A Brief History of John Baldessari, directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and narrated by Tom Waits.
Luminous vaporware: Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde’s indoor clouds
Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde creates strikingly beautiful, fluffy clouds indoors. These luminous, ephemeral ghosts of vapor float through interior spaces for a few fleeting moments before literally vanishing into “thin” air. Smilde has received a lot of press for these works, but he has an extensive body of very interesting work beyond the “cloud projects,” which you can see on his website, which is linked below, along with a number of articles about the cloud works.
Here is a nice video where Smilde discusses his clouds and you can see them in motion:
For more on Smilde and the cloud projects, see:
- Berndnaut Smilde website
- Daily Mail: Meet the man who can control the weather: Berndnaut Smilde really does have his head in the clouds
- Washington Post: Artist Berndnaut Smilde creates indoor clouds
- Slate: Capturing the Elusive Indoor Cloud
- Yatzer: How To Make Clouds Indoors: Nimbus By Berndnaut Smilde
- Time: Best Inventions of the Year 2012: Indoor Clouds
A “Generic Brand Video” that tells the truth about the worst in branding and advertising
This brilliant parody of a blandly generic corporate brand video began life as a poem by Kendra Eash in McSweeneys, This Is A Generic Brand Video. When the folks at the video stock company Dissolve saw the poem, they knew exactly what to do:
The minute we saw Kendra Eash’s brilliant “This Is a Generic Brand Video” on McSweeney’s, we knew it was our moral imperative to make that generic brand video so. No surprise, we had all the footage. (Dissolve: This Is a Generic Brand Video)
Indeed they did. The video is a sarcastic, satirical parody, but it is dead on in tone and the blank vacuity of its “message.” It perfectly illustrates the kind of empty, employee-break-room-inspirational-poster “positivity” that all too may companies aim for in their advertising, their messaging (think “leading provider of business solutions“) and, ultimately, in the names they choose for their company and products. It is thus a very effective cautionary example of what not to do.
Fast Company posted a nice article about this video (This Generic Brand Video Is The Greatest Thing About The Absolute Worst In Advertising), which also includes four real corporate brand videos from the likes of Acura, Mazda, Suncor and Cisco for comparison. The Suncor video is so “good” — in that it’s so tonally similar to the Dissolve/Eash video that it too seems like a parody — I’m compelled to include it here:
Where does this all lead? Hopefully not to the dark place that is the near future depicted in the great Alfonso Cuarón film Children of Men. Here is a compilation of clips from the movie that show some of the products that get their own “Generic Brand Video” treatments, such as Bliss, a happy pill, and Quietus, the legal suicide pill for when your depression is just too great to bear any longer:
The word quietus means an end to something unpleasant, such as tinnitus or a horrible life in a dystopian future, and is also a euphemism for death. It is the perfect smugly pseudo-comforting name for a suicide pill in a dystopian society, but what’s shocking is that it has shown up in a late-night infomercial as an apparently real “homeopathic medication” — Quietus — to combat tinnitus, or extreme ringing, buzzing or roaring in the ears:
This disturbing video is an unwittingly perfect commentary on the ubiquitous, persistent noise created by most brand messaging in our culture. Perhaps a little Quietus for the ear will help tune out such blandly “inspiring” advertising before the other Quietus becomes a pressing need.
Listen to the best naming project parody ever: Amtrak renaming project, by Harry Shearer
Symmetry and one-point perspective in the films of Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson
TOP: Kubrick // One-Point Perspective from kogonada on Vimeo.
BOTTOM: Wes Anderson // Centered from kogonada on Vimeo.
These are beautiful video compilations that demonstrate quite vividly Stanly Kubrick’s love of symmetry and how the director made use of one-point perspective in his films, and the influence he has had in this regard on the contemporary director Wes Anderson.
Visit kogonada.com to see move very interesting video “essays” on the work of great directors.
See also: The cutaway: The bisected sets of Anderson, Godard, Lewis, Berkeley, Keaton and Parrott
Blackbird (rehearsal outtake), by Paul McCartney
A great video of Paul McCartney rehearsing Blackbird in the studio, c. 1968 Beatles White Album sessions. Love the close-up of the wingtips toe tapping.
