Watch this and see if you don’t agree that Luke Geissbühler deserves to win some sort of Coolest Dad of the Year award:
This is footage that Geissbühler edited together after he and his young son Max attached a Go Pro Hero HD video camera to a helium-filled weather balloon “that rose into the upper stratosphere and recorded the blackness of space.”
After months of research, planning, and flight tests, the intrepid duo and their friends traveled from Park Slope, Brooklyn to a remote area of Newburgh in Orange County, NY with their camera and GPS system carefully wrapped in a homemade styrofoam capsule and fitted with a parachute. The balloon that carried this hand-crafted vessel skyward was rated to burst at 19 feet in diameter, and reached a height of nearly 20 miles above the earth before that happened.
This was all done within FAA regulations. This is awesome. Not just in the colloquial sense of the word, but by its dictionary definition: amazing, awe inspiring, and provoking wonderment.
Riverdance veterans Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding are taking the internet by storm with their Irish hand dancing, thanks to this video shot and directed by Jonny Reed. Their collective name is Up and Over It! There’s something so charmingly Keatonesque about their placid faces and frantically leaping limbs, isn’t there?
That ultra catchy song they’re dancing to is “We No Speak Americano”, a collaborative track by Yolanda Be Cool and DCup that heavily samples the 1956 hit “Tu vuò fà l’americano” by the lively Italian singer/pianist Renato Carosone.
An animated short of MAXIMUM MEMEWORTHY ADORABLENESS, directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp. (“I am a director and an editor. And I literally got a college degree in making movies! You believe that? A COLLEGE DEGREE. College for movies? Hah! Can you beat it? I don’t think so– movies are the best!”) He is made of awesome. Go check out his website RITE NAO.
Marcel the Shell is voiced (“untreated and unenhanced”) by Jenny Slate– yes, the very same Jenny who dropped an F-Bomb during the live taping of her SNL debut. Prepare to squee your pants.
So sayeth my old chum and fellow east bay resident, author Eli Brown, regarding this viral video of four phenomenally talented young guys TURF dancing in the rain at the corner of 90th Ave and MacArthur in East Oakland:
No Noize (red jacket), Man (black jacket), BJ (striped shirt), D Real (white shirt). Directed and edited by Yoram Savion.
TURF stands for “Taking Up Room on the Floor”. It’s a roughly decade-old form of street dancing that originated in Oaktown. This particular footage was shot a little under a year ago. Via the Bay Citizen:
In contrast to other street dances, TURF aims to tell a story. And so “Dancing in the Rain” is a memorial to dancer D Real’s (he’s in the white shirt) brother Rich, who was killed in a car accident on that corner.
The day after Rich died, D Real and a few dancers were gathered in YAK Films’ Yoram Savion’s office at Youth UpRising trying to think of a tribute that went beyond the standard R.I.P. T-shirt. Youth UpRising is a youth leadership center in Oakland with a professional dance studio.
Before his brother’s death, D Real had strayed from dancing and was beginning to dabble in music. In one of their last conversations, Rich told D Real to forget about music and focus on dancing, his real talent. So in memory of Rich, D Real and three friends who were willing to brave the pouring rain danced for this this video.
The aforementioned YAK Films production team has one seriously mind-blowing YouTube channel, and their mission statement brings joyful tears to my eyes:
It’s been over a year since Michael Jackson’s death. We still haven’t published any sort of commemoration, which may seem a little weird for a site that’s devoted thismuchrealestate to the Jacksons. While I can’t speak for my co-editors, I know that it’s taken me this long to absorb the idea of MJ being dead, let alone write about it. And, honestly, who really wants to add to the deluge?
With all the dismal tabloid dookie and conspiracytheories floating around out there, it’s heartening to see people like Sam Tsui and Kurt Schneider simply take inspiration from the once-king of pop and pay tribute with a multi-layered a cappella medley. Though the video looks simple enough, that’s all Sam, with Kurt beat-boxing over to the left. A-dork-able!
The YouTube channel of Toby Turner (aka Tobuscus) has been a guilty pleasure ’round these parts ever since he first posted “FALCOR THE URINATOR” back in 2007. That’s a very long time in internet years– almost as long as the amount of time that someone here at the compound [not naming names] has been secretively compiling a vast personal stoke material archive of erotic clipsof amorousturtles. Imagine [REDACTED]’s joy when they discovered that Tobuscus made this remix:
The Floria Sigismondi wet dream that is iamaiwhoami (Jonna Lee?) has finally taken the next step in her personal YouTube evolution, from feral avant garde video antihero to fully-fledged electro chanteuse, and she is lovely.
It’s fairly straightforward –albeit spooky– electronica. The song’s driving melody is even a bit reminiscent of those daffy chugging synths Limahl used for the Neverending Story theme song, with an added dash of Deep Breakfast. And yet? “o” is putting the same loamy glow in my bones that initial exposure to Goldfrapp, Julia Frodahl, Karin Dreijer Andersson, Björk, Julee Cruise and female surrealists like Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington once did. I remain intrigued as ever.
Leeds-based musician Brett Domino and his buddies have been up to YouTube shenanigans for a while now, but this Justin Timberlake medley performed by Domino and Steven Peavis takes the cake, especially in terms of video editing and complexity of arrangement. Instruments featured: Stylophone Beatbox, iPod Touch (using the DigiDrummer Lite app), kazoo, thumb piano, egg shaker, stylophone, cowbell, recorder, ukulele, theremin, spoons, and Roland AX-Synth. NERD UP.
