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Friday, September 6th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Bob Odenkirk & Errol Morris Create Comedic Shorts to Help You Take Action Against Global Warming: Watch Them Online
Are there any Better Call Saul fans among the global warming deniers? A scenario in which one can simultaneously pooh pooh the melting of the polar ice caps and embrace The Thin Blue Line? Director Errol Morris and his star, Bob Odenkirk, may not change any minds with their Global Meltdown spots they produced in partnership with the Institute for the Future, but hopefully the emphatic end cards will stir some fans to action.
The absurdist 30-second shorts feature Odenkirk, encrusted in epaulets and naval insignia, as the fictional Horntower, “an admiral of a fleet of one and perhaps the last man on Earth.” Marooned on a small block of ice, he rails against the inexpertly animated wildlife encroaching on his domain. (“You don’t even have the facility of language!” he tells a penguin, and later threatens a walrus that it will “get painted out” of the final cut for “complaining all the time…”) Certainly a documentarian of Morris’ stature could have taken a lengthier, more serious approach to the subject, but as he notes:
Odenkirk also has some out-of-uniform concerns about climate change, as expressed in "Where I Got These Abs," a 2011 Shouts & Murmurs piece for The New Yorker:
Watch all of Morris and Odenkirk’s Admiral Horntower spots, currently totaling nine, with ten more to come, on Global Meltdown's YouTube channel. via Kottke Related Content: Climate Change Gets Strikingly Visualized by a Scottish Art Installation Global Warming: A Free Course from UChicago Explains Climate Change NASA Captures the World on Fire Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine. Join her in NYC this Monday, September 9 for the new season’s kickoff of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Bob Odenkirk & Errol Morris Create Comedic Shorts to Help You Take Action Against Global Warming: Watch Them Online 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.  |
| 11:00a | Orson Welles Trashes Famous Directors: Alfred Hitchcock (“Egotism and Laziness”), Woody Allen (“His Arrogance Is Unlimited”) & More
A bold artist acts first and thinks later. In the case of Orson Welles, one of the boldest artists produced by 20th-century America, that habit also found its way into his speech. This became especially true in the interviews he gave later in life, when he freely offered his opinions, solicited or otherwise, on the work of his fellow filmmakers. The man who made Citizen Kane didn't hesitate to roast, for instance, the European auteurs who ascended after his own career in cinema seemed to stall, and whose work he elaborately satirized in the posthumously released The Other Side of the Wind. His considered remarks include the following: "There's a lot of Bergman and Antonioni that I'd rather be dead than sit through." No, Orson, tell us what you really think. "According to a young American film critic, one of the great discoveries of our age is the value of boredom as an artistic subject," Welles says in another interview. If so, Michelangelo Antonioni "deserves to be counted as a pioneer and founding father," a maker of movies that amount to "perfect backgrounds for fashion models." As for Bergman, "I share neither his interests nor his obsessions. He's far more foreign to me than the Japanese." Welles has kinder words for Federico Fellini, whom he calls "as gifted as anyone making movies today," but also "fundamentally very provincial." His pictures are "a small-town boy's dream of the big city," which is also the source of their charm, but the man himself "shows dangerous signs of being a superlative artist with little to say." Welles estimated the younger Jean-Luc Godard's gifts as a director as "enormous. I just can't take him very seriously as a thinker — and that's where we seem to differ, because he does. And though Godard may admire Woody Allen (himself an admirer of Bergman), Welles certainly didn't: "I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man," he tells filmmaker Henry Jaglom. "That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge." When Jaglom objects that Allen isn't arrogant but shy, Welles drives on: "Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited." Allen "hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It's people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest," while, in Allen's case, "everything he does on screen is therapeutic." Allen has what Welles calls "the Chaplin disease," and Welles' interviews also feature severe criticisms of Chaplin himself. After referencing the fact that, unlike his fellow silent comedian Harold Lloyd, Chaplin didn't write all his own jokes but used "six gagmen," he declares that Modern Times — regarded by many as Chaplin' masterpiece — "doesn't have a good moment in it." Clearly Welles felt no more need to pull his punches on his elders than he did with the whippersnappers: John Ford "made very many bad pictures," including The Searchers ("terrible"); Cecil B. DeMille Welles credits with giving Mussolini and Hitler the idea for the fascist salute; Elia Kazan will never be forgiven for naming names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities ("it's just inexcusable"); and even Sergei Eisenstein, father of the montage, is also "the most overrated great director of them all." You can read more of Welles' choice words on his colleagues in cinema in this thread of interview clips posted by a Twitter user who goes by John Frankensteiner. It also includes Welles' assessment of Alfred Hitchcock, who declined into "egotism and laziness," making films "all lit like