A sad Kermit the Frog sings Elliot Smith's Needle in the Hay (complete with The Royal Tenenbaums parody), NIN's Hurt, and Radiohead's Creep (in which Kermit says "fucking"). (via buzzfeed)
Commercial for the little-known version of Grand Theft Auto for the circa-1985 NES. The Tanooki Suit is the best part. (via house next door)
I think I have a crush on 16-year-old Mena Trott.
A collection of videos showing directors in cameos.
Many directors at some point in their careers have stepped out from behind the camera to act. This is typically in a smaller, cameo role, and often with varying degrees of success: sometimes they're completely natural and sometimes they bring the film to a screeching halt. And sometimes you'd never even know they were there.
How to synchronize 5 metronomes. If you only watch one metronome video in your life, make it this one.
YouTube user barringer82 has posted several mini-compilations of films of different eras and directors. For instance: the 1980s, Wes Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lynch, the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino, and the 1970s.
Great 60-minute documentary on English painter Francis Bacon in six parts: one, two, three, four, five, six. The production is inventive and I've never seen someone answer so many seemingly penetrating questions so quickly and fluidly, save for the one he has to read off of a card produced from his pocket. (thx, dean)
Update: The program is available in one part here. (thx, marissa)
The Final Jeopardy blog posts a video each day's Final Jeopardy question. (thx, daniel)
Video of four people in a car driving down a road in Saudi Arabia with three of them outside the car doing what looks like ice skating on the pavement. That is some weird shit. (via cyn-c)
Timelapse video of the cherry trees blossoming at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden over a period of 9 days. If you haven't been over to the BBG yet this year, now would be a good time; most of their cherry trees are at "peak bloom" right now.
The 92nd St Y has put the video of a talk called The Art of the Book up on their site. The talk was held in Dec 2006 and featured Milton Glaser, Chip Kidd, and Dave Eggers with Michael Bierut moderating. You may recall that Glaser got into a bit of hot water for some comments he made about the career paths of women in graphic design.
A suggestion from the inbox: watch the fascinatingly disturbing eagle vs. goats video with a soundtrack of Juan Diego Flórez's encore-inducing tenor solo. Two great links that taste great together. (thx, andrew & rueben)
Update: The mash-up is now on YouTube...no separate soundtrack needed. (thx, james)
Golden Eagles can be up to three feet long with a wingspan of over 7 feet. Here's a video of a Golden Eagle hunting for food, a process that involves throwing live goats off of cliffs and then scavenging the carcass. If you're at all sensitive about seeing animals die, you really shouldn't watch this. For everyone else, the only way this could be more fascinating is if David Attenborough were narrating. (via waxy)
Time lapse of a gorgeous Chad Pugh illustration from start to finish (in HD).
The video is a condensed time lapse of screenshots over a several month period. Total physical drawing time is close to 40 hours and I'd add an equal amount of time for concept time and readying the print. A screenshot was taken every 5 seconds, which actually results in a full 18 minute video.
This illustration inspired Vimeo's wonderful login screen. A limited-edition print of the finished illustration is available. (via jakob)
Video of real-life Transformers costumes that actually work. The Optimus Prime even rolls! (thx, dianne (sorry dens, she beat you by 13 seconds))
Who knew Charlie Rose interviewing himself about technology could be so amusing? "Charlie Rose" by Samuel Beckett. Give it a bit to warm up. (via fimoculous)
CBS News report from 1975 detailing the last World Airways flight out of Da Nang near the end of the Vietnam War.
The flight was supposed be for stranded women and children but as soon as the plane landed in Da Nang, it was swamped by South Vietnamese soldiers attempting to flee the oncoming North Vietnamese forces.
There were 260 people aboard a plane which is designed to carry 105. The plane was overloaded by 20,000 pounds. The baggage compartments were loaded with people. Some of the problems during the flight included, the rear stairway remained partially extended for the entire flight, the main wheels would not retract, a hand grenade damage to one of the wings causing fuel loss, and the lower cargo doors were open. The plane had to fly at 10,000 feet because of lack of pressurization thus fuel consumption was three times greater than normal.
