video Archives

August 17, 2022 By Zinzin

Frisco: a name origin story that’ll blow your stack

When Zinzin gets hold of a name that intrigues us, we go all in. We dig into its past, present, and ponder its future.

Here’s a name that got our wheels spinning: “Frisco.” At first, we only thought it was a nickname that tourists sometimes use for our fair city of San Francisco, apparently cringe-worthy to the ears of all “real” San Franciscans. However, when Zinzin learned about it’s 165-year-old storied and controversial origin, let’s just say the namer-train left the station.

May 11, 2018 By Jay Jurisich

Get outside of yourself

From Yogi Berra to Confucius, history is ripe with wisdom and advice on our quest for knowledge. One of Zinzin’s favorite wise humans is author and motivational speaker, Simon Sinek. Specifically, he speaks about the quest for knowledge in our chosen disciplines. Where do we find it?

As it turns out, the answer doesn’t lie within. It actually lies with-out — outside of the familiarity of your home, office walls, industry publications and conferences.

We think Sinek nails it when he says, “There are things that you can learn outside of your discipline that can significantly contribute to the problems you’re solving at work. You only know what you know. You don’t know what you don’t know.”

March 26, 2014 By Jay Jurisich

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:

November 28, 2013 By Jay Jurisich

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:

October 10, 2013 By Jay Jurisich

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.

August 5, 2013 By Jay Jurisich

What do Gertrude Stein and Jay-Z have in common? Picasso, baby.

If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso

Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923). The artist gets artisted upon. Upon the artist. Visited by she who by her by she who so by words visits upon. She who by words. Artisted upon visit upon by words she who by words unpaints his paint.

June 3, 2013 By Jay Jurisich

Stephen Fry on language, with kinetic typography

Attention all language purists! Stephen Fry is “an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director, activist, and board member of Norwich City Football Club” (Wikipedia).

In this video, Fry’s rant about language has been typographically animated by Matt Rogers. Fry and Rogers have created a beautiful and funny visual and verbal feast about the joy of playing with language.

Language is, after all, just a game that shouldn’t be taken so seriously. Language is messy, and playing with language is fun. Let’s play!

March 8, 2013 By Jay Jurisich

Get your yé-yé’s out: France Gall sings “Laisse tomber les filles”

France Gall has one of the best stage names ever. Often dismissed as a mid-1960s “baby pop” singing “doll” of the immortal and twisted Serge Gainsbourg, she was born Isabelle Geneviève Marie Anne Gall on 9 October 1947 in Paris, France, and managed to create (or was given) a galling Gallic name that James Joyce would have been proud to have coined. Gall was (is?) a popular French “yé-yé” singer.

I love France Gall’s song, “Laisse tomber les filles” (“Stop messing around with the girls”), written by Gainsbourg, and the pre-music-video video of the song below, from 1964 (age 17!), is wonderful, like a time capsule from a vanished world. Possibly the first example of really great terrible lip-synching.

February 11, 2013 By Jay Jurisich

Cristo Redentor by Donald Byrd, 1964

Jazz great Donald Byrd died last week at the age of 80. The the video below is his amazing jazz hymn, “Cristo Redentor,” which appeared on the classic 1964 album A New Perspective.

About the project, Byrd said: “I mean this album seriously. Because of my own background, I’ve always wanted to write an entire album of spiritual-like pieces. The most accurate way I can describe what we were all trying to do is that this is a modern hymnal. In an earlier period, the New Orleans jazzmen would often play religious music for exactly what it was – but with their own jazz textures and techniques added. Now, as modern jazzmen, we’re also approaching this tradition with respect and great pleasure.”

August 29, 2012 By Jay Jurisich

Regina Spektor: The Prayer of François Villon (Molitva)

There was a great Terry Gross interview with Regina Spektor on Fresh Air recently (On Growing Up A ‘Soviet Kid’). During the broadcast, Terry played Spektor’s recording of the song, “The Prayer of François Villon (Molitva),” by the Russian poet and singer-songwriter Bulat Okudzhava. The song appears on the Deluxe Edition of Spektor’s new album, What We Saw From The Cheap Seats.

