This past Wednesday, YouTube streamed a webcast of the latest installment of the Unstaged concert series. Arcade Fire kicked off the series last August in New York City. Now we cut to the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles, where Duran Duran took the stage. The 80s band is still around, still making music. And they’re smartly collaborating with David Lynch, who created visuals that were double-exposed over the live performance. HuffPo interviewed Lynch about the collaboration (and more) here, and you can always head to YouTube to find videos of individual songs played during the show.
Blinky™: A Touching Short Film About A Killer Robot
That’s right, touching.
From Blade Runner to Terminator to at least 30 percent of what made Battlestar Galactica great, violent robot revolt is nothing new. But 27-year old Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson, who was nominated for an Oscar for his animated short Fifty Percent Grey, tweaks the formula by shrinking the arena: This battlefield isn’t a galaxy, a solar system or even a planet; it’s just the lonely suburban home of a boy whose parents fight all day.
Max Record (Where the Wild Things Are) is fine as the angry son who hopes a new toy will solve all of his problems, but this movie belongs to the robot: More WALL‑E than cylon, more R2-D2 than ED-209, and priced at just $999.99, Blinky is a machine the whole family can love. He catches, he cleans, he plays hide and seek, he’ll wait for you in the rain, and he just wants to be your friend.…Until he doesn’t.
A warning here: Even though at its best Blinky speaks directly to the bloody-minded fifth-grader in all of us, we suggest watching the whole thing before showing it to children, or even squeamish adults.
(Visit the always excellent io9 for more free science fiction film recommendations.)
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
The Wire as Great Victorian Novel
A while back, W. Daniel Hillis made the case that The Wire may rise to the level of – if not surpass – Tolstoy’s War & Peace. Writing for the Edge.org, Hillis went so far as to say:
As much as I liked War and Peace, I probably got more out of The Wire. And why should that be surprising? More human effort can be put into a television series than a novel and more time is spent consuming it. If both are executed to their highest standards, with equal care, skill and insight, we might well expect less from the book.
If we can mention The Wire in the same breath as Tolstoy, then why not another giant of nineteenth century literature, Charles Dickens? Yes, The Wire has been called “Dickensian” too, and this week the Hooded Utilitarian has re-imagined The Wire as a serialized Victorian novel. The premise? Imagine The Wire written in 60 installments over the course of six years, starting in 1846, by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, a Dickens contemporary who wrote with a “nuance and attention to detail that Dickens never achieved.” Each installment ran 30 pages and sold for one shilling apiece.
The Hooded Utilitarian hasn’t actually printed these 60 installments (because they don’t actually exist). But they have produced a few wonderful mock pages, and written a faux piece of literary criticism to accompany them. A great job by Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson.
via BoingBoing
The New York Philharmonic Opens Digital Archives to the Public
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The New York Philharmonic recently unveiled its digital archives to the public. They haven’t finished the archive quite yet, but they have completed the Leonard Bernstein years, also known as the “International Era.” You can find business correspondence, handwritten notes, 3,200 programs, and gems like this Mahler score, full of notations and comments in Bernstein’s hand. As a recent New York Times article points out, the Bernstein years (1942–70) saw some of the most tumultuous events in American history, and in no way was the Philharmonic immune from its upheavals.
In the archives, one finds the orchestra hiring women for the first time, scouting for African-American musicians (in 1969 they had just one), and even doing its bit to manage U.S.-Soviet relations with several attempts to invite Shostakovich – unsuccessfully. Fans of Glenn Gould might particularly enjoy reading the minutes of a meeting in which members of the board, outraged over Gould’s famously controversial Brahms performance just one month earlier, argued to release him from his contract. Bernstein himself also hated Gould’s interpretation, but had nonetheless defended it before the audience in an historic speech about the pianist’s artistic integrity and judgement. (The video above is of a happier collaboration between the two masters just two years earlier.)
Also: On March 17, the NYPhil posted this video of a performance of Toru Takemitsu’s “Requiem for Strings,” to raise awareness of the plight in Japan and encourage donations.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Evgeny Morozov Animated: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
RSA has released its latest animated video, and this time it features Evgeny Morozov, the Belarus-born researcher, who takes the contrarian position that the internet can often inhibit (rather than promote) democracy, especially within authoritarian contexts like China and Iran. And what follows (above) is a more sobering talk about how authoritarian regimes use the web to suppress civic engagement and fledgling democracy movements. This clip is part of a longer 27 minute lecture (see full version here) that peers into “the dark side of internet freedom,” a phrase that happens to be the subtitle of Morozov’s new book.
