The REAL Real Funtwo Comes Forward: By His Pinky You Will Know Him
The relentless masquerade ball that is the World Wide Web spins on.
The religion of Lonelygirl15 — satanism? Thelema? — is still unknown. And the marvelously talented 12-year-old who performed Sunday at the Indonesian embassy in Washington, D.C. (here shown on keyboards) appears not to be — I repeat not to be — funtwo, of the 7 million views for his rendition of JerryC’s “Canon Rock” on YouTube.
Jeong-Hyun Lim on his now-famous guitar. Note the iconic tan hat at far left.(Photo: Seokyong Lee for The New York Times)
That funtwo — according to highly scientific fingerwork analysis by me, some Times colleagues and the good people of the JerryC fan site forums — seems to be a 22-year-old Korean guitarist named Jeong-Hyun Lim. The tell, believe it or not, was his pinky. In both the famous “guitar” video and another vid of Lim playing “Canon Rock,” the guitarist deploys the surplus digit on his pick hand in a signature way. The pinky’s not stiff; rather, it flaps. And Lim never plants it on the face of the guitar for support, as some guitarists do, when it’s not required to help grab the whammy bar.
He actually seems to show off how little he needs it. He’s that good.
Anyway, he says he made the video in New Zealand. He’s been playing for six years. He lives in Seoul. My plan is to get new video of him playing JerryC’s “Canon Rock”; for now there’s a photo of him, above, on Tuesday.
One impediment: I’m having trouble believing anything. But don’t worry. I’ll learn to trust again.
A Bad Day at YouTube Rock
It’s a stormy day for online video. Yeah, the same week that the New York Press has its Online Video Invasion story on the cover — for you out-of-towners, the NYP is a collicky, free weekly — YouTube went dark.
They claim they are fixing cobwebs or some other fake-casual thing but they are just DOWN.
What’s up, YouTube? (Note: It’s back up.)
And while we’re waiting, some boiler room/Ari Gold types wrote to me to say that the “Big Lebowski” video I linked to was mislabeled NSFW: it was NOT Not Safe for Work. The non-stop swearing in the video is just like a day at the office for them. From now on, then, videos that contain nothing but dirty words will be labels NSFWEOWSOAE. Meaning: Not Safe for Work Except on Wall Street or at Endeavor.
Guitar Childe and Three Detours
Alfonso (a k a funtwo) is real. He weighs about 80 lbs., and he’s currently stuck — I’m not kidding — playing keyboards in a Hillary Duff cover band. We heard him, we saw him. We have video. Keep an eye on this space for more.
In the meantime, vids worth a detour:
* A condensed NSFW version of “The Big Lebowski” that emphasizes its repetitious dialogue (note: much cussing ahead).
* A cool short, that’s too long, from Cannes ‘04.
* Wafa Sultan, Arab psychologist, end of world, nigh, etc.
Funtwo’s Identity: REVEALED!
(Almost.)
Great Internet Guitar God Is ONLY TWELVE!
The mysterious Funtwo.YouTube fanatics in DC: hear Funtwo LIVE tomorrow.
August 8, 2006
Dear Ms. Heffernan, About a month ago, I was very surprised when my colleague told me that my son, Alfonso, (12 years old), appeared on You Tube, and played the electric guitar on “Canon” arranged by Jerry C. His friend gave him maximum anonymity on that video with the name of “Funtwo”. The surprise that I got, was that my son never told me that he could play the electric guitar, since he did not have one. We only have a piano and he has been playing it since he was 7 years old. After I asked him to tell me the whole story behind that, he told me that it happened last year,in the first time he practiced “Canon” rock was in our neighbor’s house.
The Apocalypse Will Be Shot on DV, With Several Takes, Heavily Edited and Uploaded to YouTube
Part of the point of “In the Footsteps of Bin Laden,” reported by Christiane Amanpour (see Q & A below), is that Osama bin Laden knows digital video.
An Al-Qaeda communications committee, according to the documentary, skillfully creates public-service announcements, video news and even b-roll — the context-giving images you see during cutaways from primary action. (The doc says that machine-gun placement is particularly important to him as a filmmaker.)
With the revelation of photo-doctoring at Reuters it’s clear that propaganda can pass as photojournalism, even in mainstream news agencies.
