The Grey Video is the brilliant Jay-Z/Beatles music video mashup of DJ Dangermouse’s “Encore” off the infamous Grey Album.
The official site is down, likely a result of popularity or legality, and I don’t know if it’s coming back. Until then, I’m going to mirror the high-quality Quicktime version.
Download: grey_video.mov (Quicktime, 22 MB)
BitTorrent: grey.torrent (thanks, Kyle!)
Also, Matt Haughey is mirroring it.
I received a cease-and-desist from the Walt Disney Corporation for hosting the Kleptones’ Night at the Hip-Hopera mashup. (Disney owns Hollywood Records, who owns the rights to Queen’s catalog.)
The irony is that I’m not even hosting the files anymore… The links on my site are all redirected to someone else’s server, and have been for weeks. At any rate, I’ll be forced to remove the direct links by November 23.
As far as I know, I was the first person to put the DJ Dangermouse’s Grey Album on the Web. Now, I see the suppression of artistic freedom again with the Kleptones album, which has always been freely-distributable and never made a dime. It’s depressing to think that our horribly broken copyright law means that nobody can legally hear this album or create others like it.
The cease-and-desist is below. The album itself can still be downloaded from the mirrors on the official Kleptones site, but I’m not sure for how long. If anyone has any ideas for creative protest, now’s the time.
Update: I’ve compiled a list of active mirrors to download the album. If you want to be added to the list, e-mail me or add a comment.
This morning, Eliot was constantly flailing his arms around while lying in his playpen. It reminded me of Stan, the used-boat salesman from the Secret of Monkey Island:
Yeah, I’m a geek.
Greg Knauss doesn’t have a blog, so I occasionally publish some of his writing here, because it deserves a wider audience. Today, Greg writes:
There is a divide in this country today, miles wide and fathoms deep. It has cleaved our great nation, and has only grown — and will only continue to grow. But it’s not a left/right split, or Democrat/Republican one. It’s lunatic/non-lunatic.
Our culture has been swept along in a tide of emotionally-resonant, steadfastly anti-rational entertainment, and politics is at the head of the wave. The course of our country, the future of our people, is being determined by lizard-brain responses to images designed to trigger sub-rational responses.
Michael Moore and Ann Coulter aren’t opposed to each other, they are each other: determined propagandists, using the language and mediums best suited to strike at the emotional core of their audiences. They do not work from a common set of facts, and would ignore them even if they existed. When they speak well, they’re Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day. When they speak poorly, they’re a spittle-flecked wacko with an “End of the World is Nigh” sign. But that’s just a matter of presentation: they’re all lunatics, asking us to stop thinking and start feeling. And to start feeling what they want us to feel.
This determined emotionalism — which is another way of saying anti-rationalism — is what drives us today. You can find it distasteful, you can find it depressing, but it’s most important impact is that we have turned over the direction of the country — our future — to the part of our psyche that doesn’t want to think.
It’s not about smarts. The lunatics aren’t stupid — just the opposite. It’s about the willingness to abandon the deductive process in favor of epiphany. It’s about the abandonment of the brain in favor of the gut.
Jon Stewart has said all this, of course, and said it better. But it hit home, hard, because I recently discovered — realized — that I am not immune. I edged up against the lunatic side of the divide the past few weeks. I went — close, anyway — mad. I was angry, irrationally furious, to the point of raging at the world — appallingly, my children included — that things were going they way they were. I stared into the abyss, from the wrong side, and it scared me.
A potential reason for my brush has to do with how I spend my time: on the Internet. The Web is a festering cesspool of lunacy and emotion: Free Republic, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Atrios, Instapundit, on and on and on. Facts only enter the picture when they’re favorable. Emotion rules. There is no common ground, nor a desire for any.
That’s a problem.
Left or right, Democrat or Republican, these labels don’t mean much in the face of the looming (or nearly complete) lunatic take-over. Dispassion and reason are qualities that need to be nurtured and promoted from every political viewpoint, even — or especially — in the face of spittle-flecked wackos.
The question is, where do we start?
If you want to comment, take Greg’s advice and keep it reasonable and dispassionate. Whining (or gloating) about the election will be deleted.
With my current host, I have a one terabyte bandwidth quota. That should be enough for most anyone, but apparently not for me:
With less than two hours to go before my October monthly limit is reset, I’ve used 995 of my 1000 GB. (A disturbing 262GB of that was the Tony Hawk/Star Wars Kid video.)
