kottke.org posts about video
This is the trailer for an HBO documentary called Thoughts and Prayers about “the impact of the $3 billion active shooter preparedness industry on schools and communities across America”.
It’s tough to watch, as is this clip from the film in which a girl describes a bag of supplies that she carries in her backpack in case there’s a school shooting.
From David Ehrlich’s review in IndieWire:
Bulletproof desks that students can flip over at the first sign of trouble. A robot dog the size of a Pomeranian that jumps and yaps at the sight of an intruder. Inflatable body armor light enough for a first grader to blow up and hide behind. These are just a few of the more sensible products that are on display in the opening moments of Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock’s utterly damning “Thoughts & Prayers” — the least farcical selection of props that contribute to America’s burgeoning active shooter defense industry, which now grosses more than three billion dollars per year.
Of course, that’s a small price to pay for the laughably transparent illusion that we’re taking any meaningful steps toward protecting our kids from being slaughtered in their classrooms. In a crumbling empire where common sense has been eroded by ideology, and the political will to solve a problem can’t hope to compete with the ghoulish impulse to profit from it, creating a new business sector might just be the only kind of healing that the richest country on Earth can afford.
It is totally and utterly and completely sickening that we choose to live this way in America.
Konnichiwa! I’m back from Japan and finally getting over my jetlag, which took much longer than I expected. Here’s a list of all the things I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past few months.1 Let us know what movies, books, art, TV, music, etc. you’ve been enjoying in the comments below!
Deacon King Kong by James McBride. This was my first time reading anything by McBride and maybe I have a new favorite author? I love everything about this story and the way he tells it. (A+)
The Da Vinci Code. One of my go-to comfort movies. “Scientific” art history detective story? Yes, please. (A)
One Battle After Another. Great. Especially Sean Penn. And it reminded me of a Wes Anderson movie for some reason? Like one that he would have made had he followed the Bottle Rocket path instead of the Rushmore Path. (A+)
Meredith Dairy Marinated Sheep & Goat Cheese. All cheese is delicious, but this one particularly so. (A)
Fantastic Four. It was ok? Aside from a few things, I’m having trouble getting excited about post-Infinity Saga Marvel. There was just a special alchemy about that whole arc that is proving impossible to reproduce. (B)
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Fantastic right from the first page. Sharp writing about social mores, reminded me of Middlemarch & Price and Prejudice in that respect. One of my all-time favorites, I think. (A+)
The Gilded Age (season three). Still enjoying the hell out of this show. Total suspension of disbelief is a must. (A-)
Mission: Impossible. I haven’t seen this in maybe 20 years and I guess it holds up? Not my favorite of the series though. (B+)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Great spy thriller. Gary Oldman is fantastic in this. Cold War? Spies? Britain? I will pretty much watch as many of this type of movie as you can make. (A)
Leaving America. This is a 12-part podcast on the logistics, benefits, and challenges of leaving the United States. Oh, no reason. (B+)
The Fellowship of the Ring (and TT & ROTK) by J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s been a while since I’ve read The Lord of the Rings books and wow, are they long. There’s entirely too much “and they travelled from here to there” logistics that drag on over several pages and descriptions of hilltops & ancient landmarks that you only hear about once. But Andy Serkis narrating the audiobook? So good. (A-)
The Lord of the Rings trilogy. After each audiobook, I watched the extended version of the corresponding film. My general feeling after 65+ hours of audiobook and 12+ hours of movie is that the books are too long and the movies too short. An 18-hour mini-series — perhaps three seasons of six episodes each? — seems like the sweet spot. (A)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season three). Maybe didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the previous two season, but I love spending time with these people and look forward to doing more of that when season four drops. (B+)
Jaws. Got to see this in the theater when they released it for the 50th anniversary. Spielberg had such a strong style right from the jump. (A-)
