Just saw this on Film Four tonight (UK TV chanel)... very interesting, but 50 minutes isn't even near long enough if you've read Paul Sammon's excellent "Future Noir: the Making of Blade Runner". Interviews with everybody involved except Harrison Ford and Sean Young of course, who hated each other's guts during the making of the film. We even see Philip K. Dick before he died - what a paranoid bloke he was! And even, for the first time ever, a look at the deleted scene where Deckard visits Holden in hospital. If you look you'll see the set for that scene was from Alien.
It's amazing visiting the buildings Ridley Scott used to make his future vision of Los Angeles. In the daytime they look NOTHING like Scott's sets, particularly the Bradbury Building in L.A., used for the final battle... when you see the before and after shots it really brings home what a genius of visual style Scott is.
Most shocking is that whilst all of the people have obviously aged in the last 20 years, Joe Turkel (Eldon Tyrell) hasn't aged a day! Hmmmm...
For anyone that hasn't read Paul Sammon's book, you'll be amazed at the problems encountered making this film, a true up-hill struggle. But Blade Runner still remains one of the best American movies of all time.
Ridley Scott admits this is one of his best films, and millions of cult fans worldwide agree. A true original...
YouTube - Video explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop
Topic: Arts
6:03 am EST, Feb 15, 2007
This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music -- a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.
His fingers muscled from almost a century of weaving, Yasujiro Yamaguchi worked the humming loom in his private workshop. Patiently lacing golden threads through a warp of auburn silk, he fashioned a bolt of kimono fabric blooming with an autumn garden in shades of tea green, ginger and plum.
But Yamaguchi, like Japan's signature kimono, is slipping into winter. At 102, he is among the last master weavers of Nishijin, the country's most celebrated kimono district, and his pace has slowed. He rubbed the morning chill from his knuckles, fitted his hunched shoulders deeper inside his indigo jacket and resolutely pushed on. ... But today, as a result of globalization and rapidly changing demographics, the kimono business has collapsed, its future in question. Sales are expected to sink to an all-time low this year, even as Japan has emerged from recession to experience its longest economic boom since World War II.
The prosperity has come with an altered set of cultural values. This is a country of manga comics and glittering animation. The rising moguls driving the new economy are more likely to buy muscled chrome from one of Tokyo's expanding list of Ferrari dealerships than drop their spoils on Kyoto silk.
As the kimono becomes more museum piece than couture item, what once made it quintessentially Japanese is gradually fading. Market realities have forced kimono makers to eschew expensive Japanese silk. As a result, more than 90 percent of new kimonos and obi made in Japan, including most of those from Nishijin's most venerable textile houses, are now woven from cheaper imported silk.
Revealing more about himself than he ever has, Garry Trudeau gives us tantalizing clues about what's behind his venerable comic strip's recent burst of genius, and pain.
As notewothy might put it, this is a gold star article. Read the whole thing. It's a rare insight into the world of Garry Trudeau, who is nothing short of a pop-culture hero of mine. It's rare there is anything written about Trudeau that isn't an op-ed either complaining or cheering about this work.
Life, Meet Art: Pinter’s Last Stand - New York Times
Topic: Arts
8:59 pm EDT, Oct 20, 2006
The old man rose painfully as the performance ended. The applause built slowly from a single clap of hands to a tumult. Harold Pinter, playwright and actor, weakened by the years and by illness, had just performed “Krapp’s Last Tape,” by his friend and fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett. ... “And all along Pinter makes you feel the gravity, the meticulousness, the sheer power of his endeavor,” Mr. Nightingale [of The Times of London] wrote. “This is an old man’s last-gasp search for a meaning he knows he’ll never find.”
wow Pinter does Beckett - terrifing, awesome I would love to witness it
edit part of me reflects that in a sense i've been in the hinterland - upon occasion - and one day, barring car accidents or some other sudden exit, i'll face the silence that follows twilight
