30 Rock Rocks

The NBC sitcom 30 Rock just finished its 21-episode, first season on Thursday. Good news is that it'll be back for a second season. The troubling news is that it's been in third place and, sometimes, fourth -- behind CSI, Grey's Anatomy and (gasp) Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Along with The Office (yes, the American version), it's the best written comedy on TV right now. So how can you as a non-Nielsen household show 30 Rock some love? Watch the episodes for free (with limited commercial sponsorship) here. Or even better, buy episodes -- or the whole season -- at iTunes. (NBC will be watching both of those numbers.) If you haven't seen the show, the clip above does a great job of explaining the premise.

Some episodes that were real highlights this season include: Blind Date, Jack the Writer, Up All Night, Hard Ball, The Fighting Irish and Fireworks. And just a note on the music written by Jeff Richmond, who happens to be married to Tina Fey. It's the perfect acccompaniment for the show's shenanigans in and around Rockefeller Center. For fans of Kenneth the Page, here's a video interview with Jack McBrayer on The Sound of Young America. Oh, and keep your fingers crossed that Alec Baldwin comes back next season.

Nora & Conan

You may have seen Nora, the piano-playing cat on YouTube. (One clip has had more than 3 million views.) Well, Nora made a "guest" appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien this week, as shown in the clip above. The sketch didn't go exactly as planned. Herding cats -- or getting them to play the piano -- is never easy, but it can be funny.

The Art Depot

Last month The Armory Show set up its tent at Pier 94 on the west side of Manhattan for a fun, eclectic, unpretentious mix of artwork. One highlight (pictured at left) was Mierle Laderman Ukeles' reflective garbage truck slash "Social Mirror." She was an artist-in-residence for the New York City sanitation department in the 1980s. More looking-glass images here.

Glenn Kaino created an oversized chess board with metal hands as pieces. Its official title? "Learn to win or you will take losing for granted." His dealer? The Project. Doug Aitken (repped by Victoria Miro) used simple letter-shaped lightboxes to communicate his message: Disappear. Aitken is fresh off his Sleepwalkers project that appeared on walls of the MoMA. The exterior walls. For a slide show from The New York Times with their picks from The Armory Show go here. Get a critical wrap-up here.

Lightbox as magnifying glass

Photographer Jeff Wall presents his visual narratives on jumbo, wall-mounted lightboxes. (The image above, Restoration, is nearly 47 feet by 17 feet.) A recent cover story in The New York Times Magazine on Wall detailed the genesis of his oversized, luminscent style. Like many good things, it began in Spain. "[T]he impression made on him by the Velázquez paintings in the Prado reverberated with the advertising light boxes that he encountered on the side of bus kiosks as he traveled, setting off an explosive artistic reaction when he got back to Vancouver. 'I saw the Velázquez, Goya, Titian — I loved it and wanted to be part of it somehow,' he told me. 'Every time the bus stopped, you were looking out the window, and there was a sign in a light box. I began to think, It’s luminous, Velázquez was luminous, I’ll try it. I thought, It has a certain vulgar quality, a rough quality, a slightly uncivilized air they brought to high painting.'" Forty of Wall's photos are at the MoMA through May 14. Particularly interesting is Wall's recreation of a Japanese woodblock print by Hokusai.

Double takes for U2

One song. Two incredible videos. Director Jonas Odell (with skilled assistance from Nexus Productions and FilmTecknarna) turns flat photographs into a three-dimensional journey through iconic landscapes reminiscent of the group's early album art. Watch Odell & Co.'s video for U2's "Window in the Skies" here.

Now for something completely different, Gary Kroepke and his crew at ad agency Modernista! (their exlamation point, not mine) team up with post-production and effects house The Mill. The result? Other musicians -- from Frank Sinatra to Jimi Hendrix to Nina Simone to Thom Yorke -- bring the song to life. Watch their video. (An ambitious blogger breaks it down scene by scene, guest star by guest star, here.)

What can you buy for $1.2 trillion?

A "doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives...universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds...The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur," according to this piece by David Leonhardt in The New York Times. Leonhardt continues, "All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another: The war in Iraq." Links to the economic studies and number crunching here and here.

The Sound of (Gwen Stefani's) Music

Ran across this video of the Gwen Stefani track "Wind It Up" and was struck with the number of references to "The Sound of Music." The song, produced by the Neptunes, opens with a sample from "The Lonely Goatherd" and even has some yodeling. Director Sophie Muller reinterprets Alpine skies, a nun's habit, the von Trapp estate, scary thunderstorms and playclothes made from drapes. Watch the original goatherd puppet show from the 1965 Robert Wise film here. This isn't Stefani's first foray into borrowing from musicals. Earlier, she teamed up with Eve to rework a "Fiddler on the Roof" song as "Rich Girl."

The $150 Laptop

It's not coming to a store near you. But millions will be shipped next year to schoolchildren in developing countries, including Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Thailand and Libya. The computer, known as the XO, is the brainchild of the One Laptop per Child foundation, a spin-off of MIT Media Lab. OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte outlines the program in this Q&A. It's Linux-based, and you won't find standard office software on it. "[C]hildren are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint...I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools." Read more about the specs here or take a video tour here.

Jon Stewart, unscripted

On October 8, 2006, Jon Stewart stepped out from behind his desk on "The Daily Show" and spoke with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. In this audio clip of the conversation, Stewart talks about: the similarities between politics and show business; Fox News; and the perception that his show is a news source. (Stewart's interview starts at 12:05.) A few transcribed quotes are below.

