Well this is something special, a holiday treat for the end of 2024: a group of archivists (including Chris Person) has uploaded an HBO magic special by Ricky Jay that has been largely unavailable since it aired in 1996.
This is an RF rip of Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, to date the greatest card magic special ever produced, directed by David Mamet of all people. This special was produced by HBO and to date has never had a home release, although poor home recordings of this special exist online.
Before getting into preservation generally, it’s worth considering how we got here. Why is so much media lost or badly preserved? A recurring reason is that the people in charge are sometimes, but not always, asleep at the wheel. Media is forgotten or stored improperly, and humidity and heat have destroyed more of our history than we will ever know. Sometimes companies handle the material sloppily (I’ve blogged about the use of AI before, but there are countless examples in audio too).
Having shared all that, I feel like the quality of this YouTube video of the special is not perceptibly worse than the one uploaded to archive.org? What am I missing?
The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:
Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.
“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.
He turned over the three of clubs.
Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”
After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”
Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”
Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right — what was the card?”
“Two of spades.”
Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.
“I could really feel the heaviness of the song, and I wanted to inject a little touch of hope and light into it. There’s always a presence of light that can break through those times of darkness.”
Vanity Fair has done a video interview Billie Eilish every year since she was a relatively unknown 15-year-old singer/songwriter. They skipped releasing last year’s interview but they are back with year eight.
I still marvel that Vanity Fair embarked on this project with this particular person. They could have chosen any number of up-and-coming 2017 pop singer/songwriters and they got lucky with the one who went supernova and won multiple Grammys.
Her selection over a multitude of other talented, rising stars is truly one of the great talent scouting successes ever.
The only Christmas music I want to hear this year is The Muppets doing Carol of the Bells. Beaker, Animal, and the Swedish Chef makes a great trio, don’t you think?
I didn’t know that the whereabouts of one of Vincent van Gogh’s most important works, a 1890 painting called “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”, is unknown and that the painting had not been seen publicly since the 1990s. This investigation into the potential location of the painting is an engrossing read as well as a good opportunity to appreciate van Gogh’s piece.
Many experts encountered along the way had no clue what had happened to the painting. Four art world insiders said they suspect the painting is held by a private, very rich European family. All parties had an opinion on the core question that drives such a quest: Do collecting families have any responsibility to share iconic works of art with the broader public?
The question has grown more relevant as it becomes clearer that most museums can no longer outbid billionaire collectors for the greatest works of art. Few paintings make that point plainer than Dr. Gachet’s portrait, a piece long on public display that has now vanished into someone’s private home or a climate-controlled warehouse.
For many in the art world, such a work is not just a creative expression, but part of a trade that survives because of the interest and deep pockets of collectors who may, or may not, choose to share their work.
“People are allowed to own things privately,” said Michael Findlay, who was involved as a specialist for Christie’s in the 1990 auction sale of the Gachet. “Does it belong to everybody? No, it does not.”
See also a new short documentary on the missing painting:
Then Comes The Body is a great short documentary from Jacob Krupnick about a Nigerian man who taught himself how to dance ballet from watching YouTube tutorials, the ballet school he started in Lagos, and the students who are branching out into the rest of the world.
There’s no ballet here in Nigeria. There’s no one to look up to. There are no theaters. There are no productions. There are no ballet schools at all. The only thing you have is yourself and the internet.
The founder of Leap of Dance Academy, Daniel Ajala, was inspired to learn ballet after watching the 2001 American film Save the Last Dance. As there weren’t any ballet schools in Nigeria, he taught himself by watching YouTube videos. Determined to provide his community with opportunities he hadn’t had, Ajala established the Academy in 2017 and offers classes for free, explaining that he doesn’t want anyone “to have an excuse for not following your passion.”
Speaking of speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts here are two recent good ones. (Eep, wait, they’re all really good. What if any performance by a very talented performer in an intimate setting is always going to be special?)
Waxahatchee was solo in her 2013 performance, but here she is with an excellent five piece band, including Jeff Tweedy’s son on drums.
And here’s Doechii with a NINE piece. Gosh, this is so good and so fun to watch.
This is also worth a watch about how the NPR engineers make the concerts sound so good.
A teaser trailer for the third season of The White Lotus is out and the release date has been revealed: February 16, 2025. Parker Posey? Walton Goggins? Yes, please. But I’ve got a love/hate relationship with this show (I couldn’t get through the first season but thought the second season was great), so I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.
During the pandemic, Billie Eilish did a Tiny Desk Concert at home amidst a very faithful recreation of the NPR office. Last week, Eilish played a proper set at the actual office. From the video’s description:
Saudade is a Portuguese word that can be roughly defined as a feeling of melancholy, nostalgia or yearning for something that is beloved but not present. There’s no perfect translation, but one of the closest English expressions of the word I’ve ever seen is Billie Eilish’s Tiny Desk performance.
You’d think the Los Angeles-born singer invented the term. Every breath is so full of indulgent melancholy, hopeful regret, at 22 years old she’s become a captivating fixture of what it means, or rather what it feels, to love and lose simultaneously.
Accompanied by a small band and her brother Finneas, Eilish played The Greatest, L’Amour de Ma Vie, i love you, and Birds of a Feather. Lovely.
Watch a stone pine grow from a seed harvested from a pinecone into a small tree, a 2-year growth period compressed into just 110 seconds through the ✨magic✨ of time lapse photography. Don’t you snicker…it is magic! Its invention in the 1870s made it possible to observe, study, and appreciate objects and events in entirely new ways — it’s literal time travel.
This is a really interesting video about something called the gang-nail plate, a construction innovation that enabled larger roofs to be built on houses, removed the need for internal load-bearing walls, and made the process of construction cheaper & more efficient.
While it helped streamline building processes and cut costs, it also encouraged rapid housing expansion and larger, more resource-intensive homes. The result was an architectural shift that contributed to suburban sprawl, increased energy demands, and homes increasingly treated as commodities rather than unique, handcrafted spaces. These changes reverberated through building codes, real estate markets, and even family life, influencing how we interact with our homes and one another.
The story of gang-nail plate illustrates an inescapable reality of capitalist economics: companies tend not to pass cost savings from efficiency gains onto consumers…they just sell people more of it. And people mostly go along with it because who doesn’t want a bigger house for the same price as a smaller one 10 years ago or a 75” TV for far less than a 36” TV would have cost 8 years ago or a 1/4-lb burger for the same price as a regular burger a decade ago? (via @mariosundar.bsky.social)
Watching these expert restorers mend & refresh a pair of vintage Star Wars posters (neither of which features the logo we’re familiar with today and one of which is signed by the designer) is both fascinating and relaxing. It’s like the posters are having a spa day: bit of a soak, a gentle scrub, some light bodywork, and voila, you’re brand new. (via meanwhile)
The largest nuclear weapon ever tested was Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton device detonated by the Soviet Union in 1961. That made it “3,300 times as powerful” as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — an almost unimaginable level of potential destructive power. But Tsar Bomba wasn’t even close to being the biggest nuclear weapon ever conceived. Meet Project Sundial, courtesy of Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb, and his colleagues at Los Alamos:
Only a few months later, in July 1954, Teller made it clear he thought 15 megatons was child’s play. At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, “the possibility of much bigger bangs.” At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a “primary” to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons.
10,000 megatons. In the video above, Kurzgesagt speculates that exploding a bomb of that size would result in a fireball “up to 50 kilometers in diameter, larger than the visible horizon”, a magnitude 9 earthquake, a noise that can be heard around the entire Earth, a 400 km in which everything is “instantly set on fire – every tree, house, person”, and, eventually, the deaths of most of the Earth’s population.
Sundial would bring about an apocalyptic nuclear winter, where global temperatures suddenly drop by 10°C, most water sources would be contaminated and crops would fail everywhere. Most people in the world would die.
