Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.
YouTube - Video explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop
Topic: Arts
7:04 am EST, Feb 15, 2007
This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music -- a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.
Bumping Cypherghost's link through to BoingBoing, but this burning Elmo video is one part of a three part series that starts with this video. Watching the chared, burning robot flailing its metal limbs against the ground and laughing manically evokes some of the moredisturbing scenes from the Animatrix. The future is machines that don't break down, they die.
This Canadian television show is more funny then anything currently airing in the states. It follows a group of guys who live in a trailer park community as they go about doing crimes in the style of a fake reality show.
It is best to consume "Greendale", Neil Young's newest work, by treating it as a hybrid between a printed work and a book-on-tape -- to read it as one reads a novel.
Mr. Young really has done something new, rendering into this combination of print and audio a novel that is surprisingly sophisticated and satisfyingly complete.
... the fusion of news and entertainment media has completely eaten up everything we used to think of as concrete reality.
With the multidimensional twists that bind his music to his narrative, he's stitched the novel into a whole new set of clothes.
This is listed for only $14.99 on Amazon.
Neil Young is cool. I must pick up a copy of this.
William Gibson talks about how his new present-day novel, "Pattern Recognition," processes the apocalyptic mind-set of a post-9/11 world.
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There is no connection between Cayce and Case; no meaningfulness. Gibson explains that as part of his novelist craft, he goes through a complicated artistic ritual in order to summon his characters out of the ether. In this ritual, coming up with the right name is the crucial first step. And the process by which he came up with Cayce, he declares, had nothing to do with Case. "Cayce" was its own "found object" -- much as the name Case, from "Neuromancer," was also a found object, inspired originally by Case pocketknives.
