New(ish) Band I Like: The Bird and the Bee

I came across this two-person indie band recently, The Bird and the Bee. Here's a video profile.


Polite Dance Song:


F*cking Boyfriend:


F*cking Boyfriend remix:

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:
  

Fun Mashups

Unk & Avril & Oh Mickey:

AC/DC & J-Kwon:

Various Items

Here's the story: Work is busy, life is busy (we finally cleaned out the garage loft today) and despite my best wishes to blog effusively, I get to what I get to. That's my new motto.

• Documentary being worked on about Wikipedia and wikis in general. You can contribute ideas to the film's own wiki site.
• Chris Anderson says the music biz is UP UP UP, except for CD sales.
• Map of the Star Wars Universe. Also, comparison of Star Trek and Star Wars spacecraft.
• The other night, The ♥G♥ and I watched F**k: The Documentary. Highly fucking recommended! Comments on profanity, free speech vs. censorship, the fluid nature of language, and just how silly we Americans can be about certain syllables, from Drew Carey, Alanis Morissette, Ben Bradlee, Ron Jeremy, Ice-T, Tera Patrick, Sam Donaldson, Janeane Garofolo, Kevin Smith, Hunter S. Thompson, et al. Not just them, but the no-fucking-fun crowd: Alan Fucking Keyes, Pat Fucking Boone, Dennis Fucking Prager, Michael Fucking Medved, and Miss Fucking Manners!
• Also watched 28 Weeks Later. Spoliers! I think this was even better than Days. Interesting things to note: The central family essentially doomed half the world or so by their own inability to realize that almost all of their countrymen had perished from the Infection. The whole U.S. Army involvement was very Iraq-ish, but here's the thing: They (Army) had the wrong idea about putting everyone into a confined space, but they had the right idea about trying to get rid of everyone afterwards. Very Planet-of-the-Apesesque ending.
• Django Reinhardt/Paul Simon mashup. Awesome!
• The math of vampires, ghosts, and zombies. Excerpt: Let us assume that a vampire need feed only once a month. This is certainly a highly conservative assumption, given any Hollywood vampire film. Now, two things happen when a vampire feeds. The human population decreases by one and the vampire population increases by one. Let us suppose that the first vampire appeared in 1600 c.e. It doesn’t really matter what date we choose for the first vampire to appear; it has little bearing on our argument. We list a government Web site in the references (U.S. Census) that provides an estimate of the world population for any given date. For January 1, 1600, we will accept that the global population was 536,870,911.2 In our argument, we had at the same time one vampire.

Haven't Fallen Off Face of Blogosphere

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the Blogosphere -- Just mega-busy at work and trying to get in a couple of home projects as well.

Items:

Yahoo! beats Google -- Who woulda thought it? Excerpt: Yahoo is emerging as the leading portal, fighting Google and losing for the search business, while Google is the leader in search, fighting Yahoo and losing dominance as a portal, Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, which sponsors the ACSI report, said in a statement.

A guy named Virgil Griffith has developed a program that tracks what domain names have made "anonymous" Wikipedia edits.

Due to ridiculously tragic music-clearance process, much of the great rock music that was originally part of WKRP has been surgically removed.

India, 60 years after independence.

More Items

Items:

• Ever wonder how the Klingon language was created? Wonder no more. Also, if you ever need to Google something in Klingon...
• Cool blog on new wave/alternative rock of the 80s.
• Interesting, hard-to-categorize blog: Ectoplasmosis.
• Spiffed up my Wiki user page a bit.
• Bootie Top 10. (No, not this; maybe some other time.) Via Mashuptown. Make sure to check out Gorillaz + Styx and Eurythmics + White Stripes.

Late to the Party w/ Röyksopp

I know I should have been up on this a long time ago, but I just recently came across some videos by the Norwegian band Röyksopp. Check out the first one for sure!

Theremin Cover of Gnarls Barkley

So before I get into any of the DC trip stuff, here's Gnarls Barkley covered on the Theremin. Note: It looks like these guys purposely included the GB stillshot at the exact halfway point of their video, knowing that that would be what showed when it displayed on YouTube.

