I’ve started pre-production on the Varsity documentary. Hopefully everything will be in place for a shoot on the second weekend of December. I’ll post more news as and when it happens.
The New(ish) Jaga Jazzist album is wonderful. Courtney and I are looking into buying an iMac for me to edit on. If and when it happens it will look like this. That is all.
My first shoot with my new camera seems to have been a success. Jeff and I went to Milbrae (near San Francisco airport) to shoot a bit of documentary-style video of a seminar. I wasn’t pleased with the first day’s shooting, but I showed a measurable improvement on the second day. It was the first time I’ve shot without total control of what’s happening in front of the camera. I kept wanting to ask people “OK, one more try, please.”
Jeff has been editing the footage, and has a rough cut ready to show me tomorrow. I’ll post a link to the finished video as soon as it’s up on the Niche Media website.
Last night, after months of wrangling, dithering, and what appears to be attempted sabotage, the city council finally approved my boss’ plan to reopen the Varsity cinema in Davis as an art house cinema.
Built in the 1950s, it had all the trappings of a small movie palace, including murals and a proscenium. It’s been hacked about since then. In the 70s it was divided into two screens, then in the early 90s the council acquired it and turned it into a very dull theatre space. The murals disappeared, the seating capacity was halved, and the exterior was painted grey and white.
Cinema Treasures documents the history, whilst the Davis Wiki details what the place has been used for in the past couple of years.
All being well, over the next few months I will make a documentary about the history of the building to be shown on the night of the grand re-opening.
I’ve decided to call her Madeleine. She weighs 12lbs, or less with her lens off.
I’ll post some pictures of her tomorrow.
Regular readers may have seen the movie of pissing Czech statues I posted last month. Now, thanks to Rev. Rehash, I have an explanation of their bizarreness. I love these statues now even more than before.
Sometime in the next 3-7 days I will be the excited and slightly nervous owner of a brand new Canon XL-2.
Damn! I’d better start thinking of something to shoot!
Watching the Open University with Courtney late last night was the first time I’ve ever heard anyone exclaim “Ooh! Geology! Fun!” without a hint of irony.
But she was right; it was fun. The programme explored the origins of chalk carvings, including the Uffington horse, the Long Man of Wilmington and my favourite, the Cerne Abbas Giant.
It turns out that the giant isn’t the bronze-age fertility god that many thought him to be. He owes his creation to more recent history – the English civil war, in fact. Oliver Cromwell’s supporters often called him “the English Hercules,” and at Higham castle there is a statue depicting Cromwell in the classical Herculean form, bearing a club and completely nude, except for an improbable piece of robe fluttering around his delicates.
Lord Denzil Holles, a fierce opponent of Cromwell, is thought to have commissioned the Cerne Abbas Giant for satirical purposes. If this is the case, the Giant’s impressively erect phallus can be seen to mock Cromwell’s lust for power and his Puritan prudishness.
Certainly this isn’t the story that new-agers want to hear. One especially dippy website, which claims that a well just below the giant “has a wonderful feminine energy that balances the power of the male god on the hill above,” and makes no mention of the more recent theory. However, even without the scientific evidence which dates the carving to the seventeenth century, I would argue that the lines and form of the Giant are a significant clue.
The Uffington Horse, a genuine bronze age artefact, is a very abstract form. The giant bears no stylistic resemblance to the horse, looking rather like a cartoon. Political cartooning was already a common form in seventeenth century Britain. It seems clear to me that even if he has outlived his intended purpose, the club-wielding giant lives on as a symbol of bawdy satire. And as a pattern on biscuits.
People in the UK may know Paul Newman from his roles in movies such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Cool Hand Luke, or perhaps from seeing his face on bottles of salad dressing in Waitrose. Over in the US, Paul Newman is far better known. You can see his face on boxes of cookies, bags of popcorn and bottles of pasta sauce. As we’ve already seen, some US food companies put bible verses on their packaging. Thankfully, Paul Newman’s food packaging gibberish is as good as the next man’s. This is from the carton of Newman’s Own lemonade:
LEGEND: The marathon in Africa… I’m halfway out and barely chugging. Mountain coming! Liquid needed! What’s around? Water’s bitter! Beer’s flat! Gator, blah blah!… Fading fast. Then a vision-sweet Joanna!-Tempting me with pale gold nectar… Lemon is it? Yes, by golly! Lemonade? No, Lemon aid!… Power added! Asphalt churning!… Cruising home to victory! Hail Joanna! Filched the nectar (shameless hustler)-in the market-Newman’s Own.
