Video of Peter Sellers reciting The Beatles
Video of Peter Sellers reciting The Beatles A Hard Day’s Night in the style of Laurence Olivier doing Shakespeare’s Richard III. Got all that? (via cyn-c)
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kottke.org posts about video
Barnes & Noble’s Media section is filling
Barnes & Noble’s Media section is filling out nicely with audio and video interviews, readings, and conversations with a wide range of interesting authors.
Director File has put out its list
Director File has put out its list of Ten Best Music Videos of 2007. Of particular note on the list is a sweet and heartwarming video for The Bees “Listening Man” directed by Dominic Leung.
Leung began his career as a part of hammer & tongs, the creative team behind many influential music videos as well as the movies Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, on which he acted as 2nd unit director and title sequence director, and the upcoming Son of Rambow, which he edited. (via antville)
The “lost intro” to Star Wars, a
The “lost intro” to Star Wars, a scene featuring Luke pining for adventure on Tatooine. I’m glad it got lost. (via cyn-c)
The War on Drugs and scopolamine, the perfect drug
How America Lost the War on Drugs, a history of the United States government’s efforts to stop its citizens from using illegal substances, primarily crack, heroin, and methamphetamines. Quite long but worth the read.
All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic.
It’s not that hard to see how things got off the rails here. Dealing with the supply of drugs is ineffective (it’s too lucrative for people to stop selling and too easy to find countries which seek to profit from it) but provides the illusion of action while attacking the problem from the demand side, which appears to be more effective, comes with messy and complex social problems. What a waste. The bits about meth & the lobbying efforts by the pharmaceutical industry and the medical marijuana crackdowns are particularly maddening.
Somewhat related is a 9-part series from VBS about scopolamine, one of the world’s scariest drugs (via fimoculous). Just blowing the powder into someone’s face is sufficient for them to enter a wakeful zombie state and become the perfect rape or crime victim.
The last thing Andrea Fernandez recalls before being drugged is holding her newborn baby on a Bogota city bus. Police found her three days later, muttering to herself and wandering topless along the median strip of a busy highway. Her face was badly beaten and her son was gone.
The description of the effect of scopolamine on people reminds me of what the Ampulex compressa wasp does to cockroaches:
From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it — in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex — like a dog on a leash.
I wonder if the chemical reactions are similar in both cases.
Wow, The Simpsons did a parody of
Wow, The Simpsons did a parody of Noah Kalina’s Everyday video. Noah, you just graduated summa cum laude from Pop Culture University.
Update: But apparently the background music was used without permission.
A few months back a producer from the Simpsons contacted Carly about using her song ‘everyday’ for an upcoming episode in which they were going to parody my video. She was negotiating a rate for the song, until they never got back to her. No fee was agreed on, no contracts signed.
Maybe they decided since it was parody they didn’t need permission? I don’t find that likely since what little I know about Hollywood/TV is that they’re really concerned about clearing rights. (thx, slava)
Update: The song rights mixup was an accidental oversight and is currently being corrected.
A list of anthropomorphized online video players.
A list of anthropomorphized online video players.
YouTube - Paris Hilton. Fast, a little out of control, used by every fifteen year old in town, looks alright but you get kinda tired of seeing it everywhere.
The opening title sequence of The Kingdom
The opening title sequence of The Kingdom is a nice 3.5 minute overview of the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia.
What did Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett
What did Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost in Translation? Someone did a bit of audio analysis and posted their findings as a video. (via avenues)
Duelity is a split-screen movie with one
Duelity is a split-screen movie with one half of the screen showing the six-day creation of the earth & man in scientific terms and the other half showing the Big Bang/evolution origin of the universe as it might have been written in the Bible. (Click on “watch” then “duelity” to get the full effect.) Nice use of infographics and illustration. (thx, slava)
Led Zeppelin reunited for one concert last
Led Zeppelin reunited for one concert last night in London with over 1 million people registering for the 20,000 available tickets. There are video clips available on Google Video and YouTube and two bootlegged songs have surfaced online so far.
