In honor of today’s post on the Elliott Smith documentary Strange Parallel, here’s a collection of Elliot Smith playing some of his best songs. Smith died on October 21, 2003, at age 34. Read more about him at Wikipedia.

“Waltz #2 (XO)”

A beautiful performance of one of my favorite songs.

“I’m so glad that my memory’s remote
’cause I’m doing just fine hour to hour, note to note
here it is, the revenge to the tune
you’re no good
you’re no good, you’re no good, you’re no good
can’t you tell that it’s well understood?”

“Needle in the Hay”

A rare electric-guitar version of the song from 2000. Most of us know this tune from The Royal Tenenbaums.

“Bled White”

From the same concert as “Needle in the Hay,” this is just a straight-up rocker.

“Ballad of Big Nothing”

Wait through the shot of an empty chair for a killer encore. “You want to hear old songs or new songs?” I guess “old songs” won out.

Here’s a very different version from the Reading Festival in 1998.

“Say Yes”

Apparently recorded on September 19, 2003 — just a month before his death, and his last show.

“Rose Parade”

Recorded in 1999. The Rose Parade is an event held annually in Portland, Oregon (aka the “Rose City”).

“Alphabet Town”

A strange mixture of Sesame Street animation and shots of letters around town.

“Between the Bars”

From the short film Lucky Three.

“The Biggest Lie”

Video from the memorial to Smith erected in Los Angeles the day after his death.

I’m a little shocked that I’ve gone so many years being an Elliott Smith fan, and living in Portland (where it is contractually obligated that you be an Elliott Smith fan), but had never heard of Strange Parallel, a 1998 30-minute documentary on Smith. Directed by Steve Hanft as a promotional film (never released commercially), it’s hard to find — but a copy has popped up on YouTube, and it’s well worth a look if you like Elliott Smith. Part documentary, part experimental weirdness (as in the sequence where Smith contemplates buying a “robot hand” to improve his guitar playing), this is a gem, despite the poor YouTube quality.

Here’s a nice comment from the Wikipedia page by the director, explaining the film:

Director Steve Hanft says this about the film:

“In 1998 I was hired to make a film for the reclusive rocker Elliott Smith. Very excited, I flew to Portland, Oregon, where he was staying and met with him to figure it out before we filmed. At the meeting he explained, in a very quiet voice, with a slight smile, that he didn’t want it to be a straight-up documentary. So I suggested he write down some of his dreams. The next day, we met again, and he began talking a lot, and louder, telling me all about how he “had a fucked up dream last night.” It was very funny when he explained it, everyone in and around the music business he was in was telling him to get a mechanical hand to replace the hand that he’d trained for so long to play guitar. There was also a military recruiter who came into the bar where he was writing a song that would yell at him for no reason, and Satan was there, that kills me. A lot of people who know him from his music don’t understand that he was really funny. So we wrote the dream into the shot list and intercut it into the more traditional music footage. It was hard to get the documentary footage out of him, he hated being interviewed. He was much more into the dream sequence and we had a lot fun shooting it. It was an amazing experience and just knowing a guy like that, so talented and brutally honest, has changed my life. Bless him.”

Update: see also, Lucky Three, a 12-minute short by Jem Cohen featuring live performances of several songs.

This first episode is all about denim, specifically, jeans made from denim. Thorn and Lisagor go onsite to a shop that produces jeans “the old-fashioned way,” give very specific tips on the proper care and maintenance of jeans, and even recommend low/medium/high priced jeans, in case you’re in the market for a new pair. While this episode is focused on men’s jeans, I think women will get something out of it too — particularly the instructions for how to make jeans “shrink to fit” properly, and how (and when) to wash them.

Update: here’s a link to the series as a podcast (link opens iTunes).

Below is the video, or you can watch in HD at Vimeo.

Put This On, Episode 1: Denim from Put This On on Vimeo.

Full disclosure: I’m an executive producer (meaning I gave them some money) on this episode. I don’t get any payment or other compensation for the project, I just thought it was awesome and chipped in some cash to get it made.

Anyway, just click on this and be amazed.

You can view more accordion virtuosity on Hrustevich’s YouTube Channel. For more amazing Ukrainian talent, check out Drawing in Sand: Kseniya Simonova.

(Via the amazing Word Surgery blog.)

Complete lyrics after the jump.

A long, long time ago,
Long before the Super Bowl and things like lemonade,
The Hellenic Republic was full of smarts,
And a question resting on the Grecian hearts was;
What is the circumference of a circle?”,
But they were set on rational numbers,
And it ranks among their biggest blunders,
They worked on it for years,
And confirmed one of their biggest fears,
I can’t be certain if they cried when irrationality was realised,
But something deep within them died,
The day, they discovered, Pi.

