant mobile recod­ing sys­tem was con­struct­ed (it weighed over a ton) in order to cap­ture the din of mines, fur­naces and fac­to­ries. For Ver­tov, the intro­duc­tion of sound film didn’t mean talkies, but the oppor­tu­ni­ty to col­lage, mon­tage and splice togeth­er con­struc­tions of pure envi­ron­men­tal noise.”

You can hear three excerpts of this indus­tri­al sound col­lage above and the remain­ing sev­en at Ubuweb. Lis­ten to them first as exam­ples of “sound poems,” then watch Enthu­si­asm: The Don­bass Sym­pho­ny at the top for a bet­ter under­stand­ing of why Ver­tov remains such an influ­en­tial, indeed essen­tial, film—and audio—artist wide­ly cred­it­ed with free­ing new media from the aes­thet­ic con­fines of the stage and the page. Just below, lis­ten to one of Ver­tov’s ear­ly exper­i­ments with doc­u­men­tary sound art, from 1916. Just as he sought to cre­ate an inter­na­tion­al work­er’s visu­al lan­guage through film, “Through radio, he attempt­ed to estab­lish audi­to­ry com­mu­ni­ca­tion across the whole of the world’s pro­le­tari­at by way of record­ing the sounds of work­places and of life itself.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Dzi­ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Fritz Lang Tells the Riveting Story of the Day He Met Joseph Goebbels and Then High-Tailed It Out of Germany

The more World War II his­to­ry you read, the more you under­stand not just the evil of the Nazis, but their incom­pe­tence. Some­times you hear vari­a­tions on the obser­va­tion that “in Nazi Ger­many, at least the trains ran on time,” but even that has gone up for debate. It seems more and more that the Holo­caust-per­pe­trat­ing polit­i­cal par­ty got by pri­mar­i­ly on their way with pro­pa­gan­da — and in that, they did have a tru­ly for­mi­da­ble appa­ra­tus.

Much of the dubi­ous cred­it there goes to Hitler’s close asso­ciate Joseph Goebbels, Reich Min­is­ter of Pro­pa­gan­da and an anti-semi­te even by Nazi stan­dards. “Pow­er based on guns may be a good thing,” he said in a 1934 Nurem­berg Par­ty Con­ven­tion speech. “It is, how­ev­er, bet­ter and more grat­i­fy­ing to win the heart of a peo­ple and keep it.” He under­stood the pow­er of film in pur­suit of this end, pro­vid­ing not only essen­tial assis­tance for pro­duc­tions like Leni Riefen­stahl’s Tri­umph of the Will, but also attempt­ing to recruit no less a lead­ing light of Ger­man cin­e­ma than Fritz Lang, direc­tor of three Doc­tor Mabuse pic­tures, the pro­to-noir M, and the expres­sion­ist epic Metrop­o­lis.

Goebbels loved Metrop­o­lis, but had rather less appre­ci­a­tion for The Tes­ta­ment of Dr. Mabuse, going so far as to ban it for its sup­posed poten­tial to instill in its view­ers a dis­trust of their lead­ers. And so, on one fate­ful day in 1933 when Goebbels called Lang to his office, the film­mak­er won­dered if he might find a way to get the ban lift­ed. But Goebbels pre­ferred to talk, at great length, about anoth­er pro­pos­al: Lang’s employ­ment in artis­tic ser­vice of the Nazi cause.

“The Fuhrer and I have seen your films,” Lang quotes Goebbels as say­ing, “and the Fuhrer made clear that ‘this is the man who will give us the nation­al social­ist film.’ ” Feel­ing no choice but to thank Goebbels for the hon­or and osten­si­bly accept the offered (or per­haps insist­ed-upon) posi­tion as the head of state film pro­duc­tion, Lang went home and imme­di­ate­ly told his ser­vant to pre­pare lug­gage “for a one- or two-week trip to Paris,” leav­ing Ger­many that same evening, nev­er to return until the late 1950s. You can hear Lang tell this sto­ry in Ger­man in the clip at the top of the post, and again in Eng­lish, and in more detail, in the 1974 inter­view with William Fried­kin above.