Fun fact: Edward Teller was one of Stanley Kubrick’s inspirations for the bomb-giddy character of Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 film of the same name.
At an event last month marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, actor Bryan Cranston read a passage from the book (it’s about 13 minutes long):
After some loving jabs at the devotion this book inspires and its notorious length (“There are only 50 chapters…”), Cranston reads from Power Broker’s opening pages. The performance is fun, and Cranston gets an ad-libbed laugh by archly reading “Shea Stadium,” a part of Moses’ legacy that was demolished and replaced in 2009. Cranston’s also reads some of the famous list sections that Caro rattles off in The Power Broker’s opening chapters. The drumbeat of names is Caro’s attempt to contextualize the scale of Moses’ impact, a technique cribbed from The Aeneid.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has released a pair of visualizations of the phases the Moon will go through in 2025, one for the northern hemisphere above and one for the southern hemisphere below:
Look at that sucker wobble! Each frame of the 4K video represents one hour and there are lots of locations labeled on the map, including the landing sites of the Apollo missions.
But also: How have I never noticed that the Moon is upside-down in the southern hemisphere?! I mean, it makes total sense but I’ve just never noticed or thought it through. 🤯 (via the kid should see this)
They audition all-comers: an uproarious business in which weird randoms show up with a tendency to destroy others by using a flame-thrower or rocket-launcher for no reason at all while the production is being explained to them.
They end up performing the play all over the city, “this is Shakespeare on a billion dollar budget,” not sticking to the amphitheater. The trailer looks great.
I wonder if, when Bobby Internet invented the internet, he imagined it would be used for videos like this. There’s something so fun about watching people crack up at work. See also SNL actors breaking. They also have fun accents, which I maybe shouldn’t say because kottke.org is worldwide and if you live in Australia, you probably just think the videos are funny without any special notice of the accent.
Anyway, I was watching this and my eight year old saw it over my shoulder and said excitedly, “I’ve seen that!” I thought he was watching mostly Bluey so I asked him what he searched to find this and he said, “Balloon popping videos,” matter of factly, so I guess we’re kind of the same and that’s a perfectly understandable thing for an 8-year-old to be searching for on YouTube. Then we watched a video of these guys throwing things off a Swiss dam.
Coldplay tapped Spike Jonze & Mary Wigmore to direct the music video for a song called All My Love from their latest album and the pair decided to turn it into an early 99th birthday celebration of Dick Van Dyke. Van Dyke danced a bit, sung a bit, was swarmed by his family, and ruminated on nearing the end of his life:
I’m acutely aware that I could go any day now, but I don’t know why it doesn’t concern me. I’m not afraid of it. I have the feeling — totally against anything intellectual I have — that I’m gonna be alright.
The video is really quite moving — what a splendid human. Watch until the end, when Chris Martin composes a song on the spot for an absolutely delighted Van Dyke. (via @danielgray.com)
Oh, this is so good: NASA has an 8-hour cozy fireplace video in 4K that’s actually a rocket engine (in a fireplace).
This glowing mood-setter is brought to you by the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket that launched Artemis I on its mission around the Moon and back on Nov. 16, 2022. 8.8 million pounds of total thrust – and a couple glasses of eggnog – might just be enough to make your holidays merry.
A 15th century polymath of soaring imagination and profound intellect, Leonardo da Vinci created some of the most revered works of art of all time, but his artistic endeavors often seemed peripheral to his pursuits in science and engineering. Through his paintings and thousands of pages of drawings and writings, Leonardo da Vinci explores one of humankind’s most curious and innovative minds.
The trailer for the series is above and there are several extended clips available on the website and on YouTube.
It is difficult to categorize the kinds of videos that Posy makes — they are part science demo and part visual art. His latest video, Household Objects (But Extremely Close), uses a powerful macro lens to look at everyday objects like toothbrushes, sponges, and pencils, turning them into swirling abstract films. His music is lovely too — you can find it on Bandcamp.
