Holy moly, NPR’s Tiny Desk has been going for a long time. Weird Al Yankovic first stopped by the desk in 2010, so early that they didn’t even have it on YouTube until more recently. And the other day, they had him back for a second session!

Yankovic focused on originals the first time around, but for this show he brought parodies of Don McLean’s “American Pie” (“The Saga Begins,” from 1999’s Running with Scissors) and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” (“eBay,” from 2003’s Poodle Hat), as well as the Weezer pastiche “Skipper Dan,” from 2011’s Alpocalypse. And, for fans of the breathtakingly factual 2022 biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, he performs the film’s Emmy-losing closing-credits blues-rock jam “Now You Know.”

We only get so many gifts in this life, so let’s set an intention here and now to return “Weird Al” Yankovic to the Tiny Desk in the summer of 2042. But if he’s gonna come back and see us (or whoever’s buried us and moved on) at a sprightly 82, we’ll have to ask him to bring a string section, just to keep things fresh.

Stunning. Here’s what makes this shot look a little different from other eclipse photos; from APOD:

Usually the solar corona appears white, and to some observers the corona of last week’s total solar eclipse did appear this pearly color. But this time, totality observers in Spain saw a corona that appeared unusually golden. For one reason, from Spain, the totality occurred when the setting Sun was near the horizon. That low, sunlight travels through a large amount of air which scatters out blue light. An unusual amount of smoke in the air from nearby forest fires acted as a second filter, further scattering the remaining blue tones and deepening the already gold-dominated light.

For TCM, Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou tell us how legendary Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu made the transition to color filmmaking. His first color film was Equinox Flower in 1958 and it took a couple of films for Ozu to work out how to best employ color.

When you watch later Ozu films, you’re struck by how similar two people can be. How often one place resembles another, how life itself is cyclical and Ozu used color as another way to build these patterns.

In the recent post about the supersonic trebuchet, I wrote that if I’d had access to engineering process videos like that when I was a kid, I would have grown up to be an engineer. Well, same thing for Every Frame a Painting: 12-year-old Jason had zero idea how filmmaking worked and videos like theirs would have fired me up to try my hand at it (no idea where I would have gotten a camera though…) Maybe it’s best that I grew up to do what I’m doing, where I can learn a little bit about all of these different fascinating things. 🤷‍♂️

Are you new here? Introduce yourself if you feel like it. Heck, if you’re a regular commenter, reintroduce yourself if you’d like.

Jamelle Bouie almost never misses. In this video that’s just shy of 10 minutes long, he chastises American political & cultural pundits for their lack of moral seriousness w/r/t their focus on “wokeness” instead of the real harms being done by the authoritarian Trump regime. (And he worked in a reference to Jonathan Frakes saying no.)

I bring this up because this is just a great example of a phenomenon I’ve been struck by over the past year. Which is that, in the midst of a government that is systematically dismantling Americans’ rights, that is systematically dismantling the post-World War II world order, that is systematically tearing apart the social safety net, that is trying to exert nearly totalitarian control over large parts of American life, which is constructing concentration camps and throwing migrants into them, which has killed two Americans on the street and is looking to suppress as much as possible dissent, even bringing the full force of the federal government against people it wrongly accuses of wrongdoing — as we observe all of this, so many of our pundits and professional commentators are still obsessed with people they got mad at in 2020 and 2021.

They are obsessed with fighting the specter of wokeness — whatever that misappropriation of African American vernacular means. They look at overzealous college students, overbearing HR departments, or colleagues who put pronouns in their signatures as tantamount to a Cultural Revolution. And meanwhile, as the Secretary of Defense quite literally purges Black people from the highest reaches of the military, it doesn’t look like anything to them.

They don’t even comment on it. The Republican Party has turned pretty openly against liberal democracy. Republican lawmakers are confirming election deniers to lifetime appointments. They’re nominating election deniers to high-ranking offices like governor. And meanwhile, pundits, reporters, the press — they’re obsessed with “Hey, did Francesca Hong once say that she thought we should cancel Thanksgiving?”

I would note that the free speech absolutists are awfully quiet these days too.

Bouie was reacting specifically to this David Brooks piece and this one from from Ross Douthat (with the amazing titular admission that he can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys these days)¹ and possibly this one too. Michael Hobbes has been talking about this on Bluesky as well:

There were excesses in 2020 but they were mostly low-stakes efforts by well-intentioned people to address real injustices.

The excesses of the right during the same era were far more harmful. The reckoning we need now is about how elites lost sight of that.

…

Centrists convinced themselves annoying leftists on twitter were an equivalent threat to Jan 6 insurrectionists. They wildly inflated the threat of left-wing authoritarianism while ignoring how it was taking hold on the right.

Meanwhile, the right never meant any of it. They moaned about “cancellation” for a decade but embarked on mass firings as soon as they took power. They pretended to care about “free speech restrictions” and “educational indoctrination” while embarking on them every chance they got.

The excesses of the Woke 1 era mostly amount to cringe public statements, harmless vocabulary updates and loss of prestige for public figures.

The backlash to Woke 1, on the other hand, is imprisoning dissidents, dismantling public education and eroding democracy. That’s what needs reckoning.