Paradise. Just fine. But I feel like there are better apocalyptic shows out there. (B)
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale. It was so nice to head to the theater to nestle myself into the low-stakes world of Downton Abbey for 2 hours. (B+)
Daft Punk Fortnite. Love anything with Daft Punk. (A)
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. Right after finishing Deacon King Kong, I did something I almost never do: started in on a different book from the same author. Loved this one too. (A+)
Tron: Ares. It was a loud NIN music video on a huge screen, what’s not to like? Jared Leto was fine, but there were probably better casting options here that the audience would have been more excited about. And the direction could have been stronger…Gillian Anderson and Greta Lee were both surprisingly meh. (B+)
Tron: Ares soundtrack. Better than the movie. (A-)
Total Recall. First time! Maybe a little too Verhoeven/B-movie for me. (C+)
Cars. I’ve seen this movie several times and what I noticed this time around is how incredibly expressive the cars are. You can just tell they worked very hard on that aspect of the animation. (A-)
Shopkeeping by Peter Miller. This was recommended from a couple of different vectors — pretty sure one was Robin Sloan. Lots of resonance to my work here and how I think about it (and want to think about it). (A-)
Japan. Absolutely loved it. (A+)
Iyoshi Cola. Craft colas are often disappointing, but this one was absolutely delicious. Wish I could get it in the States for less than $14 a can. (A)
teamLab Borderless. Some of this was too “built for Instagram” but a couple of the rooms (the one where it felt like the whole room was moving & the cathedralish one with the light strings) were great. (A-)
The Sumida Hokusai Museum. Had to make the pilgrimage here. (A-)
In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Read this book about Japanese aesthetics while visiting Japan — it provided an interesting context. (B+)
Hokusai at Creative Museum Tokyo. Fantastic show…there were hundreds and hundreds of prints and drawings that showed his evolution and influence. (A+)
Okunoin Cemetery. Had one of the strongest senses of place I have ever experienced. (A)
Konbini. The Japanese convenience stores really are as appealing as you’ve heard. (A-)
Awakening Your Ikigai by Ken Mogi. Perhaps a little over-simplifying when it comes to Japanese culture, but I appreciated the message of having a purpose. (B)
Sho-Chan Okonomiyaki. When I got to Hiroshima, I knew I had to try their version of okonomiyaki, so I went to Okonomimura, a multi-story building crammed with okonomiyaki restaurants. I picked one and had one of the most surprising meals of my trip. So good. (A)
Blue Planet Sky. I spent a lot of time sitting in this room by James Turrell. (A)
Kanazawa Phonograph Museum. Lovely little museum, and a good opportunity to observe how successful inventions move from technology to culture/fashion/commerce. (A)
Princess Mononoke. I saw this in the theater on my last full day in Tokyo; they recently released a 4K remaster. Absolutely breathtaking. (A+)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Redford and Newman are both total smokeshows in this. And I’d forgotten how goofy this movie is. (B+)
A House of Dynamite. A very tough watch, but I thought this was fantastic as a tour of some of the different kinds of people who hold the fate of every single person on the planet in their hands every damn day. They’re tired, stressed, distracted, at cross-purposes with themselves, set in their ways, more celebs than leaders, and mediocre. And none of them have ever seen Dr. Strangelove? (A)
Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?
Chindōgu is the Japanese practice of inventing things that are not exactly useful but neither are they useless; they’re more unuseless, a term coined by chindōgu’s originator Kenji Kawakami. Some examples are tiny umbrellas for shoes, chopsticks with a tiny fan on them to cool your noodles before you slurp them, a flu headset (basically a roll of toilet paper you wear as a hat), and onion chopping glasses that have little fans that blow the onion fumes away from your eyes so you don’t start crying. This video explains chindōgu and provides some examples:
This is a great explainer as well, with lots of images and videos of examples, like this one:
Chindōgu have to be made. If you design the invention on paper and don’t make it, it doesn’t qualify. It’s a piece of paper with a bad invention on it. Bring the invention into the physical world so humankind can experience how truly almost useless it is.
