Acoustic Metric EP Unplugged

5 new acoustic tracks from Metric:

stream the songs (and videos) for free.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

The widget wasn’t working out for me, so here’s a direct link to the site:

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

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

the freedom to choose Devo

 

It seems that some of you have discovered my set of “Top 80s” posts by searching for Devo. Maybe the recent interest has something to do with these new bits of information:

Devo recorded a new song titled “Watch Us Work It,” which was featured in a commercial for Dell. The band has announced in a July 23, 2007, MySpace bulletin that a full length music video for the song is forthcoming. Casale said that this song was chosen from a batch of songs that the band was working on, and that also this is the closest the band has been to a new album.

In an article called Are You Not Devo? You Are Mutato, LA Weekly says that “After touring sporadically over the past decade but not releasing any new material, Devo are spending December at Mutato trying to create an album’s worth of new material and contemplating a method of dispersal in the post-record-company world.”

see 5 minutes of Cloverfield update

Here is some new stuff about the movie previously known as 01-18-08:

The poster for Escape from New York supposedly inspired the scene of the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty in Cloverfield.

J. J. Abrams apparently conceived of a new monster after he and his son visited a toy store in Japan. He explained, “We saw all these Godzilla toys, and I thought, ‘we need our own monster, and not King Kong, King Kong’s adorable.’ I wanted something that was just insane and intense.”

See 5 exclusive minutes of Cloverfield.

They have also launched viral websites for Slusho! and a Japanese drilling company to add to the mythology of the story, much in the same way that they did for Lost.

Banksy print update

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.

there’s also has some interesting new video in the Banksy film page.

oh yeah… Be Kind Rewind!

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.

Be Kind Rewind trailer

 

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.

100 Movies, 100 Quotes and (more than) 100 Numbers

 

…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

Disney cartoons, pretty girls, fair use and free culture?

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.

Giant Big Ass Badgers

Renaissance Badger?

If you’ve been paying attention you should already know about badgers, but I just discovered a couple new badger threats:

• Giant badgers terrorize Iraqi port city
  (this is real: giant badgers are stalking the streets by night, eating humans.)
• Big Ass Badgers
  (this is awesome: it’s a trailer for an exciting new film!…)

since everyone is talking about Spider-Man

I watched it, but instead of a review I’m going to share this:

“You got your Spider-Man in my Voltron!” “Your mariachi ruined my samurai!”

the dude with only one eye looks like a Jack Kirby drawing brought to life.