This is pretty amazing.
National Geographic photographer faces giant leopard seal, who then proceeds to attempt to teach him to how to hunt, and later on simply feeding him, out of sheer pity for his poor predatory skills. Seen at Boing Boing.
Although there is a difference between functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), this new song by Charlotte Gainsbourg resonates (heh!) quite well with me, since I’ve been spending so much time fMRI scan room lately. The jarring electrical noises in the song sound uncannily like our scanner here at the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center. In addition, I think it’s quite an amazing song, in a quiet eerie way. Apparently Gainsbourg took inspiration from having to spend quite a lot of time in an MRI machine, as described in this pitchfork review of the song, where you can also listen to the song.
Yesterday I had a chance to watch the Shining on a big screen and I noticed a couple of interesting things about it. First of all, it had been a few years since I first saw it, and I have watched a lot of horror between then and now, but it struck me how disturbing the movie was. It cannot compete with the gore of recent French horror (like Martyrs, for example, highly recommended!) or with the sheer physical terror of Japanese horror, but when it comes to creating an atmosphere of something profoundly wrong going on, few comes even close to this movie. The only movie I can really compare it to, is Don’t Look Now, and the two movies share quite a few features, like a prominent use of red and childlike characters with psychic abilities. But their main common denominator is the sense that both films manage to give the viewer an almost gut-level impression of the paranormal events, without showing too much. Kubrick occasionally shows a little too much (I could do without the scene in Room 237), so ultimately Don’t Look Now is a slightly better movie, but that doesn’t make the Shining bad. In fact, when you take into account the beautiful set decorations and arguably the best horror score ever, it should be counted among the finest horror movies. And I didn’t even mention Jack Nicholson!
I made the above image on befunky (hit “Get Started Now”, and then “Cartoonizer”) , one of no-doubt countless sites that give you the opportunity to create a cartoon based on a photo. I think it worked surprisingly well, looks like something from Waking Life. It’s nice to see how the program actually included details such as the cleft in my chin, and my somewhat bushy eyebrows in the cartoon. Experiments with other images have not yielded quite as compelling results, but I still think that befunky is a nice little toy. It has other effects as well, that I have not yet tried.
I saw Animal Collective play for a sold-out House Blues in Boston a few days ago. It has been suggested that Merriweather Post Pavillon, their latest release, can be considered their “pop” album, and this was certainly confirmed by the venue and the crowd. But when they started playing, I was struck by the disconnect between the pure weirdness coming out of the speakers, the venue and the ecstatic crowd. The played Who Could Win a Rabbit, for example, off their 2004 album Sung Tongs, and it would be a stretch to consider that specific song (traditional) pop music (listen below). But the crowd didn’t care – they just went nuts for the weirdness. And so did I – great show!
Another suggestion that weird might be coming back, comes from one of my favorite purveyors of weird, David Lynch, who is apparently lending visuals and vocals to a project called Dark Night of the Soul with Danger Mouse and a number of other collaborators, including Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, Nina Persson of the Cardigans and Iggy Pop. Considering the fact that the project has now run into legal problems, you might want to hurry up and listen to it here. And for those of you who doubt that Mr. Lynch can sing, here is the song Ghost of Love from the Inland Empire soundtrack, vocals and lyrics by David Lynch.
… was great! I presented on the second day of the conference, and it was probably the most gratifying thing I have done in academia so far. It was my first time presenting anything at an academic conference, but after the first couple of people, my nervousness disappeared. Everyone was extremely nice, and I got so many great suggestions and comments, that I could barely wait to get home and try some of them out. The rest of the conference was equally excellent – like a vacation that included science – and on the last day I felt like my head was going to explode from all the new stuff I had learned, and the many, many conversations I had. Still, I cannot wait until next year. Below, you can see the poster I presented, and I should also mention that some of the stuff has been published in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, you can find it here.
Good advice. And also a line spoken by Willem Dafoe in the second trailer for Antichrist. This is of course the new Lars von Trier movie, which will be shown at the Cannes film festival in less than two weeks. Now, I am a big Lars von Trier-fan: Not only is he my favourite Danish director (sorry guys, but the competition is not that steep), he is also in the top ten overall. Bearing that in mind this movie looks to exceed even my extremely high expectations. Willem Dafoe AND Charlotte Gainborough?! A creepy horror movie out in the woods?! It’s called Antichrist?! What is this, my birthday? Anyways, here’s the second trailer, and to celebrate I put a suitably satanic track in the bottom, The Jezebel Spirit by David Byrne & Brian Eno. Enjoy.
23-year old Bob Dylan plays Chimes of Freedom at the Newport Folk Festival, I think. This is one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs, and this is probably the best version of the song I have ever heard.
Time and time again, psychologists and philosophers alike ponder the ancient question: What is Happiness? To which I must answer, of course: An awesome movie from 1998 by Todd Solondz ! A few days ago I put the poster for the movie (shown above) in a frame I found in the trashcan of a house down the street, and it really looks nice. The poster is done by graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, whom I’ve mentioned before on this blog. Its orange and purple colors, and the beautiful drawings really makes me happy, which is of course profoundly ironic, since the movie is about people who are most certainly not happy. The movie is highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart.
So I finally gave it a shot, and updated Wordpress (the thingy that I run my blog on). It was really inspired by the fact that I needed some kind of spam-fighting plugin added to the blog. I have been getting a butt load of spam lately, for some reason – maybe it is the fact that I mentioned Jennifer Aniston in a post once (oops, I did it again!). Adding this plugin meant fiddling more with the blog than I’ve ever done before, and the success of it inspired me to also update to the next version of Wordpress.
So far I have not noticed any changes for you guys, the readers, but it might benefit you in other ways, because my success has inspired me to install other plugins. The first one allows subscribers to my blog, so that you get an email every time I post something new. You can subscribe under “Pages” or “Meta” at the right side of your screen. I have previously done something similar manually, in fact I have already subscribed all my previous subscribers, which is probably why you are reading this. Anyway, if you want to unsubscribe, it is in the same place as subscribing. In the future I will probably add more fun plugins, so let me know in the comments if there is anything you want, okay? And yes, yes this should hopefully also lead to more activity on the blog in general.
This post should not only be about boring blog-stuff, so let me mention a few records that I think should work fine as a soundtrack to the warmer days ahead of us: