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Marlowe from ALCHEMYcreative on Vimeo.
I’m not a car fan. I’m not going to go into all the reasons why I am not. That said, I do love the sound of muscle car engines and the bond that develops with technology and their users.
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The S From Hell from Rodney Ascher on Vimeo.
“The S From Hell” by Rodney Ascher is a darling short documentary about a logo, a minimalist synthesizer arrangement, innocent children, and what has amounted to a legacy of terror. Apparently.
Irrational fears are great fun if you don’t have them but have friends or family who are willing to confide theirs to you. This truth certainly makes ‘The S From Hell’ fun to view, and the film definitely had me laughing aloud the first viewing, but the second time, I felt much more sympathetic to the people reliving their childhood terror.
If you’re eagle-eyed enough to remember the briefest images of analog audio technology in videos I’ve posted before, this film contains footage from the Delia Derbyshire segment of Alchemists of Sound.
Source: io9.com
UNDERCITY from Andrew Wonder on Vimeo. Watch in full-screen mode.
It’s been a rough year and a half for me in my hometown of Minneapolis: the job market is in the latrine and I am poor. I seldom go out to enjoy myself and see what the city has to offer. I’ve pretty much begun to shun the art & social scene and have whittled my list of hobbies down to feeling bad about circumstances and eating junk food. Sometimes I have eaten Taco Bell. I’m making it sound worse than it is, because I really enjoy being home with my wife and daughter, and really the hardest part of my life is working nights and not being there.
An amazing development happened over the summer though, I joined a band with minimal aspirations. Eventually, the band totally minimized their aspirations to really being nothing more than a lose association of dudes annoying wives and girlfriends with loud noise. A few of us saw more potential and we made plans. We scored an office space that would allow us to play our music after-hours. We have a nice windowed office several stories above the street level and during breaks we make the time to take in the view of our portion of the skyline. The restroom is really nice; you can take a pee and watch club-goers on the street below. You can still see people in restaurants below waiting for tables. Sometimes you get to watch cops hassling people at the bus stop. Then it’s back to working on songs about barbarians, mini-vans, and societal roles.
It’s an experience that has helped me to rekindle my civic love, but without having to get too deep into the grit of it. Though I like and want the grit, I am too afraid of heights, drowing, and probably dying to try and experience this grit. Which has really set the stage for this short film, Undercity, to appeal me. Steve Duncan, ‘guerrilla historian’, has an honest and unending love for his city, New York. It is a detached and singular affection. More over, his love especially extends to the parts of the city not meant for people and thus, the dramatic and dangerous aspects of his love for his city are ever present. He’s a fascinating human here in this film, but is also equally fascinating in this NPR profile and this New York Times article.
This film (directed by Andrew Wonder) is pretty riveting: the filmmaker knows his subject well, his subject knows and loves the territory and it’s people, the photography is tight, and there are more than a few moments that made me feel weak in the knees. Things like art and film really excel, gracefully or cheaply, when they can take you places you normally can’t go. Cities are big and complex and contain frontiers. People are interesting and courageous when they want to or happen to be. It is also appealing on a very basic, yet also powerful level to dodge subway trains and cops to find cool shit.
Even better than the BBC Radiophonic Workshop doc, “The Alchemists of Sound”, is this BBC Krautrock documentary “Krautrock; The Rebirth of Germany”. Drink 5 beers and watch this, just like I did.
In what has been a glorious improvement in my state of being, I have joined a band with enough people in it that we are fully able to adequately cover all the positions between guitarists and drummer. Even more astounding is that fact that three of us have decided that the goals of the first band are too small in terms of our capabilities and have now elected to start a second band to play actual shows and write actual songs.
I’ve been trying to expand some of my influences and inspirations in order to keep bringing new ideas to the table. One inspiration is work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which was an in-house studio for the BBC in the 1950’s-1990’s, which began manipulating tape, bending circuits of audio equipment, and utilized some unorthodox means. I’m more partial to the work of Delia Derbyshire than some of the other members of the workshop through the years, but this 2003 BBC documentary is worth a watch, even though it seems to try a little hard to arrive at the point that their work directly resulted in electronica. I’m not sure who the guy is who keeps appearing in the background.
If you have 30-45 minutes and want to get your well-shot documentary fix in, I highly recommend Laboratory Conditions, a film about a man, a town, and the industry and politics that drive it.
It’s in five parts, so if you need to get beers in between the chapters, you can.
