The Grey Video: Mixing The Beatles with Jay‑Z

in Music, Video - Arts & Culture | October 1st, 2007

In 2004, Dan­ger Mouse released The Grey Album which lay­ered the rap­per Jay-Z’s The Black Album on top of The Bea­t­les’ White Album. Black and white makes grey.

Now, on YouTube, you can find The Grey Video, which exper­i­men­tal­ly brings Dan­ger Mouse’s con­cept to video. The video, cre­at­ed by two Swiss direc­tors, mesh­es clips from The Bea­t­les’ film A Hard Day’s Night with footage of Jay‑Z per­form­ing. Watch it below, and get more info on The Grey Album here. Also check our col­lec­tion of MP3 Music Blogs.

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Martin Scorsese on The Rolling Stones, Then George Harrison

in Film, Music, Video - Arts & Culture | September 29th, 2007

Mar­tin Scors­ese is on a rock ‘n roll tear.

In 2006, he released No Direc­tion Home, an acclaimed doc­u­men­tary on Bob Dylan (long after he filmed his first rock­u­men­tary, The Last Waltz in 1978). Next April, he’s set to release anoth­er doc­u­men­tary on The Rolling Stones, ten­ta­tive­ly called Shine a Light. (Watch the already released trail­er below.) And now he has just agreed to direct a film about George Har­ri­son. The movie, being made with the sup­port of Har­rison’s fam­i­ly, will cov­er his time with the Bea­t­les, his music and film career there­after, and Har­rison’s spir­i­tu­al engage­ment with East­ern reli­gion. Report­ed­ly, Paul McCart­ney and Ringo Starr may also con­tribute to the mak­ing of the film. It won’t be out for a few good years. In the mean­time, check out our recent piece, The Bea­t­les: Pod­casts from Yes­ter­day.

Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter

in Books | September 24th, 2007

David Halberstam’s no stranger to writ­ing big books about big wars, and he report­ed­ly thought of his final work, The Cold­est Win­ter: Amer­i­ca and the Kore­an War, as a “book­end” to his clas­sic on Viet­nam, The Best and the Bright­est. The book comes out this week with a very unusu­al pub­lic­i­ty blitz.

Hal­ber­stam died in a car crash last spring and so, remark­ably, a group of his friends are doing a pub­lic­i­ty tour for him. Authors like Joan Did­ion, Sey­mour Hersh, Bob Wood­ward and Anna Quindlen are tak­ing up legs of the gru­el­ing pub­lic­i­ty trek in hon­or of Hal­ber­stam. Accord­ing to the New York Times they will be “offer­ing per­son­al rem­i­nis­cences and read­ings” in an inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of festschrift and pro­mo­tion. The tour will start on Tues­day and run until Octo­ber 15^th. In the words of Sy Hersh, “Lis­ten, ain’t noth­ing like David — you don’t need this to keep David alive. You’ve got to mar­ket a book, let’s mar­ket a book, but he tran­scends that. He was a great war reporter and a great base­ball reporter, and the most loy­al per­son in the world.”

Relat­ed: See our piece from April, David Halberstam’s Last Speech and Sup­per.

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Classic Films on Google Video

in Film, Google, Video - Arts & Culture | September 24th, 2007

Here’s a lit­tle some­thing for the film buffs out there: The­Lis­tU­ni­verse has post­ed a col­lec­tion of ten clas­sic films from the 1920s, 30s and 40s that you can watch on Google Video. Just click and watch. On the list, you’ll find Fritz Lang’s M, the 1922 Ger­man silent film Nos­fer­atu, The Gold Rush with Char­lie Chap­lin, The Gen­er­al with Buster Keaton, and three films by the great Frank Capra — It Hap­pened One Night (with Clark Gable), It’s a Won­der­ful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Wash­ing­ton (both with Jim­my Stew­art). Being one of our favorites, we have post­ed “Mr. Smith” below.

Note: For more great films, please see our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online, which fea­tures more than 120 films, many of them clas­sics.

Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History

in Books, History, Most Popular | September 23rd, 2007

Here are a few facts to know about the adven­tur­ous Patrick Hunt. He’s a Stan­ford archae­ol­o­gist who has spent more than a decade try­ing to unrav­el the mys­tery of how Han­ni­bal, the great ancient mil­i­tary leader, crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with 25,000 men and 37 ele­phants. (Lis­ten on iTunes to the course he gave on this adven­ture, and get more info below). He has bro­ken more than 20 bones while doing field­work, fought off kid­nap­pers, and twice sur­vived sun­stroke-induced blind­ness. And now he has just pub­lished an excit­ing new book called Ten Dis­cov­er­ies That Rewrote His­to­ry. It’s pub­lished by Penguin/Plume and starts ship­ping tomor­row. I asked Patrick what makes these dis­cov­er­ies — rang­ing from the Roset­ta Stone to the Dead Sea Scrolls to Machu Pic­chu — so impor­tant. Below he gives us a brief glimpse into what makes each dis­cov­ery his­tor­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant and fas­ci­nat­ing. Read on, and check out his cap­ti­vat­ing new book for the fuller pic­ture.

Patrick Hunt: “First I should say that not every archae­ol­o­gist would agree that these are the ten most impor­tant dis­cov­er­ies of all time. On the oth­er hand, the ten sto­ries retold in this book are often regard­ed as among the most excit­ing archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies of the mod­ern era (since 1750). And no one would deny that these ten vital dis­cov­er­ies have for­ev­er changed the world of archae­ol­o­gy, trans­form­ing how and what we know about ancient his­to­ry. Let me tell you a lit­tle about them.

Roset­ta Stone: This excit­ing dis­cov­ery in 1799 was the key to deci­pher­ing Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs and unlock­ing the his­to­ry of the ancient world texts. It pro­vides a win­dow into the real his­to­ry of Egypt rather than an imag­i­nary one; all oth­er deci­pher­ings of ancient lan­guages since the Roset­ta Stone’s ini­tial decod­ing in 1822 are based on its prece­dents. (See pho­to here.)

Troy: Its dis­cov­ery and exca­va­tion begin­ning in 1870 proved once and for all that Troy was not just a myth based on Homer; Troy was a his­tor­i­cal site where real peo­ple lived and fought. Its ear­li­est exca­va­tor, the oft-maligned and often-uneth­i­cal Hein­rich Schlie­mann has been most­ly cred­it­ed — right or wrong — as being the “Father of Archae­ol­o­gy” and his tech­niques became the foun­da­tion of archae­o­log­i­cal research, how­ev­er great­ly improved, after­ward.

Nin­eveh and the Roy­al Assyr­i­an Library: This riv­et­ing find begin­ning in 1849 by Austen Hen­ry Layard, a sleuth of antiq­ui­ty, even­tu­al­ly unearthed a whole lost library of cuneiform texts, includ­ing ones not only from ancient Assyr­ia but also from far old­er Sumer, Akkad, Baby­lon and oth­er great civ­i­liza­tions. This had a very sig­nif­i­cant impact on world lit­er­a­ture, intro­duc­ing such sem­i­nal works as the Epic of Gil­gamesh.

King Tut’s Tomb: The dra­mat­ic open­ing of this roy­al tomb in 1922 — sought for years by a deter­mined Howard Carter — was the first time in mil­len­nia a pharao­h’s tomb had actu­al­ly been found intact; its trea­sure gave the world a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to actu­al­ly account for stag­ger­ing Egypt­ian roy­al wealth. [Dan’s note: Nation­al Geo­graph­ic has a nice web site on this archae­o­log­i­cal find.]

Machu Pic­chu: The remark­able high jun­gle moun­tain dis­cov­ery in 1911 of the remote Lost City of the Inca by Hiram Bing­ham made it pos­si­ble for the world to final­ly see an undis­turbed Inca roy­al city mys­te­ri­ous­ly aban­doned on a moun­tain­top but nei­ther con­quered nor changed by the colo­nial world. (See pho­to here.)