And it’s worth asking: Has Hezbollah learned video technique from Al-Qaeda (or Reuters)? German television shows what they say is a Hezbollah “director” whom detractors call Green Helmet as he manipulates a scene of carnage in Qana, Lebanon, for the cameras. Be warned: it’s extremely grim. It’s also subtitled, and if the Arabic or German translation is wrong, please let Screens know. Also, ignore the editorializing by the German newscaster. She can’t stop using the
word “cynical.”
Mme. Amanpour Sets Us Straight
Christiane Amanpour reporting for CNN in Afghanistan in 2001.(Photo: CNN)
Christiane Amanpour has several enlightening docs coming up on CNN, including “In the Footsteps of Bin Laden,” which will appear on August 23, and “Where Have All the Parents Gone?,” about AIDS orphans, which will appear sometime in September.
She’s also been collaborating in interesting ways with CNN’s online news service, Pipeline.
I asked her what’s good about broadband news. Her responses — and my annotations — follow.
“Pipeline has the time and space not just for short stories and reports, but to play archive reports, to play entire interviews with newsmakers, rather than short snippets and soundbites.”
Excellent.
“I think this is a good service, albeit a little strange sometimes: a couple of weeks ago, for instance, I was on the Northern Israeli front waiting to talk live with the Pipeline anchor, while in my ear (ifb) I was hearing an archive report of mine from Lebanon 1993!!!”
I heard that time-warp report too. It’s called “Beirut Rises from the Ashes.” The lesson is, “Lebanon: Not the Same As It Was in 93.”
Hey, come to think of it, why is that archived report — you have to join Pipeline to see it — getting so much play on Pipeline these days? Are people listening to other counterfactual old news reports? How’re “Tsunamis: They Just Don’t Happen Anymore” (1997), and “Gore: A Landslide in the Offing?” (2000) doing?
“I still believe that while broadband news and the Internet and dotcom news sites, etc. are very practical, I do not think they yet, and may never, carry the same weight, journalistic heft and emotional, or serious social or cultural impact as great TV news. Why? Because “it’s the pictures stupid. And the storytelling.” Simple as that. Of course there are pictures online, but it’s nowhere near the same as watching a magnificently shot TV news report on a big screen with proper sound quality.”
The screen-size question is always a live one, but this makes me think about sound. Do most televisions in people’s houses have “proper sound quality”? Do explosions or cries have to sound a certain way to spur people and governments to action? Not sure.
Read more …
Pied Pipers
Mark my words. Someone, soon, will launch BNN: Broadband News Network.
It’ll be a mangy but awesome news channel that’s independent of linear television, and it’ll have its own twisted web 9.0 logic. The kind only four-year-olds will understand, at least at the launch.
But for now, there’s Pipeline, which is CNN’s members-only video news service. AOL provides Pipeline with all its bandwidth, storage and servers, which makes it reliable, but it’s not exactly gleamingly high-def: it offers about half the standard definition of digitial television.
So it’s blurry and mumbly and, yeah, worse than television. But it’s also worse than good broadband because, being CNN, it’s got that air of a lumbering colonial power amid deranged and wily natives. The real BNN has got to successfully shatter the olde TV news templates with their styled correspondents and their voiceover, voiceover, clip, standup, chyron, ambient sound, soundbyte, sententious summary, map, logo, themesong, And That’s The Way It Is.
That said, there’s some great stuff on Pipeline. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (!) will be here to tell us about it. Christiane? (Stay tuned.)
Time on a Hand
Ned Lamont is not the only one taking online video seriously.
Over in nothing-better-to-do land, weird, unmarried men or layabout guys or just old-fashioned girls
with wage-slave boyfriends are vying for a chance to win nearly four figures’ worth of cash and prizes by putting randomly huge amounts of energy, money and time into making amateur sequels to “Snakes on a Plane,” the forthcoming Samuel L. Jackson movie with the dazzling title.
The sequel must have a title in the form of “Blanks on a Blank.” Predictably, “Unicorns on a Stagecoach” and “Hedgehogs on a Hummer” are entries.
