"This Is Coffee" A Vintage Film For Coffee Lovers

This Is Coffee, a promotional film produced by the Coffee Brewing Institute in 1961, covers different brewing methods with classic 1960s voiceover narration. Courtesy of the Prelinger Archive, the film is a “loving tribute to America’s favorite stimulant” and a great way to start the week. 

(via The Atlantic Video)

Have Headphones Changed Your World?

How Headphones Changed the World by Derek Thompson - The Atlantic:

Science says we’re full of it. Listening to music hurts our ability to recall other stimuli, and any pop song — loud or soft — reduces overall performance for both extraverts and introverts. A Taiwanese study linked music with lyrics to lower scores on concentration tests for college students, and other research have shown music with words scrambles our brains’ verbal-processing skills. “As silence had the best overall performance it would still be advisable that people work in silence,” one report dryly concluded.

…

There is evidence that music relaxes our muscles, improves our mood, and can even moderately reduce blood pressure, heart rate, and anxiety. What music steals in acute concentration, it returns to us in the form of good vibes.

That brings us finally to our final cultural answer: Headphones give us absolute control over our audio-environment, allowing us to privatize our public spaces. This is an important development for dense office environments in a service economy. But it also represents nothing less than a fundamental shift in humans’ basic relationship to music.

Procrastination Continued

There was procrastination animated, and a deeper question of what are we waiting for when we procrastinate, add to the ongoing exploration of procrastination this wonderful animated visualization by Ryan Perera as we end the week and probably try to avoid getting any new work started before the weekend. 

A short motion graphics piece about procrastination. A topic that is definitely fitting (or once was) to my lifestyle. More of my stuff can be seen at www.ryanperera.tv SPECIAL THANKS: VOICE ACTOR: ANDREW HOWELL Contact: andrew.howell.artist@gmail.com MUSIC: DUANE PERERA Contact: ansane.com Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastination curiosity.discovery.com/question/why-we-procrastinate news.cnet.com/A-formula-for-procrastination/2100-1008_3-6149636.html

(via johnaugust.com)

And You Can Dance. For Inspiration. (Five Views On Dance)

I didn’t intend to make dance the theme of the week but as it happens sometimes all of the ideas come together at once and so, in case you missed them earlier, here they are, five views on dance:

• Monday: Dancers In Slow Motion
• Tuesday: The Secret Lives Of Dancers
• Wednesday: David Parsons’ Caught Vs Wrecking Crew Orchestra’s Tron
• Thursday: Dance Your PH.D.
• Friday: A Modest Proposal By John Bohannon: Get Rid Of Powerpoint And Use Dancers Instead

For more posts on dance check out the Dance category. I also encourage you to check out The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life and The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together, two fantastic books by one of America’s greatests choreographers and collaborators Twyla Tharp. 

A Modest Proposal By John Bohannon: Get Rid Of Powerpoint And Use Dancers Instead

It started with “Dance You PH.D.” (covered here yesterday) and now John Bohannon, accompanied by Black Label Movement, takes the concept of communicating ideas through dance further in this fantastic TEDxBrussels talk. 

Music by: Greg Brosofske Minneapolis, USA based composer. Dancers: Jessica Elhert, Bryan Godbout, Stephanie Laager, Edward Bruno Oroyan Nelle Hens, Camille Prieux, Mariel Blaise, Gabson Nenaks, David Zagari & Marcio Canabarro This performance originally took place at TEDxBrussels on 22 November 2011 info: http://www.tedxbrussels.eu About TEDx, x = independently organized event In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.

In a follow up post at TED.com he explains how and why the talk came to be. 

Over the summer, I worked with Black Label Movement, a dance company based in Minneapolis led by Carl Flink. We had a shoestring budget, not even enough to get all the dancers to Brussels. So we had to create the dance and rehearse in Minneapolis in our spare time for free. Then we hired 6 Brussels-based dancers and arrived in Brussels 10 days early to rehearse with them. I’m amazed we pulled it off, but Carl wasn’t surprised. Professional dancers find this kind of pressure routine.

The piece changed drastically over the course of its creation. As I got to know the dancers and see how they struggled to make ends meet, especially when injuries occur without healthcare coverage, my mood darkened. What began as a small piece of optimistic theater about science turned into a satire about the status of artists in the US. As inspiration, I looked back to Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay, “A Modest Proposal,” It was a masterpiece of political satire that proposed a seemingly rational solution to the problem of the poor in Ireland: They should sell their babies as food, generating much-needed income and reducing their population in one stroke. It was a reply to some of the brutal utilitarian policies being discussed at the time by the aristocracy. Where you hear antique language in my presentation, I am quoting Swift verbatim.