Related: How the selfie stick was invented twice.
Vanity Fair sat down with Harrison Ford and asked him to identify which of his lines he’d said in which movie, mostly as a way of getting him to talk about his career. A few observations:
- I love that they trolled him with The Star Wars Holiday Special…and he knew the line! “I’ve never seen it, which explains it. But I was there, though.”
- Harrison Ford was in Apocalypse Now? And George Lucas, when he saw the film (post-Star Wars), didn’t recognize Ford?
- On Blade Runner: “I like any cut without the narration.”
The story he tells about his first role with lines, in a film called Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, is a good one.
Variety has done a bunch of these videos with actors & directors like Kate Winslet, Greta Gerwig, Carol Burnett, Jeffrey Wright, and Gary Oldman.
So I’ve been watching Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus on Apple TV and this review from Inkoo Kang resonated with me (emphasis mine):
Millions of offscreen casualties aside, it’s clear that Gilligan is aiming for a lighter — and stranger — outing than his two previous series. (For all that “Pluribus” delights in eerie atmospherics, the Southwestern sunniness keeps things from getting too dark.) The uncanny scenarios he conjures are a source of humor, intrigue, and genuine unease. But the show never adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Carol makes for a maddeningly tunnel-visioned protagonist — one with a shocking lack of curiosity about the entity that’s overtaken the Earth, or even about what the infected do all day when they’re not offering to cater to her whims. Her one-note sullenness means that Seehorn, who was heartbreaking as the repressed Kim on “Saul,” is squandered as the lead of her own show. The contentment and coöperativeness of the hive mind are similarly tough to dramatize.
It was somewhere around the middle of episode two when I started asking myself if I was supposed to care about Carol and what was going to happen to her, which is never a good sign. I like plenty of shows with unlikable protagonists (like Succession & Seinfeld) but I often can’t get past stubborn & incurious ones — it just seems fake to me and breaks my willing suspension of disbelief.
The show has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Pluribus fans, what am I missing here? The premise is good and I want to like it. Presumably many of the critics have seen the whole season and so maybe it picks up as it goes on?
Goro Obata went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived.
In the mountains of Hokkaido, Goro Obata traded city rules for freedom, backcountry skiing, fly fishing — and a café that sometimes closes on sunny days. Watch his story of choosing lifestyle over convention, and discover what “Higashikawa style” really means.
Obata in the video (bold mine):
From then I thought, life is fast. Death comes so easily. If I just drift, in no time I’ll be an old man. I want to build a fun lifestyle. That’s what I thought. I want to build it.
(With apologies to Henry David Thoreau.)
As part of the fascist war on “woke”, tens of thousands of books have been pulled from the shelves of libraries around the country over the past few years. On the front line are the nation’s librarians, “first responders in the fight for democracy and our First Amendment rights”. The Librarians is a documentary film about this latest wave of censorship & persecution of librarians; here’s the trailer:
From a review on RogerEbert.com:
“The Librarians” is a documentary about the hysterical, unfounded, personal, and sometimes violent attacks on librarians. It is also about their unwavering commitment to making facts, literature, and inspiration available to anyone.
And:
The film has some indelibly searing moments, linking these efforts to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare, to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ burning books by Jewish authors, and to the Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man,” with Burgess Meredith as a librarian sentenced to death. There is a quote from President Eisenhower: “Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence they ever existed. Read every book.”
The Librarians is out in theaters now but not very widely, so you’ll have to check the list of screenings on their web site.
Two reasons why XKCD’s What If? series is so compelling:
- Even when an answer seems straightforward, the devil is in the details.
- And with respect to the details, Munroe does his due diligence.
In this case, the answer to “what’s the longest possible sunset you can experience while driving, assuming you’re obeying the speed limit and driving on paved roads?” was fairly surprising and exact and the explanation delightful.
