Eerie Tom (ago)

May contain spoilers! This page is for April 2023; click here for Jan-Mar 2023; click here for 2022.

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Usually, on my “THC tincture evenings”, I watch a video or two, or listen to an album, or both. The following is a sort of diary, mostly for my own reference, and as best as I can remember, a list of the movies and music from such evenings. Links to sites outside of this blog open in new windows. ✽ indicates my first time seeing or hearing the work, or that it’s been so long I didn’t really remember much about it. ↻ indicates a link to other sections of this blog entry.

Date	Title, Director or Artist, Year
04/03/23	Frozen Days✽, Yōsuke Yamashita, 1975 Totally blown away by this album. It’s almost inhuman how these players play, like each one had an extra pair of hands. Definitely going to explore this genre of jazz some more!
	Gagaku performance Since being stoned made me appreciate Noh music, I wondered if being stoned would have the same affect on gagaku, or imperial Japanese court music dating back to the tenth century. I've never been fond of gagaku due to my dislike of the hichiriki, which just sounds like a bunch of wailing kazoos. The performance I watched had some interesting moments, particularly a duet between two flutes, but otherwise did nothing to change my opinion. I’ll stick to Noh!
	Drunk✽, Thundercat, 2017 Also blown away by this album; I don’t think I’ve been this excited by a “mainstream release” since Ua’s 2016 JaPo album.
	Y De Noir II✽, Takami, 1983
	The Andromeda Nebula✽, dir. Yevgeni Sherstobitov, 1967
04/09/23	Water Weed✽, Sabu Toyozumi, 1975 Another Japanese free jazz album. The sounds on the album were so unlike the instruments making them, I had to keep reminding myself that there were no synthesizers or samplers used. An amazing aural journey.
	Original First Album✽, PYG, 1971 I didn’t care for the lead singer’s voice at first; it just seemed wrong for the genre. But later as he sang higher or louder notes, there was an underlying texture that made all the difference. One thing I really appreciated was the fact all the singers actually had to be able to sing, and sing to properly with timing and support. It was refreshing to hear voices that didn’t sound like a teenaged girl rudely awakened from a nap or someone who had been auto-tuned. Some of the harmonies made me think of Clannad. An excellent album.
	Sleaford Mods: Performance at KEXP✽, 2017 My first time hearing the Mods. Surprisingly, it reminded me a little of the music my brother and I recorded years ago, only my brother played electric guitar and our lyrics were more tongue-in-cheek and irreverent, if not downright juvenile at times. See the performance here. And ... I’m going to see them perform live on April 19!
	High-Flying✽, Hiromasa Suzuki, 1976 Only listened to the first three songs. It just didn’t grab me.
	Lounge Lizards✽, Lounge Lizards, 1984
04/16/23	Tetsuo: The Iron Man, dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, 1980 I’d seen this film a couple of times before, but was completely unprepared for the wild roller coaster ride of watching it stoned. It’s a relentless onslaught of rapid fire editing, time lapse, extreme closeups, crude stop-motion animation, and high contrast black-and-white cinematography. It’s almost as if David Cronenberg had made a film with silent era film cameras (except Tetsuo isn’t silent). It manages to be humorous, erotic, disturbing, enticing, and horrific all at the same time. Highly recommended, but definitely not for the squeamish.
	Disco 3000✽, Sun Ra Quartet, 1978 This was my first exposure to Sun Ra’s music, and aside from the use of trumpet and sax, it sounded exactly like a Dynamicaracket album, particularly the first track and a keyboard solo on a later one. Who is Dynamicaracket? I was already working on a blog entry about them which I will post soon, but Dynamicaracket was an experimental band (1985-1994) with two members: myself, and my best friend in high school, Duane Michael Gebo. We recorded about a dozen albums together. In the last several weeks I’ve been listening to them again (all on cassette!) and have begun to appreciate the fact we may have had no formal training and were “diamonds in the rough”, but I daresay we weren’t just a couple of kids goofing around on keyboards. And speaking of Dynamicaracket ...
	Fanfare (side 2), Dynamicaracket, 1988 I haven’t mentioned any of the Dynamicaracket albums I’ve been listening to recently on my tincture evenings, and do so here only because it ties in with the entry directly below. Fanfare was an ambitious album of 26 improvised songs, an A-Z of mythological figures: Ariadne, Bona Dea, Charybdis, all the way to Zu.
	The Cosmic Eye✽, dir. Faith Hubley, 1986 This animated film combines imagery from various indigenous folk arts with what looks like art inspired by the likes of Paul Klee (who is my favorite artist), Wassily Kandinsky, and Marc Chagall. The soundtrack is a mix of dialogue, jazz, and world music. It’s a real joy just to watch and listen to such an obvious labor of love. And some of the shorter musical pieces inspired by native mythologies were not unlike what appears on Dynamicaracket’s Fanfare. The Cosmic Eye is very nearly a masterpiece, and I say nearly because if the movie had ended at around the 40 minute mark, it would’ve been deeply satisfying. Instead, it continues, and as there’s no real plot (not that there needs to be), there’s no further resolution, no climax, nothing to add to what we’ve already seen—it’s just more of the same. The film starts to feel like it overstayed its welcome rather than leaving the viewer wanting more.
	Spirits Rejoice✽, Albert Ayler, 1965
04/20/23 (and 04/21/23)	Read my account on how I celebrated 4/20 here.
04/30/23	The Benny Hill Show, dir. John Robbins, 1972 Episode: “Down Memory Lane”. I know Benny Hill has a bad rap these days, and critics tend to boil him down to little more than a dirty old man who chased half-naked women around on TV, but that’s like saying Joan Crawford was just some woman who savagely beat her kids. And it’s understandable; much of the humor is outdated and inappropriate. That aside, the man was still a gifted wordsmith and entertainer. I’ve often wondered if Hill had been influenced in part by Ernie Kovacs or Jacques Tati. One of the skits that really stood out here was his recitation of poetry in a coarse British accent, in the guise of a younger man with blond hair and in a red military jacket. He is accompanied by an incompetent musical trio. Aside from the poetry itself (one poem concerns a flat-chested woman), I could imagine the likes of Ian Dury, John Lydon, or Jason Williamson (of Sleaford Mods) doing such a performance; the tunelessness of the musicians adds an almost Dada-esque air.
	Various Skits, 1993 Several skits parodying TV genres (soap opera, cooking show, wildlife documentary, sci-fi show, etc.) by Duane Michael Gebo and myself. More information here, under “KDGJ-TV”.
	Danemon Ban: The Monster Exterminator (証城寺の狸囃子 塙団右衛門)✽, dir. Yoshitarou Kataoka, 1935
	Tsuchigumo (土蜘蛛)✽, dir. unknown, 2020 If Spiderman had been created as a Noh drama instead of a comic book, this would be the result. Unlike many Noh plays, which can be quite static (not a complaint), this one is practically an action film as warriors combat an evil spider demon. I cannot use enough superlatives to describe this. Best to see it yourself—watch on YouTube here. There are the usual static moments, but be patient for the payoff of the battle scenes. I also discussed Noh here and here.
	Montreux Afterglow✽, Yōsuke Yamashita Trio, 1976 An even more astounding performance than YYT’s Frozen Days (1975). It must’ve been a marvel to witness YYT playing live, particularly during Yamashita’s piano solos.
	Spanish Flower✽, Tee & Company, 1977
	Horrors of Malformed Men✽, dir. Teruo Ishii, 1969 (Japanese title: 江戸川乱歩全集　恐怖奇形人間) The version I saw was in Japanese with Chinese subtitles, and my Japanese isn’t nearly strong enough to do without English subtitles. Hence, although I knew the basic premise, I can’t really give a proper review. Still, I’ve long wanted to see this film. Visually, certain scenes were as if Juliet of the Spirits-era Fellini had made a horror film. I’m most proud of myself, however, for instantly recognizing who played Jogoro: choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of Butoh.

