Hello, World!

Let me apologize for not posting for so long! Let amends begin with a picture of a clown.Let me be unambigous: I LOVE CLOWNS. Yes clowns can be scary, but that's part of the fun! Humor has to have a little bit of teeth, when it comes down to it isn't the slightly scary or seedy parts of your childhood the parts that stay with you? There has been, especially in children's entertainment, a general sensitive-izing.Look at that. Innocent Mickey Mouse and playful (but less innocent) Roy 'Moose' Williams. The kids eat it up! Look at those smiles, those are real smiles. Roy , who told ribald stories to the boys when the cameras were off so that they would be ready for the more childish actual show, who stashed alcohol on the set, and who was a genuine artist (the only one on the show, oddly enough). Click the link for good biographies of the cast of the Mickey Mouse Club.
Now, the apology will continue with some music.

As Someday It May Happen (Gilbert & Sullivan):

Live Improvisation (The Boredoms):

Five Songs (The Minutemen):

Someone let me have a picture on the internet. Click to go to his blog.

Let me end my apology with a comic video. The Great One needs no further introduction.


I would like to advertise a future post (they will become regular again) on "THE KING IN YELLOW" by Robert Chambers. To recycle:

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.

Stranger: Indeed?

Cassilda: Indeed, it's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.

Stranger: I wear no mask.

Camilla: No mask? No mask!

Dearest Edward Ellington,

Happy Birthday, Duke!

Sent With Love,
From Your Beloved Mistress,
And All Her Jealous Admirers

The Residents

Instead of writing about New Wave music (which proved to be impossible to both define and remain interesting) I am just going to write an advertisement for a seminal band of the genre - The Residents.

The band and it's fans agreed at some point that these charachters can symbolize the band.

The band is made up of at least one and likely around four persons. Generally, it is believed that the original line-up of the Residents was their "managers" The Cryptic Corporation (originally Jay Clem, John Kennedy, Homer Flynn, and Hardy Fox but now only the last two remain), but all have denied it.

The Residents have worked many different genre's of music, but are often generally described as avant-garde or experimental musicians. As experimenters and formula-banes, they have produced some albums that are unparalleled works of brilliance and some outright disasters.

Some of their best albums include:

About half of Meet The Residents (especially the iconic Smelly Tounges)Their best album: The Third Reich N' RollDuck Stab! (perhaps the quintessential Residents Album)The Commercial Album (40 one minute songs, some good some bad)

Why Children love YouTube

It's impressive enough that he made all the elements rhyme and scan, but that Mr. Lehrersings them with comic class is just unfair to the other parodists.

Baby Mia loves Felix the Cat; It's her new old favorite!

Nu Pogodi! too?

How could TV compete with Mr Five by Five? Nobody else can.

And that's why children love YouTube. So I tell all the parents out there discourage TV, and encourage the internet!

I hate to get political, but because of the tax refund, there is a post about New Wave music coming.

Yasujiro Ozu

After seeing Tokyo Story, I must write a post about Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.I have only seen Tokyo Story and trailers for later films, so my generalizations will not cover his early style (though he crystallized quite young). There are greater film scholars than me.

Yasujiro Ozu was born of acute conception in 1903 and died (on his birthday) in 1963.

He is acclaimed as the "most Japanese" of filmmakers and probably would have been the greatest Japanese film director of his generation if Akira Kurasowa didn't muck things up by being the single greatest filmmaker period.
He is most famous for his filmic/narrative style. He uses one (1) type of shot: the so-called tatami shot. The tatami shot is about three feet off the ground and totally still. All transitions are straight plainly visible cuts. He uses all of 360 degree space (ignoring the 180 degree rule). Like Kurasowa and Hitchcock, his training as a painter comes through in his compositions. He does not show the dramatic moments, but rather there aftermath (making his films highly elliptical). His films are not very plot heavy, nor are they particularly dramatic. He has, in fact, been accused of remaking the same film over and over again. He responded to this criticism by saying that he is a craftsman (specifically he compared himself to a tofu maker), doing one thing absolutely correctly (making delicious tofu).

