Shatner returns..

In the spirit of those Christmas round-up shows, I thought I’d take the opportunity to look back at some of the online things that have delighted me this past year or so. Perhaps nothing did so more than this: Bill Shatner, my absolute favourite vocal stylist (I’m not kidding about this), performing ‘Taxi’ on the Dinah show…those penetrating stares, the knowing smirk poised on the edge of hysteria, the fake grimace disguising the very real pain – a true master of his art..

Bard Santa..

..I think I may have found the perfect spot for this year’s Xmas shopping..

Shakespeare’s Den!

..must admit I thought at first it was a joke, but no – it’s all here; action figures clothing, mugs, finger puppets. But it’s not all Bard-related – oh no,, there’s much more. My favourites are the great philosophers finger puppet sets..
Anyway, I’ve decided I’ll be featuring selected items here in the runup to christmas, and what better way to start than with SD’s tribute to Ludwig van Beethoven, who would have been 236 years old today. This is the gift item your kids will be clamouring for come christmas morning..

The Ludwig van Beethoven Action Figure!

Item 11256
Our price: $8.49
Secure Online Ordering
Availability: Usually ships the next business day.

“Beethoven was truly an eccentric musical genius — composing a brilliant piano sonata one minute, throwing eggs at his maid the next. This 5-1/2″-tall, hard plastic Ludwig van Beethoven Action Figure has moveable arms and legs, allowing him to sit on the 1-1/2″ plastic piano bench (included). And, since he couldn’t have composed all those masterpieces without a piano, we designed an amazing fold-up paper piano that you can print out from the internet for free! Each figure comes on our illustrated blistercard with Beethoven info on the back…”

A bloody good read..

Being and Seeming: the Technology of Representation

The inestimable Richard Powers in stellar form. An op-ed piece that starts quite sedately as an homage to architecture as the preeminent artform..

“…Buildings embody our most profound, ambitious, and capital-intensive attempts to overhaul the conditions of existence. More than any other aesthetic instrument, monuments stand metonymically for whole cultures and eras. Old chestnut definitions for the field attest to how it incorporates the expressive capabilities of the other arts. Cathedrals are the bible in stone. The exterior of a classical facade sounds as frozen music in the mind. Archaic spaces are said to open onto pure theater, infinity made imaginable. The architect Mulciber was one of the first to be cast out of heaven. Writers, painters, and musicians had to take a number and get in line behind him. And this demonic creators masterpiece, the city of Pandemonium, has stood the test of time, outlasting all other created works except, perhaps, the first…”

..but doesn’t take long to concoct a soaring parable, somehow encompassing J.S. Mill, data structure, maps, Borges, Bayreuth, Chartres, Lewis Carroll and, of course, Manhattan..

“…You take on a virtual character and move in. For a while you are thrilled, the thrill of dice baseball, of dress-ups, of massively persistent, parallel, populated role-playing games, the rush of lying to someone at a wild party, completely reinventing who you are, and, for a while, getting away with it. You have finally found another life, a sculptable, moldable, replayable thing. You make yourself into the Count of Monte Cristo, come back to set this sleepy little bourgeois fable alight. You make yourself into Tess or Anna or Emma, and vow to stay alive, to get it right this time. You thrill to your growing stats, the heaping up of fortune here, the unlooked-for, surprising, incremental addictive payoffs of this alternate existence…”

“And then, in time, another sadness sets in. The sadness of consummation. The sadness of infinite freedom. Of save and reboot. Of having the world, in all its heft and bruise and particularity, go utterly your own way.”

When the Moon hits your eye..

.. more ‘maths in the real world’, courtesy of mathsforlaughs..

…This second one is only there to give me the chance to state that there are 10 kinds of people in the world – those who understand base 2* and those who don’t..

(* I suppose, in this computer age, I should refer to base 2 as ‘binary notation’. Also, it’s just been pointed out to me that there are actually 11 kinds of people… those who understand unary notation and those who don’t. Glad we cleared that up..)

