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Friday, September 22nd, 2017
- Herbie Hancock on Jazz
- Garry Kasparov on Chess
- Dr. Jane Goodall on the Environment
- David Mamet on Dramatic Writing
- Steve Martin on Comedy
- Aaron Sorkin on Screenwriting
- Gordon Ramsay on Cooking
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | A Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in 100 Celebrity Voices
For every august personage who’s taken a crack Edgar Allan Poe’s evergreen poem, "The Raven," there are thousands more who haven’t. Humorist Jordan Monsell is doing what he can to close that gap, providing a sampling of 100 mostly male, mostly white, mostly human celebrity voices. It’s a solo recitation, but vocally a collaborative one, with a fair number of animated characters making their way into the credits, too. He certainly knows how to cast outside the box. Traditional Poe interpreters such as Vincent Price and John Astin bring some well established creep cred to the enterprise. Monsell picks Christopher Walken and Christopher Lee already have existing takes on this classic, and Anthony Hopkins and Willem Dafoe are welcome additions. But what to make of Jerry Seinfeld, Pee-Wee Herman, Johnny Cash… and even poetry lover Bill Murray? Manic and much missed Robin Williams may offer a clue. What good is having an arsenal of impressions if you’re not willing to roll them out in rapid succession? While some of Monsell's impersonations (cough, David Bowie) fall a bit short of the mark, others will have you regretting that no one had the forethought to record Don Knotts or JFK reciting the poem in its entirety. The titles offer a bit of a misnomer. In many instances, it’s not really the performers but their best known characters being aped. While there may not be too great a vocal divide between playwright Wallace Shawn and Vizzini in The Princess Bride, The Dude is not Jeff Bridges, any more than Captain Jack Sparrow is Johnny Depp. The project seems likely to play best with nerdy adolescent boys… which could be good news for teachers looking to get reluctant readers onboard. Show it on the classroom Smart Board, and be prepared to have mini-teach-ins on Katharine Hepburn, Walter Matthau, the late great Robert Shaw, and other big names whose day has passed. Shrek, Gollum, and Harry Potter’s house elf, Dobby, are on hand to keep the references from feeling too moldy. The specter of Poe gets the coveted final word, a balm to the ears after the triple assault of Christian Bale’s Batman, Mad Max’s Tom Hardy, and Heath Ledger’s Joker. (It may be a matter of taste. You’ll hear no complaint from these quarters with regard to Mickey Mouse, Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion, or The Simpson’s Krusty the Klown, wonderfully unctuous.) The breakneck audio patchwork approach doesn’t do much for reading comprehension, but could lead to a lively middle school discussion on what constitutes a successful performance. Who served the text best? Readers? Furthermore, who’s missing? What voice would you add to the Monsell’s roll call, below?
Related Content: Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven: Watch an Award-Winning Short Film That Modernizes Poe’s Classic Tale Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. A Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in 100 Celebrity Voices 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.  |
| 2:00p | Lin-Manuel Miranda Reads Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
It's worth taking note of this: In a newly-released audiobook, Lin-Manuel Miranda (the creator and star of Hamilton) narrates Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Above and below, listen to excerpts of an unabridged reading that lasts nearly 10 hours. And also note that Miranda is joined at points by Tony Award-winning actress, Karen Olivo. If you're tempted to hear the full production, you can purchase the audiobook online. Or you can download it for free by signing up for Audible's 30-day free trial. As I've mentioned before, if you register for Audible's free trial program, they let you download two free audiobooks. At the end of 30 days, you can decide whether you want to become an Audible subscriber (as I have) or not. No matter what you decide, you get to keep the two free audiobooks. Miranda's reading of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao can be one of them. NB: We have a partnership with Audible.com. So, if you give their program a try, it will help support Open Culture.
Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter 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. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: 7 Short Stories by Junot Díaz Free Online, In Text and Audio Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda Creates a 19-Song Playlist to Help You Get Over Writer’s Block A Sneak Peek at Junot Díaz’s Syllabi for His MIT Writing Classes, and the Novels on His Reading List Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda Creates a Playlist of Protest Music for Our Troubled Times “Alexander Hamilton” Performed with American Sign Language Lin-Manuel Miranda Reads Junot Diaz’s <i>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao</i> 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. |
| 5:13p | How Can We Know What is True? And What Is BS? Tips from Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman & Michael Shermer
Science denialism may be a deeply entrenched and enormously damaging political phenomenon. But it is not a wholly practical one, or we would see many more people abandon medical science, air travel, computer technology, etc. Most of us tacitly agree that we know certain truths about the world—gravitational force, navigational technology, the germ theory of disease, for example. How do we acquire such knowledge, and how do we use the same method to test and evaluate the many new claims we're bombarded with daily? The problem, many professional skeptics would say, is that we’re largely unaware of the epistemic criteria for our thinking. We believe some ideas and doubt others for a host of reasons, many of them having nothing to do with standards of reason and evidence scientists strive towards. Many professional skeptics even have the humility to admit that skeptics can be as prone to irrationality and cognitive biases as anyone else. Carl Sagan had a good deal of patience with unreason, at least in his writing and television work, which exhibits so much rhetorical brilliance and depth of feeling that he might have been a poet in another life. His style and personality made him a very effective science communicator. But what he called his “Baloney Detection Kit,” a set of “tools for skeptical thinking,” is not at all unique to him. Sagan’s principles agree with those of all proponents of logic and the scientific method. You can read just a few of his prescriptions below, and a full unabridged list here.
Another skeptic, founder and editor of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer, surrounds his epistemology with a sympathetic neuroscience frame. We’re all prone to “believing weird things,” as he puts it in his book Why People Believe Weird Things and his short video above, where he introduces, following Sagan, his own “Baloney Detection Kit.” The human brain, he explains, evolved to see patterns everywhere as a matter of survival. All of our brains do it, and we all get a lot of false positives. Many of those false positives become widespread cultural beliefs. Shermer himself has been accused of insensitive cultural bias (evident in the beginning of his video), intellectual arrogance, and worse. But he admits up front that scientific thinking should transcend individual personalities, including his own. “You shouldn’t believe anybody based on authority or whatever position they might have,” he says. “You should check it out yourself.” Some of the ways to do so when we encounter new ideas involve asking “How reliable is the source of the claim?” and “Have the claims been verified by somebody else?” Returning to Sagan’s work, Shermer offers an example of contrasting scientific and pseudoscientific approaches—the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and UFO believers. The latter, he says, uncritically seek out confirmation for their beliefs, where the scientists at SETI rigorously try to disprove hypotheses in order to rule out false claims. Yet it remains the case that many people—and not all of them in good faith—think they’re using science when they aren’t. Another popular science communicator, physicist Richard Feynman, recommended one method for testing whether we really understand a concept or whether we’re just repeating something that sounds smart but makes no logical sense, what Feynman calls “a mystic formula for answering questions.” Can a concept be explained in plain English, without any technical jargon? Can we ask questions about it and make direct observations that confirm or disconfirm its claims? Feynman was especially sensitive to what he called “intellectual tyranny in the name of science.” And he recognized that turning forms of knowing into empty rituals resulted in pseudoscientific thinking. In a wonderfully rambling, informal, and autobiographical speech he gave in 1966 to a meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, Feynman concluded that thinking scientifically as a practice requires skepticism of science as an institution. “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” says Feynman. “If they say to you, ‘Science has shown such and such,’ you might ask, ‘How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?’” Asking such questions does not mean we should reject scientific conclusions because they conflict with cherished beliefs, but rather that we shouldn't take even scientific claims on faith. For elaboration on Shermer, Sagan and Feynman's approaches to telling good scientific thinking from bad, read these articles in our archive: Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detection Kit”: 8 Tools for Skeptical Thinking Richard Feynman Creates a Simple Method for Telling Science From Pseudoscience (1966) Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detection Kit: What to Ask Before Believing