1. Real “are we the baddies?” energy from Douthat here. ↩

Ok so when you woke up this morning, you probably didn’t expect to watch a 20-minute video about a trebuchet — but to be fair, I didn’t either. But Tom Stanton’s build of a fully mechanical trebuchet that propels a tiny plastic pellet faster than the speed of sound (complete with tiny sonic boom) is genuinely fascinating to watch.

He starts with a basic plan, but as he builds & tests, there are all sorts of problems (weight, strength) that he needs to overcome. The final product is impressive, but it’s the process that’s most interesting to me. What a gift these sorts of videos are…you could sometimes find process-heavy shows on PBS (like How to Create a Junk Food) when I was a kid, but if I’d had access to stuff like the supersonic trebuchet video (and all those Lego engineering videos), I’d have probably wanted to grow up to be an engineer.

Lovely short video about artist Jas Knight, who is a participant in the Met Museum’s Copyist Program:

The Copyist Program offers time and space for artists to develop their own interpretation of an artwork through intimate study in the Museum’s galleries. Copyists have created reinterpretations of original artworks in The Met collection since 1872.

Here’s Knight from the video, in which he is copying Diego Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja:

Almost every artist was a copyist up until the 20th century because as a painter you would go through certain exercises to learn how to paint. You haven’t begun to see a painting until you’ve copied it.

And I especially liked this bit:

Velázquez’s brain is on that canvas. So we’re encountering a person’s brain that doesn’t exist anymore when we’re looking at a painting by them. I’m literally interacting with Velázquez.

In a piece about Harold Fisk’s Mississippi meander maps, I wrote about art as a time machine:

It takes some imagination, but standing before a painting by Hilma af Klint, a sculpture by Bernini, or a cave painting in Chauvet, France draws you back in time in a powerful way: you know you’re standing precisely where those artists stood hundreds or even thousands of years ago, laying paint to surface or chisel to stone. Even experiencing art through prints or photographs leads the mind to consider all the cultural, political, technological, and economic things that were happening when the work was produced. Art is a doorway to past worlds.

You can see Knight’s copy of Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja and compare it with the original. (via the kid should see this)

Death Cab for Cutie rolled into the NPR offices for a Tiny Desk Concert, which featured two new songs from their current album and some oldies: Title and Registration and Soul Meets Body. Gibbard noted:

I’m starting to realize that some of our earlier records came out a similar distance away from, like, the Beatles records when I was a kid.

This is Death Cab’s second Tiny Desk…here’s the first one from 2015:

I took this as an opportunity to listen to my favorite Death Cab song, Transatlanticism. And when are we getting a Postal Sevice Tiny Desk? Come on, we’ve been good! We need this!

(via present & correct)

British climate scientist Kevin Anderson (from a 2024 video):

So there is lots that you will hear — lots of rhetoric, lots of good words, lots of optimism about the future. But given we’ve known about this subject and apparently been working on it for 30 years, the trend line tells us that we are heading towards three to four degrees centigrade of warming across this century: an absolute climate catastrophe, a catastrophe for all species including our own. And so that’s the direction of travel. Now, that direction of travel does not have to continue, but the current trend line tells us that all we are doing so far is giving rhetoric and optimism and greenwash, and not driving the levels of change that are necessary to stay within the 1.5-to-2-degree framing of the Paris Agreement.

And:

And I have to be honest and say that my judgment, my best guess as someone who’s worked on this for years, is that we are going to fail. We’re going to go to three or four degrees centigrade of warming, and we’re going to put up with — well, we won’t put up with — we’ll have to live through, or die from, all of the repercussions that that will have. That is a terrible prospect, and one that I think we have to try everything we can to avoid.

But the message of hope, if there’s any thread of hope in this, is that it is a choice to fail. We have so far repeatedly — I’m going to say “we”; what I mean is effectively our leaders, politically, academically, in the journalistic community, across the board, those people that are framing this debate — have chosen actively to fail for three decades. And when they have breakfast with their own children, I hope they are thinking about what they have deliberately, what we have deliberately, imposed upon their future.

It may hurt to write it. And reading it? For some, that’s the worst part. The world might spin a little, and everything familiar to you might fade for a few minutes. But remember, remind yourself as you stand there, you are the lucky one.

And that’s not because you aren’t dead. You were selected. You get to stand, face the group, the family, the world, and add it up. You’re being asked to do something at the very moment when nothing can be done. You get the last word in the attempt to define the outlines of a life. I don’t care what you say, bub: That is a gift.

This rule surprised me:

You must make them laugh. Laughs are a pivot point in a funeral. They are your responsibility. The best laughs come by forcing people not to idealize the dead. In order to do this, you have to be willing to tell a story, at the closing of which you draw conclusions that no one expects.

So, I’m not exactly sure what this is, but what it appears to be is a fan-assembled album of the recording sessions for Tron: Legacy by Daft Punk & Joseph Trapanese. 67 tracks in this YouTube playlist and 61 tracks from the Internet Archive (not sure of the overlap here…) Some of it sounds just like the 31 tracks from the “Complete Edition” of the soundtrack, some of it is alternate studio takes, and some of it is probably just random bits and bobs from the movie that didn’t make it onto the soundtrack.

Anyway, if you love this album as much as I do, I’ll leave you to explore.