Blackbird
By John Lennon & Paul McCartney
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free
Blackbird fly, blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night
Blackbird fly, blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
Word of the Year for 2013: Selfie
Happy Holidays everybody. The Word of the Year for 2013, according to both the Oxford Dictionaries and Geoffrey Nunberg, is selfie. Listen to Nunberg’s commentary on Fresh Air — Narcissistic Or Not, ‘Selfie’ Is Nunberg’s Word Of The Year — which he concludes with:
I give the critics a lot of the credit for making “selfie” a contender for word of the year. When we look back on 2013, we’ll recall this not just as the year when everybody was posting pictures of themselves on social media, but as the year when nobody could stop talking about it.
It seems that anointing a Word of the Year is a competitive sport. Dictionary.com chose privacy as its Word of the Year for 2013, which is pretty much the exact opposite of selfie. Merriam-Webster chose science as its Word of the Year, apparently for some sort of scientific reason. Meanwhile, the Collins Dictionary has tapped geek as the Word of the Year, which seems a few years late, unless they just make geek the Word of the Year every year, in which case I applaud their lazy efficiency. And Germany has their own Word of the Year, #GroKo (yes, the hashtag is part of the “word”), which is short for Grosse Koalition, or Grand Coalition, the new political partnership between Germany’s two largest parties. (I guess you have to be there.) The NSA probably knew they’d choose #GroKo well before the Germans made it official, but it was nice of them to keep mum and not spoil the surprise.
Perhaps 2014 will be the year everyone turns their cameras around and takes pictures of other people — you know, just as an experiment. Maybe it will be the year of the youie, or the themie. In the meantime, all of us here at Zinzin would like to wish all of you the happiest and most joyful of holidays and a wonderful new year.
For a different — and deeper — take on the selfie culture, here’s the late great George Harrison singing and talking about his Beatles song, I Me Mine:
Everyday mysteries: Saul Leiter, a master of lyrical color street photography
Saul Leiter, perhaps the most famous non-famous New York street photographer, has just passed away at age 89. A pioneer who worked mostly in color in an age when street photography was still a predominantly black and white medium, Leiter captured the ineffable details than can only be seen and appreciated if you slow down and pay attention. Notes the obituary in today’s New York Times:
Mr. Leiter was considered a member of the New York School of photographers — the circle that included Weegee and Arbus and Avedon — and yet he was not quite of it. He was largely self-taught, and his work resembles no one else’s: tender, contemplative, quasi-abstract and intensely concerned with color and geometry, it seems as much as anything to be about the essential condition of perceiving the world.
“Seeing is a neglected enterprise,” Mr. Leiter often said.
Where other New York photographers of the period were apt to document the city’s elements discretely — streets, people, buildings — Mr. Leiter captured the almost indefinable spaces where all three intersect, many of them within a two-block radius of the East Village apartment in which he had lived since the early 1950s.
… Unplanned and unstaged, Mr. Leiter’s photographs are slices fleetingly glimpsed by a walker in the city. People are often in soft focus, shown only in part or absent altogether, though their presence is keenly implied. Sensitive to the city’s found geometry, he shot by design around the edges of things: vistas are often seen through rain, snow or misted windows.
“A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person,” Mr. Leiter says in the recently-released feature-length documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter, by the British filmmaker Tomas Leach. Here is the trailer for the film:
The New York Times continues: [Read more…] about Everyday mysteries: Saul Leiter, a master of lyrical color street photography
Virgin America Safety Video #VXsafetydance
Once again, Virgin demonstrates how to do branding. In this case, Virgin America transforms the boring airplane safety routine into a hip and funny song and dance number that actually makes you want to pay attention to the message being conveyed. There’s just enough sex, drugs, rock and roll and pure Freudian allusion to generate the creative friction to make this pop message truly pop.
Skeptical? Ask yourselves how many other safety routines have their own hashtag — #VXsafetydance — generating a whole bunch of social media buzz. Not since Laurie Anderson sang in 1982, “Good evening / This is your Captain / We are about to attempt a crash landing / Please extinguish all cigarettes / Place your tray tables in their upright, locked position,” has airplane safety crashed the culture like this.
Standby.
This is the time.
And this is the record of the time.
Lou Reed – Perfect Day (Live At Montreux 2000)
Here’s to the late great Lou Reed (March 2, 1942 – October 27, 2013), a true American original. Who could ever replace him? Who will give us the next “perfect day”?