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How Can We Know What is True? And What Is BS? Tips from Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman & Michael Shermer 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. |
| 8:00p | Watch the New Trailer for Wes Anderson’s Stop Motion Film, Isle of Dogs, Inspired by Akira Kurosawa
It surprised everyone, even die-hard fans, when Wes Anderson announced that he would not just adapt Roald Dahl's children's book Fantastic Mr. Fox for the screen, but do it with stop-motion animation. But after we'd all given it a bit of thought, it made sense: Anderson's films and Dahl's stories do share a certain sense of inventive humor, and stepping away from live action would finally allow the director of such detail-oriented pictures as Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou fuller control over the visuals. Eight years later, we find Anderson overseeing another team of animators to tell another, even more fantastical-looking story, this one set not in an England of the past but a Japan of the future. There, according to the project's newly released trailer, "canine saturation has reached epic proportions. An outbreak of dog flu rips through the city of Megasaki. Mayor Kobayashi issues emergency orders calling for a hasty quarantine. Trash Island becomes an exile colony: the Isle of Dogs." Equals in furriness, if not attire, to Fantastic Mr. Fox's woodland friends and voiced by the likes of Jeff Goldblum, Scarlet Johansson, Tilda Swinton, and of course Bill Murray (in a cast also including Japanese performers like Ken Watanabe, Mari Natsuki, and Yoko Ono — yes, that Yoko Ono), the canines of various colors and sizes forcibly relocated to the bleak titular setting must band together into a kind of ragtag family. Anderson must find himself very much at home in this thematic territory by now. It would also have suited the towering figure in Japanese film to whom Isle of Dogs pays tribute. Although Anderson has cited the 1960s and 70s stop-animation holiday specials of Rankin/Bass like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and The Little Drummer Boy — all produced, incidentally, in Japan — as one inspiration, he also said on an ArteTV Q&A earlier this year that “the new film is really less influenced by stop-motion movies than it is by Akira Kurosawa.” Perhaps he envisioned Atari Kobayashi, the boy who journeys to Trash Island to retrieve his lost companion, as a twelve-year-old version of one of Kurosawa's lone heroes. And perhaps it owes to Kurosawa that the setting — at least from what the trailer reveals — combines elements of an imagined future with the look and feel of Japan's rapidly developing mid-20th century, a period that has long fascinated Anderson in its European incarnations but one captured crisply in Kurosawa's homeland in crime movies like High and Low and The Bad Sleep Well. Anderson has made little to no reference to the Land of the Rising Sun before, but his interest makes sense: no land better understands what Anderson has expressed more vividly with every project, the richness of the aesthetic mixture of the past and future that always surrounds us. And from what I could tell on my last visit there, its dog situation remains blessedly under control — for now. via Uncrate Related Content: A Complete Collection of Wes Anderson Video Essays The Geometric Beauty of Akira Kurosawa and Wes Anderson’s Films Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, 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. Watch the New Trailer for Wes Anderson’s Stop Motion Film, <i>Isle of Dogs</i>, Inspired by Akira Kurosawa 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. |
| 9:09p | Martin Scorsese to Teach His First Online Course on Filmmaking
If you need to make movies, if you feel like you can't rest until you've told this particular story that you're burning to tell, then Martin Scorsese has a course for you. Through MasterClass, the director of Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, and Mean Streets is now set to teach his first online course. According to the video trailer above, Scorsese will explore in 20+ lessons everything from cinematography and editing, to working with actors, on-set directing, and developing a personal filmmaking style. The $90 course won't be released until early 2018, but anyone who pre-enrolls now will get early access to the class. While you wait, you can also take Werner Herzog's own course on filmmaking (also offered through MasterClass). Or explore Scorsese's lists of recommended films that we've previously featured here on Open Culture. Find them in the Relateds right below. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter 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. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Note: MasterClass is one of our partners. So if you sign up for a course, it benefits not just you and MasterClass. It benefits Open Culture too. So consider it win-win-win. Other MasterClass courses worth exploring include: Related Content: Martin Scorsese Creates a List of 39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker Martin Scorsese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspiring Filmmaker Needs to See Martin Scorsese Names His Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection Werner Herzog Teaches His First Online Course on Filmmaking
Martin Scorsese to Teach His First Online Course on Filmmaking 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. |
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