Last week I finally got around to posting about Jean-Luc Godard’s 87th birthday, and today Open Culture reminded me how rich the master’s collection of odds-and-ends shorts and clips can be. In 1968, Godard shot Jefferson Airplane performing live on a rooftop in Manhattan. Godard’s film features a performance of “The House at Pooneil Corners,” and footage of the band’s inevitable arrest. Here’s a bit from Open Culture and my favorite living film critic, Richard Brody…

“He took over from the specialists and operated the camera from the window of Leacock-Pennebaker’s office on West Forty-fifth street, shooting the band on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel across the street. (Pennebaker recalled him to be an amateurish cameraman who could not avoid the beginner’s pitfall of frequent zooming in and out.) The performance took place without a permit, at standard rock volume: as singer Grace Slick later wrote, “We did it, deciding that the cost of getting out of jail would be less than hiring a publicist…”

Amateurish or not, a piece of the footage has surfaced on YouTube. Listen to the Airplane perform “The House at Pooneil Corners,” watch Godard’s dramatic swings of focus and zoom as he attempts to convey the spectacle of the band and the spectacle of countless surprised Manhattanites at once, and think for yourself about this peculiar intersection of two bold lines in the era’s alternative zeitgeist. As Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner said in a 1986 interview, “Just for a while there, maybe for about 25 minutes in 1967, everything was perfect.” But these seven minutes in November 1968, from opening shouts to inevitable arrest, don’t seem so dull themselves.

Check out the short here…

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What happens when you add up every man who’s ever walked on the moon? You count more men than have ever been knighted to officially don the red wig and play the part of the clown, Ronald McDonald. In this surreal documentary, one former Ronald shows us just how hard it can be to escape from the grasp of that burger-slinging trickster. Here’s The Verge with an introduction…

Meet Joe Maggard, the eighth of nine men to officially don the iconic Ronald McDonald costume from 1995 to 2007. In a new 6-minute minidoc produced by The Guardian, Maggard opens up about his experience as the mascot. He fondly recalls his years as McDonald’s Chief Happiness Officer, and he details his close, personal connection with the clown persona. Things become emotional and strange.

“JOE IS PRESENT, BUT NO… NO, I’M RONALD.”

The video begins with a clean-faced Maggard sitting by his pool talking about his initial reluctance to take the job, but that he now feels like the luckiest guy in the world. When asked if he still has his costume on hand, he responds: “The clown’s right in there. The clown’s ready to go. Like any superhero, he’s ready.”

From Method Acting to extra mayo, this short film will remind you why you were scared of clowns…

Ronald from Guardian News & Media Ltd on Vimeo.

More men have walked on the moon than been Ronald McDonald. Joe Maggard was McDonald's mascot from 1995 to 2007. He was eighth of nine men to have done the job. But what happens after you step out of the big red shoes? Maggard says you never truly retire from being the fast-food chain's Chief Happiness Officer. At a carnival in Las Vegas as he dons the costume again, and offers advice on healthy eating and the importance of being Ronald

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Highlighting the auteur’s earliest days as a filmmaker, this strange, instructional short video presages Gus Van Sant’s later partnerings with William S. Burroughs. Short of the Week gets the drop on The Discipline of DE…

For this short, Van Sant choose a wonderful short story by William S. Burroughs (who would later appear in Drugstore Cowboy) and set it to images on 16mm black and white.

The film outlines the discipline of D.E. (do easy), a zen-like philosophy that proposes all human activity be done in the simplest, most easy way possible. It begins with an elderly Colonel’s discovery of D.E. and continues on to demonstrate how we can vastly improve our lives by following D.E.’s simple principle.

There is a delightful ironic tone to this piece, which never fails to remind me to pay attention to my everyday life. It’s difficult not to envy the silverware going perfectly into its respective drawers, or the clean, simple sound of the plates stacking neatly onto each other. It’s not easy to put this principle into practice, but you’ll never forget it the next time you break a glass or hit your knee on a chair—”Go back and repeat sequence.”

Thanks for the lessons Gus and Bill. Here’s The Discipline of DE…

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