Chips, chips: Via Con Me, by Paolo Conte
No matter how dark of a mood might ever overtake you, I defy you to not be happy when you hear this song. It’s wonderful…. Chips, chips!
The accompanying video scenes, though unrelated, fit the mood quite nicely. They were taken from the films, “Top Hat” (1935), “Shall We Dance” (1937) and “Swing Time” (1936), starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Via Con Me
by Paolo Conte
| Via Con Me | Away with me |
|
Via, via, vieni via di qui, It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful chips, chips, Via, via, vieni via con me It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful chips, chips, chips Via, via, vieni via con me, It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful chips, chips, |
Away, away, get away with me It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful chips, chips, Away Away, let’s get away It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful chips, chips, chips Away, away, let’s get away. It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful chips, chips, |
Not even this grey time full of musics and people that you liked…enter and take a warm bath…it rains a cold world outside. All hail Paolo Conte!
A “lyrical flowchart” of Hey Jude by The Beatles
Smart branding from Lucid Software, a company that makes the Lucidchart charting software. (Just don’t tell the Beatles.)
UPDATE: Don’t adjust your sets! Unfortunately, the Beatles did find out, so the audio track has been muted by YouTube on the video above. So you’ll have to supply your own soundtrack.
What do Gertrude Stein and JAY Z have in common? Picasso, baby.
Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923). The artists gets artisted upon. Upon the artist. Visited by she who by her by she who by words visits upon. She who by words. Artisted upon visit upon by words she who by words unpaints his paint.
If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso
If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.
Exactly as as kings.
Feeling full for it.
Exactitude as kings.
So to beseech you as full as for it.
Exactly or as kings.
Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.
Now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all.
Have hold and hear, actively repeat at all.
I judge judge.
As a resemblance to him.
Who comes first. Napoleon the first.
Who comes too coming coming too, who goes there, as they go they share, who shares all, all is as all as as yet or as yet.
Now to date now to date. Now and now and date and the date.
Who came first Napoleon at first. Who came first Napoleon the first. Who came first, Napoleon first.
Presently.
Exactly do they do.
First exactly.
Exactly do they do too.
First exactly.
And first exactly.
Exactly do they do.
And first exactly and exactly.
And do they do.
At first exactly and First exactly and do they do.
The first exactly.
And do they do.
The first exactly.
At first exactly.
First as exactly.
At first as exactly.
Presently.
As presently.
As as presently.
He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is and as he and he and as he is and he and he and and he and he.
Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable.
As presently.
As exactitude.
As trains.
Has trains.
Has trains.
As trains.
As trains.
Presently.
Proportions.
Presently.
As proportions as presently.
Father and farther.
Was the king or room.
Farther and whether.
Was there was there was there what was there was there what was there was there there was there.
Whether and in there.
As even say so.
One.
I land.Two.
I land.
Three.
The land.
Three.
The land.
Three.
The land.
Two.
I land.
Two.
I land.
One.
I land.
Two.
I land.
As a so.
They cannot.
A note.
They cannot.
A float.
They cannot.
They dote.
They cannot.
They as denote.
Miracles play.
Play fairly.
Play fairly well.
A well.
As well.
As or as presently.
Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.
And here is JAY Z,’s “Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film”:
…Eventually the pendulum swings
Don’t forget America this how you made me
Come through with the ‘Ye mask on
Spray everything like SAMO, I won’t scratch the Lambo
What’s it gon take for me to go
For you to see, I’m the modern day Pablo, Picasso baby
“Picasso Baby” is from JAY Z’s new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, and “Modern day Pablo” or not, it has a great cover design:
The sculpture shown on the cover is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which recently texted JAY Z’s source: Alpheus and Arethusa by Battista di Domenico Lorenzi (Italian, ca. 1527/28–1594):
Notes the Met’s page for this sculpture:
In Roman mythology the river god Alpheus pursued the nymph Arethusa until Diana changed her into a fountain. This group was carved to go above a fountain in the villa Il Paradiso at Pian di Ripoli, near Florence, which belonged to Alamanno Bandini, Knight of Malta.
Who knows? Maybe this is JAY Z and his muse, Beyoncé, many many lifetimes ago. Here is the full, nearly life-size sculpture:
