The Muppets sing Kanye West’s Monster
This is surprisingly well done.
Continuing with the unexpected Kanye groove on kottke.org this morning.
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kottke.org posts about remix
The beauty of Pixar
A nice video tribute to Pixar that weaves together footage from all their films.
(thx, asdhsa)
The lost Radiohead album
It’s called 01 and 10…ok, it’s not really a lost album. But apparently if you take the first five songs from OK Computer (from 1997) and the first five songs from In Rainbows (from 2007) and alternate them, the songs fit together musically and lyrically to form a coherent album.
Consider that In Rainbows was meant to complement OK Computer, musically, lyrically, and in structure. We found that the two albums can be knit together beautifully. By combining the tracks to form one playlist, 01 and 10, we have a remarkable listening experience. The transitions between the songs are astounding, and it appears that this was done purposefully.
The lyrics also seem to complement each other. There appears to be a concept flowing through the 01 and 10 playlist. Ideas in one song is picked up by the next, such as “Pull me out of the aircrash,” and “When I’m at the pearly gates, this will be my videotape.”
(via prosthetic knowledge)
The year in film, 2010
Some gloriously crazy person took clips from 270 films that were out in 2010 and mixed them together into a coherent narrative:
This year’s movies have legitimately transformed my idea of what is creatively possible. To commemorate, I’ve remixed 270 of them into one giant ass video.
Wonderful. Here’s a list of all the films used. (thx, aaron)
Michael Jordan advises LeBron James
Cleveland’s response to LeBron James’ boner of a Nike commercial has more heart, but this mash-up of the LeBron commercial with a previous Michael Jordan Nike commercial is an absolute masterpiece.
Map of the world rearranged by population
If all the countries in the world swapped geographic positions based on population, then you’d have something that looked a bit like this:
Take the world’s largest country: Russia. It would be taken over by its Asian neighbour and rival China, the country with the world’s largest population. Overcrowded China would not just occupy underpopulated Siberia - a long-time Russian fear - but also fan out all the way across the Urals to Russia’s westernmost borders. China would thus become a major European power. Russia itself would be relegated to Kazakhstan, which still is the largest landlocked country in the world, but with few hopes of a role on the world stage commensurate with Russia’s clout, which in no small part derives from its sheer size.
Canada, the world’s second-largest country, would be transformed into an Arctic, or at least quite chilly version of India, the country with the world’s second-largest population. The country would no longer be a thinly populated northern afterthought of the US. The billion Indians north of the Great Lakes would make Canada a very distinct, very powerful global player.
The full map is here. Interestingly, four countries stay in the same positions: the US, Ireland, Yemen, and Brazil.
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book is called Tree of Codes and he constructed it by taking his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, and cut out words to form a completely new story.
It’s a rare novel that’s blurbed by Olafur Eliasson:
[A]n extraordinary journey that activates the layers of time and space involved in the handling of a book and its heap of words. Jonathan Safran Foer deftly deploys sculptural means to craft a truly compelling story. In our world of screens, he welds narrative, materiality, and our reading experience into a book that remembers it actually has a body.
Vanity Fair has an interview with Foer on how he came up with the book…I’m guessing it might not have a Kindle version. See also The Jefferson Bible.
Cleveland to LeBron: you should shove it
Nike made a rare misstep with LeBron’s recent “What should I do?” commercial, but Cleveland’s video response is fantastic.
Overlapping digital mosaics
Mosaic collages like this one — where each “pixel” is a tiny self-contained image — are fairly common but I haven’t seen too many like these before:
Lovely effect; they’re fun to look at zoomed in or out. (via matt)
Super There Will Be Blood
The Super Nintendo version of There Will Be Blood:
This is pitch perfect. What really puts this video over the top are the sound effects (“milkshake!”) and that it doesn’t go on too long.
Bill Murray as other Wes Anderson characters
Man, what if Spike Jonze had made Being Bill Murray instead? Casey Weldon did a series of paintings of Bill Murray as characters from Wes Anderson’s movies…but non-Murray characters like Max Fischer, Margot Tenenbaum, and the Baumer.
Prints are available. And these were a part of a show called Bad Dads, consisting of art inspired by various Anderson films. Again, prints are available.
Found photo animations
Cassandra Jones takes photographs she finds online and stiches them together to form animations like this Eadweard Muybridge homage:
Really nice. Jones’ other work is worth a look as well. (via heading east)
Fallon and Timberlake give rap history lesson
This is the best thing you’ll see all day. Please just watch:
The Beastie Boys and Eminem stuff killed me. Who knew Fallon could sing? (via @hodgman)
Kanye West + Tracy Jordan
One of last week’s top tweets made this observation:
Put “Liz Lemon,” in front of Kanye’s tweets and he becomes Tracy Jordan. “Liz Lemon, I wonder what happened to my antique aquarium.”
