Taylor Swift covers Eminem’s Lose Yourself
Not even country music can ruin that song. But as you well know Taylor, Eminem’s version is the best of all time. (via @anildash)
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kottke.org posts about remix
Rorschmap
Rorschmap is a trippy Google Maps mashup by James Bridle that provides kaleidoscopic views of locations from around the world. Here’s Paris, complete with MegaSeine.
Beastie Boys vs. Sesame Street
Sesame Street characters, including Grover on the flute, perform the Beastie Boys’ Sure Shot.
(via devour)
Mona Lisa in 140 dots
This is pointillism taken to its limit.
Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Mona Lisa’ reduced & remixed down into 140 exact circles of colour. Makes no sense close up. Makes every sense from the other side of the room.
Prints are available.
Ten hour videos
YouTube user TehN1ppe has been uploading a series of 10-hour repetitive videos. Here’s Super Mario climbing a vine for ten hours in a row:
There’s also epic sax guy playing for 10 hours, badger badger (mushroom! mushroom!) for 10 hours, 10 hours of Tetris, 10 hours of the Inception horn, 10 hours of vuvuzela, and, oh my yes, 10 hours of Hypnotoad.
Somehow, these aren’t even close to the longest videos on YouTube…here’s one that plays for 518 hours (more than 21 days).
Kind of Bloop album postered on Jay Maisel’s building
A pair of fair use crusaders hired some “street art underground” friends to place several posters of the Kind of Bloop album cover on the building that Jay Maisel owns in Manhattan as payback for Maisel threatening to sue Andy Baio over using a representation of Maisel’s photo of Miles Davis for Bloop’s cover.
I hope that every time Jay leaves the house, he sees these posters — and as he looks at them or tries to tear them down he thinks about how evil what he did was. Maybe he’ll realize that at some level all art borrows from other art, and suing another artist for fair use appropriation undermines all artists. Maybe he’ll feel guilty about being such a thief. And then maybe he’ll think about giving that money back — or donating it to charity or something. But probably not.
Something tells me this isn’t going to end well. (via @jakedobkin)
Rave On Buddy Holly
Rave On Buddy Holly is an album-length compilation of Buddy Holly cover songs sung by the likes of Cee Lo Green, Fiona Apple, Lou Reed, and Paul McCartney. You can listen now on Soundcloud, via the embed below, or pre-order the album on Amazon.
Andy Baio was sued for Kind of Bloop
Andy Baio got sued for using a pixel-art representation of Jay Maisel’s iconic photo of Miles Davis on the chiptune album of Davis’ music he commissioned in 2009. He settled with Maisel by paying him $32,500 and agreeing to stop using the artwork.
After seven months of legal wrangling, we reached a settlement. Last September, I paid Maisel a sum of $32,500 and I’m unable to use the artwork again. (On the plus side, if you have a copy, it’s now a collector’s item!) I’m not exactly thrilled with this outcome, but I’m relieved it’s over.
But this is important: the fact that I settled is not an admission of guilt. My lawyers and I firmly believe that the pixel art is “fair use” and Maisel and his counsel firmly disagree. I settled for one reason: this was the least expensive option available.
At the heart of this settlement is a debate that’s been going on for decades, playing out between artists and copyright holders in and out of the courts. In particular, I think this settlement raises some interesting issues about the state of copyright for anyone involved in digital reinterpretations of copyrighted works.
Unfortunately, Baio’s post does nothing to dissuade me that Maisel is a joyless putz. Seeing this kind of behavior from large clueless companies is almost expected but from a a fellow creative artist? Inexcusable. Surely some reasonable arrangement could have been made without visiting enormous stress and a $30K+ bill onto a man with a young family. Disgusting.
“New” mix by The Hood Internet
This looks to be about a year old, but it’s new to me: 57 minutes and 37 seconds of goodness from The Hood Internet.
It’s a little more chill than their usual stuff — “Trillwave is the soundtrack to the party after the afterparty or maybe to a sun-drenched backyard barbecue the next day” — but I like it a lot so far. (via @djgeekdout)
Everything is a Remix, the ideas episode
The third episode of Kirby Ferguson’s excellent Everything is a Remix has been posted. The first episode was about music, the second dealt with movies, and the third is on technological innovation.
“I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.” — Henry Ford
FYI: the credits are actually in the middle of the video…there’s another few minutes of material after they run.
Lady Gaga’s musical family tree
Do you get that funny feeling that you’ve heard Lady Gaga’s Born This Way somewhere before? Maybe when it was called Express Yourself or Waterfalls or God is a DJ?
A+ for the performance too. Everything is a Remix, folks.
ASCII pointillism
Textify.it is a web app that uses text to make alphabetic pointillist representations of images. I turned a photo of the Most Photographed Barn in America into this:
It’s also available as an iOS app. (via prosthetic knowledge)
Visual exploration of Infinite Jest
Chris Ayers is designing posters, logos, and magazine spreads for the fictional people, places, and things in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, including movie posters for Himself’s films, a magazine layout for an article on Orin, and this poster for the Whataburger Southwest Junior Invitational tennis tournament:
(via @tcarmody)
Doctor Who gonna bust a cap in yo ass
Sometimes the simple things in life are best…like a compilation of clips of The Doctor shooting guns with a gansta rap soundtrack.