In the end, only 5 women and 2 or 3 children made it onboard. That's some powerful journalism. (thx, brandon)
Stephen Fry and The Machine That Made Us
All six parts of a BBC documentary called The Machine That Made Us are on YouTube: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six (60 minutes total). (BTW, if you're in the UK, you can watch it on the BBC's iPlayer.) The film stars Stephen Fry and tells the history of the Gutenberg Press.
Stephen's investigation combines historical detective work and a hands-on challenge. He travels to France and Germany on the trail of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press and early media entrepreneur. Along the way he discovers the lengths Gutenberg went to keep his project secret, explores the role of avaricious investors and unscrupulous competitors, and discovers why printing mattered so much in medieval Europe.
But to really understand the man and his machine, Stephen gets his hands dirty - assembling a team of craftsmen and helping them build a working replica of Gutenberg's original press. He learns how to make paper the 15th-century way and works as an apprentice in a metal foundry in preparation for the experiment to put the replica press through its paces. Can Stephen's modern-day team match the achievement of Gutenberg's medieval craftsmen?
Here's part one to get you started:
I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but it's supposed to be really good. Oh, and if you're thinking "who does this Fry bloke think he is going on about technology like he knows something about it", you should check out his blog...he's a top-notch tech blogger. (thx, dean)
RealScoop's software analyzes statements made by public figures in audio or video and plots the results on a scale of believability that runs from believable to highly questionable.
RealScoop uses advanced emotion-based voice analysis technology to rate the believability of people's statements.
For instance, here's Michael Vick apologizing for holding dog fights, Eliot Spitzer resigning the governorship of NY, and Bill Clinton's infamous "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" statement. The Clinton audio and associated metering is really pretty good...it spikes in all the right places. (thx, john)
Spine tingling "The World is Just Awesome" advertisement for the Discovery Channel. (via avenues)
This timelapse video of man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours is difficult to watch. The video accompanies an article in the New Yorker about elevators.
White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice-it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)
The end of White's story is heartbreaking. On the plus side, the article also discusses a favorite social phenomenon of mine, how strangers space themselves in elevators.
If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the "touch zone"; seven square feet as the "no-touch zone"; and ten square feet as the "personal-comfort zone." Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range -- less than eighteen inches between people -- "intimate distance," the point at which you can sense another person's odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, "Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons."
(via waxy)
The pictures of the accused are startling in the banality of the faces. (While the spelling of many of the names -- April, Britney, Brittini, Cara, Kayla, Mercades, Stephen, Zachary bring to mind a revived Mouseketeers.) A number of the girls look surprisingly similar, but minus the prison garb, they could just as easily be reacting to a berating for poor schoolwork. The boys, who were posted as lookouts while the girls carried out the beating, look a little more ready for jail.
The pictures are fascinating in the narrow range of emotion they convey, from self-pity to sullenness, but to my mind all stop before genuine contriteness. (I'm reading this in, of course, but I have a hunch I'm right.) Yet there's an all-American look to these kids that can only remind us how narrow the line is between good and evil.
Matt Jones argues that short looping videos are the real long photographs.
A loop would be a captured action or situation rather than a narrative, where the duration of the loop is set but the loop goes on forever so you can study the layers, the detail, the figure and the ground in the same way you can a photo. A bottled system not a short story. Think about all the tiny clips you've played again and again on the internet just to see one aspect, one moment, act out -- a goal or a dramatic chipmunk. Not stories, but toy moments.
The Art of the Title Sequence, a blog highlighting good movie title sequences. (thx, ben)
Awesome collection of folk graphics and photography protesting Flickr's decision to let members post short videos. But without the video, we'd miss out on stuff like this. (via waxy)
It will take you literally hours to get through this list of the 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time (video often included). (thx, miguel)
This video makes me irrationally happy...I watched it four times in a row just now.
It was the freshest move I've ever seen, like he was floating on air.
And yeah, that's Kanye West's Vimeo account. His blog is entertaining as well; a recent favorite post is YOU CAN'T MAKE ME STOP POSTING YAGHTS!!!
Update: Vimeo erased the video because it was not original content so I pointed to one on YouTube. They also erased all but one video on Kanye's account...I guess they were all videos by other people.
Flickr users can now upload video to their accounts. I uploaded a video during the beta test but since I'm not a pro user, I can't show it to anyone now that Flickr's gone public with the video uploading. :(
Update: Ok, Flickr Pro is back in effect. Still can't mark the video unprivate. Maybe the video stuff isn't truly live yet? (thx, heather & adam)
Update: Yep, the video stuff goes live "starting late Tuesday or early Wednesday".