However, whilst he donates all his after-tax profits to charity, and the products are made from organic ingredients, it’s not specified which charities are the beneficiaries, and almost all the products include the ubiquitous and fattening high fructose corn syrup. “Gator, blah blah,” indeed.
There’s a point in The Big Lebowski where the Dude, played by Jeff Bridges, finds his car has been stolen. The police retrieve the vehicle; it’s in a bad state, but at least the joyrider didn’t steal his Credence Clearwater Revival tapes. The dude later discovers a crumpled page of homework down the back of the driver’s seat. His friend Walter locates the owner of the homework. The kid lives just down the road from an In-N-Out Burger.
The first time I watched The Big Lebowski, I thought the name of the burger chain was just a humourous invention of the Coen brothers, but it’s not. In-N-Out Burger is a popular burger chain in California, Arizona and Nevada. The comical name aside, what’s interesting about In-N-Out Burger is that their food packaging carries bible references.
…and stuff him where the sun don’t shine. Courtney has finally driven me mad with her Harry Potter fetish. I don’t think she’s uttered a single sentence in the last week that hasn’t started with “Dumbledore,” “Snape,” or “Rowling.” I swear I will destroy any copy of the book I see, other than Courtney’s prized UK edition which arrived in the mail today. If I destroy that, she destroys me.
As an antidote, I was very glad to read J.G.Ballard’s article in the Guardian about Michael Powell. What’s especially amusing is that the article was written to promote a season of Powell’s movies at the National Film Theatre, an institution that Ballard blew up in his 2003 novel Millennium People.
During my degree I saw a perfectly preserved print of Powell & Pressburger’s wartime movie The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. It was the first time I’d seen an early colour movie in the same quality that it would have originally been shown. Even better, Blimp was shot in colour at a time when colour film stock was strictly rationed. The immediacy of the movie was striking. Suddenly 2002 and 1943 were not so far apart as I had previously thought.
Big Chill soon! Many of the acts I want to see normally draw blanks with everyone, and not just Courtney. So, in preparation for the festivities, here’s my list of must-sees and reasons for seeing.
1) The Fatback Band
The only reason these rhythm and blues masters are on my radar is for their groovy tune “Bus Stop.” It’s not even mentioned on the Big Chill website, so I can only assume the tunes that are must be even better. They’ve done everything from r’n’b to soul to disco to hip-hop, and are guaranteed to be as polished as brand new bling. They’ve been sampled to death, too, so there’s a good chance we’ll all know bits of their set. My early favourite for most danceable grooves of the weekend.
2) Roisin Murphy
Also known as the voice of Moloko. She’s probably getting a lot more exposure back home than here, so apologies if everyone’s excited about seeing her. What’s even more exciting, for me at least, is that Matthew Herbert is producing her new stuff. The Matthew Herbert big band was my highlight of 2003’s Chill, and his Bodily Functions album is one of my favourite albums. She played Glasto, and the bit of her gig I saw online was great. As well as being pleasing to the ear, she’s easy on the eye. Mmm. Redheads.
3) Kate Rusby
Over the last couple of years I’ve started to really appreciate English folk music, and during that time I’ve consistently heard good things Kate Rusby, but somehow I’ve not heard any of her stuff. Everyone who tells me about her says how great she is live, and what a good voice she has. I hope she’s got a nice chill afternoon slot. Perferably just before the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. I’m really looking forward to hearing the recommendations justified.
4) A Certain Ratio
The punk-funk sound seems to be re-emerging with bands like !!!, and even Franz Ferdinand, but it was A Certain Ratio who first made it popular in the late seventies/early eighties. I heard their stuff on a reissue when visiting Courtney in Norwich in 2002, and it stuck in my head. Danceable and spiky, they should be worth watching. I just hope they’re not a washout like the under-rehearsed Durutti Column were last year.
5) Horace Andy
A legendary roots reggae singer, he’s best known to my generation for his work with Massive Attack. Can’t wait.
It’ll be interesting to see St. Etienne, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain will be good fun once more, and Nouvelle Vague promise to be entertaining. Their version of Love Will Tear Us Apart is great. Even better, whilst surfing today in preparation to blog, I came across Yat Kha’s cover of the same song. Yat Kha are a group of Tuvan throat singers. Yes, throat singers. I almost went to see them in Canterbury, and now I wish I had.
Love Will Tear Us Apart – Albert Kuvezin & Yat-Kha
Go one, have a listen. We all need something to smile about today.
The word "gourmet" is over-used in the USA. Constant application to items such as burgers, jerky and cat food have stretched the word out, made it frayed and baggy, worn holes in the knees and rendered it useless for carrying meaning.
Today laughing chance brought me stumbling across a section of the salon.com website known as the Surreal Gourmet. A chap called Bob Blumer advocates recipes in which a familiar ingredient is cooked in an unfamiliar appliance and vice versa. Did you know you can poach salmon in a dishwasher?
At first I thought "how ingenious," but in the last few minutes it’s occured to me that it’s as "ingenious" as it is "gourmet". True ingenuity is not using a non-essential electrical appliance to amuse dinner party guests, it’s plastering a dead hedgehog in mud and roasting it in a bonfire, gypsy style. That, and making water flow uphill using a corkscrew tube.
Wow, has so much time already passed since I promised to write more blog posts? Time flies when you’re having visitors. In fact, I’ve over a month’s worth of thought backlog to transcribe and edit into legible form.
About a month ago, James and I were merrily meandering down Haight Street when we came upon what is probably the best record shop in the world. The experience of walking into Amoeba records for the first time is roughly similar to going downstairs in Blackwells in Oxford. You see the lines of shelves running away and converging on the distant horizon and your mind somersaults to think that there’s so much good stuff out there. There can’t be enough hours in a human life to listen to all the CDs in Amoeba, but if the staff would have let me sleep there I’d have been tempted to try.
I was good; I limited myself to one purchase – and what a purchase! I shelled out eighteen clams for a little cardboard box titled Oscillons from the Anti-Sun. Said box contains three CDs of tracks from Stereolab’s elusive EPs, a DVD of promo videos and live performances, and little CD sleeve sized stickers of their EP covers. All excellent, but most importantly it has the song Fluorescences, which I heard once in 1996 on Mark Radcliffe’s Radio 1 graveyard slot and have wanted ever since. It’s just as good as I remember.
A lot of the early Stereolab stuff I haven’t heard before. Listening to Jenny Ondioline I realised that, odd as it may sound, there are aesthetic similarities between Stereolab and Wilco, especially when you compare the groop’s early stuff to material from Wilco’s latest, A Ghost is Born. There are moments where both bands will build up a tapestry of noise, a repetitive riff, a synthy drone and mechanical percussion, and then they’ll break through this with a pretty melody sung by a modest voice.
And what’s an oscillon? It’s a recent (1996) discovery in the field of physics. Here’s a video of an oscillon in action. Essentially they are surprisingly constant patterns formed by vibrating particles, of great significance to those who study chaos theory.
And who are Stereolab? They’re an oddly retro-futuristic band who often stuff a gamut of musical styles into three-part pop songs. Half of the band are from London, the other half from Paris, and I’m a sucker for their singer, Laetitia Sadier. Imagine Juliette Binoche playing a cooly detatched pop singer and you’re almost there.
Grrrboooaaaaggghhhh! The Big Chill website is down. We’ve been waiting for it to be back up so we can buy our tickets for about a week. We’ve given up. I’m calling their phone booking line tomorrow morning. Whoop-de-whoop for days off.
Anybody know any more than me about this badness? I hope it doesn’t mean the website collapsed under the weight of demand for tickets, although I doubt that would be the case. It’s not as if it’s as manic as Glastonbury.
Considering the glut of qualified graduates queuing up for a job in the media, is it any wonder people are getting used? Reading this makes me think that my less conventional approach to breaking into the film and TV industry may actually be the better bet.
‘Exploitation is more widespread than ever’ Media Guardian, 11th April, 2005
For those of you who are unsure exactly what my method is, here’s the lowdown:
That’s my method so far. Due to lack of data, I cannot promise it will deliver the desired results, but I feel my big break is just around the corner. It’s a lot more fun than working eighty hours a week for a pittance in London, and I appear to have come just as far by doing so. Here’s to being a Deadbeattm!
Davis Film Festival tonight and tomorrow. Lots of shorts, lots of schmoozing. And, thanks to one of my regular caffeine-addicts, I have a free ticket. Get in!
Yes folks, grief porn is the best definition I’ve heard this week.