On Washington vs. Hollywood: "We traffic in government and Hollywood, for the most part. And the similarities between the two cultures are so stunning that it's hard to imagine they are ever at odds with each other...They always used to say that politics is show business for ugly people, but I believe that show business is politics for the powerless."

Stewart on the "rudderless protoplasm" of news today: "In the media atmosphere, you either bring clarity or noise. And for the most part, the people that have overtaken the business have the biggest noisemakers...I think Fox knows what they're doing and CNN doesn't...They don't know why they exist...There's no editorial point of view...Fox News is actively pursuing something. They are actively pursuing what they feel is an editorial slant in the other media that they need to correct. So they believe that they are a corrective...a salve to whatever they thought is festering in the media culture. They're wrong...We are reactive in the same way, except we just think that what's wrong is that most of it is theater and very little is authentic. So, the reason that you have to be reactive is government and corporations work non-stop, incessantly, 24 hours a day to create noise. And if you're just reporting...what you're reporting is the smoke from the machine."

On his show as a news source: "People put up our show as a news show because they feel underserved by news shows. It says nothing about our show's news ability...We're not journalists. We have one guy with a TiVO...We're cranky people, like, that would sit in a bar and yell at the TV. Only somebody gave us a show. But the reason people keep presenting us in that manner is because they feel sad about what they're being served with."

In a related story, Ben Karlin, the executive producer and former head writer for Stewart's show, is stepping down. (No punchline to follow. But here's an NPR interview with Karlin from April 2006.)

Happy fifth birthday, iPod!

On October 22, 2001 Apple introduced a pocket-sized, portable device that held 1,000 songs. In the original press release, Steve Jobs said, “With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.” What might have seemed like marketing hyperbole at the time has proven itself quite true. However, the beginning was bumpy. Apple's rip, mix, burn philosophy drew the ire of the music industry. So, to create a marketplace for legitimate digital downloads, Apple began to talk to record labels. (Some news organizations even mistakenly reported that Apple was buying Vivendi Universal's music division.) What the Cupertino-based company came up with was the iTunes Music Store. A revolution for both the computer and music industries. Over 60 million iPods have been sold over the past 5 years, and the latest incarnation is a matchbook-sized iPod shuffle. But what's next?

Big Yellow Taxi

What if you hopped in a cab and ended up a contestant on a quiz show? That's the premise of the Discovery Channel's show, "Cash Cab." In the clip above, a contestant/passenger gets some help from a pedestrian. Volkswagen does their own version in a Rabbit (minus the cash) in the Gypsy Cab Project. But for those of us who have to pay for our cab rides in New York, fares have just doubled when stuck in traffic. Good news is that there are 11 different hybrid vehicles in the city's fleet, including a Lexus RX.

Underdog Chefs

British food can be peculiar, insular, of questionable nutritional value and, at times, a disgrace. Bubble and squeak. Aspic. Marmite. The bacon butty. So why is it that Britain produces so many chefs who find an international following? Do they have more obstacles to overcome when they start out and therefore try harder? Do they purposely look for a platform outside their homeland because they know their countrymen's tastes? Below are a few of them who've created a wider appeal.

Jamie Oliver cooks with a conscience. His restaurant Fifteen employs young people whom other places wouldn't even think of hiring. Now, he's crusading for better school lunches, as seen in the promo above. And not everyone is happy about it. Gordon Ramsay's eponymous restaurant in London has three stars from Michelin and a price tag to match. And his eagerly anticipated new eatery across the Atlantic opens at the London NYC Hotel next month. On TV he dishes out some tough love to hapless chefs and restauranteurs on "Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares." Nigella Lawson remains the queen of comfort food that's still far more sophisticated than anything Paula Deen would whip up. While Tom Parker-Bowles isn't quite a household name yet, his mother Camilla is. The stepson of the future king of England cooks and has assembled recipes from around the world in his new book.

Reinventing the wheel. Or the rocking chair.

Stumbled onto the 100% Design show in London, and a few pieces really jumped out as smart, inventive and entertaining. The picture is of a rocker called Ku-Dir-Ka by Lithuanian designer Paulius Vitkauskas. The floor model was bright green, but it's also available in black and red according to its manufacturer, Contraforma. Designer Anthony Dickens takes a whole new look at time with clocks that scroll in a linear fashion while others rotate like a carousel. Andrew Lang has created something that looks like a flower pot screwed to the wall. Instead, you lock your bike to it. No need for big bike racks. A design group called Asobi from Slovenia crushes all sense of scale with their XXL suggestion for public seating, the Isle Lounge. Dead Good brings cool Britannia to a mirror. The London office of ad agency Wieden & Kennedy even got in on the act, sponsoring a design contest for a new product that reprepresents them . It's very democratic. Vote here.

Five years later

A tribute in light, through 2008 at least. A renewed effort to build a physical memorial. What if that morning had never happened? Rounding out a neighborhood by building up. And Santiago Calatrava's designs for the new transit hub.

Everybody's crazy

Jody Rosen of Slate.com has a great piece on the large number of covers out there for the Gnarls Barkley track "Crazy." It seems to be the lingua franca on this summer's music circuit for groups like the Raconteurs, Of Montreal and the Kooks. Even better, Rosen unearths the Ennio Morricone track that's the basis for the song's main riff.

Six years of every day

Photographer Noah Kalina has been taking one picture of himself every day for the past six years. And he's strung all the photos together into a video. Music by Carly Comando. Listen on her My Space here. Two more similar projects (by different photographers) are here and here. And what would a trend be without a spoof?