Update: The video stuff looks like it's live now. Here's a video of Ollie crawling that we took a couple of months ago. Videos are limited to 90 seconds...they're calling them "long photos". Love that.
Video of the top 50 soccer goals. A dubbed-from-VCR YouTube video is probably not the best way to watch these, but that's the hand we've been dealt.
Video of Charlie Rose's conversation with chef Thomas Keller the other night. Good stuff as always, although I'm disappointed about how completely he's embraced the idea of the chef as empire-tender rather than as a person who cooks.
I realized the other day that I prefer eating at places where the person that owns the place is in the kitchen because no one else is going to care as much about your meal and experience as that person. Which doesn't mean that you can't find excellent food and experiences at Per Se or the diner around the corner, but the increasingly prevalent fine dining empires feel like, in the words of Bilbo Baggins, "too little butter spread over too much toast". (via eater)
Anders Weberg makes true P2P art. Weberg shares his videos on Bittorrent until a single other user downloads them. Then he stops sharing it and...
After that the artwork will be available for as long as other users share it. The original file and all the material used to create it are deleted by the artist. [...] Feel free to don't or download the film, watch it and share it for as long as you like. Or delete it immediately.
David Attenborough narrates a sexual encounter between two leopard slugs. I know slug sex probably isn't your thing, but this is worth a look. Beautiful. (thx, alex)
Awesome trippy video made in 1971 that demonstrates through dance the process of amino acids linking to form protein. Skip ahead to ~3:30 for the dance itself. This film is still being shown in class at MIT. (thx, jeff)
Steve Nash directed his own Nike commercial. Nash's original concept for the commercial is clever:
At first, the idea was to shoot on different mediums -- camera phone, 8-millimeter, 16-millimeter (the eventual choice), security footage. My idea was the city was watching me. The genesis was a lot of people film me or take a picture of me in the city on cellphones. If it's such an appetite to see me do normal things, it was an idea to do something people like.
(via truehoop)
There Will Be Vader, a mashup of There Will Be Blood and Star Wars, with Daniel Plainview playing the part of Vader.
(via house next door)
Andy Baio has digitized and put online a VHS tape from 1995 called "Internet Power!" Gape in wonder at its mid-90s-ness.
Robots are getting better...the Big Dog robot can recover itself from slipping on ice, walk in the deep snow, and keep its balance when kicked hard in the side. Great video. (via mouser)
This talk by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor was universally considered the best talk at the TED conference last month. In it, she describes the lessons she learned from studying her stroke from inside her own head as it was happening.
And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. And I realized, "Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke! I'm having a stroke!" And the next thing my brain says to me is, "Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?"
A video stream of yesterday's iPhone SDK presentation.
Update: Jason at SVN speculates on the implications of yesterday's announcements.
An (animated (and condensed (and brief (and truncated)))) history of evil. Almost as interesting for the comments as for the video itself.
A lot of sweat goes into every bottle.
(thx, aaron)
I'm interested in short video as a contemporary equivalent of the photograph. Here are two examples. My lovely wife talking about her lovely mother. My nephew a few years ago singing his favorite song. I love these moments, not only because they are people I love, but because I think they show, as snapshots do, how spectacular a moment can be.
21 accents in 2 minutes 30 seconds.
(via gracefulflavor)
Do you love Will Ferrell? Do you sweat?
Trailer for an amazing-looking game called Crayon Physics Deluxe; it's part Line Rider, part The Incredible Machine. Deluxe is a sequel to the more rudimentary Crayon Physics (sadly, PC-only). (via clusterflock)
Harlem rent parties and Fats Waller
According to Wikipedia, a rent party is:
a social occasion where tenants hire a musician or band to play and pass the hat to raise money to pay their rent. The rent party played a major role in the development of jazz and blues music.
Further reading suggests that rent parties started in Harlem in the 1910s as a way to offset rising rents.
