Open Culture's Journal
 
 [Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]

Tuesday, September 3rd, 2019

    Time Event
    8:00a
    3,700+ MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in September: Enroll Today

    FYI. 3,700+ MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are getting underway in September, giving you the chance to take free courses from top flight universities. With the help of Class Central, we've pulled together a complete list of September MOOCS. And below we've highlighted several courses that piqued our interest.

    Here's one tip to keep in mind: If you want to take a course for free, select the "Full Course, No Certificate" or "Audit" option when you enroll. If you would like an official certificate documenting that you have successfully completed the course, you will need to pay a fee.

    You can browse through the complete list of September MOOCs here.

    Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please 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.

    Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and sharing intelligent media with your friends. Or sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. 

    3,700+ MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in September: Enroll Today 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.

    Image
    2:00p
    The Greatest Cut in Film History: Watch the “Match Cut” Immortalized by Lawrence of Arabia

    "I've noticed that when people remember Lawrence of Arabia, they don't talk about the details of the plot," writes Roger Ebert in his "Great Movies" column on the 1962 David Lean epic. "They get a certain look in their eye, as if they are remembering the whole experience, and have never quite been able to put it into words." Redundant though it may sound to speak of a "film of images," Lawrence of Arabia may well merit that description more than any other motion picture. Its vast images of an even vaster desert, as well as of the titular larger-than-life Englishman who turns that desert into the stage of his very existence, were shot on 70-millimeter film, twice the size of the movies most of us grew up with. To experience them anywhere but in a theater would be an act of cinematic sacrilege.

    The small screen renders illegible many of Lawrence of Arabia's most's memorable shots: Omar Sharif riding up in the distance through the shimmering heat, for example. Others are such technical and aesthetic achievements that their appreciation demands full-size viewing: take the assembly of two images that comes out of a search for "greatest cut in film history."

    It invariably comes out alongside the bone and the satellite from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Lawrence of Arabia's famous cut more than makes up in sheer sublimity what it lacks in comparative historical sweep. It occurs early in the film, just after the young British army lieutenant Lawrence has received word of his impending transfer from Cairo to the Arab Bureau. He lights a cigar for Mr. Dryden, the diplomat who arranged the transfer, blows it out, and suddenly the sun rises over the Arabian desert.

    "If you don’t get this cut, if you think it’s cheesy or showy or over the top, and if something inside you doesn’t flare up and burn at the spectacle that Lean has conjured, then you might as well give up the movies," writes The New Yorker's Anthony Lane in his remembrance of the director. But Lean didn't conjure it alone: the work of the cut was done by editor Anne V. Coates, who died just last year. "The script had actually called for a dissolve, in which one scene slowly fades into another," the Washington Post's Travis M. Andrews writes in a piece on her editing career in general and this edit in particular. "Today, that can be done quickly with editing software. At the time, though, filmmakers and editors had to create the effect by hand, ordering extra negatives of the film, which was then often double exposed and overlaid with each other."

    “We marked a dissolve, but when we watched the footage in the theater, we saw it as a direct cut,” Coates told Justin Chang in FilmCraft: Editing. “David and I both thought, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting.’ So we decided to nibble at it, taking a few frames off here and there.” Ultimately, Coates only had to remove two frames to satisfy the perfectionist director. "If I had been working digitally, I would never have seen those two shots cut together like that," she added, throwing light on the hidden advantages of older editing technology, not in terms of price or speed but how it made its users think and see. (Famed editor Walter Murch has written along the same lines about the ideas generated by having to manually roll through many shots to find the right one among them, rather than digitally jumping straight to it.)

    Coates had also "convinced her boss to check out a couple of these new-fangled nouvelle vague films, 'Chabrol and that sort of thing,'" writes The Guardian's Andrew Collins. "Rather than be affronted by their subversive jump cuts, Lean was enamored, and embraced the French style." And so it's in part thanks to the rule-breaking of the nouvelle vague — which, with Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless released less than two years before, was certainly nouvelle — and in part to the limitations of the editing process in the early 1960s that we owe this unimprovable example of what, in technical language, is known as a "match cut" — or more specifically a "graphic match," in which a connection between the visual elements of two shots masks the discontinuity between them. So is 2001's single-frame jump over millions of years of evolution, of course. But Lawrence of Arabia's immortal match cut is the only one that uses an actual match.

    Related Content:

    The 100 Most Memorable Shots in Cinema Over the Past 100 Years

    A Mesmerizing Supercut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

    The Alchemy of Film Editing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Hannah and Her Sisters, The Empire Strikes Back & Other Films

    How the French New Wave Changed Cinema: A Video Introduction to the Films of Godard, Truffaut & Their Fellow Rule-Breakers

    Lawrence of Arabia Remembered with Rare Footage

    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 Facebook.

    The Greatest Cut in Film History: Watch the “Match Cut” Immortalized by Lawrence of Arabia 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.

    Image
    7:00p
    Meditation for Beginners: Buddhist Monks & Teachers Explain the Basics

    In the app-rich, nuance-starved culture of late capitalism, we are encouraged to conflate two vastly different concepts: the simple and the easy. Maybe no better example exists than in the marketing of meditation—the selling of an activity that, in essence, requires no specialized equipment or infrastructure. What mediation does require is a good instructor and encouragement. It is simple. But it is not easy. It’s true, you’ll hear teachers ruefully admit, they don’t print this on the brochures for retreat centers: but sustained meditation can be difficult and painful just as well as it can induce serenity, peace, and joy. When we sit down to meditate, we “feel our stuff,” to paraphrase David Byrne.

