kottke.org posts about remix
Web/movie mashups. My favorites:
Harry Potterybarn.com
Il Huffington Postino
Slumdog Millionaire Dollar Homepage
Behind Enemy Bloglines
Schindler’s Craigslist
Charlotte’s WebCrawler
Freecreditreport.com Willy
And while not strictly adhering to the form, I also chuckled at “Bone Thugs & eHarmony”. The best I could come up with for kottke.org is Girls Gone Wild: Kottke West, which is not so good.
Update: Duh, I totally forgot about Koyaaniskottke. Also: kottke.orgazmo, The Kottke Horror Picture Show, and Kottke Balboa. (thx, andy & charley)
For all of the talk that Shepard Fairey is just a plagiarist, I think that the clearest indication that his art is above board and adding something new to the world is that until a few days ago, no one knew who had taken the photo of Obama that became the basis of the iconic Hope poster, not even Fairey or the photographer who took it.
Reuters are understandably somewhat put out on their own and Young’s behalf, but like it or not, Fairey’s use of the picture are well within the parameters of “fair use”. His transformative use of the image - both in flipping and re-orienting it, adding jacket and tie and the “O” Obama logo, and converting it to his block print style make it consistent with all legal precedents for use.
Update: But, but ,but, not so fast. It looks like Tom Gralish has found the actual photo that Fairey used; it was taken by AP’s Mannie Garcia at a National Press Club event in April 2006. (thx, ryan)
Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 is a newspaper compiled and printed by a pair of fellows from the UK that is just that…a bunch of stuff that they liked reading on the web last year. I *love* this. And hate it (a little bit).
The hate part first. TOFHWOTI is almost precisely the thing I’ve been wanting to do for years now…take the very best of the best links of the year and bundle them up into a printed artifact of some sort. So seeing it done first and so expertly was a bit of a punch in the nose. Of course, ideas are so cheap and plentiful these days that “I thought of it first” has no value without follow through, something that my schedule for the past few years hasn’t allowed for. This year, *for sure*, dammit! (I’m also pissed that I didn’t get around to ordering a copy for myself until this morning and found that they’re all sold out! Gah! Like I said, no time.)
But damn, is that thing beautiful or what? You don’t even need the physical artifact to see that much. The simple but playful design is just right. Getting it printed super-cheap on newsprint fits nicely with the concept and content. All the little details are accounted for; I wouldn’t change a thing. More like this, please.
“Don’t forget…” is a street art project that consists of Photoshop palettes pasted over heavily airbrushed advertising in a metro station in Berlin. (thx, phil)
I’m really enjoying The Hood Internet’s third mixtape. They take pop, indie rock, & rap songs and mash them up. For instance:
Jay-Z (feat. Lil Wayne) vs Xiu Xiu
Flo Rida (feat. T-Pain) vs Hot Chip
T-Pain (feat. Chris Brown) vs TV On The Radio
Lil Kim (feat. Missy Elliott) vs MGMT
Their version of R. Kelly’s I’m a Flirt mashed with Broken Social Scene from their first mixtape was one of my favorite songs of 2007, far superior to the original IMO.
Mixtape vol. 3 track listing and downloads here.
A five-minute rap video that summarizes all five seasons of The Wire.
Police chief, yeah, his rank is proper
‘Cause of the window, he starts a war with Frank Sobotka.
MIA’s Paper Planes is still my favorite Wire-inspired song, but this is pretty sweet. (thx, about 2000 people)
A map of the Milky Way done in the style of the London tube map.
I was re-reading Carl Sagan’s novel Contact recently, essentially a series of arguments about SETI wrapped into a story, and he alludes to some sort of cosmic Grand Central Station. That, coupled with my longtime interest in transit maps, got me thinking about all of this.
A company called Fandrich & Sons buys cheap grand pianos mass-produced in China, upgrades them so that they sound more like expensive hand-made European pianos, and sells them for a reasonable price.
With his higher-end grands — which the Fandrichs named “HGS” for “Holy Grail Scale” — they start with pianos built in China. He and his workers gut the piano, replacing the hammers, felt and bass strings with German and American parts. They reinforce the underbelly of the piano by installing short ribs — spruce beams between the existing main ribs.
Using a computer program designed in-house, the keys are reweighted across the board to eliminate friction and even out the response. The reweighting gives the Fandrich pianos their signature touch, one that some players have described as buttery, effortless.
