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Video of a Steve Jobs speech circa 1980. This was just recently donated and presented by the Computer History Museum.
(via @itscolossal)
Update: Well, that didn’t last long..the Vimeo embed ist kaputt. But it’s still available on the Computer History Museum’s site. Perhaps we can persuade them to throw it up on their YouTube channel?
Before Ice Cube became a rapper, he studied architectural drafting at the Phoenix Institute of Technology, so he has some interesting things to say in this short appreciation of Charles and Ray Eames.
They was doing mashups before mashups even existed. It’s not about the pieces, it’s how the pieces work together. You know, taking something that already exist and making it something special. You know, kinda like sampling.
(via ★interesting)
Update: The NY Times has an interview with Ice Cube about the video.
Q: How are your drafting skills these days?
A: You don’t want to live in nothing I draw. I got a certificate. For a year. In ‘88. I don’t think I picked up a T-square since.
Occupy Wall Street went up to protest at Lincoln Center last night during a performance of Philip Glass’ opera Satyagraha. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross was there and captured the protest on video, which included Glass himself reading the closing lines from the opera, amplified to the crowd by the people’s mic. It is an amazing scene.
When the Satyagraha listeners emerged from the Met, police directed them to leave via side exits, but protesters began encouraging them to disregard the police, walk down the steps, and listen to Glass speak. Hesitantly at first, then in a wave, they did so. The composer proceeded to recite the closing lines of Satyagraha, which come from the Bhagavad-Gita (after 3:00 in the video above): “When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.” True to form, he said it several times, with the “human microphone” repeating after him. Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson were in attendance, and at one point Reed helped someone crawl over the barricade that had been set up along the sidewalk.
(via stellar)
The beginning of each episode of The Wire featured a short quote of dialogue from that episode…here are the characters saying all those quotes:
(via supercut.org)
The street skiing video has more narrative structure but the tricks pulled in this urban snowboarding video are just filthy.
(thx, river)
80-minute video of a conversation between Neil deGrasse Tyson and of an out-of-character Stephen Colbert “about science, society, and the universe”. Someone needs to get this on YouTube or something…the video streaming is slooooow.
Update: Ah, here’s a mirror on YouTube. (thx, aaron)
When dense briny water (left behind by newly formed sea ice) sinks, it freezes the water around it, forming an icicle that stretches to the sea floor. Then it freezes water and wildlife on the sea floor. David Attenborough narrates:
This is like street skating except with alpine skis down hilly city terrain. Includes jumps over hung laundry & parked cars, railslides down stairs, etc. Crazy.
(thx to @gnuhaus for the better embed)
Update: The skier in this video, JP Auclair, was killed in a Chilean avalanche while working on a film project. (thx, david)
I’ve been on the web for 17 years now, I’m a professional link finder, and I have never in my life seen anything like these guys performing on an Indian talent show. They *start off* by biting into fluorescent light bulbs and it just gets more nuts from there.
You never really see this much bleeding on American Idol… (via unlikely words)
In this 15-minute video, Terry Gilliam talks about how he does the cut-out animations that defined the Monty Python visual aesthetic. Gilliam’s technique is all about simplicity and embracing constraint.
(via ★thoughtbrain)
On the 48th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, Errol Morris talks to Tink Thompson about “The Umbrella Man”, a gentleman who was pictured in the Zapruder film standing with an open umbrella near where Kennedy was shot on a sunny day. The result is a nifty six-minute film.
For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?
The Updike piece from the New Yorker is available here (subscribers only, but the abstract is informative):
For example, “the umbrella man”: though the day was clear and blowy, he can be detected, in photographs, standing on the curb just about where the assassination would in a few seconds occur, holding a black umbrella above him; seconds later he is again photographed, walking away, gazing tranquilly at the scramble of horrified spectators. His umbrella is now furled. Who was he? Where is he now?
The film pairs nicely with Morris’ recent interview of Stephen King about the latter’s new novel based on the Kennedy assassination.
This is Arnold Schwarzenegger doing the DVD commentary for Total Recall. Instead of adding any context to the film, he simply describes exactly what was happening in each scene.
I have three guesses as to what’s going on here:
1. It’s a fake from a really good impersonator.
2. Arnold is dumb and he’s unaware of how dumb he is.
3. But my money’s on this one: Arnold was contractually obligated to do the DVD commentary but when it came to it, he didn’t really want to. So he torpedoed the whole thing and had some fun in the meantime. (via stellar)
Since the late 1980s, Mark Landis has been donating forged paintings he’s painted to a number of museums around the country. No one really knew why…until John Gapper from The Financial Times tracked him down.
For nearly three decades, Landis has visited museums across the US in various guises and tried to donate paintings he has forged. As well as Father Scott, he has posed as “Steven Gardiner” among other aliases. He never asks for money, although museums have often hosted meals for him and made small gifts. His only stipulation is that he is donating in his parents’ names — often his actual father, Lieutenant Commander Arthur Landis Jr, a former US Navy officer.
