“We shot the actors pretending to have sex and then had the body doubles who really did have sex and in post we will digital impose the two. So above the waist it will be the star and the below the waist it will be the doubles.” — Louise Vesth, producer of Lars Von Trier’s upcoming two-part sex epic movie ‘Nymphomaniac, which had promised to include graphic sex scenes between actors Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Shia LaBeouf, and Uma Thurman, reveals that won’t technically be the case. So much for seeing LaBeef’s, ahem, beef.

Virgin Atlantic’s new inflight passenger instant messaging system might be the greatest thing ever invented.

Tom Hawking’s list of 50 albums everyone needs to own, with the caveat that he selected one album per year from 1963-2013 is the rarest of lists.

It’s both a comprehensive musical overview of the last half century, touching on many necessary albums and cross-polluting plenty of genres, but it’s also one that is well argued and opens the door for alternative possibilities.

Plus, there are a few nice surprises sprinkled in, especially in the aughts. That’s a hard decade to select because we don’t have the time and retrospectiveness (is that even a word?) to select each year’s defining record. But, Hawking does an admirable job.

In many ways his list is doubly hard since he is selecting records that are not only musically important, but also historically and culturally important as well.

Ray Manzarek, keyboardist and founding member of The Doors, passed away yesterday afternoon from bile duct cancer. He was 74.

The quasi-Baroque introduction Mr. Manzarek brought to the Doors’ 1967 single “Light My Fire“ — a song primarily written by Mr. Krieger — helped make it a million-seller. Along with classical music, Mr. Manzarek also drew on jazz, R&B, cabaret and ragtime. His main instrument was the Vox Continental electric organ, which he claimed to have chosen, Mr. Vitorino said, because it was “easy to carry.”

The Doors’ four-man lineup did not include a bass player; onstage, Mr. Manzarek supplied the bass lines with his left hand, using a Fender Rhodes piano bass, though the band’s studio recordings often added a bassist.

Mr. Densmore said, via e-mail: “There was no keyboard player on the planet more appropriate to support Jim Morrison’s words. Ray, I felt totally in sync with you musically. It was like we were of one mind, holding down the foundation for Robby and Jim to float on top of. I will miss my musical brother.”

After Mr. Morrison’s death, Mr. Manzarek strove to keep the Doors together, led his own bands and continued to influence the Los Angeles underground. He produced “Los Angeles,” the 1980 debut album by the leading Southern California punk band X. But he also kept returning to the music of the Doors, rejoining Mr. Krieger in 2002 in a band whose name became the subject of a long legal battle with Mr. Densmore over use of the Doors’ name. Manzarek-Krieger, as the band was finally named, had more dates booked this year, Mr. Vitorino said.

“I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of my friend and bandmate Ray Manzarek today,“ Mr. Krieger said in a statement. “I’m just glad to have been able to have played Doors songs with him for the last decade. Ray was a huge part of my life and I will always miss him.“

Above is one of best examples of Manzarek’s talent in both signing and piano playing. The Doors were one of the first bands I fell for hard and most of that can be attributed to the playing of Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore. While Morrison could often be ponderous and insufferable, those three had serious musical chops and complimented one another’s unique styles really well.

Not sure what’s more impressive: that Yahoo has rescued and improved the beleaguered photo sharing site under Marissa Mayer or that it now comes with one TB of free storage space. Every other photo sharing site — Facebook/Instagram and Google, particularly — are now playing catch-up. For the first time in a long time, it feels like Flickr is ahead of the pack, invested in its own success, and innovating. That makes me want to resign-up for the service.

Yeah, like you’re not going to watch this the minute it hits theaters.

Mat Honan perfectly captures the good and bad of Google after spending four-hours live-blogging its I/O keynote.

Totally meant to link to this last week, but my trip to Orlando got in the way. Daniel Craig gets his 007 on in this frame for frame brick remake of the opening scene from Casino Royale.[via devour]

Spending $1.1 billion for Tumblr seems like a coup for Yahoo. Tumblr gets its exit strategy without worrying about how to actually make money and Yahoo gets the youth street cred it was sorely lacking.

The big question that is yet unanswered is whether Yahoo will muck this up like most of its acquisitions or can they treat Tumblr similar to how Facebook has treated Instagram? If it’s more like the latter, then this will be a good thing for both.

Time will tell.

Update: It’s official because Marissa Mayer just posted that clever GIF on her, you guessed it, personal tumblr announcing the deal. It’s actually pretty charming.

An older video (from 2010) courtesy of the European PGA Tour in which four golfers attempt to knock clay pigeons out of the sky with a golf ball. Including the missed shots makes the actually hits seem much more epic and worthy of celebration. [Thanks, Tommy!]