Some of the work is great. Before the site-runners pulled off the live-score posting — some kind of fraud was going on — “Cow on a Helicopter” was leading the pack, with a score of 40. I also like, in no order, “Donkeys on a Wheelchair,” “Aardvarks on a Tank,” “Tarantulas on a Hovercraft” and “Eagles on a Hybrid.” For simple fear factor, though, I turn to “Squirrels in a Car.” But that idea is chilling enough without a movie.
Swimming in the Fishbowl
Bill Maher.(Damian Dovarganes/AP)
I finally checked in with Bill Maher on Amazon Fishbowl. It’s that online Merv Griffin situation. After starting with the premiere, an oldie from the days of James Frey, I found to my grave disappointment that I couldn’t fast-forward through the segments. So catching up took forever.
And I’m not even done. Right now, for example, the Dixie Chicks are still singing “Taking the Long Way” on Fishbowl behind this Word document that I’m writing. Their voices are lurching because I’m running too many applications. Which brings this up: why would I watch a whole live performance of an overplayed song in the middle of a workday anyway? It conveys no new information or entertaining surprises. And it monopolizes my eyes, ears, and applications.
Only comedy! I present Mel Gibson in a fake interview!!! :)
OK, it’s day six of the media’s Gibson blotto bender, days are blurring into nights, and we clearly won’t stop till we finish this kilo. Me, I’ve been waiting all week for the perfect vid reax that will cap off this story so I can go to bed. But no — nothing has defined the hilarity of this thing yet. So I carry on my jittery search.
Oof
The Oof Variations —those gross-out vids in which someone pursues pain or wipes out — are multiplying.
A guy pulling sausages through his sphincter, kids totaling shopping carts, debilitating skateboard accidents. These are the Faces of Near-Death, and the Russians especially seem to love them. Inspired by the TV phenomenon “Jackass,” groups like Glum Team leverage circus arts and moronism to do their sick stunts. But why?!
My guess is that card-sized video on a computer screen threatens to be dry and abstract, and that anything that makes it visceral redeems it. (Office Pirates is onto this.) Good reactions to online video: wincing, cringing, gagging, gawking, groaning, smiling. If it doesn’t register in your body — reread the opening lines of “Lolita” and try not to feel them on your tongue — a video’s not going to work.
A Single-Camera Dramedy, Just in Time for the Fall Season
Give this girl a show.Will someone in Broadband Hollywood just give lonelygirl15 — and, all right, her producer and sidekick danielbeast — their own show already?
In her videos, she perfects the emo girl-in-her-room pose, balancing playful and moody as she muses about her life and times. She has huge online fame; repressive, religious parents who probably know nothing about YouTube; and a sibling-ish love affair with her video editor. What could be more 2006? Obviously the implication from the stills that promote her videos is that she’s going to strip, but she never does, and she controls that shell game by being sweetly deaf to innuendo.
One of her critics — a guy who thinks she’s a fake in part because she’s lighted too beautifully — says her life so far is “almost Shakespearean in the way it played out.” And that cowboy-hatted critic is appealing too! (Of course, she also has her share of protectors. Warning: plenty of cussing ahead.) So it’s time to get “lonelygirl15,” the full-on series, going. Invite the parodists and critics to round out the cast, give some play to the idea that she’s a fake, and create a perfect “My So-Called Life” for the MySpace hordes.
MTV Overdrive, I’m talking to you. (And while we’re at it, MTV, get your broadband channel to work on a Mac NOW.)
Sound and Light
Muted booms in blurry sandstorm light. Is this the face of modern war reporting? It’s digital video — even cell-phone images — shot from balconies. Stunned, resigned, unheroic camerawork.
Choose sides here.
(And don’t forget that other war.)
Götterdämmerung
Sure, Eddie Van Halen is a guitar king on stage, but what about online?(Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press)
Playing insanely hard, speedy neoclassical rock music is not the ticket to stardom anymore. The great guitar shredders — Buckethead, Steve Vai, that Viking guy and all those Italian-Americans — are rarely spotted on Fuse or the MTVs. And if you’re only watching TV, the shredder’s art seems to be as obsolete as the Baroque music it cribs from.
But shred’s not dead! Think about it. Who would be good at highly technical, highly demanding, classically-inspired music that relies heavily on Strads and other kinds of audiophile equipment? And who, of those people, might lack the parents or the social skills that would let them “play out,” especially when that means commanding a stage like Eddie Van Halen? That’s right: those bashful frontmen are our online video friends, especially JerryC and FunTwo.
