How a Korean Potter Found a “Beautiful Life” Through His Art: A Short, Life-Affirming Documentary

I like to think I appre­ci­ate all aspects of the cul­ture of South Korea, where I live, but dif­fer­ent attrac­tions bring dif­fer­ent for­eign­ers here. Some come for the food, some come for the music (pop, tra­di­tion­al, or some­where in between), some come for the med­ical tourism. Oth­ers, like British ceram­i­cist Roger Law, come for the pot­tery. The half-hour doc­u­men­tary above will give you an idea of what makes Kore­an pot­tery, and the Kore­an pot­ters who craft it, so dis­tinc­tive, tak­ing view­ers into the work­shop of Lee Kang-hyo, who has become famous by there bring­ing togeth­er the dis­tinct tra­di­tions of onggi glazed earth­en­ware pot­tery and buncheong white slip dec­o­ra­tion.

“As a high school stu­dent, I asked myself some fun­da­men­tal ques­tions,” says Lee in voiceover as we watch him beat the clay of what looks more and more like a large jar into shape. “What would be good to do for a liv­ing? What is my best tal­ent? How can I enjoy a life of peace? It was then I decid­ed to become an artist.” As he cre­ates, he tells us about the long his­to­ry of pot­tery in Korea and his expe­ri­ence prac­tic­ing and mas­ter­ing the tra­di­tions in which he works. Looked at ong­gi, he says, “I nev­er thought they were sim­ply big jars. I thought they were great sculp­ture.”

“My doc­u­men­tary tells the sto­ry of Lee Kang-hyo’s search for a beau­ti­ful life, through his work with clay and the love of his fam­i­ly,” says direc­tor Alex Wright, a sto­ry that “gives an insight into the spir­i­tu­al jour­ney that plays a vital part in his artis­tic prac­tice.” For Lee, this had to do as much with the heart and mind as with the hand, loos­en­ing up and light­en­ing up even as he grew more skilled, a real­iza­tion that first occurred when he became friend­ly with Japan­ese mas­ter pot­ter Koie Ryo­ji. “Kang-hyo, why don’t you try to change your think­ing?’ ” Lee remem­bers Koie ask­ing after he pre­sent­ed him with his lat­est piece. “And he lift­ed it up and crushed it. He said: ‘Form does­n’t always have to be straight. It can be beau­ti­ful.’ ”

That les­son holds in oth­er cul­tur­al spheres as well. “Ceram­ic cul­ture is very close­ly con­nect­ed to dietary life and food cul­ture,” Lee observes. “Korea has devel­oped a fer­ment­ed food cul­ture. A lot of foods are fer­ment­ed and stored, such as sauces and kim­chi,” which might stay in their ceram­ic jars for years before con­sump­tion. And so “Korea has devel­oped the skills to make big jars, more than any oth­er coun­try” with the “quick­est and most per­fect forms.” This might sound like the mak­ings of a rus­tic, util­i­tar­i­an pot­tery — and indeed cui­sine — but in fact the work of Lee and oth­er Kore­an mas­ters increas­ing­ly aligns with the grow­ing glob­al taste for things out­ward­ly sim­ple but inward­ly refined. In that par­tic­u­lar sen­si­bil­i­ty, whether expressed as pot­tery or food or music or any­thing else, Korea might well lead the world.

Lee Kang-hyo ‘Ong­gi Mas­ter will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed con­tent:

“Prim­i­tive Pot­ter” Trav­els into the Back­coun­try for 10 Days with Only a Knife & Buck­skin and Makes Anasazi Pot­tery

The Art of the Japan­ese Teapot: Watch a Mas­ter Crafts­man at Work, from the Begin­ning Until the Star­tling End

Kintsu­gi: The Cen­turies-Old Japan­ese Craft of Repair­ing Pot­tery with Gold & Find­ing Beau­ty in Bro­ken Things

Three Pink Floyd Songs Played on the Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Gayageum: “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Research Finds That Intellectual Humility Can Make Us Better Thinkers & People; Good Thing There’s a Free Course on Intellectual Humility

