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kottke.org posts about video

Lo Heads

Rapper/producer 88-Keys is a Lo Head, an obsessive collector and wearer of Ralph Lauren Polo clothing and accessories. He’s been wearing nothing but Polo every single day since 1993. This interview with rapper and Lo Head Rack-Lo functions as a sort of Lo Head manifesto.

A lot of street dudes have paved the way and paid a hefty price for all of you to even be able to rock Lo and all those other name brands as well. Other names like North Face, Benetton, Gucci, Spyder, Gortex, Louis Vutton and the list goes on - Lo-Life’s did it all first. So let me school ya’ll for a second. This Lo movement officially started in 1988. And even before 1988, the movement was in development. Have ya’ll ever heard of Ralphies Kids or USA (United Shoplifters Association), that’s the foundation right there. Those are basically the two crews that Rack-Lo united as Lo-Life’s to form voltron on the Hip Hop world. And a lot of you dudes probably weren’t even born then. So what the fuck are you really saying? So I’m just making it clear that if your going to rep that Lo shit and be apart of a fashion institution there’s a certain way to do it. Word, it rules and laws to this shit. This aint no fly by night shit where u wake up one morning and decide to rock Lo like Kayne West did. That shit there is a fairy tale a lot of heads are living.

Kanye defended his status as a Lo Head in the song Barry Bonds from his Graduation album.


The Ascent of Money

The Ascent of Money is a two-hour documentary about the evolution of money and finance. The whole thing is available for viewing on PBS’s web site for free.

“Everyone needs to understand the complex history of money and our relationship to it,” he says. “By learning how societies have continually created and survived financial crises, we can find solid solutions to today’s worldwide economic emergency.” As he traverses historic financial hot spots around the world, Ferguson illuminates fundamental economic concepts and speaks with leading experts in the financial world.

The series is based on Niall Ferguson’s book of the same name (an Amazon and NY Times bestseller) and will air in an expanded 4-hour version later this year. (via lined & unlined)


Protection from success

Elizabeh Gilbert talks about how to keep being creative in the face of success. In particular, she mentions erecting a “protective pyschological construct to protect you from the results of your work”.

And just so you don’t end up wondering about it for half the talk like I did, Melissa Gilbert played Laura Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie. Elizabeth Gilbert is a writer. (via john hodgman)


How Pixar hires

In a 10-minute video, Randy Nelson, the Dean of Pixar University, talks about how Pixar hires. One thing they look for is people who are interested rather than interesting.


The Beatles’ last concert

Video of The Beatles’ last public performance in three parts: one, two, three. They performed on top of the group’s own building with an audience situated on rooftops and down on the street. (via the year in pictures)


A pair of links about Ira Glass

The first is a three-part manifesto from 2004 about how he got his start in radio, how to effectively tell stories, and how to realize when your story isn’t working.

Force yourself to do a lot of stories. This is the most important thing you can do. Get yourself in a situation where people are expecting work out of you, or where you simply force yourself to do a certain number of stories every month. Turn the stuff out. Deadlines are your friend.

The Gel Conference just posted a video of Glass speaking at the 2007 conference in which he “describes the elements of a good story”.


America’s quiet ports

The current inactivity at Port of Long Beach is indicative of larger problems in the highly coupled global economy. Americans are buying fewer goods, including those made abroad, so no new goods are coming in to the port and those that have already arrived are sitting on the docks, including 165+ acres of Toyota cars. Because Americans are not buying foreign goods, China has slowed production. Slowed production means that they don’t need cardboard boxes for packaging. Since we ship our used paper to China for recycling into cardboard boxes, hundreds of tons of paper are sitting on the docks, unshipped. The strengthening of the dollar abroad means that American made goods aren’t selling and the ships hauling them are unable to leave the port. Nothing is selling anywhere so everything sits in the now-constipated port.


How to edit a film

A short lesson in film editing in the form of a scene from the film Modern Romance, featuring Albert Brooks and Bruno Kirby. The director of the film that comes in about halfway through is real-life producer/director James L. Brooks. (thx, dave)


Wonderwall techno

We all had a healthy laugh earlier in the month when someone took the vocal track from Van Halen’s Runnin’ With The Devil and ran it through Microsoft Songsmith, creating an automatic and unusual musical accompaniment for David Lee Roth’s tortured vocals. Since then, people have done this with all sorts of songs and they’re all pretty bad. Surprisingly, Wonderwall by Oasis works really well as a techno song. (thx, rob)


Four hours of baby play packed into two minutes

Excellent timelapse video of a baby playing with his toys. The camera angle and the way he moves through the room consuming his toys makes it look like an amoeba in a petri dish. (thx, curtis)


Flying over glowing cities

Timelapse video of a cross country flight at night, flying above clouds glowing with city lights.

My advice to you is to make the video full screen, put in your headphones and enjoy the soothing ride. (via migurski)


Jump London

Jump London, a 2003 documentary about parkour, is available in its entirety on Google Video. (thx, sacha)


The T-Mobile Dance

Go on, see if this T-Mobile commercial doesn’t make you smile. They did a good job in making it look organic and building to greater and greater coordination. Great commercial…it shows exactly what mobile phones are for.

