Category Videos
It Seems Like Years Since It’s Been Clear
I saw this in a couple of different places last week and thought it was worth sharing. It’s George Martin, the legendary record producer who made all of the records of The Beatles, along with Dhani Harrison (the son of George Harrison) and his own son, Giles (who is also a record producer) fiddling around with the original tracks for “Here Comes The Sun” at a studio mixing board and discovering a hidden guitar solo by George Harrison that had been removed from the final mix of the song. It’s not earth-shattering or anything, but like other “lost” elements of some Beatles songs, it is very cool to hear such familiar music with different elements. It’s also amusing to see that George Martin had completely forgotten about it over the years and his delight is evident as they listen:
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Do You Believe In A Secular America?
Via Friendly Atheist, this PSA is one of the seven finalists in a competition sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation called “Ten Point Vision of a Secular America”. Of the seven, I think this one is the best, because it focuses on a very positive idea: that everyone, religious or not, can support the notion that our political and social structures be secular as a way to insure that people of every sort of belief system are given equal rights and treatment under the law, in education, and in the daily life of the nation.
As a runner up, I would say that this one about creeping theocratic rhetoric and behavior, particulalry among American conservatives, is very effective in pointing out just how pervasive those things have become in our political and cultural discourse, and why it’s important to protect and restore secular ideals.
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I Would Gladly Pay You Tuesday
Filmmakers Ben Wu and David Usui have created a series of short films called “This Must Be The Place” looking at the idea of “home” from very different perspectives. One visits a Korean artist who lives in Brooklyn in apartment overflowing with collected objects he treats as cherished art objects. Another is about a back-to-the-land sort of fellow who lives in a handmade log cabin in upstate New York and makes tintype photos. And the one I’m sharing with you here is about an old-fashioned diner-style burger joint in mid-town Manhattan still going strong after almost 75 years in business, where some of the employees have been working for literally decades:
If you’re interested, the restaurant’s own website is here, and I’m pleased to see that it’s very reasonably priced, especially considering the location. There’s too many modest-to-poor joints in New York City that feel justified in charging prices and treating customers like they were in the Rainbow Room and not a coffee shop or burger joint. What’s evident, though, is that the sense of place borders on the eternal, which is a quality that has pervaded New York for a long time but is beginning to die out.
Wu and Usui have also produced other short films for clients ranging from the New York Times to MoMA to Pepsi, which you can view on the website for their production company Lost & Found Films.
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Pink Wash-Out
Proving once again that timing is everything, take a couple of minutes to watch this trailer for a new documentary called “Pink Ribbons, Inc.” that was released in Canadian theaters last Friday, in the very midst of the kerfuffle between the Susan G. Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood.
Because this is a) a documentary and b) sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada, I don’t expect that you’ll see this at your local multiplex any time soon, but perhaps the fortuitous timing will get this booked into some smaller indie movie houses that might have otherwise not bothered. NFBC is also good about putting content online, so it might wind up on their website at some point too.
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I’ll See Your Cephalopod And Raise You One Corvid
A crow goes snow-tubing:
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Won’t You Think Of The Pancakes?
Already 80% of the world’s maple syrup is produced in Quebec and by 2100, global climate change may have driven the range of the sugar maple out of the United States altogether. This video features New Hampshire maple sugar producer Martha Carlson, who is also a Ph.D. student at University of New Hampshire researching the impact of global climate change on sugar maples.
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Hey Paula
Here’s one of my most favorite oldies tunes, “Hey Paula”, from the one-hit-wonder duo “Paul and Paula”. It was Number One for three weeks in early 1963, just six months before I was born, and stayed on the charts for almost four months. Even though I’ve loved this song ever since I first started listening to oldies music in college, this clip is the only time I’ve ever seen Ray Hildebrand and Jill Jackson perform. It’s a simply terrible lip-synch job, but it was fun to see them anyway.
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Somebody Call Jake And Elwood
Chicago Tribune music critic Howard Reich writes about the recent passing of blues guitar legend Hubert Sumlin as just the latest in a string of passings of legendary Chicago bluesmen. The tradition of Chicago blues is dying out along with those old men, Reich says, and there aren’t a lot of younger musicians taking up where they are leaving off.
Being a sheltered white boy from Maine, I didn’t know anything about the blues when I actually LIVED in Chicago, so I can’t even share a story of the time I saw Pinetop Perkins or something. Well, actually, I did *almost* see Pinetop Perkins years later, but not in Chicago; it was in Portland, Maine, as a matter of fact, and he was supposed to play at one of the venues for Portland’s New Years Eve celebration, but he missed the gig because of the weather. So there you go. A few years after that, once we had moved to Massachusetts, I began listening to “Blues After Hours” on WGBH radio on Saturday nights, which always opened with a special tune created just for the show by Pinetop Perkins, so he and I eventually caught up with one another. I spent many Saturday nights playing Civ until the wee hours and listening to the great artists of blues music, not just from Chicago but St. Louis and Kansas City and the Mississippi Delta and everywhere else. That phase ended not long after Charlotte was born, when the host of the radio show, Mai Cramer, passed away. The show lingered on for a few more years with another host. WGBH pulled the plug on it in ’07, but I had moved on anyway. These days I don’t need to listen to the blues, because I got ‘em myself.
Here’s a video clip of Howlin’ Wolf, Hubert Sumlin, and Willie Dixon playing “Smokestack Lightning” back in 1964, just so you know what you’ve been missing:
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Cue The Bollywood Musical Number!
I have had this song in my music collection for several years: Jaan Pehechan Ho. It’s from a 1960s Bollywood movie, but became popular in the West when it was used in the cult-hit movie “Ghost World” about a decade ago, and has turned up again in one of those retro-looking Heineken ads. Recently, some blog I follow, probably Dangerous Minds, turned up the original number from the movie Gumnaam on YouTube. The clip is cool in the way that only 1960s movies could be yet uniquely Indian, and clearly inspired the Heineken ad. Enjoy.