Btw, the ending of the video is a callback to an early XKCD comic about angular momentum.
Dark chocolate is very serious business. That’s why this ad for Bournville dark chocolate, which takes aim at dark chocolate snobbery, is so funny.
This one is so intense. It comes with a list of side effects.
Mine comes with a therapist.
To the uneducated palette, this tastes like burnt tire.
This one captures bitterness, astringency, and resentfulness. The taste is so grown up.
Oh, mine’s massively grown up.
This is only available under the counter of a pet store with no address.
This sugar was used by the Aztecs as currency.
Some believe this one’s haunted.
Mine’s flammable.
In an interview lasting for more than an hour, classicist Mary Beard shares her knowledge & experience about how the picture of Rome we might have in our heads, inherited from Hollywood movies like Gladiator, is incomplete (and just plain wrong in some cases) and what the reality was, gleaned from Roman sources.
We’ve inherited the history of Ancient Rome through movies, ruins, and shallow stories. The truth is far messier, says classicist Mary Beard. The hidden side of Roman life that screens rarely capture is chaotic; crowded streets teeming with Romans whose everyday lives were shaped by social hierarchies and familial obligations.
Mary Beard unpacks what archaeology, literature, and even shoes tell us about the Romans’ daily lives. From the role of slaves in dressing elites to the rowdy crowds at chariot races, she shows how we’ve underestimated their complexity.
(via open culture)
A Japanese experimental music group called Open Reel Ensemble plays reel-to-reel tape recorders from the 70s & 80s as musical instruments (give it a sec to get going):
Brilliant! A YouTube commenter notes: “Very cool, looks like you’re fishing for sound waves.” Here’s another video of them playing…this one’s like a reel-to-reel version of DJing with turntables:
I went looking for information about how they’re producing these sounds and found this profile of the group from 2018.
Over the years, the group has developed new techniques. As Motherboard explains, each member can now “program” sounds directly on to the recorders, creating a strange blend of digital and analog technology. With multi-track recorders, Open Reel Ensemble is able to switch individual tracks on and off, too. Sometimes they’ll record blocks of sustained noise, at various pitches, to be triggered and disabled like notes on a guitar. These allow the band to play intricate chords and melodies on stage. “We’re finding new techniques every day,” Wada said, “exploring rotation and movements, and the relationship between magnetics and sound.”
I bet they are amazing to see live.
Stress in pre-modern times was a “biological superpower” that helped humans hunt for food and survive in harsh environments and situations. But our bodies can’t easily tell the difference between the stress of encountering a lion in the jungle and a worrying email from your boss.
Our world has changed so quickly and profoundly that our biology couldn’t keep up. Stress is still the same it was fifty thousand years ago: Sense a stressor. React immediately and with full force. Prioritize present moment survival, make sacrifices if necessary.
That works well when you have to jump out of the way of a car. But most stressors we encounter nowadays are abstract, acute and more numerous, often intangible, persist for much longer and usually don’t even require physical action. The tigers of the past are now angry emails, deadlines, online dating, rush hour traffic or doom scrolling the news and social media.
Note: Watching this video might actually stress you out, at least until you get to the solutions part of it.
Caveat: In places with a lot of economic insecurity & few social safety nets, like the US, the solutions presented by this video may not be super helpful. Slowing down, disconnecting, and taking time for mindfulness can be difficult under the best of conditions and nearly impossible if you’re working two jobs as a single mother to just make ends meet.
From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of cats in the world, extinct, wild, and domesticated, and how they are related to each other. Some interesting facts I learned:
- The saber-toothed tiger was the largest cat to ever live and researchers now believe it had a short tail rather than a long one.
- There was an American cheetah. It was bigger than the cheetah we know today and “almost as fast”. It went extinct around the time humans showed up in North America.
- Leopards and snow leopards aren’t actually that closely related.
