Free: Download the Sublime Sights & Sounds of Yellowstone National Park

in Biology, Life, Nature | October 10th, 2019

Moments before writing these words I was feeling a little stressed—a not uncommon experience for most everyone these days. Then I watched the 25-second video of a bighorn sheep, above, and something happened. Not an epiphany or moment of Zen. Just a momentary suspension of human woe as the animal silently munched, a creature so unlike myself and yet so motivated by the same basic needs.

How much better to observe the sheep firsthand, in its home at Yellowstone National Park? But perhaps we can, through our computers, touch into a little of the remedy Oliver Sacks suggested for our modern traumas. Nature gives us “sense of deep time,” the neurologist wrote, which “brings a deep peace with it, a detachment from the timescale, the urgencies of daily life… a profound sense of being at home, a sort of companionship with the earth.”

Research has found that watching nature documentaries can bring on real contentment, confirming what millions of National Geographic devotees already know. Now, at the National Park Service’s site, you can immerse yourself in virtual visits with not only our silent bighorn sheep friend, but the song of a mountain bluebird, or choruses of howling wolves. The audio library contains dozens more such melodious and haunting sounds from Yellowstone’s biophony.

The video library is replete with not only short clips of animals doing what animals do, but also video tours like that above, in which we learn how park rangers capture and handle bison in their conservation efforts at the park. Then there are stunning landscape videos like that below of Lower Falls viewed from Lookout Point in the spring of 2017, with soothing natural white noise from the rushing water and blowing wind.

All of this content is available for download and free for anyone to use. Remix the sounds of falling snow, geysers, and mountain lions; make as many nature gifs as you desire. As you do, bear in mind that while humans might greatly benefit—both psychologically and culturally—from the digital preservation of the natural world, the true purpose may be to help us understand why we need to step back and preserve the real thing.

Just above see a (nondownloadable) video from Yellowstone on the importance of listening to and conserving the land’s natural soundscapes—a feature of the world that best thrives in the near absence of human involvement.

Enter the sound library here, and the video library here.

via Kottke

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

David Gilmour Makes His Live at Pompeii Concert Film Free to Watch Online

in Music | October 10th, 2019

On a hot October day in 1971, Pink Floyd and their crew assembled their live gear in an empty ancient Pompeii amphitheater and, with a film crew along for the ride, recorded one of the first epic concerts of their career, playing “Echoes,” “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” “Careful with that Axe, Eugene,” and other prog numbers that set the stage for Dark Side of the Moon. A few years later, they’d be playing in stadiums actually filled with people, and well, you know the rest.

In 2016, guitarist David Gilmour returned to the same amphitheater with his current band in tow, and filmed another concert movie (also called “Live at Pompeii”). This time the stadium was filled (though not on the ancient seats), nighttime was exchanged for daytime, and the set list was a combination of Floyd classics, older rarities like “Fat Old Sun” and “One of the These Days”, and plenty of tracks from his then new solo album Rattle That Lock, released in 2015.

Gilmour opted not to play “Echoes,” telling Rolling Stone that it was too much a Rick Wright song and didn’t feel right to play it without him. It was the first public performance in the ancient Roman amphitheatre since AD 79. (The guitarist was also made an honorary citizen of Pompeii).

Well, Gilmour just released the full concert on YouTube after a worldwide cinema screening of the concert in 2017. The YouTube playlist contains tracks that weren’t in the film, so for fans, this is just an extra special bonus.

The band includes Chester Kamen on guitars, a session musician who has played with both Gilmour and Waters on various occasions; Guy Pratt, who’s been Pink Floyd’s touring bassist since Roger Waters split; Chuck Leavell of the Allman Brothers; Greg Phllinganes, and Steve DiStanislao.

The show begins as the last rays of sunlight disappear behind Mt. Vesuvius, a nice Floydian touch. It ends, appropriately enough, with “Comfortably Numb,” (embedded above) but not with an exact copy of its famous guitar solo.

“I just try and let the solo come out,” Gilmour said in the same Rolling Stone interview. “I couldn’t play the one off the album. I try not too think about it too much.”