Let Bartlet be Bartlet..

.. inspired by that nice vee lady – all good questions..

You’ve got to climb Mount Everest..

..to reach The Valley of The Dolls. The beautiful, and now strangely forgotten, Barbara Perkins gazing wistfully but hopefully out of a train window as it speeds past Stockport Viaduct on its way to New York and maybe a new life..
Birthday girl Dionne is her usual, magical self on the theme tune, which is desperate to have been written by Burt but was actually the work of Dory and Andre Previn – surely their finest..
And while we’re surelying – this is surely the best opening scene ever to feature a yellow cab pulling up at a sidewalk in Manhattan, is it not?..

..No, of course it’s not – this is..

Currently hating myself for liking this picture..

..I blame Amélie..

New Audrey..

Audrey Tautou, as Amélie Poulain.

Out-takes from that quite wonderful movie..

Those bloody equations, comin’ over here..

..in the light of recent pronouncements from our glorious leader, a little maths joke (or, for our colonial friends, a little, er.. ‘math’ joke)..

OK, he’s no Vini Reilly but..

.. where did Stanley Jordan go? Surely one of the few genuinely innovative guitar stylists of his generation, here he is performing (eventually) Burt’s ‘One Less Bell to Answer”..

…and speaking of innovation, wasn’t he also the first guitarist to have his speaker system unobtrusively built into the shoulderpads of his jacket?..

Tilt/shift tram in San Francisco..

..I recall that Corinne once succeeded in derailing one of these babies, on a dark SF night many years ago. I won’t elaborate further here..
(via noushin)

Jack Handey, the master..

“…The weirdest thing about going to the store and seeing a jar of pickles with your picture on it is not that your picture is on the jar. It’s that the manager won’t give you the pickles for free, and doesn’t even think the picture looks like you…”

Weather Report quiz question..

The classic WR lineup – Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius and Pete Erskine – performing Black Market in 1978. Wonderful piece, and one that I’ve used as a warm-up exercise in SOS rehearsal rooms for more years than I can remember…but here’s the question – what is remarkable about the clip below?

Here’s a clue – it’s Zawinul-related.. (my money’s on Wez to solve this one, or maybe Mark.. Jamie is perhaps just a bit too er, contemporary..

(..was just reading that, with the advent of new HD bittorrent technology, these grainy youtube clips will soon be a thing of the past – that’ll be great but occasionally these low-res vids have a charm all of their own – some of the scenes here look like the band are inhabiting a Rembrandt painting, especially the overhead shots of Zawinul at the keyboards, and the low-res haze makes Jaco look even more like some kind of Mayan deity than he usually does..)

UPDATE; If you want to figure it out yourself, don’t look in the comments. Somebody got there first..

Fashion victim..

“…Recently, The Star, a newspaper in Toronto did a fashion layout using some of Poster Child’s posters as a background.

To let them know that he was watching, he put the model up on the same wall as a stencil in the same scale as the photograph…” (via wooster collective)

..so, now all we need is another fashion shoot with the same model in front of the same wall, and then another stencil, and then another shoot.. and pretty damn soon we should have our very own genuine 21st century Bodhisattva…

Tom Waits for no man..

…ever hear Waltzing Matilda sung by a grizzly? Oh, alright, it’s actually ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’..

..felicitations, ya big bear…

Google Maps locates M.C. Escher’s apartment building..

..somewhere near Birmingham, apparently..

The IBM Paradox..

.. in web form…

Dancing to Architecture..

Giant Steps- A film by Michael Levy, music by John Coltrane. Takes a moment to load, but then don’t we all?..

Figure 1. (Every Playboy Centerfold, 1988-1997)..

..by Jason Salavon.

“… The first in a ongoing series begun in 1997, this photograph is the result of digitally averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the 10 years beginning Jan. 1988 through Dec. 1997. The shroud-like image is yielded by a simple, custom process: point-by-point mathematical averaging. No special “morphing” is used…”

Yes, it’s “I just like this picture” day again..