Pom­peii: Pre­served by the erup­tion of Vesu­vius in AD 79 and not dug out for almost two mil­len­nia, Pom­peii (prob­a­bly acci­den­tal­ly found by a farmer dig­ging a well) is the sin­gle most impor­tant Roman site in the world; its arti­facts offer the largest and fullest record of life in a Roman city. Pom­pei­i’s mis­for­tune is our great for­tune. It pre­serves a city with thou­sands of objects vir­tu­al­ly unchanged. (See images here.)

Dead Sea Scrolls: Since 1947, when two Bedouin boys in the desert stum­bled upon the first cave at Qum­ran, these hid­den desert texts have rev­o­lu­tion­ized our per­cep­tions of ear­ly Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian reli­gion; their find­ing has pushed back our knowl­edge of bib­li­cal man­u­scripts by a thou­sand years. This dis­cov­ery and the off-and-on secre­cy of the finds reads like spy fic­tion but is real instead. (See pho­to here.)

Akrotiri on Thera: Archae­ol­o­gist Spyri­don Mar­i­natos had been laughed at by his peers for his the­o­ries and was final­ly vin­di­cat­ed 30 years lat­er (cir­ca 1967). Like Pom­peii, ash from the vol­canic erup­tion in 1620 BC pre­served a whole Aegean city that might have been the source of the Atlantis myths but was cer­tain­ly a wealthy city with fab­u­lous wall paint­ings depict­ing Bronze Age life. It gives us for the first time a whole new body of Minoan art and under­stand­ing of Mediter­ranean sea trade. (Images here.)

Oldu­vai Gorge: Since the 1920’s, the Leakey fam­i­ly dogged­ly per­sist­ed search­ing in East Africa for the most ancient human ori­gins; dra­mat­ic unearthing of bones and tools in 1959 from Oldu­vai and oth­er sites in Great Rift Africa for­ev­er showed the world how long — at least a mil­lion years — antecedents to human life have per­sist­ed, final­ly pro­vid­ing proof of Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion from ear­li­er pri­mate and hominid finds.

Tomb of 10,000 War­riors: This stag­ger­ing tomb from around 220–210 BC, spread­ing over hun­dreds of acres, sin­gle-hand­ed­ly awak­ened West­ern inter­est in Chi­nese his­to­ry and revi­tal­ized Chi­nese archae­ol­o­gy. The opu­lence and grandeur of an emper­or’s tomb aston­ished the world. Archeo­tourism in Chi­na has prof­it­ed immense­ly from the acci­den­tal 1974 find of a pre-Han tomb where lies the author­i­tar­i­an emper­or who forcibly unit­ed and rewrote Chi­nese cul­ture in many ways that still sur­vive today.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: Above, I men­tioned that you can lis­ten to Patrick Hunt’s Stan­ford course on Han­ni­bal on iTunes. The course is going to be rolled out in install­ments over the next sev­er­al weeks. Sep­a­rate­ly you can lis­ten to a stand­alone lec­ture that he gave on Han­ni­bal short­ly before the start of the course. (Lis­ten on iTunes here.) This lec­ture gets ref­er­enced in the course at sev­er­al points. Patrick­’s work on Han­ni­bal is spon­sored by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Soci­ety.

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Bob Dylan Video Goodness

in Music, Uncategorized, Video - Arts & Culture | September 19th, 2007

Mark Octo­ber 1 on your cal­en­dar. That’s when Bob Dylan will release a new box set of his “great­est songs.” Now, cut over to the web­site designed to mar­ket the album, and you’ll find a cou­ple notable pieces of video. First up, you can watch the video that accom­pa­nies Mark Ron­son’s remix­ing of “Most Like­ly You Will Go Your Way (& I’ll Go Mine).” (Watch it on the web­site here or on YouTube here.) It’s appar­ent­ly the first time Dylan has allowed a remix of any of his songs, and the song has been get­ting some air­play this week.

