Smashing Telly brings us yet another landmark series which I’ve heard mentioned many times, but had not had a chance to see until now - John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. The series led to book of the same name, which is still available, but to the best of my knowledge the series has not.
I know next to nothing about Paul Anka, other than the fact that he and I share the same hometown of Ottawa, so this may seem a little out of left-field. This Canadian National Film Board film following him as a 19-year old is really great. It’s quite well made and an interesting look into a different era.
See also Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.
It’s seriously worth the time, though I hope the NFB gets a copy up that can be viewed all in one chunk in high quality.
Thanks to my friend Lily for the tip.
I’m a little late to this party, but the similarities here are pretty uncanny. I had also forgotten what a great job Burgess Meredith did as the Penguin.
A frightening take on the economy. It’s hard to not be pessimistic right now, but it seems we should eschew a growth-based economy for something more resilient. My eyes are on the Resilience community (an offshoot of biological studies). I haven’t seen much from them in the wake of the current crisis.
Here’s a cute little video of 100 aged 1 to 100 banging a drum, in order of age.
Here is my entry for the just-completed M60, the Montréal 60-Second Film Festival. The festival, in its inaugural year, was a big hit, with tons of great films and far too many people being turned-away at the door.
My entry is really more of a tech demo than a film. It was done entirely with a flatbed scanner, an idea that quickly lost its luster as my cheap $100 scanner slowly imploded under the strain of about 400 scans in the space of a few days, getting ever slower and showing ever more lines and other artifacts of wear.
Shepard Fairy Style Dion Poster
Jack Dylan has his own version of the famous poster. I don’t agree with this sentiment, but it seems a whole lot of people aren’t Dion fans.
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Creator of The Wire, David Simon, gives a lengthy lecture on some of his beliefs that influenced the best show on television in a long time.
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A peek into how the movie industry has changed via its credits.
Living in a former Olympic City with an unused main stadium we only managed to pay off two years ago (the Montreal Olympics were in ‘76) I’m not at all surprised to see this video showing the unused state of the venues from the Athens Olympics. There’s something about the Olympics that seems to make architects think they can just drop their stadiums and athletic facilities in the middle of a field of concrete with no regard for how they’ll be used for the decades after the games. There’s little wonder that they’re often abandoned and somewhat depressing as soon as all the crowds leave.
The planning committees should have retrofits in mind when they build the facilities to keep them functional when they’re done with - including covering up some of that ugly and barren concrete with something practical.
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A classic clip from Candid Camera which shows just how easy it is to get people to bend to group behavior.
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HP Packages New Laptops in Messenger Bags
A simple solution to reducing packaging, so long as those messenger bags are at least somewhat decent in quality.
Yesterday, Montreal’s port had an open house. There were tours by train, bus and boat which carried visitors into the heart of the city’s port operations. It was great to see the inner workings of a system which is easy to take for granted. We saw ocean-going freighters being unloaded, and the much smaller lake-going ships readying themselves to take cargo to the great-lake cities of Toronto, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Thunder Bay.
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A relatively simple little fountain that ingeniously seems to bend time.
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A powers of 10 style video that shows the structures of concrete in great detail, down to a molecular level. Like the original poster, I would love to see this done for other materials.