EW got a bit of dirt from Marvel about its potential Phase Three plans, which may or may not align with previous rumors that Planet Hulk was on the table.

We’ll save you from jumping over to EW, because they were nice enough to lay it all out in a ten-page slideshow. Fuckers.

Anyway: Ant-Man is definitely happening with Edgar Wright attached to direct; Doctor Strange is one of the “prime candidates” to get his own franchise; there’s a good chance we’ll see Iron Man 4 but Marvel said the character might be recast depending on RDJ; the rest of their report is basically a “no comment” for things like Hulk, Inhumans, or Black Panther or “not working on it but would love to” type of shit for Daredevil, Punisher, Ghost Rider, and Runaways.

So, good sleuthing EW. You really nailed that exclusive.

There’s a Kickstarter going on right now to get a giant coffee table book made of the band’s early days. Seems like $75 is a bit spendy, but then again that’s probably the typical going rate for a big, beautiful, one-of-a-kind coffee table book. Any music history or Pixies fan will probably want this.

“Internally the project was code-named Project Acela, a reference to the high-speed train between Boston and Washington. A team led by Albert Cheng, Ms. Sweeney’s executive vice president for digital media, was given a deadline of May 14, the date of the ABC upfront. While Apple devices came first, other phones and tablets will be supported in the coming months, Mr. Cheng said. Securing the necessary rights from programming providers was laborious, but ABC will be able to stream all of its stations’ local newscasts, syndicated talk shows like “Katie,” and national series like “Grey’s Anatomy.” The live-stream functionality comes at a time when ABC and its broadcast rivals are trying to keep the attention of audiences that are increasingly turning to cable channels and Internet streaming services like Netflix.” — Yes, ABC’s new app let’s users stream live television, which is amazing!, but requires a cable subscription to do so. Even though ABC is kind of free. Anyway, I get it, but it feels appropriate that the project was code-named after America’s high-speed train that isn’t really a high-speed train.

Well, I’ll be. Looks pretty darn good for longtime fans of the show. Lots of funny callbacks and slightly insidery jokes. Seeing this it makes me think there’s no need for a feature film. Just give us a new season of AD every few years and we can call it good. [via complexmag]

It’s only six seconds, so hopefully, we’ll get a longer look later tonight when ABC drops a preview during that fairytale show they air at 8 p.m. It looks Marvel-y, it looks superhero-y, it looks very TV-y!

The biggest thing to note, is it looks like Luke Cage is the guy jumping off the building in the first second. Sadly, not Isiah Mustafa, but still. The prevailing belief is it could be J. August Richards, better known to Angel fans as Charles Gunn. Thoughts? [via Whedonesque]

Update: Here’s the full, 30-second clip.

Carpenter Andy Stewart learned boat-building as a young age because that was his family’s trade. To hear him talk about his craft and the process of hand-making a wooden boat will make you ache for a bygone era that only exists in your mind.

Just as easily, though, Stewart could be discussing boats and boat-building as a greater metaphor for what it takes to succeed in life. No man is an island, not even one living on a boat. [via gizmodo]

Yowzahs.

Skygazers across the Australian Outback were among the lucky few to witness a solar eclipse on Friday as the moon glided between Earth and the sun, blocking everything but a dazzling ring of light.

The celestial spectacle, known as a “ring of fire” eclipse, was the second solar eclipse visible from northern Australia in six months. In November, a total solar eclipse plunged the country’s northeast into darkness, delighting astronomers and tourists who flocked to the region from across the globe to witness it.

The eclipse lasted between three and six minutes, depending on its location, and blacked out around 95 percent of the sun at its peak. A partial eclipse was visible to people in other parts of Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand and the South Pacific.

(Photo by Nicole Hollenbeck 45 miles south of Newman, Australia. The “second sun” is a lens effect.)

I’ve been dying to get a first glimpse of Gravity ever since the movie was in development and there were all kinds of crazy rumors swirling around it, like it would essentially be a single tracking shot in the vein of that famous scene (original doesn’t appear to be on YT) from his excellent Children of Men.

According to Gravity executive producer Chris DeFaria, the movie “opens with a continuous 17-minute shot” that shows everything we see in this trailer. The movie probably won’t be one continuous tracking shot, but what I’ve heard is that there are mostly staged scenes similar in length to the 17-minute opening, wherein we follow what happens to Bullock and Clooney once they have let go.

Gravity comes out on October 4th. Holy shit, though, this left me a bit terrified for Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that I am irrationally terrified of drifting alone in space.