But did it it real­ly hap­pen as he says? In his Film Quar­ter­ly arti­cle “Fritz Lang and Goebbels: Myth and Facts,” Gös­ta Wern­er casts doubt, not­ing that “even though it is high­ly prob­a­ble that Goebbels did offer Lang the post as head of the entire Ger­man film pro­duc­tion, there is not a word about it in Goebbel­s’s usu­al­ly metic­u­lous diary for the year 1933. Lang is not men­tioned there at all.” For Lang’s part, his pass­port’s “for­eign cur­ren­cy stamps from Berlin tes­ti­fy, as do the var­i­ous entry and exit stamps, that between the jour­neys abroad in the sum­mer of 1933 Lang returned to Berlin, which city he left final­ly only on 31 July 1933 — four months after his leg­endary meet­ing with Goebbels and sup­posed dra­mat­ic escape.”

But then, you expect a cer­tain amount of dra­ma from a sto­ry­teller of Lang’s cal­iber, onscreen as well as off. And despite hold­ing the views of, in Wern­er’s words, a “fierce nation­al­ist,” Lang clear­ly made the right choice in real­i­ty by not get­ting caught up in the offices of the Third Reich, when­ev­er and how­ev­er he made that choice. To this day, cinephiles respect and admire the pow­er of Lang’s film­mak­ing — a pow­er that we can only feel relieved did­n’t fall into the wrong hands.

via Bib­liok­lept/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Lam­beth Walk—Nazi Style: The Ear­ly Pro­pa­gan­da Mash Up That Enraged Joseph Goebbels

Metrop­o­lis: Watch a Restored Ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s Mas­ter­piece (1927)

Fritz Lang’s M: The Restored Ver­sion of the Clas­sic 1931 Film

Fritz Lang’s “Licen­tious, Pro­fane, Obscure” Noir Film, Scar­let Street (1945)

Titan­ic: The Nazis Cre­ate a Mega-Bud­get Pro­pa­gan­da Film About the Ill-Fat­ed Ship … and Then Banned It (1943)

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­maFol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

David Lynch Creates a Very Surreal Plug for Transcendental Meditation

While fans wait with increas­ing dour moods on the future of the Twin Peaks reboot, David Lynch is busy doing…something. When the Tribeca Dis­rup­tive Inno­va­tion Awards hon­ored the direc­tor for his work as founder and chair­man of the David Lynch Foun­da­tion, it turned out Lynch couldn’t make the evening.

Instead of the usu­al apol­o­gy email, the man who once turned some test footage into a weird short film made a quick video to screen at the award show. It’s…Lynchian.

The video fea­tures a Bar­bie doll—-renamed Trix­ie for this short—-lying on a pur­ple blan­ket and tak­ing a call from Lynch, who is out shop­ping for Trixie’s make­up. Hear­ing Lynch’s ver­sion of a woman’s voice is strange enough, but he goes on to chas­tise the young girl when she sug­gests sun­bathing nude is a form of med­i­ta­tion. Then fol­lows Lynch’s pitch for Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion, which he’s been using as a cre­ative boon since before Eraser­head. See our pre­vi­ous post: David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty. And also: David Lynch Talks Med­i­ta­tion with Paul McCart­ney.

The video ends with some mechan­i­cal birds singing. Pos­si­bly they’re from a place where there’s always music in the air, or, most prob­a­bly, from Digi Birds.

Inci­den­tal­ly, this isn’t Lynch’s first Bar­bie video. In 2011 he pro­mot­ed his new cof­fee line with a sim­i­lar video which you can check out here.

Until the Showtime/Twin Peaks nego­ti­a­tions are final­ly solved, any new Lynch is worth check­ing out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch’s Sur­re­al Com­mer­cials

David Lynch Teach­es You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Weird, Sur­re­al­ist Video

David Lynch Takes Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers Inside the Art & Craft of Mak­ing Indie Films

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Kickstart the Theatrical Release of the First Comprehensive Black Panther Party Documentary

I grew up with a sim­plis­tic, mor­al­iz­ing offi­cial his­to­ry of the Civ­il Rights move­ment, one full of plat­i­tudes and false dichotomies: a san­i­tized ver­sion of Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. stood as the mod­el of a “good” Civ­il Rights leader; Mal­colm X, the Black Pan­thers, and oth­er rad­i­cals were vil­i­fied as “bad” Civ­il Rights leaders—or Anti-Amer­i­can ter­ror­ists. We read “Let­ter From a Birm­ing­ham Jail,” but noth­ing from Angela Davis, Huey New­ton, Eldridge Cleaver, or Stoke­ly Carmichael. This is how most his­to­ries go, offi­cial nar­ra­tives being what they are. There are heroes and vil­lains, and lit­tle in-between. How­ev­er, there is much more ambi­gu­i­ty sur­round­ing events than most of us choose to accept. I came to see things much dif­fer­ent­ly regard­ing the Black Pan­ther Par­ty, though not in a way that makes me feel like trad­ing insults with strangers on the inter­net. I reserve the right to make up my own mind. You must also make up yours.

