kottke.org posts about video
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.
In his latest video essay, Thomas Flight praises the comfort film and shares some examples (The Big Lebowski, Perfect Days, Mon Oncle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Moonrise Kingdom) from a few different types.
We want high stakes to make things interesting. But if you’re constantly being bombarded by conflict in your real life or the other media you’re consuming, it might be nice to spend some time with a story that takes a step back from high-stakes conflict as the primary narrative driving force.
I don’t know about you, but I am watching, reading, and listening to a looot of comfort media lately. (And by “lately”, I mean the past 8-10 years. 🫠) I felt this bit deeply:
There’s a point at which we can become trapped in chronic nervous system distress because of the media we’re consuming. Our brains are hardwired to scan our environment for potential dangers or problems. The media you consume can then end up releasing cortisol, raising your blood pressure, elevating your heart rate, inducing stress. And when we have access to this media in our pockets all the time, it means that places in our lives that may have typically been felt as a safe haven in the past, like maybe our living room or our bedroom, are now often the places where we’re really intensely and intimately consuming some of the most distressing media that we ever consume.
What are your favorite comfort movies? Any non-obvious ones? (E.g. I watch disaster movies as comfort films. The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, The Core, Deep Impact.)
Watch as Paul Davids plays 80 of rock’s most iconic guitar intros, including ones from Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, The Kinks, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, ZZ Top, Joan Jett, AC/DC, Blur, and The White Stripes.
Swift Justice is a short documentary that, perhaps for the first time, takes viewers inside a rural Afghan courtroom operated by the Taliban, whose arbiters decide cases using Sharia law. [Content warning: a man is visibly beaten in the courtroom to make him “speak the truth”.]
To Westerners, the term “Sharia law” may call to mind sword-wielding fanatics with Old Testament sensibilities. Traditionally, though, less than ten per cent of the Sharia—Arabic for “religious law”—relates to criminal injury like murder, rape, or theft. The rest concerns family and marital relations and prosaic matters of commercial transactions and ritual. Sharia courts have existed in Afghanistan for centuries, and during the U.S. occupation they formed one of three distinct legal systems. There were also the official courts of the U.S.-backed Afghan government that were notoriously corrupt and inefficient. Bribery was this system’s lubricant; murderers often walked free, while the innocent languished in prisons rife with torture and other abuses. And there was the tribal system, an informal and sometimes ad-hoc approach to dispute resolution based on rural Pashtun practices. Few rural Pashtuns miss the old Afghan government courts; instead, today the central tension is between tribal and religious law.
A few years ago, a researcher looked at every surviving print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa that she could find (113 in all) and, using differences caused by “woodblock wear”, developed a system for determining if a particular print was made early in the life of the woodblocks used, late, or somewhere in-between.
Did you know there are 113 identified copies of Hokusai’s The Great Wave. I know the title says 111, but scientist Capucine Korenberg found another 2 after completing her research. What research was that? Finding every print of The Great Wave around the world and then sequencing them, to find out when they were created during the life cycle of the woodblocks they were printed from.
This involved painstakingly documenting visible signs of wear to the keyblock that made the Great Wave, and tracking these visible changes as the keyblock continued to be used (fun fact; scholars estimate there were likely as many as 8000 prints of The Great Wave originally in circulation).
See also The Evolution of Hokusai’s Great Wave.
The latest video from Kurzgesagt imagines a scenario in which an advanced civilization called the Noxans can potentially survive the heat death of the universe.
With five hours of the full energy emitted by the Sun, we could power present day humanity for about 10 billion years.
So the Noxans harvest the last stars and build a gigantic complex of batteries around their home star. In principle, this energy could keep them alive for a few hundred trillion years, a long time but not even close to forever.
So now the hard part of the plan begins. The Noxans need to change the nature of life itself.
In his latest video, Evan Puschak looks at the differences between Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence and Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation.
In every adaptation across artistic mediums, there is a loss. You lose something of the original, something vital. But hopefully you gain something too, ideally something that the new medium is uniquely good at expressing.
I’ve been thinking about the pros and cons of adaptation as I make my way through the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy on audiobook. I’ve been watching each of the movies after finishing the corresponding book, so I’m getting a really good sense how the books differ from the film adaptations. Some hardcore Tolkien fans were critical of some of Peter Jackson’s choices (leaving out Tom Bombadil for instance) but as the 20-hour+ audiobooks attest, you can’t leave everything in — and there are long sections where the books’ narrative drags like a rusty muffler.
On May 22, 1981, for the finale of the show’s 12th season, Mister Rogers visited Sesame Street. With apologies to the Avengers, this has to be the greatest crossover event in history.
