Having attended the live simulcast, I highly recommend attending seeing it to any MST3K fans, where the combined Rifftrax/MST3K crews tackle such shorts as Shake Hands With Danger and At Your Fingertips: Grasses, a school arts-and-crafts film of such depressing sadness (“It’s Jim Henson’s Blair Witch Babies!”) that you realize how desperately kids of the 1960s and 70s needed the Internet and video games to be invented.
And new star/test subject Jonah Ray did a pretty good job holding his own in the riffing, only flubbing once.
if you’re a fan of MST3K or riffing, you should definitely check it out.
I would have thought I put up Cranes’ “Jewel” long ago in my Shoegazer Sunday series, but I do not appear to have done so, so here are two versions: a music video version that seems a bit flashier, and the more-stripped down album version.
For your Sunday dose of Shoegaze, here’s The Fauns’ “Road Meets the Sky,” accompanied by the lightcycle race scene from Tron, a combination that, for some strange reason, works really well together…
Another signed Ray Bradbury first, one I’ve been patiently stalking for quite some time.
Bradbury, Ray. Death is a Lonely Business. Franklin Library, 1985. First edition hardback (precedes the Knopf trade edition, per the Locus database), a Fine copy in decorated leather boards, sans dust jacket, as issued. Signed by Bradbury. Mystery novel, the first of many, and his first new novel since The Halloween Tree. Bought for $34.95 off eBay.
Local shoegaze rockers and engineering hobbyists, Whale Coma, accidentally created the world’s first artificially intelligent band member when their pedalboard became self-aware Sunday night.
Guitarist Connor O’Hoolihan excitedly connected yet another pedal to the now-conscious tangle of cords the band has affectionately dubbed “SkyPed,” a functioning life form of questionable intent and motivation that has begun to formulate rudimentary yet coherent speech through O’Hoolihan’s Electro-Harmony-Vocal Synthesizer Pedal.
“I told him not to add a Rat Stink Fuzzy Big Muff™ when he’s already running two Fat Boy Moose Knuckles™ and a Red Bitch Psycho Trem™,” said Willy Bennett Dyson, the band’s third guitarist. “We’re playing with something we don’t fully understand.”
Pohl, Frederik and Jack Williamson. The Singers of Time. Doubleday Foundation, 1991. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine- dust jacket with small wrinkle to top inner flap tip. Signed by Pohl. Bought off eBay for $4.00 plus shipping.
You could study Wrath of Khan as a portrait of different performing styles. Consider William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, and a central paradox of their chemistry. Spock is the alien – a being who strives to rid himself of all emotion – but past a certain point, you notice how Nimoy is a much more natural performer, communicating so much with droll phrasing lilts and micro-gestures. Whereas the human Kirk is played by Shatner, one of Hollywood’s great experts in hyperbole. (Khan is Shatner at his most wide-eyed.) As a young actor, Nimoy learned the Method and idolized Brando; Shatner came up performing energetic Shakespeare. That doesn’t make one better nor one worse – the dissonance is the key – but it adds layers to their pairing. You associate Spock with explicit stiffness – he’s a freaking Vulcan – but Nimoy’s acting is maybe more “cinematic,” eye-focused, while Shatner is more “theatrical,” full-bodied.
Plus a lot about how director Nicholas Meyer sets up shots for maximum effect.
It’s a very interesting essay on the best Star Trek movie. Read the whole thing.