But one must be informed. Which is why projects like The Black Pan­thers: Van­guard of the Rev­o­lu­tion—whose Kick­starter cam­paign video you can see above—are so impor­tant. It weighs heav­i­ly to be writ­ing this now, as tragedies all too famil­iar to the fig­ures in the film still play out tonight and near­ly every night across the U.S. We owe it to our­selves to know the his­to­ries of the cur­rent strug­gle, both offi­cial and unof­fi­cial. I over­heard some­one say recent­ly that get­ting a gen­uine edu­ca­tion requires tak­ing “two sets of notes.” For those raised with a one-dimen­sion­al text­book his­to­ry of the Civ­il Rights move­ment, The Black Pan­thers: Van­guard of the Rev­o­lu­tion is like anoth­er set of notes, along with oth­er films like Goran Olsson’s The Black Pow­er Mix­tape: 1967–1975, Lee Lew-Lee’s All Pow­er to the Peo­ple! The Black Pan­ther Par­ty and Beyond, and Mario and Melvin Van Pee­bles’ fic­tion­al­ized his­to­ry Pan­ther.

These films pro­vide inter­est­ing and excel­lent intro­duc­tions to the sub­ject, but Stan­ley Nel­son’s doc­u­men­tary offers, as he puts it, “the first com­pre­hen­sive look at the rise and fall of the Black Pan­ther Par­ty.” Nel­son is an award-win­ning vet­er­an doc­u­men­tar­i­an whose films include Free­dom Rid­ers, Free­dom Sum­mer, Jon­estown: The Life and Death of People’s Tem­ple, and The Mur­der of Emmett Till. He began The Black Pan­thers sev­en years ago, and its cur­rent release, audi­ences have told him, “could not have come at a bet­ter time.” The film has already pre­miered for “a select audi­ence” at Sun­dance, New York’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, and L.A.‘s Pan African Film Fes­ti­val. With eight days to go, the Kick­starter to fund the doc’s mul­ti-city the­atri­cal release has almost reached its goal of $50,000. See their page to help them get all the way there.

Then con­sid­er read­ing, and re-read­ing, “Let­ter From a Birm­ing­ham Jail.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wattstax Doc­u­ments the “Black Wood­stock” Con­cert Held 7 Years After the Watts Riots (1973)

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Watch The March, the Mas­ter­ful, Dig­i­tal­ly Restored Doc­u­men­tary on The Great March on Wash­ing­ton

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Visit The Online Library of Babel: New Web Site Turns Borges’ “Library of Babel” Into a Virtual Reality

Red Book

Jorge Luis Borges spe­cial­ized in envi­sion­ing the unen­vi­sion­able: a map the same size as the land it depicts, an event whose pos­si­ble out­comes all occur simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, a sin­gle point in space con­tain­ing all oth­er points in space, a vast library con­tain­ing all pos­si­ble books. That last, the set­ting, sub­ject, and title of his short sto­ry “The Library of Babel,” has giv­en read­ers much to think about since its first pub­li­ca­tion in 1941, and in recent decades has done more than its part to bol­ster Borges’ posthu­mous rep­u­ta­tion as a seer of our unprece­dent­ed­ly rich but often dif­fi­cult-to-nav­i­gate new media land­scape.

Borges imag­ined the Library of Babel com­pris­ing a huge num­ber of con­nect­ed hexag­o­nal rooms lined by book­shelves. “Each shelf con­tains thir­ty-five books of uni­form for­mat; each book is of four hun­dred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty let­ters which are black in col­or.” Each book con­tains a dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tion of let­ters, and in total they con­tain all pos­si­ble com­bi­na­tions of let­ters, with the result that the Library as a whole con­tains

Every­thing: the minute­ly detailed his­to­ry of the future, the archangels’ auto­bi­ogra­phies, the faith­ful cat­a­logues of the Library, thou­sands and thou­sands of false cat­a­logues, the demon­stra­tion of the fal­la­cy of those cat­a­logues, the demon­stra­tion of the fal­la­cy of the true cat­a­logue, the Gnos­tic gospel of Basilides, the com­men­tary on that gospel, the com­men­tary on the com­men­tary on that gospel, the true sto­ry of your death, the trans­la­tion of every book in all lan­guages, the inter­po­la­tions of every book in all books.