“Optimistic” from the 2000 album Kid A has always been my favorite Radiohead song. Ominous and bleak, with a götterdämmerung of a climax, it sounds as if the world were coming to an end. But last night I listened to the album for the first time while stoned. Everything was going just fine until I hit “Optimistic”, and then the universe went insane. When the song ended, I wanted to hear it again. It was like being on a roller coaster and yelling “Again!” to the operator each time the car pulled into the station—except with each successive listen, I notched up the volume. I knew eventually I’d reach a point where the sound would overload and clip, but that’s what I wanted. I ended up listening to “Optimistic” in this manner about twelve times before I decided I should move on, though I could’ve easily listened to the song all night this way. With all that volume and distortion, it became a cathartic listening experience.

Guitarist and lead singer Thom Yorke’s voice here was a real tour de force, darting back and forth between confrontational rocker and ironic choir boy. There were times (no doubt due to clipping) it sounded like he was singing into a tin can with a tidal wave of reverb added on the final syllables.

During the first thirty seconds, there is what sounds like a guitar in the left channel, very faint, similar to the instrument used in the score for Chronopolis (1982, dir. Piotr Kamler, music by Luc Ferrari). If you listen right at the beginning of the film after the first synthesized “moan”, you’ll hear it. The sound returns towards the end of “Optimistic”, at about 4:22.

I was also intrigued by the spasmodic, raspy guitar in the left channel at about 1:30, playing what sounded like 32nd notes.

In what might be described as the choruses (where Thom cries out “Whoa-oa-oaaaa!”, such as at 2:30), there is an odd metallic taong taong taong coming from the guitar in the right channel, almost like someone is banging on a garbage can. It added considerable texture to the already jangled music and noise. The choruses also have a triumphant feel, like Thom had not merely won the Lottery of the Universe, but had seized the prize by force.

At 2:57, Thom sings “I’d really like to help you, man” twice, but on the second “man”, it’s drawn out by the reverb. But the effect is even stronger on the next line, “Nervous messed up marionette, floating ’round on a prison shiiiiiip ...”. Not unlike the climax of Kate Bush’s “Get Out of My House” (The Dreaming, 1982), where she transforms into a mule to scream down the malevolent force haunting her house, it’s as if powers beyond human comprehension had been unleashed, and all hell had broken loose. As I said earlier, it’s like götterdämmerung.

Lyrically, while I’m not quite sure exactly what the song is about, it certainly conjures up frightening, terrible imagery: a primordial survival of the fittest and giant dinosaurs—how frightening would it be to have a four story high, fifty ton Brachiosaur, herbivorous or not, bellowing at you?

As I let the sound blast through me, I felt like a lone astronaut floating in deepest space, light years from any star, ultimately reduced to atoms by the force of the song. Allow me to paraphrase “The Coming of Arthur” from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-1885).

Shockwave after shockwave, each mightier than the last Till last, a twelfth one, gathering all the deep And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged Roaring, and all the universe was in a flame

And I’ll finish with a little video I cobbled together by way of illustration. Crank up that volume!

Watch on YouTube

(sources: Space 1999 (War Games episode), a Japanese documentary about black holes, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Note 1: Many spoilers ahead!
Note 2: The references in this blog entry to “god(s)” do not refer to the traditional concept of a being that is a creator and judge. Herein, it simply refers to a being or entity either of immense power, beyond human comprehension (or perhaps vice versa: a being unable to acknowledge or comprehend human existence or experience), or both.

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PART 1

Last September I watched a Noh performance while stoned. Besides immensely enjoying it, I was completely blown away by the inclusion of a single pine tree on the stage. It seemed to represent a “meta pine tree” of all pine trees, embodied in a single tree. I struggled to understand why I saw it that way, especially since in the Noh play it really did only represent a single pine tree, not a whole forest or grove. I struggled even more to try to explain it.

