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Entries for March 2015
Bjork reveals her moving album cover for Family
Holy crap! Bjork’s released something she’s calling a “moving album cover,” although it appears it’s basically the video for the song “Family” on her Vulnicura album. It’s about the darkest, strangest, most beautiful thing I’ve seen on the internet in a while. The video is a collaboration between Bjork and Andrew Thomas Huang.
(thx This Isn’t Happiness)
Severed goat heads are haunting Brooklyn
“Severed goat heads keep turning up in nearby Prospect Park,” reports Adrien Chen. Was it religious sacrifice? A prank? Something else?
A mysterious flood of goat heads is the only interesting thing that has happened in Park Slope since I moved to the neighborhood three years ago. Yes, the rush to blame a little-understood religion practiced largely by immigrants smacked a bit of lazy xenophobia, but the idea of Park Slope as a hotbed of animal sacrifice, in addition to child-friendly bars, was undeniably intriguing. In a city where everyday occurrences are casually weighed against the events of September 11, 2001, it was shocking to find that so many of my neighbors and I were actually shocked. The goat heads seemed to rear out of some shadow New York City that was even gnarlier than the pre-Guiliani version I’d seen in the movies, and at the edge of Brooklyn’s most thoroughly gentrified neighborhood, to boot. When New York asked me to investigate the goat heads, I leapt at the chance. I wanted to see if the world they hinted at lived up to the hype.”
His investigation includes a Freedom of Information Law request (“‘I’VE SEEN AS MUCH AS SEVEN SQUIRRELS DEAD IN THE PARK,’ went one report. ‘I’VE SEEN ONE THAT’S DECAPITATED’”), a Vodou priest, and multiple trips to the butcher.
Snoop Dogg’s Peaches N Cream lyric video
Snoop Dogg’s next album, BUSH, doesn’t drop until May 12, but until then, we’ve got a very cool lyric video for the first single, “Peaches N Cream,” featuring Charlie Wilson and directed by Wolf & Crow.
The hardest working man in Japanese porn
Details has a long, strange profile of Shimiken, the “king of Japanese porn.”
On a sunny Saturday morning in eastern Tokyo, a silver Audi pulls into a parking lot and sparks pandemonium. Out of the driver’s seat bounces a small, stocky man with bulging biceps, spiky orange hair, and a broad smile spread across his effulgent, spray-tanned face. He bounds onto the pavement wearing a hoodie and a T-shirt that reads SEX INSTRUCTOR. To his left, the mostly male crowd leans forward, en masse. “Shimiken!” several shout, and a clatter of smartphone shutter sounds follows like a round of applause.
“Let’s go,” Shimiken whispers to a handler attempting to clear a path through the throng. He raises one arm over his head to air-high-five his riveted fans. It’s the morning of the Japan Adult Expo, and the crowd has been waiting for tickets. Inside, they’ll get to meet the stars of their wildest fantasies. Outside, they’ve already caught a glimpse of something rarer: the man who has actually lived them all.
Apparently, Shimiken, who is 35, is “beset by XXX exhaustion” because, he says, “the number of male porn stars in Japan is less than that of Bengal tigers.”
Fury end title sequence
I finally got a chance to watch “Fury” last weekend, and the part of the movie that was the most compelling to me was the end title sequence. The sequence terrifyingly captures the slamming chaos of war. (Contains graphic imagery.)
The main title sequence and the end title sequence were created by Greenhaus GFX.
Meet guest editor Susannah Breslin
Hello! I’m going to be off for the next week and Susannah Breslin will be editing the site in my stead. From her bio:
I created one of the internet’s first sex blogs, The Reverse Cowgirl, and I’ve been called a “modern-age Studs Terkel.” In 2008, TIME named me one of the top 25 bloggers of the year. I’m best known for my longform investigation of the Great Recession’s impact on the porn industry: “They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?” I’ve written for Harper’s Bazaar, Details, Newsweek, Salon, Slate, The Daily Beast, Marie Claire, Variety, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The LA Weekly. I’ve appeared on CNN, NPR, and “Politically Incorrect.”
Her newest work is a new short story called The Tumor that was drawn from her breast cancer diagnosis a few years ago. Susannah has long sent me interesting links and emails, so I’m excited to see what she gets up to this week. Welcome, Susannah!
Robert Durst arrested on eve of Jinx finale
Whoa! Robert Durst has been arrested in New Orleans in connection with the killing of his friend Susan Berman in Los Angeles in 2000.
Robert A. Durst, the scion of a New York real estate family, was arrested on Saturday in New Orleans on a warrant issued in a homicide investigation by Los Angeles County, law enforcement officials said.
For years, questions have swirled around Mr. Durst about the unsolved killing of a close friend and confidante in Los Angeles 15 years ago, and about his first wife’s disappearance in 1982 and the shooting and dismemberment of a Texas neighbor in 2001.