Harlemites soon discovered that meeting these doubled, and sometimes tripled, rents was not so easy. They began to think of someway to meet their ever increasing deficits. Someone evidently got the idea of having a few friends in as paying party guests a few days before the landlord's scheduled monthly visit. It was a happy; timely thought. The guests had a good time and entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of the party. Besides, it cost each individual very little, probably much less than he would have spent in some public amusement place. Besides, it was a cheap way to help a friend in need. It was such a good, easy way out of one's difficulties that others decided to make use of it. Thus was the Harlem rent-party born....
Jazz pianist Fats Waller was associated with these parties and lived a short but colorful life.
The ebullient young man with the dazzling jazz style was a big hit at the Sherman Hotel. His nightly audience included men with wide lapels and bulging pockets. One evening Fats felt a revolver poked into his paunchy stomach. He found himself bullied into a black limousine, heard the driver ordered to East Cicero. Sweat pouring down his body, Fats foresaw a premature end to his career, but on arrival at a fancy saloon, he was merely pushed toward a piano and told to play. He played. Loudest in applause was a beefy man with an unmistakable scar: Al Capone was having a birthday, and he, Fats, was a present from "the boys".
The party lasted three days. Fats exhausted himself and his repertoire, but with every request bills were stuffed into his pockets. He and Capone consumed vast quantities of food and drink. By the time the black limousine headed back to the Sherman, Fats had acquired severeal thousand dollars in cash and a decided taste for vintage champagne.
I was inspired to read about rent parties and Waller by this interview with Michel Gondry, director of Be Kind Rewind. Gondry says about his film:
It's important in the story that there's a parallel between what's happening in the film and what happened in the past with rent parties, which were very real. Fats Waller became the great musician he was through those parties. When someone could not afford the rent for one month, they'd make a party. You'd bring a dollar, and there would be a piano contest all night long. People making their own entertainment, that's exactly what it is.
Here's Waller performing one of his most well-known pieces, Ain't Misbehavin'.
Jad Abumrad from Radio Lab curates The Morning News' Video Digest and selects clips from movies with good music.
Interesting explanation of Prince Rupert's Drops with accompanying video demonstration.
The very high stress within the drop gives rise to unusual qualities, such as the ability to withstand a blow from a hammer on the bulbous end without breaking, while the drops will disintegrate explosively if the tail end is even slightly damaged. When this happens, the large amount of potential energy stored in the drop's crystalline structure is released, causing fractures to propagate through the material at very high speed.
I did research on glass back in college but I never heard anything about this.
Kooky video by Chip Kidd in which he does impressions of people interpreting odd bits of text. The Wicked Witch of the West reciting Psalms 23 is my favorite. The video is in support of Kidd's new book, The Learners, out today. (via towleroad)
Nice TV ad for the Madrid Metro...a view of the city from underground.
Demo film of the Polaroid SX-70 made by Charles and Ray Eames but set to a soundtrack of The Cramps performing Garbageman. Wot? (via spurgeonblog)
Video of a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on the topic of "Does God Exist?"
Video of the world's fastest clapper. What a showman!
Update: And this guy can do the hambone ("a rhythmic knee and chest slapping motion") pretty damn fast. (thx, alesh)
A collection of time-lapse movies of people playing Wii. One fellow plays for quite some time while holding a newborn baby.
Time merge media
Someone made a video overlay of the 134 times it took him to get through one level of hacked version of Mario World.
Oh, and how that relates to quantum mechanics:
But, we can kind of think of the multi-playthrough Kaizo Mario World video as a silly, sci-fi style demonstration of the Quantum Suicide experiment. At each moment of the playthrough there's a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulator's save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.
Some of my favorite art and media deals with the display of multiple time periods at once. Here are some other examples, many of which I've featured on kottke.org in the past.
Averaging Gradius predates the Mario World video by a couple years; it's 15 games of Gradius layered over one another.
I found even the more pointless things incredibly interesting (and telling), like seeing when each person pressed the start button to skip the title screen from scrolling in, or watching as each Vic Viper, in sequence, would take out the red ships flying in a wave pattern, to leave behind power-ups in an almost perfect sine wave sequence. I love how the little mech-like gunpods together emerge from off screen, as a bright, white mass, and slowly break apart into a rainbow of mech clones.
According to the start screen, Cursor*10 invites the you to "cooperate by oneself". The game applies the lessons of Averaging Gradius and multiple-playthrough Kaizo Mario World to create a playable game. The first time through, you're on your own. On subsequent plays, the game overlays your previous attempts on the screen to help you avoid mistakes, get through faster, and collaborate on the tougher puzzles.
