Music

Don’t “accidentally” steal a song

April 25, 2013 – 1:17 pm

So the Black Eyed Peas have always been one of the worst “borrowers” in the music industry, but now member Will.I.Am has taken the cake. He took background music by Russian artist Arty & Mat Zo and let someone rap over it. Unfortunately for the original artist, he never had permission to use the music (nor was he paying any money for it). Now he’s claiming it happened by accident:

“Arty is a dope producer so I wrote this song to ‘Rebound’ this last year,” he said. “I got in touch with Arty and showed it to him, did a different version to it ’cause I asked him [to] make it newer ’cause I don’t just wanna take your song and rap over it.”

Says Will.I.Am.

Hearing the original song reminded me of this fantastic piece of video-art, which, in contrast to everything the Black Eyed Peas have ever done, is hugely original and entertaining:

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Films

Only God Forgives Trailer

April 4, 2013 – 11:47 am

So Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling are back at it. Here’s the red band trailer to Only God Forgives, slated to debut at Cannes this year. I have no idea why it’s red band, but who knows, maybe they’re afraid of the impact Gosling has on the audience.

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Films

Every Woody Allen stammer, ever

March 27, 2013 – 6:16 pm

In a tireless effort, spanning several months, good people at The Huffington Post, put together this complete compilation of Woody Allen stammers. Enjoy!

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Music

Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt

February 13, 2013 – 3:47 pm

In case you’re in need of some magnificent piano and violin play, here’s something for you:

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Films

PLURALITY – a sci-fi short

October 9, 2012 – 9:57 am

I want this to be a feature film.

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Music

A collection of longform articles about Christian Rock

September 24, 2012 – 11:13 am

Christian Rock is, well, Christian Rock. Here’s a bunch of articles curated by Slate about the phenomenon. Loads of fun and insight.

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Reading

On Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

September 13, 2012 – 5:32 pm

Christopher Hitchen’s last book came out recently and here’s a great little piece on it. And yes, it’s The Millions again:

 After a typically engaging talk, and an equally entertaining on-stage conversation with Salman Rushdie, Hitchens milled about among fans and friends off-stage. I caught him there and introduced myself. “It’s an honor to meet you,” I quivered. “If you say so,” he quipped. I went on to explain that I was from Denmark and wanted to thank him for his very vocal support of the Danish cartoonists back in 2006. He leaned in and put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t let them fuck you around,” he said, before wandering off.

Read the whole thing here.

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Films

Kinetic Edinburgh

September 4, 2012 – 2:53 pm

I love Scotland and I love this video. It’s most beautiful.

Kinetic Edinburgh from walid salhab on Vimeo.

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Reading

The Opening Paragraphs of D.T. Max’s Life of David Foster Wallace

August 27, 2012 – 10:23 pm

It’s almost four years since David Foster Wallace took his own life. Next week, a new, definitive biography by D.T. Max will come out. The Millions has the opening paragraphs. Read them here.

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Films

The simple things

August 27, 2012 – 8:51 am

It’s the simple things in life, really.

The pleasure of from Vitùc on Vimeo.

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Uncategorized

Alan Turing’s birthday

June 23, 2012 – 9:01 pm

It’s Alan Turing’s birthday today. For those who’ve never heard of him, he was one of the people responsible for cracking the German Enigma machine during WWII, something like the father of modern computing and unfortunately an incredibly unfairly treated human being.

Google is celebrating with a Turing machine in their doodle, here’s a haunting letter from Turing on Letters of Note and finally here’s a funkily designed but informative website detailing everything about Alan Turing.

Happy Birthday, old chum!

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Design Science

About Keys

May 1, 2012 – 11:59 am

Slate has a piece up about keys. Yes, keys:

It’s a metal form that—when inserted into an opening and turned—draws back a bolt or latch. But the metal key is marked for extinction. Electronic access controls—keycards, keypads, biometric scanners, and the like—are already common in hotels, office buildings, and cars, and they’re gaining ground. What will we lose when the metal key, a form that has endured for centuries, disappears? And what will we gain?

It’s one of those illustrated slideshow-esque articles, but still worth it. Read it!

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Food

How To Basic

April 26, 2012 – 8:50 am

Here’s a YouTube account that gives instructions on how to do basic things like add milk to coffee or eat cereal. Example:

It’s good, clean fun. Well, not clean.

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Science

A flaming dragon eating a ball of fire

April 17, 2012 – 3:06 pm

This looks a lot like a dragon licking up a ball of fire. And even though it’s actually a solar flare on the sun, taken yesterday, I vastly prefer my version:

All credit for this picture goes to: NASA/GSFC/SDO. Click the picture to see a hi-rez version.