I’m facing the same problem now with something else I’ve watched recently, an episode from the original Star Trek series, “The Changeling”. In this episode, the Enterprise beams aboard a small floating robot called Nomad. Unbeknownst to our heroes, Nomad murdered four billion people in a nearby star system because they were “imperfect” according to Nomad’s relentless, computerized definition of “perfection”. Can our heroes save the day before Nomad makes its way to Earth and decides everyone there is also imperfect? I’ve seen the episode at least five or six times over the years, and have read James Blish’s adaptation of the story at least a dozen times, so nothing in the episode is new to me. But this time it was the two scenes where Nomad kills security guards that blew my mind.

In one scene, Kirk leaves Nomad in the brig, behind a force field, through which the robot easily flies. The two security guards open fire with their phasers. The beams harmlessly hit Nomad’s own force field, and in response, Nomad vaporizes the guards with an energy beam. Later in the episode, Kirk orders Nomad to go with two more security guards and not to harm them. Nomad accompanies the guards briefly, then flies off in a different direction. The guards order him to stop, and when Nomad begins making an electronic noise, the guards open fire. Again, the beams hit Nomad’s force field, then Nomad vaporizes the guards.

In both scenes, when the guards fire and Nomad fires back, the images of the guards “freeze” and glow red, then the guards quickly fade out: no smoke, no ashes, no corpse, nothing is left. This special effect was probably due in part to the limitations of the budget or the special effects or both—it was far easier to animate the phasers and Nomad’s energy beams over a still shot of the guards in the corridor, then cross fade to an empty corridor. Judging by this depiction of the guards’ deaths, they probably had no idea what hit them, or even felt anything. They were just instantly gone, as if they had never existed.


Going, going, gone: time from impact of Nomad’s energy beam to complete vaporization of the guards: 2.002 seconds the first time, 2.045 seconds the second time.
I abhor robots or aliens in science fiction who claim they have no emotions, then display all kinds of emotions like impatience, gloating, triumph, etc.—I’m looking at you, Beta Cloud aliens from Space: 1999! But Nomad is an especially emotionless robot—it speaks in a flat, even tone, and its body is boxlike and made of grey metal. As robots go, this thing couldn’t be more cold and machine-like if it tried. Perhaps that’s part of the horror of these scenes: to be killed by some unfeeling, calculating machine who simply saw the guards as nuisances. Nomad killed them without malice or premeditation, in much the same way we humans reflexively swat at flies.

I’m reminded of a scene from The Man Who Would Be King (1975, dir. John Huston), when Daniel Dravot meets a beautiful young woman named Roxanne. He tries to approach her but she shies away. An interpreter tells Dravot:

If god takes a girl, she catches fire and go up in smoke. God’s heart a burning torch. His veins run fire, not blood. If god makes love to girl, she goes cha-chung! in one flash. Not even any ashes left.

In both Nomad’s power and ability—the size of a table lamp yet able to wipe out four billion beings, and heaven knows how many others before that, not to mention bringing Scotty back from the dead!—and its inability to comprehend basic aspects of humanity (that humans are life forms, the meaning of music, etc.) certainly make it “godlike”. And perhaps not unlike the Noh “gods”, whose actions and expressions were completely inscrutable to we mere humans, there is something fascinating and awesome (in the traditional sense of the word) and staggering and impenetrable and ineffable about them, that they are beyond our ability to understand them, and that’s what makes these “gods” so intriguing!

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PART 2

And that would’ve been the end of the blog entry had I not, a week later, seen another Star Trek episode, “Wolf in the Fold”. A noncorporeal entity that feeds on fear and terror inhabits the bodies of people and uses them as agents to commit brutal murders. When the entity is eventually identified, Spock renders its host (a man named Hengist) harmless with a tranquilizer, then Hengist is put into the transporter and beamed into space at the “widest angle of dispersion” so that his atoms are separated and the entity is unable to cause any more harm.

Here I must say, I didn’t actually watch the full episodes of “The Changeling” or “Wolf in the Fold”, but their satirical versions on Star Trek Abridged, a series which condenses each episode to about four minutes in length and redubs them with satirical, often sarcastic and off-color humor. I mention this because there’s an important difference: in the original version of Wolf, Hengist is made helpless by the tranquilizer but when placed in the transporter, he is still talking and threatening the crew, whereas in the STA version, Hengist appears to be unconscious because his final lines weren’t redubbed.

The reason this is important here is, while watching the STA version, it struck me that Hengist, like the security guards in The Changeling, never knew what hit him. He was (seemingly) unconscious and beamed to his death—the transporter is used to kill him. Is this another case of a machine killing someone? Perhaps no, perhaps yes. No, because the transporter is operated by a person, and the machine is merely “following orders”. But yes, because the transporter is obeying its orders without considering the ramifications of what it’s doing. There’s not even a safeguard programmed into the transporter to prevent it from killing someone by “widest angle of dispersion”; why would there even be such a setting, aside from being a plot contrivance? And so, like Nomad, the transporter is reducing its victim to atoms with nary a concern or malice.

After watching a few more vids, I went to use the bathroom. And it suddenly hit me, so intensely and so immediately I struggled to retain the insight and write it down as quickly as possible, in some way that would make sense to me later!

I conceived of some (possibly mechanical) godlike “creature(s)”, unfeeling, thinking only in terms of pure logic; in binary, of zeroes and ones. They are unknowable to us, beyond human ken. The Noh gods are not mechanical, but their thoughts and feelings, if they have any, are far beyond human comprehension. What happens when Nomad or the transporter “attack” us and our bodies are vaporized or dispersed? We are reduced to atoms, pure and simple. We attain the pure perfection of zeroes and ones. We no longer have emotion or intelligence, at least not in a way measurable by humans. We have achieved, in a sense, a similar godhood, or a state like nirvana, of nothingness, of non-self.