Moving away from games, several artists are experimenting with the compression of multiple photographs made over time into one view. Jason Salavon's averaged Playboy centerfolds and other amalgamations, Atta Kim's long exposures, Michael Wesley's Open Shutter Projekt and others. I'm quite sure there are many more.
Dozens of frames of Run Lola Run racing across the giant video screen in the lobby of the IAC building.
The same kind of thing happens in this Call and Response video; 9 frames display at the same time (with audio), each a moment ahead of the previous frame.
Related, but not exactly in the same spirit, are projects like Noah Kalina's Noah K. Everyday in which several photos of the same person (or persons) taken over time are displayed on one page, like frames of a very slow moving film. More examples: JK Keller's The Adaption to my Generation, Nicholas Nixon's portraits of the Brown sisters, John Stone's fitness progress, Diego Golberg's 32 years of family portraits, and many more.
Update: Another video game one: 1000 cars racing at the same time. (thx, matt)
Update: More games: Super Earth Defense Game, Time Raider, and Timebot. (thx, jon)
Update: Recreating Movement is a method for making time merge photos (thx, boris):
With the help of various filters and settings Recreating Movement makes it possible to extract single frames of any given film sequence and arranges them behind each other in a three-dimensional space. This creates a tube-like set of frames that "freezes" a particular time span in a film.
How You See It overlays three TV news programs covering the same story. (via waxy)
Update: James Seo's White Glove Tracking visualizations. The Slinky one is mesmerizing once you figure out what to look for. Seo also keeps a blog on spilt-screen media.
Several very cool animations, graphs, and photos of Northern Hemisphere sea ice coverage are available from The Cryosphere Today. Among them: ice coverage time-lapse from 1978-2006 and 2007's ice retreat (the greatest ever recorded). (via ben saunders)
A series of four lectures on physics, specifically quantum electrodynamics, by Richard Feynman. Only Part 1 is available on Google Video and the rest are in streaming Real format (blech)...hopefully they too will make their way onto Google Video.
Update: Another lecture by Feynman, this one about Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics.
Update: I got an email from the nice folks at Vega Science Trust asking me to change the wording of this entry with regard to encouraging people to put these copyrighted videos up on Google Video. Fair enough...what I really meant by that is I wish the videos were presented in a more useable manner than RealVideo format. If there's one thing that YouTube has shown us more than anything, it's that people find watching video in embedded Flash players really convenient.
This video is too long and come frontloaded with too much explanation, but like a jelly doughnut, there's some goodness in the middle.
Basically, I simulate clocks as living organisms. Selective pressure is focused on their ability to accurately tell time. NO goal is imposed on the design (you can tell this because every simulation ends with a differently constructed clock). And it works. Clocks evolve through a series of transitional forms: Pendulum, Proto-clock, 1-handed Clock, 2-handed Clock, 3-handed Clock, and 4-handed Clock. Gradually the complexity is built up.
Sarah Silverman would like her boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel to know...well, just watch. (via davenetics)
How to make a fireball you can hold in your hand. Sweet Jesus, that's cool.
Update: According to the commenters at Boing Boing, this may or may not be a hoax. As usual, use caution when attempting to hold fire in your hand. (thx, seuss)
I CAN'T stop laughing at this laughing shark.
Beautiful, beautiful slow-motion skate video intro by Spike Jonze. The video it's taken from isn't too shoddy either...here's a typical glowing review. (via avenues)
If you're curious as to what designers mean when they talk about design, check out Paola Antonelli's talk from last year's TED conference. (BTW, TED has made publicly available a great number of talks from their conferences...like 40-50 hours of material.)
Short teaser for Generation Kill, David Simon and Ed Burns' next project for HBO about the Iraq War. It's from October but I hadn't seen it until now so maybe you hadn't either? The 7-hour miniseries is based on Evan Wright's book of the same name. This video discusses the book and its subject matter. (thx, david)
The I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!!! scene from There Will Be Blood. If you haven't seen the movie, don't watch this...it's from a scene near the end. (P.S. DRAINAGE!!!)
