Acting legend Peter O’Toole has died at age 81. One of the greats, and one of my personal favorite actors, not only from Lawrence of Arabia, but as The Stunt Man, Lord Jim, The Lion in Winter, Beckett, My Favorite Year, and even his great, weird, twitchy turn in The Ruling Class.
Since everyone else in the world will have clips from Lawrence of Arabia, here’s an entire play O’Toole was in, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, in which he plays a very talkative drunk writer (or perhaps a writing drunkard).
Here’s New Zealand’s Baltier Space with the title track from their Robot World shoegaze album, which checks in on the crunchier side of classic shoegaze:
Thanks to the keen eye of SF Signal’s John DeNardo, we have word that the auteurs at The Asylum or offering their homage to Terror of MechaGodzilla: Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark.
It looks like pretty much everything we’ve come to expect from The Asylum…
Just as I’ve done the last two Thanksgivings, I bring you a public service announcement from William Shatner: try not to set yourself on fire while frying a turkey.
For those with low Shatner thresholds, the advice is:
Don’t overfill the pot with oil.
Turn off the flame when lowering the turkey into the oil.
Always fry your turkey away from your house.
Properly thaw the turkey before cooking.
Use a grease-approved fire extinguisher.
If you’re going to fry a turkey, this is pretty sound advice.
I was in the mood for something mellow, and Golden Garden‘s “Ghostwood” admirably fits the bill, even if the video comes in almost entirely on the cheap side of the “cheap but arty” continuum.
Lead singer Aubrey Rachel Violet Bramble (if in fact that’s a single person’s real name and not a real name + fake name combo) has the most obvious “little girl” voice this side of Alison Shaw of Cranes.
Don Webb alerted me to this Finnish bread ad which is so depressingly grim that it’s hilarious:
Translation to the only dialog: “Well are you hungry or not?”
On Don’s Facebook page, Marc Laidlaw suggested that the father and son might be the same actors who were in Rare Exports, and I think he might be right.
I worked with a Finn once, and he said Finnish National Health care didn’t bother with such frivolities as Novocaine when they were drilling your teeth when he was growing up. No wonder they kicked the Soviet Union’s ass in the winter war…
For your Sunday dose of Shoegaze, here’s San Francisco’s Slowness (who describe themselves as a “drone pop band”) with “Walls of Blue,” a steady-state song that sounds like an extended riff off the end of Pink Floyd’s “Time.”