- Spike Jonze will be a busy man at Sunday’s YouTube Music Awards. Jonze
has revealed that he will be directing live music videos for multiple artists
during Sunday’s show, including indie rockers Arcade Fire and pop hack/walking
publicity stunt Lady Gaga. The first-ever YouTube Awards will take place at
Pier 36 in New York, with actor and indie rocker Jason Schwartzman hosting. Jonze,
director of “Where the Wild Things Are” among many other projects, will serve
as creative director for the show. Like many of its most popular videos, the
show will be brief – 90 minutes – and there will be a mere six awards handed
out during its hour and a half of existence. There will also be live
performances from a collection of artists that are mostly terrible - Lady Gaga,
MIA, Tyler, The Creator and Earl Sweatshirt – with Arcade Fire and Eminem the
two primary exceptions. In YouTube fashion, the show will be streamed live for
the world and Jonze will have the unique task of creating visuals as the
ceremony happens, including a music video for Arcade Fire as they perform their
new track “Afterlife.” "It’ll be really interesting to try and pull it
off," Jonze said. "We have a whole handful of directors, we’re mixing
the music video film world in with the live broadcast world and trying to make
live music videos." He also knows that the logistics of such an effort
will be difficult, but there will be plenty of hands on deck for the project. "We
have this big warehouse so instead of it being in a theatre where everyone’s
performing their song to an audience we’re going to have sets all around the
warehouse and each artist will have a different set,” Jonze added. “There are
different ideas, some have narratives, one of them doesn’t really have the
artist in it. We're trying to take the music video format and produce it
live." Despite being an accomplished director, Jonze admitted his nervous
about the night. Live TV can do that to people……..
- Aaaaaand the mystery deepens. The curious case of Costa Concordia
cruise liner Captain Francesco Schettino already has plenty of dramatic angles,
but the addition of a young Moldovan dancer who was on the bridge of the ship
with the cowardly captain when it capsized last year is intriguing nonetheless.
Domnica Cemortan had previously denied any affair with Schettino, but she
admitted this week that she had been his lover. Schettino faces multiple
charges including manslaughter and Cemortan’s previous testimony casting him in
a positive light will now be called into question. Hranted, she was pretty much
the only one describing him as a hero for allegedly bringing the ship nearer to
shore rather than letting it sink out at sea, but her words are now rendered largely important. The Costa
Concordia partially sank on Jan. 13, 2012, off the Tuscan island of Giglio,
when it hit a reef. Thirty-two people died and at the time of the crash, the
boat was carrying more than 4,000 passengers and crew. When she took the
stand on Tuesday, Cemortan initially refused to say whether she had a
"love story" with the captain, who is married. When she was
warned about possible contempt of court charges if she did not reply, Cemortan
said, in Romanian through an Italian translator: "Yes, I had a
relationship with him." However, she insisted she had not seen Schettino
since the shipwreck. Cemortan also admitted that she had boarded the ship that
same day without a ticket, adding: "When you're somebody's lover they
don't ask you for a ticket.” Mark this down as the 1,007,104,887th time in the
history of humanity that someone has been totally lying when they insisted that
a person with whom they were having an affair was “just a friend.” This friend
joined the negligent captain on the bridge as a guest when he steered the ship
too close to Giglio island and was dining with him just before the wreck. The
trial is ongoing in a specially adapted theatre in the Tuscan city of Grosseto
after reopening last month following an operation to raise the Concordia, which
had been lying on its side, which opened the way for a search for clues on what
had caused the accident. In addition to the manslaughter charges, Schettino
also faces charges of causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship………
- The Florida
Atlantic Owls are a bad college football team. How bad? Bad enough to drive two
of their coaches to (allegedly) start rolling fatties and looking to blaze
their troubles away. At least that’s how it looks after FAU head coach Carl
Pelini and defensive coordinator Pete Rekstis resigned over allegations of
illegal drug use. According to sources close to the situation, the coaches
attended a recent social event at which marijuana was used and although it was
an isolated incident, everyone involved mysteriously agreed that it was in the
best interest of the program that the coaches resign. Those facts don’t add up
unless Pelini and Rekstis were sitting in a stoner circle and passed the bong
around with the rest of the Phish-loving chron smokers, Athletic director Pat
Chun confirmed that Pelini and Rekstis tendered their resignations after he
confronted them about rumors of their use of illegal drugs. "On Monday, I
was made aware of these concerns and I immediately reported the allegations to
our General Counsel," Chun said. "The university acted quickly and
decisively to follow up and take action that is in the best interests of our
student-athletes and the University overall. I can assure you that we have no
information that suggests anyone other than these two individuals engaged in
these activities.” Chan also released a statement purportedly from Pelini in
which the now-former coach apologized for his “poor judgment” and expressed
concern only for the well-being of the players and coaches he left behind. The
concern was clearly not as strong as the pull of the fattie he and his
coordinator toked off of, but it’s not as if the two of them are leaving a
program at the apex of its success. Pelini exits campus with a 5-15 record an
the Owls are coming off a 45-10 loss to Auburn……..