I’m well aware that the story has been swishing around the internet for a couple of weeks, which makes it positively prehistoric in terms of modern-day newsworthiness, but the homosexual necrophiliac ducks are still calling to me to post about them. Here’s the story in the Guardian, and here’s the oddly prescient Alan Moore song, the March of the Sinister Ducks (3.1meg mp3 file).
Once again, Alan Moore knows the score.
Junkopia kudos to the first person to identify the movie this still is from.
Kelvin and James are not allowed to enter; they can send me smug emails instead.
I don’t normally get pant-wettingly excited about movies coming out. Normally the ones I enjoy most are the ones I discover almost by accident. Recently Shaun of the Dead, Hero and Sideways were movies I went to see because I’d heard a little about them and had an inkling they might be my kind of thing. I was keen to see them, but they weren’t exactly highlighted on my calendar months in advance. I can’t tell you release dates for films any more than I can remember anniversaries.
I’ve listened to the radio series; I’ve read all four installments of the book; I can quote the odd line here and there; I regret never tracking down the TV series. The movie is out on April 29th and I’m considering going to the cinema the night it opens. I might even book tickets ahead of time because I almost wet myself earlier today when I saw the trailer.
I understand that some people are getting weak-kneed about some other science fiction/fantasy film. It seems as if they’re in denial of the fact that the two prequels of this movie left them feeling dirty and cheated. This other movie excites me not a jot.
If Tony Blair can apologise for the Potato Famine, then I can certainly be offended on behalf of the Irish when America turns them into Dr. Seuss characters.
Reports were coming into the coffee shop this morning that a bar in town, the Graduate, was serving a green eggs and ham breakfast in honour of St. Patrick’s Day.
Green eggs and ham?
Yeah, it’s Irish.
Great! I’ll take three!
Normally I am a big fan of the writing in the New Yorker. It’s elegant, sometimes witty and often precise and descriptive. Even the piece on the British foxhunting debate, which portrayed Britain in a modern version of the old sweeping stereotypes, was just about within my tolerance. I just read it as a fun story rather than a serious piece about the real world. And let’s face it, for many, many Americans – even the educated liberal middle-classes who form the New Yorker’s core audience, Europe is just a fun story, a place to go on holiday. So, despite the occasional wrongheaded opinion piece and the articles about other cultures which fail to pick up on the cultural nuances, I’m always glad to see the latest issue sitting in the mail box. It’s a good read and I can accept the bad apple in the barrel.
Daniel Zalewski’s article about Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, head of the OMA agency, which appeared in the March 14th issue, is more than a bad apple. It’s so rotten it deserves to be reproduced in Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner.
Hunter S. Thompson shot himself to death last night. Was it suicide? Was it a joke? Was it the drugs? Was it an accident? Who knows?
But looking at this picture it’s hard to be surprised by the method of self-erasure he chose.
I’ve been kind-of a fan for years, ever since I saw them in support of Radiohead in Oxford, but recently I’ve been getting more into Sigur Rós. Yes, yes, I know I’ve come to them fairly late, but I’ve not been buying quite as many CDs for the last couple of years and it’s not as if they get any airplay on US radio.
No, the reason I’m getting into them quite so much besides Jonsi’s voice, the bowed guitar, the lush arrangements and haunting melodies, is because they have a very sensible website. Rather against the norm, it’s extremely informative, doesn’t stream music at you unbidden and, best of all, offers a plethora of free high-quality mp3s for you to download. It’s enough to pique my interest, and it’s in keeping with the band’s ethos that they treat their fans as real human beings rather than cashcows.
I bought ágætis byrjun and thanks to the website I know how to pronounce it too. I expect I’ll be getting hold of () next. Being able to get hold of tunes for free has – shock – made me more likely to buy the band’s music. Big record companies are so not rock’n’roll. If they were they’d know the best business model is the heroin dealer’s: the first couple of fixes are free – after that you pay.
While I’m on the subject of music downloading, the restrictions programmed into files bought from iTunes, Napster, etc. make buying from them a real rip-off. Thankfully there are some sites that sell downloadable music without the DRM. One of them is run by Warp records and through it you can buy music from a cool (if small) selection of labels – including Ninja Tune. Oh yes. It’s called Bleep.
It’s not as good as having a CD with liner notes, but it is cheaper.
Finally, what could be more intriguing than a stone marimba made by a man in a hobbit hole? The story of a man who makes stone marimbas in hobbit holes badly translated from German, perhaps?