We may have grown used to hear­ing about the impor­tance of crit­i­cal think­ing, and stowed away knowl­edge of log­i­cal fal­lac­i­es and cog­ni­tive bias­es in our argu­men­ta­tive toolk­it. But were we to return to the philo­soph­i­cal sources of infor­mal log­ic, we would find that we only grasped at some of the prin­ci­ples of rea­son. The oth­ers involve ques­tions of what we might call virtue or character—what for the Greeks fell into the cat­e­gories of ethos and pathos. The prin­ci­ple of char­i­ty, for exam­ple, in which we give our oppo­nents a fair hear­ing and respond to the best ver­sion of their argu­ments as we under­stand them. And the prin­ci­ple, exem­pli­fied by Plato’s Socrates, of intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty. Or as one punk band put it in their Socrat­ic trib­ute. “All I know is that I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t know noth­ing.”

Intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty is not, con­trary to most pop­u­lar appear­ances, reflex­ive­ly accord­ing equal weight to “both sides” of every argu­ment or assum­ing that everyone’s opin­ion is equal­ly valid. These are forms of men­tal lazi­ness and eth­i­cal abdi­ca­tion. It is, how­ev­er, believ­ing in our own fal­li­bil­i­ty and open­ing our­selves up to hear­ing argu­ments with­out imme­di­ate­ly form­ing a judg­ment about them or the peo­ple who make them. We do not aban­don our rea­son and val­ues, we strength­en them, argues Mark Leary, by “not being afraid of being wrong.” Leary, pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy and neu­ro­science at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, is the lead author of a new study on intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty that found “essen­tial­ly no dif­fer­ence between lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives or between reli­gious and non­re­li­gious peo­ple” when it comes to intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty.

The study chal­lenges many ideas that can pre­vent dia­logue. “There are stereo­types about con­ser­v­a­tives and reli­gious­ly con­ser­v­a­tive peo­ple being less intel­lec­tu­al­ly hum­ble about their beliefs,” says Leary. But he and his col­leagues “didn’t find a shred of evi­dence to sup­port that.” This doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that such peo­ple have high degrees of intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty, only that all of us, per­haps equal­ly, pos­sess fair­ly low lev­els of the trait. I’ll be the first to admit that it is not an easy one to devel­op, espe­cial­ly when we’re on the defen­sive for some seem­ing­ly good reasons—and when we live in a cul­ture that encour­ages us to make deci­sions and take actions on the strength of an image, some min­i­mal text, and a few but­tons that lead us right to our bank accounts. (To quote Oper­a­tion Ivy again, “We get told to decide. Just like as if I’m not gonna change my mind.”)

But in the Duke study, reports Ali­son Jones at Duke Today, “those who dis­played intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty did a bet­ter job of eval­u­at­ing the qual­i­ty of evi­dence.” They took their time to make care­ful con­sid­er­a­tions. And they were gen­er­al­ly more char­i­ta­ble and “less like­ly to judge a writer’s char­ac­ter based on his or her views.” By con­trast, “intel­lec­tu­al­ly arro­gant” peo­ple gave writ­ers with whom they dis­agreed “low scores in moral­i­ty, hon­esty, com­pe­tence, and warmth.” As a for­mer teacher of rhetoric, I won­der whether the researchers account­ed for the qual­i­ty and per­sua­sive­ness of the writ­ing itself. Nonethe­less, this obser­va­tion under­scores the prob­lem of con­flat­ing an author’s work with his or her char­ac­ter. Moral judg­ment can inhib­it intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty and open-mind­ed­ness. Intel­lec­tu­al­ly arro­gant peo­ple often resort to insults and per­son­al attacks over thought­ful analy­sis.

The enor­mous num­ber of assump­tions we bring to almost every con­ver­sa­tion with peo­ple who dif­fer from us can blind us to our own faults and to oth­er people’s strengths. But intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty is not genet­i­cal­ly determined—it is a skill that can be learned, Leary believes. Big Think rec­om­mends a free MOOC from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh on intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty (see an intro­duc­tion to the con­cept at the top and a series of lec­tures here). “Faced with dif­fi­cult ques­tions,” explains course lec­tur­er Dr. Ian Church, “peo­ple often tend to dis­miss and mar­gin­al­ize dis­sent…. The world needs more peo­ple who are sen­si­tive to rea­sons both for and against their beliefs, and are will­ing to con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty that their polit­i­cal, reli­gious and moral beliefs might be mis­tak­en.” The course offers three dif­fer­ent lev­els of engage­ment, from casu­al to quite involved, and three sep­a­rate class sec­tions at Cours­era: The­o­ry, Prac­tice, and Sci­ence.