Anhedonia is a 90-min film that uses
Anhedonia is a 90-min film that uses the audio from Annie Hall and stock video footage from Getty; here’s an 11-min excerpt. (thx, katerina)
IAC’s Manhattan headquarters has an absolutely massive
IAC’s Manhattan headquarters has an absolutely massive video wall in the lobby. ITP professor Daniel Shiffman took his class over to play around with it, projecting hundreds of frames of Run Lola Run on the wall at the same time in sequence. You can see the scene cuts racing along the wall, demonstrating the franticness of the movie.
Lynch
On-set photos of David Lynch and cast members from the final episode of Twin Peaks. (via waxy)
Behind-the-scenes of a Gucci perfume ad directed by Lynch, referencing his own most recent feature, Inland Empire. Finished commercial here. (via spoutblog)
Upon watching Inland Empire, I was so immediately immersed, my first thought was that David Lynch should only ever shoot video. Apparently, he feels the same.
Two Movies, Linked by Subject Matter
Two more movies on my horizon, both about outsiders in the music business:
- The trailer for Young @ Heart that nearly brought me to tears last night can’t yet be found online, and the clip available at Channel4, where the film originally aired in the UK is a bit dry. Instead, you’ll find info on the film and two great clips at The Documentary Blog, including a heart-wrenching performance of the Young @ Heart chorus of elderly people (average age 80) performing Coldplay, part of a repertoire including The Clash, The Ramones, and Sonic Youth.
- Great World of Sound is an Altmanesque comedy about two normal southern guys who get caught up in a record industry talent scout scheme. The trailer at Apple looks promising.
Update: Young @ Heart trailer can now be found here.
VHS gets love from two upcoming movies
Most avid readers will speak to an emotional attachment to books through associations of the senses - the roughness of the page, the smell of ink and glue - when describing a love of reading. Filmmakers and connoisseurs of film will cite an obsession with the physical properties of the celluloid through which movies are projected.
But for a generation of filmmakers who cut their filmmaker teeth by shooting with the family camcorder and editing with two VCRs, there is a logical fixation with the object of the plastic and magnetic 1/2” VHS videocassette and the visual artifacts of its recorded image.
Two movies will be released in the next months which hold the VHS aesthetic dear. One is Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind in which two video store clerks decide to deal with a store full of accidentally erased tapes by remaking the classic movies in their own, VHS homebrew fashion.
The other paean to VHS is Son of Rambow, Garth Jennings’ film which was the darling of Sundance this year. The title is that of the homebrewed movie that two little boys make after discovering and being mindblown by a bootleg copy of Rambo: First Blood on VHS.
No trailer yet for Son of Rambow, but a review from The New York Times.
This begs the question: with Super-8 and VHS all but a distant memory, with MiniDV on the way to extinction, what formats will the future filmmakers obsess over and what artifacts will they attempt to reproduce for nostalgia as they grow up and the formats of their youth are phased out?
Harry Partch
I’m a philosophic man, seduced into carpentry.
-Harry Partch
The Japan Society in New York is currently staging “Delusion of the Fury,” the best-known work of Harry Partch. Partch was a pioneer of microtonal music who began modifying conventional instruments, then eventually manufacturing his own instruments in order to write music that conventional instruments couldn’t play. In this video from 1968, he is seen playing an instrument of his creation, the harmonic canon.
Update: Ben Tesch, who launched the collaborative weather site cumul.us in October, also developed a site for American Mavericks in honor of Harry Partch and his music. The site allows you to play virtual recreations of a large selection of Partch’s instruments. It’s very cool.
Guitar Hero III has mono
Activision is working with Nintendo on re-mastering the Guitar Hero III discs for the Wii, which have been mistakenly encoded to reproduce music in mono rather than in stereo. Once the re-mastering has been done, early next year, the company will swap out current Guitar Hero III discs for free.