Gorillaz + No Doubt + Deep Purple; Beastie Boys + Beverly Hills Cop

Weekend Items

Several things:

• I had never come across this transcipt/article before about DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid even though it's over seven years old. Excerpt: When we look at art we see how cultures become cross-fertilized. In the US there are many cultures, North/South American, African, Asian...The US has the widest variety of cultures in the smallest geographic region in the history of human civilization. So when you have access to the recordings of all these diverse cultures, continuous access to them, that's when things get really interesting. With collage, anything goes, anything can be mixed and transformed. Art is a reflection of culture, and to me music is our social reflection.
• Cool blog to add to the sidebar, via Bella Rossa -- The Groovy Age of Horror.
• Another blog to check out -- that of graphic novelist Warren Ellis.
• Via Techyum, here's the NYT on the U.S. Court of Appeals telling the FCC to go fuck themselves. Excerpt: Mr. Martin, the chairman of the [Federal Communications C]ommission, attacked the panel’s reasoning. “I completely disagree with the court’s ruling and am disappointed for American families,” he said. “The court says the commission is ‘divorced from reality.’ It is the New York court, not the commission, that is divorced from reality.” He said that if the agency was unable to prohibit some vulgarities during prime time, “Hollywood will be able to say anything they want, whenever they want.” Anything they want? Oh my God, not that!
• Here's a guy who always likes to identify exactly which books are sitting on the shelves when he sees pictures with bookshelves in the background. Excerpt: I wish someone could put a stop to this epidemic. Whenever I see such pictures I have an uncontrollable urge to seize the nearest magnifying glass and try to decipher the titles. What is it that drives some people (I know others who confess to this failing) to devote their time to such snooping when we could be walking the downs, or exploring the music of Medtner, or deconstructing the latest piece about Paris Hilton? (No need to explain -- I do the same thing.)
• I like the philosophy of this Rebecca Blood post (and the post of the librarian from whom she got the article) recreated here in its entirety: How to be a more effective researcher -- Q: Question: How do I start researching? Answer: Treat research as a lifestyle not an assignment. A great approach from what appears to be an academic librarian, including a new (to me) term: The Invisible College. [Wikipedia article] Bloggers will immediately see themselves in this role, so it's worth pointing out that anyone who limits themselves to blogs will miss many other communities of interest, online and off. Here's the main page of the blog referenced by a librarian named Linda Jones. That kind has to do with how I approach my Wikipedia edits... I get a topic I am interested in, and review the material that other "amateurs" have prepared, and then just kind of see how I can improve the organization, presentation, and indexing of the material, and see what blanks I can fill in to lend towards greater completion.

Watching X Documentary

I'm watching a documentary from the mid-80s on the punk band X, titled X: The Unheard Music. X-cellent band, of course, but difficult to do keyword searches upon.

Here's a clip from this doc with X performing Soul Kitchen with their sometime producer, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek:

Singing Los Angeles:

Exene in a silent film:

And here she is a couple years ago:

Reading Great Jazz Book

So I've been reading this excellent book I got the other day, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. It discusses at length one of my favorite (if not my overall favorite) jazz albums, The Real Ambassadors by Dave and Iola Brubeck. Here's an interview with author Penny Von Eschen.

I was surprised at how little I found on the Internet about this album, given how creative it was. It was a jazz musical, performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1962, about all sorts of things -- race, diplomacy, communism, American popular culture, the music business, the nature of God, a whole bunch of stuff. The Brubecks wrote it for Louis Armstrong, who performed it with Lambert, Hendricks, and Bavan (Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross on the soundtrack), and Carmen McRae. Here's an excerpt from the Von Eschen interview: I love the fact that it was written and rewritten over a period of five years, during the early dynamic years of the tours. It very powerfully captured both the foreign policy and domestic civil rights contradictions. For example, it opened with somebody saying something about going to Moscow, and Armstrong then calls out, "Forget Moscow, when do we play in New Orleans?" -- which is reminiscent of his standing up to Eisenhower, saying that he wouldn't play in the Soviet Union. While it very directly recalls his defiance of Eisenhower, it also very directly speaks to the idea of the Brubeck's wanting to honor Armstrong's role in civil rights. This was important because by this time, both among musicians and young fans of jazz, Armstrong was seen as an artist from an earlier generation -- an "Uncle Tom" who accommodated demeaning roles and strategies. The Brubeck's wanted to bring out his defiance, and did so in another part of the play when the narrator says that the "hero" is known for keeping his opinions to himself, after which Armstrong calls out, "Lady, if you could read my mind, your head would bust wide open."

But, there are efforts at foot by a woman named Dianne Mower to bring about a revival of the TRA musical. Here's her website, and in order to help get the word out, I am planning on creating TRA's very own Wikipedia entry. UPDATE: Wikipedia entry here.