They were thinking;
Pi, pi, mathematical pi,
3.14 15 92,
65 35 89 7,
932384 62,
6433832 7 (not rounded).

Well this kind of Pi is different than most,
It hasn’t got berries, ain’t spread on toast,
And that’s how it’s always been,
We keep extending its decimal places,
Pushing our computers through their paces,
But we’ll never reach the end,
So why the fascination with,
A number whose end is just a myth?
Whence the adulation,
For mental masturbation,
It might have something to do with the stars,
To calculate distances from afar,
But that’s just a guess ’bout the way things are,
Regarding the precision of Pi,

I am pondering;
Pi, pi, mathematical pi
3.14 15 92
65 35 89 7
932384 62
6433832 7

Now I feel that I should mention,
Pi is applicable in any dimension,
At least as far as I know,
If there were no Pi we’d be missing things,
Like marbles and mugs and balls of string,
And sports, such as soccer and curling,
The orbs in their celestial paths,
Navigate along elliptical graphs,
Ellipses have pi in them too,
Just one side of them has grew,
You can see pi in most everything,
It’s in Cornell’s Electron Storage Ring,
And also in slinkies and other springs,
And that’s why it’s important to know pi,

You should memorize,
Pi, pi, mathematical pi,
3.14 15 92,
65 35 89 7,
932384 62,
6433832 7,

Once one night I had a dream,
That pi was gone and I had to scream,
Cause all pi things had disappeared.
Can you imagine a world like that?
Circles aren’t round and spheres are flat,
It’s the culmination of everything we’ve feared,
‘Twas a nightmare of epic proportions,
One that gave me brain contortions,
Oh wait! I mean contusions,
They put me in some institutions,
But then I escaped and now I’m free!

To sing of the virtue of pi,
Pi, pi, mathematical pi,
3.14 15 92,
65 35 89 7,
932384 62,
6433832 7.

Today is International Animation Day, and YouTube is featuring some great animated films available on their site. My favorite is “Sita Sings the Blues,” which is excellent, and has an amazing story behind it — basically, the movie includes some old songs which ran into copyright troubles getting clearance for the songs (and the songs were critical to the movie), so the creator decided to give the movie away for free under a Creative Commons license. The movie is funny, sweet, and also informative. Note that if you like it, you can also download it in various places online in full HD (just Google for it or check Archive.org). Check it out:

Sita Sings the Blues

Sleeping Betty

Beautiful, vaguely Miyazaki-like animation from Canada, with no intelligible dialogue. As YouTube describes it:

In a sumptuous palace in the basement of a house in a Montreal working-class neighbourhood, Princess Betty sleeps in a narcoleptic stupor. The king is at her bedside. He appeals to Uncle Henri VIII, Aunt Victoria, an emotional alien, a cool witch and, why not, a handsome prince! This worthy Prince Charles lookalike has to leave his royal suburb, confront a Canadian dragon and brave a surreal set of road rules in order to save the princess. But will Betty be wakened with just a kiss?

Sleeping Betty is the Perrault classic done with Claude Cloutier’s sharp pen. His detailed drawings in Indian ink conjure up caricature and Victorian engravings in a disjointed, anachronistic and playful setting.

Fantaisie in Bubblewrap

Completely bizarre and morbidly cute; little bubblewrap creatures try to resist being popped by an evil Hand of Death.

Archon Defender

I’ll admit that I haven’t watched the entire film, but judging from what I’ve seen, this is part Bladerunner, part Gattaca, with perhaps some Robotech thrown in. The film took three years to make (by a single animator, David T. Krupicz). Read more about it at the Archon Defender website.

Be Amazing!

Okay, I couldn’t help but throw in a mental_floss classic produced by our very own Ransom Riggs. “Be Amazing!” is a six-minute animated film that dramatizes one of the scenarios from our “Be Amazing!” book. It’s a “step-by-step guide to destroying civilization with nanotechnology.” What could go wrong?

I’ve seen the film in advance, and I highly recommend it, particularly if you’re interested in any of the four plants featured in it: tulip, marijuana, potato, and apple. By telling the stories of these plants, Pollan explains how in some ways the plants are manipulating us, rather than the other way around — in the same way that flowers “use” bees to spread their pollen, these plants have “used” humans to spread themselves across the planet and out-compete other plants. One note: the program may not be suitable for young children, as there is use of the word “sex” (as applied to plants) and discussion of marijuana. It also might be pretty boring for the under-twelve set (despite beautiful flower photography), unless they’re thoroughly nerdy.