And then there is this video con­cept. Back in 1967, D. A. Pen­nebak­er released Don’t Look Back, a well-known doc­u­men­tary that cov­ered Dylan’s first tour of Eng­land in 1965. The open­ing seg­ment of the film has Dylan stand­ing in an alley, flip­ping through cards inscribed with lyrics from Sub­ter­ranean Home­sick Blues. (Also the beat poet Allen Gins­berg looms in the back­ground. We’ve includ­ed the orig­i­nal video below.) Now, I’m men­tion­ing this because the afore­men­tioned web­site lets you re-work this video seg­ment. Click here and you can re-write the cards that Dylan flips through, and then watch your edit­ed ver­sion. It’s anoth­er form of re-mix­ing, I guess.

Last­ly, I want to direct your atten­tion to the trove of videos that Google put togeth­er back when Google Video was a real liv­ing, breath­ing thing. Cre­at­ed to coin­cide with the release of Dylan’s last stu­dio album, Mod­ern Times (2006), this col­lec­tion lets you watch 11 videos in total, rang­ing from unre­leased footage from D. A. Pen­nebak­er’s Don’t Look Back, to Dylan’s appear­ance on The John­ny Cash Show, to his per­for­mance of “Dig­ni­ty” on MTV’s Unplugged. Good stuff, to be sure.

The World of Words & Carnal Knowledge

in Books, Podcasts | September 18th, 2007

Gram­mar is in vogue. The sta­tis­tics don’t lie. The Gram­mar Girl (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) remains one of the most pop­u­lar pod­casts on iTunes, and The Gram­mar Grater (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) is hold­ing its own. From gram­mar, it’s just a short step to words, to ety­mol­o­gy. And, today, we want to high­light Pod­ic­tionary (iTunes — Feed — Site) for you. It’s a “word-of-the-day” pod­cast that spends an easy three to five min­utes sur­vey­ing the his­to­ry of com­mon words in the Eng­lish lan­guage. (This makes it use­ful for native and non-native speak­ers alike). Its cre­ator, Charles Hodg­son, has so far tack­led over 600 terms, which means that he’s amassed an exten­sive audio archive that you can access here.

And his work on words does­n’t stop there. Hodg­son recent­ly pub­lished a new book called Car­nal Knowl­edge: A Navel Gaz­er’s Dic­tio­nary of Anato­my, Ety­mol­o­gy, and Triv­ia (St. Mar­t­in’s Press). Far from pedan­tic, the book uses engag­ing prose and fun facts to tease out the mean­ing of words we use to describe our bod­ies. The whole body gets cov­ered here, from the “eye” to the “simi­an line” to the “gul­let,” and it goes straight down to the nether regions, too. For more infor­ma­tion, spend some time with the blog that accom­pa­nies the new book.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ten Pod­casts to Build Your Vocab­u­lary

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Keeping Wikipedia Honest

in Web/Tech | September 18th, 2007

Wikipedia is now the 9th most fre­quent­ed site on the web, and it hosts over 7 mil­lion arti­cles in over 200 lan­guages. Like it or not, Wikipedia is here to stay.

Rec­og­niz­ing this, some inno­v­a­tive pro­gram­mers have start­ed devel­op­ing ways to shore up Wikipedi­a’s some­times shaky foun­da­tions. In par­tic­u­lar, they’re find­ing ways to mon­i­tor Wikipedia entries for tam­per­ing and par­ti­san manip­u­la­tion. A cou­ple weeks ago, we men­tioned a new site called Wikipedia Scan­ner, which allows users to deter­mine whether par­ti­sans have edit­ed par­tic­u­lar wiki entries by match­ing the entries against IP address­es. Now, anoth­er site, Wiki­rage, lets you track the pages on “Wikipedia which are receiv­ing the most edits per unique edi­tor over var­i­ous peri­ods of time.” This is a nice fea­ture part­ly because it pin­points which topics/entries are gen­er­at­ing buzz at the moment (today it is Black­wa­ter USA, Michael B. Mukasey, Fred Thomp­son, the Unit­ed States Con­sti­tu­tion and Dane Cooke — a log­i­cal sequence, to be sure.) But Wiki­rage is also handy because it high­lights which entries “have high revi­sion, van­dal­ism or undo rates.” The upshot is that mil­lions of peo­ple have built Wikipedia. But it’s smart pro­gram­ming, mixed with some man­pow­er, that’s keep­ing the whole enter­prise a lit­tle more hon­est and reli­able. Stay tuned for more on how this works out.