It’s like­ly that many of us need some seri­ous prepa­ra­tion before we’re will­ing to lis­ten to those who hold cer­tain views. And per­haps cer­tain views don’t actu­al­ly deserve a hear­ing. But in most cas­es, if we can let our guard down, set aside feel­ings of hos­til­i­ty, and become will­ing to learn some­thing even from those with whom we dis­agree, we might be able to do what so many psy­chol­o­gists con­tin­ue to rec­om­mend. As Cindy Lamothe writes at New York Mag­a­zine’s Sci­ence of Us blog, “we have to be will­ing to expose our­selves to oppos­ing per­spec­tives in the first place—which means that, as daunt­ing as it may seem, lis­ten­ing to friends and fam­i­ly with rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent views can be ben­e­fi­cial to our long-term intel­lec­tu­al progress.” The hol­i­days are soon upon us. Let the healing—or at least the char­i­ta­ble tol­er­ance if you can man­age it—begin.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry Iden­ti­fies the Cog­ni­tive Bias­es That Make Trump Tick       

32 Ani­mat­ed Videos by Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy Teach You the Essen­tials of Crit­i­cal Think­ing

Why We Need to Teach Kids Phi­los­o­phy & Safe­guard Soci­ety from Author­i­tar­i­an Con­trol

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

Meet the World’s Worst Orchestra, the Portsmouth Sinfonia, Featuring Brian Eno

What is it about objec­tive­ly ter­ri­ble works of art that so cap­ti­vates? Cults form around Tom­my Wiseau’s The Room, the “Cit­i­zen Kane of bad movies,” or ama­teur girl-group The Shag­gs, “the best—or worst—band of all time.” Such utter art­less­ness can­not be faked, but it can, com­pos­er Gavin Bryars found, be delib­er­ate­ly orches­trat­ed, to quite enjoy­ably ter­ri­ble effect. In 1970, Bryars staged a three-day tal­ent show at the Portsmouth School of Art, with come­di­ans, ven­tril­o­quists, musi­cians, etc. His own entry was the Portsmouth Sin­fo­nia, now right­ly known as the “world’s worst orches­tra.” The Sin­fo­nia, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, “wel­comed musi­cians and non-musi­cians alike, though peo­ple of tal­ent were expect­ed to play instru­ments on which they were not pro­fi­cient.” The first iter­a­tion of the group con­sist­ed of 13 stu­dents who could hard­ly play at all.

Lat­er ensem­bles fea­tured more dra­mat­ic dis­par­i­ties in tal­ent. But no mat­ter their lev­el of abil­i­ty, “all mem­bers were expect­ed to play the reper­toire to the best of their abil­i­ties. The result was a spe­cial kind of cacoph­o­ny: every famil­iar theme (Also sprach Zarathus­trathe William Tell Over­tureBeethoven’s Fifth), though played as inept­ly as pos­si­ble, was approached with respect and even care. You will instant­ly rec­og­nize every tune they attempt, and you will prob­a­bly bust a gut,” adds Dan­ger­ous Minds.

Maybe it’s the earnest­ness that gets us, the best of inten­tions pro­duc­ing the most ridicu­lous of results. Though formed as a “one-off joke,” Atlas Obscu­ra notes, the Sin­fo­nia con­tin­ued after an “out­pour­ing of enthu­si­asm,” and even attract­ed Bri­an Eno, who joined on clar­inet, an instru­ment he’d nev­er played, and pro­duced and record­ed with the group on their debut 1974 album, Portsmouth Sin­fo­nia Plays the Pop­u­lar Clas­sics.