- Domestic cats are mostly descended from wildcats (not to be confused with cats who are wild — wildcat refers to two specific species, the European wildcat (Felis silvestris) and the African wildcat (Felis lybica)).
See also All the Dogs, Explained: “Standing on his hind legs, [the tallest ever Great Dane] was taller than Shaq.”
Operation Space Station is a two-part PBS documentary series on the International Space Station. Here’s a very short teaser trailer:
A synopsis:
The size of a football field, the International Space Station hurtles around Earth at 17,000 mph, shielding its astronauts from the most hostile environment humans have ever endured. After 25 years of continuous human presence in space, astronauts and Mission Control insiders reveal the most terrifying moments aboard this remarkable orbiting laboratory, where a single mistake could prove fatal. From ammonia leaks, meteor strikes, and docking disasters, to spacewalk horrors, potentially lethal showers of space junk, and the moment the entire ISS backflipped out of control, follow life-or-death dramas unfolding 250 miles above our planet — and the human ingenuity and teamwork that save the day.
(via installer)
Here’s the trailer for The Age of Audio, a feature-length documentary about the invention and popularization of podcasting, from Adam Curry to Ronald Young Jr.
I ran across this movie via a clip on Instagram that explains how the word “podcast” came to be; here’s the same clip from YouTube:
Every time there’s a new technology, it always has to be named the dumbest thing.
Whoever came up with the name podcasting, like what a dumbass name.
It’s so funny cuz the podcast community gets very heated about these issues.
Whoever invented the word podcast, I’m going to punch him in the throat.
See also blogging. 🫠
High Horse: The Black Cowboy is a three-part documentary about the culture of Black cowboys & cowgirls and their erasure from the history of the western United States.
From executive producer Jordan Peele and Monkeypaw Productions, the pop culture and historical documentary confronts and reclaims the Wild West while revealing the story of the Black cowboy — a history that has largely been untold. It rides into the forgotten corners of history, shattering myths and celebrating the Black cowboys, farmers, jockeys, musicians, and rodeo champions who built the West — and now takes back their place in the saddle, sitting high atop the horse.
High Horse: The Black Cowboy starts streaming Nov 20th on Peacock.
A two-hour version of the music played in the Wellness Center in Severance. “Please try to enjoy each listening session equally.” See also Severance: Music To Refine To.
✅ Added to my Underscore collection.
Bionic and the Wires connects sensors to plants and fungi to help them play music.
The attached sensors measure bio-electrical fluctuations in the mushroom. The fluctuations are converted into signals that control the robotic arms. The keyboard is playing a synth in Ableton Live.
What are the chances it’s just saying “uh, can you get these things off of me?” Top YouTube comment tho: “Play that fungi music.” (thx, pascal)
Speaking of Daft Punk, did you know they released some new music recently? Ok well, that’s not quiiiite true, but in late September, Epic launched the Daft Punk Experience in Fortnite and IMO it’s a) extremely cool, nd b) should be considered a part of the group’s official discography.
For a taste of what it’s like, here’s the seven-minute intro to the experience:
I watched this live when it launched, on a big TV and with the sound turned up, and it was awesome. Again, no new music, but definitely a new music video experience.
During the intro, you can control your player slightly but the game mostly moves you through it. After you’re inside the pyramid though, there’s a lot to do. The main event is a concert playing some of the songs from their Alive 2007 tour; here’s what that looks like from start to finish (33 min):
You can move freely around and dance, including with other players who are in the pyramid with you. During some songs, you can bounce really high on the dance floor or fly around the room.
Off of the main pyramid are four smaller interactive rooms (in order of coolness):
- Dream Chamber Studios: You can choose from almost two dozen Daft Punk songs and mix them together, adjust tempos, etc. This room alone makes the whole experience worthwhile…it’s the easiest way to create DP remixes.
- Around the World. You and up to three other players work to recreate and then customize the iconic Around the World music video. Oh, and you’re all Lego characters.
