random thoughts about some of your surface world culture.
I’ve got some more posts from the past to share with you on that critics site.
The best stuff that I encountered from last year is on my top 10 of 2008 list.
I’ve also encountered a lot of good stuff from this year:
Two of the best EPs that I found were Exquisite Corpse from Warpaint and Wake the Earth from the Honey Trees.
A couple full-length albums that I liked were (a)spera from Mirah and Replace Why With Funny from Dear Reader.
The new (and improved!) plan is to start sharing links to the reviews that I’ve been posting on a totally different site…a totally different site with reviews about everything, from the new items at your local convenience store to the expensive wines served in upscale restaurants…located in exotic countries. The Las Vegas Critics site is one of the reasons that this particular blog has stagnated, but Secret Undersea City will soon host links to all of the reviews I’ve been writing during the time I’ve been gone. Get ready.
Starring: Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, Felicia Day as Penny
Screenplay By: Joss Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, and Zack Whedon
Directed By: Joss Whedon
Produced By: David Burns, Michael Boretz, and Joss Whedon
Plot Outline: The story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.
Music by: Joss Whedon and Jed Whedon
Lyrics by: Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, and Maurissa Tancharoen
Score and Orchestration by: Jed Whedon
you might want to try this:
Some people have been searching for “banksy prints” to find my post about “free banksy prints” and I noticed that, in addition to the free stuff changing every so often, this message has popped up on the site: “Banksy does not sell photos of street graffiti or mount exhibitions of screenprints in commercial galleries” Seems like good information to know if you’re interested in obtaining some of his work.
I got so excited when I saw the trailer for Be Kind Rewind (what a great idea!) that I immediately watched it again before showing it to my cuddle partner. She was equally excited (mainly because she loves Mos Def) and also watched the trailer again. Then we talked about it a bit and I forgot all about sharing it. Until now.
Luckily for you, they’ve released some youtube videos specifically to remind me to share.
Jack Black and director Michel Gondry explain the art of sweding.
And there’s more: Robocop, Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy, Rush Hour 2 and BoYZ In THe HooD are all sweded here. I hope they’ve got more movies up their sleeve though…I don’t want these to be the only ones.
…and here is the list of movies:
100. Night of the Living Dead
99. Laura
98. Dead Poet’s Society
97. Bladerunner
96. The Lost Weekend
95. Ocean’s 11
94. Star Wars Continue reading ‘100 Movies, 100 Quotes and (more than) 100 Numbers’
I have no words to describe how the death of OiNK makes me feel, so I will share what some others have said:
Paraphrased Wikipedia: Copyright agencies described Oink as an online pirate pre-release music club; former users described it as one of the world’s largest and most meticulously maintained online music repositories. There were around 180,000 members at the time of closure and all of their avatars had to be cute.
“If you’re not familiar with Oink, here’s a quick summary: Oink was was a free members-only site – to join it you had to be invited by a member. Members had access to an unprecedented community-driven database of music. Every album you could ever imagine was just one click away.”
[Read the rest on: When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.]
…and it wasn’t just me:
What do you think about OiNK being shut down?
Trent Reznor: I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don’t feel cool when I go there. I’m tired of seeing John Mayer’s face pop up. I feel like I’m being hustled when I visit there, and I don’t think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc. Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release leaks. And that’s what’s such a difficult puzzle at the moment. If your favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it? People on those boards, they’re grateful for the person that uploaded it — they’re the hero. They’re not stealing it because they’re going to make money off of it; they’re stealing it because they love the band. I’m not saying that I think OiNK is morally correct, but I do know that it existed because it filled a void of what people want.
[the rest of the interview is on: Trent Reznor and Saul Williams Discuss Their New Collaboration, Mourn OiNK]
How one Walt Disney Cartoon was made:
(Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs behind-the-scenes)
Here are a couple quotes from the documentary:
“…the thousands of pencil drawings go to the inking department. Here, hundreds of pretty girls…”
“The inked celluloids next go to the painting department where more pretty girls apply the final colors.”
Damn…Walt Disney was a bigger genius than I ever realized. Unfortunately, to some degree, we also have the Disney Company to thank for possibly being detrimental to cultural diversity. One can argue that a rich, continually replenished, public domain is necessary for continued artistic creation. Disney as we know it wouldn’t exist if the current copyright laws were in place years ago because many of Disney’s animated films are based on Nineteenth Century public domain works, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Pinocchio, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Alice in Wonderland, and The Jungle Book.
There has never been a time in history when more of our ‘culture’ was as ‘owned’ as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now. (pg. 28 of Free Culture)
Free Culture is a book about the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies.
get a digital copy of the book for free
And here’s a humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms:
A Fair(y) Use Tale
the work that must have gone into this…woah.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
