There’s a proliferation these days of music videos that fairly grab you by the lapels and scream "look how clever! forward on to all of your friends!! post it on your blog!! now!!!" And while it often comes off as a blatant marketing move, when it’s done with style, and actually is, you know, clever, I have to appreciate it. And then, you know (again), forward it on to all my friends. Or post it on my blog.
This video, Naive New Beaters "Live Good", comes from a metafilter post, and the comments on it hint at both sides of this equation — from "how neat!" to "I’m so tired of this kind of crap." Many metafilterites hate the song, and I will say watching it without the audio is just as effective (though maybe not for the band).
Much as our parents’ generation derided the effect that MTV had on editing (faster cuts, more eye candy, louder), I can imagine a future in which we deride the way artworks become more and more "look at me!!!" in an attempt to stand out on a crowded playing field. And the kids of today will all say "are you kidding? that’s what makes it awesome!" Or whatever they say instead of "awesome". Maybe the new word will be "grandiose".
Well at this point everyone’s probably at least a little familiar with the Wii, Nintendo’s semi-revolutionary game system with the motion sensor controller. I haven’t played the thing myself (game systems make me stay up until 3 in the morning trying to win the robot) but everyone I know says it’s the greatest thing since Guitar Hero. The new Wii Fit game(?) made the front page of the New York Times Sunday Style section a few weeks ago, so it’s definitely in the popular consciousness.
A while back I came across a pretty keen Ted lecture about how to use the Wii remote to make some sophisticated and cheap equipment…it’s pretty cool if you’re into that kind of thing…I love this stuff, listening to brainiacs wax poetic about their specific area of uber-nerd expertise…
but then MM (thanks, Malcolm!) hipped me to this new Wii game that made me realize they have barely scratched the surface of what this thing can do. It’s available at ThinkGeek.com, but let’s not bother with descriptions or critiques, let’s just go right to the videotape:
Some of you are loving this (I’m looking at you Devito!), some are hating it (M Trump, nice to see you), but I have to say I do love this part:
According to the Japanese text on the box "Super Pii Pii Brothers promotes good bathroom skills and allows women to experience for the first time the pleasure of urinating while standing."
What a pleasure it is. What a true pleasure it is.
Does the hi-five seem particularly egotistical? It’s a way for two people to somehow share in a self-congratulatory moment and also turn that moment into a big public display. "Hey lookit us, we did something great!" And yet, when done unselfconsciously, or in the true joy of a moment, it is somehow, fantastic. A pure form of "Yesss!"
I love the idea of the hi-five unironically (I think), though it should be reserved only for the best occasions.
In February, right when I had started the blog, I was working on a project at Sundance Channel when I saw an editor working on these amazing Isabella Rossellini short pieces based on the sex life of bugs(!!). They are weird and amazing. Yes, they have that sort of "consciously viral" quality to them (i.e., "I’m a big business but I’m making something weird so it gets forwarded around the internet!"), but luckily Isabella R is so over-the-top and great that it doesn’t matter.
I immediately thought I would grab them from the edit room and post them on my blog before they were even out! I had just started my blog, and already a real scoop! This was going to be great!
Then I realized that Sundance would know it was me and I really like working there (still, I kinda feel, as Gillanders would say, "the old Josh would have done it."). So I’ve been patiently biding my time for them to have an official release and now it has happened. Here is a brief sampling of two of them, bee and snail. Find the rest on the Sundance site here.
(For some reason they’re not available outside the US, which has caused a bit of a stink on the internets (old-school rights management in a new school world)…someone on boingboing provides a workaround to the original flv’s here)
(pic of mixwit.com, the new mixtape site with a great cassette-style interface)
Since I started the blog in February 08 I’ve been thinking a lot about this stuff. I wasn’t really sure what joshgranger.com was going to be when I bought the domain. Then while getting ready to start the blog proper, wordpress (whose software powers this site) had a little exercise before you start blogging where you write down what you plan to do, who the audience is, how often you’ll blog, etc., in an effort to make sure you know what you’re getting into.
