Tag: youtube

~ Mark

Shaq vs. Bynum. The little tussle at the end is stupid; but you gotta love seeing Shaq embarrass someone with a huge dunk, and then seeing him get shown up seconds later. I don’t even care about basketball, but Bynum’s rebuttal got me fired up.

~ Mark

They skipped a few minutes’ worth of the opening toccata section, but man, how cool. That footwork! (via kottke)

I’m wondering what someone could do if they spent their life practicing an instrument like this one. Or what could a group of players (dancers?) make of it? One of the things that can make percussion ensembles (or say, a drummer in a band) more interesting than other chamber groups is all the movement. It can be really visual and just plain fun to watch, which you don’t always get from a pianist or string quartet or whatever.

(Source: http://www.kottke.org/)
~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

Some are saying Halo Kid is the new Star Wars Kid (already some remixes out there). What I find so fun and lovable about these videos isn’t the mocking, but just seeing someone so completely, enthusiastically lost in their own creativity and imagination. Give Halo Kid’s cardboard weapons a look (they’ve even got working reload functions). What a treat.

Koyaanisqatsi

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

I watched Koyaanisqatsi this weekend. It’s got a lot of cool footage and overall it was worth watching. But part of the problem with the message (that we live a “crazy life,” a “life out of balance”) is that it’s so dependent on the soundtrack.
A lot of it made me think of those time-lapse videos I saw on kids TV when I was little. Seeing a factory in fast motion was cool, not cause for worry. I was glad I found this Koyaanisqatsi: Redux which matches a portion of the film to a goofy, upbeat soundtrack, and contrasts it with a more dramatic string arrangement in the middle (musical transitions are around the 2-minute and 4-minute marks). I like parts of Philip Glass‘ original soundtrack for the film, and I think it’s kind of spooky-cool how the soundtrack can direct your response to what you’re seeing. But it’s too much of an emotional shortcut.

There are a lot of excerpts from the film on YouTube, like the original trailer, the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing in St. Louis, scenes from New York, and the famous closing scene that reprises the opening.