Tag Archives: music

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Quirky music videos

I like quirky, odd music videos, alongside the well-made, polished commercial stuff. My latest favorites from YouTube are enclosed below.

The Kooks have some pretty good music. Here they cover Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”:

This Japanese group put together a stop-motion animation video set to something that could be called music:

Luray Caverns, in Virginia, has a man-made wonder: the Great Stalacpipe Organ. It’s made of little hammers that strike stalactites of various dimensions, producing musical sounds. I heard it in person, and it sounds pretty eerie in that big, dark cave.

Don’t know if these fellows are real policemen, but the song and video are pretty funny. Perhaps it’s because I can’t understand a single word:

Have you ever heard Bolero played on a single instrument? No? Then have a peek at this:

A talented flute player by the name of Greg Patillo put together some unique interpretations of popular theme songs:

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Lists

Juggler plays piano with balls

No, this has nothing to do with those balls. Get your mind out of the vernacular. This has to do with an amazing performer that plays the piano with four balls that he juggles at the same time. I’m not sure if it’s real or not, but if it is, he’s got an amazing talent!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1094643087935036471

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Reviews

Two Tickets to Broadway (1951)

Two Tickets to Broadway (1951)The story of this movie is simple, and normally bankable: small town girl makes good in big city. This is a story with plenty of room for nice little twists and turns that make a movie worthwhile. However bankable the story is, the movie feels fake all the way through. Granted it’s a musical, and they’re always a little fake, but still, it’s terrible, and I can point exactly to what’s ruining it: the screenplay. Who wrote this pickle of a screenplay, anyway? Yikes! It’s just not grounded, it goes all over the place and tries to do too much. They should have used it for toilet paper instead of filming it.

It’s a shame, too, because the actors were good, and the singing was good, even great at times. Bugsby Berkeley’s choreography was surprisingly toned down, and it sort of fit in with the atmosphere of the movie. I say sort of, because Bugsby’s stuff never really fits in, it always stands out. When he steps into a movie, it changes. Thank goodness there were none of his usually outlandish dance numbers here, although I have to say the American-Indian dance was too weird. It was just insulting, and I bet it wouldn’t get done nowadays, in our more relaxed culture. What were those people thinking when they left that number in?

Things to watch for if you want to kill some time watching this movie: Janet Leigh is great all the way through, Tony Martin sings beautifully, Ann Miller is her usual self, dancing all over the place and baring her long legs as usual, and the reparte between Charles Dale and Joe Smith, as Leo and Harry, the owners of the deli, is just plain funny.

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Lists

Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment

The silly folks at EepyBird have put together a wonderful video (synchronized to music, nonetheless) illustrating the explosive combination of Diet Coke and Mentos, and imitating the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas. Beautiful, just beautiful!

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Thoughts

In praise of CD mixes

Ligia and I went on a road trip this past Memorial Day weekend, and I put together CD mixes for the trip instead of taking an iPod along. The result was surprisingly good. In the past, I’d simply take the iPod along, plug it in, set it on Shuffle, and go, but the sheer volume of music made it hard for me to enjoy it much. I like to get a sense of closure to my trips, and going through one or two or three CD’s does it for me. I know each one will take about an hour or so, depending on how many songs I burned on it. With an iPod, I arrive at my destination, and I still have another few hundred hours of music before I’ve gotten to the end of my collection. It’s not as fulfilling.

I also like the thought and effort that goes into making a mix CD. I have to sit there and manually select each song, place it in a playlist, then burn it to a CD. When I pull out that warm CD from the computer, I feel like I created something. It gives me a little sense of achievement, however minuscule it may be. I also enjoy the CD more, knowing I wanted each song to be there, and I chose it for that particular trip. I don’t get that with my iPod, not nearly as much. Instead, I have to skip through many songs I don’t feel like listening to at a particular time, and that’s annoying.

Where I think the iPod proves its usefulness is with repeated use. CDs will tend to skip after being played several times in the car, whereas an iPod won’t. Yes, I’m aware of the ability of copying playlists to the iPod and playing them, but somehow the decidedly low-tech CD gives me a little more satisfaction. Just like inserting a coin in a jukebox, sliding a CD into my car’s CD player lets me know I’ll get a tangible amount of entertainment I’ll want to listen to.

Finally, it’s still troublesome to use an iPod in the car. There still aren’t simple, easy to use solutions out there. There’s either a radio transmitter, which gives you radio-quality sound, with static and interference in densely populated areas, or the various incantations of data links, each of which works in its own, limited ways. Some allow you access to the entire library, but degrade the sound quality somewhat, and you can’t control the volume and the tracks from the car’s stereo, while some will allow you to do just that while preserving sound quality, but limiting access to the entire iPod library. With the latter, you’re stuck making and playing custom playlists, while making sure each can’t exceed 99 songs, etc. For the money, data links are still pretty annoying, and that’s why I say CD mixes still rule.

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