Category Archives: Music

this soylent green is not people

Every day last week, I had a light night followed by an early morning. I averaged 6 hours of sleep, so when the alarm went off earlier today so I could wake up in time to go to the hockey game, I smashed it with Thor’s Hammer and went back to sleep. I’ve only been awake for an hour, which disappoints the part of me that wants to wring every second out of every day, but satisfies the part of me that is like “shut up with that Type A shit for a minute and accept that you can sleep as long as you need to on the goddamn weekend every now and then.”

So I recalibrated my day. When I finish this coffee, I’ll have another coffee. I’ll probably make some oatmeal pancakes because that’s been on my mind all week long, and then I’ll clean up and organize my office, then my game room, and finally my kitchen. It will eventually be a busy, productive day in Castle Wheaton.

But at the moment, I’m having this coffee and listening to the classic Ambient album Earth to Infinity, by Deep Space Network, while I get my day slowly started.

As I do from time to time, I’m going to evangelize about this album, which is perfect for background music and active listening, depending on how much of a journey you want to take. So as I say from time to time, if you want some ambient in your life (you need it already, whether you know it or not), here’s one of the greatest tracks off this album, Soylent Green:

This album is nearly impossible to find, because it went out of print within minutes of its release. If you can track it down, though, it’s worth the effort.

broadcasting on the deep space network

This is another one of those visual background noise things I like to make.

I used some public domain moving images that I found at Internet Archive, did a bunch of editing and filtering in iMovie, and then replaced the sound with a classic out-of-print ambient track from Earth to Infinity called Memphis to Mars.

I’m surprisingly happy with the way this turned out. When I watched it all the way through, it made me think of syncing Dark Side of the Moon with Wizard of Oz or Echoes with Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. That wasn’t intentional, but I’m happy it turned out that way.

 

there’s an opera out on the Turnpike

I was first exposed to Springsteen during the Born In The USA era, and he just didn’t land on me. The Rolling Stones were a similar experience for me, since I was first really exposed to them during the Dirty Work/Steel Wheels era. Some people may love those eras and albums, but to me it was just 80s pop excess and commercial garbage. Also, I was really into metal and rap, so there’s that.

I didn’t truly fall in love with the Stones until Guitar Hero (or maybe it was Rock Band) showed me the majesty of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, and I went back into their early years to fall into Sticky Fingers and Let it Bleed. I was like How in the world is this the same band that did The Harlem Shuffle?

… and so it appears to be happening to me with Springsteen, right now, in real time. Nebraska is playing as I write this. I’ve never liked his music, but I think that’s because I wasn’t hearing albums of his that were right for me. Paul and Storm played Jungleland in the van when we went on tour together, and while that wasn’t enough to make me a fan, it took up some space in my head and sort of hung out there. So this morning, my random shuffle station of classic rock songs pulled Jungleland off the internet, and I thought, “I’ll give that album a listen.” A few clicks later, I put Born To Run on the Sonos, and holy shit what a record.

I was 3 in 1975, and my parents didn’t listen to cool music (they say that they did because they owned some Beatles and Boston records, but I swear to Christ it was all Joni Mitchell and Loggins and Messina and Yacht Rock and even though my mother still denies it, I endured an unreasonable amount of Barbara Streisand’s Woman In Love when I was a kid) so I didn’t grow up with this as background music the way my kids grew up with The Pixies and Nirvana and Radiohead (you’re welcome, Ryan and Nolan) … but if I’d been a teenager in 1975, this record would have spoken to me the way The Queen is Dead did, I think.

So I don’t think anyone cares, and this is one of those posts that doesn’t really say anything, but feels good to write for precisely that reason.

Anyway, I think I’m going to go buy two Springsteen records for the first time in my life.

From the Vault: the seat with the clearest view

Anne and I took a long walk today, and while we were on our way back, I remembered writing this post for my blog, a million years ago. The game I’m talking about, Kangaroo, was the subject of a column I was writing for The AV Club at the time, called The Games of Our Lives:

Even though Kangaroo is sort of a forgettable game, it will always be special to me because, like Wizard of Wor, it reminds me of a specific time and place in my life: the set of my first feature film, The Buddy System. We shot that movie at 20th Century Fox during the summer of 1983, and the art department had both Kangaroo and Turbo set on free play, and because the sound was turned off, I got to play them whenever I wanted to. That movie was a lot of difficult work. Richard Dreyfuss hadn’t gotten sober yet, and many days he just didn’t show up for work, so I spent a lot of time playing gin rummy with my aunt, racing cars, and beating up the evil pink monkeys. The director didn’t know how to talk to kids, so he just gave me lots of line readings (which annoyed me, even as I neared my eleventh birthday) . . . but when I look back on that summer, what I really remember is the time I spent with Susan Sarandon, who played my mother in the film, and how much fun we had together. She took me under her wing, and treated me like I was her son, colleague, and friend. When the director was a dick, she made it okay. When Richard was looney on the cocaine, she made it okay. But more than anything else, she never talked down to me. She made me feel like I was part of the cast, and I deserved to be there, even though I was just a kid. The only other person to treat me that way when I was a child working in movies was Rob Reiner.

