Le Merle (the Blackbird) is a cutout animation directed in 1958 by cinematic innovator Norman McLaren. Based on a French-Canadian folksong, the story tells of a bird who loses a beak, a neck, eyes, wings, legs, etc, and then finds them in duplicate and triplicate.
Over the course of six years, Adam Tenenbaum turned his Silver Lake, California front yard tree into one that was filled with the warm light of 30 vintage chandeliers. In this short, filmmaker Colin Kennedy (who lives down the street) talks with Adam about how this public art project began.
Did you know T.S. Eliot’s portentous and heavily allusive 1922 masterpiece “The Waste Land” was originally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” a quote from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend? Filled with references to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, this most famous of high modernist poems—scourge of millions of college freshman each year—was a very different animal before notorious modernist impresario Ezra Pound got his hands on it. Pound’s heavy reworking is responsible for the poem you hear above, read by Eliot himself. The first image in the video shows Pound’s marginal annotations.
In the video above listen to Eliot read his second-most famous work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with the text of the poem choreographed by Wordookie, an open-source version of Wordle. “Prufrock,” first published in 1915, is as dense with literary allusions as “The Waste Land” (and thus as painful for the average undergraduate). And if Eliot’s reedy alto doesn’t deliver "Prufrock"'s gravitas for you, listen to Anthony Hopkins read it.
In this Science on the SPOT: Preserving the Forest of the Sea, watch Kathy Ann Miller, PhD, curator of the University Herbarium at the University of California – Berkeley, as she shares the wide variety of seaweeds in the collection.
I love when someone gives a personalized video tour of their work, especially when it mixes nature, science and beautiful, art-like specimens all together. Kathy and her team are digitizing samples of 80,000 kinds of seaweed collected from the North American west coast, so that they can be shared online with researchers from around the globe. You can read more about the project here.
Geographer turned Software Engineer, looking to shape the invisible systems that guide our world. Professionally interested in mapping, data visualization, values-based programming, and STEAM evangelism. Personally interested in crochet, knitting, textiles, and archery.
