3rd Avenue El

July 21st, 2009 · 3 comments or link to (permalink)

A short film made in the early 1950s about the elevated rail line that traveled from the base of Manhattan, up the Bowery and 3rd Avenue, to Gun Hill Road in the Bronx.

New Yorkers, how many places do you recognize as they zoom by? What brewery was that on 3rd Avenue?

The characters are an arty type, a drunk, a little girl, a young couple, and the drama or plot, such as it is, revolves around a nickel stuck in the wooden floorboards of the train (also notice the padded seats). The main characters here are really the subway and the city.

(via The Prelinger Archives)

3 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: New York City business history nostalgia society talks

Gunter Grass and Norman Mailer

September 13th, 2008 · comment or link to (permalink)

The New York Public Library ran a particularly great selection of lectures last year. Here is the culmination: Gunter Grass followed by both Grass and Norman Mailer.

comment » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: talks

Chris Bangle: Great Cars Are Art

August 7th, 2008 · comment or link to (permalink)

BMW designer, Chris Bangle’s TED talk. I’m putting this up because of the death of Andrea Pininfarina, today.

There’s a list of some classic Pininfarina designs, through three generations of the family, on Oobject.

comment » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: talks

John Maynard Smith – Royal Institution Discourse on “The Origin of Life”.

April 28th, 2008 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)

Here, the late, great, Maynard Smith talks about what it means to say something is living. Like many virtuosos, he makes something difficult seem simple, with utterly clear explanations – the lecture is a small masterpiece.

He considers that what some biologists (such as Stuart Kauffman) define as life i.e. self reproducing things that metabolize, does not differentiate between life and something like a flame and that we must always add heredity (of infinite possible variety) to account for what we consider to be truly alive.

This leads to life as seen from an information perspective i.e how we transmit information between generations, and he outlines 9 milestones in the evolution of life from this vantage point, from replicating molecules to electronic information communication.

2 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: science talks

42 Hour Film of Buckminster Fuller

February 19th, 2008 · 5 comments or link to (permalink)

This has to be the most extreme example of what Smashing Telly set out to promote, the antithesis of ‘moronic 30 second dog on skateboard’ clips, this is 42 hours of gloriously intelligent video.

With people not much older than Fuller, like George Orwell, having not a single audio or video recording of themselves in existence, Buckminster Fuller fans can consider themselves lucky that such a film legacy exists.

In 1975 Buckminster Fuller recorded these sessions entitled ‘Everything I know’, in Philadelphia. This is the first film in the series, the entire set is available at the Wiki below.

1 hr 19 min 59 sec

conversationswithbuckypbwiki.com

5 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: important dead people science talks