The group’s num­bers swelled by the mid-sev­en­ties to include, Eno wrote in the album’s lin­er notes, “a mem­ber­ship of about fifty.” He lets us know in his dead­pan intro­duc­tion that the Sin­fo­nia took its work seri­ous­ly. The orches­tra “tends to gen­er­ate an extra-ordi­nary and unique musi­cal sit­u­a­tion where the inevitable errors must be con­sid­ered as a cru­cial, if inad­ver­tent, ele­ment of the music.”

It is impor­tant to stress the main char­ac­ter­is­tic of the orches­tra: that all mem­bers of the Sin­fo­nia share the desire to play the pieces as accu­rate­ly as pos­si­ble. One sup­pos­es that the pos­si­bil­i­ty of pro­fes­sion­al accu­ra­cy will for­ev­er elude us since there is a con­stant influx of new mem­bers and a con­tin­u­al desire to attempt more ambi­tious pieces from the realms of the pop­u­lar clas­sics.

This is dif­fi­cult to read with a straight face, but Bryars “was adamant,” the blog Clas­si­cal Music Reimag­ined explains, “that the musi­cians shouldn’t play for laughs – they hon­est­ly had to play to the best of their abil­i­ty, and atten­dance at rehearsal was manda­to­ry. Footage of the orches­tra in action shows an incred­i­ble lev­el of con­cen­tra­tion and focus (if not results).” A few mem­bers do seem be hav­ing fun with Han­del’s Mes­si­ah in the short clip of a live per­for­mance below, fea­tur­ing a seri­ous Eno. But most of them are gen­uine­ly giv­ing it their all.

Exper­i­men­tal the­ater, con­cep­tu­al art, or prac­ti­cal joke, it makes no dif­fer­ence. There is tru­ly some­thing “extra-ordi­nary and unique” about this “musi­cal sit­u­a­tion,” you must agree. The so-bad-it’s‑goodness of the Sin­fo­nia comes not only from their lack of tal­ent, but also from the enor­mous gap between inten­tions and results—a uni­ver­sal­ly rec­og­niz­able con­di­tion of the human com­e­dy. We cel­e­brate the excep­tions, those whose great efforts tru­ly pro­duce great­ness. But in the Sin­fo­nia, we may encounter the less-great parts of our­selves, enno­bled in their inep­ti­tude by the fool­har­di­ness of this tragi­com­ic dar­ing.

via Atlas Obscu­ra +  Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Piano Jazz Album by Come­di­an H. Jon Ben­jamin — Who Can’t Play Piano

The 15 Worst Cov­ers of Bea­t­les Songs: William Shat­ner, Bill Cos­by, Tiny Tim, Sean Con­nery & Your Excel­lent Picks

Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Out­er Space: “The Worst Movie Ever Made,” “The Ulti­mate Cult Flick,” or Both?

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

Atheist Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky Explains How Religious Beliefs Reduce Stress

Let’s put aside for a moment the ques­tion of whether, or which, reli­gion is “true.” If you think this ques­tion is answer­able, you are like­ly already a par­ti­san and have tak­en cer­tain claims on faith. Say we ask whether reli­gion is good for you? What say the sci­en­tists? As always, it depends. For one thing, the kind of reli­gion mat­ters. A 2013 study in the Jour­nal of Reli­gion and Health, for exam­ple, found that “belief in a puni­tive God was pos­i­tive­ly asso­ci­at­ed with four psy­chi­atric symp­toms,” includ­ing gen­er­al anx­i­ety and para­noia, while “belief in a benev­o­lent God was neg­a­tive­ly asso­ci­at­ed with four psy­chi­atric symp­toms.”

So, a cer­tain kind of reli­gion may not be par­tic­u­lar­ly good for us—psychologically and socially—but oth­er kinds of faith can have very ben­e­fi­cial men­tal health effects. Author Robert Wright, vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor of reli­gion and psy­chol­o­gy at Prince­ton, has argued in his lec­tures and his best­selling book Why Bud­dhism is True that the 2500-year-old East­ern reli­gion can lead to enlight­en­ment, of a sort. (He also argues that Bud­dhism and sci­ence most­ly agree.)

And famed Stan­ford neu­roen­docri­nol­o­gist and athe­ist Robert Sapol­sky, author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, makes an inter­est­ing case in the Big Think video above that “this reli­gion busi­ness” humans have come up with—this form of “meta­m­ag­i­cal thinking”—has pro­vid­ed a dis­tinct evo­lu­tion­ary advan­tage.

