Wendy Carlos on HAL 9000
When I first experienced 2001 (in the huge Cinerama theater on Broadway), I guessed that the effect of HAL dying simply had to have been done on an Eltro machine, or a close copy of one. By absurd coincidence, I was an engineer in NYC who may have had the most experience with an original Mark II, at Herb Moss’s Gotham Recording Studios, now long gone.
Spotted this today and just had to share. Ain’t nothing but the geek in me.
(Via Coudal.)
Dear Clusterflock
Of all the courses you took in school (any school, at any time in your life), which one has had the most significant impact on your life?
The Motorcycle I Rode Halfway Across the Country
In this picture it’s 1970, and I had just turned 17. The motorcycle is a Honda 450. I was 15 when I rode it from Dallas to California, through the southwest and into the northwest and back again.
Hello in There
I found a link to the Midler piece I referenced in my comment on c’flock. It wasn’t until I remembered it was the lead-in for Hello in There, a song by John Prine, that I found it. Now, this isn’t the exact rendition to which I referred from the live recording I had on 8-track. (I have not heard this for years.) The version I remember was edgy-er (edgier? How the fuck do you spel…? Don’t matter). The first was funnier and all the more poignant because of the edge with which she delivered it. This version has been softened, pablumized. I’d like to think it wasn’t Bette who changed her performance, that it was some soul-less, humor-less somebody from Disney or Corporate related to this broadcast who made her change it to make it more sentimental. Still, there’s something surreal in Emmett Kelly, sitting on the stage, in face. Here it is:
The Films of Our Lives
I saw a movie recently in which an 80ish women has an unlikely photograph on her wall. It shows Anita Ekberg in the famous scene where she wades in the Trevi Fountain in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.” She tells her elderly boyfriend: “I looked exactly like her when I was young.” Maybe she did and maybe she didn’t, but the photograph struck a chord. I saw Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” for the first time in London on the summer of 1962, in a little cinema on Piccadilly Square. I taught it a shot at a time at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1972, and again in 1982, 1992 and 2002, give or take a year. I’ve seen it countless other times, but those ten-yearly screenings have helped me measure the inexorable progress of time.
Continue reading The Films of Our Lives on Roger Ebert’s Journal.
Gravity
I imagined standing in the laundry basket, hands on either side, lifting myself into the air.
Life Imitating Art Imitating Life
A reference made by the representative of Corwood Industries to Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc reminded me. The first time I saw Passion (without musical accompaniment), the film snagged for a second or two, then commenced to burn from exposure to the intense heat of the projector lamp.
I misheard
all of the lyrics to Kyu Sakamoto’s “Ue wo muite arukou” (released as “Sukiyaki” in the United States, where for three weeks in 1963 it was at the top of Billboard’s Pop chart).
Great video.
A sad aside: Kyu Sakamoto was a passenger on Japan Airlines Flight 123 on August 12, 1985. Flight 123 crashed into Osutaka Ridge outside Tokyo; all members of the crew and all but four of the 509 passengers died. The crash remains the deadliest single-aircraft disaster ever.
This World is Not My Home
Purdy much how I recollect it…
Carson
He made a rosewood box from a single piece of wood. I had no idea the technology behind it. I could tell something was wrong. Mother or father looked askance at him. The box was waxed or oiled. The edge of the top was routed or carved — it sat inside the hollow. I looked at him and wondered why it was.
Drive-In (Incidents from the Life of Ryan)
At the drive-in, Sheila Ryan:
(1) Gained her first knowledge of the Holocaust.
(2) Proposed a fun activity she has yet to enact.
Separate incidents.
When asked to explain
I was in Dreamland, and he asked me to ‘explain’ Joey Ramone to someone who didn’t know the Ramones from Bo Diddley. And true to type, I had to start off with this long back story about how when I first saw the Ramones back in 1977, their repertoire was so limited that they played an entire set twice within one set.
Wayback Machine
Remember the kids you thought were adults?
Regrets (I’ve Had a Few)
I regret having discovered only today that Eddra Gale (La Saraghina of Fellini’s 8½) was born in Chicago and that she died in Deming, New Mexico in 2001. I wish I’d met her and gotten to know her.
On Memory
Cooper Renner possesses total recall of an event in which both he and I participated, an automotive breakdown the anecdotal punch line of which is “Charge it to The Doctor.” I trust his recollection implicitly, but I have no direct memory of the incident.
I recall details leading up to a separate incident (wherein he pulled the car over to the shoulder so that I could open the door and vomit). I recall feeling very very ill immediately after he and I exited a classroom on completion of an exam. I recall lurching into a restroom and praying in vain to the porcelain god. I recall my desperate yearning for Melanie (our friend, classmate, and fellow car pool member) to wrap up that exam and free Renner to drive us — me — home. In fact, I can do a pitch-perfect imitation of Renner standing outside the closed classroom door and gazing in at Melanie as he softly crooned, “Lit-tle gi-i-rrl! Bet-ter hur-ry! Someone’s gonna who-oop!” He remembers none of this.
Google is warping our minds
Nicholas Carr wrote the article I wanted to:
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Dear Clusterflock,
It’s real hot and sticky this weekend—too sticky to move out of the airstream of the fan—so I’ve been sitting on the couch rereading Mighty Maggie Mason’s (months-old) lists of 100 Things Worth Doing (parts 2, 3, 4) and 100 Things to Do Before I Go (parts 2, 3, 4).
