5 ½ Werner Herzog Gems

Monkey philosophy, literary incongruity, and what eating a shoe reveals about the state of contemporary culture.

We’re a little obsessed with the endlessly eccentric, delightfully dark German director Werner Herzog. So we’ve curated five — and a half — of our favorite Werner Herzog nuggets to get existential with or simply have a good intellectual chuckle over.

PLASTIC BAG

Directed by Ramin Bahrani of Goodbye Solo fame, Plastic Bag follows the existential journey of a plastic bag, narrated by Herzog, searching for its maker.

The film is part of FutureStates, a series of 11 fictional mini-features exploring hypothetical scenarios for our future through the lens of the world’s current realities.

WERNER HERZOG READS CURIOUS GEORGE

Okay, so it isn’t really Herzog. It’s an impersonator, filmmaker Ryan Iverson. But the prospect of the dry, uncompromising, deeply existentialist German interpreting children’s classics is oddly alluring, both humorous and awkwardly disturbing. Either way, you can’t stop listening.

WERNER HERZOG READS MADELINE

Yep, it’s another impersonation. But we just can’t get enough of them. The urgency with which “Herzog” recites the playful rhymes of the book is so comically incongruous that you — or at least we — can’t help chuckling.

WERNER HERZOG READS WHERE’S WALDO

No children’s books parody is complete without a stab at Where’s Waldo. Here, “Herzog” takes a tone that’s somewhere between Freud and The X Files, taking the absurdity of the whole concept to a whole new level.

WERNER HERZOG EATS HIS SHOE

Returning to the authentic Herzog, these excerpts from Les Blank’s classic 1980 short film, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, are part serious cultural commentary, part humorous encounter with Herzog’s public persona, part rare glimpse of his private creative process as a deeply thoughtful filmmaker.

The film documents Herzog delivering on a bet he made with Errol Morris, which held that if Morris finished his acclaimed first feature, Gates of Heaven, Herzog would eat his shoe.

BONUS

You may recall an old Brain Pickings favorite from a couple of years ago, Clemens Kogler’s Le Grand Content — a brilliant blend of humor and philosophy reflecting on today’s infographic culture. Inspired by Jessica Hagy’s equally brilliant indexed blog, another Brain Pickings favorite, it’s narrated by a (rather excellent) Werner Herzog impersonator who nails Herzog’s characteristic monotonous snark with a degree of precision and an ounce of caricature that only adds to the dark charm of the piece.

This instant classic is without question in our top five animations of all time.

For a deeper dive into the magic of Herzog, we highly recommend Werner Herzog Collection, a fantastic 1977 film anthology featuring eight of his excellent films, along with commentary, as well as Herzog on Herzog, a priceless collection of interviews Herzog has given throughout his prolific career in both fiction and documentary.

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7 Must-Read Books by TED Global Speakers

Design imperialism, what gender equality has to do with military spending, and where 185 pig parts go.

Last week, reported from this year’s TEDGlobal — four grueling days of cerebral stimulation and idea orgy spectatorship. Today, we spotlight 7 must-read books by some of this year’s speakers, litmus-tested for brilliance in the world’s most reliable quality-control lab: the TED stage.

PIG O5049

Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma set out to explore the increasing difficulty with which we can trace the origin of the products we consume in this age of globalization, labor specialization and outsourcing.

In PIG O5049, she hunts down the astounding number of different products — 185, to be exact — made from parts of a specific pig, owned by a farmer friend and tagged with the identification number 05049.

The book is a photographic anthology of these items — ranging from — complete with infographic charts and diagrams outlining the production destiny of the various pig parts.

Beautifully bound and visually stunning, the book takes an unusual, non-preachy approach to an issue of ever-growing importance, leaving you the reader to draw your own conclusions — a task more challenging than it sounds in an age of information overload and prescriptive ideology.

WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM

We’ve had a longtime brain crush on cultural theorist and author Steven Johnson, one of the sharpest thinkers and most compelling writers in the broader world of creative culture and intellectual property. His latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, explores exactly what the title promises — and, based on his instant-hit TED talk, it does so in a brilliant way that treks across anthropology, sociology, philosophy, behavioral psychology, cognitive science and copyright law, breezing through the cross-pollination of these diverse disciplines with an ease and humor that promise a read not fit for putting down.

