Wednesday, March 29th, 2017

Time	Event
5:45p	School of Visual Arts Presents 99 Hours of Free Photography Lectures FYI: Last week, photographer Dan Culberson flagged on Reddit a trove of free photography lectures available on School of Visual Arts‘ rich YouTube channel. Elaborating, the photography blog Petapixel writes: Tons of hour-long lectures can be found on the channel’s Images, Ideas, Inspiration playlist, most of them photography related and all of them fascinating. You’ll find something for everyone on this channel—from a lecture by gallery rep Margit Erb talking about her close personal and professional relationship with the great Saul Leiter, to a talk by Dancers Among Us photographer Jordan Matter, to Jack Hollingsworth’s fascinating talk titled “Small Camera Big Results.” There are a total of 99 videos in that playlist alone—approximately 99 hours of education, inspiration, and ideas. Above you can watch Jack Hollingsworth’s lecture, “Small Camera Big Results.” He has “traveled to over 20 countries and shot over 400,000 images with his iPhone,” and here he discusses his iPhone photography technique, and all the apps he uses. Find more lectures on this Images, Ideas, Inspiration playlist. Also find courses on digital photography in our collection, 1200 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, and Flipboard and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. To make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. If you’d like to help support Open Culture, please consider making a small monthly donation to our site. We would greatly appreciate it! via Petapixel Related Content: Google Makes Its $149 Photo Editing Software Now Completely Free to Download An Introduction to Digital Photography: Take a Free Course from Stanford Prof/Google Researcher Marc Levoy Learn Digital Photography with Harvard University’s Free Online Course The History of Photography in Five Animated Minutes: From Camera Obscura to Camera Phone How to Take Photographs Like Ansel Adams: The Master Explains The Art of “Visualization” 1200 Free Online Courses from Top Universities School of Visual Arts Presents 99 Hours of Free Photography Lectures is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
7:30p	Discover Ray Bradbury & Kurt Vonnegut’s 1990s TV Shows: The Ray Bradbury Theater and Welcome to the Monkey House There has always been good television. Even Kurt Vonnegut, wittiest of curmudgeons, had to agree in 1991 when he was interviewed in The Cable Guide for his own contribution to the medium, an adaptation of his book of stories, Welcome to the Monkey House on Showtime. Vonnegut did not like television, and compared it to thalidomide. “We don’t know what the side effects are until it’s too late.” He could only go up from there, and did, praising, Cheers, M*A*S*H, and Hill Street Blues, and then saying, “I’d rather have written Cheers than anything I’ve written.” I never know exactly when to take Vonnegut seriously. He also calls TV everybody’s “rotten teacher” and says “I’m sorry television exists,” but he had long been a TV writer in its “so-called golden days,” as John Goudas put it in a Los Angeles Times interview with Vonnegut in 1993, when his seven-episode run of Kurt Vonnegut’s Monkey House, hosted by himself, would soon come to a close. Vonnegut found himself very pleased by the results, remarking of his stories that “TV can do them very well,” and especially praising “More Stately Mansions,” above, starring an irrepressible Madeline Kahn, whom he called “a superb actress.” Another very direct, witty speculative writer in the same year’s issue of The Cable Guide, Ray Bradbury, appeared with Vonnegut as part of two “dueling, short features,” notes Nick Greene at Mental Floss, “under the auspices of promoting the authors’ upcoming cable specials,” Monkey House and The Ray Bradbury Theater. Bradbury was also an old media hand, having written for radio in the 50s, and seeing adaptations of his stories made since that decade, including one on Alfred Hitchcock’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Like Hitchcock, when it came time for his own show, The Ray Bradbury Theater in 1985, Bradbury introduced the episodes and became a public face for thousands of viewers. He also wrote each episode, all 65 of them, from 1985-86 on HBO and 1988-92 on USA. In his Cable Guide interview, Bradbury calls television, “mostly trash,” then adds, “I’m full of trash… I’ve watched thousands of hours of TV. I’ve seen every movie ever made… everything’s the same.” What did he like to watch? Nova, unsurprisingly, and CNN, which he called “the most revolutionary thing in years.” In his interview (which you can read in a high resolution scan at Mental Floss), Bradbury credits television