And this actually explained my fascination with many things:

• Cyborgs: an attempt to fuse our humanity with mechanical resources.
• Announcements, such as those made in train stations and airports: a dispassionate voice calmly conveying information. It is the voice of something all-knowing, something with which one cannot communicate.
• Similarly, the computer entities from films like Dark Star, Logan’s Run, THX-1138: again, calm and dispassionate, even in the face of disaster.
• Retro computer graphics: simple, blocklike, unrealistic and pixelated depictions of people, trees, animals, etc.
• Electronic music and its various subgenres.
• Yuki Nagato from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: she is a mostly emotionless artificial construct created by the “Data Overmind”, “a conglomerate of data organisms”. Yuki often alters reality or probability by speaking in a rapid, machine-like chittering sound. My favorite episode of Melancholy is when Yuki battles another construct named Ryōko, then defeats her by re-booting local reality—how mind-blowing a concept is that?
• Similarly, Ruri Hoshino from Martian Successor Nadesico, a detached and seemingly wise beyond her years young woman who can interface with the computer telepathically.
• The episode of Space Dandy where he encounters the 2D universe. Actually, many SD episodes have some pretty mind-blowing concepts.

A few weeks earlier I had seen an action film, Blood Debts (1985, dir. Teddy Page), one of those “so bad it’s good” films. One scene caught my attention. Our hero walks through a park late at night. He passes a man who is sitting on a concrete bench. In the background there is the glow of some street lights. But when I saw those, I imagined they were the eyes of a giant cat, sitting quietly and absolutely motionless, watching the man on the bench. It was not necessarily benevolent or malevolent, for it was a god-cat. It’s probably merely a physiological reaction to the THC, but when beholding the god-cat, or the Noh gods, or the meta pine tree, or the destruction of the guards, I could “feel” energy radiating, as though through some other sense. This in turn reminded me of the “Italo-Japanese” I heard while watching Juliet of the Spirits: a form of Japanese only the characters in the film and I could understand, but not actual Japanese people!


Click image for larger view; opens in new window.
Street lights? Or the eyes of a giant cat? The cat image comes from an 1865 illustration of the Cheshire Cat by artist John Tenniel (1820-1914).
While working on this blog, I happen to be reading “The Diaries of Paul Klee”; Klee (1879-1940) is my favorite artist. By pure coincidence (or was it perhaps synchronicity?), I came across this entry:

143. The term “self-criticism” turns up for the first time. Then I philosophize about death that perfects what could not be completed in life. The longing for death, not as destruction, but as striving towards perfection. On the whole, a stage between striving and despair. (from Diary 1)

I also looked up “nirvana” to be sure I was using the term correctly, as I know only a little about Buddhism. And lo and behold, Wikipedia says:

In the Buddhist context, nirvana refers to realization of non-self and emptiness, marking the end of rebirth by stilling the fires that keep the process of rebirth going.

Non-self and emptiness? Sounds like vaporized guards and dispersed entity agents to me! Had I somehow unknowingly been tapping into Buddhist concepts all along? It bears further investigation, but another time—this blog entry is long enough already. But this is all very head-spinning trippy stuff. Am I just imagining all this while under the influence? Or am I able to perceive things on a different level than most?

May contain spoilers! This page is for 2022; click here for 2023 (Jan thru Mar); click here for 2023 (Apr thru ?).

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Usually, on my “THC tincture evenings”, I watch a video or two, or listen to an album, or both. The following is a sort of diary, mostly for my own reference, and as best as I can remember, a list of the movies and music from such evenings. Links to sites outside of this blog open in new windows. ✽ indicates my first time seeing or hearing the work, or that it’s been so long I didn’t really remember much about it. ↻ indicates a link to other sections of this blog entry.

