Hip-Hop Pop-Up

Filed Under Movies and Music, Websites | 2007-04-11, 12:46

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with pop culture and advertising for quite some time. While I find quite a bit of it insulting and manipulative, I also find it incredibly intriguing at the same time. Hip-Hop Pop-Up is one of those sites that extracts and exposes the subtle advertising in mainstream hip-hop today. With a culture built around brand names, what’s hot now, and flashy possessions, it’s not too surprising to see how often inadvertant commercials are dropped in the lyrics. However most of us are so used to it that it doesn’t stand out. Hip-Hop Pop-Up will play a mainstream hip-hop song and launch pop-ups for each of the products/brand names that are mentioned in the lyrics. The current song on there is Kanye West’s “All Falls Down” which clocks in with 11 product placements and 10 companies, generating 12 pop-ups. You’ll want to turn off your pop-up blocker to get the full effect. Yes, kind of annoying, but so is the fact that we’re advertised to almost every second of our lives.

via ni9e blog

Pearls Before Breakfast

Filed Under Movies and Music | 2007-04-10, 21:31

Monday, April 9, 2007 1 p.m. ET
Post Magazine: Too Busy to Stop and Hear the Music
Can one of the nation’s greatest musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Gene Weingarten set out to discover if violinist Josh Bell — and his Stradivarius — could stop busy commuters in their tracks.

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

1 Comment

The Fountain – Aronofsky’s latest almost here

Filed Under Movies and Music | 2006-11-01, 11:33

The Fountain
I love films by Darren Aronofsky. Alright, well maybe love isn’t the right word for both films I’ve seen. Pi is one of my favorite films, and I can watch it over and over. Like the companion that you always enjoy conversing with and spending time with. Requiem for a Dream is an incredibly powerful movie that I have only watched once for fear that I would not be able to make it all the way through again. It is an incredibly powerful creation that depresses you, yet makes you feel happy to be alive no matter what trivial problems you have. It’s more like that one night stand that was so incredible, yet so wrong at the same time.
I’m so happy to hear that he’s coming out with a new movie and that he is again pushing some boundaries and approaching it without the typical Hollywood “let’s make millions with explosions and sexy women” attitude.
So what makes this deserving of a post on a blog dedicated to ‘geek’? Ironically it’s the fact the he has chosen not to use CGI to portray scenes from space. Using microphotography, Aronofsky has recreated space it what hopes to be a timeless manner. While the CGI of the past few years quickly gets dated, this approach seems to point back to the methods used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a timeless film without an enourmous special effects budget.

The technique is described in an article in Wired:

Then Aronofsky’s team discovered the work of Peter Parks, a marine biologist and photographer who lives in a 400-year-old cowshed west of London. Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge. The secret of Parks’ technique is an odd law of fluid dynamics: The less fluid you have, the more it behaves like a solid. The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. “When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you’re looking at infinity,” he says. “That’s because the same forces at work in the water – gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space.

I am looking forward to this movie so much, and I hope it does live up to its expectations. It has Aronofsky behind it, a story about eternal life, space, time travel, Clint Mansell doing the score, Hugh Jackman is starring in the lead role, and people are already comparing it to 2001 and films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

For more information on the film:
Trailers
Official movie site
IMDB page