Tom Armitage knocked up a Kanye Jordan Twitter account so you don’t even need to work at imagining. The results are often sublime. (via jimray)
A movie that tells time
Christian Marclay is working on a 24-hour film called The Clock.
“The Clock” is a montage of clips from several thousand films, structured so that the resulting artwork always conveys the correct time, minute by minute, in the time zone in which is it being exhibited. The scenes in which we see clocks or hear chimes tend to be either transitional ones suggesting the passage of time or suspenseful ones building up to dramatic action. “If I asked you to watch a clock tick, you would get bored quickly,” explains the artist in remarkably neutral English. “But there is enough action in this film to keep you entertained, so you forget the time, but then you’re constantly reminded of it.”
Love that Marclay. Back when I was still doing 0sil8 — man, what a time capsule that is — one of the projects that I started working on but never got close to finishing was a clock made up of photographs…1440 photographs, one for each minute of the day.
Movies scenes + Cee-Lo’s Fuck You
The Dallas Observer has collected a few clips from movies where the music has been replaced by Cee-Lo’s Fuck You. The Dirty Dancing one is probably the best:
I wonder how the slow-dance scene at the end of Rushmore would work. Or the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future. Audio NSFW. (via @erikmal)
Lady Gaga sings about Java programming
Ok, so it’s not Gaga (and certainly not Christopher Walken), but she does work “object oriented” into the lyrics.
This is possibly the best production of the worst idea I’ve ever seen.
Rockin’ Robin + Smells Like Teen Spirit
Nirvana mashed up with Michael Jackson? Surprisingly awesome.
Tarp surfing
Get yourself a skateboard, a big blue tarp, have someone lift the edge of the tarp over you as you skateboard by, and guess what that looks like:
(via mathowie)
Periodic table of swearing
I would be fucking remiss in my duties here if I didn’t inform you of this bloody awesome periodic table of swearing, you bunch of stupid old wankers.
There’s goddamned prints available. (via clusterflock)
Ferris Club (or maybe Fight Bueller?)
Ferris Bueller. Fight Club. You see where this is headed, right?
Well done. (via matt)
Unwrapping flowers
Golan Levin and Kyle McDonald took some old code for converting between polar and cartesian geometries and hacked it to flatten out photos of flowers into panoramic landscapes.
Polar-to-cartesian unwrapping of flower photographs is the new flattening flowers between the pages of books. The Processing source code is available. NotCot applied the effect to chandeliers. I dorked around in Photoshop a little and you can get similar results using the “Polar Coordinates” filter…you just have to stretch out the image first. (via today and tomorrow)
The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut
Stieg Larsson is back with a previously unreleased Lisbeth Salander short story from his rumored extensive back catalog: The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut.
She tried to remember whether she was speaking to him or not. Probably not. She tried to remember why. No one knew why. It was undoubtedly because she’d been in a bad mood at some point. Lisbeth Salander was entitled to her bad moods on account of her miserable childhood and her tiny breasts, but it was starting to become confusing just how much irritability could be blamed on your slight figure and an abusive father you had once deliberately set on fire and then years later split open the head of with an axe.
Considering the New Yorker’s umlaut policy, this is an unusual stone throw.
Kirk/Spock musical slash fiction
This mashup of Star Trek with Kesha’s Tik Tok just makes me really really happy.
Turns out there’s a whole mess of Kirk/Spock musical slash fiction (mash fiction?) on YouTube…there’s Kirk/Spock vs. Lady Gaga’s Monster, Kirk/Spock vs. She Blinded Me With Science, Kirk/Spock vs. I Kissed a Boy, Kirk/Spock vs. Jerry Mungo’s In the Summertime, Kirk/Spock/McCoy vs. The Beatles’ Come Together, Kirk/Spock vs. You Spin Me Round and many more. (via david)
Update: And here is Kirk/Spock vs. Closer by NIN, perhaps the Citizen Kane of Kirk/Spock musical slash fiction:
(thx, mark)
Kubrick vs. Scorsese, a tribute
Warning: this video contains spoilers, violence, and cinematic greatness.
Many friends after seeing my video “Tarantino vs Coen Brothers” requested me to do a new video duel of directors, so I decided to do now a tribute to my two favorite directors, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, were 25 days re-watching 34 films, selected more than 500 scenes, and a hard work editing.
Tarantino vs. Coen Brothers is here; and here’s Scorsese on Kubrick, in which I was delighted to learn that Scorsese thinks, as I do, that Eyes Wide Shut is underrated.
Toy Story + The Wire mashup
Woody = McNulty, Buzz = Stringer, and Mr. Potato Head = Bunk. (via stevey)
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