Durst is the subject of the HBO series The Jinx, which I have been obsessed with over the past few weeks. The final episode airs tonight. Jinx director Andrew Jarecki must be freaking out…the arrest might be due to new evidence uncovered by Jarecki during the production of the show.
Update: On November 7, 2016, Durst pled not guilty to Berman’s murder.
The beauty of pi puts infinity within reach
I’m dreading it. No hope of solving any equations that day, what with the pie-eating contests, the bickering over the merits of pi versus tau (pi times two), and the throwdowns over who can recite more digits of pi. Just stay off the streets at 9:26:53, when the time will approximate pi to ten places: 3.141592653.
The New Yorker’s Steven Strogatz on why pi matters.
Tipping mystifies tourists, economists and anthropologists. Should we stop?
Dalek Relaxation Video
It’s been a hectic week and now that it’s Friday, let’s all chill with this relaxation video narrated by a Dalek.
Exhale. EXHALE! EX!!!-HALE!!! Ps. Make your voice sound like a Dalek. (via digg)
Crayon sculptures
These crayon sculptures by Hoang Tran are amazing.
Select sculptures are available on Etsy. (via ignant)
Desire map of the 50 states
In Alaska, people search for the cost of a gallon of milk. In Alabama and Florida, people search for the cost of abortions. In other states, vasectomies, facelifts, and taxis are popular searches. The map was compiled using the autocomplete results for “how much does a * cost”… for each of the 50 states. (via mr)
Photoshop experts using Photoshop 1.0
Photoshop 1.0 came out in 1990 and didn’t have layers, live preview, multiple levels of undo, or many other features. See some current Photoshop experts wax nostalgic and wrestle with the lack of features in this entertaining video.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
Super slow motion video of popping a balloon underwater
This video, shot at 36,000 frames per second, shows a balloon popping underwater. I am not quite sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this.
For instance, the air bubbles do not immediately rise to the surface…it takes them about 20-25 ms to get in the mood. Compare with a slow motion video of popping a water balloon in air:
Again, watch how it takes for gravity to kick in. It’s like Wile E. Coyote after having run off a cliff, hanging in midair holding a sign that says “EEP!” (via @BadAstronomer)
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
HBO will premiere the critically acclaimed authorized documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck later this year on May 4. Here’s the trailer:
Looks promising. The film is directed by Brett Morgen, who also did the excellent The Kid Stays in the Picture documentary about Robert Evans. And the name comes from a late-80s mixtape made by Cobain.
Harvard sentences are standardized phrases used to test audio equipment. “A salt pickle tastes fine with ham.”
Fire? What Fire? Football!
Ok, this is one of the strangest photos I’ve ever seen. In the background, there’s a building on fire and in the foreground, there’s a football game going on like there’s not a building on fire right there. From their photographic recap of 1965, In Focus has the story:
Spectators divide their attention as the Mount Hermon High School football team in Massachusetts hosts Deerfield Academy during a structure fire in the Mount Hermon science building on November 24, 1965. The science building was destroyed, and Mount Hermon lost the football game, ending a two-year-long winning streak.
Update: The photo above reminded some readers of this photo, taken by Joel Sternfeld in 1978.
You’ll notice the fireman buying a pumpkin while the house behind him burns, although there’s a bit more to the story than that.
In 1996, a building burned outside the stadium during the LSU/Auburn game:
(via @slowernet & @davisseal)
Update: Sarah Lyall of the NY Times goes long on the Mount Hermon photo, which was very much real and celebrated when it was initially published.
Even at the time, when the photograph was reprinted around the world, people thought it was too weird to be real. “My colleagues maintain it is a real picture, but I believe it is of the April fool type,” wrote Phil F. Brogan, an editor at The Bulletin newspaper in Bend, Ore. (“I can assure you that the picture was not faked,” replied Arthur H. Kiendl Jr., the headmaster of Mount Hermon, the Massachusetts prep school where the game took place.)
In fact, the photograph, of Mount Hermon’s game against Deerfield Academy on Nov. 20, 1965, was an instant classic. Though the photographer, Robert Van Fleet, never received much in the way of money for it, it was named the Associated Press sports photograph of the year. It was featured on the back page of Life magazine. It was reproduced in dozens of newspapers and magazines across the United States, including The New York Times, often accompanied by supposedly amusing captions about Rome burning, the teams’ “red-hot rivalry” and the like.
I am obsessed with The Jinx. It’s like Serial++. Can’t wait for the last episode on Sunday
Hydrothermal hints of the potential for life on Enceladus
Two teams of NASA scientists have discovered evidence that hydrothermal vents on the Saturnian moon of Enceladus show signs of “active hot-water chemistry”. Why is that exciting? Because similar chemistry occurs deep in the Earth’s oceans *and* can support life. Phil Plait explains.