Reli­gion seems to be an almost uni­ver­sal phe­nom­e­non, as Sapolsky—who is him­self an atheist—freely admits. “90 to 95% of peo­ple,” he says, “believe in some sort of omnipo­tent some­thing or oth­er, every cul­ture out there has it.” Rarely do two cul­tures agree on any of the specifics, but reli­gions in gen­er­al, he claims, “are won­der­ful mech­a­nisms for reduc­ing stress.”

It is an awful, ter­ri­fy­ing world out there where bad things hap­pen, we’re all going to die even­tu­al­ly. And believ­ing that there is some­thing, some­one, respon­si­ble for it at least gives some stress reduc­ing attrib­ut­es built around under­stand­ing causal­i­ty. If on top of that, you believe that there is not only some­thing out there respon­si­ble for all this, but that there is a larg­er pur­pose to it, that’s anoth­er lev­el of stress-reduc­ing expla­na­tion.

Fur­ther­more, says Sapol­sky, a benev­o­lent deity offers yet anoth­er lev­el of stress reduc­tion due to feel­ings of “con­trol and pre­dictabil­i­ty.” But benev­o­lence can be par­tial to spe­cif­ic in-groups. If you think you belong to one of them, you’ll feel even safer and more reas­sured. For its abil­i­ty to cre­ate social groups and explain real­i­ty in tidy ways, Reli­gion has “unde­ni­able health ben­e­fits.” This is borne out by the research—a fact Sapol­sky admits he finds “infu­ri­at­ing.” He under­stands why reli­gion exists, and can­not deny its ben­e­fits. He also can­not believe any of it.

Sapol­sky grudg­ing­ly admits in the short clip above that he is awed by the faith of peo­ple like Sis­ter Helen Pre­jean of Dead Man Walk­ing fame, despite and because of her “irra­tional, nut­ty,” and stub­born insis­tence on the impos­si­ble. He has also pre­vi­ous­ly argued that many forms of reli­gios­i­ty can be indis­tin­guish­able from men­tal ill­ness, but they are, para­dox­i­cal­ly, high­ly adap­tive in a chaot­ic, world we know very lit­tle about.

In his inter­view at the top, he pur­sues anoth­er line of thought. If 95% of the human pop­u­la­tion believes in some kind form of super­nat­ur­al agency, “a much more bio­log­i­cal­ly inter­est­ing ques­tion to me is, ‘what’s up with the 5% of athe­ists who don’t do that?’”

It’s a ques­tion he doesn’t answer, and one that may assume too much about that 95%—a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of whom may sim­ply be rid­ing the band­wag­on or keep­ing their heads down in high­ly reli­gious envi­ron­ments rather than tru­ly believ­ing reli­gious truth claims. In any case, on bal­ance, the answer to our ques­tion of whether reli­gion is good for us, may be a qual­i­fied yes. Believ­ers in benev­o­lence can rejoice in the stress-reduc­ing prop­er­ties of their faith. It might just save their lives, if not their souls. Stress, as Sapol­sky explains in the doc­u­men­tary above, is expo­nen­tial­ly hard­er on the human organ­ism than belief in invis­i­ble all-pow­er­ful beings. Whether or not such beings exist is anoth­er ques­tion entire­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Biol­o­gy That Makes Us Tick: Free Stan­ford Course by Robert Sapol­sky

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion, Which, Like Dia­betes, Is Root­ed in Biol­o­gy

Robert Sapol­sky Explains the Bio­log­i­cal Basis of Reli­gios­i­ty, and What It Shares in Com­mon with OCD, Schiz­o­phre­nia & Epilep­sy

How Bud­dhism & Neu­ro­science Can Help You Change How Your Mind Works: A New Course by Best­selling Author Robert Wright

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

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchian: A Video Essay

As soon as it began air­ing on ABC in the ear­ly 1990s, Twin Peaks got us won­der­ing where its dis­tinc­tive­ly res­o­nant odd­ness, nev­er before felt on the air­waves of prime-time tele­vi­sion, could have come from. Some view­ers had already seen co-cre­ator David Lynch’s films Eraser­head and Blue Vel­vet and may thus have had a more devel­oped feel for it, but for every­one else the nature and ori­gin of the “Lynchi­an” — as crit­ics soon began label­ing it — remained utter­ly mys­te­ri­ous. Now, with the long-await­ed Twin Peaks: The Return hav­ing com­plet­ed its own run, we’ve start­ed think­ing about it once again.

