Animal, mineral, vegetable ... I could list the way I've always loved this Joan Armatrading tune. Here's a live version from a few years ago at Glastonbury.
"The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised." - Freya Stark
Alfred Hitchcock was still making movies around the time I was getting fascinated with them, although my primary exposure to him as a kid was less seing things like Family Plot (his 1976 farewell) than reading The Three Investigators book series, which went out under his imprimatur. Soon enough, though, I couldn't get enough of watching his older films, and I still find many of them a thrill.
I'm looking forward, then, to see what Anthony Hopkins does in the forthcoming film Hitchcock, which is about the making of Psycho. The movie started shooting last month. The publicity photo released at the start certainly indicates Hopkins will transform himself for the role, as he's done before.
Paul Weller has aged considerably since he wrote this Jam single in the late Seventies, but he's always played it. Here's a rendition from Jimmy Fallon earlier this month.
I've worked independently a couple of times during my career, and can relate to the humour in this video, although I think it will be even more biting for the independents (the graphic designers, the web developers, the writers, and so on) that have astonishingly frustrating conversations with clients about pricing.
The Community finale that featured an eight-bit-style rendering of the characters inside a bespoke videogame was, well, amazing. I still chuckle.
I'm not sure what kind of show NBC expects to next year, having turfed creator Dan Harmon, but I have my doubts that the most clever show on U.S. TV will hang on to that description. Too bad.
If only I had a network and could offer Harmon something.
After Donna Summer died earlier this week after battling cancer, I played her cover of State of Independence, which was recorded a year or so after the original from Jon and Vangelis. It was kind of faithful, but had that Quincy Jones topspin in its production, particularly with the all-celebrity chorus, a good three years before We Are The World but sharing some of the same names.
it's an interesting song, with lyrics that can be taken as stream-of-consciousness randomness, trite jibberish, or deeply spiritual. Take your pick.
I still prefer the original, which appeared on The Friends of Mr. Cairo in 1981.
We're so accustomed to cinematic sleights of hand, especially since the CG era began, that we often don't blink when we see something astonishing on the screen. Well, we think, they figured out a way of doing that.
But sometimes what we see is what was shot. I was reminded of this while reading this list on Paste of movie scenes that were much more real than what we might have thought. It's a diverse list, from Harrison Ford's panicky lines at the Death Star (he deliberately did not read his dialogue, to ensure that what came to mind would be spontaneous) to Edward Norton popping Brad Pitt one while filming Fight Club.
This clip, though, is from another realm altogether. I remember seeing Hearts of Darkness and being amazed to learn that Martin Sheen was a) drunk and b) genuinely falling apart while he was shooting a scene in which Willard is in that very condition. The smashing of the mirror and the smearing of the blood were all unexpected consequences; Sheen insisted that the cameras keep rolling.
Not from drugs ... that came a few years later ... but through a remastered tape of Culture Club's appearance on Top of the Pops. Certainly a lot shinier than what passes for "vintage" video from the early Eighties. Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? was Boy George's introduction to the pop charts, and it still gets played, which is not too shabby at all.
Today's TeeFury design speaks to me. (And I have the numerous headbumps to prove it. At 6'6", it's no picnic learning that some doorframes, signs, drops, etc., are more dangerous than others.)
This video was made last August, while The Avengers was being filmed in Cleveland, but it's getting a new life (a billion bucks at the box office will spark a lot of interest in anything A-team) lately. Tom Hiddleston, who plays the villainous Loki, proves himself to be an all-round decent chap for a crowd of fans looking for a little excitement.
Stephen Fry speaks up for the cursers, noting (rather correctly, I feel) that those who say that swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary happen to have a poor vocabulary themselves.
Needless to say, this is not meant for children or playing aloud in a workplace. Unless everyone's into cursing.
I Saw Her Again is one of the great doormat songs of pop music; that is, a tune about how a cad knows he's stringing along a woman, but does it anyway. Even though it's so sunny, its lyrics are acidic: "And it makes me feel so good to know/ she'll never leave me." It's even creepier knowing that the authors are the Papas, John Phillips and Denny Doherty, writing together about Doherty's affair with Mama Michelle Phillips, who was married to John Phillips.
The song is also well-known for a "mistake" that has been discussed, I would imagine, since it came out: namely how Denny Doherty appears to have a false start on the third chorus. "I saw her ... I saw her again last night," he sings.
But it turns out the error is not Doherty coming in too early, but an error in the editing process.
Here's engineer Bones Howe, telling the tale from the board, in a documentary about the Wrecking Crew, the legendary L.A. musicians who played on countless recordings in the Sixties.
Here's the tune itself ... the song of the day here on Dot Dot Dot.
Well, it might seem that way; this funny mashup takes the ominous score for the trailer of Scott's Prometheus and attaches itself like an alien to Pixar's not-nearly-so-cute-anymore Cars 2.
Dot Dot Dot is Morse code for the letter 'S,' the full message Guglielmo Marconi claimed to have received atop Signal Hill in St. John's in 1901. It ushered in the age of telecommunications. My maternal grandfather worked as a telegraph operator for Canadian Marconi on Signal Hill for many years.
As well, I have a habit of overusing the ellipsis when I write ... as frequent readers might notice.
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