Sunday, February 23, 2014

The Finishing Line (1977)



Another terrifying British PSA, or public service announcement, about safety. This one might be the mightiest. It is bizarre, surrealistic, long (20 minutes), and excellent. 

But a warning: it's violent and scary. 

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Golgo 13 No. 1: The Impossible Hit (1989)



This is a weird artifact from my childhood. I bought this comic book while visiting family friends in the Upper Peninsula. I remember buying it with change. And it blew my mind while I sat in what I now remember as a haunted, Victorian mansion, but was probably just a slightly older, bigger house than ours. Now I can't help looking at it and thinking of Jean Pierre Mellville's Le Samouraï. I must have been remembering it, in a way, when years later I loved Mellville's film. 

The comic book format here is interesting because this is basically an advertisement for a Nintendo game, with gamer tips in the back. It looks like they took the original Japanese Manga-size pages and blew them up to comic size, and sold that as tie-in merchandise. This makes it both lame and cool. Lame because, it seems like a cheap way of going about it, in more than one way. Cool because it looks like an 80's bootleg comic version of Manga.


Thursday, February 13, 2014

Can performing "I'm Hiding My Nightingale" from Kamasutra



Hey. So I have this German re-pressing of Irmin Schmidt's soundtrack to Kamasutra (Vollendung der Liebe) which I like to listen to now and again. This morning I woke up with one of its songs in my head, "I'm Hiding My Nightingale."

I looked it up on youtube and found the above video, featuring Schmidt playing with Malcolm Mooney-era Can. It doesn't feature them prominently, but its a great little window into this pseudo-documentary, which I don't think is available. It looks like a perfrect example of the half earnest art film, half cheapo exploitation flick hybrid that was really common then, and often had great soundtracks.

Check out those dance moves!

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Winter Update



Brrr. It's February and it feels like it. I know I'm from Wisconsin, but still. You adjust, and then you say "Brrr" again. 

The big winter update is that "Speed of Sound" is reworked. While holed up with the flu, watching Anthony Mann westerns all day long, I had a bunch of ideas. I thought I was done with the film back in November, but it was not so! Of course. 

I was eager to be done with it back then partly because I was stubbornly sticking to a crazy schedule drawn up by me and David Fetzer in the fall of 2012. I'm really excited about the changes--- 95 total (I'm a big list maker). We're still getting the effects done and this new version is still probably about a month out.

I've also been working often on a new feature script, and several shorts including PSA's. Spending a lot of time in the laboratory this winter, as it should be. I was thrilled to finally dust off my nice record player and put it up in the office. It's been great to get out all the soundtracks, waking up to the Electric Company theme, and having one less screen to look at if I want to listen to something. And sunny afternoons have been lovely with the squirrel disco ball.






Above, Anna Huckabay, who plays Dave's girlfriend, Kelly, in Speed of Sound, stops by.

Above, ye old faithful. Making music more mechanical and valuable, and making me more nerdy and happy.


Above, a wintry David dreams of tropical Wisconsin.