how the hell are you?

Well well well. I have neglected this repository for two weeks, and nary a nag has reached me in complaint. Fine, fine. I don't need you either, world. Wait, yes I do. Please, somebody, look at me look at me look at me! I'm gonna do something! Look at me!
Okay, I'm done. Not really, I'm still needy, but I'm going to attempt to be interesting now instead of whiny. 321GO.

In no particular order, here are the cool things I've found in the last while.

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This Christmas Abstract by Tris McCall is a delightfully cynical, often amusing, and incredibly long-winded analysis and commentary on pretty much every Christmas carol and 'holiday' song you've ever heard. And many that I haven't. I really haven't taken the time to read the whole thing. Or much of it at all, honestly. But here's an excerpt to get you excited:

"Away In A Manger" is a pretty dope song, and if you get a good piano player with a gospel sensibility and courage to find unusual chords, musically speaking, you've got something cooking. Lyrically speaking, it's the very soundtrack for Christian brapholatry. "The little lord Jesus laid down his sweet head?!?!" Is this the Ancient of Days, or the subject of a diaper commercial?

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Yet another awesome artist... William Schaff can be quite creepy, but I love the intensity of his work. His site is a remarkably vast collection of his work in various medias and I recommend taking some time to peruse it.

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A while ago Rob and I got to talking about the movie Brazil, and Terry Gilliam in general, and while this is not an uncommon topic for us, on this particular occasion I felt compelled to attempt the discovery of the name of the vocalist in our copy of the Brazil Theme. While I was ultimately unsuccessful in this pursuit, I found out many fascinating things about the movie. I started with the music, of course, and found a couple delightful interviews with Michael Kamen, the composer who did Brazil (and Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas and many other movies...). Towards the end in the section "Past, Present And Future", he talks about Brazil. I'm just gonna quote the whole thing, because I think it's AWESOME.

It was Ray Cooper who was playing tambourine when I was producing Pink Floyd, and I had just written the string charts for one of their things, and we brought Ray in the studio, and because we had just re-orchestrated it was still quite loud in the mix, and Ray was playing tambourine and listening to the music and he said "Who did the charts? Who did the orchestra?" and I went "I did" and he went "Really. Have you ever done any film?" and I said, kinda sheepishly, that I had done the film Venom, which was on billboards in London, it was the week it was opening. It's a wonderful cast in Venom, it's not a wonderful film, but I was astounded when Ray Cooper went "You did Venom?!?!?", like it was "I had written the Bible?!?!?" (laughs)
He goes "That's an incredible score! George Harrison and I listened to the score!" and I'm like "What? What? What are you talking about?" It turns out that Ray Cooper, better known as a tambourine player with Elton John and Eric Clapton, who looked like an escapee from Belsen, was actually the managing director of Handmade Films, and ran, of course, all of the music from Handmade, which of course was all the Monty Python films, a lot of Terry Gilliam's work, and George Harrison's film company. I was gobsmacked, I think is the word, to find that they had actually listened to Venom, apparently it was offered to Handmade to distribute it. They had passed on the film, quite wisely, but they recognised the music and, on that day, Ray said to me "Do you know Terry Gilliam?" and I said "No. I know Eric Idle." and he said "Would you like to work with Terry? He's doing a film called Brazil." and I said "Yeah, yeah" and he said "I'll get you that, I want you to do that film. Give me an example of your work", so I sent him a ballet score. He called me and said "Yeah, Terry loves it, we'll do this" and then I didn't hear from them for nearly a year, and I thought it had just vanished, like things do in the entertainment industry. These great ideas are taken and turned into birthday cakes, beautifully designed but gone the next morning. It took a year, and I had all these visions of Robert De Niro pulsating down the streets of Rio drowned in sweat, or the history of the revolution in Brazil, and then suddenly it wasn't quite like that. It wasn't even the brazil nut, it was the song, and I started a whole new relationship with films.