See Life­hack­er for the 10 Top Wikipedia tricks, and to find the most pop­u­lar pages on Wikipedia in absolute terms, click here.

The End of History Revisited

in Current Affairs, History | September 15th, 2007

Stew­art Brand, the cre­ator of the icon­ic Whole Earth Cat­a­log, heads up the The Long Now Foun­da­tion, an orga­ni­za­tion com­mit­ted to cul­ti­vat­ing “slower/better” think­ing and fos­ter­ing greater respon­si­bil­i­ty over “the next 10,000 years.” (Yes, they’re ambi­tious.) To help bring this about, Brand hosts a month­ly speak­ing series that you can down­load as a pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — MP3s), and, in late June, he brought in Fran­cis Fukuya­ma to speak. Fukuya­ma, a pro­fes­sor of inter­na­tion­al polit­i­cal econ­o­my at Johns Hop­kins, first made a name for him­self in 1989 when, dur­ing the wan­ing days of the Cold War, he pub­lished an essay called “The End of His­to­ry?” (Lat­er, he would turn it into a best­selling book, The End of His­to­ry and the Last Man.) Steal­ing a page from Karl Marx, Fukuya­ma main­tained that his­to­ry had a direc­tion to it. It flowed with pur­pose, always bring­ing progress. But the end point was­n’t com­mu­nist utopia. It was lib­er­al democ­ra­cy mixed with free mar­ket eco­nom­ics. That’s where human­i­ty was col­lec­tive­ly head­ing, with a vic­to­ri­ous Amer­i­ca lead­ing the way. (In his orig­i­nal essay, he wrote, “What we may be wit­ness­ing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the pass­ing of a par­tic­u­lar peri­od of post-war his­to­ry, but the end of his­to­ry as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ide­o­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion and the uni­ver­sal­iza­tion of West­ern lib­er­al democ­ra­cy as the final form of human gov­ern­ment.”)

In the inter­ven­ing years, the world’s move­ment toward west­ern democ­ra­cy has­n’t exact­ly fol­lowed a straight line, and the 9/11 attacks and the ensu­ing “War on Ter­ror” have seem­ing­ly lent cre­dence to a dim­mer world­view, one out­lined by Samuel Hunt­ing­ton in the con­tro­ver­sial book, The Clash of Civ­i­liza­tions and the Remak­ing of World Order. Speak­ing 18 years after the pub­li­ca­tion of his orig­i­nal essay (iTunes — Feed — MP3 — Blog), Fukuya­ma revis­its, clar­i­fies and large­ly defends his the­sis that lib­er­al democ­ra­cy is still on track to pre­vail. And that’s because, in his mind, there are deep eco­nom­ic, sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal trends in motion that dri­ve almost inex­orably toward these polit­i­cal ends. Whether he is right or wrong, it’s impos­si­ble to say. Regard­less, his talk is smart, hard­ly dog­mat­ic, and worth your time.

New R.E.M. Concert Video “Leaving New York”

in Music, Video - Arts & Culture | September 13th, 2007

Below we have “R.E.M. Live, record­ed on the Around the World Tour, which pro­mot­ed Around the Sun, a stu­dio album from 2004. It is to be released Octo­ber 16.” (Thanks to Justin for the clar­i­fi­ca­tion.)

Source: Stere­ogum. (For more music, check out our col­lec­tion of MP3 Blogs.)

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