The book comes out in October and is now available for pre-order.

THE VISUAL MISCELLANEUM

The Visual Miscellaneum, which we reviewed in full last October, is one of our all-time favorite books, so we were delighted to see its author, David McCandless take the TED stage. (And even more delighted to chat with him about infoviz and Britishness over wine.)

If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and grab a copy of this visualization gem, a brilliantly curated anthology of infographic whimsy on anything from military spending to the most pleasurable guilty pleasures.

THE ACORN HOUSE COOKBOOK

Chef and entrepreneur Arthur Potts Dawson has set out to revolutionize the restaurant industry, the world’s most wasteful, second only to war. His Waterhouse restaurant, for instance, is the world’s first fully non-carbon eatery, running entirely on hydroelectricity from kitchen to table — a true walk-the-walk manifestation of his principles.

In The Acorn House Cookbook: Good Food from Field to Fork, with a foreword by TEDPrize winner and food activism celebrity Jamie Oliver, Dawson intersects great food with environmental sensibility in a recipe arsenal that makes for the most refined kind of moral and gustatory palate.

HALF THE SKY

At TED, women’s rights crusader Sheryl WuDunn made a convincing case for the idea that gender inequality is the greatest moral challenge of the 21st century.

Her bestselling book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, is as much a necessary course in cultural anthropology and gender politics as it is a manifesto for intercepting a vicious cycle of raging abuse and quiet oppression. She points to local women as the most powerful change agents without which it is impossible for a country to raise itself from poverty.

THE FORTY RULES OF LOVE

In The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak weaves a fascinating story-within-a-story involving a Bostonian suburban housewife, literary infatuation, and 13th-century mysticism.

The novel exudes Shafak’s characteristic East-West narrative, a cross-cultural bridge of eloquence and captivating storytelling, and links nicely to her excellent TED talk about how fiction can overcome identity politics.

Stories help us get a glimpse of each other and, sometimes, maybe even like what we see.”

DESIGN REVOLUTION

Last year, we reviewed Emily Pilloton‘s fantastic humanitarian design anthology, Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People. Since then, Pilloton and her partner have moved the Project H Design headquarters to Bernie County, North Carolina — one of rural America’s poorest areas, where 13% of children live below the poverty line. There, Pilloton has set out to revolutionize a broken education system from the ground up, founding the country’s first high school design/building program. She lives and breathes the Project H Design manifesto: There is no design without action; design WITH, not FOR; document, share and measure; start locally and scale globally; design systems, not stuff.

Design Revolution remains a powerful reminder of why humanitarian design matters — not to egos but to communities, not to award committees but to human ecosystems. It’s a particularly interesting read in the context of the recent epic kerfuffle in the design community, initiated by Bruce Nussbaum as he called designers the new imperialists, unleashing a deluge of responses by some of today’s most arduous in-the-field humanitarian designers, including Architecture for Humanity’s Cameron Sinclair, FrogDesign’s Robert Fabricant, and Pilloton herself.

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7 Quirky & Creative Playing Card Deck Designs

Soviet Mayans, typographic treats, and what mathematical functions have to do with the sexism of the sixties.

What’s not to love about playing cards? They are the perfect intersection of design, playtime and intellectual calculation. Today, we look at seven particularly creative, quirky and downright outlandish decks that inject extra aesthetic indulgence and fun into any card game.

OZLEM OLCER

As we raved on Twitter a few months ago, MAD DECK by Özlem Ölçer may just be the most gorgeous deck of playing cards ever designed.

Stunning custom illustrations grace the backs of the cards, like these gems found on the joker.

MARSHALL MCLUHAN

Yes, we’re a little (“little”…) obsessed with Marshall McLuhan over here. So these Distant Early Warning (DEW) playing cards by McLuhan hit the sweet spot on so many levels. Despite the distinct sexisms of the Mad Men era, this deck is a treasure chest of cultural commentary, subtle political satire and pop culture inside jokes.

As the story goes, these cards were the inspiration for Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies deck of dilemmas.