Date	Title, Director or Artist, Year
01/19/22	THX-1138, dir. George Lucas, 1971 Original theatrical release version, not the godawful “Director’s Cut” version released in 2004.
	Chronopolis, dir. Piotr Kamler, 1982
	Electric Dragon 80.000 V, dir. Gakuryū Ishii, 2001
01/26/22	Zardoz, dir. John Boorman, 1974
02/02/22	The Andromeda Strain, dir. Robert Wise, 1971
02/16/22	Fantastic Planet, dir. René Laloux, 1973
02/23/22	Lady Iron Monkey✽, dir. Chi-Hwa Chen, 1979
03/02/22	The Color of Pomegranates✽, dir. Sergei Parajanov, 1969
03/09/22	Shaolin Drunkard✽, dir. Yuen Woo-Ping, 1983 See blog entry.
03/16/22	Black Lizard, dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1968
03/24/22	Drunken Wu Tang✽, dir. Cheung-Yan Yuen, 1984
	Phase IV✽, Saul Bass, 1974 The MST3K version!
03/30/22	Crippled Masters✽, dir. Joe Law, 1979
	The Dreaming, Kate Bush, 1982 My all-time favorite album by any artist. Listening to it stoned only deepened my appreciation. See information relating to The Dreaming↻ here.
04/06/22	The Angry Red Planet✽, dir. Ib Melchior, 1959
	Nunsexmonkrock, Nina Hagen, 1982 Another big favorite album of mine. As with Kate Bush’s The Dreaming↻, listening to this while stoned only deepened my appreciation. The two albums are comparable: “Antiworld” and “Taitschi Tarot” would not have been out of place on The Dreaming; “Sat in Your Lap” and “Get Out of My House” would not have been out of place on Nunsexmonkrock. See information relating to Nunsexmonkrock↻ here.
04/13/22	Nine Demons✽, dir. Cheh Chang, 1984
05/18/22	The Flat Earth, Thomas Dolby, 1984
05/11/22	Dogora, dir. Ishirō Honda, 1964
05/25/22	Kung Fu Genius✽, dir. Wilson Tong, 1979
08/03/22	Godzilla (the “Cozzilla” version✽), dirs. Luigi Cozzi, Ishirō Honda, Terry O. Morse, 1977 See blog entry.
08/26/22	Juliet of the Spirits, dir. Federico Fellini, 1965 See blog entry.
08/31/22	Return of the Bastard Swordsman✽, dir. Chun-Ku Lu, 1984 See blog entry.
09/05/22	A One Man Show✽ (Grace Jones), dir. Jean-Paul Goude, 1982
	Yellow Submarine, dir. George Dunning, 1968
09/12/22	The Point, dir. Fred Wolf, 1971 Seeing this again led me to an album by Bill Martin↻, the voice of the Rock Man.
	Ninja Hunter✽, dir. Wu Kuo-Jen, 1987
09/19/22	Shibaraku✽, dir. unknown, yr. unknown Filmed Kabuki performance. See blog entry.
	Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, dir. Hajime Satō, 1968
09/26/22	Matsukaze✽, dir. unknown, 2020 Filmed Noh performance. See blog entry.
	18 Swirling Riders✽, dir. Fu-Ti Lin, 1977
05/25/22	Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees✽, dir. unknown, 2009 Filmed bunraku performance. See blog entry.
	Invaders from Space✽, dirs. Teruo Ishii, Akira Mitsuwa, Koreyoshi Akasaka, 1964 See blog entry.
	Bill Martin's Concerto For Head Phones And Contra-Buffoon In Asia Minor✽, Bill Martin, 1970 Martin was the voice of the Rock Man from The Point↻.
10/10/22	Image of Bruce Lee, dir. Yueng Kuen, 1978 First kung fu film I ever saw, sometime in the early 1980s.
	Planet of the Vampires✽, dir. Mario Bava, 1965
10/17/22	Deadful Melody✽, dir. Ng Min Kan, 1994
	King of Jazz✽, dir. John Murray Anderson, 1930
10/24/22	Alice in Wonderland✽, dir. Norman Z. McLeod, 1933
	Ways of Kung Fu✽, dir. Chiu Lee, 1978 Blog pending!
10/31/22	Robot Carnival✽, dirs. Hidetoshi Ōmori, Hiroyuki Kitakubo, Hiroyuki Kitazume, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, Kōji Morimoto, Mao Lamdo, Takashi Nakamura, Yasuomi Umetsu, 1987
	Communication✽, Paul Bartos, 2003 The song “I’m The Message” was featured in the second Digital Wonderland video.
	Farewell My Concubine✽, dir. unknown, 2014 Filmed Chinese opera. Watch here on YouTube.
11/14/22	Metal Box✽, Public Image Ltd., 1979 My interest in hearing this album to listen to this album by this review of Nina Hagen’s Nunsexmonkrock↻, which also mentioned Kate Bush’s The Dreaming↻ and Captain Beefheart’s Trout Fish Replica. The article also led me to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts↻.
	The Residents - Mole Show✽, dir. The Residents, 1983 Watch here on YouTube.
	Attack from Space✽, dirs. Teruo Ishii, Akira Mitsuwa, Koreyoshi Akasaka, 1964
11/18/22	Forbidden Planet, dir. Fred M. Wilcox, 1956 Just for kicks, having seen the movie many times, I changed the video to high contrast black and white and substituted a techno mix from Mixotic for the audio.
11/21/22	A.P.E.✽, dir. Paul Leder, 1976
	Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam✽, dir. Çetin Inanç, 1982 AKA the “Turkish Star Wars”
11/28/22	Goose Boxer✽, dir. Tai See Fu, 1979 Blog pending!
	Har Har Mahadev✽ (first half), dir. Chandrakant, 1974 For some reason, imdb.com lists this movie as being released in 2019.
12/04/22	Har Har Mahadev✽ (second half), dir. Chandrakant, 1974
	My Life in the Bush of Ghosts✽, Brian Eno and David Byrne, 1981 See comment about this album under Metal Box↻.
	Sadko✽, dir. Aleksandr Ptushko, 1953 AKA The Magic Voyage of Sinbad
12/12/22	Matching Escort✽, dir. Ling Chang, 1982 Like watching a long-form Björk video, guest starring Dr. Strange!
	Too Much Pressure✽, The Selecter, 1980
	Mark Hollis✽, Mark Hollis, 1998 This was my first time hearing this album. After reading reviews of it, I was expecting something abstract, dissonant, and fragmented (which would’ve been fine). Instead, it sounded like the warmest, most intimate, and most lovingly recorded and mixed album I’d ever heard! Allmusic’s review sums it up best.
12/09/22	Dunderklumpen!, dir. Per Åhlin, 1974 Watched in the original Swedish, without subtitles.
	Boomerang, The Creatures, 1989
12/23/22	Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats?✽ (Icky Flix version), dirs. The Residents and Graeme Whifler, 1984/2001
	Evil Brain from Outer Space✽, dirs. Teruo Ishii, Akira Mitsuwa, Koreyoshi Akasaka, 1964
12/28/22	10 Brothers of Shaolin✽, dir. Chung Ting, 1977
	Tanta Hasha, Kaoru, 1988 Another long-time favorite album: there are definitely touches of Kate Bush’s The Dreaming↻ and Hounds of Love here, mixed with Yoko Ono’s wailing vocals and her more avant-garde, experimental music.

There were other videos I saw but didn’t record on what dates. These include:

Title, Director or Artist, Year

Drunken Dragon✽, dir. Chung-Hsing Chao, 1985

The Pleasure Principle✽, Gary Numan, 1979

Vermilion Pleasure Night (ep. 1), dir. Yoshimasa Ishibashi, 2000

Home of the Brave✽, dir. Laurie Anderson, 1986

Playtime, dir. Jacques Tati, 1967 This is my all-time favorite film.

The Legend of Dinosaurs (MST3K version), dir. Junji Kurata, 1977

I got the idea for my seventh Digital Wonderland video from a scene from Fahrenheit 451 (1966, dir. François Truffaut) in which Linda, the wife of protagonist Guy Montag, participates in an interactive television show where the characters directly address her. What if, I thought, I used clips of people addressing the camera, as if speaking to me? I doubted I could find 90 minutes of suitable footage so I left it on the backburner for a while.