What does the Lynchi­an look like from the van­tage of the 21st cen­tu­ry? David Fos­ter Wal­lace, in an essay on Lynch’s Lost High­way twen­ty years ago, defined the term “Lynchi­an” as refer­ring to “a par­tic­u­lar kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mun­dane com­bine in such a way as to reveal the for­mer’s per­pet­u­al con­tain­ment with­in the lat­ter.” Lewis Bond, the video essay­ist who runs the Youtube chan­nel Chan­nel Criswell, goes a bit deep­er in “David Lynch — The Elu­sive Sub­con­scious.” What is it, he asks, that denotes the style of Lynch? “The same way a hall­way sink­ing into dark­ness is Lynchi­an, so is a white pick­et fence in a slice of Amer­i­cana.”

These and the enor­mous vari­ety of oth­er things Lynchi­an must “exude elu­sive­ness, and the enig­ma of what sig­ni­fies Lynchi­an sen­si­bil­i­ties lies in pro­duc­ing unfa­mil­iar­i­ty in that which was once familiar.“At first glance, that state­ment may seem as obscure as some of Lynch’s cre­ative choic­es do when you first wit­ness them. But spend a few min­utes with Bond’s wide-rang­ing video essay, tak­ing in Lynch’s images at the same time as the analy­sis, and you’ll get a clear­er sense of what both of them are going for. After exam­in­ing Lynch’s use of the sub­con­scious in his films from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent angles, Bond arrives at Pauline Kael’s descrip­tion of the film­mak­er as “the first pop­ulist sur­re­al­ist.”

“Although his work is puz­zling, and more often than not intend­ed to be so,” says Bond, Lynch “still man­ages to strike a chord with the way we feel.” Lynch, in oth­er words, puts dreams on the screen, but instead of sim­ply relat­ing the inven­tions of his own sub­con­scious — hear­ing some­one retell their dreams being, after all, a byword for an ago­niz­ing­ly bor­ing expe­ri­ence — he some­how gets all of us to dream them our­selves. What haunts us when we wake up after a par­tic­u­lar­ly har­row­ing night also haunts us when we come out of a Lynch movie, but the artistry of the lat­ter has a way of mak­ing us want to plunge right back into the night­mare again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Art of David Lynch”— How Rene Magritte, Edward Hop­per & Fran­cis Bacon Influ­enced David Lynch’s Cin­e­mat­ic Vision

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

An Ani­mat­ed David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

What Does “Kafkaesque” Real­ly Mean? A Short Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

What “Orwellian” Real­ly Means: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son About the Use & Abuse of the Term

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

China’s New Luminous White Library: A Striking Visual Introduction

MVRDV, a Dutch archi­tec­ture and urban design firm, teamed up with Chi­nese archi­tects to cre­ate the Tian­jin Bin­hai Library, a mas­sive cul­tur­al cen­ter fea­tur­ing “a lumi­nous spher­i­cal audi­to­ri­um around which floor-to-ceil­ing book­cas­es cas­cade.” Locat­ed not far from Bei­jing, the library was built quick­ly by any stan­dards. It took only three years to move from “the first sketch to the [grand] open­ing” on Octo­ber 1. Elab­o­rat­ing on the library, which can house 1.2 mil­lion books, MVRDV notes:

The building’s mass extrudes upwards from the site and is ‘punc­tured’ by a spher­i­cal audi­to­ri­um in the cen­tre. Book­shelves are arrayed on either side of the sphere and act as every­thing from stairs to seat­ing, even con­tin­u­ing along the ceil­ing to cre­ate an illu­mi­nat­ed topog­ra­phy. These con­tours also con­tin­ue along the two full glass facades that con­nect the library to the park out­side and the pub­lic cor­ri­dor inside, serv­ing as lou­vres to pro­tect the inte­ri­or against exces­sive sun­light whilst also cre­at­ing a bright and even­ly lit inte­ri­or.