Here’s a preview of the documentary:

After the jump, I include some notes on each plant discussed in the documentary.

The Apple – Good for Booze AND for Eatin’

Apples arose in Kazakhstan, where bears would eat them and, uh, deposit the seeds as they went. But when people entered the picture, we began to spread the apple and its sweetness. Thus, the “biological strategy” of apples is to increase their sweetness, causing us to spread them around the globe. Humans have an innate desire for sweetness — presumably because in nature, sweetness is rare and generally denotes lots of calories.

Although the Bible doesn’t specify the fruit that was at the heart of so much trouble in the Garden of Eden, we assume it to be an apple — even though it was probably a pomegranate due to geographic restrictions on where apples grow best. Then there’s the rather fascinating discussion of Johnny Appleseed, whose real motivation was to bring alcohol (via hard cider) to pioneers, rather than tasty sweet apples. (Follow the link for some more info, all snagged from Pollan’s book, on the man — he was surprisingly rich for a dude who wore a tin pot on his head.)

Tulips

Tulips are examples of angiosperms, or flowering plants. The rise of the angiosperms brought sex (via flowers and pollen exchange) into the plant picture, and as Pollan says, “sex creates variation.” The documentary thoroughly explains the Dutch speculative investment bubble known as Tulip Mania, which made tulips one of the most valuable commodities in the world. At the height of Tulip Mania, a single tulip bulb sold for the equivalent of what today would be $10-15 million! Tragically, some of the most prized tulips were made beautiful because of a virus that was slowing killing them — which caused spectacular striped or “broken” flowers, but ultimately killed the plant. Pollan suggests that the tulip’s biological “strategy” has been to develop a form of beauty that humans find very appealing, causing us to domesticate and grow it even to the point of financial ruin.

Cannabis

I won’t say much about this section, as this is a family blog, but I can certainly say that this program treats the topic fairly and doesn’t go nuts with it. There’s an interesting discussion of how THC (the main “active ingredient”) binds to receptors in the human brain that affect the brain’s ability to remember and forget — and Pollan wonders exactly how a plant would find a way to manipulate those human brain receptors in order to make cannabis such a widely-propagated plant today. It is a curious question, indeed — how would a plant manage to just “happen” to have such a profound effect on humans? Again, Pollan wonders if this is a biological “strategy” in some sense.

The documentary includes extensive footage of legal (under state laws, though not federal law) cannabis growing operations — you get an inside look into how medical marijuana is produced, and it’s surprisingly complex. My favorite line: in describing how the farmers plant only female cannabis plants so they’ll produce more THC-rich resin, Pollan describes the grow room as a room of “massive sexual frustration” — all the female plants are desperately trying to catch some male pollen, producing more and more resin in their efforts.

Potatoes

The documentary takes us to South America, showing how the descendants of the Incas are still farming potatoes, and how potatoes traveled from South America to Europe via the Spanish Conquistadores. The potato was such a hugely productive crop (more food per acre than grain) that it transformed the Old World, enabling the industrial revolution. There’s also much discussion of “The Lumper,” the dominant strain of potato in Ireland that happened to be susceptible to a wind-spread fungus that destroyed Lumpers, causing the terrible Potato Famine. The famine killed one out of every eight people living in Ireland. Can you imagine that? Pollan suggests that the Potato Famine is a parable about the dangers of monoculture (planting a single type of plant) — had the Irish planted a wider variety of potatoes, they might have had more that were resistant to the fungus that killed Lumpers.

Also discussed: how the fast food industry currently relies on a monoculture of the Russet Burbank potato to make the “long fries” used in McDonald’s, to fill those tall red fry boxes; how that monoculture demands lots of pesticides; and how Monsanto is developing insect-repellant crops — and what happens with those crops over the long term.

Full Blogger Disclosure

I have received an advance screener of this documentary from PBS, but have not been compensated in any way for this post. I just like PBS and documentaries, and think this is a great program — and the book is highly recommended as well.

* = Note that the program is presented by KQED in San Francisco and produced by Kikim Media. But to myself and y’all, that’s fancy talk for “PBS.”

Now stop working and go enjoy zillions more Turn of the Century images.

(Via Tweets of Old.)

(Via Blogtown PDX).

Note: updated spelling of the rapper’s name per commenter Andrew’s suggestion. No need to bring out the bat’leth here.