Several weeks later, I was watching Marooned (1969, dir. John Sturges). In one scene, astronaut Jim Pruett is speaking to Mission Control via closed-circuit television. Pruett’s image was in black-and-white (albeit with a bluish tint*), and slightly blurry and overexposed. This made me think of my early days, still living at home, staying up late to watch old movies on TV in my bedroom. What if, thought I, in addition to talking heads, I included clips from old commercials and movies, all converted to black-and-white, then blurred, overexposed, and tinted blue?

*I believe the slightly blue tint of black-and-white TVs is a result of old TV tubes having a single color phosphor, usually bluish-white.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find all the clips I remembered from those days**, so I ended up poring over hundreds of movies and TV episodes to find exactly what I wanted. For example, I didn’t want slick commercials from major retailers and restaurant chains—I preferred ads from local businesses, with amateurish camera work and acting (often by the company president, instead of a professional model), and early computer graphics made on Scanimate and the like. I also got a laugh out of finding out-of-context scenes of men embracing, men undressing, men whispering into each other’s ears, and so on. I also re-cropped when necessary the screen ratio of all the clips to 4:3. In total, I came up with about 630 video clips. Some of the sound from those clips was included, as well as audio clips of people with interesting voices or dialogue without the accompanying video.

**These included a TEAC commercial shown on KSCI, and one for what seemed to be a motocross event in Los Angeles.

Musically, since the video was supposed to represent late night TV, I didn’t want thumping techno music but something more ambient and laid back. I also thought I might, for once, post the entire video online instead of an abridged version, and so chose music with Creative Commons licenses permitting reuse and adaptation. However, I wasn’t able to find enough music that suited my needs, so I ended up composing and recording three pieces myself.

Finally, after considerable editing and re-editing, I completed it! Note: The first 45 seconds are a countdown to give me time to get the headset on. You are welcome to skip to the main feature, though something interesting happens at the 30 second mark ...

Watch on YouTube

I was expecting nothing more than a mix of nostalgia and faux interactive television, but was surprised at the result: I had inadvertently created a “video letter” to my younger self. It was as if I had distilled all the TV-gayness from my youth (plus commercials!) into this video. When I was still living at home, I was as closeted as could be because I was in “enemy camp”—my parents weren’t exactly the most accepting or tolerant of people. I was so closeted that, if I was watching TV with my family and a man appeared shirtless or in a swimsuit, I’d turn my head or pick up a magazine or leave the room, anything to demonstrate I wasn’t the least bit interested in seeing him. Late night TV became a sort of refuge; my parents had gone to sleep and I could bask safely in the glow of a television world where nobody judged me. The out of context scenes, when viewed in “concentrated form”, created a gay-friendly fantasyland of 1980s Los Angeles television, where most of the men are reasonably attractive, where they laughed, cried, fought, triumphed, lived, and died (poor Mischa Auer dies twice!), where advertisers spoke directly to me in friendly, reassuring tones. The sheer man-fulness of the video is relieved only by the presence of “screen queens” and fierce ladies (both real and fictional) like Marlene Dietrich, Maidie Norman, Joan Crawford, Grace Jones, Tuppence Beresford (as portrayed by Francesca Annis), Isis (as portrayed by Joanna Cameron), and so on. Watching the video reminded me of the final scene from Cinema Paradiso (1988, dir. Giuseppe Tornatore), where all the censored kissing scenes have been compiled into a single film full of love and desire.

I am reminded of a May 19, 2017 entry on “Boomer’s Beefcake and Bonding” blog, where Boomer responds to a TV writer (Robert A. Black) for You Can’t Do That On Television who says that nothing he wrote was aimed at gay kids in the audience. Boomer wrote:

Not one tv program, movie, comic book, or cartoon has ever been produced with the idea that there will be gay children in the audience. Not one. Not ever. Gay children are most emphatically assumed not to exist. Writers, producers, directors, and actors all, without exception, assume that every child, without exception, is heterosexual. Gay children are interlopers in an alien country. Everything they see, everything they hear, everything they read is meant for someone else. They have to grab what they can. If they must distort the text, read things that the author didn’t [intend] find things that aren’t even there, no problem. When it is a matter of survival, anything goes.

I also didn’t know while making this video other people had done similar “collage films”, such as Bruce Conner’s “A Movie” (1958) and Chuck Workman’s “Precious Images” (1986).

My only “disappointment” was how un-blue the video looked. On my monitor and online, it has the blue tint, but on my headset everything has a somewhat metallic look, as though dipped in silver. While this effect is pretty cool, wasn’t the point of this video to recreate the old TV look? I tried re-tinting the video several times, making it bluer and bluer, but it never quite matched what I saw on the monitor. Finally, I gave up, lest I spend the rest of my life trying to fix it. Similarly, I had considerable difficulty getting all the volume levels of the music, video clips, and audio clips just right, and after several adjustments that were never quite perfect, also had to let that go.

And here’s the playlist. All links open in new windows.

Song (Year)		Artist	Music	CC-BY License
01.	“Artifacts of Nature” (2019)	4T Thieves	Link	NC 4.0
02.	“Nighttime 2” (2012)	DeepWarmth	Link	NC-SA 4.0
03.	“Clapotis” (2023)	Eerie Tom (ago)	Link	NC 4.0
04.	“Episódio 5” (2004)	Aquarelle	Link	NC-SA 3.0
05.	“Mnemo” (2007)	Lomov	Link	NC-SA 2.5
06.	“Three in One Apartment” (2009)	Dennis Shoker	Link	NC-SA 3.0 US
07.	“Vacuum III - Complexity” (2015)	Sirius Radiance	Link	SA 3.0
08.	“Sun’s Cradle” (2019)	Astrovia	Link	SA 4.0
09.	“Woke Up Surrounded by Enemies” (2007)	Herzog	Link	NC-SA 3.0
10.	“Painting with Light” (2019)	4T Thieves	Link	NC 4.0
11.	“Station 46059 1PM UTC ” (2023)	Eerie Tom (ago)	Link	NC 4.0
12.	“Eight” (2008)	Dimitris	Link	NC-SA 3.0
13.	“Mes Ruines, tes Ruines” (2008)	Muhr	Link	NC-SA 2.0 DE
14.	“Tailoringtape” (2009)	Eleven	Link	NC-SA 3.0
15.	“Shadow of Time” (2014)	SiJ	Link	SA 3.0
16.	“Opal” (2005)	Lomov	Link	NC-SA 2.0
17.	“Mercury’s Youth: The Lost Satellite” (2019)	Astrovia	Link	SA 4.0
18.	“Summer Breeze and Autumn Leaves” (2019)	4T Thieves	Link	NC 4.0
19.	“I Am No Cathedral” (2007)	Herzog	Link	NC-SA 3.0
20.	“Diel Vertical Migration” (2023)	Eerie Tom (ago)	Link	NC 4.0
21.	“Under a Jade Ledge” (2010)	Deepwarmth	Link	NC-SA 4.0