This vision has inspired a fair few thinkers, includ­ing most recent­ly Brook­lyn author and pro­gram­mer Jonathan Basile. “I was lying in bed one night and the idea of an online Library of Babel popped into my head,” he says in an inter­view with Fla­vor­wire.  “My first thought was — it must exist already. It seems like such a nat­ur­al exten­sion of the capa­bil­i­ties of a com­put­er that I was sure some­one would have made it. The next day I looked for it, a bit excit­ed­ly, and was dis­ap­point­ed. From then on, it’s kind of been a reluc­tant des­tiny for me.”

As the fruit of that des­tiny, we have libraryofbabel.info, a new web site that will the­o­ret­i­cal­ly come to con­tain exact­ly what Borges’ Library of Babel con­tains: the text of every pos­si­ble 410-page book. You can start look­ing through them by search­ing for text, view­ing a ran­dom book, or brows­ing by hexag­o­nal cham­ber. You’ll notice that the vast, vast major­i­ty of Basile’s Library of Babel offers noth­ing but non­sense — the very same thing, in oth­er words, that Borges’ does, which in his telling caus­es great frus­tra­tion among the luck­less librar­i­ans charged with main­tain­ing the place.

But a vis­it to the online Library of Babel should bring you to the same ques­tion the orig­i­nal sto­ry does: to what extent does mean­ing reside in the phys­i­cal world, and to what extent does it reside in our minds? And what would Borges him­self make of all this? “He was nev­er one to take the bor­der between real­i­ty and fic­tion too seri­ous­ly,” says Basile. “Read­ing his sto­ry is already, in its own way, enter­ing the world of the library. In a sense it’s a hor­ror sto­ry, but it feels to me more like a black com­e­dy. Per­haps he would just laugh.”

Enter the online Library of Babel here.

via Fla­vor­wire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Per­son­al Library

Borges: Pro­file of a Writer” Presents the Life and Writ­ings of Argentina’s Favorite Son, Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

Jorge Luis Borges’ Favorite Short Sto­ries (Read 7 Free Online)

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­maFol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch a Japanese Craftsman Lovingly Bring a Tattered Old Book Back to Near Mint Condition

Remem­ber dis­fig­ur­ing binders with band logos and lyrics, doo­dling in the mar­gins of text­books, idly mark­ing the fore edges with ball point designs?

At most, such pur­suits helped pass a few min­utes in study hall.

How long would it take to undo all this hand­i­work?

Clear­ly much, much longer than it took to cre­ate. In the above episode of the Japan­ese doc­u­men­tary series, The Fas­ci­nat­ing Repair­men, Tokyo-based book con­ser­va­tor Nobuo Okano brings over 30 years of expe­ri­ence to bear on a tat­tered, mid­dle school Eng­lish-to-Japan­ese dic­tio­nary. This is not the sort of job that can be rushed.

Its orig­i­nal own­er must be dri­ven by sen­ti­ment in hir­ing a mas­ter crafts­man to restore the book as a present for his col­lege-bound daugh­ter. Sure­ly it would be just as easy, pos­si­bly even more con­ve­nient, for the young woman in ques­tion to look up vocab­u­lary online. If keep­ing things old school is the goal, I guar­an­tee a recent­ly pub­lished paper­back would prove far cheap­er than con­ser­va­tor Okano’s labo­ri­ous fix.

He spends four hours just turn­ing and press­ing its bat­tered pages—all 1000 of them—with tweez­ers and a tiny pink iron.

He also scrapes the spine free of crum­bling glue, resets tat­tered maps, pre­serves the old cover’s title as a dec­o­ra­tive ele­ment for the new one, and dis­patch­es the ini­tials of a teenage crush with one chop of his blade. (So much for sen­ti­ment…)

One need not speak Japan­ese to admire the painstak­ing crafts­man­ship that will keep this beat-up old book out of the land­fill.