Morozov is currently a visiting scholar in the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford, and if you’re wondering how he looks at technology and the role it played in Egypt’s revolution, you can watch a quick clip here.
Le Flaneur: Time Lapse Video of Paris Without the People
Luke Shepard, a student at the American University of Paris, began working on Le Flaneur as part of a project for school, but it quickly took on a life of its own. He used a Nikon D90 DSLR camera to take over 2,000 photos of Paris at night, and then used Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro to produce this impressive tour of a world that most of us rarely see – Paris without Parisians. In English, “flaneur” translates roughly as “stroller,” “loafer,” or perhaps “aimless walker,” and, in an interview with National Geographic Traveler, Shepard explained that he was inspired to shoot these images in part by late-night pleasure rides on his bicycle.
(Note: Some viewers may prefer to watch with the volume off, as the chase scene-ready soundtrack detracts a bit from the eerie sense of a virtually deserted city. For more time-lapse photography, check out these videos of Mecca, New York City, and the Milky Way.)
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Elizabeth Taylor on “What’s My Line?” (1954)
Elizabeth Taylor, a star for seven decades, died earlier today of congestive heart failure. She was 79 years old. To pay quick tribute, we’re highlighting Taylor’s 1954 appearance on “What’s My Line?,” the longest-running game show in American television history (1950 — 1967). A good way to remember Taylor – having a little fun in her prime.
The film mentioned at the end of the scene – The Last Time I Saw Paris stars – also happens to be available at the Internet Archive for free. Enjoy
Related Content:
Salvador Dali (and Other VIPs) on “What’s My Line?”
Leonard Cohen Reads “The Future” (Not Safe for Work)
If you’ve been feeling the End Times’ icy breath a little close on your shoulders these past few weeks, we recommend a healthy dose of Leonard Cohen. You can start with this 20-minute interview from 1993, conducted by Barbara Gowdy of the Canadian literary series, Imprint. And click “play” with caution — it starts with Cohen reading the very NSFW poem “The Future,” from his eponymous 1992 album.
The second you hear that famous blue baritone say “Give me absolute control over every living soul,” you know the apocalypse can certainly wait till the poem’s over. Or maybe it can’t, but at least you’ll have spent your last few moments listening to Leonard Cohen.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Kutiman’s Trip to Jerusalem
The Israeli artist Ophir Kutiel, otherwise known as Kutiman, returns to YouTube with a rather different project. No Mother of All Funk Chords. No Kutiman-Thru-You. No new take on the remix, but rather a three-day stroll through Jerusalem with a Canon T21. An ancient, holy city seen through a modern lens. The background music is a Kutiman original with Itamar Duari on percussion…
Lawrence Krauss: Every Atom in Your Body Comes From a Star
Lawrence Maxwell Krauss, author of the best-selling book The Physics of Star Trek, is a theoretical physicist and Professor of Physics at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the beginning and the end of the universe.
This past January, Krauss attended the World Economic Forum in Davos and was asked by 99 Faces TV to talk about his work. In a relatively short 381 seconds, he speaks about the scale of the universe, the concept of dark energy and explains how “you really are stardust.” That is to say, every little atom in your body comes from a supernova (or exploding star). Krauss elaborates on this poetic thought in this 2009 video (definitely recommended), and he’ll have more to say in his new book, A Universe from Nothing.
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By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
Charismatic Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan Gives Public Lecture (1972)
The footage above is from an extremely rare – and unexpectedly entertaining – video of the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), giving a lecture at The Catholic University of Louvain in 1972. The film is notable for a couple of reasons:
1. In France, Lacan’s rock star status owed much to his popular public seminars. The charismatic iconoclast had been giving free public lectures for decades, and those lectures were usually packed with students, colleagues, skeptics, young radicals … and fans. The video gives you an idea of what the fuss was all about. Even at 70, Lacan still owns the room, and he has the presence of a stage actor, complete with dramatic pauses, ironic self-reflection, and pitch-perfect storms of emotion (see minute 15:07).
2. At minute 21:37, a politically inspired heckler tries to ambush him. It’s a moment right out of a comedy show, if the comedy show were chic and grainy and edited by Jean-Luc Goddard. Note the grace with which Lacan neutralizes the poor guy, lights his cigar and then concludes the lecture, even though the fallout from their encounter is still stuck in his hair.
Lacan’s ideas have fallen a bit out of fashion in the past two decades, particularly in the U.S., where psychoanalysis has been nudged out of the spotlight by neuroscience and post-structuralism has lost ground to post-colonial studies. But Lacan still has his fans, notably the “Elvis of Philosophy,” Slavoj Zizek, who dominates YouTube the way his predecessor once did salons.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
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