In this clip from my favorite Werner Herzog film, Encounters at the End of the World, the director muses about the mental health of penguins and observes a lone penguin heading in the wrong direction. From an appreciation of this penguin scene written by Tim Cooke for Little White Lies:
Herzog proceeds to explain that the penguin will not go to the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice, nor will he return to the colony; instead he heads straight for the mountains, “some 70 kilometres away”. Catching him and bringing him back will make no difference — he’ll simply turn around and head again for the interior. “But why?” Herzog asks. We then see footage of another of these “deranged” penguins, 80 kilometres off course, sliding on its belly towards certain death. These shots of the solitary birds marching to their demise, mere black dots against the white expanse, are perfect in their portrayal of loneliness and desolation.
The scene, then, is a splendid tragicomedy, serving as a sour antidote to the fluffy charm of films like the The March of the Penguins, which arrived two years earlier. It’s a play within a play; masterfully constructed, it delivers a hefty emotional blow. It’s in this construction, and self-reflexive style, that truth and revelation can be found — Herzog’s ecstatic truth, that is. The natural world, as we learnt from the horrors of Grizzly Man, is not easily compared with ours. The structures we adopt for our stories — be they tragic, romantic or comedic — do not fit nature quite so tightly, and Herzog knows this. Any facts about the penguins’ motivations and thought processes remain unobtainable. We view the narrative as the filmmaker builds it: through an exclusively human lens.
I just spent my lunch hour watching the 22 nominated goals for the 2024 Puskas & Marta Awards, given to the most spectacular goals scored by men’s & women’s footballers last season.
Icelandic photographer Haukur Sigurdsson captured this aerial image of Nordic skiers looking like musical notes on a staff. Someone on YouTube played the tune:
A Japanese group called Electronicos Fantasticos! figured out that by connecting a supermarket barcode scanner to a powered speaker and rhythmically scanning barcode-like patterns with it, you can make music. This is so fun!
Oh man this is so great: electronic music sample breakdowns from 1990 until the present day. The visualizations on these are fantastic — just watch a bit of the first one (Groove Is In The Heart) and you’ll see what I mean. They’re not all that great (some of these producers are out here working harder than others, is what I’m saying), but these are some of my favorites:
Groove Is In The Heart by Dee-Lite (Eva Gabor Green Acres sample!)
Firestarter by The Prodigy (sample from The Breeders?)
Praise You by Fatboy Slim (It’s a Small World from Mickey Mouse Disco? Fat Albert Theme?!)
One More Time by Daft Punk
Robot Rock by Daft Punk
Archangel by Burial
First of the Year by Skrillex
Girl by Jamie xx
Pick Up by DJ Koze
leavemealone by Fred again
Is DJ Shadow electronic? I would have liked to have seen something from Endtroducing… but maybe they couldn’t even locate the samples. 😂
In this video, Sara Saadouni explains the three passive cooling techniques used by fellow architect Diébédo Francis Kéré in designing a school building in Burkina Faso, where temperatures can be quite warm all year. The roof is especially clever.
He introduced a curved double roof that created an air gap between the first and second roof. As the heat naturally rises and escapes into the gap, the prevailing winds quickly carry it away, accelerating this process and cooling the building more efficiently.
But that’s not all. The first roof is made up of perforated ceiling slabs, allowing the heat to escape more efficiently and therefore to be quickly transported by the wind.
The other genius idea was to also curve the roof, which allowed for the Venturi effect — a phenomenon where air speeds up as it moves through the narrower sections created by the curve and therefore boosting natural ventilation.
Meteorite hunter Roberto Vargas tracks fireballs on the internet and then goes to see if he can find them.
Usually I’m alerted that something has fallen or that people have seen a fireball through the American Meteor Society I book a flight, go to wherever it is, and then I start searching. I would just walk around and use my magnet cane to tap rocks. If they stick to the magnet and they have a black outer shell, they should be meteorites.
Vargas has over 500 meteorites in his personal collection.
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