This Thing Is On
So the camera was rolling, too. That brilliant short film about statecraft — open-mike night starring Bush and Blair in St. Petersburg — appears in its subtitled form on CNN’s version (audio version).
CNNEleven ways of looking at this video:
1. Bush chews his buttery roll with an open frown. 2. Blair’s nuisancey fake-casual hovering. 3. Bonus shot of Koizumi. 4. Chartreuse chairs. 5. Bush: the “irony” is! 6. This suspenseful camerawork — roving, prying shots of men who aren’t on the audio track — should be copied by Hollywood. 7. Bush’s pushy way of stalling: “It’s a process, I agree.” 8. Blair’s nervous Anglo filler: “as it were.” 9. Bush’s nervous homeboy filler: “know what I’m saying?” 10. The only person studying her handouts is the woman, German Chancellor Angela Merkel. 11. Did Putin do it?
The tireless team behind the Bush-Blair “Endless Love” duet should get on this.
The One, the One for Me
About Rocketboom: Joanne is better than Amanda.
About this blog: Who doesn’t love good tech news? And who doesn’t love Mark-Cuban-is-buying-Dan-Rather news?
(What’s that kind of manly gossip called, again? Maybe “business”?)
I know I love tech and business news. But Screens is more sissy than that: it’s about the arts-and-crafts of online video. Like what of all these ventures is beautiful or stupid or smart or hilarious or grim. I’m still here, slowly trying to figure that out. (To recap: In my view, Joanne is beautiful and smart.)
Neep Sleep Becomes Neep Tweest
Mais pourquoi, mais pourquoi, mais pourquoi — why, why, why would the story be dead yet?
Photo: ABCIn a single day, the videos of Zidane bull-ramming that taunting jerk Materazzi during the final match of the World Cup on Sunday has drawn more than 1.5 million views. And counting. That kind of speed is unprecedented on YouTube, and it confirms that online video not only has its Marianne in Paris Hilton, but it has found its marquee body part — the human nipple.
Which is to say that for now the classic nip slip maneuver has been upstaged by the nip twist, the little spark of sadism to the chest that Materazzi seems to have visited on Zizou, provoking the master to his skull slam, and unraveling the match for the French.
That twist, along with Materazzi’s foolproof insult “you son of a terrorist whore”, could have gotten to anyone. C’mon, check out what YouTube bills as the “BEST ANGLE***” on the matter, and see if after some snide sotto voce whatever you too wouldn’t have wanted to bow deeply and ram the guy hard to the ground.
The Sub Standards
Translation persists as a giddy subject for online video. (Yeah, it’s not all Mentos geysers and Ari Gold montages down here in the convergence shack.) MEMRI demonstrates that ideology can haunt translations; that’s why they’re so careful. Be precise with the subtitles and you can cut how you want, and create and distribute video opinion pieces that look almost like file footage.
Fansubs, the amateur-subtitling of anime by English speakers who know some Japanese, are still the way anime fanatics see sparkly-new shows as fast as their manic little fanhearts desire. This kind of subtitling is what Wikipedia calls “highly collaborative”; often dozens of fans work on one show, with each assigned only a minutes-long section of the anime to translate. Within 24 hours after a show has aired in Japan, an English-subtitled version of the program is available online, usually on peer-to-peer distributor like BitTorrent. Read more …
Revelation
The Persians have spoken. The Iranians have spoken. The speakers of Farsi have spoken. With a minor adjustment, the MEMRI translation stands. And Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, is still a saber-rattler who called his soccer team to arms in an apocalyptic-sounding way. Also, as a sports analyst, he favors shooting over running or passing.
Paris, Williamsburg
Paris Hilton: the new Mary Pickford?(Photos: left, Aaron Harris/Associated Press; right, Milestone Films)
Every new technology needs a girl. And just as it’s hard to imagine silent movies without, um, whatshername (pause while I Google) Mary Pickford, would there even be Web video without Paris Hilton?