Update: Here’s a short movie of the filming on Flickr by someone who just happened to be there. (thx, matt)


Presidential inauguration videos, 1901-2005

A MetaFilter user has tracked down video for all of the Presidential inauguration ceremonies for the past 100 years. Here’s McKinley’s from 1901, Teddy Roosevelt (1905), JFK (1961), and Reagan (1981).


Flight 1549 simulation

The BBC did a flight simulation of US Airways flight 1549 that shows what the water approach looked like from the cockpit. (thx, david)


Video footage of Hudson River plane crash

I’m still fascinated by the water landing of US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River late last week. Here are a few more things I’ve seen related to it over the last couple of days.

First the videos. Someone visiting the Bronx Zoo caught the plane on video, flying low in the sky just after the bird strike. A Coast Guard video monitoring station got a shot of the plane just after it splashed down…you can see the spray from the impact flying in from the left of the video just after the 2:00 mark.

Soon after the plane hits, the camera zooms in and you can see just how quickly people get out and onto the wings. And then this video shows it most clearly:

Look how low and level and steady Sully guided that thing in! Amazing!

The NY Times has a couple of good pieces in their extensive crash coverage. I loved reading what various passengers had to say about the crash, lots of little moments of heroism in there.

The life raft attached to the plane was upside down in the river, just out of reach. Mr. Wentzell turned and found another passenger, Carl Bazarian, an investment banker from Florida who, at 62, was twice his age. Mr. Wentzell grabbed the wrist of Mr. Bazarian, who grabbed a third man who held onto the plane. Mr. Wentzell then leaned out to flip the raft. “Carl was Iron Man that day,” Mr. Wentzell said. “We got the raft stabilized and we got on.” A man went into the water, and the door salesman and the banker hauled him aboard. He curled in a fetal position, freezing.

The Times also comes through with the 3-D flight graphic I asked for the other day but they upped the ante with a seating chart of the plane where you can click on certain passengers’ seats to read their thoughts. Mark Hood in seat 2A described the landing:

When we touched down, it was like a log ride at Six Flags. It was that smooth.

The whole thing is still so amazing. Looking at the underside of the plane as they lifted it from the water last night, you can see the damage to the bottom of the plane and just how close they all were to being flung all over the place or sinking quickly or a number of other different outcomes.


How to get out of a car without showing your knickers

Good advice for Hollywood starlets, pop singers, and socialites: a video on how to get out of a car without showing your knickers. Slightly NSFW.


The metal that remembers

Video of Nitinol wire, a shape memory alloy which returns to a pre-determined shape when heated.


Balloon animal coitus

This is NSFW if very squeaky balloon animal sex is not safe to view at your workplace. Unsafe perhaps, but hilarious. (via siege, also NSFW)


Bernstein conducts Shostakovich with YouTube vocals

Leonard Bernstein conducts Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 while comments from YouTube commenters are read. (via the rest is noise)


Missed conception

Sperm travels up a dark tunnel and then…saying more would ruin the ending. Just watch:

I seriously LOL’d at the reveal. Slightly NSFW, I guess. (via house next door)

Update: The video was down earlier for some reason but now it’s back up.


Willard Wigan, micro sculptor

Video of Willard Wigan’s work. Wigan makes exceptionally tiny sculptures that fit on pin-heads or within eyes of needles. He once lost a sculpture of Alice in Wonderland:

I think I inhaled her.

Some of the parts of his sculptures are no bigger than human blood cells and to steady his hands, he works in between the beats of his heart.

The stillness of it is very important — you have to control the whole nervous system, you have to work between the heartbeat — the pulse of your finger can destroy the work.

(thx, alex)


Famous poet zombies

I can’t decide if this is creepy or cool: a bunch of videos of dead poets reading their poems. The effect is achieved by warping photos to make it look like their mouths are moving. Here’s Poe reading The Raven and Robert Frost doing The Road Not Taken.


The Noises Rest

The You Look Nice Today ensemble talk about how to make sound effects for the silent film industry.


The Wire, rapped up

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)


3-2-1 Contact!

Opening theme to 3-2-1 Contact. This was the soundtrack to my tween and early teen years.


Best special effects shots

A wide-ranging and carefully considered list of the top 50 special effects shots in movies. The Matrix bullet-time effect doesn’t make this list because:

An effect extraordinarily limited in what can usefully be done with it, it has nonetheless been flogged to death in the 10 years since The Matrix.

The Burly Brawl from the second Matrix movie thankfully didn’t make the list either, likely because the whole thing looks like a cartoonish video game (and not in a good way). The only quibble I can think of: maybe Titanic should have been on there somewhere? (via fimoculous)

Update: Titanic actually made the worst effects list. (thx, rob)


A conceptual drill

Video of an ineffective concrete drill.

Each worm/worm gear pair reduces the speed of the motor by 1/50th. Since there are 12 pairs of gears, the final speed reduction is calculated by (1/50)12. The implications are quite large. With the motor turning around 200 revolutions per minute, it will take well over two trillion years before the final gear makes but one turn.


Wide left, no, wide right!

Highlights of yesterday’s Patriots/Bills game, aka The Wind Bowl. We must have rewound that Buffalo field goal attempt at least five times…I still can’t believe it hooked that much in two different directions.


GEL videos

The excellent GEL conference has started posting videos of some of the presentations made during the conference.