kottke.org posts about video
In 1964, when they were teenagers at New Trier High School near Chicago, Michael Aisner and James Stein interviewed Louis Armstrong backstage at one of his concerts. In his boxers.
You can’t take it for granted. Even if we have two, three days off I still have to blow that horn a few hours to keep up the chops. I mean I’ve been playing 50 years, and that’s what I’ve been doing in order to keep in that groove there.
Aisner also interviewed Muhammed Ali a couple years later.
Until fairly recently, recycled glass was not made into new glass bottles. But now recycling plants can use optical sorting to separate out colored glass from clear glass so the latter can be used to make new bottles. Here’s how the process works.
Don’t miss the glass gobs shooting down into the molding machine at around 2:13.
Pascale Honore enjoyed watching her sons surf but couldn’t participate because she’s been a paraplegic for the past 18 years. But then Tyron Swan, a friend of her sons, duct taped her to his back and took her out on his board.
Man, that smile is incredible. What a great video. Pascal and Tyron are trying to raise funds to take their show on the road. Backed. (via ★interesting)
This made me Laugh Out Loud for reals…Simone Rovellini doctors clips from movies to make actresses’ heads explode. The first clip features Dirty Dancing, When Harry Met Sally, Pretty Woman, and Ghost:
And this one features a bunch of Disney princesses:
More videos and animated GIFs on the Exploding Actresses Tumblr. (via @scottlamb)
Flavorwire has collected 50 notable works of video art that are available to watch online for free, mostly on YouTube and Vimeo. Here’s a piece from Chris Burden where he has a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22 rifle.
Other artists represented are Christian Marclay, Cory Arcangel, Marina Abramovic, and Andy Warhol.
Andrew Johnson has been diagnosed with Early Onset Parkinson’s Disease and recently underwent deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery to implant a brain pacemaker that supplies his brain with regular and reliable electrical pulses. In this incredible video, Johnson turns the pacemaker off and you can see the effect that DBS has had on his life.
Understatement of the year at the end of the video. Wow. Johnson writes about his experience with Parkinson’s on his site, Young and Shaky. (thx, eamon)
As part of the media company’s push for original programming, John Hodgman’s comedy special, Ragnarok, is exclusively streaming on Netflix right now.
Deranged Millionaire, John Hodgman, and his infamous moustache dispense their survival guide to the Mayan apocalypse or as he’s deemed it “RAGNAROK”. With his eccentric list of post-apocalyptic necessities, beef jerky dollars, sperm whales and mayonnaise, John Hodgman entertains the audience in the face of impending doom.
Heeeeere’s a trailer:
Coudal Partners travelled to rural Nevada to capture this 6 hour and 21 minute real time film of the night sky.
Click through to YouTube to watch it in the original 4K resolution, which is much better than even 1080p. They produced the video in conjunction with the Night Sky edition of their Field Notes notebooks.
Watch as a giant albino python opens a door and comes right on in, thank you very much.
Bored of being in a dark room, she flips on the light, opens the door and bails. This particular episode takes place at 1am. This is why we keep doors locked with her around. We don’t need her harassing the neighbors.
Maybe don’t watch this if you want to sleep tonight. (via @daveg)
This might be the dumbest thing on YouTube, which is saying quite a lot.
Or maybe not…maybe running up flowing lava isn’t the worst thing you can do with your life and limbs.
If you slow down the Seinfeld theme by 1200%, it sounds like the soundtrack to a bad 80s sci-fi movie.
You may also enjoy Justin Bieber at 800% slower.
Ok, it’s no NFL bad lip reading but this fake commentary by a British broadcaster of a baseball game is still pretty hilarious.
He runs in to bowl…Mork and Mindy, that’s going for six! No! Caught by the chap in the pajamas with the glove that makes everything easier. And they all scuttle off for a nap.
DJ BC took the Beastie Boys and mashed them up with The Beatles.
He did more than 40 songs…get them all here. (via ★glass)
Are those your drums? The Late Show host likes drums so much that when musical guests finish up their sets on the show, Letterman often asks the drummer about them.
(via @hodgman)
This is great…Daft Punk’s Get Lucky as it would have sounded in every decade from the 1920s to the 2020s.
This is what singles should be from now on…you get the original song, a 30s jazz version of the song, a 1800s classical version, an 80s new wave version, and so on.
People love Jerry Seinfeld so much that we will watch him driving cars and drinking coffee with other comedians. Wait, that actually sounds fantastic!
All the season one episodes are available on YouTube, featuring Ricky Gervais, Alec Baldwin, Michael Richards, and Larry David. (via devour)
Here are a few clips from Christian Marclay’s The Clock that have been surreptitiously filmed and uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo.
The clips are crappy bootlegs that cut off part of the screen, but I still totally get sucked in after 30 seconds of each clip.
The first season of Sesame Street aired in 1969-1970 and this photo of the cast dates from then:
The giveaway is Oscar the Grouch’s orange fur…it would switch to green for the second season. Here’s the first 15 minutes of the first episode:
And here’s part 2, part 3, and part 4.
Sesame Street is insane, BTW. They aired 130 60-minute episodes over six months for that first season and over its 43 seasons, the show has averaged 100 episodes per season. A truly amazing combination of quantity and quality.
