putting the j in jjosh

Unhappy bear

so rare that the Norse gods are invoked, let alone on network tv in 2003…

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Lou.

I think the post title says it all. He was going approx 120 mph.

So NYT has this music blog where people like Andrew Bird and Peter Holsapple write about songwriting and being a musician. Pretty neat. I got there from waxy, who links to a fun and well-written entry by Suzanne Vega about writing "Tom’s Diner", being remixed, and having her voice be the test audio for the invention of the mp3(!). Cool stuff. My favorite bit is where she writes about all the remixes of Tom’s Diner she’s received over the years, and when she put out a compilation of some of her favorites:

"However, it was a logistical nightmare to administrate. I had to go back to all the people who had taken the song without permission, and ask their permission . . . to use their version of my song! This is the main reason we have not put out “Tom’s Albums” 2 and 3, which we certainly could, as now we are up to almost 30 remixes including (really good) ones from Danger Mouse and Tupac." 

Tupac?!

That’s got Billboard #1 written all over it.

UPDATE

Hmmm, well the track was apparently released last year — youtube embed below — and I need to revise my predictions of #1 greatness. Vega is a little off when she calls it a remix — it’s more like a re-interpretation. The youtube comments on the various postings of this track are all over the map, with some fans saying it’s the "best soft pac ever" and others doubting it’s even him. It’s apparently a new(ish) track that showed up on The Best Of 2Pac Part 2: Life, a double CD set retrospective that came out last December (that allmusic calls "of poor quality", "hastily or indifferently assembled" and "another in a long line of posthumous cash-ins apparently overseen by 2Pac’s mother"). Sounds kind of weak to me.

Warren Ellis has an interesting post linking to this article that links to a new report. (this info is moving moving moving!) Anyway, it’s about permafrost melt releasing giant chimneys of methane. From the quote of the quote:

"In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.

Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane."

As always though, Ellis puts it more succinctly:

"Should all concerns be confirmed, it appears that we’re all going to die from the escape of monstrous planetary farts from beyond history."

I wasn’t sure whether to post this or not but people told me they wanted to see it, so here it is. When we went out to OR last July, I was the best man at Roscoe’s wedding. This is my speech.

Best Man Speech from Vivid Wedding Films on Vimeo.

In the absence of faith, what stands behind a currency based on faith?

Interesting Op-Ed from the NYT about the financial implications of the fact that the dollar moved off the gold standard ages ago and has never looked back. MattD and I were talking about this just last night (over Frito pie) and using the rhetoric of barstool philosophers to maintain that, as Speed Levitch has said, "this is outrageousness and it cannot last."

Frito pie

First, MDvto sent me this great Quincy theme tune…

Then, while hunting for that basketball vid from below, I checked the history of this browser and searched keyword "youtube." There were a bunch of interesting vids that never made it to the blog…here they are, random and youtubey. Individually they didn’t seem to warrant a post, but collectively, it’s some pretty good stuff…

Driving on Salvia

Ninja Cat

Stunning Organ Recital

Rap Battle

Editor Explains Editing a Crappy movie, pt 1

Editor Explains Editing a Crappy movie, pt 2

Hi-Fructose Corn Syrup Association makes HFCS Promo

Bill Maher Nose Broken Accidentally by Erik Estrada in 90’s Game Show

(jump to 2:50 in so you don’t have to watch all that game show)

Kevin Smith Berates a Geek at a Comic Convention

Soulja Boy Reviews An Esoteric Video Game

Noel Gallagher Rambles About How Much He Loves The Smiths

Fantastic EMC Rap Video "Leak It Out"

Tearing down the handball courts on our block. damn.

UPDATE – according to brooklyn blog OTBKB, they’re going to replace the whole area with a brand new basketball court, new handball court (nice) and a skate park(!). Should be interesting…

So LeBron James challenges this trick shot maestro to a game of horse. This is actually a bad move on James’s part, I mean, horse uses a totally different set of skills than regular basketball, right? In fact, one could even argue that a pro player is *more* ill-equipped to play horse because he has spent so much time training his muscle memory to perform certain exact shots from exact positions. To try and make them perform more random ones? Tough stuff.