My little written bit basically amounted to sharing anything I found online that I thought was cool — music, video, linkage — much like my favorite blogs. I’ve come to think of it as an extension of the mixtape, which is an artform I’ve loved since I was taping off the radio in 1982. In college my mixtaping reached a alltime high level: I was using the media lab to tape things off of VHS videocassettes; I had inherited my dad’s old cassette player that could control the level in (yes! no more loud to soft transitions); I was part of a group of fellow mixtapologists who took it very seriously (report cards were made for each mix, a fanzine was published (I show up on page 13)); I was able to scour the college radio station for b-sides and weird rarities, or record myself doing "long-distance dedications"; ETC.
Post college, I was lucky enough to have a father who loved cutting-edge tech, so I could offer people CD mixes when it was still a novelty. When I decided to try DJ’ing, I did a lot of research before deciding to go with CD decks (more flexibility, don’t have to buy records all the damn time). I could run the decks into my computer and record the mixes, then split them into tracks with other software.
Part of the joy of the mix (both making and receiving) was getting/hearing something that made you say "where did THAT come from?!" And of course, the mixtape merely offered you the track name. There wasn’t really any context, so a really obscure track (I remember putting a Crooked Fingers track on a tape for Dan R before Eric B had even become Crooked Fingers…coup!!) could have an air of mystery about it that really added to the fun, and prompted attempts at one-upmanship.
The same is true of forwarding links to your friends — you just send the youtube link, not usually where you got it from. And this keeps that sense of mystery, that great feeling of "where did they find THAT?!"
1. Does this video bring the dopeness or the freshness? Discuss.
2. On my good days I’m pretty sure I could make something like this. I really could.
3. Do you think these are made up from other vids downloaded from youtube or from hi-rez sources? If you use youtube vids and then re-compress them for youtube, do they look like crap? Is youtube’s new mp4-ness affecting this?
4. Culled from Warren Ellis’s blog. His description: "http://www.eclecticmethod.net. Video mixtapes, video remixes, live video DJ shows and other peculiar experiments that involve beats, images and science." The site is indeed full of great stuff.
By now the internet is full of — and links have been forwarded and re-forwarded of — the classic way to make the Garfield comic strip funny: remove Garfield’s speech or thought balloons. It also seems to make it more the way cats really behave…
But, thanks to Malcolm M I have now discovered that there’s a way to take Garfield into the stratosphere of funny: live action. This guy’s site has a ton of these…each one dramatizes a 3 panel strip and then does a weird sort of remix with a music track. Very weird, and I love it.
…via a survey on Waxy of supercut montages, here is a collection of all the questions asked during one two-hour episode of Lovelines, separated out by host and then put in alphabetical order. There’s something great about this. Plus it reminds me of working at BBC America, cutting the swearing out of British shows for American broadcast, and making a montage of all the swear words. So much fun.
This is an animated film, done in the style of old 8-bit video-game animation. If you ever went to an arcade or played Nintendo, you’ll recognize the style. It also tweaks the conventions of those old games, coming from Japan and full of "what-the-sh*t?!?!" moments that might have made sense in Japan but make no sense in our culture.
It’s done by Paul Robertson, downloaded from his Livejournal page — he did an earlier film that was like Street Fighter but I didn’t like it nearly as much as this one. Even though this one feels like it gets in my head and dances like a bumblebee telling where the honey is.
All this is a way of saying that this film is completely messed up. Especially by the time you get to the end. There’s this pig, and Buddha gets involved, and then these Violence Kings appear and so on.
It’s called Kings of Power 4 Billion %
I was going to suggest getting intoxicated in some way before watching it, but having watched the whole 12 and a half minutes I don’t think you’d make it.
So stay in your right mind for this one, ‘cuz it’s going to make you feel like you drank a gallon of anti-freeze or something…good luck…