The video above gives you a visu­al intro­duc­tion to the build­ing. And, on the MRDV web­site, you can view a gallery of pho­tos that let you see the library’s shape­ly design.

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:

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Japan’s Inflat­able Con­cert Hall

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Christopher Hitchens Dismisses the Cult of Ayn Rand: There’s No “Need to Have Essays Advocating Selfishness Among Human Beings; It Requires No Reinforcement”

Charges of hypocrisy, con­tra­dic­tion, “flip-flop­ping,” etc. in pol­i­tics are so much mud thrown at the cas­tle walls. Unless the peas­ants gath­er in large enough num­bers to storm the palace and depose their lords, their right­eous­ness avails them noth­ing. What does it mat­ter to the cur­rent par­ty in pow­er, for example—who wears the nation­al flag like a cape and has decid­ed the civ­il reli­gion and its Evan­gel­i­cal vari­ety are one in the same—that its most-admired role mod­el and (alleged) fix­er is a cor­rupt Russ­ian auto­crat who mur­ders jour­nal­ists (or a Con­fed­er­ate gen­er­al who led the armies of a trea­so­nous slave state)?

So it is, on and on, with the polit­i­cal class.

Take Alan Greenspan, chair­man of the Fed­er­al Reserve from 1987 to 2006. Dur­ing these years, he was wide­ly hailed as a major pow­er behind the throne, no mat­ter the poli­cies of those who occu­pied it. He was “oblig­ed to report,” Christo­pher Hitchens wrote in Van­i­ty Fair in 2000, “to Con­gress only twice a year, at for­mal occa­sions where he is received with the def­er­ence that was once accord­ed the Emper­or of Japan.” I well remem­ber the dowdy fris­son accom­pa­ny­ing those appear­ances in the 90s, the Bill Clin­ton bub­ble years. Hitchens only slight­ly exag­ger­ates. But some­how, Greenspan retained this guru-like aura despite the fact that his posi­tion vio­lat­ed his sin­cere­ly-held beliefs as a mem­ber, he him­self told Hitchens, of Ayn Rand’s “inner cir­cle”

As Hitchens notes in the grainy video clip above, “a state Fed­er­al Reserve Bank is not part of the Lib­er­tar­i­an pro­gram, though Mr. Greenspan seems a bit iffy about this self-evi­dent propo­si­tion.” In addi­tion to cham­pi­oning athe­ism and abor­tion rights, Rand, Greenspan’s “intel­lec­tu­al guru,” defined the rigid ide­o­log­i­cal dis­dain for gov­ern­ment med­dling in mar­kets and social spend­ing of any kind. Yet she end­ed her days on the gov­ern­ment dime. But there are no con­tra­dic­tions for pur­vey­ors of theod­i­cies. Ran­di­ans, or “Objec­tivists,” if they pre­fer, must know that to every­one out­side the cir­cle, the phi­los­o­phy looks like eth­i­cal­ly-bank­rupt cult log­ic, wish­ful think­ing eas­i­ly dis­card­ed when incon­ve­nient. Still, adepts will write to tell us that if we only grasped the gnos­tic rea­son­ing of such-and-such argu­ment, then we too could pierce the veil.

Hitchens dis­pens­es with this pre­tense, not as an anar­cho-com­mu­nist rad­i­cal but as a some­time neo­con­ser­v­a­tive hawk and some­time admir­er of Rand (or at least a knowl­edge­able read­er of her work). “I have some respect for the ‘Virtue of Self­ish­ness,’” he goes on to say in his aside on Rand above—which occurred dur­ing a lec­ture called “The Moral Neces­si­ty of Athe­ism” at Sewa­nee Uni­ver­si­ty in 2004. (In his Van­i­ty Fair essay, Hitchens pro­nounced him­self a “Rand buff.”) And yet, the title of Rand’s col­lec­tion of essays pro­vides him with the rhetor­i­cal essence of his cri­tique, one drawn from a dif­fer­ent strain of virtue—of a reli­gious vari­ety, even. After dis­miss­ing Rand on lit­er­ary grounds, he says:

I don’t think there’s any need to have essays advo­cat­ing self­ish­ness among human beings; I don’t know what your impres­sion has been, but some things require no fur­ther rein­force­ment.