- Daft Club: Dance to music from Random Access Memories. (You can see the full Daft Club sequence in the latter part of this video.)
- Robot Rock Arena: You and some teammates join forces to defeat robots using musical weapons.
In all, that’s six new interactive audiovisual experiences from Daft Punk, featuring 31 songs from their discography. It’s huge.
The easiest way to see/experience all of this is to play the game…the Daft Punk Experience is still playable afaik. Fortnite is a free download and the DPE is free as well. If you’re a Daft Punk fan, it’s worth checking out for sure.
In his most recent video, Evan Puschak takes a close look at Marlon Brando’s face and gestures in a scene from On the Waterfront to explain how Brando changed film forever.
And this is what makes Brando a genius: when his eyes betray his words. His voice says, “What do you really care?” But his eyes say, “Please care. Please show me that you care.”
Welp, time to watch On the Waterfront, I guess.
I don’t even know what this is — classical pop? surrealist orchestral? — but it goes hard and is kind of fantastic. Wow. A few comments from YouTube:
This is the most insane lead single from a pop artist I’ve ever come across! I’m absolutely stunned.
The only criticism I’m going to make is that the song should last at least 8 minutes.
I feel this needs to replace whatever was stolen from that museum in France.
Berghain by Rosalía is available to stream or buy on many of the usual platforms.
Papers is a 3-minute animated short film made by Yoshinao Satoh from what must be thousands of newspaper scans. The animation set to Different Trains by Steve Reich & Kronos Quartet. I love this style of collage animation.
From NY Times reporter Anna Kodé (whose “intersection of culture and real estate” reporting I’ve been enjoying lately), a short video on the increasingly hostile architecture of NYC.
The spread of the leaning bench and the lack of seating at places like Moynihan or around the city signals to homeless individuals that they are not welcome in these places. It signals to all New Yorkers that these are not social places. These are places to simply pass through.
Here’s a video Vox did on the subject seven years ago.
Being in Japan is offering me such a contrast to so many things in the US. There are benches in public places here and they don’t have spikes all over them. Japan has the world’s lowest rate of homelessness, probably because they take care of people.
In America, we don’t provide housing or much of anything else for people (including a living wage or affordable health care) and the result is that no one can sit down in Penn Station or in a subway station and oh by the way, lots of people have nowhere to live. Why do we do this to ourselves? We could live better lives but we choose not to….for reasons?
Listening to Ethan Hawke talk about his career for 30 minutes is a treat. He starts with Explorers (which I loved as a kid) and continues with Dead Poets Society, Before Sunrise, Boyhood, and First Reformed. Good Lord Bird is on the list as well…I’m making my way through the book right now and I’ll be eager to check out the miniseries after I’m finished.
I wish they would have included Gattaca but you have to stop somewhere otherwise the dang thing’s gonna be an hour long.
This is so so cool and an arrow-splitting bullseye in the middle of my wheelhouse: a short Boards of Canada tune played on a DEC PDP-1, one of the most significant machines in the history of computing.
Here’s a description of what’s going on, courtesy of @dryad.technology on Bluesky:
The PDP-1 doesn’t have sound, but it does have front-panel light bulbs for debugging, so they rewired the light bulb lines into speakers to create 4 square wave channels.
You can read more about The PDP-1: The Machine That Started Hacker Culture:
The bottom line is that the PDP-1 was really the first computer that encouraged users to sit down and play. While IBM machines did the boring but necessary work of business behind closed doors and tended by squads of servants, DEC’s machines found their way into labs and odd corners of institutions where curious folk sat in front of their terminals, fingers poised over keyboards while a simple but powerful phrase was uttered: “I wonder what happens if…” The DEC machines were the first computers that allowed the question, which is really at the heart of the hacker culture, to be answered in real time.
And every day is a good day to listen to Boards of Canada. Oh! And if you’re anywhere near Mountain View, the Computer History Museum has regular demos of the PDP-1 and will play the song if requested!