I honestly hadn’t noticed the mono issue, but I’m still waiting for my replacement ‘Pet Sounds’ to ship.
Woody is Speechless
Woody Allen is always on.
A similar trick of media with The Wire.
A history of the laugh track at Slate.
(via and higher quality version at itisnotforyou)
Darjeeling Toy Train
The eponymous train of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited is fictional, but loosely based on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, nicknamed the “Toy Train.” Photos found on flickr reveal a color palette as lush as that of the movie.
New episodes of The Wire, available now!
New episodes of The Wire, available now! Well, sort of. The Amazon page for the season 4 DVDs contains three mini prequels to the series: one with a grade school-aged Prop Joe, a teenaged Omar, and McNulty’s first day with the homicide unit.
I trusted you
This rare video of a 1977 Andy Kaufman performance on the weekly musical late night TV series The Midnight Special is probably as good a litmus test as any for an appreciation of Andy. (via Paul Scheer)
High Wire
“There’s only three things I’ve ever been afraid of: electricity, heights, and women. And I’m married, too.”
Accompanied by an exalted score, this video of a guy who flies around on the outside of helicopters and repairs high-voltage power lines is enthralling. (via whatdoiknow)
Roberto Carlos, O Rei (The King)
Influenced by his idol, Elvis Presley and the 1950s rock revolution, he rose to stardom as the main figure of the 60s musical movement known as Jovem Guarda (Young guard, in opposition to the ‘old guard’ of Brazilian music), which was the first manifestation of the Brazilian pop rock movement.
In 1966 Brazil, this man was bigger than the Beatles.
(thx, chana)
Poignant, amusing, disturbing, hunger-inducing? I don’t know
Poignant, amusing, disturbing, hunger-inducing? I don’t know what to make of this video, but I can’t stop watching it. If you only watch one chocolate bunny melting video this year, make it this one. (via clusterflock)
Crash test video of a Smart Car
Crash test video of a Smart Car hitting a wall at 70 mph. Compare with these tests of a pair of Chinese sedans. Ouch. (thx, eric)
Been on a bit of a Guitar
Been on a bit of a Guitar Hero kick lately…I just played it for the first time recently so of course I’m looking around the web for advice, hacks, YouTube videos, etc. Nothing like a little web research to reinforce how little you know.
Anyhoo, I found this video of a 8-yo kid shredding it up on Guitar Hero 2…he missed only three notes on an expert level song and wasn’t even looking at the screen some of the time. Little blighter. If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go have a few alcoholic drinks, smoke some cigarettes, rent a car, and join the Army…let’s see him do all that! (P.S. I wrote a hit play!)
Photographer Justin Guariglia spent eight years documenting
With the blessing of the main abbot, Shi Yong Xin, Guariglia has earned the full collaboration of the monks to create an astonishing, empathic record of the Shaolin art forms and the individuals who consider themselves the keepers of these traditions. It is the first time the monks have allowed such extensive documentation of these masters and their centuries-old art forms-from Buddhist mudras to classical kung fu-in their original setting, a 1,500-year-old Buddhist temple.
Photos and video here. Watching the videos, especially the one featuring Tong Jian Quan, I was reminded of hip hop dancing (Michael Jackson in particular) in a way that watching kung-fu and other martial arts in Hollywood movies does not.
Also, Shaolin monk Hai Deng was famous for performing a one-finger handstand. The video seems a little suspect but this performance brings the single finger handstand into the realm of possibility.
Cosmic Zoom is a 1968 animated short film
Cosmic Zoom is a 1968 animated short film directed by Eva Szasz, made under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada, and was the inspiration of the Eames’ wonderful Powers of Ten. Cosmic Zoom was in turn based on Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps by Kees Boeke.
Here’s a video of a car driving
Here’s a video of a car driving on Japan’s aforementioned melody roads. (thx, kyle)
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