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Roger Ebert talks about how to read a movie . This all began for me in about 1969, when I started teaching a film class in the University of Chicago's Fine Arts program. I knew a Chicago film critic, teacher and booker named John West, who lived in a wondrous apartment filled with film prints, projectors, books, posters and stills. "You know how football coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to...
A list of fifty great arts video available on YouTube , including Joy Division playing on Grenada Television in 1978 , Jack Kerouac reads On the Road in 1959 , and Jackson Pollock making one of his drip paintings in 1951 . ( link )
Jonah Lerher on daydreaming and the human brain's default network . Creativity, especially with regard to children, might be stifled by too little daydreaming and too much television. After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, Belton came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of "empty time," or periods without any...
If you've spent any time at all walking around Manhattan, you've likely run across Joe Ades , the English gent hawking vegetable peelers at the top of his lungs on a bit of sidewalk. An occasional part of his current routine is a laminated copy of a profile of him that Vanity Fair published in May 2006 . No surprise: Ades is a character. Mayhew and the patterers might have been surprised at just how...
Who would have thought ten years ago that Hollywood's biggest action stars would be Tobey Mcguire (Spider-Man), Matt Damon (Bourne), Elijah Wood (LoTR), Christian Bale (Batman), Johnny Depp (Pirates), and maybe even Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man)? No Stallones, Schwarzeneggers, or Van Dammes in that group. ( link )
William Drenttel opines on the all-white-male jury of an Adbusters design competition : Nearly a decade into a new century, I believe it is unacceptable for a design organization, foundation, board of directors, magazine or other enterprise, to mount an initiative with an all male panel of judges -- or, put another way, "white, native English-speaking men from the U.S., British Isles or Australia."...
COLOURlovers, the site that takes inspiration from colors in the real world to make design palettes, today has a collection of palettes inspired by some wickedly vibrant bruises . ( link )
A chart from Wired in 2005 shows how Star Wars influenced the later development of movies, games, TV programs, and the like . The Star Wars empire has grown into one of the most fertile incubators of talent in the worlds of movies (Lucasfilm), visual effects (Industrial Light & Magic), sound (Skywalker Sound), and video games (LucasArts). Along the way, some of the original Lucas crew has gone on...
Name: The Great Wall of China Date of construction: 6th century B.C. through 16th century Built to keep out: Invaders from the north Status: Tourist attraction and UNESCO World Heritage Site Little known fact: You actually can't see it from space. Name: The Green Wall of China Date of construction: 2002 through ~2050 Built to keep out: The Gobi Desert Status: Mixed Little known fact: Prior to the...
I could read about con men and tricksters all day. "I could sell shit at an anti-scat party," he says, "you have to figure out someone's wants and needs and convince them what you have will fill their emotional void." A con man is essentially a salesman -- a remarkably good one -- who excels at making people feel special and understood. A con man validates the victim's desire to believe he has an...
Experiments with Guilloche patterns , those fine geometric patterns you find on European banknotes. Banknote patterns fascinate me. I can get lost for hours in all the details, seeing how the patterns fit together, how the lettering works, the tiny security 'flaws' -- they're amazing. Central to banknote designs are Guilloche patterns, which can be created mechanically with a geometric lathe, or more...
Basketball players are more skilled than even keen observers of the game (sportswriters and coaches) when predicting whether a shot will go in the basket or not . Not surprisingly, the players were significantly better at predicting whether or not the shot would go in. While they got it right more than two-thirds of the time, the non-playing experts (i.e., the coaches and writers) only got it right...
I'm not sure anyone has made anything online funnier than this classic: Triumph the Insult Comic Dog interviews Star Wars fans standing in line for Attack of the Clones . ( link )