television shows." Welles suspects age-related cognitive issues — "I think he was senile a long time before he died," in part because "he kept falling asleep while you were talking to him" — but he also trashes the work Hitchcock did in his prime, such as Vertigo. Sight & Sound's last critics poll named that film the greatest of all time, but Welles calls it even worse than Rear Window, about which "everything was stupid." But at least all these filmmakers, living and dead, can rest easy knowing they didn't rank as low in Welles' estimation as John Landis, "the asshole from Animal House." Jaglom, believing he can influence Landis and mend their relationship, asks what he can do to help. Welles' suggestion: "Kill him." Related Content: Jorge Luis Borges Reviews Citizen Kane — and Gets a Response from Orson Welles Jean-Paul Sartre Reviews Orson Welles’ Masterwork (1945): “Citizen Kane Is Not Cinema” 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. Orson Welles Trashes Famous Directors: Alfred Hitchcock (“Egotism and Laziness”), Woody Allen (“His Arrogance Is Unlimited”) & More 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. |
| 5:16p | Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them
St. Benedict by Fra Angelico, via Wikimedia Commons We might imagine that life in a monastery is one of the safest, most predictable ways of life on offer, and therefore one of the least distracted. But “medieval monks had a terrible time concentrating,” writes Sam Haselby at Aeon, “and concentration was their lifelong work!” They complained of information overload, forgetfulness, lack of focus, and overstimulation. Their jumpy brains, fundamentally no different from those we use to navigate our smart phones, were the culprit, though, like us, the monks found other sources to blame. “Sometimes they accused demons of making their minds wander. Sometimes they blamed the body’s base instincts.” Given the nature of their restrictive vows, it’s no wonder they found themselves thinking “about food or sex when they were supposed to be thinking about God.” But the fact remains, as University of Georgia professor Jamie Kreiner says in an interview with PRI’s The World, monks living 1600 years ago found themselves constantly, painfully distracted.
So, what did the wisest monks advise, and what can we learn, hundreds of years later, from their wisdom? Quite a lot, and much of it applicable even to our online lives. Some of what medieval monks like the 5th century John Cassian advised may be too austere for modern tastes, even if we happen to live in a monastery. But many of their practices are the very same we now see prescribed as therapeutic exercises and good personal habits. Cassian and his colleagues devised solutions that “depended on imaginary pictures” and “bizarre animations” in the mind,” Haselby explains. People were told to let their imaginations run riot with images of sex, violence, and monstrous beings. “Nuns, monks, preachers and the people they educated were always encouraged to visualize the material they were processing,” often in some very graphic ways. The gore may not be fashionable in contemplative settings these days, but ancient methods of guided imagery and creative visualization certainly are. So too are techniques like active listening and nonviolent communication, which share many similarities with St. Benedict’s first rule for his order: “Listen and incline the ear of your heart.” Benedict spoke to the mind’s tendency to leap from thought to thought, to prejudge and formulate rebuttals while another person speaks, to tune out. “Basically,” writes Fr. Michael Rennier, Benedict's form of listening "is taking time to hear in a certain way, with an attitude of openness, and commitment to devote your whole self to the process,” without doing anything else. Benedict’s advice, Rennier writes, is “great… because obstacles are all around, so we need to be intentional about overcoming them.” We do not need to share the same intentions as St. Benedict, however, to take his advice to heart and stop treating listening as waiting to speak, rather than as a practice of making space for others and making space for silence. “Benedict knew the benefits of silence,” writes Alain de Botton’s School of Life, “He knew all about distraction,” too, “how easy it is to want to keep checking up on the latest developments, how addictive the gossip of the city can be.” Silence allows us to not only hear others better, but to hear our deeper or higher selves, or the voice of God, or the universe, or whatever source of creative energy we tune into. Like their counterparts in the East, medieval Catholic monks also practiced daily meditation, including meditations on death, just one of several methods “Cistercian monks used to reshape their own mental states,” as Julia Bourke writes at Lapham’s Quarterly. “A medieval Cistercian and a modern neuroscientist” would agree on at least one thing, Bourke argues: “the principle that certain feelings and emotions can be changed through meditative exercises.” No one devises numerous formal solutions to problems they do not have; although their physical circumstances could not have been more different from ours, medieval European monks seemed to suffer just as much as most of us do from distraction. In some part, their lives were experiments in learning to overcome it. via Aeon Related Content: Meditation for Beginners: Buddhist Monks & Teachers Explain the Basics How Information Overload Robs Us of Our Creativity: What the Scientific Research Shows How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Concentration Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them 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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