Posted: 19 Sep 2011 06:20 PM PDT

On the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, on the making the Teen Spirit video:

CRAIG MONTGOMERY The "Teen Spirit" director wanted to do all this story, narrative stuff, and Kurt just wanted to have the band playing and kids going nuts. Krist wanted booze and sent me out to liquor stores to get it. Did that cause things to disintegrate? The thing was never integrated enough to disintegrate.

SAMUEL BAYER The kids were recruited from a Nirvana show on the Sunset Strip, and they were egging on the band, so it was kind of me versus them—and I was losing. Kurt absolutely hated me by the end. He didn't want to lip-synch the song. And I always believed that maybe his anger with me added a whole level of intensity to his performance. I always had a vision for something destructive at the end of the video, but truth be told, I was so beat up by the end of the day I just couldn't take any more. I was sitting on the dolly and somebody came up to me and said, "Kurt wants to invite the kids down to destroy the set." And I'm like, "Great. Destroy the set. What do I care?" And the kids came down, and it was this beautiful display of anarchy and destruction; I just flipped the camera on and shot 400 feet of film, and that was the end of the video.

via Everybody Loves Our Town – Full Chapter Excerpt | MTV Hive.

Ferguson: The Six Killer Apps of Prosperity

Posted: 19 Sep 2011 01:51 PM PDT

Niall Ferguson’s TED Global talk from earlier this summer on the “six killer apps” of prosperity. It’s all a little over-trendy for me, but … here you are:

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Odd Pudding

Posted: 19 Sep 2011 11:06 AM PDT

“When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?”
- Tom Stoppard, Arcadia