You Took

I heard this song for the first time at The Church's amazing show at The Sinclair in Cambridge MA a few weeks ago. Simply amazing. Kilbey's voice is so much richer than it was back in the day. And as good as the studio version is - it rocked incredibly hard on stage. Take it away boys...

A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

A supercell near Booker, Texas from Mike Olbinski on Vimeo.

This supercell storm captured by Mike Olbinski is spectacularly eerie and beautiful at the same time.

Octopi Time!

 I remain, as always, fascinated by octopi. Listen to this:

So there is a lot going on in the arms, but the connections between arms and brain are apparently restricted to a narrow channel. ...
If you were an octopus, distinctions [in moving your limbs] would be blurred. Your arms would move in a way that is a mix of the centrally and peripherally controlled. To some extent you would guide them, and to some extent you would just watch them go.

Which explains the absolutely eerie way in which they move combined with the intelligence in their eyes. Well, that and the lack of bones.

Bowie Resurgent

Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) writes about Bowie in the wake of his suprise new album:

With Bowie, we'll never know where we stand with him. There ain't no rut for this dude. Maybe he'll invent another persona. Maybe we'll get to know him qua him. Maybe he'll face death in some very Bowiesquely compelling way. I personally, well, I need a guy like him around. Jeez, we're living in the dying embers of the Western capitalist moment. Our big banks, mired in massive fraud they're free to get away with, have deprived us of any moral center, and made fairness an outmoded concept. Our President is prepared to cut Social Security benefits, suffused with a bizarre desire to make nice with the crazy Republicans in a Grand Bargain of deficit cutting, which nobody needs, ferchrissake. Fuck Obama. He's no savior. We ain't got a Savior Mechanic, to paraphrase Bowie.
That's why I needs me some cultural fun and games. I needs me some Weimar amidst the rise of financial fascism. I needs me some happy surprises from some individual public figure out there.
I needs me some David Bowie

Getting Ready for the Work Week

Revel in the surrealism of Beach House - a music video directed by Eric Wareheim and starring the inimitable Ray Wise (forever Leland Palmer in these parts)

Paperman

Can't embed it for some reason, but you have to see this disarming Disney animated short: Paperman. It's a lot of fun, has excellent animation, and took the grumps out of me after a hard day.

Hat tip Boing Boing

Update: It seems that Paperman was created using Meander, a new tool that combines hand-drawn techniques with CGI. Promising!

Go Vote!

It's that time! Go to your polling place and cast your ballot. And when you do so, be sure to keep in mind these important words from Chris Rock:

The Who's "Amazing Journey"

As many of you know, i'm a Who obsessive. As such, when Dangerous Minds posted links to the Amazing Journey video, I dove right in. I haven't watched the entire thing yet, but what I have seen is another reminder that this group of talented individuals created glorious noise - something larger than the sum of their parts.

Really looking forward to seeing Pete n' Roger play Quadrophenia at the Garden this November.

Watching "Sight"

This short video has really stuck with me in the few days since I've seen it. Really did a great job depicting what life might be like with embedded technology bringing virtual information into every moment of your life. Also: killer ending!

Vangelis Bringing It Home

Check out this early electronic music jam of Vangelis performing live for a Spanish television station and tell me that he basically isn't the equivalent of a gothic vampire, pounding away dramatic tunes on his pipe organ in a 75 room mansion in Transylvania. Really intense and fun stuff!
Back in the 80s, Vangelis (along with Tangerine Dream) was about all I knew about electronic music. This shit was hot back in the day!
h/t Dangerous Minds

Viva Roxy Music!

I didn't see Roxy Music looked like until I was already a fan. Hard to believe in this day and age, but when I started listening to the group's incredible ahead-of-its-time music a while back, all I had was a series of ripped CDs and static pictures from the internet. Of course, their visual look was always a large part of the band's appeal, and you can see them in all their glory in this sweet Roxy Music documentary (hat tip: Dangerous Minds). I got a kick out of seeing Brian Eno with long hair, and really just can't hear enough of their first four albums.

Sunday's Touchdown on Mars

This Sunday, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's rover Curiosity will attempt to land on Mars. There's an extremely complicated delivery mechanism designed to get the rover to the surface, with a lot of interacting parts. The video above describes the hot mess. Keep your fingers crossed that the rover will survive the 7 minutes of terror!

Is It In My Head?

The BBC produced an amazing documentary the making of Quadrophenia, in my opinion the best of their albums. It's the reason I continually hear French Horns in my head when I head off to battle (be it in a running race, a hard office meeting, or whatever). Despite what's shown in the screen capture above, there's lamentably little John in the production, but the rest of it is top notch.

Parkour Time

Loved this parkour but watching it made my knees hurt.

Spaceship Clouds

Amazing footage of what's called a "lenticular cloud" near Mt. Fuji in Japan. Look at the size of that giant spaceship!

Hat Tip to Bad Astronomy

Pursuit of Light

Brain Pickings introduced me to this gorgeous video of the fantastic images collected by NASA on both space and on earth. Awesome! and a good soundtrack by Moby that's light-years above the typical "angelic choir" music that usually accommodates these types of videos.

The MP3 in Vinyl

Check out this awesome video that uses vinyl records to simulate the building of the visuals of an MP3 track. It's mesmerizing.

Rain on the Sun

Check out this amazing video that Bad Astronomy posted the other day:

Here's the explanation of what we're looking at:

"A lot of the material ... that falls back onto the Sun [is] because of the Sun’s strong gravity. Since the material is an ionized plasma – a gas stripped of one or more electrons — it follows the magnetic field lines of the Sun, so you can see graceful arcs of this stuff falling back down after the blast. ...
Gravity does the work, but magnetism does the steering."

At What Cost CCTV?

Boing Boing points out a big governmental program at its best:

"The Price of Privacy: How local authorities spent £515m on CCTV in four years" is a new report from Britain's Big Brother Watch, and it documents how the skyrocketing expansion of Britain's police and local government surveillance has resulted in over 4,000 fewer patrolling police officers, less privacy, and no appreciable reduction in crime.

The report goes on to detail many of the inefficiencies of the program, including that in many cases "...cameras [are] regularly not working or turned off, footage being deleted before it can be used and pictures of insufficient quality for court purposes." and also points out that "...the United Kingdom [is] the most watched nation of people anywhere in the world"

Sounds like a great program. But hey - at least the terrorists haven't won.

Moscow in Timelapse

Москва'2011(Moscow/Russia) from zweizwei |motion timelapse| on Vimeo.

I love old Russian architecture. Would love to see St. Basil's Cathedral in person some day.