Here are a couple of different news mash-ups where speech is pitch-corrected and set it to music.
It's interesting to me, because it really does a good job of pointing out the musicality of speech (as well as pointing out people whose speech is kind of monotonic).
But, still, I wonder how long the trend will last before people get bored with it.
This one is akin to the T-Mobile Dance, with "over 70" students dancing to a medley of pop tunes.
"Flashmob" is their description, not mine. In my humble opinion, there's far too much planning and choreography involved for this to qualify as a Flashmob.
The audio in the sample is not really safe for work.
This Improv Monologue Project has been going on for a few weeks. The rules are pretty simple: One actor, one prop, one location, one camera, one take, two minutes, no rehearsal, no do-overs.
Naturally, some are better than others, but by and large they're all entertaining. And it looks like it would be fun to do.
Pictured at the right: "Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Peep Street."
This is the Washington Post's third annual contest for dioramas built with Peeps brand candy-type food-like products.The Peeps Show finalists are up and available for viewing at the Post's website. (Sorry, the contest is over. No more voting.)
Also notable among this year's finalists:
* Nightmare at 20,000 Peeps * Peepzilla! * Peeps of Wrath * Peep Wee Herman's Playhouse * Peepselot * iPeep Nano
I just find this fascinating. I reached a point where I just assumed the whole thing was a hoax (albeit a well-executed hoax).
Here's what the film's website says about it: "In Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have taken the magnificent scientific visualisations of the sun and solar winds conducted at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Semiconducted them. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor were artists-in-residence at SSL. Combining their in-house lab culture experience with formidable artistic instincts in sound, animation and programming, they have created a magnetic magnum opus in nuce, a tour de force of a massive invisible force brought down to human scale, and a very most beautiful thing.'
"With Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have tapped into a new and ancient aesthetic of turbulence. We can hear it in the sounds of natural radio-naturally-occurring electromagnetic signals from the earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere-that course through Magnetic Movie, at times animating the animation, a quick nervous response condensed into static. The sound itself is the product of the combined turbulences of the earth's molten core, weather systems and electrical storms, ephemeral ionization in the upper atmosphere, and the solar winds."
I read this to mean that the images are indeed fictional, but not necessarily wholly inaccurate.
Yeah, I remember being in that exact scene as a wee lad of 20.....
Looks like there's less nudity and fewer people painting themselves (and each other) blue. But some things don't seem to go out of style -- hanging from trees, hanging from light poles, screaming to the point of harming one's vocal chords.....
Come to think of it, I recall my favorite jacket being ruined that night by unwanted blue paint.
This time to promote a Belgian version of "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" (a "Pop Idol" / "American Idol" type reality show that chooses an actress for the role of Maria in a "Sound of Music" revival).
Or our own homegrown "It's Oh So Quiet" in Union Square (that preceded these later commercial efforts).
Speaking of 1...2...3:45 6/7/8 (the official name of last June's Union Square dance event), we're now approaching the one-year anniversary of the beginning of rehearsals for that event. So it's not unthinkable that something similar might be in the works.
Now might be a good time to remind everyone: If you want to know how to participate the next time this group does something like this, drop me a note. I'll pass you details if and when they become available.
Neil LaBute, whose work always makes someone angry, has scored a new high.
In his current show, "reasons to be pretty," a character launches into a long tirade against her boyfriend, telling him everything she thinks is wrong with him.
This past Saturday night (April 4), during this monologue, an audience member got up from his seat, "called her a bitch twice, said a few other things that cannot be printed, and stormed out of the theater."
I was checking at Netflix just now to see when Sir Ian McKellen's "King Lear" would be available and if it would be on Blu-ray (April 21, and not in the foreseeable future, respectively).
On the page giving the description, I saw this section at the bottom of the page, "MORE LIKE THIS". It recommendations were "Neverwas," "X-Men 3: The Last Stand," "Eighteen" and "Flushed Away." Now, I know that Sir Ian was in two of these, and his voice is in the other two. But, I mean, come on. Let's get real. "If you liked 'King Lear,' you might like 'Flushed Away'?"
So I went digging to see if it would come up with other tenuous "If You Liked...Then You Might Like" double features. Here's what I found in less than ten minutes of searching:
Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather" -- "Hellboy"[1]
"Baby Mama" -- "The Opposite of Sex"
"The Opposite of Sex" -- "Little Miss Sunshine"
"Evita" -- "Not Without My Daughter"
"Show Business: The Road to Broadway" -- "Dogtown and Z-Boys" (Hey, they're both documentaries....)
