A Smashing viewer suggested this great documentary about seminal electronic music composer, Tristram Cary.
Cary was involved in the design of a pre-Moog synth, created the distinctive Hammer House of Horror sound and composed music running the gamut of the UK film and TV industry from Ealing Comedies to Dr Who.
This is a film that takes a look behind the scenes of Al Jazeera as the Iraq War unfolds. Although this is a staple film posted by those who oppose the Iraq War, that in itself is almost proof that Al Jazeera has an impossible task as an objective news source. For that matter, so do the US cable channels as long as Fox can still get advertisers.
The film is interesting to me primarily because it is about modern media and how war is and will be covered, spun, pushed and distorted by all parties involved, particularly those on the offensive.
1 hr 25 min 54 sec Mar 17, 2007
The innovative 2005 documentary which used state of the art 3d computer graphics to simulate a mission to an inhabited planet around a remote star. The beginning is awful, why is George Lucas an expert in astro-biology? However, the film warms up as it passes some conventional alien life to encounter some really imaginative ones such as the giant 50 foot high beasts that walk over an amoebic sea.
1 hr 33 min 42 sec Jan 31, 2008 www.albca.com
Self indulgence week closes with a drum roll. This excellent solo from Baby Dodds in 1946.
Lewis is on the right. He pronounces almost every vowel as a diphthong, something that is heard only among very old English aristocrats, these days.
I’m sure Lewis would be turning in his grave if he knew that he was a hero of the contemporary Christian right.
Comments Off on C.S. Lewis Lectures on the Novels of Charles Williams important dead people, self indulgence week
Nietsche is dead, God is not. Sadly.
Comments Off on Silent Film of Nietzsche accompanied by unnecessary music and moustache. important dead people, self indulgence week
On the one hand I hesitate to post The Waste Land since it is clearly self indulgent nonsense. However:
1. This is/was self indulgence week.
2. It’s really good self indulgent nonsense.
3. Eliot himself inoculated the poem by saying it was nonsense.
I do feel uncomfortable with the bits that sound pretty anti-semitic to me. Perhaps someone could elucidate?
A home movie from 1947. What a place Princeton was, after the war.
@ 33 seconds: Einstein
1:06 Godel on left
1:25 Selberg at the right, his wife Heddy in the middle
1:41 Paul Erdos (left) and Hermann Weyl (right)
3:01 Paul Dirac at right, and his student Harish-Chandra at left
Comments Off on Einstein, Dirac, Godel, Erdos, Weyl in Princeton important dead people, self indulgence week
Mark Twain in his signature “Don’t Give a Damn” white suit. The first true American.
(Self indulgence week runs over a couple of days, since I didn’t manage to put up the remaining clips in time, on account of having to rebuilt the site after it was hacked. I have now intstalled 3 miles of razor wire, machine gun posts and watch towers).
“A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture”. So said Pevsner, who fled Nazi Germany to the UK and is responsible for one of its greatest architectural edifices. Something that is neither a bicycle shed or a cathedral, but an inimitable 32 volume foundation to the definitive history of the “Buildings of England”.
Today’s piece of self indulgence is poached from my all time favorite Youtube user, “Meades Shrine”.
1 comment architecture, important dead people, self indulgence week