“Excellent” being defined however you want. It can be aimed at a niche audience or something with a broad appeal. It can be video, audio, text, or anything else. Fiction, non-fiction, comedy, drama, technical schematics for a piece of machinery (if you must) – whatever, just so long as you honestly think it’s a surpassing example of whatever it is.
To start: The NY Times blog for Errol Morris, documentarian extraordinaire, which generally deals with perception of visual media. The discussion currently linked above starts with a doctored picture of an Iranian missile test and goes from there. Here is an essay about some (mostly one) of the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Here is Part 1 of an analysis of a possibly staged photo from the Crimean War. In my opinion, they’re all fantastically interesting.
Anyway, there aren’t many posts there (roughly one or two per month for the past year), but the ones that do get written are robust.
Your contribution(s)?
The way Kaki King plays her guitar. King is a young girl who wanted to be a drummer, but instead learnt to play the guitar. She does so in a very onorthodox way, and with crazy skills. In her hands, a guitar becomes an drum, bass, steel slide guitar, and harp, all at once.
How about the obvious?
Ok, for another example, AAroads . The most comprehensive guide to interstates and major highways in the United States. If you’re taking a road trip or just want to take an armchair roadtrip, this is the website to read.
Here’s a 4-minute poem performed by its author, Rives. It’s one of the “TED Talks” from Monterrey, CA. I’ve listened to it about a dozen times over the past half year and always think it’s excellent. If I Ran The Internet.
They only got clearance to fly her in at the last minute, so you get the Spitfire and Hurricane landing to make way, and then the Lancaster and Vulcan in formation display. Four pieces of Aviation history in the same six minutes, and the formation flying between the propeller driven Lancaster and the trailing jet bomber is breathtaking.
I am really enjoying pandora.com which is internet radio that tailors itself to your taste. Plus they have a pretty wide range of music. I put in Stan Rogers and out comes a variety of folk music in the style of his. Or a decade like 80s. Very fun.
I don’t remember if it was someone here or elsewhere that led me to this site. Anyway, for your viewing pleasure: Shorpy: The 100-year-old photo blog. It’s a growing collection of very old photographs, scanned in at super high resolution. The site is named after this kid, a 14-year-old mine worker in Alabama in 1910. It’s amazing to see such sharp representations of the distant past.
I came across Peter Callesen’s A4 Paper Cut art awhile back, and am glad to have a chance to revisit it. There are some newer works on there I hadn’t seen before, but my favorites are still Down the River (~1/3 down), Looking Back (~2/3 down), and Traces in Snow (near bottom). The detail shots are what make first and last of those really awesome.
I also like his Large Paper Cut Installations. His other stuff is neat (see his main website, which links to the ones I provided within a frame), but the above are my favorites.