(via ★interesting)
ASCII videos
ASCIImeo takes Vimeo video and plays them as ASCII art. Here’s an example video: Dogboarding. I love that the player controls are all text as well…here’s a screenshot:
i’m on my datamosh, glitchin up vide0000ooos
Not even going to try to explain this one. Ok, I’ll try a little…this is Yung Jake singing about datamoshing and making animated gifs and such.
you think it’s connection you think it’s your bandwidth
but its me. i’ll steal your bitch like a bandit
see me on YouTube. fucking with video
find me on world star. find me on Vimeo
im not on PhotoBooth. that shit’s different
cuz dey told me to step out of the frame but i didnt
(via ★philgyford)
Delia Derbyshire, the first DJ
Lovely short film clip of BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Delia Derbyshire demonstrating how to make electronic music using tape loops. Look at the beat matching!
It was Derbyshire who gave the original Doctor Who theme its distinctive sound. (via ★danielpunkass)
Movie references in Kill Bill
Following on from the Kill Bill section of episode 2 of Everything is a Remix, this video contains what feels like an exhaustive look at the movies that Tarantino referenced in Kill Bill.
(via @kbandersen)
Angry Birds theme, covered by Pomplamoose
Angry Birds is still the top paid app in the App Store. And Pomplamoose is still twee and adorable. (via ★glass)
You come at the Lion King, you best not miss
The Lion King movie recut into a five-minute summary of all five seasons of The Wire.
I almost didn’t post this because it dogs on the underrated season 2. (via ★vuokko)
AC/D2 to play Star Wars music festival
If there was a Star Wars version of Coachella, some of the bands playing at the festival would be called Kessel Run DMC, Guided by Millions of Voices That Suddenly Cried Out in Terror and Were Suddenly Silenced, and C-3PO Speedwagon.
Human Planet: The Douche
Pitch-perfect take-off of BBC’s Human Planet nature series. The subject is The Douche, an urban-dwelling bottom feeder.
Among the progressive forward-thinking citizens, there stands a great cancer, a type of human that is not evolved like the rest of the race: The Douche. For the poor Douche, hunting is still its main priority. This type of human does not hunt for food; they are consistently trying to find their own self esteem.
Human Planet is a pretty great show, but I would love to see an entire series like this: Soccer Moms, The Hipster, Nerds, Trophy Wives, Eurotrash, The Academic, etc. (via devour)
Hilarious fake TLC promo
Turns out there’s not so much learning on The Learning Channel anymore.
Fake shows from the video: 12 Wives, 12 Problems; Dwarf Hoarders; Uterus Cannon; and Hasty Home Surgery.
Real TLC shows: 19 Kids and Counting; Strange Sex; Extreme Couponing; and I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. (via ★dansays)
Tron Legacy soundtrack remixed
If you liked Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy soundtrack, you might like Tron Legacy R3CONF1GUR3D with remixes by Crystal Method, Paul Oakenfold, and M83. It’s just out today and I haven’t listen to it yet, so caveat emptor.
First person Super Mario
Here’s what playing the original Super Mario Bros would look like from a first-person perspective.
(via devour)
The Qaddafis and the Bluths
The New Republic compared the Qaddafi family with Arrested Developments Bluth family and found some similarities.
Mohammed Qaddafi and Gob Bluth are both the oldest sons of tyrannical fathers, and both stand in the shadows of their younger, more favored brothers. The sibling rivalry can get intense — Mohammed’s feud with younger brother Mutassim over a Coca-Cola plant ended only after a worker had been injured and a cousin had been stuffed into a car trunk, while Michael and Gob’s dueling banana stands ended with the fire department being called twice.
Debating The Hangover
The timeline of events goes like this:
Last night, I posted the trailer for the sequel to The Hangover.
This morning, my friend David posts the following on Twitter:
Poleaxed by indication that pop culture aesthete @jkottke might actually like Hangover, the execrable frat boy flick
To which I replied a few hours later:
@daveg Are you kidding? That movie is hilarious.
Anil suggested a debate:
@jkottke @daveg I will pay you guys for an Oxford debate about the Hangover’s merits, or lack thereof.
And Michael Sippey went there and posted a video of an animated David and an animated me having a debate about The Hangover:
I thought you were a pop culture aesthete.
No, I’m from the Midwest.
You live in Manhattan.
But I grew up eating hot dogs.
But you write about expensive conceptual restaurants and post pictures of contemporary art like that thing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where the woman sat at the table all summer.
That’s a pretty accurate five-line bio of me.
Collaborative tourist snaps
For her Photo Opportunities project, Corrine Vionnet finds tourist photos of famous landmarks online and layers them to make images like this:
(thx, reed)
Mississippi River system as subway map
A map of the Mississippi River and all its tributaries drawn in the style of Harry Beck’s London Underground map.
Prints are available. (via strange maps)
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