David Gilmour Invites a Street Performer to Play Wine Glasses Onstage With Him In Venice: Hear Them Play “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”

David Gilmour Talks About the Mysteries of His Famous Guitar Tone

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Women of Rock: Discover an Oral History Project That Features Pioneering Women in Rock Music

in Music | October 10th, 2019

If you’ve wondered why projects celebrating women in the history of rock are needed, maybe all you need to do is listen to women in rock. Stories of boys’ clubs in the industry, from record labels to journalists to fandoms, are ubiquitous, which is why so many voices are pushed to the margins, say rock historians like Tanya Pearson, director of the Women of Rock oral history project.

Marginalization happens not only on stages and studios but at the level of memory and preservation. “Canons influence how we remember the past,” Pearson writes. “Rock journalism, media, and scholarship perpetuates a one sided, androcentric rock narrative…. Women do not easily fit and so they continue to be underrepresented. If they are represented at all, they are not given the same level of attention or granted the same access to audience as their male counterparts.”

Women of Rock, a “collection of digital interviews and written transcripts housed at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith college,” focuses “primarily on artists who have been left out of the popular rock narratives.”

Pearson and her volunteer collaborators hope that “by creating space for women, trans, and gender nonconforming artists to share their personal and professional histories” the project can “contribute to their personal and professional histories and accurate popular rock narratives.”

Pearson created the project while an undergraduate at Smith, finding herself “frustrated by the scant details available about her favorite musicians,” writes Sharon Hannon at Please Kill Me. “The main reason I started this project,” she tells Hannon, “was that it’s something I wish I had access to when I was 13 or 14,” a time in her life when she was “desperately searching for representation.” The problem wasn’t that women like her did not exist in rock, but that she couldn’t find out much about them.

The site’s current roster of interviewees is an interesting and impressive mix. It includes women who have been integral to punk, indie, and alternative rock—like Lydia Lunch (further up), Nina Gordon and Louise Post of Veruca Salt, Alice Bag, Shirley Manson, Julie Cafritz, Melissa Auf der Mauer, Kristin Hersh, Mary Timony, Kira Rosseler, JD Samson, Amanda Palmer, and Exene Cervanka. (Sadly, Kim Shattuck of the Muffs, who passed away recently, isn’t featured.) And there are lesser-known artists who deserve a much wider audience, like Brie (Howard) Darling, a member of the criminally underrated Fanny, and whose full interview you can see below.

All of these women have stories to tell about surviving in a “male dominated business” as Tracy Bonham says in the trailer at the top of the post. Stories about “the patriarchal system,” as Shirley Manson says in her interview further up, “that allows men to thrive” and pushes women out. All of these musicians also tell us stories about themselves—their childhoods, influences, struggles, and passions, leaving behind a record in which future women rockers and rock historians among the current generation of 13- and 14-year-old kids can see themselves.

See the project’s YouTube channel for more full interviews and interview clips and visit the Women of Rock site for more.

New Web Project Immortalizes the Overlooked Women Who Helped Create Rock and Roll in the 1950s

How Joan Jett Started the Runaways at 15 and Faced Down Every Barrier for Women in Rock and Roll

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Million Years of Human Evolution Visualized in Six Minutes

in Biology | October 10th, 2019

One vulgar conception of human evolution holds that we “come from monkeys.” You don’t have to be a bona fide evolutionary biologist to know that’s not quite how we currently understand it to have happened, but how clearly do you grasp the real story? The animation from the American Museum of Natural History above goes over seven million years of evolution in a mere six minutes, and it’s certainly not a straight line down from “monkeys” to us. The video does, however, start its story with apes, and specifically chimpanzees, “our closest living relatives” with whom “we share a common ancestor that lived seven million years ago.”

But we once had “much closer relatives, hominins, who are no longer living.” These we know about through the fossils they left behind in Africa, from which the first known hominin emerged those seven million years ago. Different bones from different species of hominins found elsewhere on the continent suggest small teeth, upright walking, and bipedalism, some of the qualities that distinguish humans from apes.