His movies are all about families slowly dissolving as ordinary people doing ordinary things for ordinary reasons. The odd feeling they are suffused with is called 'mono no aware', a Japanese term meaning "an awareness of the impermanence of things". In other words, things change over the course of his movies, because things change in real life.

There is in this style an unrelenting logic and simplicity that drew me to the movies as a fly to honey. I often find older movies unwatchable due to the lack of certain things (particularly sound design) that would only later be perfected. But in Ozu's films are perfect in the sense of being impossible to change without lessening.

Blocking or giving direction? You be the judge!

Tokyo Story, shown above, is the story of an elderly couple's visit with their children in Tokyo. Their children, while not poor, are not as successful as it seems from far away. The children (except a widowed daughter-in-law) are not particularly kind, pawning off their parents on each other while paying lip service to social conventions. An unusually melodramatic movie by Ozu standards, by our expectation it is a calm highly elliptical film. Despite its simplicity, it bears repeat viewing and close attention.

Ozu was a minimalist in many ways, but he is minimalism done right. His films are very humane, his only interest is the conditions of Japanese life. This is not minimalism, but merely wrong.
The film reminded me of the symphonies of Jean Sibelius. To quote the great composer: Whereas most other modern composers are engaged in manufacturing cocktails of every hue and description, I offer the public pure cold water. So too with the films of Ozu. There is no melodrama in his films, despite the easy drama seemingly inherit in their theme.

Note too how the comparison of making cocktails with making tofu. What an odd connection. It reminds me of another Sibelius quote: If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances.

Not Edgar Allan Poe

This is a picture of Edgar Allen Poe. This isn't be a post about Edgar Allen Poe. There probably won't ever be a Poe post. It's not that Poe isn't interesting, far from it. But I can offer no new insights into his writing. Try here. Poe is a romantic, but he is his own romantic (not a Romantic), not at all indebted to the European school. Some find his writing gaudy, some find it full of life.

Instead this will about Netflix. After less than a week of use it's already made itself worth it. Another post will come after using its mail system. I have to make a complaint, the Anime & Animation section is almost entirely anime, most western cartoons are under Children & Family.

The Watch Instantly system is easy to use and addictive; since getting it the time has mysteriously presented itself to watch:

The Bank Dick
Doctor Who
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
Murder By Death
Night Of The Hunter
And 2001: A Space Odyssey

Quick Reviews:

I had forgotten how much I loved the Ligeti chorus in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Also, everything else great about the movie. But, all the movies flaws.

The Night of The Hunter is one of the great movies of all time, and Netflix didn't burn the negative so it remains so.

I saw the supposedly incomprehensible ending of Murder By Death coming a mile away. As soon as the second act began (with a quick recap by the Nick Charles analogue) there wasn't a single twist in the movie.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker is a great series. Carl Kolchak is a reporter for a Chicago newswire that specializes in grisly stories, especially those that may involve occult figures. The X-Files payed its debt to it (on heresay, written having never seen the X-Files). Somebody had the great idea to hire lots of young writers, so the show is bursting with vigor and humor (until the murders start). In addition, the photography is excellent, far above 70's TV standards, and Darren McGavin gives excellent performances as Mr. Kolchak.

The first series of Doctor Who is mostly notable for being, like Kolchak, a well written sci-fi television show, but also notable for me for featuring what I call early BBC acting at its purest. Old (elderly) stage actors carefully thinking about their line readings exactly where the cinematographer blocked them.

The films I ordered (Our Hospitality/Sherlock Jr, The Short Films of Winsor McCay, and Tokyo Story) all arrived when advertised, but I will be taking a log to find if I'm being throttled, or given low quality DVDs. I am very wary and I will keep extensive records. An extensive criticism is available here. Be warned, I'm watching you Netflix.

Continuing, even Netflix has its limits on what it stocks. Come on, not even one episode of Nu, Pogodi?

