Category: things I love

A video I love and why

You may credit (or blame) Tim Nekritz for inspiring me to post the following. It’s in response to his “invitation to join me in the blogosphere for a conversation titled A Video I Love And Why, where anyone is welcome to blog about or discuss great web video.”

For his entry, Tim chose the poignant and powerful With Glowing Hearts video from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. It’s a great video, and Tim provides a solid list of reasons for why it appeals to him.

And now for something completely different.

I’ve opted for a less polished, animated piece called Battle of the Album Covers. (Warning: Nothing poignant to see here, but there is some blood, gratuitous violence and frontal nudity.)

Why do I love it? Well, let’s see:

1. The concept. Breathing motion and cartoon life into album art is just a clever concept. I wish I’d thought of it.

2. A tribute to a lost art form. Album cover art is an under-appreciated and nearly extinct pop art form. This video captures many well-known album covers, along with some obscure titles, and sets them in motion through some brilliant animation.

3. How many can you spot? Don’t you love those games that challenge you to spot as many things as possible? I do. Hence, I love this video.

4. Four Pink Floyd album covers. Did you find them all?

5. The humor. OK, so it’s sick, twisted humor, maybe. But it’s funny. At least I think so.

6. The production values. What production values? Precisely. This is not high art. It’s folk art — of the people, by the people, for the people. It’s what YouTube was created for. It’s punk.

So, there’s my entry. Let’s keep this meme going. Blog about a video love and tell us why, then let Tim and me know about it.

Off-topic: 15 minutes, 15 memorable books

Stephen Baker (BusinessWeek writer, author of The Num3rati and @stevebaker on Twitter) issued an interesting challenge via Twitter this morning:

In less than 15 minutes list the 15 most memorable books you’ve ever read. (Baker’s list.)

It was pretty easy to come up with an off-the-cuff list of memorable books in the alloted time frame (see below). But Baker’s challenge (actually a Facebook meme that he moved into the blogosphere) got me thinking about what 15 memorable books I would list that pertain to marketing, public relations and communications. That is a blog post for another day. For now, here’s my contribution to the 15 memorable books meme.

  1. The Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor. A master storyteller whose characters and descriptions offer a glimpse behind the veil of the material world. (I also recommend her collection of essays and letters, Mystery and Manners, for those interested in the craft of writing fiction.)
  2. The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. Brilliant, spare tales from Vietnam, from one who was there.
  3. What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg. A great American novel about a great Americal obsession: blind ambition and the quest for fame.
  4. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, by Lester Bangs. Bangs was the mad genius rock critic. His style was over the top and excessive, as was his lifestyle, but also insightful. This is a collection of his best writings, published and unpublished.
  5. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. Greatest comic novel ever.
  6. Geronimo Rex, by Barry Hannah. An underrated coming-of-age story from one of the south’s great writers of fiction.
  7. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. This novel taught me more about theology and the human condition than any other book.
  8. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Not sure I have the fortitude to read this one again (read it twice) but its magical realism stuck with me.
  9. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey. Randall Patrick McMurphy: Christ figure.
  10. A Confession, by Leo Tolstoy. The great author’s spiritual journey. Ecclesiastes has nothing on this.
  11. The Ragamuffin Gospel, by Brennan Manning. Here’s where I learned about the power of forgiveness — of self and others.
  12. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. The second-greatest comic novel ever written.
  13. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. Exposed me to my racist self.
  14. Hard Times, by Studs Terkel. This oral history of the Great Depression should be required reading in every business school.
  15. Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe. The best writings from the master of suspense. Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock owe a debt of gratitude to Poe.

Creating that list took all of 10 minutes. (The links and descriptions took longer.) I could probably list another 15 memorable in another 10 minutes.

How about you? What are the 15 most memorable books you’ve ever read? If you want to play along, post on your own blog (or in the comments below) and leave a comment with a link to your list.