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Science

Our universe is nothing, really

April 17, 2012 – 2:51 pm

If you’re still wondering, physics is actually working on answering the question from whence we came. From an article in the LA Times:

As particle physics revolutionizes the concepts of “something” (elementary particles and the forces that bind them) and “nothing” (the dynamics of empty space or even the absence of space), the famous question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is also revolutionized. Even the very laws of physics we depend on may be a cosmic accident, with different laws in different universes, which further alters how we might connect something with nothing. Asking why we live in a universe of something rather than nothing may be no more meaningful than asking why some flowers are red and others blue.

It’s fascinating and you should read it.

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Films

“Rear Window” time-lapse

April 3, 2012 – 12:05 pm

If you’ve ever seen Hitchock’s “Rear Window”, you will appreciate this video that stitches together the whole view from said rear window, displaying in a time-lapse, well, the whole film. It must have been painstaking work and as is the case so often, I can’t even begin to imagine the time that was put into this:

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Reading TV

What happened to the Sportswriter?

April 1, 2012 – 9:24 pm

After having pre-ordered my copy of Richard Ford’s new novel Canada today, I did a bit of stumbling about on the Interwebs, when I found this article from 2007 about an HBO mini-series that was in the pipeline then. Directed by James Mangold of 310 to Yuma fame and written by Mark Bomback, it should have been a six hour version of Ford’s Bascombe novels, titled “The Sportswriter”.

Well, it’s five years later and I can’t find anything about the thing. Not on Mangold’s and not Bomback’s IMDB page. Which looks to me like it’s been shelved, but maybe someone out there knows more about it?

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Reading

Hunting for the manuscript

April 1, 2012 – 1:04 pm

I post a lot of Millions articles here, for the very simple reason that they’re always so damn interesting. Here’s another one: John Kennedy Toole’s biographer Cory MacLauchlin seems to have found the original manuscript of Toole’s only novel:

I had nearly given up on the question of the original manuscript until a year ago when I interviewed Lynda Martin, the sister of Toole’s best friend in high school. “The manuscript?” she said in a soft southern accent. “Yes, well I have it in my closet here at home.” I nearly dropped the phone as she explained Toole’s mother had given it as a gift to her brother after the novel was published. When her brother passed away in 2008, she acquired it. It had a few penned-in edits, she explained, but not drastic revisions. “I don’t know what to do with it, really” she said. “I considered selling it at auction.” Christie’s estimated its value up to $20,000, if deemed authentic. She hadn’t called Sotheby’s yet. “Please” I begged, “just hold on to it. I’m on my way down.”

It’s a charming little story about the value of memories. Read it here.

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Films Reading

Tarzana, California

March 13, 2012 – 3:11 pm

With “John Carter” in theatres right now (getting mediocre reviews, despite Michael Chabon being partly responsible for the script), you might be interested in this fact about the story’s creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs: the man didn’t just create the Mars epos, he’s also the inventor of Tarzan. So it’s only logical that with the wealth he amassed from his books, he built a farm and named it Tarzana. Said Tarzana is now a city in California (and judging by Google Maps’ satellite photography, people in Tarzana are quite partial to pools):

For more on Burroughs, Salon released a good piece on him today:

For occasional entertainment Burroughs read the early pulp magazines, especially All-Story. Named after the cheap newsprint upon which they were printed, the pulps supplied adventure and romantic fiction to the masses for half a century. By the 1920s and ’30s newsstands around the country would display the lurid and spicy covers of Weird Tales, the Shadow, Amazing Stories, True Confessions, Dime Detective, Astounding, and Black Mask. Pulp writers would include such important literary figures as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Robert A. Heinlein and scores of others. But in 1911 most of the writers weren’t of this caliber, and Burroughs was convinced he could write better adventure stories and maybe even make a living at it.

In fact he rather underestimated himself.

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random

High Line Park

March 5, 2012 – 9:00 pm

In New York City, an abandoned railway track overgrown with grass, bushes and even trees, was turned into a recreational park and opened to the public in the late 2000s. It’s an interesting story which took quite a bit of perseverance from local activists. You can read about it here.

The reason I’m writing about it now is that via the magic of Google Maps’ Street View, you can actually walk the length of the whole park. It’s a charming exploration of an urban oasis, slightly elevated above the hustle and bustle of Chelsea. Click the image to have a look yourself.

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