In automotive terms, the Fandrichs are “trying to upgrade a Hyundai to run like a Bentley, for the price of a Honda”. (via girlhacker)
A periodic table of awesomeness featuring Bacon as element #1, Laser as #21, and Black Holes as #82. I like bacon. Bacon is a close personal friend of mine. But can’t we keep this overexposed pork product out of it for once? (via rw)
After posting the video of the chickens from the Muppets clucking their way through the Blue Danube waltz, I couldn’t resist putting it together with the most iconic use of that tune in contemporary culture. Here, then, is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Chicken Cordon Bleu Danube cut.
Beeker from The Muppets sings Ode to Joy.
Meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep, meep meep…
Gonzo, Camilla, and the rest of the chickens sing The Blue Danube Waltz.
Bock bock bock bock, bock bock, bock bock. Bock bock bock bock, bock bock, bock bock…
Somewhat related: Beaker sings Yellow by Coldplay.
Just Like the Movies is a short film by Michal Kosakowski that samples footage from movies that were made prior to September 2001 to recreate the events of 9/11. More info.
“It’s just like the movies!” was usually the first reaction of those watching the events of 9/11 in New York unfolding on their TV screens, no doubt recalling the endless number of catastrophes that Hollywood has proposed over the years. Now confronted with the reality of one such scenario — of unprecedented destructive and symbolic resonance — a feeling of deja vu arises while looking at these images.
Really well done. (thx, christopher)
In a compilation of 64 videos all shown on the same page, one man recreates Thriller — the beats, the howling, the singing — all by himself. This is pretty awesome, like Christian Marclay on speed. (thx, christopher)
For his Fabric of Brooklyn project, Tom Mason took photos of scenes in Brooklyn and combined them to depict super-bustling neighborhoods. Reminded me of this wonderful composite image of a busy airport by Ho-Yeol Ryu.
Two covers of Tom Waits’ Way Down in the Hole, the title song for The Wire: Tom Waits and Kronos Quartet and MIA and Blaqstarr. (thx, brandon)
From a review of A Christmas Tale, a movie by French director Arnaud Desplechin:
Artists who believe in the mystique of originality are often reluctant to reveal their inspirations. But the magpielike Mr. Desplechin revels in what the writer Jonathan Lethem has called the ecstasy of influence. “I didn’t invent anything,” he said. “Being a director is not such a grand thing. My job is just to show the audience what I love.”
The funny thing about the “ecstasy of influence” quote is that it was used by Lethem in a well-known Harpers article about plagiarism that was itself, in Lethem’s words, “stole, warped, and cobbled together” from a variety of other sources, which sources he lists at the conclusion to the article.
The phrase “the ecstasy of influence,” which embeds a rebuking play on Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” is lifted from spoken remarks by Professor Richard Dienst of Rutgers.
The ecstasy of influence would make a good name for this here blog. (via snarkmarket, another ecstatic influence fan)
Love Lockdown + Reckoner. Kanye mashed up with Radiohead, I pretty much gotta post it. (via delicious ghost)
I don’t know if this has been linked around everywhere or not, but this surprisingly realistic video of a dance-off between Barack Obama and John McCain tickled every last bone in my body. I watched it at least four times.
Here’s how to use the RJDJ iPhone app. You install the app, plug your headphones in, launch it, and press “Now Playing”. A song plays, the app starts to sample the sounds in your environment, and those sounds are remixed in real time and played back to you. It might be the coolest thing ever. Check out this video and this other video for a quick look at how RJDJ works. The first video shows some songs that use the iPhone’s accelerometer to modify and scratch the beat. (via waxy)
PS. It might only be the coolest app in theory…it’s also flaky as hell. It was working fine for me and then crapped out…there’s no music now, only sound sampling and it’s really quiet. Maybe you need to use the Apple headphones with the mic?
Truthful TV title cards. Heroes becomes No One Dies Ever, Mad Men is Drink Smoke Fuck, and Lost is Winging It.
Angelina Jolie, powers of a ten. By Eamesfiddle.
Read in the right way, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style becomes an important reference for software development.
5.21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat
Young writers Inexperienced programmers will be draw at every turn toward eccentricities in language. They will hear the beat of new vocabularies abstractions, the exciting rhythms of special segments of their society industry, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for beginners is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.
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