Mother 2|Earthbound 1

Earthbound was a video game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.Mother 2 was a video game for the Super Famicom.
Really, Mother 2 and Earthbound are the same game.

They take place in "Eagleland", a parody of the kind of 1950's Leave It To Beaver-esque America (except The Beatles are already big). Oh, it is quite hilarious.This is Ness, the male lead and main character. You control Ness, but you aren't Ness (your you, but this never comes up until the very end of the game)

Something bad is happening. It isn't 100% clear what it is, but it's definitely bad. A meteorite strikes near Ness's house. You go to check it out, but the path is blockaded. Back home Ness's neighbor Pokey, above, gets Ness to help him (Pokey) look for his (Pokey's) brother Picky. Ness, his dog King, and his neighbor Pokey sneak out to check out the meteorite. Pokey is cowardly and mean (this becomes important later), but King and Ness fight off snakes and crows and eventually gets up to the meteorite where picky is. An alien fly with psychic powers named Buzz Buzz comes down from the heavens to try to stop the bad things that are happening. Soon after this Ness, Pokey, Picky and Buzz Buzz are attacked by a different alien Starman Jr.Buzz Buzz defeats Starman Jr. and the whole group goes to Pokey's house, where the P-pair (Pokey and Picky) get in trouble for sneaking out. Their mother slaps the fly in the air, killing Buzz Buzz. Buzz Buzz explains that you have to visit 8 sanctuaries to prevent a cosmic horror from eating the earth.

After that it gets a little odd, in funny and occasionally meta-fictional ways. A good explanation of a few of the subtler touches is available here. He gives away the ending of the game though, so don't read if you intend to play. Also, don't attempt to play without some sort of guide. The game was designed to be play with a guide.

A few stand out devices:
Ness can buy a house, which serves no purpose except to be a house
There's an optional quest that has no reward except a warm feeling inside
A traffic jam blocks a road, and then clears up (normally in video games things only happen by player action, making this almost disturbing)
Two bosses are unbeatable
Lots of music, images, and plots are only scene once and vanish (MacGuffins)
The Blues Brothers
Items that can only be used one obvious time (with a bizarre second twist if it isn't a McGuffin)

Anyway, this cosmic horror (called Giygas) has already infiltrated the world to a great extent, causing people, inanimate objects, and animals to go crazy. In addition to aliens and wild animals, on the way to defeat evil Ness will be attacked by:

ZombiesAbstract ArtAnnoying Old Party MenA cult leader obsessed with the color blue (named Carpainter!)
Loaded Dice

And many, many others. Fortunately Ness won't have to do it alone, Ness will be aided by at most three people at a time:

Poo, Jeff, Ness, and Paula

Also, the Blues Brothers (well, copyright friendly analouges) help you at several points.

Eventually you get to the end and discover that Giygas sacrificed his living form to be beyond time and invincible. Using the technology designed by:

Jeff's father, Dr. Andonuts
The Apple KidAnd the Mr. Saturns (a possibly alien race)

The four of you have to give up your bodies, enter robots and travel to the end of time to fight Giygas. Pokey, who has been manipulating people for Giygas for some time now, appears in a mecha-spider suit to kill you. Giygas had sacrificed its own body for omnipotence, and dwells inside the familiar looking Devil's Machine to keep from destroying reality.Pokey has taken control of the machinations of Giygas (taking control of the Starmen, several large corporations and the entire criminal world) and doesn't intend to give them up. The four of you, at this point armed with powerful weapons and great psychic powers attempt to wrangle Pokey.

Pokey opens the devil machine, and the blind idiot god Giygas emerges.
Giygas emerges from the devil machine a swirling red mass that undulates between being a skull and a fetus:Then things happen that someone who has not played the game can understand. Lets just say that beating the blind idiot god is impossible, but you still have prayer!Since this post is an obscure game on a dead console, it is not likely that you will ever play it if you have not. Suggesting that you play a ROM on an Emulater just wouldn't be right. So Loth Beg would like to recommend that you watch The Blues Brothers, the film version of magical realism, and celebrate their important role in Earthbound.