From somewhere in Long Beach
by Chris Barrus
Greg was the guy that gave this bourgeois suburban Spacemen 3 freak from Orange County a chance to work in rock-n-roll and, well, my life hasn’t been the same. I hadn’t really communicated with him recently outside of the odd “hello” at a gig or something but he casted a long shadow over everyone. Still processing. LA Times obituary.
So I’m planning on taking a couple of weeks for the drive from Los Angeles to New York. Michael Gondry’s video for “Behind” makes the drive in 4 minutes and 1 second.
One last playlist before I pack up all the mp3s for the trip east. Awhile back one of the music magazines (Mojo perhaps?) ran a top 40 list of Los Angeles/California-themed songs. Most of the usual suspects were included (X, NWA, The Eagles, The Doors, etc.) but there were some omissions that stood out. Therefore a CD70!
The track listing (and this time in order):
Come to think of it, the Zevon track might have been in the original list but what the hey, it’s a great song.
With the deaths of Christopher Reeve and Jacques Derrida in the news, the death of legendary spacecraft designer Max Faget’s got buried back a couple pages. His obituary is pretty amazing – designing just about everything that NASA flew from the X-15 and Mercury capsules to the Space Shuttle. Though maybe not known outside of NASA history buffs, a couple of Soviet-era cosmonauts were glad that he was around.
Typography symbols are constantly recontextualized, but punctuation marks are eternal. At least until 1962 when the interrobang “‽” was created.
American Martin K. Speckter concocted the interrobang itself in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency, Speckter believed that ads would look better if advertising copywriters conveyed surprised queries using a single mark.
All about the interrobang. Countdown to when “interrobang” (“exclarotive’ and “exclamaquest” were potential alternate names) is used as a band name begins in 5, 4, 3, 2…
1962 is my last disc (for now) for the CDR 700 Go! project. Sequencing was much more difficult on this than on the other discs, and the best results seemed to happen with just making a new playlist and hitting random play on it.
Went to see Hero this evening (short review: state of the art hack and slash, worth seeing) and got a dollar bill back in the change that had been stamped with a message saying “Track My Journey Across The U.S.A! Please Enter My Serial Number At www.wheresgeorge.com”
Went to Where’s George and discovered that the bill had initially been marked in Barstow, travelled to Hawaii, and then worked it’s way back to Irvine. Kind of a cool site for triviaspotter types like myself. I’ll let loose a bunch of these on the trip east.
Following from the similar “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” and “Out Of Time“, “Transportation Futuristics” is a treasure dump of retrofuture eye candy with a hundred years’ worth of monorails, SSTs, flying cars, floating cities, etc.