High intensity interval training is essentially the principal for which P90X and Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred are based off of. Those workouts really do work — if you stick to the regiment. That was my biggest problem. Well, my inherent laziness was really my problem. But, anyway, I digress.

Turns out, you don’t have to devote 30 minutes or even an hour per day to get in shape. You can devote as little as seven minutes per day (Farrelly Brothers nailed it way back when!) doing the 12 exercises above. All you need is a wall, a chair, your own body weight and the desire to crank up the intensity. Do each move as intensely as you can for 30 seconds and take a 10 second rest between intervals to let your muscles recover.

The 9 Film Frames Tumblr tries to sum up various movies — capture their story essence, really — by pulling out and arranging nine frames of (digital) celluloid. Above is Roman Polanski’s classic noir Chinatown. [via petapixel]

Slow motion video of little kids trying new foods for the first time. Simple. Perfect. What reaction was your favorite? Mine was the kid who tried pickled onion. [via GND]

GeoGuessr is a cool new game consisting of five rounds wherein you plopped into an unknown location on Google Maps and asked to guess your location. It’s hard. My high score so far is around 11,000. My first thought was this is the next evolution of Andrew Sullivan’s long-running View From Your Window contest.  [via Kottke]

Yes, Roland Kelts is ostensibly writing about the ins-and-outs of translating Japanese author Haruki Murakami from his native tongue into English. But, even within that narrow literary chore are several interesting nuggets about the cultural literary (and otherwise) differences between Japan and America.

It’s nearly impossible to find just one nugget worth pulling out, but I’ll try:

The Japanese language acquires much of its beauty and strength from indirectness — or what English-speakers call vagueness, obscurity, or implied meaning. Subjects are often left unmentioned in Japanese sentences, and onomatopoeia, with vernacular sounds suggesting meaning, is a virtue often difficult if not impossible to replicate in English.

I find this is often the case with anime, as well. There’s a dream-like quality to much of anime, or a magical realism, if you prefer.

Okay, that’s a bit of hyperbole, obviously, because as long as as the government is still engaging in domestic spying and the TSA makes getting through airport security a nightmare, we will constantly experience the ripples of 9/11 in America.

But, I couldn’t help but feel some sense of closure as the spire was placed atop 1 World Trade Center to the height of 1776 feet.

(Photo courtesy of NBC’s Anne Thompson.) More at HyperVocal.

Leno, of course, had nothing to do with the amazingness of this Pump News skit. Someone should just give this couple their own show, stat. [via gawker]

Andy Greenwald, writing for Grantland:

The reason Marvel’s shared movie universe made waves was the visual impact of seeing its iconic characters brought to life, sure. But the reason it continues to make money — truly insane, Tony Stark/Warren Worthington amounts of money — is due precisely to the sort of sprawling serialization usually found on TV.10 TV can’t beat movies by fighting over the unwanted crumbs of empire, the dwindling reserves of crime-fighting C-listers. (Matter-Eater Lad: The Series, coming soon to Hulu Minus!) TV can’t beat movies because, in this instance, movies already won by being TV.

But here’s where the Uncle Ben/Jor-El life lesson comes in. Historically the best television never comes from settling for the stories other mediums won’t tell; it occurs when TV champions the stories that other places can’t.

It’s amazing to me that the current landscape of TV serialization and world-building hasn’t led to more and better superhero TV shows. That could change and hopefully will because the current TV environment is ripe for a masked adventure — beyond the CW’s ‘Arrow’ of course, which is enjoyable on a certain “guilty pleasure” level.

Time will tell if ABC and Joss Whedon can make ‘Agents of SHIELD‘ work for TV.

It’s a little known fact that I’m a huge Rick Moranis fan. It started with the trio of ‘Spaceballs’, ‘Ghostbusters’, and ‘My Blue Heaven’, obviously, and before I knew it I was binge watching Moranis as a young teen relishing his zany comedic timing.

Later, like all Moranis fans, I wondered how such a gifted comedic actor could just walk away from Hollywood at the height of his creative juices with no fanfare. Like Keyser Soze he was just gone.

Moranis, as it’s now known, quietly retired from showbiz in 1997 to raise his kids and devote 100% of his energy to them after his wife passed away from breast cancer.

Anyway, the only Moranis blip on the radar since then has been a 2006 comedy album, The Agoraphobic Cowboy, that was nominated for a Grammy. So, it’s with tremendous excitement to say you can all go to rickmoranis.com now to order his new comedy/music album dropping May 21st.

Now, if we can just get Moranis to be in a movie. Any movie.