"Donnie Darko" -- "Proof" (Yeah, I know. Jake Gyllenhall is in both)
"The Kite Runner" -- "Finding Neverland"
"Broadway: The Golden Age" -- "Ronald Reagan: His Life and Legacy"
And the must-see triple feature:
"Not Without My Daughter" -- "The Passion of Joan of Arc" -- "Beaches"
Hmmm... Maybe Netflix needs a more intelligent cross-referencing scheme....
[1]Okay, as it happens, I really do like both. But I also can say that I like both "Babette's Feast" and "Dawn of the Dead." That doesn't necessarily mean that I like one of them because I like the other one, or just because both movies focus on eating.
Gomez's new album, "A New Tide," came out this week. It's been nearly three years since they released an album. I just received it yesterday, and I will have to listen to it a few times before I'll feel like I can say anything useful about it.
I think the main reasons that most of their stuff appeals to me are: (1) they don't have just one sound -- they have three singers who take turns at the lead; (2) they can write a decent hook; (3) their production tends to be very nice and textured (this often means that live performances are significantly different from their studio recordings); and (4) though each album is not a complete, radical departure from the previous one, each album they release is different enough than the previous one that you can never accuse them of just making the same album over and over again.
You can stream Tuesday night's Jimmy Fallon show when they performed "Airstream Driver" (if you don't feel like watching the whole show, jump forward to about 37:30). In the meantime, here's their groovy video for "Silence."
This is how one German choreographer in 1966 thought people of the future would dance. From a German science fiction television show, "Raumpatrouille Orion," that ran concurrently with "Star Trek."
Bjork has announced that she "has accepted the position of lead vocalist for legendary Led Zeppelin."
Car and Driver announced that President Obama ordered the removal of Dodge and Chevrolet automobiles from NASCAR. [UPDATE: But don't go looking for this article on their site. You won't find it. Even though it was clearly labeled as a joke, apparently the article caused a lot of people to become very upset. Car and Driver has pulled the article down.]
Due to a hostile takeover, Funny or Die has changed its name to "Reba or Die," and has converted to all-Reba-McEntire content. (Click picture to enlarge and read the press release.)
And my personal favorite is the Qualcomm announcement of its innovations in its convergence program:
First-time theatrical producer Charles Hewitt has announced his plans to mount an all-singing, all-dancing adaptation of Harper Lee's novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," with the tentative title, "Boo!"
Hewitt says, "I was supposed to read the book back in high school, but I just watched the movie instead and still got a C on my book report that way. But from what I remember about seeing the movie when I was 16, I always thought that it would make a great musical. It has everything: human drama, and intense . . . human drama and lovable, cuddly characters and funny stuff and drama and, and, and action and mystery and, really, when you get down to it, when all is said and done, just good old human drama. And with the current trends in musical theater, I figured the time was right. The time was right to sell this as a high-concept kind of 'Tom Sawyer meets Spring Awakening' kind of thing. You know?"
First-time composer Marisela Eisenstein is excited about being attached to the project. Eisenstein, 22, says, "This is, like, mad cool. I've never actually written a song before? But my friend Julie has 'Songsmith' installed on her laptop, she says it's, like, really easy to use, and she'll teach me how to use it. She said I could totally borrow it from her."
The book and the lyrics are being written by Christopher St. Clair, whose most recent play, "I Once Killed a Man Just to Watch Him Die," was a lighthearted comic romp based loosely on "Crime and Punishment." The play was reviewed by several critics.
St. Clair says that he has written several songs already, including "He Done It! He Hit Me!", "Reading to Mrs. Dubose," "Rabid Dog Tango" and the show-stopping eleven o' clock number, "Bob Ewell's Lying Up There Under a Tree with a Knife Stuck Up Under His Ribs."
St. Clair spoke about the challenges of adapting the Pulitzer Prize winning novel. "It's an okay book, I guess. But it really needs some zazzing up. So we're expanding Calpurnia's role so that she's secretly a gospel singing star at night, and we're going to make Atticus more of a lovable goof, a kind of Gomer-Pyle-type character. And regarding Boo Radley, let me just give you this little hint: Think 'Shrek meets Mel Brooks.'
"And, while I don't want to give away any of the major plot points, let's just say I always thought it was kind of a downer that Tom Robinson was found guilty. I mean, it's such a blatant miscarriage of justice, and it just, like, totally brought me down, and that's just not what musicals are for, you know? And rape is such an ugly subject, we might just have to tone that down and make it, like, Tom Robinson borrowed the Ewell's lawn mower and forgot to give it back or something a little more family friendly like that. So we're fixing some little things like that."
Found in many references.
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