In the episode, Rogers agrees to judge a race between Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus, a character that no one on the show but Big Bird has seen. When BB tells his friends he met Mister Rogers, they don’t believe him, including Mr. Snuffleupagus! Later, BB & MR have a conversation about what’s real and what’s make-believe. Here’s more on the episode from the Neighborhood Archive and the Muppet Wiki.
Mr. Rogers comes to visit Big Bird at his nest. Big Bird wonders if Mr. Rogers is really here, because no one believed him before. Mr. Rogers observes that sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and suggests that they both pretend some more. Big Bird imagines a teddy bear riding a race car, and realizes that he can’t touch him — except in his imagination. Mr. Rogers, on the other hand, is real. They both share a hug.
A couple of weeks later, Big Bird visited the Neighborhood of Make-Believe on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. There’s no good clip of this on YT, but you can see some of the footage here and the full episode on Mister Rogers’ official site.
Big Bird didn’t visit Mr. Rogers directly (in the real world) because of the two shows’ differing views on make-believe:
Caroll Spinney agreed to appear in the episode as Big Bird after some dialogue with Fred Rogers; when Spinney originally received the script for the show he saw it required him to remove the costume and discuss the inner-workings of the Big Bird puppet. Spinney protested, as he didn’t believe in ruining the illusion of Big Bird for the children. Rogers agreed, but only under the stipulation that Big Bird’s appearance was restricted to the fantasy segments of the “Neighborhood of Make-Believe,” as he didn’t believe in perpetuating the deceitful blur of real and pretend to children that occurred when presenting the character as real in the “real world.”
While Sesame Street Unpaved mentions that Rogers understood Spinney’s concern over showing the children how Big Bird works, Spinney said at some of his book signings (promoting his autobiography, The Wisdom of Big Bird) that he and Fred Rogers argued over the phone for roughly twenty minutes over whether or not to have him tell the kids how he performs Big Bird.
And then there’s this, included here because I ran across it on YouTube: Arsenio Hall gifts Fred Rogers a very fly jacket.
A few days ago, I linked to a NY Times piece about the V&A’s 90,000-piece archive of David Bowie stuff — costumes, photos, drawings, lyrics, etc.
The David Bowie Centre is a working archive with new reading and study rooms. The archive contains over 80,000 items, including 414 costumes and accessories, nearly 150 musical instruments and other sound equipment, designs, props and scenery for concerts, film and theatre. Bowie’s own desk is part of the archive, alongside notebooks, diaries, lyrics, correspondence, fan mail and over 70,000 photographic prints, negatives and transparencies.
The Centre is brought to life with a series of small, curated displays. Highlights include 1970s Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane ensembles designed by Freddie Burretti and Kansai Yamamoto, a film showcasing performances from Bowie’s career, and an installation tracing his impact on popular culture.
Last week, Open Culture linked to this video tour of the Bowie collection by Jessica the Museum Guide:
I imagine it’s not quite like being there in person, but still. (via open culture)
Antonio Scurati’s 2018 “documentary novel” M: Son of the Century was a worldwide bestseller about the early political career of Benito Mussolini and the rise of fascism in post-WWI Italy. Director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Darkest Hour) has adapted the book into an 8-part TV series called Mussolini: Son Of The Century. Here are a pair of trailers:
One commenter on this YT video says “it’s Cabaret meets Clockwork Orange, meets Metropolis…” I stumbled across this via Carla Sinclair, who writes:
It is, unsurprisingly, violent and gritty, highlighting Benito Mussolini’s rise to power that began in the year 1919, when he founded the National Fascist Party in Italy. But it’s also beautifully shot, with military and fight scenes stunningly choreographed to electronic music by Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers. At times it feels like an intense musical — without the song and dance.
If you’re in the US, you can stream Mussolini: Son Of The Century on Mubi — four of the episodes are available so far and the new ones debut on Wednesdays.
I haven’t gotten my Brick Technology fix in awhile, so here’s a video featuring a series of more and more capable Lego vehicles climbing over taller and taller walls. As I have written before, here’s what makes these videos so compelling:
They’re not even really about Lego…that’s just the playful hook to get you through the door. They’re really about science and engineering — trial and error, repeated failure, iteration, small gains, switching tactics when confronted with dead ends, how innovation can result in significant advantages. Of course, none of this is unique to engineering; these are all factors in any creative endeavor — painting, sports, photography, writing, programming. But the real magic here is seeing it all happen in just a few minutes.
See also their recent video about Lego cars crossing a treadmill bridge. (via the kid should see this)
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