June 7, 2012 By Jay Jurisich

Neil Young’s Americana: God Save The Queen / My Country Tis of Thee

The folk song collective unsconscious

Neil Young’s album, Americana features Neil Young and Crazy Horse cover versions of 11 classic Americana folk songs that many of us grew up singing: Oh Susannah, Clementine, Tom Dula, Gallows Pole, Get A Job, Travel On, High Flyin’ Bird, Jesus’ Chariot, This Land Is Your Land, Wayfarin’ Stranger, and God Save The Queen. Or, I should say, we grew up singing the sanitized versions of many of these songs, which are considerably richer and darker in their original lyrics, as Young sings them.

You might wonder why an album of Americana includes “God Save The Queen,” the national anthem of the country whose yoke the United States threw off over 200 years ago. Well, for one thing, “Americana” as an idea or regional identifier includes all of North America, not just the U.S., and as a Canadian Young grew up singing “God Save the Queen” every day in school. In the U.S., of course, our national anthem is “The Star Spangled Banner,” but prior to 1931 the national anthem of the United States was “My Country Tis of Thee,” sung to the tune of, you guessed it, “God Save The Queen.”

May 5, 2012 By Jay Jurisich

Neko Case sings Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me”

Neko Case sings Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me” on Austin City Limits. This is absolutely incredible, one of my favorite performances and songs ever. Seemingly simple, but incredibly powerful.

I’ve been a big fan of Neko Case for years, and she’s a fantastic songwriter. But something about this song, maybe the combination of the restrained explosion of Case’s voice with the great Harry Nilsson’s words, just slays me. Incredible. I could–and have–listen to it over and over and over.

Don’t Forget Me

In the winter time, keep your feet warm
But keep your clothes on and don’t forget me
Keep your memories
But keep your powder dry, too

In the summer, by the poolside
While the fireflies are all around you
I’ll miss you when I’m lonely
I’ll miss the alimony, too

Don’t forget me, don’t forget me
Make it easy on me just for a little while
You know I think about you
Let me know you think about me, too

And when we’re older and full of cancer
It doesn’t matter now, come on get happy
‘Cause nothing lasts forever
But I will always love you

Don’t forget me, please don’t forget me
Make it easy on me just for a little while
You know I think about you
Let me know you think about me, too

Harry Nilsson’s original version of Don’t Forget Me is pretty great, of course, but Neko Case manages to top the great master himself, which is no small feat.

April 12, 2012 By Martin McMurray

Verisimilitude: Furniture Guy vs. Mattress Man

The Furniture Guy

Just who is Vinnie “T” Testeroni, the would-be daredevil spokesperson for “The Furniture Guy”? And why doesn’t “The Furniture Guy” appear in his own commercial? Whoever Vinnie “T” is, director Paul Thomas Anderson went to great lengths to recreate his character in the 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love. In fact, the main antagonist in the film, Dean “The Mattress Man” Trumbell, played here by Philip Seymour Hoffman, was based on the above commercial blooper for “The Furniture Guy.”

March 21, 2012 By Jay Jurisich

Song of the Kindertransport

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, which won the 2000 Academy Award for best documentary feature, is an amazing film. It tells the story of how roughly 10,000 Jewish children were able to leave Central Europe for safety in England in the months before World War II began, in what came to be known as the kindertransport.

The scene in the video below is especially beautiful and haunting. It depicts the moment when the first children are leaving by train for a strange land full of strangers who spoke a language they did not speak, with a song, Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär, sung by a child. Most of these child exiles, spared from the concentration camps, would never see their parents, family and friends again, who were not so lucky.

While recently watching the DVD, I was moved to replay this scene several times, and snapped photos of the paused screens showing the translated text of the song in subtitles over background footage of the train taking the children away. Composited together, they form a sad poem of this heartbreaking moment that defined the lives of these children.

Here is the text of the words of the song Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär from the translated subtitles, with repetitions derived from lines of the song that repeat across several different scenes, as depicted in the composite above:

If I am far from you
in my sleep
I am with you.

When I awake
When I awake
When I awake
When I awake
I am alone.

There’s not an hour in the night
when my heart is not awake
and thinking of you.

That you
thousands of times
thousands of times
gave me your heart.

March 17, 2012 By Jay Jurisich

James Joyce Reading Finnegans Wake

Every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Here is a 1929 recording of James Joyce reading the Anna Livia Plurabelle episode of Finnegans Wake, where he speaks in the brogue of an Irish washerwoman. Below is the full text of this episode. Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. The last paragraph is one of my favorite passages in the whole book, and hauntingly beautiful in Joyce’s reading. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

video

If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso

The folk song collective unsconscious

Don’t Forget Me

The Furniture Guy

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