“A brilliant American financier and his exotic wife build a lavish mansion in the jungles of Costa Rica, set up a wildlife preserve, and appear to slowly, steadily lose their minds. A spiral of handguns, angry locals, armed guards, uncut diamonds, abduction plots, and a bedroom blazing with 550 Tiffany lamps ends with a body and a compelling mystery: Did John Felix Bender die by his own hand? Or did Ann Bender kill him to escape their crumbling dream?” — Ned Zeman’s Outdoor Magazine article, ‘Love and Madness in the Jungle’, is like The Shining combined with a Raymond Chandler novel and you should totally stash it away for this weekend to read.

Betaworks describes itself as “a company that builds companies,” but really it’s a start-up incubator and the most interesting media technology company at the moment. Lately, it has scooped up a bevvy of smaller companies.

We know they are working on a Google Reader replacement. It bought the much-maligned Digg last year and gave the site a nice facelift, doing the impossible — it revived a dead corpse and made it better. Last month, the company bought a majority stake in Marco Arment’s Instapaper, a best in class read-it-later app with an incredibly devoted user-base.

Those products focus on the distribution side of media, but they have other horses in the stable:

• Combined with other popular Betaworks products focused on analytics, namely, bit.ly, SocialFlow, and Chartbeat, and what they have is a set of modern publishing tools based on data and distribution.
• Digg’s importance can’t be understated because it’s now the consumer-facing portal to slurp all that media down. Really, Betaworks has the chance the turn Digg into a classier version of BuzzFeed that isn’t reliant on advertising because it sells those data and distribution tools to other media companies.
• They also built an addictive iOS game called Dots, which scored a million downloads within a week, and will be used as a Trojan Horse for learning about user-engagement that can be applied to its other products.
• It’s incredibly time consuming to find mobile video entertainment worth watching. Mostly, watching video on mobile is relegated to amateur YouTube videos of cats. Telecast aims to solve that problem by delivering users three 5-minute bursts of high quality, personally tailored video every day.

Further down the line, the company wants to figure out how to package those tools to help publishers produce and distribute better content (a partnership with WordPress/Tumblr seems obvious), help readers discover that content and read it in an optimal setting, and finally, help those publishers in turn make more money.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Betaworks comes out with a publishing API that hooks into their Google Reader, but also one publishers can use to distribute their river of news in a standardized, modern way. Anyway, Betaworks is definitely a company to keep an eye on. They are compiling some really fascinating pieces that could lead to big things.

A slice of David Foster Wallace’s now-legendary Kenyon College commencement speech gets turned into a great short film by The Glossary.

In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we’ve ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education.

We made this video, built around an abridged version of the original audio recording, with the hopes that the core message of the speech could reach a wider audience who might not have otherwise been interested.

Blur was totally right. Modern life is rubbish. However, that being said, you should totally carve out ten minutes of your day to watch this. [via shortformblog]

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a Google Doodle, because, quite frankly, I’ve just grown bored and tired of them. However, I’ll make the exception today, because Google put together a nifty little homage to designer Saul Bass, with a musical interlude from Dave Brubeck’s “Unsquare Dance.”

The following film title sequences are referenced: Psycho, The Man with the Golden Arm, Spartacus, West Side Story, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Anatomy of a Murder, Ocean’s 11, and Around the World in Eighty Days.

Light up a smoke. Pour two fingers of bourbon. Sit back and admire the man’s genius.

The trilogy is complete, or will be, once Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost’s ‘The World’s End’ hits theaters on Aug. 23.

Of course, the trilogy I’m referring to is the trio’s The Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy or Blood and Ice-Cream Trilogy — whichever you prefer to call it.

It includes 2004′s beloved ‘Shaun of the Dead’, a zombie-comedy in which the Cornetto ice cream flavor was Strawberry for the color blood; 2007′s under-appreciated ‘Hot Fuzz’, a buddy-cop action-flick send-up in which the Cornetto ice cream was blue. Word is this time around for the alien-buddy flick the ice cream flavor will be mint green.

‘The World’s End’ looks to be a perfect capstone to the whole shebang.

I don’t feel any urge to buy an Audi, but I will slow clap them to death on this very excellent commercial featuring Leonard Nimoy Vulcan pinching Zachary Quinto. [via geekosystem]

“When people would point to me as a brand instead of just a guy. Or a sum of money, a monetary figure, instead of just a guy. I was always about just telling the best story I can. I had little, artistic movies that I wanted to do. I consider Kiss Kiss Bang Bang to be one of those, oddly. It’s something that had been on my mind a long time.” — Shane Black, will never be able to shun his past as Hollywood’s overpaid action-movie spec script wunderkind extraordinaire, but with the success of Iron Man 3 he has the chance to embark on a his third-act.

