Cahiers du Cinema

My coffee table displays Giant and Regular Size Sundials From Around the World (crown folio, minor scratches) and several issues of Cahiers du Cinema. Here is Godard's top ten list for the year 1962 from "Godard on Godard" in Cahiers :

01. Hatari! (Howard Hawks)02. Vanina Vanini! (Roberto Rossellini)03. Through a Glass, Darkly! (Ingmar Bergman)04. Jules! et Jim! (Francois Truffaut)05. Le Signe du Lion! (Eric Rohmer)06. Vivre sa Vie! (Jean-Luc Godard)07. The Flaming Years! (Alexander Dovzhenko)08. Sweet Bird of Youth! (Richard Brooks)09. Une Grosse Tete! (Claude de Givray)10. Ride the High Country! [G.B. Guns in the Afternoon!] (Sam Peckinpah)

My Trip to Istanbul

Puppet Operas

We love puppet operas. Here's a link to one: http://www.wertzateria.com/eyeye.html The sets are designed by Wertz who did Camper Van Beethoven's latest album cover. Bryce heard some members of CVB at Red Hill Books. This is in Bernal Heights. Bryce has been spending a lot of time near Bernal & Mission of late seeing two different performances of the Pope of Yes. Yes, Bryce is becoming a Valencia Street Hipster. He does not like the group Yes, only the Pope of Yes.

Free the trolls from the Bastille

For July, the Troll Altar has the most fabulous display of a citoyen being freed from the Bastille.

What band is playing now?

Bands should always paint their name on the front of the base drum so you can tell who they are. Ricky Nelson, Laurence Welk, and the Carrie Nations did it. Otherwise, there is confusion. Junk Thief and I went to the Big Freedom Blowout at El Rio . We listened to The Mystic Sequins, I Was Using That Pencil, Introverted Smile, Shades of Melanie, and Insouisance. I loved the first band, with their two drummers and synth, not to mention patchwork pants. But because they didn't paint their name on the drumset I didn't know who they were and had to text message Landron who standing next to me. Speaking patchwork pants, Pope of Yes will be at the Knockout 3223 Mission at Valencia on July 15. Don't this this melodramatic popular song / classical opera and vocal / electro synth playful one-man-band duo. Photo by Eggs (c) 2008. Later, Junk Thief and oneself went to the Makeout Room to see PoY in a fantastic show on a school night. We got our posters signed and our spirits imbued.

Three-Nine will take you on a never-ending journey

Flying Steamrollers Part II

Weighing 575,000 pounds, the Empire State Express No 999 was the first wheeled object to obtain a speed of 100 MPH. The cheering crowds could n'er realize that someday a wheeled object would reach the outer realms of the universe. That train is Galaxy Express 999. The plot: a waif wants an indestructible body. The only place to get one was the planet Schwell some trillion miles away at the end of the Galaxy Express line. When Tetsuro reached the planet Schwell he did not have to pay for an indestructible body. They were giving them away. No one wanted to live forever because they became irritable.

Steamroller Punk

Men's Vogue Online had a great post about artist Chris Burden.
The fact that in 1971 a gallery Santa Ana, California featured a performance artist who had himself shot in the arm with a rifle astounds the mind. It was during the Vietnam war, but how could a groundbreaking (and skin breaking) piece be happening in that bed of right-wing paranoia, Orange County? Burden attended UC Irvine, one of the new UCs at the time that set their sites on experimentation. Tamara Fites is an alumna. Even today, homocore steampunker Tom Jennings works there a technician in the Arts Computation Engineering graduate program. Tom's own creations do not go back quite to the Victorian age, but the early days of real computing. One of his creations is a voice synthesizer using paper telex tape. Various "taped" stories can be loaded into the machine which speaks in an early artificial computer voice (resembling the train annoucments in BART stations). One tells the story of mathematician Alan Turing who broke the Nazi code, but was later arrested by the Brits for being a homosexual. Jennings is obsessed with codes and invented the early bulletin board file exchange protocol, fidonet. Speaking of computer voices, there is always HAL. Bryce is nostalgic now because it's been so long since he's sent a cable or a telex. That was text messaging! No happy faces. One of the keys rang a bell on the other end. Photo by Twylo That key combination is Cntrl+G.

We can rewrite Poe's poem:

Hear the sledges with the ctrl+Gs -

Silver ctrl-Gs!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!

Headset

Google "kitty" and the top hit will be Sanrio. Click that and Hello Kitty sashays towards you like Paula Abdul. You've come a long way, baby!

I first fell in love with her in a toy store in 1977. Sinatra did it his way, Doris Day did the "Que Sera Sera," and there, printed on a bright pink pencil holder was "I enjoy ring toss." Is there any better way to sum up life?

Kitty's MMOG is in closed beta test right now. You can catch a video tutorial before the release! Not having a mouth does not stop Hello Kitty from wearing a Madonna headset. Mothra does not have a mouth, well, she has mouth parts. I feel a poem coming on...

Twins sing to summon Mothra

Mothra swims to rescue twins

Tokyo radio goes on the fritz

Technically not a cocoon, but who counts

It's made from the finest silk

Out emerges our goddess

In her pipe-cleaner finery

Ravishing the world for love