And though hominins may have walked upright, they also climbed trees, but eventually lost the grasping feet needed to do so. Later they compensated with the very human-like development of making and using stone tools. Two million years ago, the well-known Homo erectus, with their large brains, long legs, and dextrous hands, made the famous migration out of Africa.

We know that by 1.2 million years thereafter Homo erectus’ brains had grown larger still, fueled by new cooking techniques. Only about 200,000 years ago do we, Homo sapiens, enter the picture, but not long after, we interbreed with the various hominin species already in existence as we spread outward to fill “every geographic niche” of the Earth. Ultimately, hominins couldn’t keep up: “Climate pressures and competition with Homo sapiens may have wiped them out.” Now that we’ve seen their story and ours recapitulated, let’s pour one out for the once-mighty hominin who preceded us, lived alongside us, and influenced us in ways genetic and otherwise — at least if it hasn’t given us too much pause wondering when the evolutionarily inevitable successor to Homo sapiens will appear in our midst.

via Laughing Squid

550 Million Years of Human Evolution in an Illustrated Flipbook

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Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Never a First Human Being

10 Million Years of Evolution Visualized in an Elegant, 5‑Foot Long Infographic from 1931

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

The Simulation Theory Explained In Three Animated Videos

in Philosophy | October 9th, 2019

The idea that we are software emanations in a vast, unimaginably complex computer simulation may carry more dizzying philosophical, ethical, and psychological implications than any other metaphysical assumption. It is not, however, quite a new idea, even if machines sophisticated enough to make worlds are only now conceivable. We see ancient sages speculate that solid matter is no more than some sort of graphical (tactile, etc.) user interface originating from the mind of a master coder.

We see a similar idea in the immaterialism of 18th century British empiricist George Berkeley. And where would science fiction be—especially the hallucinatory sci-fi of Philip K. Dick—without varieties of the simulation theory? The TED-Ed lesson on simulation theory, above, by University of Maryland physicist Zohreh Davoudi (animated by Eoin Duffy) opens with a quote from Dick: “This is a cardboard universe, and if you lean too long or too heavily against it, you fall through.”

In Dick’s world, this happens frequently. But if our reality were a simulation, how could we possibly step outside it to confirm? Provable or not, the theory is endlessly compelling. Davoudi walks us through a couple of fascinating scientific attempts to “fall through” by theorizing the evidence we might expect to find if the universe is made of code.

For one thing, there would probably be glitches. To correct for errors, “the simulators could adjust the constants in the laws of nature.” Tiny shifts, perhaps undetectable with current instruments, could signal heuristic revisions. Other theoretical approaches involve using subatomic particles to detect the finite limits of the godlike computer’s power.

Would finding shifts in physical laws prove a simulation. No. And in any case, our entire species could have come and gone before any such shifts have taken place. We cannot presume that humans are the chosen beneficiaries of the simulated universe. Maybe we’re prototypes. Maybe our solar system is someone’s side project. Wouldn’t the simulators notice us figuring it out and prevent us from doing so? (They would, presumably, be watching.)

And why should the great computer have anything resembling the computational limitations of our own machines, Davoudi asks. After all, if it exists outside the universe as we know it and created its physical laws, it’s safe to assume that it exists in a different universe with entirely different laws, which we might never begin to understand. If your mind falls into pools of infinite regress when contemplating the idea—aided by consciousness-raising substances or otherwise—you won’t find anywhere safe to land in the other simulation videos here, from Vox and philosophy YouTube channel Kurzgesagt. But you might begin to see the concept as a little more plausible, and maybe more unsettling, than before.

Elon Musk, for example, drawing on the work of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, suggests that the simulators are not extra-dimensional beings (or whatever), but hyper-sophisticated future humans running Sim versions of their past. This version also becomes the philosophical equivalent of mise en abyme as ancestor simulations, run on other planets, create their own simulations, ship them offworld, and so forth.…

You can go as far down this rabbit hole as you like. Or, you can do as Samuel Johnson supposedly did when he heard Bishop Berkeley claim that matter didn’t exist. Kick the nearest heavy object and shout, “I refute it thus!”

Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?: A 2‑Hour Debate with Neil Degrasse Tyson, David Chalmers, Lisa Randall, Max Tegmark & More

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Philip K. Dick Theorizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Computer-Programmed Reality”

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki Free Online: A Four Part-Part Documentary on the Unstoppable Japanese Animator

in Animation, Film | October 9th, 2019

When Conan O’Brien found himself temporarily out of a late-night television hosting job a few years ago, he went on tour with a stage show instead. If the documentary chronicling that period of his career wasn’t called Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, a similar title could equally fit the recent films that have captured Hayao Miyazaki’s oscillation between work and “retirement.” In 2013’s Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, previously featured here on Open Culture, we thought we witnessed Miyazaki animating the final frame of his final feature. But his subsequent withdrawal from filmmaking proved short-lived, and his preparation for re-emergence (including his gone-viral critique of experimental computer animation) provides the subject for 2016’s Never-Ending Man.

This year, Never-Ending Man director Kaku Arakawa returns with 10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki, a four-part documentary available to watch free at NHK’s web site, and whose trailer appears at the top of the post. “Whereas Never-Ending Man tracked the director’s career from his short-lived retirement in 2013 to the germination of his forthcoming feature How Do You Live?, this series covers the decade running up to 2013,” writes Cartoon Brew’s Alex Dudok de Wit. Those were busy years for Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, involving as they did the production of Ponyo and The Wind Rises, as well as two films directed by Miyazaki’s son Goro: the Ursula K. LeGuin adaptation Tales from Earthsea and the 1960s boarding school-set From Up on Poppy Hill.

Tales from Earthsea came out in 2006, and at the time Miyazaki felt that Goro was unready to make his debut. As awkward as the period of estrangement between Miyazaki père et fils during that movie’s production may feel — especially given how often they’re in the same office — it reflects the near-impossibly high standard to which the man who directed My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away holds not just his successor and his collaborators, but himself. Above all himself, as revealed by the candid footage Arakawa’s decade of access to Miyazaki’s life allowed him to gather.

“We see him at work in his private studio and at Studio Ghibli, and relaxing at home,” writes Dudok de Wit, “insofar as he’s capable of relaxation.” What Miyazaki says to Arakawa about his craft, his worldview, and his life suggests a mind perpetually at work, even during the rare times his hands aren’t. 10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki ends with the making of The Wind Rises, but Arakawa must surely have known not to take the animator’s pronouncements of it being his final feature seriously: Hayao Miyazaki can’t stop, nor do we want him to.

Watch 10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki online here, and find it listed in our collection of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Watch Hayao Miyazaki Animate the Final Shot of His Final Feature Film, The Wind Rises

Watch Moebius and Miyazaki, Two of the Most Imaginative Artists, in Conversation (2004)

Hayao Miyazaki Meets Akira Kurosawa: Watch the Titans of Japanese Film in Conversation (1993)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Download Full Issues of MAVO, the Japanese Avant-Garde Magazine That Announced a New Modernist Movement (1923–1925)

in Art | October 9th, 2019

The early 20th century artistic and literary revolution called Modernism appears in history as an almost entirely European-American phenomenon. Textbooks and syllabi tend to leave out important modernist movements on other continents, which means we miss out on important cross-continental conversations. Though, to be fair, very few English-speaking textbook writers and teachers have known much about the work of, Mavo, an avant-garde group of Japanese artists from the 1920s.

Scant literature has been available in translation. Critics “were often dismissive of the group,” notes Margaret Carrigan at Hyperallergic, “and art historians have all but ignored them in favor of larger contemporaneous movements, like German Expressionism.” Whatever the reasons for the slighting of early Japanese modernism, we can now try to rectify the imbalance thanks to online sources covering the fascinating history of Mavo—both its interesting parallels with European Modernism and its important differences.

Or we can begin to get an intriguing sense of these things, more or less, depending on our level of familiarity with Japanese language and culture. MAVO magazine, edited by Tatsuo Okada and Tomoyoshi Murayama, “appeared in 7 issues between July 1924 and August 1925,” writes Monoskop, who host six of those issues in high resolution scans. (Click on the PDF link under the image of each cover.) “By the third issue, the magazine was thick with advertisements and the usage of actual newspaper as its pages.” The original linocuts and “photographic reproductions of assemblage, painting, and graphic works” are small and sometimes inscrutable in grayscale.