Oth­er episodes fol­low oth­er crafts­peo­ple as they lav­ish atten­tion on a suit­case, grater, and a stuffed toy pen­guin. Watch a com­plete playlist here.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Artist Takes Old Books and Gives Them New Life as Intri­cate Sculp­tures

The Chem­istry Behind the Smell of Old Books: Explained with a Free Info­graph­ic

The Craft and Phi­los­o­phy of Build­ing Wood­en Boats by Hand

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Animated Philosophers Presents a Rocking Introduction to Socrates, the Father of Greek Philosophy

Would there be such a thing as phi­los­o­phy had there been no such person—or lit­er­ary char­ac­ter, at least—as Socrates? Sure­ly peo­ple the world over have always asked ques­tions about the nature of real­i­ty, and come up with all sorts of spec­u­la­tive answers. But the par­tic­u­lar form of inquiry known as the Socrat­ic method—a blan­ket pre­sump­tion of ignorance—would not have become the dom­i­nant force in West­ern intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry with­out its name­sake. And that is, of course, not all. In the work of Socrates’ high­ly imag­i­na­tive stu­dent, inter­preter, and biog­ra­ph­er Pla­to, we find, as Alfred North White­head sug­gest­ed, a “wealth of gen­er­al ideas” that have made for “an inex­haustible mine of sug­ges­tion” for philoso­phers since antiq­ui­ty.

As blues­man Robert John­son did for rock and roll, Socrates more or less sin­gle-hand­ed­ly invent­ed the for­mu­las of West­ern thought. He might be called the first philo­soph­i­cal rock star—and judg­ing by the Guns N’ Ros­es sound­track to the ani­mat­ed video above, the pro­duc­ers of the Greek Pub­lic Tele­vi­sion series Ani­mat­ed Philoso­phers seem to feel the same. Dubbed into Eng­lish, and with char­ac­ter ani­ma­tion that owes more than a lit­tle to South Park, this episode makes the case for Socrates’ impor­tance to phi­los­o­phy as tan­ta­mount to Christ’s in Chris­tian­i­ty. Over­stat­ed? Per­haps, but the argu­ment is by no means a thin one.

To make the point, writer, edi­tor, and host George Chatzi­vasileiou inter­views Greek philoso­phers like Vasilis Kara­ma­n­is and Vasilis Kalfas, who basi­cal­ly agree with Roman ora­tor Cicero’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Socrates bring­ing “phi­los­o­phy down from the heav­ens to the earth”… as well as, says Kalfas, “into the city” as a “teacher of the cit­i­zen” in a mod­ern demo­c­ra­t­ic city-state. A key part of Socrates’ appeal is that he “did not take any­thing for grant­ed, no mat­ter how obvi­ous it may have seemed.” Though this atti­tude is as much a per­for­mance as it is a gen­uine admis­sion of igno­rance, the Socrat­ic approach nonethe­less set the stan­dards of intel­lec­tu­al integri­ty in the West.

The com­par­i­son with Christ is rel­e­vant in more ways than one. The fathers of the Chris­t­ian church relied as much on Pla­to and his stu­dent Aris­to­tle—some­times it seems even more so—as they did on the Bible. Per­haps chief among ear­ly the­olo­gians, Bish­op Augus­tine of Hip­po receives the ani­mat­ed rock star treat­ment above in anoth­er episode of Ani­mat­ed Philoso­phers, this one sub­ti­tled in Eng­lish. The many oth­er episodes in the series—on Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, Dem­ocri­tus, Empe­do­cles, Par­menides, Plot­i­nus, Epi­cu­rus, Her­a­cli­tus, and Pythagoras—are all avail­able on Youtube, but only in the orig­i­nal Greek with no titles or dub­bing. It’s no great sur­prise the series focus­es almost exclu­sive­ly on Greek philoso­phers. And yet, nation­al pride notwith­stand­ing, the ancient civ­i­liza­tion does have legit­i­mate claim to the ori­gins of the dis­ci­pline, espe­cial­ly in that most influ­en­tial fig­ure of them all, Socrates.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

140 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

A His­to­ry of Ideas: Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain The­o­ries of Simone de Beau­voir, Edmund Burke & Oth­er Philoso­phers

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

Allan Bloom’s Lec­tures on Socrates (Boston Col­lege, 1983) 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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