Hilton looks just right smaller-than-life: on those credit card-sized screens, cocaine-colored hair aswirl, all Mystic-Tanned limbs and coltish gait. We’re getting used to seeing her on computer desktops, framed by abandoned emails and Microsoft Word documents, the workaday stuff we can click on to instantly blot her out, should we ever — though who knows why we would — need a break.
Anyway, beet.tv has a fine newsbreak about how Google Video is gaining on YouTube today, and of course the face of this tech news is Paris. We’ve already seen plenty of online clips of the wardrobe malfunction that serendipitously befell the pixel princess while she was shooting this video; now we’ve got the real thing. I love that she never, ever seems bothered by the mad unauthorized dissemination of her mini image. She shows grace under copyright pressure, and she’s got the true spirit of the age. Read more …
Cut on the Bias
When the Brokeback spoofs made the rounds a few months ago,
it seemed clear that editing finesse could turn a video clip into an entertaining and even persuasive video op-ed. If you employ a particular bias — toward gay love stories, say — while you edit a blockbuster movie trailer, you can make it seem like your version of romance was there all along, underneath the superficial straight story. “Heat” seems like it’s about cops and robbers. But if you watch the “Heat” mashup , it’s actually about two gay dudes.
It’s like when you get your hair colored: a stylist will try to convince you that if you just “lift away” that false drab brown color with bleach, you’ll reveal the “real” blonde hair that’s rightfully yours. Uh, yeah.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, right, receives a special shirt from the Iranian national soccer team.(Associated Press)
But what about when you style the news this way? Here’s a video from Iran cut on the bias by MEMRI, a translation organization that exhibits subtitled video clips from Arabic and Farsi television. This one it distributed through iFilm, which is owned by Viacom.
The clip shows the strange Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — you know, the nuke-getting, Holocaust-denying one — addressing his country’s soccer team. In MEMRI’s subtitles, he says that Iranian youth are always successful in their undertakings, including in the “nuclear field.” He then goes on to encourage the team to play soccer in a way that makes the ball sound like an ICBM. He concludes by expressing his pleasure that so many Germans support the Iranian team. Read more …
Glimpse
So take a look at Revver, the greedy twin of YouTube. A video-sharing site, Revver is not a Montessori collectivized information-should-be-free venture. Instead, it’s videos embedded with ads. If a video gets a lot of looks, the producer gets that ad money, but he has to split it with the Revver house. It all seems so easy. Revver seems very pro-artist, and its site even offers a course in online filmmaking that’s quicker and more motivating than Robert McKee.
Forget film school. The secret to making online video is Plan, Edit, Frame. Read more …
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Remember how in 1992 people used to say we were entering an enchanted world in which the Internet and television would be as one? That sounded exciting. But then one and another America-transforming event happened — O.J., the failure of Pets.com — and somehow the master screens kept stubbornly not converging.
So at the start of 2005 convergence seemed like a bust. Even the word convergence was starting to sound like Esperanto or the Equal Rights Amendment, a concept that had so obviously not worked that it was embarrassing to mention it.
Be embarrassed no more. When Robert Ryang’s inspired fake “Shining” trailer got blogged to bits in the fall of 2005, it became clear that people and their connections were finally ready to accept video on computers. Desegregation at last.
And they wanted to watch online video casually, nonchalantly, without having to download RealPlayer 11 times or endure weird buffering breaks. iTunes brought us “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” and then tons of other TV, and the networks got in the webcast business and the crazy-friendly YouTube.com made videolove fun.
But with everyone creating and producing and uploading now, who is going to be on the downside, watching and savoring it all? All of that web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, consumer-generated video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes and mashups?
Um, me? Yes, that’s my idea. I’ll watch. That’s what Screens is for.
About Screens
With television and the Internet converging at last, who's going to watch all this here-goes-nothing online video? Everything from political propaganda videos to nip slips (the popular video of, yup, celebrities revealing their breasts) seems to expect an audience. "Screens" will find, review and make sense of all those senseless new images: web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes, mashups and more.
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- About Virginia Heffernan
- Virginia Heffernan is a television critic for The Times. Before coming to the newspaper, she wrote for Slate, and before that she was an editor at Harper's and Talk magazines. She has a Ph.D. in English from Harvard. In 2005, she published a comic novel, "The Underminer," which she wrote with Mike Albo.
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