Shortly before his retirement at 60, Tatsuo Horiuchi picked up a copy of Microsoft Excel and started making art with it. His art does not look anything like you’d expect Excel art to look:
Update: Here’s a short video on Horiuchi and his art:
Baltazar Ushca is the last ice miner of Ecuador’s Mt. Chimborazo. Dozens of men, including Ushca’s brothers, used to mine Chimborazo’s glacial ice but commercial ice production has rendered the arduous process obsolete.
Also, it appears that the rocks and grass aren’t separated from the ice before it goes into the blender?
This film was apparently shot in NYC in 1939. Features scenes in Midtown, Chinatown, Harlem, and more locales around the city.
(via @UnlikelyWorlds)
Watch as a crew from WMTW News 8 in Maine is preparing to do an update on a missing man when the man in question just saunters up right behind them.
The first 55 seconds of this video is like a real life version of the moonwalking bear test. (via devour)
Angels pitcher Robert Coello’s unique pitch has knuckleball movement but is thrown with a fastball grip & pitching motion and has a bit more speed on it than a typical knuckleball. His catchers and opposing hitters call it the WTF pitch.
Physicist Alan Nathan, a professor at the University of Illinois who studies baseball and has a particular interest in the knuckleball, hadn’t ever seen a pitch like Coello’s. His preliminary theory on the pitch: His thumb on the underside of the ball exerts backspin, counteracting the tumbling effect his top fingers put on the ball and balancing the torque so perfectly that the pitch has a knuckleball effect with superior speed (around 80 mph).
Be sure to wait for the slow motion at the end of the video.
This is a video of a pair of Kenyan high schoolers competing in a high jump contest, skillfully using a throwback technique rarely seen these days.
Cool, right? They’re using a scissors-jump technique that was popular in international competitions prior to the early 1900s, when landing areas were sand pits rather than the huge foam pads you typically see today. Various techniques followed the scissors-jump, with each making higher jumps possible until Dick Fosbury invented his Flop in 1968. All international competitors use the Flop today.
Interestingly though, the Fosbury Flop is not the instantly disruptive innovation I’d always thought it was. Fosbury started sailing over the bar backwards as a senior in high school in the mid-1960s. He refined his invention for years until his gold medal at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics attracted the attention of other jumpers, who recognized the potential of the technique. But if you look at the progression of high jump world records, there was no huge jump (sorry) in record heights because of the Flop. Ten years after the Flop’s big-stage debut at the Mexico City Games, the world record holder Vladimir Yashchenko still used the straddle technique. And in the 1980 Olympics, three high jump finalists didn’t use the Flop. Like most new promising technologies, the Flop took time to catch on, even though 45 years on, it’s the clearly superior technique. (via @dunstan)
Here’s an unfortunately short bit of circus riding by Tim Knoll. You often see a lot of the same tricks in bike videos, so Knoll’s style mix of flatland, street, and circus riding is refreshing. I do get nervous when he stands on his handlebars or plays limbo with a row for semi-trucks. Be careful, Tim Knoll!
(thx, alex)
When Commander Chris Hadfield covered David Bowie’s Space Oddity on board the International Space Station:
how were the intellectual property rights handled?
The song “Space Oddity” is under copyright protection in most countries, and the rights to it belong to Mr Bowie. But compulsory-licensing rights in many nations mean that any composition that has been released to the public (free or commercially) as an audio recording may be recorded again and sold by others for a statutorily defined fee, although it must be substantively the same music and lyrics as the original. But with the ISS circling the globe, which jurisdiction was Commander Hadfield in when he recorded the song and video? Moreover, compulsory-licensing rights for covers of existing songs do not include permission for broadcast or video distribution. Commander Hadfield’s song was loaded onto YouTube, which delivers video on demand to users in many countries around the world. The first time the video was streamed in each country constituted publication in that country, and with it the potential for copyright infringement under local laws. Commander Hadfield could have made matters even more complicated by broadcasting live as he sang to an assembled audience of fellow astronauts for an onboard public performance while floating from segment to segment of the ISS.
We live in a world where sending a guitar into space is trivial while ironing out rights agreements is the tough part. (via waxy)
And why should Boards of Canada have all the fun? Sigur Ros has a new album coming out as well, to be released the week after on June 18. Two singles from Kveikur are already out:
And the album can be pre-ordered on iTunes, at Amazon, or direct from the band.
Oh hello new Boards of Canada single. Nice to see you.
Sounds goooood. The entire album will be out on 6/11 in North American (6/10 in the UK) and is available for pre-order on iTunes and at Amazon.
[SORTA MAD MEN SPOILERS! but not really] I don’t know if Ken Crosgrove dancing on the latest episode of Mad Men is the best thing that’s ever been on the show, but it’s definitely in the top 10. And it might be even better with a little Daft Punk.
And it might be best with the Crazy in Love cover from Gatsby…just load up that this YT video while watching the animated GIF and you’re all set. (This is how Millennials watch TV, BTW…it’s all animated GIFs with YouTube video soundtracks. Civilization is gonna be juuuuuuust fine.)
This is possibly the best three-minute demonstration of anything I’ve ever seen. Derek Sivers takes a shaky video of a lone dancing guy at a music festival and turns it into a lesson about leadership.
A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he’s doing is so simple, it’s almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!
Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it’s not about the leader anymore — it’s about them, plural. Notice he’s calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.
I got this link from @ottmark, who astutely notes its similarity to Kurt Vonnegut’s three types of specialist needed for revolution.
The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius — a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”
The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like this working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.”
On Twitter, Jeff Veen shortened the three personas to “the inventor, the investor, and the evangelist”.
Newer posts
Older posts
Socials & More