Landis has been prolific and amazingly persistent. A few weeks before he came to Lafayette, “Father Scott” arrived at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, with a forgery of Head of a Sioux by Alfred Jacob Miller that he said he was giving in memory of his mother, “Helen Mitchell Scott”. Landis has so far offered copies of that work to five other museums. Yet in all this time, although curators speculate about his motives, no one has found out why he is doing it.
Update: Landis is the subject of a documentary film called Art and Craft.
Mark Landis has been called one of the most prolific art forgers in US history. His impressive body of work spans thirty years, covering a wide range of painting styles and periods that includes 15th Century Icons, Picasso, and even Walt Disney. And while the copies could fetch impressive sums on the open market, Landis isn’t in it for money. Posing as a philanthropic donor, a grieving executor of a family member’s will, and most recently as a Jesuit priest, Landis has given away hundreds of works over the years to a staggering list of institutions across the United States.
This is not your typical sky time lapse…instead of looping through 365 days in one video, each day gets its own little movie in a grid.
A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.
Best viewed at YouTube in full-screen HD. (via data pointed)
Speaking of going fast, this is a lovely 22-minute documentary about a downhill skateboarding race in Teutonia, Brazil where the competitors reach speeds in excess of 70 mph on almost unbelievably rough pavement.
(via ★acoleman)
Rival protesting groups clashed with police and each other during Independence Day festivities in Warsaw, Poland and someone caught some of it on a camera mounted on a remote control helicopter.
This shorter video of police double-timing it down a narrow Warsaw street is almost cinematic. It reminds me of how the different camera views in the Madden NFL video games inspired the NFL broadcasting networks to invent camera systems to provide similar views. In the future, the news will look more and more like movies. (via @coudal)
One of the many micro-genres featured on kottke.org is the “going fast video”. In that spirit, here’s a car going 462 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
My favorite part is right around 30 seconds, when he hits the gas and you can see the dirt fly up from the rear wheels. Also, the driver’s demeanor is an odd combination of frightened and bored, like Bill Murray on the elliptical in Lost in Translation. Help! (via devour)
Andreas Helgstrand at the World Equestrian Games 2006 wowing the crowds with his unconventional music choice.
Compare with the original. (via ★acoleman)
Michael J. Fox recently took the stage at his annual benefit for Parkinson’s disease and played a familiar favorite: Johnny B. Goode. Marvin, get on the phone to your cousin!
And if that’s not Mike Fox awesomeness for one day, here he is on a recent episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Perhaps you’ve seen the recent videos of the Earth at night taken from the ISS…they were a bit rough. This? This is five minutes of gorgeous HD:
You can watch it embedded here but what you’ll really want to do is head over to Vimeo so that you can watch it in fullscreen HD. (via colossal)
A video compilation of deaths from old school video games, from Pong and Space Invaders right on up to Afterburner.
The music is a MIDI version of Mad World, originally done by Tears for Fears but probably best known in the gaming community as the music in the most poignant trailer ever done for a violent third-person shooter game.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite things on one of my favorite shows (3-2-1 Contact) was Al Jarnow’s Cosmic Clock, a short video animation showing a billion years of time passing in fewer than two minutes. There’s so much science in this little video.
This is one of those things I thought I’d just never see again. YouTube is truly a global treasure.
Using a rig of 30 GoPro cameras, these guys captured surfers in Matrix-esque bullet time.
(via petapixel)
If you like M83 and have listened to their new album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, you’ll probably love this M83 backup singer audition video.
I literally LOL’d when he started singing. (via stellar)
Be honest…isn’t this how we all do the washing up when no one’s around? (via interesting)
On October 26th, a hole was blasted in the base of 125’ tall Condit Dam on the White Salmon River in Washington. In less than 2 hours, the reservoir behind the dam drained completely and the White Salmon flowed unimpeded by a dam for the first time in 100 years.
The time lapse at the end of the reservoir draining is awesome. (★interesting)
I wish the video were of better quality, but it’s still something to see.
(via @daveg)
Another excellent video by Made By Hand: The Knife Maker.
Writer turned knife maker Joel Bukiewicz of Cut Brooklyn talks about the human element of craft, and the potential for a skill to mature into an art. And in sharing his story, he alights on the real meaning of handmade-a movement whose riches are measured in people, not cash.
At Cut Brooklyn, Bukiewicz also does knife sharpening, holds open shop hours in his workshop, holds knife skills classes, and has various knives for sale.
Made By Hand’s first video was about the Breuckelen Distilling Company.
Dancing skills + sword fighting skills + old lady sitting motionless in a chair skills + huge boom box skills + dog almost gets beheaded skills + it gets magical around 52 seconds =
(via @thanland)
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