by Chris Barrus
All the James Bond talk earlier got me wondering about who the guitarist was who played the famous theme music. The answer: Vic Flick. He’s still around and so is the guitar (a Clifford Essex Paragon DeLuxe played through a DeAmond Volume Pedal into a Vox 15 Watt Amplifier.)
Not surprisingly, his list of album credits is pretty full-on. I had no idea that he played on Serge and Jane’s “Je t’aime… moi non plus.”
James Brown on stage at Boston Gardens. April 5th, 1968 – one day after Martin Luther King was assassinated. I can ‘t write anything more that could do justice to this clip.
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There’s a lot of YouTube clips and all are worthy, but one I always rather liked was Beat The Devil. Sure it’s a long hyperkinetic Tony Scott BMW commercial with Clive Owen and Gary Oldman, but it’s 100% James Brown.
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(a somewhat belated entry to the Carl Sagan blog-a-thon)
I have a vivid memory of the first time I saw Carl Sagan on television and it wasn’t Johnny Carson or Cosmos. It was during the 1971 Mariner 9 mission to Mars. A planet-wide dust storm was obscuring all the surface features which left everyone sitting around killing time while waiting for the dust to settle. Sagan was being interviewed about what the orbiter might see and he was asked about Percival Lowell, the Martian canals (sorry, “canale”), and Martian War Of The Worlds. Sagan took the guy’s question seriously and without any condescension offered that while there didn’t seem to be any Martians or water in the traditional 19th century sense, there could have been in the past. He added that if Martian climate could change dramatically, then Earth’s climate could change just as radically. Either way, further study is important because there’s only one Earth.
Heady stuff for a six year old, but he made it interesting and (most important) extraordinarily cool.
A couple years later there was a Cornell alumni event (both my parents are from Ithaca and my dad was a Cornell grad) in Los Angeles with Sagan and he talked about the then-recent Viking landings and what the ambiguous biological experiment readings meant – emphasizing that science shouldn’t allow itself to be tunnel-visioned into one particular belief while it’s trying to figure things out. A theme that runs constant through his subsequent writing.
I got to meet him afterward and he gave me a stack of Mars photos that he used in the presentation and autographed one to me. Thirty years later, I’m still kicking myself for losing track of it though it’s probably Out There Somewhere. I remember exactly what picture it was and what he wrote on it:
“To Chris – Hope you get to visit here. — Carl Sagan”
How to tell the difference between the International Space Station and all the other air traffic overhead:
Tonight’s pass over Los Angeles just now was one of the best I’ve seen. Amazingly clear sky this evening. So far, it seems that Heavens Above has slightly more accurate pass timings than NASA.
Following up on my earlier Tower Records post, I can now answer the question “When was the last time I bought something at Tower?” Answer: today!
I’ve reading about the great deals that people were getting at the Tower clearances, but apart from those few outrageous finds there wasn’t anything that motivated me enough to plow through the bins one last time. Frankly, I’m sick of CDs these days, but after reading Doug O.’s blog post today about his Tower finds I figured what the hell. This sentence in particular got me moving:
I bought 94 CDs, for a total of $448.25 including tax. At the bottom it says “You saved 1104.16 today!”
The Glendale Tower is down to its last three days of operation with everything at 70% off. I’ve been pretty critical about Tower’s selection which isn’t surprising at all if you’re standardized on Fingerprints and Amoeba, but I was rather shocked at what I was able to dredge up. Here’s today’s haul:
Top row:
Middle row:
Bottom row:
Total: $51.96 (I saved $104.92 today!)
Drawn links to the work of Adam PÄ™kalski and after being sucked in for a hour I concur, he’s 450 all different kinds of awesome. (Gallery one & two)
The mysterious secret agent snowman had to become a new desktop background.
One universe destroys for revenge…
“You are an asteroid that’s seen many of your brethren decimated by the evil spaceships in the original asteroids game. The loss of your rock-fellows has hurt and scarred you deeply. For long, your rocky heart has longed for revenge. So now, you’ve finally decided to go to the ships and destroy them.”
While another destroys for art…
Blast Calder’s mobiles to a million brightly coloured bits! Instead of being a mere spectator to the play, irony, and humour of the toys in Calder’s Circus, or a spectator to the free play of the motion of Calder’s mobiles, in Calderoids you get to play with his art yourself when you climb in your spaceship and fly around his sculptures, laughing as you zap them to pieces!
Something had been bothering me about the last four James Bond films and my irritation had nothing to do with Pierce Brosnan (who was a perfectly capable Bond, even when elements of the movies, well, weren’t). I was put-off by the mix-up of Serpentine italic and Britannic bold italic with the traditional sans serif caps used in the opening titles. To illustrate:
Ugly. Not just ugly, but tremendously ugly. At best, they’re suitable for a video game box but fundamentally they’re about as striking and iconic as a direct-to-DVD E-list action movie. Worse, they clash with the font used for the rest of the credits. Now compare these with some earlier ones from the Maurice Binder era:
Consistent and elegant typography. As outrageous as a typical Bond movie is supposed to be, you at least feel like you’re about to see something better than your average spy/action/comic book flick. Which brings us to Casino Royale:
That crap ItalicBoldMetallic title font is finally tossed for a sans serif (I think it’s Century Gothic) that’s familiar enough, but honestly I didn’t notice that much because the opening credit sequence is so bloody great. Congrats to Daniel Kleinman for making us forget how lousy Chris Cornell is. Note to Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, please hire Hooverphonic or Alison Goldfrapp for the next movie. k thx bye.
As for the movie itself. Casino Royale and Daniel Craig wisely sidesteps the entire “how does he compare to Connery” issue that a zillion armchair critics have saved into their blog draft folders and goes completely off-axis to a third Bond-archetype that isn’t Connery or Moore. Something about Craig’s Bond was naggingly familiar when about two-thirds of the way through, I figured it out. These are the two actors people should be comparing together:
All the online reviews are pretty spot-on, so I won’t waste your time with running through them again. The best thing I can say about it is that after it finished, I immediately wanted to see the sequel. It’s also the only movie this year I’ve paid to see twice.
You can watch the opening credits to all of the Bond movies here. Typotheque has a lengthy essay on the title design to From Russia With Love and Salon looks at Maurice Binder’s work.
The result from feeding my user icon (which is the cover to Spectrum’s True Love Will Find You In The End CD into the 1024 Cheerleaders generator. Neat site.
England 1898. New Jersey 1938. Santiago 1944. Quito 1949. Los Angeles 1953. Buffalo 1968? Buffalo radio station WKBW updated the Orson Wells War Of The Worlds broadcast using their DJs and in-house news reporters playing themselves. Despite a month’s worth of warnings beforehand, 4000 people called the police and reportedly Canada sent some military units to guard bridges over the Niagara River. WKBW subsequently retooled the broadcast in 1971 and again in 1975. Listen to a mp3 of the 1971 version at Echoes Of A Century.
After so many sham invasions from Mars, you would think that the real Martians would finally get around to doing it for real.