for “a lot of what happened in Europe”—referring to the fall of Communism, as well as Tiananmen Square, and the Gulf War. “Finally, the message got through,” he says, “and people revolted… CNN,” he concluded, “is very powerful television.” If he could see us now. See Bradbury’s very first episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater, “Marionettes” from 1985, just above. And purchase the complete TV series online. Related Content: Hear Kurt Vonnegut Read Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle & Other Novels Hear Kurt Vonnegut Visit the Afterlife & Interview Dead Historical Figures: Isaac Newton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998) Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001) How Ray Bradbury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Discover Ray Bradbury & Kurt Vonnegut’s 1990s TV Shows: The Ray Bradbury Theater and Welcome to the Monkey House is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
8:00p	The Philosophy, Storytelling & Visual Creativity of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Anime Film, Explained in Video Essays “Ghost in the Shell is not in any sense an animated film for children,” wrote Roger Ebert twenty years ago. “Filled with sex, violence and nudity (although all rather stylized), it’s another example of anime, animation from Japan aimed at adults.” Now, when no critic any longer needs to explain the term anime to Western readers, we look back on Ghost in the Shell (1995) as one of the true masterpieces among Japanese animated feature films, mature not just in its content but in its form. Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, takes a look at how it expresses its philosophical themes through its still-striking cyberpunk setting in his video essay “Identity in Space.” Puschak first highlights the presence (in the middle of this “sci-fi action thriller” about the hunt for a wanted hacker turned self-aware artificial intelligence) of an action-free interlude: a “three minute and twenty-ish second-long scene” consisting of nothing but “34 gorgeous, exquisitely detailed atmospheric shots of a future city in Japan that’s modeled after Hong Kong.” Its plot-suspending visual exploration of the film’s Blade Runner-esque urban space of “a chaotic multicultural future city dominated by the intersections of old and new structures, connected by roads, canals, and technology,” emphasizes that “spaces, like identities, are constructed. Though space often feels neutral or given, like we could move anywhere within it, our movements, our activities, our life, is always limited by the way space is produced.” Just as all of Ghost in the Shell‘s characters exist in space, the main ones also exist in cybernetic bodies, regarding their identities as stored in their effectively transplantable brains all connected over a vast information network. The half-hour-long analysis from AnimeEveryday just above gets into the philosophical dilemma this presents to the film’s protagonist, the cyborg police officer Motoko Kusanagi, examining in depth several of the scenes that — through dialogue, imagery, symbolism, or subtle combinations of the three that viewers might not catch the first time around — illuminate the story’s central questions about the nature of man, the nature of machine, and the nature of what emerges when the two intersect. Film Herald’s briefer explanation of Ghost in the Shell (which contains potentially NSFW images) points to three main themes: identity, Cartesian dualism, and evolution, all concepts that come into question — or at least demand a thorough revision — when the boundary between the natural and the synthetic blurs to the film’s imagined extent. “My intuition told me that this story about a futuristic world carried an immediate message for our present world,” said director Mamoru Oshii, and now, more than two decades later, Hollywood has even got around to remaking it in a live-action version starring Scarlett Johansson in the Kusanagi role. That does provides a chance to update some of the now-dated-looking technology seen in the animated original, but there’s no improving on its artistry. Related Content: Blade Runner Spoofed in Three Japanese Commercials (and Generally Loved in Japan) Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917-1931) How the Films of Hayao Miyazaki Work Their Animated Magic, Explained in 4 Video Essays The Matrix: What Went Into The Mix Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Philosophy, Storytelling & Visual Creativity of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Anime Film, Explained in Video Essays is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)

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