The urbane Hitchens goes on to tell an off-col­or anec­dote about Lil­lian Hell­man with a moral­is­tic under­tone, gets a laugh, and piv­ots to a much old­er the­o­log­i­cal con­flict to bring his point home.

So to have a book stren­u­ous­ly rec­om­mend­ing that peo­ple be more self-cen­tered seems to me, as the Angli­can Church used to say in its cri­tique of Catholi­cism, a work of super-arro­ga­tion. It’s too stren­u­ous.

It’s try­ing too hard, that is, to con­vince us, and itself, per­haps, that its super­sti­tions, self-defens­es, and desires are nat­ur­al law. Rand’s belief sys­tem has so lit­tle intel­lec­tu­al cur­ren­cy among thinkers on the left that few peo­ple spend any time both­er­ing to refute it. But Hitchens did the polit­i­cal cen­ter a ser­vice when he took on defend­ers of Ran­di­an­ism in the media, such as he does in the debate below with David Frum, the now infa­mous neo­con­ser­v­a­tive Cana­di­an speech­writer for George W. Bush. Those who think the health­care debate began with the elec­tion of Barack Oba­ma may be sur­prised to see it con­duct­ed in almost the very same terms in 1996.

Frum defends a ver­sion of the lib­er­tar­i­an view, Hitchens a social demo­c­ra­t­ic per­spec­tive. When Rand’s name inevitably comes up near the end of the dis­cus­sion (4:40), Hitchens artic­u­lates the same views: “I always thought it quaint, and rather touch­ing,” he says with dry irony, “that there is in Amer­i­ca a move­ment that thinks peo­ple are not yet self­ish enough…. It’s some­what refresh­ing to meet peo­ple who man­age to get through their day actu­al­ly believ­ing that.” Like many oth­ers, Hitchens embod­ied a num­ber of con­tra­dic­tions. Among them, per­haps, was his staunch, almost Catholic belief—despite his stren­u­ous objec­tion to religion—that self­ish­ness… too much self­ish­ness, a val­oriza­tion of self­ish­ness, a cult of self­ish­ness… is self-evi­dent­ly a rather sin­ful thing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Ayn Rand Col­lect­ed Social Secu­ri­ty & Medicare, After Years of Oppos­ing Ben­e­fit Pro­grams

Christo­pher Hitchens Cre­ates a Revised List of The 10 Com­mand­ments for the 21st Cen­tu­ry

Flan­nery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960)

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

What Do Aliens Look Like? Oxford Astrobiologists Draw a Picture, Based on Darwinian Theories of Evolution


When Charles Dar­win laid out his the­o­ry of nat­ur­al selec­tion in 1859, lit­tle could he have imag­ined that, a good 150 years lat­er, this cor­ner­stone of evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry might help us form a men­tal pic­ture of what alien life looks like. But that’s pre­cise­ly how a group of researchers from Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty have done: In a research paper called “Dar­win’s Aliens,” they’ve applied Dar­win’s the­o­ry to alien life, posit­ing that aliens–like humans–adapt to their envi­ron­ment, under­go nat­ur­al selec­tion, and move from sim­ple to com­plex life forms. And, by the end, they could plau­si­bly look some­thing like a “colony of Ewoks from Star Wars or the Octomite” pic­tured above.

You can read “Dar­win’s Aliens” in the Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Astro­bi­ol­o­gy. It’s pub­lished on the Cam­bridge Core web­site.

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!

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Sent Music & Pho­tos Into Space So That Aliens Could Under­stand Human Civ­i­liza­tion (Even After We’re Gone)

Free NASA eBook The­o­rizes How We Will Com­mu­ni­cate with Aliens

The CIA Puts Hun­dreds of Declas­si­fied Doc­u­ments About UFO Sight­ings Online, Plus 10 Tips for Inves­ti­gat­ing Fly­ing Saucers

Carl Jung’s Fas­ci­nat­ing 1957 Let­ter on UFOs

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.