This brings up the whole phenomenon of trick shot youtube videos. have you seen these? Some guys are doing some amazing things. Things that they must have spent a bit of time practicing. And before youtube there wasn’t as much of an incentive, right? Like parkour or that 17 year time-lapse thing that’s going round the internets…as always, the biggest resource is time.

I went to this promo conference thing back in 2002 and went to a seminar on the power of the internet. At this time we were still delivering approval tapes on VHS (wha?), no one posted anything for review online, we still got physical DAT’s from sound studios (instead of posting aiff’s) — it was the dark ages. Anyway, in this seminar, there were 3 guys speaking, and the first two were so boring, going on and on about how our jobs in TV were going to be transformed, and we better be worried and stay on top of technology and so on (true, but boring). Snooze-fest.

The third guy spent his time just telling us what websites he thought were cool. This was kind of revelatory for me. It was so interesting to see what weird stuff was out there, and to have this attitude of surfing the net’s hidden corners, looking for the stuff that keeps the world weird. I don’t remember all the things he showed, but I remember this one that was so dark, odd and good, full of small animations that seemed like they were out of a dream.

Six years later, and they show up on metafilter. Sweet. Dutch cartoonist/animator Hans Hoogerbrugge. Really, you’ve got to click here and go to the website to get the full experience, ‘cuz the clicking and discovering is half the fun, but here’s a small mov of me clicking around on it just to give you an idea of what it is. The sounds, the visuals, the feeling of the thing — so dream-like.

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His main website is pretty cool too, full of weird artworks and this great museum installation that animates the outside of a museum wall and has the character say whatever people text to it. Pretty great.

 Random thoughts from this morning:

– saw a chimney sweep truck on my way to the subway — is that good luck like it used to be in Mary Poppins-era London?

– right after that I saw nuns, which I immediately took as another indicator of good luck, I’m not sure why

– reading this David Foster Wallace piece from Harper’s about proper usage of English and grammar I’m reminded of a time when a bunch of us in High School were trying to explain to someone what an ambiguous pronoun was…we came up with this scenario in which the dinosaurs somehow knew that a meteor was coming to impact earth so they scratched this graffiti that said "A meteor is going to destroy earth! We don’t like it! and that scientists would puzzle throughout the millennia as to whether by "it" the dinosaurs meant the meteor or the earth…we were drunk when we came up with this and just howled at the whole scenario…

– another bit from the DFW piece talks about how language usage follows the norms of a particular community…he makes this point with an analogy, explaining that even though it might make perfect sense for men to be able to wear skirts (cooler, more comfortable, less likely to cause sterility, etc.) in Western culture it would be looked on as some kind of statement. Then right as I’m about to go into my building at work I see a guy in a leather utility kilt! I mean, this is New York, so sure, but it’s the first kilt I’ve seen in the city…I gave him a broad smile, a thumbs up and said "I like your style."

– been toying with some samples and trying to get the whole thing to coalesce and it’s not really happening, but I thought you might get a kick out of hearing a mashup rough draft. Sometimes it’s taking me a million iterations to get something to the point where it’s working, so I had this thought that charting the evolution of the track might be fun…at this point there’s some good interaction between samples, but the flow of the track is a mess…

samples used:

Beulah – Hello Resolven

Police – Voices In My Head

Jay Z – American Gangster

Voices_rough_v01

Sometimes I think if I got a Monome (shown below, played by Daedelus) I could totally rock it, sometimes I think it would be beyond me, sometimes I think it looks pretentious, sometimes I think it totally rocks it futureshock style.

I am kicking myself that I didn’t make it out to the Daedelus/Flying Lotus show at (le) poisson rouge two weeks ago…

Daedelus "Proton Power Megamix" (dublab VisionVersion) from dublab on Vimeo.