One of the interesting things I have found on youtube is the music videos that fans make for their favourite musicians. For example, Sufjan Stevens is a popular artist nowdays, but his earlier works came out with no music videos for them. In this case, fans of the musician have put time and effort into making their own music video versions. And these are surprising well done. Have a look and judge for yourself.

The Red One is a recent digital camera produced by the Red Digital Camera Company. The camera shots at greater than HD and at up to 120 frames per second, which allows the production of great slow-mo video.

As an example, here is a clip shot on the Red One.

skate – shot on red #1347 – 120 fps from Opus Magnum Production on Vimeo.

The music is ‘It’s Alright’ by Bang Gang and the site appears to be the Trocadéro in Paris.

JG Ballard has just passed away. Described by the New York Times suchly: Ballard would eventually be deemed worthy of his own adjective, “Ballardian,” defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”

It is always difficult to get a sense of an author from a short passage, but this is from a short story, Voices of Time:

The dome was in darkness, all the windows shuttered, but the generator still hummed in the X-ray theatre. Kaldren stepped through the entrance and switched on the lights. In the theatre he touched the grilles of the generator, felt the warm cylinder of the beryllium end-window. The circular target table was revolving slowly, set at 1 r.p.m., a steel restraining chair shackled to it hastily. Grouped in a semi-cicle a few feet away were most of the tanks and cages, piled on top of each other haphazardly. In one of them was the enormous squid-like plant had almost managed to climb from it vivarium. Its long translucent tendrils clung to the end of the tank, but it body had burst into a jellified pool of globular mucilage. In another an enormous spider had trapped itself in its own web, hung helplessly in the centre of a huge three dimensional maze of phosphorescing thread, twitching spasmodically.

All the experimental plants and animals had died. The chimp lay on its back among the remains of the hutch, the helmet forward over its eyes. Kaldren watched it for a moment, then sat down on the desk and picked up the phone.

While he dialed the number he noticed a film reel lying on the blotter. For a moment, he stared at the label, then slid the reel into his pocket beside the tape.

After he had spoken to the police he turned down the lights and went out to the car, drove off slowly down the drive.

When he reached the summer house the early sunlight was breaking across the ribbon-like balconies and terraces. He took the lift to the penthouse, made his way through into the museum. One by one he opened the shutters and let the sunlight play over the exhibits. Then he pulled the a chair over to a side window, sat and stared up at the light pouring through into the room.

Two or three hours later he heard Coma outside, calling up to him. After half an hour she went away, but a little later a second voice appeared and shouted up at Kaldren. He left his chair and closed all the shutters overlooking the front courtyard, and eventually he was left undisturbed.

Kaldren returned to his seat and lay back quietly, his eyes gazing across the line of exhibits. Half asleep, periodically he leaned up and adjusted the flow of light through the shutter, thinking to himself, as he would do in the coming months of Powers and his strange mandala, and of the seven and their journey to the white gardens of the moon, and the blue people who had come from Orion and spoken in poetry to them of the ancient beautiful worlds beneath golden suns in the island of galaxies, vanished for ever now in the myriad deaths of the cosmos.

JG Ballard, The Voices of Time, 1960.

He may not be long as the Doctor, but at least he has a sense of humour.

The worst thing has happened, David Foster Wallace killed himself today, aged 46.

Report from the New York Times.

Foster Wallace was a unique and amazing storyteller. His novel, Infinite Jest, is quite rightly regarded as a masterpiece and his short stories often beautiful.

His writing style was unlike anything else, a combination of incredible storytelling with endless but powerful detail and widely meandering asides. But getting to the heart of the matter nonetheless.

For an example, I give you this quote from a commencement speech he wrote in 2005.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

If you remember the statue “Crouching Boy” that was the Australia entry in the 2001 Venice Biennale, you might like this look at this site covering other works of his.

There is a trailer out for a new documentary out about the renowned composer Philip Glass: Glass a Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts.

Philip Glass has a long career as a composer, and very distinctive style of work, aspects of which are appropriate for film. He has actually done a lot of film scores, including the Truman Show, Kundun, Notes on a Scandal, The Illusionist and Koyaanisqatsi. Two I really enjoy are Mishima and The Hours.

His non-film work is better though, try looking at Glassworks (piano) and Glassworks (full orchestra) and Train/spaceship.

Although I think the Kronos Quartet do a beautiful rendering of his work. For example here is Company (with some interesting, but unrelated animation).

I have occasionally bought and read a copy of Vanity Fair, it sometimes has interesting articles, mixed in with Hollywood gossip and a strange fascination with celebrity and people who holiday in the Hamptons. I could never really figure out what it was all about, but I recently came across this quote, which I think hits it:

Vanity Fair: the magazine about celebrities who wish they were intellectuals, and intellectuals who wish they were celebrities.

Update: I found where i saw the above quote on Crooked Timber.

The following ad for VWs in Britain is wonderful:

It first caught my eye because is uses the music from the soundtrack to the George Clooney version of Solaris (as distint from the Soviet Tarkovsky version Solyaris). Cliff Martinez’s music (listen to the first track and the last) is beautiful and moving, particularly appropriate for an ad about night driving. While I first ignored it, the reading by Richard Burton of Dylan Thomas is also amazing:

“It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed, to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dew fall, star fall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.”