they announced the release of the next series of dvds from the directors label, who put out the great spike jonze, chris cunningham, and michel gondry compilations a while back. out in september: anton corbijn, johnathan glazer, mark romanek, and stephane sednaoui. i think romanek is the best of the bunch - probably would be my unpopular first choice over jonze, cunningham, and gondry as well - and can't wai
t to get my hands on a copy of his dvd as his music videos have become increasingly hard to find online. the video for lenny kravitz's "are you gonna go my way?" was one of the first videos that made me take short form film seriously. jay-z's "99 problems" is the best hip-hop video ever made and would definitely make my general top five list. i think the most influential, however, is the terribly underrated video for bowie's "jump, they say", which marks an aesthetic turning point in that it utilizes elements of high budget videos shot by fashion 
photographers (madonna by herb ritts, etc) as well as a futuristic narrative that, up to that point, had been poorly executed. not only did it birth such videos as blur's "the universal" and namecheck chris marker, but i think it can be seen as an early embodiment of murakami's superflat style...and bowie wears cool suits all the way through.again, come see me spin on saturday
the knife just can't be stopped.
snag the dahlback & dahlback remix of "pass this on" for weekend listening. someone smack me in the mouth if i forget to play it saturday night
I don't think anyone anticipated how influential the director's series DVDs became. It was literally impossible to have a serious discussion about music videos or animation (via Gondry) with a group of college kids in the last five years without one or another coming up. Just another of those strange, sideways influences on a generation that went from picasso porn to the internet, animaniacs to Arrested Development.
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