I have finally found the guy I want to marry. Seriously, this is my favorite YouTube video right now, and I'm not even sure that I can explain why. Something about the soft color, and the quiet. And he's so sensitive. (I sure hope he's 18 or older or I'm gonna feel real bad inside.)
Lawyer-Dance
Dying to see this video now showing in Chelsea of a dance performed by lawyers, including John Sloss, a film attorney, and Scott Rosenberg, who I think is with Legal Aid. It's playing with another video, of four day laborers hired to create an earthwork on the beach; both are by Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom.
Eugene Mirman reports from the New Hampshire primaries in front of Wal-Mart's, Burger Kings, and other live locations.
I saw Mitt Romney speak yesterday and at the time I was, like, I don't really like this and then when I woke up, I HATED it.
(via mr john hodgman)
Graffiti Research Lab built their own camera rig to capture bullet time photography (a la The Matrix) for $5000-$8000. Here are the instructions to build your own and the music video they made using the rig.
Todd Gallagher explores the myth of grabbing a dollar bill off the top of a basketball backboard and tries to find someone who can do it.
The legend of touching the top of the backboard has gone on for years, and it has been excitedly attributed to so many different players that it's commonly assumed any number of guys in the NBA can do it. But in a sport where any individual achievement is promoted ad nauseam, we've never seen any proof of it actually being done.
Check out these videos of his leading candidate, James White: White doing a between-the-legs dunk from the free throw line and his dunks from the 2006 NCAA dunk contest.
Video of people describing their split-screened counterparts. Give this one a shot...it's better than I made it sound. Simple, restrained, and thoughtfully made. (via snarkmarket)
Demo of VideoTrace, "a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video -- models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence". Starts off slow but gets interesting with the one-click truck cloning. (thx, lance)
The last part of this video featuring Conan O'Brien singing The Beastie Boys' Sabotage as Edith Bunker from All in the Family makes me laugh over and over and over.
David Lynch does an iPhone commercial, not really. (via andre)
Hilariously bad knockoffs of Pixar's Ratatouille and Cars called Ratatoing and The Little Cars. (via waxy)
Burton is offering a $5000 prize for the best snowboarding video taken at one of the three remaining US ski areas (Alta, Taos, Deer Valley, Mad River Glen) that don't allow snowboarding. The intro video is the perfect explanation for why these four areas don't allow snowboards.
Sean Ohlencamp works at Chiat Day and recorded his computer desktop once a day for the past year. (via le monoscope)
Video compilation of the brightest frame from 1500 different movie explosions. Turn up the sound for this one.
Video of Peter Sellers reciting The Beatles A Hard Day's Night in the style of Laurence Olivier doing Shakespeare's Richard III. Got all that? (via cyn-c)
Barnes & Noble's Media section is filling out nicely with audio and video interviews, readings, and conversations with a wide range of interesting authors.
Director File has put out its list of Ten Best Music Videos of 2007. Of particular note on the list is a sweet and heartwarming video for The Bees "Listening Man" directed by Dominic Leung.
Leung began his career as a part of hammer & tongs, the creative team behind many influential music videos as well as the movies Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, on which he acted as 2nd unit director and title sequence director, and the upcoming Son of Rambow, which he edited. (via antville)
The "lost intro" to Star Wars, a scene featuring Luke pining for adventure on Tatooine. I'm glad it got lost. (via cyn-c)
The War on Drugs and scopolamine, the perfect drug
How America Lost the War on Drugs, a history of the United States government's efforts to stop its citizens from using illegal substances, primarily crack, heroin, and methamphetamines. Quite long but worth the read.
All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic.
It's not that hard to see how things got off the rails here. Dealing with the supply of drugs is ineffective (it's too lucrative for people to stop selling and too easy to find countries which seek to profit from it) but provides the illusion of action while attacking the problem from the demand side, which appears to be more effective, comes with messy and complex social problems. What a waste. The bits about meth & the lobbying efforts by the pharmaceutical industry and the medical marijuana crackdowns are particularly maddening.
Somewhat related is a 9-part series from VBS about scopolamine, one of the world's scariest drugs (via fimoculous). Just blowing the powder into someone's face is sufficient for them to enter a wakeful zombie state and become the perfect rape or crime victim.
