Category Archives: Kultcha

Via Crooked Timber: Frozen Grand Central Station, this video of a brilliantly silly piece of performance art.

Via Eszter's Blog, a link to the wonderful and funny Understanding art for geeks – a photoset on Flickr.

You need to know some HTML and spend too much time online to get all the jokes, but even without many will be funny. Half a dozen made me laugh out loud and most made me smile. (Warning: One or two were in bad taste.)

Here's a sample, a Wikipediaficiation of Cristiano Banti's, Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition (1857):

GW Bush sings (in a Rex Harrison sort of a way) The End of the World As We Know It.

This one might actually make your head explode.

So do we have a new art form here — mashing up samples to make unlikely/impossible singer/song combos? If so, it's a temporary thing. Part of the fun is that some of the rivets show. When the technology gets so good that it becomes child's play to make Hillary Clinton do a duet with Dick Cheney on “I Got You Babe,” then it won't be fun any more.

Obligatory link to Sonny & Cher (1965) and much more interesting link to two of the less likely people ever singing “I've Got You Babe” (1973).

OK, I think this is a bit weird, a more serious piece of strange than Stairway to Somewhere: someone has set a complaint to music. And not just any complaint, but Mackris v. O'Reilly, the infamous sexual harassment complaint filed against TV bloviator Bill O'Reilly and settled for an undisclosed sum.

There's a video with a lengthy excerpt of this work at O'Reilly's Sexual Harrassment Lawsuit Sung Like Handel's “Messiah”. And here's how they describe the project:

The piece is a setting of the sexual harassment complaint lodged against Fox News pundit, Bill O’Reilly, by staff producer, Andrea Mackris, in October 2004 and recorded at its world premiere in January 2007. It includes all memorable moments from the original complaint and more – paranoid rants, clumsy sexual innuendo, and the famous falafel fantasy. Composer Igor Keller has produced this concert-length work in the form of a baroque oratorio, in the style of an updated Handel’s Messiah, for 28-piece chamber orchestra, 26-voice chorus and three soloists. It’s an oratorio for the 21st century!

There's also an extensive FAQ.

I'm in no position to judge from the excerpt if this this is good art or not (although I am suspicious). I did go see “Jerry Springer: The Opera” the last time I was in London, and despite what one might think about the idea of basing an opera around Jerry Springer, it was good. So who knows.

I don't know if I should be calling this video brilliant, perverted, or a wakeup call for western civilization or all of the above.

Sotted via Boingboing's Cory Doctorow who writes,

This superb video mashup from The Beatnix takes fuzzy footage of the Beatles in concert and seamlessly converts it to a pleasepleaseme-esque rendition of Stairway to Heaven. John Scalzi promises it'll make your head explode and he's not far wrong.