If anyone would like to see this live, we demo the PDP-1 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on the first and third Saturdays of the month, 2:30 and 3:15p. Just ask, and we’ll be happy to play it!
(via @k4r1m.bsky.social)
It’s not often that a movie trailer makes you cry — but this one might.1
Come See Me in the Good Light is a documentary film about poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley facing a cancer diagnosis that took Gibson’s life earlier this year.
This is the beginning of a nightmare, I thought. But stay with me, y’all, because my story is one about happiness, being easier to find, once we realize we do not have forever to find it.
Falley’s letter published just after Gibson’s death will give you a sense of the spirit of the film & the two humans at the center of it:
A couple years ago, Andrea said, “Whenever I leave this world, whether it’s sixty years from now, I wouldn’t want anyone to say I lost some battle. I’ll be a winner that day.”
Whatever beast of emotion bucks or whimpers through you right now, I hope you can hold that line beside it: Andrea didn’t lose anything. If you had been here in our home during the three days of their dying — if you’d seen dozens of friends drift in to help, to say goodbye, to say thank you, to kiss their perfect face, if you’d felt the love that floored every hospice nurse — you would have agreed. Andrea won.
The film is set to premiere Nov 14 on Apple TV.
One hour and twenty-five minutes. That’s apparently all of the footage that exists of Joy Division playing their music on TV and in concert. Open Culture’s Colin Marshall writes:
Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground that their first album sold only 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one started a band. Joy Division’s debut Unknown Pleasures sold only 20,000 copies in its initial period of release, but the T‑shirt emblazoned with its cover art — an image of radio waves emanating from a pulsar taken from an astronomy encyclopedia — has long since constituted a commercial-semiotic empire unto itself. That speaks to the vast subcultural influence of the band, despite their only having been active from 1976 to 1980. When we speak of the genre of post-punk, we speak, in large part, of Joy Division and the artists they influenced.
(via open culture)
From director Kathryn Bigelow comes A House of Dynamite (trailer), starring Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, and Greta Lee.
When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.
A House of Dynamite is out in theaters right now and will be on Netflix in a couple of weeks.
If you were one of those people who loved watching DVD extras, you’ll enjoy the hell out of ILM visual effects artist Todd Vaziri breaking down some of the special effects that he and his team have worked on, including Rogue One, The Force Awakens, and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Introducing the video on his site, Vaziri writes:
My goal was to highlight the artistic process of visual effects. Movies like the ones I highlight in the video are crafted by hundreds of artists, technicians and production folks, all working together to achieve the vision of the director. I’m so proud to have worked with such amazing crews over the years.
Many of the effects he highlights aren’t the obvious ones — monsters, digital Leia, lightsaber battles — but rather effects that you’d never notice — indeed effects that you shouldn’t notice because they are designed to be seamless. Like a “dust poof” from a slingshot shot — it registers and helps sell the scene, but you’d never think, “oh, that’s an effect”.
The whole thing is fascinating — and the rope thing is genius.
Giorgia Lupi and her team at Pentagram have created a data-driven animation for the MTA called A Data Love Letter to the Subway.
More from Lupi (who calls this an “absolute dream project”):
The project, “A Data Love Letter to the Subway,” visualizes each train line as a character whose unique qualities are extracted from MTA data. Data like length, location, and transfers were abstracted into train behaviors and attributes. Imaginatively animating each train line’s age, length, and path, we wrote a poetic story that explores the trains’ interwoven encounters with commuters and one another.
Our “Love Letter” draws on the elemental nature of picture books to unpack the visual system of the subway with curiosity and wonder. Drawing from the MTA’s Open Data Program, with my team we translated train data into a narrative made of attributes and behaviors, providing a rich view of the interactions, roles, differences, and the connections made and sometimes missed within the subway ecosystem.
Maps, NYC, the subway, data visualization…I am not sure how much more in my wheelhouse a thing could be.
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