I remember one afternoon, while we were on a break between scenes, I walked through an empty set, and saw Susan listening to her Walkman (like an iPod, but it uses these things called “cassette tapes,” that you may have seen on “I Love The 80s.”) She pulled off her headphones, and said, “Do you want to hear some cool music?”

“Sure,” I said, and walked into the room, which was her character’s bedroom in the movie. They’d built an entire house on the stage, and even though I’d been on lots of sets before, it was still magical to me. There were lights and catwalks and cables and all the elements of movie magic just outside the camera’s view. Some lights, flags, and C-stands crowded the corners of the set, and our chairs were pushed up against one wall. The room was dimly lit by the reflected light from the shooting set, a few rooms down the hall.

I sat down next to her and heard music coming out of her headphones.

“How are you doing today?” She said.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I saw Superman III last night.”

“Oh? How was it?” She said. She paused her Walkman, and the tinny sound of a guitar was replaced by the voices of the crew setting up the next shot.

“It was really stupid,” I said. “They tried too hard to be funny, so it wasn’t cool like the first two.”

“Do you know who Richard Pryor is?” She said.

I shook my head.

“He played Gus.”

“The guy who made the machine?” I said. “Oh god! I hated him.”

“He’s a famous comedian.” She said.

“Well, he’s not very funny,” I said. Compared to the antics of Jack Tripper, or Arnold Jackson’s Watchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis? which was the height of comedy as far as I was concerned, Richard Pryor just didn’t rate.

“When you get older, you should listen to his comedy albums,” she said. “I think you’ll change your mind.”

She was right. When I was fifteen or sixteen, my friend Pat and I picked up Richard Pryor Live in Concert, and I laughed so hard I almost forgave him for Brewster’s Millions. He went on to be a comedic influence in my life, joining Bill Murray, Bill Hicks, Bill Cosby, and a few comedians who are not named Bill, including Chevy Chase and Steve Martin.

“If I do, I’ll call you,” I said. Unfortunately, by the time I did, we’d lost touch. That has always made me feel a little sad.

“We’re ready for first team!” The first assistant director called out.

She picked up her headphones and put them over my ears. “Quick! Before they find us!” She said. I giggled as she pushed play.

A man started to sing. His voice was deep and beautiful. The music was soft, and felt sort of sad. If I’d known what “haunting” was, that’s how I would have described it.

After a minute, she said, “Do you like it?”

I did. It was unlike any of the music my parents listened to, and was very different from the pop music I heard on the radio.

“Who is it?” I said.

“It’s my friend,” she said. “This song is about an astronaut who blasts off and never comes back.”

“It’s really cool,” I said, as an assistant director poked his head into the room.

“I have first team,” he said in to his walkie talkie. “We’re ready for you on set,” he said to us.

We got up and went to work before I could find out the title of the song. As the day went on, and the work took over, I never thought to ask, and by the end of the day, I’d forgotten about it entirely.

Later that year, I helped my dad repair a gate on the side of our house. We listened to KMET (the greatest rock-n-roll radio station in history, which was tragically replaced in 1987 by the worst light-jazz pile of shit in history) while we worked, and that song from Susan’s friend came out of the radio.

“Dad!” I said, “This is the song that Susan played for me when we filmed The Buddy System! This is her friend!”

My dad stopped hammering, and listened.

“Do you know who it is?” I said.

“Yeah,” my dad said. “This is David Bowie.” The song was Space Oddity.

To this day, whenever I hear it, I can see my eleven year-old self, sitting in that empty, dusty, dimly-lit set on stage 18 at Fox. I can feel the rough pads of Susan’s headphones on my ears, and remember how happy I felt to be part of a secret club.

ephemeral nightmare (proof of concept video)

This is a proof of concept I made to test out a project idea I’ve had for a little while, sort of similar to my Ephemera Mashup. The main inspiration for this came to me awhile ago, when I was in a bar downtown that was silently playing Mondo Hollywood on TVs. That film, without sound, is a collection of images that are strange but also good, and I thought it would be fun and cool to collect films from the Internet Archive, and cut together something of my own.

The idea with this particular proof was to create something that was a little creepy and slightly off, that could be projected onto the wall at a warehouse party, without sound, as background art. I ended up with something that works with or without sound, and (I think) rewards varying levels of attention. In fact, I rendered the audio only, and put it on my Soundcloud, because I think it’s cool and weird all on its own.

So, to make this, I grabbed a bunch of public domain footage from the Internet Archive, and cut it all up. Then I tossed it into iMovie and applied some filters. I modified the audio in Audacity, and mixed in some other audio that I also created in Audacity by modifying other public domain works. If I like it, and feel that it was worth the time, I’ll make some more like this that actually have more deliberate cuts and choices in the content. At the moment, this is primarily clips that I eyeballed, thought were interesting, and tossed into the edit timeline.

I got sort of fascinated by some old burlesque and stag footage that I found at the Archive, so that’s in here, and may offend those with sensitive dispositions.