I was poking around YouTube looking for more Shoegazer songs when I came across “Bright” from Tokyo Shoegazer, an accurate and wonderfully self-referential name.
That’s only part of the song; the full track comes in at 8 minutes and 19 seconds of reverb-and-sustain drenched fuzzy, blissed-out shoegaze goodness.
That track is off of their debut album 「crystallize」, which evidently just came out November 23. For once I’m not ten years behind the curve! All the tracks are available on iTunes. I’ve already picked up “Bright” (which hits very close to the heart of my Shoegazer sweet spot, which is still Slowdive’s Just for a Day), and may end up buying the rest.
Even if you’re not a Shoegazer fan, you have to admit that this collection of guitar effects peddles on the album cover is impressive:
Howard Waldrop and I reviewed Hugo over at Locus Online, which we liked an awful lot.
The film involves (slight spoiler) the work of French film pioneer Georges Méliès, who produced, directed, wrote, and starred in over 500 silent short films, many of which no longer exists. But several of the ones that do are up on YouTube, and I thought I would gather them here. Méliès, a former stage magician, was the first to create a number of optical effects.
His most famous film, A Trip to the Moon, with the classic image of the shell embedded in the man-in-the-moon’s eye.
Interestingly, this was not his first film featuring the moon, as shown by The Astronomer’s Dream:
Another interplanetary voyage, this time by train, to the sun (in hand-tinted color, no less):
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea:
The Haunted Castle:
Mélies himself is front and center as each of The Four Troublesome Heads:
Nigel Tufnel Day may have passed, but the Spinal Tap madness continues!
National Geographic did an interview with him regarding the origins of Stonehenge. He turns out to have many fascinating insights as to how it was actually built, some involving dinosaur spit.
I’ve been looking for some scary videos on YouTube, and honestly, the most popular “paranormal” videos there are pretty embarrassingly lame. “Ah! A guy in eyeshadow steps out of the dark! It’s a ghost!”
Much creepier, to my mind, are the video of abandoned mental hospitals and insane asylums filmed by various urban spelunkers over the years. Most were pretty depressing places in the first place, so they’re doubly creepy and depressing at night compared to regular abandoned buildings. Here’s a sampler of a few videos I found.
A short video of an abandoned insane asylum in Maryland:
A longer video from the same asylum, with some paranormal creepiness near the end:
From Albuquerque’s abandoned insane asylum, seen in daylight:
The videos I’ve seen from San Antonio’s abandoned asylum have all been either crappy or still images, but this one from the abandoned Boys Home isn’t bad, though too long and also in daylight:
This appears to be the segment of a TV show called Scariest Places on Earth on Dixmont Insane Asylum in Pennsylvania. Full of both horrific history and cheestastic reality TV edited to hype the paranormal angle. Evidently being on a paranormal reality TV show requires subnormal intelligence. And voiceovers from the psychic in Poltergeist? Really, ABC Family?
Warning: Teenagers. Fortunately this bunch exploring the Downey Insane Asylum in California are merely teenage stupid and not reality show stupid (though sadly, this does extend to their editing choices). And the night vision lens does make their eyes look nicely creepy.
A different approach, for this mini-documentary on the Northville Regional Psychiatric Hospital in Michigan:
According to this list, Nurse With Wound’s “I’ve Plummed This Whole Neighborhood” is the Creepiest Song Ever. Having listened to it, I do think it’s contender, though a bit repetitive and trying too hard.
Although I was a tiny bit disappointed by Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty (I didn’t think the “Versus A.I.” single-player maps were as interesting as those in Brood War, and I was pissed that not all of the units were available for those, even if you weren’t playing online; damn it, I want my medic!), I’ll still pick this up. Pretty much everything Blizzard does is first rate.
Sounds like a bonus-ish, heroes-and-tower-defense type thing. Hmmm. I could really see myself getting sucked into that. Or would, if there were a way to avoid getting pwned by 17-year old Koreans…
With Halloween almost upon us, and ten days before the annual Fark scary story thread, I thought it would be a good time to put up some posts for the season, no matter how vaguely related. First up is “Hittin’ The Trail For Hallelujah Land,” one of the earliest Merrie Melodies (AKA Looney Tunes) ever made, and the first of the infamous “Censored Eleven” cartoons, which, due to racial insensitivity and general political incorrectness, have never been released by Warner Brothers on DVD.
“Hittin’ The Trail For Hallelujah Land” is now in the public domain. What makes it seasonal is that there’s a graveyard and skeleton dance sequence in it.
