bloggie blog

For some reason, the song I Try by Macy Gray has popped up my on radar recently, including a very fun closing bit in an episode of The Office from last season that I just recently saw, the one where Andy appears in a community theater presentation of Sweeney Todd. Great episode! But anyway, back to the song:

Macy Gray sings, “I may appear to be free, but I’m just a prisoner ….” And I think that lyric shows the problem and the wonder of this song. It’s a song that is strong and free, an uninhibited performance by a woman with a solid grasp of her talent. And yet it’s a song about the way in which she’s weak. This strong-weak dichotomy is kind of awesome. It leads me to think the song makes no sense, yet the song keeps pulling me in. Feel me?

So, The Cars are back. My first reaction: Seriously? My second reaction: “Let’s go!” Boy, does this take me back to the day when I pored over the paper insert of their self-titled debut album. Their latest single can be seen on the YouTube:

If you like “Sad Song” with its classic Cars clicky eighths and Ric Ocasek’s vintage voice, you can download it for free from iTunes. The Cars are dead, long live The Cars! (Does not apply to Benjamin Orr, RIP.)

Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and (seemingly) random motion.  Check out the video.

via Pendulum Waves | Video | Gear.

Commercial acting teacher Carolyne Barry has put a series of short videos on YouTube. They are informative snippets that show her teaching commercial acting. You can learn a lot from them, and they also give you a sense of what her classes are like.

There are 18 of these helpful clips, but only about 20% of the viewers of clip 1 have made it through all the clips. This is probably because the title of each video is long, and identical except for the number, and that number gets cut off as the titles are shortened by YouTube, it’s pretty hard to watch them in any sort of order without a lot of clicking around.

Until now.

Visit this YouTube playlist I made, and you’re good to go.