Hummingbird Frenzy

Turn up the volume and listen to this Hummingbird Frenzy around a cluster of eight hummingbird feeders on a back patio. The happy swarm was filmed by YouTuber Duane Reid in Valley Center, California in August. How many hummingbirds can you count? Reid writes of his wife’s hobby:

Lunchtime for Cheryl’s Hummers! Enjoy the frenzy. Over 150 hummingbirds feeding at the same time. Starts out with only one or two, then builds up to a swarm, so view it thru till the end to see them all. Notice the different colors and markings?

Star Trek Double Knit Scarf

Colosse - A Wood Tale

Collosse – A Wood Tale, directed by Yves Geleyn: a short film about the meeting of a robot marionette and a little bird.

Le Merle (1958) - Norman McLaren

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.

The Chandelier Tree

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.

T. S. Eliot Reads T. S. Eliot

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.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

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.

Interview with Dr. Kathy Ann Miller - KQED Science

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.

Streamschool (Patakiskola) - Peter Vacz

Streamschool (Patakiskola) by Péter Vácz: Inspired by a Hungarian poem, this beautifully-textured stop motion piece about growing up tells the story of a little girl who travels with a river to the sea. The version above is in Hungarian with English subtitles, but it’s also available in French: L’école des ruisseaux.

Plus! Notes on how it was made. 

Ryan (Short) - Chris Landreth

Winner of the 2005 Oscar® for Best Short Animation This Oscar®-winning animated short from Chris Landreth is based on the life of Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who produced some of the most influential animated films of his time. Ryan is living every artist's worst nightmare - succumbing to addiction, panhandling on the streets to make ends meet. Through computer-generated characters, Landreth interviews his friend to shed light on his downward spiral. Some strong language. Viewer discretion is advised. Directed by Chris Landreth - 2004

The Silence Beneath the Bark (Short) - Joanna Lurie

A tender fairy tale about discovery and growing up, this is The Silence Beneath the Bark, Le silence sous l’écorce (2010), by Joanna Lurie. Read more about the film here.