There are many affinities with European modernisms—dichotomies of playfulness and precision, the love of collage and industrial machinery. The history of Mavo, like that of modernists worldwide, is a history of anarchic, confrontational art, charged with contempt for tradition. In 1923, the Shin-aichi newspaper, notes The Japan Times, covered the story of a Mavo exhibit in which artist Takamizawa Michinao tossed rocks through the windows of a state-sponsored, traditional art exhibit while Mavo artists displayed their own abstract canvases outside the gallery.

Mavo came about as the rebranding of an earlier group, “Japan’s Association of Futurist Artists, which became the local offshoot of the European Futurist phenomenon that began in Italy in 1909.” They were eclectic, publishing criticism, designing posters, buildings, and dance and theater pieces, incorporating Cubism and Dadaist tendencies. Unlike the Italian Futurists, who became increasingly fascist in their orientation, Mavo opposed the conservative state. “The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1924 brought about a proletarian and socialist bent to Mavo activities.”

See more of MAVO magazine at Monoskop, and learn more about the movement at The Japan Times, Hyperallergic, and Monoskop’s bibliography of a few scholarly sources in English (and Japanese, if you read the language). Also see Gennifer Weisenfeld’s book, MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931. If the phrase Japanese avant-garde calls up names like Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama, now it may also bring to mind the earlier Mavo and the many artists under its umbrella who adapted European influences for Japanese modes of artistic revolution.

Extensive Archive of Avant-Garde & Modernist Magazines (1890–1939) Now Available Online

Download Influential Avant-Garde Magazines from the Early 20th Century: Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism & More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Appeal of UFO Narratives: Investigative Journalist Paul Beban Visits Pretty Much Pop #14

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi, Television | October 9th, 2019

TV news reporter Paul Beban (ABC, Al Jazeera, Yahoo, and now featured on the Discovery Network’s Contact) joins your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to discuss the public fascination with UFOs, both at the peak of their popularity in the 50s and in the current resurgence. Do accounts of sightings necessarily make for good TV? Do you have to believe to be entertained? Is belief in UFOs related to religious belief? To beliefs in conspiracy theories and anti-government venom? To humor?

We get into the mechanics of Contact, the Area 51 hubbub,and also touch on the show Project Blue Book, films like Arrival (2016) and UFO (2018), the documentary Unacknowledged (2017), the short story “Roadside Picnic,” and more. To learn more about UFO lore in America, check out some of these podcasts.

Some of the resources we used for this episode included:

“The New American Religion of UFOs” by Sean Illing
“Why Are Area 51 Conspiracy Theories So Popular? Here’s What Psychologists Say” by Jeffrey Kluger
“35 of the Most Popular Conspiracy Theories in the US” by Frank Olito
“More UFOs Than Ever Before” by Rich Cohen
“What Kucinich Saw: Witnesses Describe His Close Encounter” by Michael M. Phillips
“Those UFO videos are real, the Navy says, but please stop saying ‘UFO’” by Kayla Epstein

Plus, here are some stats from Gallup about UFO sightings and belief, you might want to pick up the book Nostalgia for the Absolute that Paul refers to, and here’s the 2014 talk by Robbie Graham that Brian referred to describing “hyper-reality” and the Hollywood UFO conspiracy. Here’s a list of UFO documentary series.

This episode includes bonus discussion that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Free: Download the Sublime Sights & Sounds of Yellowstone National Park

David Gilmour Makes His Live at Pompeii Concert Film Free to Watch Online

The Women of Rock: Discover an Oral History Project That Features Pioneering Women in Rock Music

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Million Years of Human Evolution Visualized in Six Minutes

The Simulation Theory Explained In Three Animated Videos

Watch 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki Free Online: A Four Part-Part Documentary on the Unstoppable Japanese Animator

Download Full Issues of MAVO, the Japanese Avant-Garde Magazine That Announced a New Modernist Movement (1923–1925)

The Appeal of UFO Narratives: Investigative Journalist Paul Beban Visits Pretty Much Pop #14

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