Oh wow. I absolutely LOVE how everything connects. And it just got better from there, when I found the Brazil FAQ. Oh my goodness. If you're one of the dozen people I know who actually knows what the hell I'm talking about, this movie I mean, then you should read the whole damn thing because it's AWESOME. Especially so when Rob and I discussed it at two in the morning or whenever I first found it. Here are just a few tantalizing excerpts:

Certainly BRAZIL is an enigmatic title for a movie that seems to have nothing to do with the country of Brazil. One of the drafts of the screenplay was entitled _The Ministry of Torture, or Brazil, or How I Learned to Live with the System -- So Far_, and Gilliam also considered calling his screenplay 1984 1/2. Many of the drafts appear to have simply been titled "The Ministry." In the book _The Battle of Brazil_, Gilliam explains where the inspiration stemmed from, while he was in Port Talbot, Wales: "Port Talbot is a steel town, where everything is covered with gray iron ore dust. Even the beach is completely littered with dust, its just black. The sun was setting, and it was quite beautiful. The contrast was extraordinary, I had this image of a guy sitting there on this dingy beach with a portable radio, tuning in these strange Latin escapist songs like 'Brazil.' The music transported him somehow and made his world less gray."

Q. Why the hideous masks, like the one Jack Lint wears for the
interrogation?
A. Gilliam's mother once sent him a mask like that, and it haunted him ever
since. Gilliam intended the effect of combining the masks and the
decaying bodies of the Forces of Darkness (the small, troll-like
creatures which Sam sees in his dreams) to be an intermingling of the
beginning and ends of life.

Golly. I love this stuff. Anyway...

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Photographer Leo Fabrizio has a book about bunkers. Yes, bunkers. The military installations, often elaborately disguised to foil bombers and spies. Many have been painstakingly maintained for decades, and some facades are on par with movie sets in terms of detail. So this Leo guy is probably just as fascinated by bunker mythos as Rob is, since he's been spending years taking photos of disguised bunkers, and that's pretty cool for both of them. If I were is Switzerland I would totally pick up a copy of this book. But I'm not. Sorry.

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I've talked about Aerogel before. It's amazing stuff. Here's a practical use for it, though by practical I certainly don't mean affordable... yet...
A translucent roofing system. It allows full spectrum light transfer but is highly efficient because of its powerful insulatory characteristics. Specifically, they're "filling polycarbonate or glass with nanogel". Oooh. Gives me shivers. Not really. But it's exciting. Rob, you probably saw this coming. I can imagine when we first started talking about Aerogel you said something about wanting windows made out of it and I probably said how ludicrous that would be. Well, yeah. Moving on.

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I don't think I can explain this any better than Gizmodo does. People playing live-action Pac-Man at Lancaster University with RFID markers, cell phones, and... well, costumes. By the beard of Zeus...

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Okay, this is really exciting. It sounds like a huge step forward in technology for internal combustion engines. HUGE.

The Axial Vector Engine!

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Well, this is very silly. Art these days, I'll tell you what. A large scale wall-hangable...



$2500 each. And they're only making ten of them. And you're supposed to recall fond childhood memories, like losing the one really tiny piece in the carpet and gluing your fingers together. Aww...
P.S. Rob and I made a 1:700 model of the Bismarck in 6.5 hours, starting at one in the morning. It was fantastic. One part dremel tool, one part Kahlua, two parts sharp things, one part toxic glue fumes, and five parts brillant ingenuity. Ah, that was good. Yah.

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Okay, last thing for today. Those awesome Swedes are at it again, 'it' being awesomeness, 'again' being The Swedish Statement. They're determined to put Sweden 'on the map' of ultra-high-end audio equipment manufacture and design, so in bringing together five manufacturers of amazing things, they have one of the best two-channel audio systems in the world. Well, yeah. The cost for it all is something like $400,000. The goddamn speakers have cones made out of fucking diamonds. It's breathtaking. Check it out.