And so, of course, I’ve also started making my own lists. It’s fun but surprisingly difficult—at least the “to do” part. Apparently I’m not very good at setting goals: I’ve got twice as many dones as to dos so far, and I can assure you that that is not because I’m a stellar overachiever.
Read more
All the Men and Women Merely Players (RIP Paul Sills 1927-2008)
I’ve been wrassling all week over a cluster-post about Paul Sills. I mean, I was silent about Bob Rauschenberg. I promised and failed to deliver a meditation on Yves Saint Laurent. The best I could do for Bo Diddley was a photo and quotation and link to a clip on YouTube.
And then Paul Sills died.
This is getting morbid.
So I’m just going to crib, this time from Gapers Block’s newsletter, The Party Line.
In my ongoing quest to evaluate my personal contribution to this world, recently I stopped Googling myself long enough to realize that I enjoy a curious claim: I’ve reduced to tears two women from two separate Chicago performing arts families.
Almost Forgot
Last night I had a dream that Clinton was McCain’s running mate. They tagged it the McClinton campaign.
Back slowly out the door — then run like hell
Speaking of what she (rather brilliantly) characterized as the “anger problem gift” of Christopher Hitchens, India went on to speculate on his liabilities as a friend. ” . . . one might find oneself trying to steer him out of parties by the elbow rather often,” she noted.
And it all came flooding back. Early 1980s. Milwaukee. A place called the National Liquor Bar. Enormous. And very very open — a stark, austere lay-out I associate with barbecue joints, not bars. And brightly — I mean brightly — lit. Big old fluorescent tubes in metal fixtures. And not much in terms of ‘amenities’ or bar food. In fact, the eats may have been limited to the pickled eggs that rested in big jars up above the bar proper.
I’m not sure why we Madison hipsters patronized the place. Maybe because it was the bar closest to the Mexican restaurant we liked. (We liked the restaurant, as I recall, mainly because of their policy that “so long as you keep eating, we’ll keep serving”. And it was really something to watch Al, who was a trim, svelte guy, pack away enough Mexican food to satisfy a crew of construction workers. Now that was entertainment.)
Anyway, one night we went into the National Liquor Bar with Jerry. It was his first visit. Now Jerry did not have an “anger problem” nor an “anger gift”, but he did have a wicked wit and a mode of vocal inflection that . . . well, just screamed Q-U-E-E-N.
And he paused once we’d entered, took in the scene, then said in a voice clearly audible to the entirely silent (and solitary) men scattered throughout the place, “Oh, I know what this is. It’s a Vietnam. Veterans’. Stress Center.”
. . . and we all moved ever so slightly away from Jerry, thinking to ourselves, “Jerry, we love you, man, and this is going to make us feel real real bad — but we didn’t walk in with you and we don’t even know you.”
The Originator (1928-2008)
It’s a truncated clip (from the TNT Show), but it vanished completely from YouTube a while back, so a little bit is better than none. Longer and nastier than the clip that once was up and now is down. Bonus: The Duchess.
And: you get two songs. “Hey, Bo Diddley”, followed by “Bo Diddley”. “Bo Diddley” commences about two minutes into the clip, and that’s when things start to get really juicy.
Tattoo
Camera-phone snap. 31 May 2008.
Branded 1980 by Larry, Atwood Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin. Admired 1990 in Athens by partisans of PASOK, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα), whose party symbol it resembles. [Discreetly covered whilst visiting Royalist strongholds in the southernmost Peloponnese.] Refreshed circa 2003-2004 in Chicago.
I expect I’ll regret you
But the skin-graft man won’t get you
You’ll be there when I die
Tattoo
(Pete Townshend, “Tattoo,” from The Who, The Who Sell Out, 1967)
Nevada Test Site Oral History Project
Courtesy of the National Nuclear Security Administration/Nevada Site Office.
In December 1950, President Harry S. Truman approved the establishment of a continental nuclear proving ground 65 miles north of Las Vegas, Nevada. Between 1951 and 1992, 1021 nuclear detonations took place at the Nevada Test Site — one hundred explosions were in the atmosphere and 921 were underground. It is estimated that the test site employed 125,000 during the Cold War. The photograph [above] shows the De Baca test, detonated on October 26, 1958. Five days later the U.S. and U.S.S.R. agreed to a nuclear testing moratorium which stayed in effect until the Soviets resumed testing in 1961. In 1992, a second nuclear testing moratorium went into effect. Subcritical tests and other national security programs are ongoing at the 1375-square-mile Nevada Test Site.
Dear Clusterflock (inspired by Uncut magazine):
What was your first single (45 rpm, etc.) record purchase?
What was your first LP/CD/cassette purchase?
My first single almost certainly would’ve been by the Beatles, probably “We Can Work It Out” (unless “Nowhere Man” came out earlier?) But, knowing my reputation for idiosyncrasy, you will not consider it inappropriate, I hope, to learn that either my second or third single would have been Mouse and the Traps’ “Do the Best You Can”.
My first LP was Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits.
All That Heaven Allows
The instant I read India’s anguished plea for an explanation of what the hell is the deal with Red Velvet Cake, I had the first half of the formula.
“Red Velvet Cake and ________.” A recollected phrase. What he, a prince among men, bestowed on her as a birthday tribute. Her favorite cake and a DVD of her favorite film. A point of pride to which she testified.
And it came to me. “Red Velvet Cake and Imitation of Life.”
Better than that it does not get.