Tag Archives: video

Film: From a Land of Ashes and Mist

by Editor | 1 Comment

From an Italian master of short film memory, Fabio Scacchioli, comes this beautiful 23-minute work that expresses the illusion of solid permanence and the heroic attempt to build a reality based on fragments of memory. Even found memories and images can become part of one’s own person. This fleeting and subtle idea becomes more discernible as the film progresses.  The impressive imagery revolves around the recent earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy and compares the desolation of a town reduced to rubble with the lives that once literally danced through home movies.  It is a film about looking for ghosts.

Khan Academy Teaches Math and Science on YouTube

by Editor | 2 Comments

Salman Khan teaches math and science via YouTube video lessons.  It’s called Khan Academy.  He teaches a wide variety of subjects including algebra, calculus, biology, physics, chemistry and statistics.  He thinks everyone should be able to get an education for free and he does not think universities are doing it properly.  The education model needs to be rethought and rebuilt.  Many people think so and that’s why Kahn Academy has so many students and is attracting venture capital money.  He’s getting more viewers than most university web sites.  Here’s a PBS NewsHour piece about him:

Here’s a lesson on adding and subtracting fractions:

Poetry: Azeem

by Editor

It’s National Poetry Month and here is my favorite poet of the month.   Azeem.  We see a lot of writing about cute poets with education credentials and then someone like this brilliant Azeem fellow comes along and says a few things into a camera and reminds everybody that poets can shoot word bullets. I watch this video and my heart starts pumping and I get fidgety and I want to leave my chair and get to know words as well as this guy knows them.  I noticed Azeem because he is one of the few subscribers to my YouTube film channel and so I checked him out.  I’m extremely impressed.  You want people to be interested in poetry?  Show them this guy and they’ll be interested in about 5 seconds flat.  I think what makes most poets uninteresting to the American reading public is that they all secretly have an image of a bookshelf in mind.  Bookshelves are fine if you are browsing for a book, but they are death for anyone who’s making something.  Azeem is also working with some hugely talented filmmakers who make fantastic imagery and do it with ease.  If he comes to Los Angeles, I want to know about it and go see him play.

Set a Blaze:

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