A Thousand Pictures Is Worth How Many Words?

Ok, so I'm on a music video kick. Here is another original one. It's by Sia (full name: Sia Fuller), a ex-member of Zero7, from Australia.

She once told her friend Daniel Askill that the only visual medium she ever looked good in was Polaroid pictures, so that is what they made the video out of.

Have a look here. Check out the fade in on the opening shot.

I had never heard her music before, this song reminds me favorably of Tori Amos.

An Original Creation

This is the story of how two cartoonists, Raina and Dave, met, fell in love and finally, how they got engaged.

And of course, being cartoonists, the story is a comic.

Very cute.

Feel The Beat

Most music videos don't do much for me. They often times take themselves too seriously or try to me too cool. The hip-hop videos are especially bad at this. Most of the time I need something original or at least artistic to catch my attention. It also doesn't hurt when the song is actually good. Money or a famous director does not make a good video.

This is why it's so refreshing to see that the band OK Go have made what is probably the best video in recent years, A Million Ways. Here is a link to the 16 megs .mov. Smaller size and other codecs can be found on their site.

Apparently it's all amateur: one camera, their own backyard, their own clothes, choreographed by the lead singer's sister, that's all.

All you got to do is feel the beat.

New Expressions

Two new expressions, at least for me:

Sub-porno: Acting so bad that it makes porn actors/actresses look like they are delivering Oscar worthy performances during dialogue scenes. Said of this movie by my friend Francis.

WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot: A camouflaged way of saying WTF.

Them

I just finished reading Jon Ronson's book, Them. In it he talks with all different kinds of extremists, from Muslim hardliners to the "new" KKK.

One person in the story is David Icke. Icke believes that twelve foot tall, blood drinking, shapeshifting lizards secretly control the world and particularly the WTO. The fact that he seems to gather more supporters against the WTO than those who use "ordinary" arguments to justify their opposition to the WTO is very irritating and alarming for the long time activists.

One "regular" anti-WTO activist, Michael, says:

"He can discredit the whole movement," said Michael. "I can see the WTO saying, 'If you oppose us you're just scared of some lizard conspiracy' and that's the most scary thing to me"

The author goes on to say:

I think that in David Icke, Michael was seeing an omen of the blackest kind. He was seeing the future of thought itself: a time when irrational thought would sweep the land, much as racism had done the previous century when Washington, D.C. was a blaze of white, the white of a million Ku Klux Klansmen marching past a Klan-friendly White House and a Klan-friendly Capitol Hill.

While this is not something that will happen tomorrow, I think it is something to be aware of and to guard against. I guess the point here is that the reasoning and the methods should count as much as the results.