Links for Boxing Day

Happy Boxing Day! (Long time no blog.) Items:

• DJ Lobsterdust vs. the 1980s: Six good mashups here, including Van Halen/Soulja Boy and The Scorpions/Luda.
• Speaking of non-traditional music, here's David Byrne in Wired on the future of the music business. Excerpt: First, a definition of terms. What is it we're talking about here? What exactly is being bought and sold? In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory. Technology changed all that in the 20th century. Music — or its recorded artifact, at least — became a product, a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context. This upended the economics of music, but our human instincts remained intact. I spend plenty of time with buds in my ears listening to recorded music, but I still get out to stand in a crowd with an audience. I sing to myself, and, yes, I play an instrument (not always well).
• Freakin' GOBS of great stuff at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.
• Via Mind Hacks, an optical illusion called (I'm not making this up) The Purple Nurple: