Have you seen Italian Spiderman yet? The premise is that Italian Spiderman was a 1968 Italian action-adventure film made by Alrugo Entertainment, which was deemed “un-viewable” by Italian distributors and never released. The story has the only 35mm print of the film being lost at sea, but recovered in the present day, thereby allowing Alrugo Entertainment to release the film… Read more →
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If you like the arty, breathy, female singers…
…like Kate Bush, or Tori Amos, or Bjork, you may like Bat For Lashes. They’re new to me this week, following a pointer from Emma Bull. Me, I like those artistswell, I would pretty heavily qualify in time my Tori appreciation…. Plus, the videos on Youtube are pretty great. Check these out: Read more →
Lazy Post: Wednesday Night Music
That’s my favourite Montreal blueswoman, Dawn Tyler Watson, performing her song “Hey Hey”, the lyrics of which inspired the title of her album Ten Dollar Dress. (I found her because I saw the album on a wall once, and the title more or less forced me to buy it.) Read more →
Their great chicken-bone and moonshine empire will rise again
I know you’re already seen this, but it’s just too good to let go by. My favourite bit references the hobo signs stuff we were looking at earlier this month: And they devised a secret language of signs and scrawls used to alert their passing brethren to danger or opportunity. A crucifix chalked on the side of a house meant… Read more →
Proto-Muppet Protection Racket Advertising
There is an extensive explanation for this wild and bizarre sequence at the Muppet Wiki. Here’s a bit of it: In 1957, Jim Henson was approached by a Washington, D.C. coffee company to produce ads for Wilkins Coffee. The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the commercials had to be lightning-fast — essentially, eight seconds for… Read more →
There’s not a lot of pop music with this inspiration
That’s the video for the World Party song Is It Like Today?. The reason it’s here: it’s explicitly inspired by, and intended to be a precis of, Bertrand Russell‘s History of Western Philosophy. Lyrics after the jump: Read more →
Grateful Thursday
I am totally having a Grateful Dead day today, and I feel motivated to share with you all. Annotated Lyrics: Scarlet Begonias, Ripple, Uncle John’s Band, and Tennessee Jed. The other track, Me & My Uncle, is a cover. Read more →
Rokia Traore: Nothing to do with superstrings
A few years ago I picked up a Rokia Traore album. I’m not sure what the impetus was–probably I was looking for another hit of the same kind of musical whammy that I got from Orchestre Baobab‘s Pirate’s Choice, so I was exploring African contemporary. Let us cut a long story short and say that I enjoyed the album, and… Read more →
Understanding Superstrings
“Hooray for popularization!” A while back I mentioned that I was really enjoying following the various TED Talks as they are being put online. (In fact, at this point, I’ve got an archive of over 230 of the talks as MP4 videos–around 12Gb–that I’m working my way through, either on the iPod during enforced waiting periods, or in my rare… Read more →
More on The Wire
Apparently if I had been paying more attention to some of my sources, I could have taken advantage of being in Boston for work to pop into a lengthy panel at Harvard’s Institute of Politics last night on the topic: The HBO Series The Wire – A Compelling Portrayal of an American City. (Well, if I had been paying more… Read more →
The Great Song Of Indifference
One of my favourite music videos of all time, for Geldof‘s second-best song. The woman playing the bodhrán–the one with all the stage presence of a bass player–scares me. A lot. Read more →
Tom Waits For No Man
Why not? More details at the YouTube page–here’s the first bit, but there’s much more: Performed for us live (at the La Brea stage in Hollywood, 1978), and rotoscoped – a process that traces back the live action frame by frame and turns it into animation. The original live action was shot with 5 cameras – 2 high, 2 low… Read more →
It Might Surprise You
And now, for a nice long weekend diversion, a selection of songs with a common characteristic: people seem to be surprised that I really like them. First up we have Dino. This might surprise people who know me a bit, since I’m really not a lounge type of cat. It might surprise people who know me better even more, since… Read more →
Monday Misc. Music
To help me get through another annoying Monday, I have composed a short playlist of five songs that I like, which bear no relationship to each other whatsoever. Additionally, I am reasonably certain that anyone reading this will most likely not have heard any of these songs, and I can state with some certainty that no one reading this will… Read more →
Once more unto the breach
…to close a bunch of tabs before Firefox memory issues eat my computer. Let us begin with my praise of BibliOdyssey. They pulled me in earlier this month with the scans from an antique geomancy almanac, and I’ve been exploring their archives since then. Wow, is there a lot of stuff in there for a bibliophile to gawk at. Cosmological… Read more →