The last thing Andrea Fernandez recalls before being drugged is holding her newborn baby on a Bogota city bus. Police found her three days later, muttering to herself and wandering topless along the median strip of a busy highway. Her face was badly beaten and her son was gone.
The description of the effect of scopolamine on people reminds me of what the Ampulex compressa wasp does to cockroaches:
From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it -- in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex -- like a dog on a leash.
I wonder if the chemical reactions are similar in both cases.
Wow, The Simpsons did a parody of Noah Kalina's Everyday video. Noah, you just graduated summa cum laude from Pop Culture University.
Update: But apparently the background music was used without permission.
A few months back a producer from the Simpsons contacted Carly about using her song 'everyday' for an upcoming episode in which they were going to parody my video. She was negotiating a rate for the song, until they never got back to her. No fee was agreed on, no contracts signed.
Maybe they decided since it was parody they didn't need permission? I don't find that likely since what little I know about Hollywood/TV is that they're really concerned about clearing rights. (thx, slava)
Update: The song rights mixup was an accidental oversight and is currently being corrected.
A list of anthropomorphized online video players.
YouTube - Paris Hilton. Fast, a little out of control, used by every fifteen year old in town, looks alright but you get kinda tired of seeing it everywhere.
The opening title sequence of The Kingdom is a nice 3.5 minute overview of the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia.
What did Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson's ear at the end of Lost in Translation? Someone did a bit of audio analysis and posted their findings as a video. (via avenues)
Duelity is a split-screen movie with one half of the screen showing the six-day creation of the earth & man in scientific terms and the other half showing the Big Bang/evolution origin of the universe as it might have been written in the Bible. (Click on "watch" then "duelity" to get the full effect.) Nice use of infographics and illustration. (thx, slava)
Led Zeppelin reunited for one concert last night in London with over 1 million people registering for the 20,000 available tickets. There are video clips available on Google Video and YouTube and two bootlegged songs have surfaced online so far.
Anhedonia is a 90-min film that uses the audio from Annie Hall and stock video footage from Getty; here's an 11-min excerpt. (thx, katerina)
IAC's Manhattan headquarters has an absolutely massive video wall in the lobby. ITP professor Daniel Shiffman took his class over to play around with it, projecting hundreds of frames of Run Lola Run on the wall at the same time in sequence. You can see the scene cuts racing along the wall, demonstrating the franticness of the movie.
On-set photos of David Lynch and cast members from the final episode of Twin Peaks. (via waxy)
Behind-the-scenes of a Gucci perfume ad directed by Lynch, referencing his own most recent feature, Inland Empire. Finished commercial here. (via spoutblog)
Upon watching Inland Empire, I was so immediately immersed, my first thought was that David Lynch should only ever shoot video. Apparently, he feels the same.
Two more movies on my horizon, both about outsiders in the music business:
- The trailer for Young @ Heart that nearly brought me to tears last night can't yet be found online, and the clip available at Channel4, where the film originally aired in the UK is a bit dry. Instead, you'll find info on the film and two great clips at The Documentary Blog, including a heart-wrenching performance of the Young @ Heart chorus of elderly people (average age 80) performing Coldplay, part of a repertoire including The Clash, The Ramones, and Sonic Youth.
- Great World of Sound is an Altmanesque comedy about two normal southern guys who get caught up in a record industry talent scout scheme. The trailer at Apple looks promising.
VHS gets love from two upcoming movies
Most avid readers will speak to an emotional attachment to books through associations of the senses - the roughness of the page, the smell of ink and glue - when describing a love of reading. Filmmakers and connoisseurs of film will cite an obsession with the physical properties of the celluloid through which movies are projected.
But for a generation of filmmakers who cut their filmmaker teeth by shooting with the family camcorder and editing with two VCRs, there is a logical fixation with the object of the plastic and magnetic 1/2" VHS videocassette and the visual artifacts of its recorded image.
Two movies will be released in the next months which hold the VHS aesthetic dear. One is Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind in which two video store clerks decide to deal with a store full of accidentally erased tapes by remaking the classic movies in their own, VHS homebrew fashion.
The other paean to VHS is Son of Rambow, Garth Jennings' film which was the darling of Sundance this year. The title is that of the homebrewed movie that two little boys make after discovering and being mindblown by a bootleg copy of Rambo: First Blood on VHS.
No trailer yet for Son of Rambow, but a review from The New York Times.
This begs the question: with Super-8 and VHS all but a distant memory, with MiniDV on the way to extinction, what formats will the future filmmakers obsess over and what artifacts will they attempt to reproduce for nostalgia as they grow up and the formats of their youth are phased out?
I'm a philosophic man, seduced into carpentry.
-Harry Partch
The Japan Society in New York is currently staging "Delusion of the Fury," the best-known work of Harry Partch. Partch was a pioneer of microtonal music who began modifying conventional instruments, then eventually manufacturing his own instruments in order to write music that conventional instruments couldn't play. In this video from 1968, he is seen playing an instrument of his creation, the harmonic canon.
Update: Ben Tesch, who launched the collaborative weather site cumul.us in October, also developed a site for American Mavericks in honor of Harry Partch and his music. The site allows you to play virtual recreations of a large selection of Partch's instruments. It's very cool.
Activision is working with Nintendo on re-mastering the Guitar Hero III discs for the Wii, which have been mistakenly encoded to reproduce music in mono rather than in stereo. Once the re-mastering has been done, early next year, the company will swap out current Guitar Hero III discs for free.
I honestly hadn't noticed the mono issue, but I'm still waiting for my replacement 'Pet Sounds' to ship.
Woody Allen is always on.
A similar trick of media with The Wire.
A history of the laugh track at Slate.
(via and higher quality version at itisnotforyou)
The eponymous train of Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited is fictional, but loosely based on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, nicknamed the "Toy Train." Photos found on flickr reveal a color palette as lush as that of the movie.
New episodes of The Wire, available now! Well, sort of. The Amazon page for the season 4 DVDs contains three mini prequels to the series: one with a grade school-aged Prop Joe, a teenaged Omar, and McNulty's first day with the homicide unit.
This rare video of a 1977 Andy Kaufman performance on the weekly musical late night TV series The Midnight Special is probably as good a litmus test as any for an appreciation of Andy. (via Paul Scheer)
"There's only three things I've ever been afraid of: electricity, heights, and women. And I'm married, too."
Accompanied by an exalted score, this video of a guy who flies around on the outside of helicopters and repairs high-voltage power lines is enthralling. (via whatdoiknow)
Roberto Carlos, O Rei (The King)
Influenced by his idol, Elvis Presley and the 1950s rock revolution, he rose to stardom as the main figure of the 60s musical movement known as Jovem Guarda (Young guard, in opposition to the 'old guard' of Brazilian music), which was the first manifestation of the Brazilian pop rock movement.
In 1966 Brazil, this man was bigger than the Beatles.
(thx, chana)
Poignant, amusing, disturbing, hunger-inducing? I don't know what to make of this video, but I can't stop watching it. If you only watch one chocolate bunny melting video this year, make it this one. (via clusterflock)
Crash test video of a Smart Car hitting a wall at 70 mph. Compare with these tests of a pair of Chinese sedans. Ouch. (thx, eric)
Been on a bit of a Guitar Hero kick lately...I just played it for the first time recently so of course I'm looking around the web for advice, hacks, YouTube videos, etc. Nothing like a little web research to reinforce how little you know.
Anyhoo, I found this video of a 8-yo kid shredding it up on Guitar Hero 2...he missed only three notes on an expert level song and wasn't even looking at the screen some of the time. Little blighter. If you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go have a few alcoholic drinks, smoke some cigarettes, rent a car, and join the Army...let's see him do all that! (P.S. I wrote a hit play!)
With the blessing of the main abbot, Shi Yong Xin, Guariglia has earned the full collaboration of the monks to create an astonishing, empathic record of the Shaolin art forms and the individuals who consider themselves the keepers of these traditions. It is the first time the monks have allowed such extensive documentation of these masters and their centuries-old art forms-from Buddhist mudras to classical kung fu-in their original setting, a 1,500-year-old Buddhist temple.
Photos and video here. Watching the videos, especially the one featuring Tong Jian Quan, I was reminded of hip hop dancing (Michael Jackson in particular) in a way that watching kung-fu and other martial arts in Hollywood movies does not.
Also, Shaolin monk Hai Deng was famous for performing a one-finger handstand. The video seems a little suspect but this performance brings the single finger handstand into the realm of possibility.