Here’s a (nearly) comprehensive list of clip sources which appear (sometimes only as audio) in this video. Films include:

Der letzte Mann, 1924
Seven Chances, 1925
The Monster, 1925
A Page of Madness, 1926
3 Bad Men, 1926
Flesh and the Devil, 1926
Poor Papa, 1927 (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short)
The Unknown, 1927
The Bat Whispers, 1930
The King of Jazz, 1930
Corsair, 1931
The Devil and The Deep, 1932
Shanghai Express, 1932
Murder at Dawn, 1932
The Death Kiss, 1932
Rain, 1932
The Monster Walks, 1932
Sinister Hands, 1932
Night After Night, 1932
What Price Taxi, 1932
The Old Dark House, 1932
The Mummy, 1932
Scarface, 1932
Sucker Money, 1933
Alice in Wonderland, 1933
The Phantom Broadcast, 1933
So This is Harris!, 1933
Only Yesterday, 1933
The Kennel Murder Case, 1933
Night of Terror, 1933
Secret of the Blue Room, 1933
The Ghost Walks, 1934
Murder on the Blackboard, 1934
The Mysterious Mr. Wong, 1934
The Search for Beauty, 1934
The Whole Town’s Talking, 1935
Loss of Sensation*, 1935
Hats Off, 1936
The Preview Murder Mystery, 1936
Yellow Cargo, 1936
Hollywood Picnic, 1937
The Face Behind the Mask*, 1941
Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake, 1942
Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943
Captive Wild Woman, 1943
The Lost Weekend, 1945
The Flying Serpent, 1946
Lady in the Lake, 1947
The Intruders (Heckle and Jeckle short), 1947
He Walked by Night, 1948
Meditation on Violence, 1948
The Amazing Mr. X, 1948
La Mancornadora, 1949
Outpost in Morocco, 1949
Knock on Any Door, 1949
Everybody’s Dancin’, 1950
The Killer Who Stalked New York, 1950
Where the Sidewalk Ends, 1950
The Thing from Another World, 1951
The Well, 1951
Kansas City Confidential, 1952
Suddenly, 1954
Who’s Right?, 1954 (Marriage for Moderns series)
Bride of the Monster, 1955
Roger Williams: Founder of Rhode Island, 1956
La momia azteca, 1957
Varan the Unbelievable, 1958
A Bullet in the Gun Barrel, 1958
Opening Speech, 1960
Last Year at Marienbad, 1961
King Kong vs. Godzilla, 1962
La Dénonciation, 1962
8 1/2, 1963
From Russia with Love, 1963
Dogora, 1964
Invaders from Space, 1964
Vapors, 1965
Alphaville, 1965
Attack from Space, 1965
Planet of the Vampires, 1965
Juliet of the Spirits, 1965
Fahrenheit 451, 1966
Gamera vs. Barugon, 1966
Playtime, 1967
The Incredible Machine, 1968
Destroy All Monsters, 1968
The Color of Pomegranates, 1969
Marooned, 1969
Gamera vs. Zigra, 1971
Dark Star, 1974
Tiger and Crane Fists, 1976
Logan’s Run, 1976
The Instant Kung Fu Man, 1977
The Ways of Kung Fu, 1978
7 Grandmasters, 1978
True Game of Death, 1979
Per Aspera Ad Astra*, 1981
Heartbeeps, 1981
Looker, 1981
Blade Runner, 1982
Attack of the Joyful Goddess, 1983
Home of the Brave, 1986

Commercials include National Lumber, Truckmaster, Phil & Jim’s, It’s a Good Sign featuring Julianne Gold, Aqueduct City, and Control Data Institute. Music videos include Siouxsie and the Banshees, GusGus, Mew, Santigold, Cabaret Voltaire, Amii Stewart, Laurie Anderson, Missing Persons, Björk, Wall of Voodoo*, Stone Temple Pilots, Tom Tom Club, Dead Kennedys, and The B52s.

TV series include:

Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime
Antiques Roadshow (UK)
Armchair Thriller
Armored Fleet Dairugger XV (aka “Vehicle Voltron”)
Backstage Antiques
The Big Story
Charlie’s Angels
Concepts in Science (Senior Biology: Organic Evolution)
Danger Man
Getter Robo
Gunsmoke
NBC News Overnight
Night Beat (WGN)
Noah and Nelly in ... SkylArk
The Saint
The Secrets of Isis
The Serpent Son (aka Oreisteia)
Shazam!
Skorpion
Space: 1999
Star Trek (original series)
Super Friends
TV Powww* (Los Angeles, with Ralph Harris)
V.I.P.
WSB-TV Action News
You Rang, M’Lord?

*April 2023 update. I still wasn’t completely happy with how all the clips looked so I re-edited the vid, swapping out those clips with a few new ones. I won’t be uploading that version to YouTube, however.

Kabuki, Noh, and Bunraku are all forms of Japanese classical theater.

Kabuki is known for its heavily-stylized performances and the elaborate costumes and makeup worn by some of its performers. I saw a Kabuki performance in Tokyo in 2006.

Noh uses masks, costumes and various props in a dance-based performance consisting of mannered gestures. I saw a Noh play, Sumidagawa (Sumida River), in Nagoya in 2005.