TAUBA AUERBACH

One Deck of Playing Cards by designer Tauba Auerbach comes as a dual series — one based on mathematical equations and one on geometric shapes.

In the mathematical set, basic math functions like +, – and ÷ represent suits, face cards are platonic solids, and jokers are ? and ?. Black and white foreground-background dynamics replace the traditional red and black, dividing the deck in half into black and white — a nice play Auerbach’s brilliant 50/50 book project of 2008, offering 100 pages of 100 patterns each composed of equal parts black and white. The opposites of each suit subtract mathematically and appear in the opposite color for the perfect inversion of color and function.

The geometric deck uses four basic shapes as suits, each abstracting the traditional representation of that card. The color scheme of the deck is red and black on white, with platonic solids representing the royal family. Original artwork and three new typefaces portray the king, queen and knave.

In short, absolutely brilliant.

JEAN DAVID

In the 1950’s, El Al Israel Airlines commissioned designer Jean David (sometimes referred to as Jan David) to create a deck of playing cards in which the faces portrayed heroes from Israel’s past. Park folklore, part vintage design goodness, the cards are an absolute treat of design and cultural heritage.

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JIM SUTHERLAND

What would a design showcase be without some typographic deliciousness? Thanks to designer Jim Sutherland, we don’t have to contemplate that apocalypse scenario. His typographic playing cards are designed with the basic guidelines of neither repeating nor altering any of the typefaces being used, which he self-admittedly qualified as solving 52 micro design problems.

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SOVIET MAYAN CARDS

Easily among the most baffling pieces of cross-cultural pollination is that fact that, apparently, Mayan motifs were popular during Soviet era in Russia. Case in point: This Mayan-inspired deck of playing cards, designed by an unknown Soviet artist in the middle of the 20th century. An intersection of Eastern enigma and Southern sorcery, these designs are as enchanted as they are befuddling.

INVISIBLE PLAYING CARDS

Finally, the perfect deck for your beachside poker game: These invisible playing cards by Kikkerland Design are cool, quirky, and completely waterproof.

And, at $6, they’re an absolute winning hand.

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5 Seminal Vintage Russian Animation Short Films

What dancing ballerinas and hungry kings have to do with the dawn of the digital age.

While Walt Disney was building an animation empire in America, a thriving school of animation mastery was unfolding on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Russian art directors, illustrators, animators and video producers were experimenting with techniques often decades ahead of their time and creating beautifully crafted, visually stunning short films despite the technological limitations of the era. Many of these masterpieces are now available in Masters Of Russian Animation — a remarkable collcection of animated shorts from the 1960s through 1980s in four volumes.

Today, we look at five of these gems, with many thanks to reader Sebastian Waack (@edutechnews) for bringing some of them to our attention.

HEDGEHOG IN THE FOG (1975)

Based on a Russian folk tale, Hedgehog in the Fog, a 1975 gem by master-animator Yuri Norstein, utilized techniques like cutout-animation and stop-motion three decades before they reached creative buzzword status.

Thinking about how these effects were achieved — brilliantly — in the age of manual, analog studio production does give one pause in the face of all the digital tools we take for granted today.

Found on Volume 2.

STORY OF A CRIME (1962)

Director Fyodor Khitruk’s Story of a Crime is part Hanna-Barbera, part Hitchcock, part something else entirely. Using techniques like cutout collages and photo-illustration hybrids long before they had entered the mainstream animation arsenal, the film won the Jury Prize at the prestigious 1980 film festival in Lille, France.

You can catch part 2 here. Found on Volume 1.

THE SINGING TEACHER (1968)

From director Anatoly Petrov comes The Singing Teacher, an eerie, haunting, stunningly illustrated gem from 1968.

Found on Volume 1.

THE KING’S SANDWICH (1985)

Based on the famous A. A. Milne poem The King’s Breakfast, director Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s The King’s Sandwich features intricate line illustration and remarkably expressive characters from the dawn of computer animation.

Found on Volume 3.

BALLERINA ON A BOAT (1969)

With its minimalist lines and intricate play of perspectives, director Lev Atamanov’s Ballerina on a Boat is a lovely exercise in storytelling through grace and simplicity.

Found on Volume 2.

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