Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

Archive for the ‘YouTube’ Category

The new Alice in Wonderland movie is only the latest film adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s novel. There have been over twenty earlier versions. It’s hard to give an exact number — do you want to count the X-rated musical version, the animated sequel Alice in Wonderland in Paris, and the direct-to-TV Muppet version?

The first film version was a 1903 British production directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, with Mabel Clark in the role of Alice, and Mrs. Hepworth playing both the White Rabbit and the Red Queen. Only a single incomplete original print has survived, and the British Film Institute has partially restored it. It’s brief and dreamy, but the special effects are pretty good for the time, especially when Alice changes size and is trapped in the White Rabbit’s home. I also really liked the playing card costumes, which are faithful to the original Tenniel illustrations. It really looks like they had a good time making this!

Alice in Wonderland (1903) — More information about this film from BFI Online

Clara Cannucciari, the 94-year-old star of Great Depression Cooking with Clara, cooks pizza, one of her favorite foods. Clara likes her pizza pretty simple, the way her mother made it, without “all this fancy stuff that they put in now, we couldn’t afford that, but we were happy with the plain pizza.”

I love Clara, the Italian-American grandma we all had or should have had!

You never know what you’ll find when you go searching around on YouTube. I have written here before about searching for the song Peoria. I was hoping to find a performance of the song by Bob Scobey’s Frisco Band that I remembered from my childhood, but instead I found a lively performance by the Duesseldorfer Banjo Club.

Last night I was searching again, this time looking for videos of Clancy Hayes, popular singer and banjo player who did the vocals for the Bob Scobey’s Frisco Band. What I found was a record I didn’t know existed, Hayes singing a song for Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1960 Presidential campaign.

It’s a catchy number, featuring lines like this:

They’ve proved they have the know-how
To guide our ship of state
Through fair and stormy weather
That’s for sure!

Not much video in this video — it’s just a still shot of the record. Great Tweed label, though!

YouTube’s Music Discovery Project is a great new tool that produces playlists of music videos. Enter a name, and you get back a playlist of videos by that artist, a list of related artists, and a “mix tape” of videos of your artist and similar performers. You can deselect any videos you don’t like, and save the playlist to your YouTube account.

The examples on the YouTube page are people like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift and the Black-Eyed Peas, but I’ve found it works just as well with the real oldies like Cab Calloway, Jack Teagarden and Kate Smith.

There are a lot of music recommendation services and personalized internet radio services out there which may have more features, but I like the speed and simplicity of YouTube’s service, along with the video content that’s available here, especially for the old stuff. None of the recommendation services are perfect, but I like using them even if I disagree with a lot of the selections. This can be a good way to find new artists — or in my case, new OLD artists.

Here’s a screenshot of the Mix Tape page for Jack Teagarden. You can click on this to see a larger image, or better yet, just go to YouTube and try this yourself! You don’t need to have a YouTube account to try this, only to save the playlist.

• Music Discovery Project — Direct link to this YouTube service
• Jack Teagarden and Friends — My video mix playlist of Jack Teagarden and similar artists
• YouTube Music Discovery — Post from the unofficial Google Operating System blog
• YouTube Launches Music Discovery Project “Disco” — Post from RollingStone