After weeks of clues and a 13-day countdown, Taylor Swift’s comeback single “ME!” has officially dropped. Here are the music video’s best moments in animated gif form because I care about you:
0:05 — Are you sick of the snake motif from Taylor’s Reputation era? Well, so is she. Bye bye, Slytherin aesthetics. Hello, cozy Hufflepuff vibes.
Prelinger Archives, a collection of over 3,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films, meets the Free Music Archive, an ever-growing interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads? In a contest titled “The Past Re-imagined as the Future,” participants were asked to answer that very question. According to the FMA, the 122 resulting videos mashups “are deeply disturbing, abstract, violent, beautiful, and often half-naked.” In pairing the two archives, contestants edited images from the past with technology from the present, merging video with sound in repeated demonstrations of the rich resources available within these open digital libraries.
The San Francisco-based Prelinger Archives, is a stockpile of ephemeral films meant to record, instruct, and sell. In founder and collector Rick Prelinger’s opinion, these tell us more about the history than feature films — or at least more about the ideals and role models of the past. But such material is generally marginalized in favor of more established, highly produced narratives. As a result, the Prelinger Archives contain many reels of original film stock and master negatives that do not exist anywhere else in the world.
The goal of the Prelinger Archives is to make public all this previously inaccessible material. Film by nature necessitates equipment, but after digitization, no more than a computer and a pair of headphones is needed to appreciate such gems as A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire. Instead of preserving and sequestering these often one-of-a-kind films, the Archive seeks to provide preservation and access.
Conversely, a seemingly infinite stream of digitized music is readily available for download with a few clicks of the mouse. The trouble is not finding it for free, but finding it legally, respectfully, and in keeping with the artists’ wishes regarding use. Launched in 2009 and directed by the great New Jersey freeform radio station WFMU, the Free Music Archive is a tightly curated library of free downloadable music. What you can do with a song after downloading it depends on each track’s specific license. With the motto “It’s not just free music; it’s good music,” the FMA provides a hub for musicians, audio curators, podcasters, remix artists, and audiophiles looking for new, rare, and guilt-free tunes.
The range of submissions to “The Past Re-Imagined as the Future” is as diverse as the material represented within the archives themselves. Guidelines for the contest were fairly broad: at least half the sound and video used had to come from the archives and the final product needed to clock in at under fifteen minutes. All the videos are currently online, where the judges — a group of audio, video, and artistic professionals scattered across the globe — will pick their favorites, and where you can weigh in on the popular choice winner.
In just a small sampling of the contest video mashups, I watched short documentary narratives, abstract reflections on image and sound, comedic juxtapositions, frenetic collages, and what could only be described as hardcore punk music videos. Pacing varies from glacial to neck-break speeds. Music choices capture the eclecticism of FMA’s offerings.
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For one very self-reflective contribution, On Time, Todd Wiseman sampled an incredible number of sources from the Prelinger Archives, matched with the song “rain scope down” by the artist Leggysalad. The end result is a buoyant non-narrative video that beautifully captures the passage of time, the ways in which it is filled, and how quickly or slowly it can go by. The old-timey footage and variety of people and activities represented by the Prelinger films make perfect sense in this format.
The contest is a fantastic creative prompt, but it also provides participants with a practical lesson on the responsible use of digital resources. Each participant was required to list their many sources and select their own Creative Commons designation, protecting and promoting their work in an informed way. This is something current remix culture of both music and amateur video making is sorely lacking. The Free Music and Prelinger Archives prove there is a middle ground between small- and large-scale distribution that is fertile, inspiring, and just waiting to be remixed.
View all 122 video mashup submissions at videoremix.freemusicarchive.org and vote for your favorites. Voting will continue through November 25, 2012. Winners will be announced online and in a public screening at New York’s Anthology Film Archives on November 29, 2012.
0:31 — Fight scene with Panic! At The Disco’s Brendon Urie, randomly in French? Mais oui! Meredith and Olivia cameos? Absolument! (And they said I would never put my French minor to use.)
0:37 — We’ve all been this hangry.
0:45 — The feeling when you’re having a terrible day and someone asks how you are.
0:57 — Taylor sings, “And there’s a lot of cool chicks out there” and the camera pans to paintings of baby chicks wearing shades and a portrait of the MF-ing Dixie Chicks! I gay gasped. America owes them an apology for being blacklisted during Dubya’s reign, but that’s a subject for another article.
