Puck

Doug Stanhope: Voice of America – ABORTION IS GREEN.

Well, duh.

via YouTube – Doug Stanhope: Voice of America – ABORTION IS GREEN.

It’s common knowledge by now that the Irish saved civilization. What we didn’t realize, not until Joel Conroy came along to tell us in his award-winning film Waveriders, is that the Irish also gave us surfing.

The Irish invented surfing? Yeah, right, and Jamaicans gave us bobsledding. But wait: the Irish have waves. Big ones. The wall of water known as the North Atlantic slams into the wildly west coast of Ireland and makes waves. Really big ones.

Waveriders argues that Ireland really does have a claim to a central place in the history of surfing. And, based not only the majesty of those west coast waves but the fact that the messiah of the modern surfing revival was Irish as well, we need to take that claim seriously. The messiah’s name was George Freeth, and he was born on the island of Oahu in 1883. He had a part-Hawaiian mother and an Irish father. California clams him as one of their own, but so does the Irish city of Ulster. What there’s no argument about is Freeth’s important role in the popularization of surfing and his modernizing of lifeguarding.

Freeth learned surfing from its true inventors, the Hawaiians. The arguably Irish man brought his talent for surfing to California, surf-crafting the paddleboard and rafting it into service for saving the lives of those imperiled at sea. Freeth died in 1919, a victim of the global flu pandemic. A bronze bust of Freeth was stolen from the Redondo Beach Pier in 2008, probably for its melt value. Read the rest of this entry »

NPR’s “Project Song” got Stephin Merritt in the studio for 48 hours. Merritt wrote a cool song called “Man of a Million Faces.”

From a group of six photos and six words, The Magnetic Fields guru Stephin Merritt picked “1974″ — and an image of a man wearing a kind of suit covered with baby dolls. Two days later, the song they inspired was finished.

Another fantastic video from the Playing for Change folks.

Manny Farber wrote like he ran with the Beatniks, smoking, drinking and bopping to jazz rhythms. In Farber on Film, we get the straight, the uncut, the complete writings of Farber on film.

Farber wrote scores of film reviews for The Nation, Time, The New Republic and other publications. But his reviews rarely fit into the “first this, then that, and I liked it because” box that most reviewers cram themselves into. Farber mused on the beauty of images, confronted actors’ choices, challenged directors, and digressed down rarely trod paths in order to introduce pertinent impertinences and relevant social revelations.

Farber was a self-described champion of “termite art”: he loved eccentric virtuosity rather than “white elephants,” conformist monstrosities that “pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.” Termite art, in contrast, is “ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” White elephant art was seamless mass in “pursuit of… continuity” and “harmony,” while termite art participated in the world: it is “an act of observing and being in the world” and

goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, like as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity. Read the rest of this entry »

A one-take music video par excellence by OK Go, directed by Brian L. Perkins. Booooooom asks,

Can we crown them kings of the one-take music video yet?

Hell yes.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

I produced and edited this project for work. It took about three months to get to this 3-minute video, in part because I needed to travel to various locations in the state to conduct the interviews and then cull through some 20 hours of raw footage to find just the right sound bites. In any case, I’m fairly happy with it, though some of the shots and some of the sound are less than perfect. I do think the editing is fine and it tells a great story: the importance of science to a premium wine industry and, correspondingly, the key to the science is an outstanding education.

Leonard Bernstein, early mass media star, gave millions of people a long string of sophisticated lessons in music. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Bernstein appeared on all three major television networks many times as brilliant educator and glorious composer, all the while and just off screen he was also a glamorous bon vivant. Bernstein was a man who lived large and looms large still in the musical consciousness of the United States, and the world as well.

From 1958 to 1973, Bernstein delivered four TV music performance/lectures per year, illustrated lavishly with the likes of the New York Philharmonic: the Young People’s Concerts series is still one of the longest-running programs on classical music. Earlier in the 1950s, he delivered for Omnibus a handful of performances that are considered among the finest of the so-called “golden age of television.” Omnibus was a dignified, mid-century monumental series hosted by Alastair Cooke that explored art, science and the humanities. Read the rest of this entry »

Using X-rays to literally delve beneath the surface of this mysterious portrait, Christopher Swann’s 1999 documentary is a fascinating examination of a beautiful painting.

One of only three portraits of women by Leonardo da Vinci, the subject of the painting was the 16-year-old Ginevra de Benci, a member of a wealthy family. The portrait may have been Leonardo’s first commission; he is thought to have been 22 when he painted it in 1474. The picture hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. – or, rather, the upper half of the painting hangs there.

For at some point in its past, the picture was mutilated: the bottom half was cut away, so that Ginevra is portrayed only from about mid-bust upwards. Ginevra’s Story shows how art historians, using computer-aided design technology, reconstructed the bottom third of the painting. The reconstruction is based on sketches of Ginevra’s hands in the Windsor Castle art collection, and on comparison with Ginevra’s “sisters,” the Mona Lisa and the “Lady with an Ermine.” Read the rest of this entry »

Booker T. and the MGs were the house band for Stax Records and provided the backbone for many a hit record. Here they in a performance in Oslo, Norway, in 1967.