A Japanese dude in a Moog pentacle having a space music synth brock out. If I had that kind of collection of hardware I’d rate that as a pretty good way to start my Monday.
For the last few months I’ve been enjoying reading Michael DeForge’s new comic, Ant Comic. Colorful, delicate, gently funny and slightly surreal, it chronicles the dramas of everyday life in an ant colony. It’s currently up to episode 10 out of about 50.
Given the London Borough of Waltham Forest’s recent history of destroying hundreds of thousands of library books, my sense of irony mandated me borrowing A Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Báez from the miserable remains of Leytonstone Library. I wonder if whoever selected it for their collection was working on that basis as well. I’m glad I did, because it’s a superb piece of accessible historical scholarly writing and I highly recommend it.
I just discovered the blog Art of the Title, dedicated to the design of film title sequences. In this excellent post they interview Tom Kan, the designer of the remarkable opening titles to Gaspar Noé’s film Enter the Void, which became one of my favorite pieces of cinematic typography the instant I saw it.
“Whatever we see as the drive behind Tolkien’s tragic vision, and however we relate to its politics and aesthetics, the tragedy of the creeping tawdry quotidian gives Middle Earth a powerful melancholia lamentably missing from too much of what followed. It deserves celebrating and reclaiming.”
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There and Back Again: Why Tolkien Rocks. China Miéville, one of my favorite modern writers, in a piece for Amazon’s blog on the reasons why fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien deserves his reputation.
Following on from my last post about a little-known string instrument, here’s another: the harpolyre. This three-necked oddity, invented in 1829, is a member of the relatively little-known harp guitar family, and was perhaps the ideal instrument for the Steve Vai of the 19th century.
Featuring interviews with Ridley Scott, Syd Mead and Douglas Trumbull, this 13-minute documentary about the production of Blade Runner, made to be screened at a film convention, is essential viewing for anyone interested in prop design and special effects work, not just fans of the film. My favorite part is where Mead shows how much detail was put into something simple - a parking meter. To my recollection it only features briefly in the background of one scene, let alone clearly enough for you to read the warning notice on the side.
The K’nuter. A ten minute tour of a full adder, a digital circuit that performs addition of numbers - built out of K’Nex. The complexity is astonishing. The video is cheerfully narrated by the device’s builder, who must have an incredible mind.
In the early 1980s, Studio Ghibli (makers of Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, etc.) were abortively involved in the production of a film of Winsor McCay’s beautiful 1920s comic strip Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland. While what eventually was released was a very different beast, before director Hayao Miyazaki walked away from the project a short test film was made. This is it. I wish the film had been completed by them, because both Ghibli and McCay are among my favorite artists.
It’s a long time since I saw anybody do anything fresh with Monty Python material, but in this clip Vic Reeves, Harry Enfield, Eddie Izzard and, bizarrely, Severus Snape Alan Rickman, at a live performance in 2001, bring a grin to my face with a remarkable semi-freestyle reinterpretation of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch. Enfield gives a ludicrous performance, absurdly throwing a Yorkshire “t’” before completely the wrong words, but is vastly outshone by Reeves, whose broad accent and surreal ad-libbing completely floors him and Izzard - although Rickman, to his credit, manages to keep a straight face. Brilliant.