1:09 — I am here for this Jordan almond cosplay.
1:53 — Somewhere out there, Lisa Frank just jumped in her car and is zooming to the courthouse to sue Taylor for stealing her folder vibe. (Unrelated but related: I wonder if that waterfall dress comes in my size.)
02:03 — The bottom dude’s face will be haunting my dreams tonight, for sure.
02:06 — Flowers: too typical. A marriage proposal: hard pass. A kitten: GIMME.
2:22 — Brendon Urie took Mystikal’s encouragement to “shake ya ass” seriously.
2:42 — Taylor is coming for Barney’s gig. And letting us Millennials know we are no longer her target demo. The parents of every child between the ages of one and twelve aren’t ready for how many times they will be forced to listen to this song.
Six Degrees of Separation, the John Guare play and subsequent movie, which begins with an affluent Manhattan couple telling their friends about a really unusual episode that recently transpired.
Mark Pinter as Philip and Kim Martin-Cotten as Lillian
In Another Way Home, the Nadelmans tell their tale with a “we have such a story to tell you” flair. But their story is not an anecdote; it’s a story of a family — their family — in distress. We do indeed want to hear about the Nadelman’s family crisis. The Magic’s world premiere of Ziegler’s play ultimately conveys how badly parents and their children can hurt one another. Earnest sentiments ring true and family dynamics can hit home. Still, under Meredith McDonough’s unbalanced direction, the narrative tone is off-key.
Joey Nadelman (Daniel Petzold), the 16-year-old son is a handful, to say the least. And in the play, Joey, who is in crisis, says the least. Petzold expertly navigates the character’s fuming silences, angry outbursts and inner turmoil. Like Joey, we would like to hear him get a word in edgewise.
Daniel Petzold as Joey and Jeremy Kahn as Mike T.
Petzold’s Joey brings an understated urgency to the play, but Lillian and Phillip Nadelman seize the audience with their verbal busy-ness. There are very few quiet moments in Another Way Home. With its bare stage and self-consciously elaborate eloquence, writerly prose takes center stage, distancing us from the drama.
The Nadelmans directly address their captive audience; whether they are talking about lobster bibs or autism, they are “on.” Are they confiding in us? Are they entertaining us? Are they reciting a staged novel? They stand stiffly, speaking well-practiced, too eloquent prose.
The couple’s intelligent, well-articulate unhappiness could be played for Jewish neuroses, but they are more generic. (They are more East Side WASP than West Side Jewish.)
The parents have traveled from the Upper West Side to a sleep-away camp in Maine, where their problem son is now a CIT (Counselor-in-Training). He has been diagnosed with ADD, then ADHD, autism and then ODD — Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
When his parents arrive at camp, Joey is full-throttle oppositional. Does he have a bad case of being a teenager? Could he be suicidal? His parents are at a loss as to how to speak to him without someone getting pissed off. Mark Pinter plays Phillip, a successful and self-satisfied lawyer who is not sure he really likes his kid. Kim Martin-Cotton’s Lillian is fairly sure she doesn’t really like her life. Neither of them know how to talk to their son. She nags about Joey not wearing sunscreen and not writing letters. She calls her teen daughter (Riley Krull) for advice.
Riley Krull as Nora and Kim Martin-Cotten as Lillian
Mother, father and son get on one another’s last nerve. Into the scene walks, Mike T, a camp counselor who is a breath of fresh, kind and non-oppositional air, bringing sanity and sympathy to the insular Naderman family tension. Although the parents are overbearing, Mike can get them to listen. As Mike, Jeremy Kahn is genuine and appealing. We wait with bated breath (a little) to see if he can be the family’s horse whisperer. Petzold is painfully real as Joey; we must also wait to see if he will survive being a teenage Nadelman.
Another Way Home runs through December 2, 2012 at Magic Theatre in San Francisco. For tickets and information>, visit magictheatre.org.
All photos: Jennifer Reiley.
03:53 — All of a sudden, I’m nostalgic for Gak (and that time I may or may not have done LSD in college).
What do you think of the song? Vote below to have your voice heard (before Putin manipulates the results).
What do y’all think of Taylor Swift’s comeback single, “ME!”? (Listen/watch the music video here: https://t.co/wbIBNs8PQ8) #TaylorSwiftTONIGHT
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