Here are some gorgeous half-erased blackboards photographed with a large-format camera.

Off-topic, but her computer portraits and google image composites are great as well.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 12:23 PM on June 12, 2008

It's too bad she didn't scan larger images. The actual prints (18"x24"?) have an amazing depth to them.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 12:31 PM on June 12, 2008

Here is Baden Powell performing five songs from a 1990 TV program with all sorts of closeup camera angles so that you can see his fingers.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 4:40 PM on May 19, 2008

To add to the list of giants, old and new, here is Raphael Rabello playing songs by João Pernambuco, an influential Scott Joplin-era Brazilian guitarist.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 5:23 PM on May 19, 2008

Nice. Paulinho da Viola really deserved to be more internationally known. His voice and his songs are consistently impeccable.

Thanks for this post.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 5:28 PM on May 20, 2008

oops. deserves to be...
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 5:28 PM on May 20, 2008

These are great, and that interview jack_mo linked to is hilarious.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 3:36 AM on May 14, 2008

I'm with koeselitz. "From the air" is one of the most haunting pop songs ever. It totally gives me chills too.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 1:34 PM on May 12, 2008

That's crazy that you were just looking at the dangdut video! I really like how seamlessly the two parts of the song fit together, and their timing is spot-on. The chorus is such an earworm.

Also, what's up with the guy with James Brown hair that pops up from that oil drum to tell everyone to get along? And the baby at the end? It just keeps getting more random.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 4:44 PM on May 9, 2008

Here are some examples of the earlier dangdut that inspired Project Pop:

Rhoma Irama (The King of dangdut)

Elvy Sukaesih (The Queen of dangdut)
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 4:54 PM on May 9, 2008

In the Project Pop video, one of the 'gang members' has a tattoo on his arm in solidarity with Inul Daratista. She got a lot of press a few years ago for pushing the boundaries of hip-shaking for an Indonesian Muslim woman. Particularly iffy in the eyes of religious conservatives is her dance move known as 'drilling.' Rhoma Irama is especially anti-drilling.

This video of hers is Shakira meets Bollywood with a touch of rock guitarmony thrown in. [no nudity but perhaps... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 1:15 AM on May 10, 2008

I had no idea that the Brazilian viola caipira (10-string cowboy guitar) was so similar to the baroque guitar. Thanks for the links!
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 7:16 AM on May 7, 2008

My band in eighth grade couldn't decide whether we wanted to be more like the Replacements or Hüsker Dü. In our minds, that is. We obviously didn't rise to level of either, but those were our hometown heroes at the time.

We kicked the asses of the Grateful Dead-wannabe band of juniors and seniors in the Battle of the Bands, however. That was glorious.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 7:37 AM on April 24, 2008

.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 12:55 PM on April 21, 2008

I'm surprised that there is so much skepticism on this thread. This is not a breaking story--the fraught politics of musical ownership in this case are well documented in Louise Meintjes' master's thesis "Paul Simon's Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning," the book Music Grooves by Steve Feld and Charlie Keil, and the book Nightsong by Veit Erlmann.

My favorite part of the story is the fact that the isiZulu words that Ladysmith Black... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 8:41 PM on April 19, 2008

Sure, the thesis is obscure, but an article-length version of it is on-line (I didn't link to it directly because you need access to jstor) and I thought someone might be interested in looking at it. But the books are available.

What I was trying to get at is that these questions of ownership were asked so much in the wake of the recording that Charles Hamm opened up a short article by asking "Does more need to be said about Paul Simon's Graceland?" (even if... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 11:56 PM on April 19, 2008

Let it be officially on the record that my typo hath been corrected (twice, in fact).
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 7:47 PM on March 23, 2008

I know, I know. Myspace pages are horrible. I only mentioned it because I thought it was interesting that there are all sorts of clear Latin American influences in his stuff, but for marketing, or just how he wants to position himself, he chose not to mention any of them.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 4:35 AM on March 24, 2008

TVBC rocked my little world when I saw them live as a teenager in the 1980s. The drones, the crazy tunings, the danelectro that he would get all sorts of skronk-y sounds (until he broke it and the show had to end). My friends and I holed up in the garage and tried our best to figure out what he was up to, approximating it in DADDAD and CGCGCE with lots of raised fourths to make the scale sound exotic.

A few years later, when we saw them again, it wasn't as... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 11:08 AM on February 23, 2008

I was excited to see that Of Montreal covered Os Mutantes' Bat Macumba. It is too bad, however, that their version doesn't reproduce one of the main things that makes the song so great.

The original lyrics create bat wings on the written page by removing a syllable at a time with each repetition so that the sentence roughly translated as "play those afro-brazilian religious drums to bring on spirit possession" morphs into "Batman" and then back again.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 7:54 PM on February 1, 2008

What is the rough equivalent of eponysterical when the life of someone posting to a thread impinges on their posting in a way that relates to the content of the post?

What a crazy thing, nickyskye. I'm glad you're okay as well.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 6:01 AM on January 31, 2008

Hat Maui, I agree. It has its contradictions.

But the content--I need to sit down and watch the whole Arto Lindsay and ?uestlove interviews as soon as I can.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 5:08 PM on January 20, 2008

There, let's make its even with The Candiru Fish with one documented case of swimming inside an human penis by swimming upstream in his pee flow.

OPS, NSFW and fucking scary for males !

I just like to clarify that the candiru is not just scary for males. It is an equal opportunity orifice fish that likes cozy, warm spaces.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 6:28 AM on January 19, 2008

an emphasis on virtuosity for its own sake

I think fourcheesemac pinpointed the root cause of the problem. Fleck reminds me of a lot of the Leo Kottke/Michael Hedges disciples on acoustic steel-string guitar who pull off the speed and technique but ultimately leave you flat.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 6:16 AM on January 19, 2008

Even as a hoax, I like how this makes you listen differently after you read it. It turns you into a paranoid music detective.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 3:18 PM on January 12, 2008

The thing that was most bizarre about the whole thing was that they would dance to any song that was on the countdown that week. Music Box Dancer by Frank Mills? John Lennon's Woman? Eek. I want to know what they did to the dance mix "19" featuring samples of interviews with Vietnam War vets with PTSD by Paul Hardcastle.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 7:03 AM on January 12, 2008

Good luck Rangeboy and felix betachat. I'm there too, prepping for it as we speak.

I'll just say that once I had a meeting with a dean where he did nothing but make pseudo-casual small talk, while watching me like a hawk. He mentioned nothing about the position, and looked at me quizzically when I tried to talk about it. It was terribly disconcerting. Then he offered me a piece of candy from a jar on his desk, and I had this sinking feeling that the way I responded... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 12:28 PM on January 11, 2008

I love it! The triple post is pure brilliance.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 8:29 PM on January 4, 2008

I like that the second and third posts are exactly twelve hours apart. Now are there seven more coming down the pike? Poor cortex will have to play whack-a-mole with them.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 8:31 PM on January 4, 2008

the triple post is pure brilliance!
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 8:29 PM on January 4, 2008

Thanks for the post. I think they're intriguing. There is something very unique about his approach, especially in the flatter, more abstract photos of his new project

The more documentary-like photos of rural south africa remind me of Sebastião Salgado's photos of the poor, in that they emphasize where the body proportions of his subjects diverge from what is generally considered healthy and normal. There have been many interesting discussions about the implications of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 12:57 PM on March 16, 2007

i can't believe i got to the bottom of these 130+ comments.

no, it's not gorilla marketing. the campus gorilla was a different grinnell institution. i helped buy him his suit back in 1993.
posted to MetaFilter by umbú at 8:00 AM on March 14, 2007