Eminem + Black Sabbath; Eminem + Eurythmics

Sometimes we call him "Emma Emma." Just do.

Good Research Sites; Web redesign; NYT on Cannes; NYT on Coulton et al.; Slave Leia

Items:

• Via Rebecca Blood, here's a whole bunch (119) of links to non-Google research resources on the Web.
• Help Me Redesign the Web -- Article from Technology Review. Excerpt: Like singing a song or writing a story, designing a printed page is a craft that is fundamentally uni­directional, or one-to-many. The flexibility of Web structures confounded and then humbled many traditional designers as they started trying to make Web pages. The whole thing had been developed to let the readers--the users, software developers confusingly called them, as if they were addicts--have control. How could that be good? For these reasons, and others, most magazines' websites until very recently were dull, repurposed versions of their print editions. Thus, a new crowd took on the design of websites. These enthusiasts assumed that the print crowd didn't get it, that what they saw as the "new paradigm" would last forever. The two-way flow of information, the Web's flexibility, immediacy, and cheapness, deeply appealed to them.
• Good NYT article on the Cannes Film Festival. Excerpt: Its international scope is part of what makes Cannes so unmistakably French. No matter how wide-ranging their selections, American festivals — New York, Chicago, San Francisco, even Sundance — remain parochial events, but Cannes is bigger than the city that bears its name. It is a French affair, a source of national pride and a reminder of this country’s cherished, and perhaps vestigial, status as a capital of world culture. The covers of the glossy magazines cluttering newsstands are divided between Nicolas Sarkozy, the newly elected president, and Cannes, and it is not always clear which — affairs of state or affairs of cinema — are more important.
• Another good NYT article, this one on the web-based efforts of musician Jonathan Coulton (Wiki, 43 Folders Pt. 1, 43 Folders Pt. 2, NPR) and others (OK Go, Jane Siberry Issa, The Hold Steady). Excerpts: The universe of musicians making their way online includes many bands that function in a traditional way — signing up with a label — while using the Internet primarily as a means of promotion, the way OK Go has done. Two-thirds of OK Go’s album sales are still in the physical world: actual CDs sold through traditional CD stores. But the B-list increasingly includes a newer and more curious life-form: performers like Coulton, who construct their entire business model online. Without the Internet, their musical careers might not exist at all. Coulton has forgone a record-label contract; instead, he uses a growing array of online tools to sell music directly to fans. He contracts with a virtual fulfillment house called CD Baby, which warehouses his CDs, processes the credit-card payment for each sale and ships it out, while pocketing only $4 of the album’s price, a much smaller cut than a traditional label would take. CD Baby also places his music on the major digital-music stores like iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster. Most lucratively, Coulton sells MP3s from his own personal Web sites, where there’s no middleman at all... ...Will the Internet change the type of person who becomes a musician or writer? It’s possible to see these online trends as Darwinian pressures that will inevitably produce a new breed — call it an Artist 2.0 — and mark the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul who shuns the spotlight. In “The Catcher in the Rye,” J. D. Salinger wrote about how reading a good book makes you want to call up the author and chat with him, which neatly predicted the modern online urge; but Salinger, a committed recluse, wouldn’t last a minute in this confessional new world. Neither would, say, Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, a singer who was initially so intimidated by a crowd that she would sit facing the back of the stage. What happens to art when people like that are chased away?
• LBNL, here is a site of fangirls who like to dress up like the Jabba-enslaved Princess Leia.

Jukebox Heroes

I was watching something about the history of guitars earlier...

Here's the great Django Reinhardt:

Django
Uploaded by pomesu

Here are Les Paul (The guy who essentially invented everything having to do with rock + roll guitars) and his wife, Mary Ford:

And, Jeff Beck and Carlos Santana:

And while we're at it, here's an hour's worth of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, looks like it's from the documentary.

Items

I woke up at 6:00 this morning and there was a freakin' SNOWSTORM outside! Gaaaahh!

Items:

• Rebecca Blood on her reading patterns: I decided it was time to apply a different filter to at least half of the books I read. Not, "Does this sound like an interesting and/or important topic?" but "Does this sound fun to read?" Using the library has helped me in this, allowing me to explore without spending money, and (theoretically) making it easier to just chuck a book if it's not living up to the "fun" standard (though I still have trouble putting down a book without finishing it).
• I love this! Straight Outta Compton by Nina Gordon. More here.
• Here are a whole bunch of diagrams of how things are connected, including aspects of history, geography, biblical events, Star Wars, and more. (via Bock's Car.)

Artists' Desk; Music Metadata; History of Ideas; 1999/Baba O'Riley Mashup

Items:

• Via Boing Boing, here's a bunch of photographs of artists' workspaces. I've been thinking of putting up some before-and-after pictures of the book room and stuff. Included in this batch of photos is the desk of the woman who makes 30-second remakes of famous movies using bunnies.
• I appreciate Chris Anderson's comments on how different types of metadata are needed for classical music CDs as compared to pop music CDs. Excerpt: But I was interested in Amazon's classical music store for another reason: classical is a genre that the one-size-fits-all music aggregators such as iTunes don't handle particularly well. They're oriented around pop music, with its artist, album, track data format. Meanwhile classical music organizes around composer, conductor, performer, soloist, etc.
• Here's the Dictionary of the History of Ideas.
• I freakin' love this mashup of 1999 and Teenage Wasteland (I know, Baba O'Riley). The link I just posted is the basic version, and the more elaborate version is here.
• Here are a bunch of podcasts of things from last year's Web 2.0 Summit. I listened to a couple the other day; I'll probably listen to some more this weekend.

Theremin Interview; Alex Gross's Green Lantern; TM:SNC Quote

Items:

• Recently we watched the Criterion version of the 1945 Hitchcock classic Spellbound, a film that made use of the Theremin. Here's one of the DVD extras, an episode of the Fishko Files in which WNYC radio host Sara Fishko takes a Theremin lesson.
• Do yourself a favor and check out the work of Alex Gross. I saw a copy of his new book today, and it was far out! Here's a painting of an old photograph he saw of a guy who kind of looked like the original Green Lantern. A little artistic license, and voilà!

• A real good music film -- Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser. Monk is one of my three favorite jazz musicians (the other two being Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck). Interesting side note -- TM:SNC is the film that (as far as I know) has the first use of the phrase "You'll flip. I mean flip for real." later adapted and immortalized in The Usual Suspects as follows: Fenster - "I said he'll flip you." Cop - "He'll what?" Fenster - "Flip you. Flip ya for real." Monk actually used the phrase (at 01:07:38) after Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter gave him an expensive magic marker, and he was commenting on the illegibility of his autographs: "Get somebody that can decipher that for you, you know, and say what it means... and get what it means... you know. It'll upset you. You'll flip. I mean flip for real." (I just updated the Wikipedia page on Unusual Suspects to make that clarification.)

Christopher Walken + Jackson 5

Fatboy Slim's Walken/Hotel video + ABC/Jacksons.

Schlesinger Obit, Samurai Vader, IQ Scarcity, Floyd/Bee Gees Mashup

Items:

• Farewell to historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. NYT obit excerpt: Mr. Schlesinger wore a trademark dotted bowtie, showed an acid wit and had a magnificent bounce to his step. He was a lifelong aficionado of perfectly blended martinis. Between marathons of writing as much as 5,000 words a day, he was a fixture at Georgetown salons when Washington was clubbier and more elitist. In New York, he was a man about town, whether at Truman Capote’s famous parties or escorting Jacqueline Kennedy to the movies.
• Here's Darth Vader's uniform Samuraized. Excerpt: Transforming Vader into a Samurai, or a Samurai into Vader, required the integration of several design motifs that married the traditional with the fantastic. "First, we hit on the idea of adding the 'front crest', which was designed based on the Imperial Icon, to the front of the helmet," says Yoshitoku. "By adding this, the 'leader of the Imperial Army' image is emphasized, as ancient Japanese military commanders used their ancestral family emblems on their front crest. We also added a Vader-like design to the face guard (called a menpo) which features a handcrafted look as if artisans of the past had done it."
• I'm sure we all know people for whom the phrase "scarcity of IQ" applies. Here's a thumbnail economic analysis of that phenomenon. Excerpt: In practical terms, "Conservation of IQ" is used to argue for limits on immigration, against various meliorist attempts, and possibly even for eugenics. I've heard it used to argue for outlawing marijuana, which of course destroys brain cells... ...I don't assign special status to The Conservation of IQ for two reasons. The first is the Flynn effect, or the fact that measured IQs have been rising steadily over time. This implies some combination of a) IQ gains come naturally under conditions of progress, and b) IQ statistics are to some extent phony and don't measure real intelligence. We can debate the mix, but either deflates fears that IQ is somehow especially scarce or endangered. These data also suggest that IQ is an artifice to be unpacked rather than a primary category.
• Pink Floyd meets the Bee Gees!