We see these vents in the ocean bottom on Earth, too. The water there is very hot, heated by tectonic processes inside Earth’s crust. It brings up minerals and nutrients, and life thrives there. A lot of the processes are the same as what’s imagined is happening on Enceladus; minerals are dissolved in hot water that spews up into the cold ocean, precipitating out. A lot of it is sulfur based, but amazingly life exists there anyway. The environment is highly toxic to humans-huge pressure, boiling water near the vents, freezing a bit farther away, and loaded with icky chemicals-but as a scientist once said, “Life finds a way.”
Between the evidence of past flowing water on Mars, Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes, Europa’s underground ocean, and Enceladus, it seems increasingly probable we’ll find life somewhere else in the solar system. That’s a pretty exciting prospect! (via @ericholthaus)
Update: It was also announced today that the Hubble has detected signs of a salty underground ocean on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.
New observations of the moon using Hubble support this. Ganymede has a weak magnetic field, and, like on Earth, this generates an aurora-the glow created when high-speed subatomic particles slam into the extremely thin atmosphere. This glow is brightest in ultraviolet, and so astronomers used the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (my old camera!) on Hubble to observe Ganymede. STIS is quite sensitive to UV and detected the aurora.
Now this part is a bit tricky: Jupiter has a powerful magnetic field as well, which interacts with Ganymede’s. As they do, the aurora changes position over time, moving up and down in latitude. However, the observations show that the aurorae do not change nearly as much as expected if Ganymede were solid. The best way to explain this is if the moon has a salty ocean under its surface. The ocean would have its own magnetic field and would resist the influence of Jupiter’s magnetic field, which in turn keeps the aurora steadier.
Turns out there’s water all over the place in the solar system. How about that?
The real subway map of Manhattan
From Thrillist, the real subway map of Manhattan, your one-stop shop for Manhattan neighborhood stereotypes. (via @mkonnikova)
This Book Is a Planetarium by Kelli Anderson
One of my design heroes, Kelli Anderson, is coming out with a pop-up book called This Book Is a Planetarium. What’s unique about this book is that the pop-up elements are functional contraptions, in the vein of her record player wedding invitation. There’s a tiny planetarium:
and a speaker for your smartphone:
The news comes via a video profile of Anderson’s work by Adobe. So cool.
We’ll Find Something
If you and a friend are walking around Manhattan trying to find dinner, this is how the conversation will go:
It’s funny because it’s true. That’s a clip from We’ll Find Something, a short film by Casey Gooden starring Upstream Color’s Shane Carruth and Amy Seimetz.
Update: The full film has been released online and it is excruciating to watch if you’ve ever had bad relationship moments while traveling.
Could you drive an NYC cab? Take this NYC geography test and find out. (My score: 75%)
Is Charlie Brown the worst baseball manager ever? “he lost hundreds of games, often by hundreds of runs…”
Back in Time, a Back to the Future documentary
2015 seems like a pretty good year to do a documentary about Back to the Future. Here’s a trailer:
The scope of the film has changed since the project started — it was originally just about the DeLorean Time Machine — and so the production team has gone back to Kickstarter to fund completion of the film. (via @ystrickler)
Progress, but Eyes remain on the Prize
President Obama delivered two key messages during his speech in Selma over the weekend. One, it’s a mistake to suggest that racism is banished in America.
We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true.
And two, we’ve made a lot of progress:
If you think nothing’s changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or L.A. of the Fifties. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing’s changed. Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress — our progress — would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.
It’s worth putting politics and cynicism aside long enough to consider that on Saturday, a black President spoke at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. There’s a long way to go, but that’s a hell of a 50 years.
New trailer for Inside Out
Ok, I’m starting to feel better about Inside Out, Pixar’s upcoming animated feature that takes place mostly inside the mind of a young girl. The first trailer featured a bunch of gender stereotypes and mostly left me scratching my head, but the second trailer is solid:
Zoolander and Hansel walk the runway at Paris Fashion Week
First the actual Michael Bolton pops up in Office Space and now Derek Zoolander and Hansel are walking an actual runway show during Paris Fashion Week:
Is this what we have to look forward to for the next 10 years, late-90s/early-00s media remixed for an aging and increasingly wealthy Generation X? Bring it on?
Update: Here’s the video of the whole show; the Zoolander appearance happens right at the beginning.
And as if there were any doubt, the stunt was a promo for Zoolander 2, which will come out in 2016.
Update: At one point, Zoolander grabbed the phone out of someone’s hand and walked with it. Here’s the video of that.
The someone turns out to be Jerome Jarre, a big Vine star who gets paid by brands to do this sort of thing all the time so chances are it was staged. Sorry, there are no more genuine moments left, it’s all fake from now on.
No-talent ass clown
Funny or Die digitally inserted the singer Michael Bolton into Office Space, where he plays Michael Bolton, the Initech programmer.
(via devour)
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