- Someone’s been busy chasing their dream of being a mole person
under the ground near the border between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico. These bold
folks have created a massive underground passageway that zigzagged all over the
map and was so sophisticated that officials who discovered it actually showed
it the respect of dubbing it a "super tunnel." This behemoth of
manual earth-moving skill stretched the length of nearly six football fields
and had lighting, ventilation and an electric rail system to make it a prime
route for smuggling all manner of drugs across the border. It measures 35 feet deep, 4 feet tall and 3 feet
wide and was (allegedly) built by one of Mexico's most notorious criminal
organizations, the Sinaloa cartel, U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said following its
discovery. So far, three people are in custody and could face federal charges
after investigators seized more than 8 tons of marijuana and 325 pounds of
cocaine linked to the tunnel. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
confirmed the arrests one day after they shut down what they described as the
newly completed and "highly sophisticated" tunnel. It briefly linked a
warehouse in Mexico with another warehouse in a California industrial park.
Clearly, the powers that be are feeling themselves right now and Duffy could
not wait to pop her (figurative) jersey and thump her chest in triumph. "If
you continue to build and attempt to use these tunnels, we are determined to
make this a big waste of your dirty money," she said in a message aimed at
other cartels. "Not only will we take your drugs and shut down your
tunnels before you even get an opportunity to use them, but we're now in a
position where we're going after your management." Slow your roll,
Duff-meister, because the more challenges you issue, the more mole people you’re
going to have to battle……..
- The news from the Peruvian Amazon is not good. As it turns out,
the always-fun ravaging of the ecosystem by a surge in illegal gold mining is
twice as bad as researchers had thought. A chuckle-inducing new study using a
type of groundbreaking technology that’s discovered thousands of previously
undetected small mines in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, near the Bolivian
border, unearthed the bad news. The region is a global biodiversity hotspot
full of rare wildlife and as a result, it also hosts various nature and
indigenous reserves and dozens of thriving jungle lodges that attract tourists
from around the world. Unfortunately, its valuable natural resources has
provided a perfect stage for hordes of greedy gold miners unleashing widespread
devastation since the 2008 global financial crisis saw gold prices skyrocket.
Thousands and thousands of miners (some of them possibly minor miners) have
flooded the region and set to dredging riverbeds and carving up vast tracts of
the forest floor in remotes areas beyond the reach of the local authorities.
These enviro-ignorant kooks have poisoned the water table for miles around by
dumping hundreds of tons of mercury, which they use to extract gold from the
soil. According to this report, authored by the Carnegie Institution for
Science and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(seriously guys, an acronym wouldn’t kill you), the mining has cleared 15,180
acres of forest per year since 2008 – roughly the size of 20 Central Parks. That figure is twice
previous estimates and it was made possible by a new technology known as LiDAR,
which consists of a laser mounted on a plane overflying the Amazon that creates
3D maps of the forest in far greater detail than anything previously achieved………
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