Your Daily Awesome

Charlie Rose is the best interviewer on television right now, hands down, yet on the very rare occasion that I run across his program, he inevitably has a guest whom I have zero interest in. But his new website has over 4,000 hours or archived, searchable interviews on video. It’s almost too dizzying of an array to choose from, so here are a few to start with: Jonathan Safran Foer, Oliver Sacks, Bjork, Jay-Z, John Szarkowski, Allen Ginsberg, bell hooks, Andrew Weil, Annie Proulx, David Foster Wallace, and Willie Nelson.

Here are Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed together in the studio:

via Metafilter

An oldie but goodie:
(Don’t watch unless you can handle the goddamn language!)

Several months ago, I posted a link to Oliver Laric’s “50 50,” a video comprised of 50 people rapping 50 Cent songs on YouTube. Laric’s most popular piece is “787 Cliparts,” which is pretty impressive. But today I was poking around on his site and ran across my new favorites: the Stevie Wonder Duets, which are so smart and charming at the same time, while taking the mash-up concept to new levels. Go ahead and spend some time at his site; you’re bound to discover something you love. The above video is “Aircondition.”

If you’re jonesing for some Use Your Illusion-era GnR today, here’s a BBC documentary about the band and the photographer who took some of their most famous images.

via Metafilter

via WFMU

Fans of the Wholphin DVD series are already familiar with Derek & Simon: The Show, the lo-fi sitcom produced by the hilarious Bod Odenkirk. Here’s a page with a ton of D&S shorts, including one with a sweet cameo by Michael Cera. This one’s called “Cock-Eyed.”

“There are a lot of great werewolf stories in here…”

Call me a product of the ’90s, but the sort of inspiration that I got from both of these creative masterpieces is the exact reason that I started this blog.

The same way the previous half-generation felt that Blue Velvet redefined cinematic and aesthetic experience by bringing an uncanny psychological menace to suburbia; so too did Lost Highway have a similar impact on me: it helped me to realize that art posed questions rather than provide answers. It posed metaphysical queries; had Patricia Arquette nude; introduced be to Robert Loggia; provided one of my favorite soundtracks of all time; and managed to chill the piss out of me by entering through my brain and gut simultaneously.

Similarly, the next year when David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was published, it was as if the rules of creative nonfiction had been re-written. DFW was blisteringly smart and funny at the same time, and his essay, David Lynch Keeps His Head, was like having the coolest guy you knew break down your favorite movie with crazy insight as well as on-the-set reportage.

2. WHAT DAVID LYNCH IS REALLY LIKE

I HAVE NO IDEA. I rarely got closer than five feet away from him and never talked to him. You should probably know this up front. One of the minor reasons Asymmetrical Productions let me onto the set is that I don’t even pretend to be a journalist and have no idea how to interview somebody, which turned out perversely to be an advantage, because Lynch emphatically didn’t want to be interviewed, because when he’s actually shooting a movie he’s incredibly busy and preoccupied and immersed and has very little attention or brain space available for anything other than the movie. This may sound like PR bullshit, but it turns out to be true, e.g.:

The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree. This is on 8 January in L.A.’s Griffith Park, where some of Lost Highway’s exteriors and driving scenes are being shot. He is standing in the bristly underbrush off the dirt road between the base camp’s trailers and the set, peeing on a stunted pine. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it’d take to run down the base camp’s long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. So my first (and generally representative) sight of Lynch is from the back, and (understandably) from a distance. Lost Highway’s cast and crew pretty much ignore Lynch’s urinating in public*, and they ignore it in a relaxed rather than a tense or uncomfortable way, sort of the way you’d ignore a child’s alfresco peeing.

TRIVIA TIDBIT:
What movie people on location sets call the trailer that houses the bathrooms: “the Honeywagon.”

*(though I never did see anybody else relieving themselves on the set – again, Lynch really was exponentially busier than everybody else.)

Next month, master cellist Erik Friendlander will release Block Ice and Propane, a solo album of compositions inspired by the summer-long roadtrips he and his family used to take with his father, photographer Lee Friedlander. “What is an American sound, what does that even mean?”, he wondered in the New York Times. “So I started checking out American music. But I realized that a lot of what I have in my brain about America is from these trips, seeing national parks and small towns and diners and parades — everything my father wanted to cover.”

I personally have never seen Nic Cage’s remake of The Wicker Man. But this jawdropping YouTube makes it look like the most bizarre, incredible film to come along in years. And now I’ve seen all the best parts, so I don’t have to bother with all the boring filler. Thanks, YouTube. (And bravo, Mr. Cage. Bravo.)

Click here for the video. You’ll like it.

via