A Ken Nordine litany of links:
Word Jazz Discography and Podcast.
YouTube Channel.
Wikipedia Ken Nordine
WFMU’s Beware of the Blog “Ken Nordine Helps Open a Chicago Hi-Fi Store, April, 1957 (Exploring My Reel-to-Reel Catacombs, Volume Six) – WFMU’s Beware of the Blog”
WBEZ Eight Forty-Eight Radio’s Smoothest Voice: Ken Nordine Turns 90
Vocalo Video: Ken Nordine turns 90, gives us a trippy tour of his house/studiog More…
Some of the best live music happens in an office, namely NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. Their videos are now on NPR Music’s YouTube Channel.
So many good ones up: Bill Callahan, Farfarlo, Avett Bros, Tallest Man on Earth, Raphael Saadiq, Ralph Stanley, Sam Phillips.
The following exercise in simplicity is just Sir Tom Jones, accompanied by Brian Monroney, his musical director since 1996 and a masterful guitarist — with a few fans among the nipper folk, all clustered around a diminutive desk:
WNYC Radiolab has been mixing mediums, combining their stellar science pubradio series with video artwork of Everynone. Their latest is a nearly wordless visual contemplation of “words”:
via MQ2.
BeatlesTube.net lists Beatles songs and videos, w/ lotsa info on each. For example, here’s a “Lucy…Diamonds” animation (from Yellow Sub movie), then some of the John/Paul quotes about “Day…Life.”
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
About A Day in the Life video – BeatlesTube.net:
JOHN 1968: “‘A Day in the Life’ –that was something. I dug it. It was a good piece of work between Paul and me. I had the ‘I read the news today’ bit, and it turned Paul on. Now and then we really turn each other on with a bit of song, and he just said ‘yeah’ –bang bang, like that. It just sort of happened beautifully, and we arranged it and rehearsed it, which we don’t often do, the afternoon before. So we all knew what we were playing, we all got into it. It was a real groove, the whole scene on that one. Paul sang half of it and I sang half. I needed a middle-eight for it, but Paul already had one there.”
that was co-written. The orchestra crescendo and that was based on some of the ideas I’d been getting from Stockhausen and people like that, which is more abstract. So we told the orchestra members to just start on their lowest note and end on their highest note and go in their own time… which orchestras are frightened to do. That’s not the tradition. But we got ’em to do it.”
PAUL 1988: “Then I went around to all the trumpet players and said, ‘Look all you’ve got to do is start at the beginning of the 24 bars and go through all the notes on your instrument from the lowest to the highest– and the highest has to happen on that 24th bar, that’s all. So you can blow ’em all in that first thing and then rest, then play the top one there if you want, or you can steady them out.’ And it was interesting because I saw the orchestra’s characters. The strings were like sheep– they all looked at each other: ‘Are you going up? I am!’ and they’d all go up together, the leader would take them all up. The trumpeters were much wilder.”
This tune is transfixing: “War & Peace” Music and Words concept by Ryuichi Sakamoto (坂本龍), Words by Arto Lindsay
Performed live @ ZEPP, Tokyo 24 July 2005, by: Ryuichi Sakamoto, Steve Jansen, Christian Fennesz, Skuli Sverrisson, Keigo Oyamada. “War & Peace” studio vers is on the 2004 CD Chasm
War & Peace
Is war as old as gravity?
If I love peace do I have to love trees?
Are there animals that like peace and animals that like war?
Is peace quiet?
Is making war an instinct we inherited from our hunting or farming
ancestors?Were farmers the first warriors?
Do we love without thinking?
Do we do the right thing without thinking?
When children fight with their brothers and sisters are they learning
how to make war?How do we test the limit of our bodies without war?
Why do they compare war to a man and peace to a woman?
Peace is unpredictable.
Why is war so exciting?
War is the best game and the worst life.
Is peace the hardest work?
Is peace a time of tension?
What are the different kinds of victory, in a war, in a race?
Is despair a solution?
Why is it dangerous to say “never forget”?
Same song performed by RS’s old bandmates: Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Past, present, and future POVs of time, thru the lens of a Philip Zimbardo lecture, and the art of RSAnimate:
The Secret Powers of Time
RSA is the (deep breath) Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. They’ve been animating excerpts from their series of talks. Nary a note on who the artist is, tho, but it seems these whiteboard wonders are from Cognitive Media.
‘Nother RSAnimation worth checking: “Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us” (talk by Dan Pink).
The new Black Public Media.org site is overflowing with flix. One of my faves was this short portrait of author/playwright James Baldwin:
“Remix: Price of a Ticket” was originally a PBS American Masters by Karen Thorsen, remixed (with permission) by Sabrina S. Gordon.Black Public Media.org is a project of NBPC: National Black Programming Consortium.
Amazing how much feel you can pack into a two-minute song, “Ain’t No Sunshine” Bill Withers 1972:
via Some Velvet.
And here’s RRKIrk’s take on same tune…
“Ain’t No Sunshine” Rahsaan Roland Kirk Blacknuss
New CD by The Books out soon called The Way Out
Their label, Temporary Residence Limited, is enticing us with this track, “Beautiful People” (2:53 mp3):
While we’re waiting for the new release (mine’s already pre-ordered), let’s go back and…
Song off CD Lemon of Pink
Video from DVD Playall.
Producer Jay Allison on the new pubradio series PRX » The Moth, stories told unscripted and live before an audience:
Chris Engles, photographer and radio producer (site | blip.tv | prx), blends the two skills expertly in this audio-slideshow of Boston’s Weberdance:
Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010) was an original mixer, mashup-er, sampler, manager, and modern music maker. Here’s some selections from his career:
Bow Wow Wow from See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah. City All Over! Go Ape Crazy (1981):
McLaren from Duck Rock (1983):
McLaren from Fans (1984):
British Airways Commercial, music: McLaren w/ Yanni (1989):
McLaren, samples: Esther Bigeou’s “St. Louis Blues” & “She’s Not There” Zombies, from
Kill Bill Vol. 2 soundtrack (2004):
The final four games were great, but even better was seeing the Prez take on former pro Pacers star Clark Kellog in a game of HORSE, renamed POTUS for this CBS playground matchup. Makes me proud to have a Prez that can talk policy, talk trash, while consistently sinking nada-but-net from 3-point land:
Some 1966 sweets from the go-go-booted silver-throated blonde bombshell…
“Sugar Town” Nancy Sinatra:
Yes, the same song She (of & Him) sang in (500) Dys. o’ Summer. And here’s Frank’s kid in her full glory on the album cover:
Another anatomy of a news story, this from the Onion:
“Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere”
via Gravity Medium.
A film by Danfung Dennis embedded in Afghanistan with US Marine’s Echo Companyas they were dropped behind enemy lines to seize a key bridge. “Battle for Hearts and Minds“:
On July 2nd, 2009, four thousand US Marines of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade launched a major helicopter assault into a Taliban stronghold in the Helmand River Valley in southern Afghanistan in order to break a military stalemate reached with the Taliban.
“Battle for Hearts and Minds- Trailer”:
Battle for Hearts and Minds Trailer from Danfung Dennis on Vimeo.
“Ball” by Ries Straver is “at first glance a simple study of tension and expectations but the foreboding characteristics of the girl elevate it to a level of auspicious uneasiness”:
Ball from Ries Straver on Vimeo.
Photography by James Mollison.
Sound Design by Adam Lieber.
via Soup.
Want to be a bona fide journalist? Forget J-school, forget internships, all you need to know is:
“How To Report The News” Charlie Brooker, BBC4 Newswipe
via Robert Patterson.
The revus are in…
“Hitler responds to the iPad”
I thot f’sure Obama was gonna tell us last night that “Everyone gets and iPad.” A jobs and edu stimulus all in one.
A clip from maybe the world’s first “jihadist comedy” film:
The flick’s from Chris Morris of the UK mockumentary TV series Brass Eye. Premiered at Sundance, distributed by Warp.