    Next to the host of physical complaints and external stressors clamoring for attention, if we’ve got personal bad vibrations to contend with, they will hamper our ability to accept the present and relax. This is why, historically, those wishing to embark on the Buddhist path would first take ethical precepts, and practice them, before beginning to meditate, under the presumption that doing good (or non-harm) quiets the mind. “It is true that meditation is important in the Buddhist tradition,” writes Tibetan teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche at Lion’s Roar. “But in many ways, ethics and virtue are the foundation of the Buddhist path.”

    Of course, there are non-Buddhist meditation traditions. And the mindfulness movement has demonstrated with great success that one can carve most of the religion away from meditation and still derive many short-term benefits from the practice. But to do so is to dispense with thousands of years of experiential wisdom, not only about the difficulties of sustaining a meditation practice over the long term, but also about meditation's inherent simplicity—something those of us inclined to overcomplicate things may need to hear over and over again.

    Tibetan teachers like Mingyur (and teachers from every Buddhist lineage) are generally happy to expound upon the simplicity and joy of mediation, with the good nature we might expect of those who spend their lives letting go of regrets and fears. Sometimes their messages are packaged for easier consumption, which is a fine way to get a taste of something before you decide to explore it further. But the point remains, as Mingyur says in the video at the top from The Jakarta Poet, that “meditation is completely natural.” It is not a product and doesn't require any accessories or subscriptions.

    It is also not an altered state of consciousness or a nihilist escape. It is allowing ourselves to experience what is happening inside and all around us moment by moment by tuning into our awareness. We can do this anywhere, at any time, for any length of time, as the monk further up tells us. “Even three seconds, two seconds, while you’re walking, while you’re having coffee and tea, while you’re having a meeting… you can meditate.” Really? Yes, since meditation is not a vacation from your life but an intensified experiencing of it (even the meetings).

    We get a celebrity endorsement above from the man who plays the angriest man on television, Gordon Ramsay. The chef takes a break from his abusive kitchen rages to meet with a Thai monk, who says of his decision to enter the monastery, “I’ve been to many different places, I’d traveled around, but the one place I hadn’t looked at was my mind.” Westerners may hear this and think of far out states—and there are plenty of those to be found in Buddhist texts, but not much talk of them among Buddhist teachers. Generally, the word “mind” has a far more expansive range here than the firing of synapses: it includes movement of the stomach lining, the tension of the sinews, and the beating of the heart.

    One of the most tragic misunderstandings of meditation casts it as a mental discipline, splitting mind and body as Western thought is wont to do for centuries now. But the awareness cultivated in meditation is awareness of everything: the senses, the body, the breath, the space around us, our cognition and emotion. Every Buddhist tradition and secular offshoot has its way of teaching students what to do with their often-ignored bodies while they meditate. The differences between them are mostly slight, and you’ll find a good guided introduction to beginning meditation focused on the body just above, led by Mingyur Rinpoche.

    The happiness one can derive from a meditation practice does arrive, according to meditators worldwide, but it is not a solitary achievement, Buddhist teachers say, a prize claimed for oneself like a profit windfall. It is, rather, the result of more compassion, and hence of more humility, better relationships, and less self-involvement; the result of stripping away rather than acquiring. Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who left a career in cellular genetics in his twenties to study and practice in the Himalayas, hasn’t shied away from marketing as a way to teach people to meditate. But he is also upfront about the importance of ethics to beginning mediation.

    In addition to being a “confidante of the Dalai Lama,” notes Business Insider, Ricard is also “a viral TED Talk speaker, and a bestselling author.” His message is the importance of compassion—not as a goal to achieve some time in the future, but as the very place to start. “There’s nothing mysterious” about it, he says in an interview on Business Insider’s podcast. He then goes on to describe the basic practices of “Metta, ”among other things a way of training oneself to have kind and loving intentions for others in an ever-widening circle outward. In the video above, Ricard talks about the practice, and the science, of compassion at Google.

    Many people balk at this kind of sentimental stuff, even from a man Google describes as “the world’s best bridge between modern science and ancient wisdom.” But if we can hear anything in the ancient wisdom distilled by these Buddhist teachers, perhaps it’s a simple idea fast-meditation apps and utilitarian programs generally skip. No, you do not need to put on robes, become a monk or nun, or take on a set of ancient traditions, beliefs, or rituals. But as American Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says below, “if you want to learn to be wise and present, the first step is to refrain from harming yourself or others.”

    Related Content:

    Alan Watts Presents a 15-Minute Guided Meditation: A Time-Tested Way to Stop Thinking About Thinking

    How Meditation Can Change Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Buddhist Practice

    Daily Meditation Boosts & Revitalizes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Harvard Study Finds

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

    Meditation for Beginners: Buddhist Monks & Teachers Explain the Basics 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.

    Image

    << Previous Day 2019/09/03
    [Calendar]     		Next Day >>

Open Culture   About LJ.Rossia.org