It’s safe to assume that everybody in America has seen the interview with Charles Ramsey, the hero neighbor who found the three missing Cleveland women and called 911 — after eating McDonald’s.

There were of course, a bunch to of remixes to hit on Tuesday, but The Gregory Brothers, masters and inventors of the genre, have done us all a solid. [via HV]

I think this movie has a few Academy Award nominees in it, no? All in all, I guess it looks good, but I’m not sure I’d be all that excited to see this if I wasn’t already a fan of the book.

Ray Harryhausen, a legendary visual effects pioneer and stop-motion model animator, passed away at the age of 92.

Harryhausen’s fascination with animated models began when he first saw Willis O’Brien’s creations in KING KONG with his boyhood friend, the author Ray Bradbury in 1933, and he made his first foray into filmmaking in 1935 with home-movies that featured his youthful attempts at model animation. Over the period of the next 46 years, he made some of the genres best known movies – MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), MYSTERIUOUS ISLAND (1961), ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966), THER VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969), three films based on the adventures of SINBAD and CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). He is perhaps best remembered for his extraordinary animation of seven skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) which took him three months to film.

Harryhausen’s genius was in being able to bring his models alive. Whether they were prehistoric dinosaurs or mythological creatures, in Ray’s hands they were no longer puppets but became instead characters in their own right, just as important as the actors they played against and in most cases even more so.

When we talk about Hollywood titans, perhaps nobody else had as much influence on special effects and summer blockbusters as Harryhausen did. In that regard, we can probably praise and blame him for much of what currently see coming out of Hollywood.

Meet Charles Ramsey, who just provided the next news interview destined to become autotuned. I’ve already seen this posted everywhere today, so Ramsey is blowing up.

Not only is he a master interviewer, but he helped rescue three Cleveland girls that were kidnapped back in 2003. While Amanda Berry, Michele Knight and Gina DeJesus can thank Ramsey, the Internet gets to thank him for today’s unintentional comedy.

Charles Ramsey definitely joins the Autotuned News Mount Rushmore with Sweet Dee and Antoine Dobson. [via deathandtaxes]

Reddit was one of Y Combinator’s first successful start-ups back in 2005. Now, the site, which appropriately bills itself as the front page of the Internet, has become one of, if not, the most influential sites in the world because it’s a community, but also “the crib sheet for weary bloggers who need to hit page-view quotas,” as Simon Dumenco so aptly puts it.

Basically, if you read it on Gawker or BuzzFeed, chances are it was on Reddit the day before. If you are watching a goofy video on the local news or Good Morning America that probably means it was on Reddit several days ago.

We’ve already heaped plenty of praise on NPR’s Chana Joffe-Walt, not necessarily for her name — which is definitely gnarly — but because she’s so damn good at what she does. Anyway, The Atlantic looks at the unusual and awesome names of NPR correspondents:

But can you still make it in the radio business with a plain name? Robert Smith of Planet Money told me by email that the only reason to change his name “would be so that I could be more famous. You would remember it better if I ended by reports with, ‘I’m Mobius Tutti.’” But at the same time, he says, “I’m in this business to tell other people’s stories, and not to promote myself or my own name. Being a Robert Smith is always a good reminder that you aren’t that different than the people you cover.”

And really, are NPR names so different from yours and mine? “It’s simply that you don’t hear the staff at Kinko’s saying their names over and over again, out loud,” Smith says. “Kinko’s was founded by Paul Orfalea. If he had said, ‘Paul Orfalea, NPR News, Los Angeles,’ you’d think, what a perfect NPR name.”

Ulaby agrees. “Tell me the names of your co-workers,” she says to people who bring up NPR’s unusual names. “After four or five names, they usually get my point. NPR names are not so weird.” As further evidence, Ulaby points out the bylines in newspapers. “No one ever says, ‘Oh, New York Times reporters have such … unusual names,’” she says, pointing to front page reporters like Douglas Quenqua and Simon Romero.

Then, Neda Ulaby throws a bit of sass in the magazine’s direction:

“And, um, the Atlantic’s masthead?” she asks. “Alexis Madrigal, Conor Friedersdorf, Garance Franke-Ruta, and Geoffrey Gagnon? Not to mention the incomparable Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg. I don’t know who she is but she deserves her own public radio show.”

“We live in the era of President Barack Obama,” Ulaby adds. “Welcome to the new American nomenclature.”

You know how you’re a big fucking nerd? When you can hold a conversation about the names of NPR correspondents like it’s no big deal. I need a new life. Everything about this article hit home in ways that I’m not proud of.