Bunraku is a form of puppet theatre, usually featuring three kinds of performers: puppeteers, chanters, and shamisen musicians. I saw Bunraku in Los Angeles, sometime in the early 2000s.

I was curious what it might be like to watch Kabuki while stoned. The Kabuki performance I saw in Tokyo was good, but I was disappointed that the play was about everyday people (merchants, I think) with everyday problems. Nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to see the spectacle often associated with the genre! So I chose a video at random online, not realizing it was one of the most famous plays, “Shibaraku”.

I don’t think I’ve ever had such an amazing artistic experience before! How can I possibly describe it? The voices of the actors, as well as their gestures, body movements, and facial expressions, not to mention the opulent costumes, were about as alien as anything could be. I felt like Alice sucked into Wonderland, or that I had been transported to the planet Kabuki to meet the inhabitants. The performers seemed like marionettes, or hinamatsuri dolls come to life. The makeup made them seem like German Expressionist film actors, or Fellini’s grotesques.

I’ve heard Ella Fitzgerald’s voice described as a saxophone, and Karen Carpenter’s as an oboe, but the voices of the Kabukians were like flutes, bagpipes, and even guitars and cats. I could only imagine how tough these sounds must be on the voice: shouts, growls, yelps, cries, and utterances made with such tremendous control, expression, range, and timbres. The rhythms and accents made the Japanese a barely recognizable language, as if the Kabukians knew only a few Japanese words and were doing their best to communicate.

I closed my eyes now and then, just to listen—the sound was quite hypnotic. I was so distracted by it, in fact, that I totally missed the climactic moment where the hero beheads several of the villain’s warriors with a single swipe of his sword.

I was afraid, after watching Kabuki, that giving Noh a try would be disappointing. Everything in Noh moves in slow motion, and the singing is often very droning. And unfortunately, when I saw it in Nagoya, I kept nodding off, though so did many Japanese people in the audience! But quite the opposite happened this time. Again, I chose a vid at random, a play called “Matsukaze”.

Well, if seeing Kabuki while stoned was like meeting space aliens, seeing Noh while stoned was like meeting the gods. The story revolved around a courtier who encounters the ghosts of two sisters. One of them mistakes a lone pine tree for her lost love. In the play, the stage is completely bare apart from the performers and a stand holding a single pine tree.

These “gods” were mysterious and inscrutable: if one imagined they were not wearing masks but that those were their actual faces, which looked too small compared to the size of the bodies, it meant it was impossible to read their expressions, and perhaps comprehending the gods is not meant for we mere humans. While the onstage pine did only represent a single pine, it seemed to me like a kind of “meta-pine”—humans may require hundreds of trees to constitute a forest, but for the gods, one would suffice. In my imagination, this meta-pine neither represented a single tree or many trees, but somehow was every pine tree in a singular form.

One of the percussionists, otsuzumi player Hirokazu Kakihara, kept a tempo of sorts by frequently chanting “Yo!” but as time passed, I realized he was making a much wider variety of sounds. I don’t know if this was the intent, but it seemed he was providing the atmosphere by imitating sounds of the wind, water, animals, and birds, all in a highly distorted way. I actually found it kinda sexy, the way he made those sounds!

Kakihara was accompanied by at least two other singers, singing in a way not unlike western opera, in very rich baritone voices. I don’t know if it was the way they sang or just my crappy ear buds, but the voices sounded like they were run through a chorus or flanging effects box, or that I was hearing some overtones. I don’t suppose multiple Noh singers can vary their vibrato or pitch in relation to each other with enough precision to create such effects, but maybe they can. (I looked it up; yes, overtones can occur in vocal music) There were a few moments where the music had a steady rhythm, and so sounded vaguely like dreamlike techno music (with really cool samples).

The performance overall made me think of something you’d see in the Vatican ... slow reverent movements, chanting, and costumes of great splendor.

So if Kabuki featured space aliens and Noh featured gods, what did Bunraku feature? Nothing, unfortunately; perhaps after seeing Noh my expectations were too high, and I didn’t see Bunraku for anything except what it was: a highly artistic puppet performance, in a play called Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees (Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura). What really stood out for me, however, was the tayuu, or singer.

The tayuu, Miwa Tayu Takemoto, could have just as easily made a career as a rock star. Again, I spent a good deal of the time with my eyes closed, just listening to him sing, chant, cry out, and emote. He often sang in a deep growl, but sometimes his voice would climb to a rich, bell-like golden tenor, and then even higher into the falsetto range. It was hypnotic and spellbinding, and I could picture him as an enigmatic god of rock vocalists, right up there with Freddie Mercury, Chris Cornell, or Jim Morrison. I was also reminded a little of the Chinese fortune teller from Return of the Bastard Swordsman.

The shamisen player, Nozawa Katsuhei, seemed to hit several notes out of key; it was sometimes quite atonal or dissonant, even for Japanese music. I found this intriguing; the play was written in 1747, but the music sounded very 20th century. Is it any wonder the combination of “modern music” and a charismatic singer sounded like a really good (unplugged) rock concert?

I’ve downloaded more performances of all three types of theater and look forward to seeing them!

As I’ve said before, one of the problems with creating a Digital Wonderland video featuring futuristic footage and computer animation is finding just the right kinds of clips. But I’ve been in the mood for a new one so I spent about three months trying to find just what I wanted.

To create a more carefully curated video, I came up with a few “rules”:

1. Clips could not be longer than ten seconds, to create more rapid changes from clip to clip. Previously, it had been about fifteen seconds.

2. A type of clip (say, from a particular music video) could not occur more than nine times (or once every ten minutes for a 90 minute video)—ideally six times (or once every fifteen minutes). This was a problem with the first two DW vids where, for example, every other clip seemed to be a display from a Japanese train line.

3. Clips couldn’t be too static or too repetitive; to counteract this, I doctored some of the clips by adding text, special effects, or superimposing other clips or animation on top.

4. Though not a rule, I included some of the original audio from the clips, just to see how that would work with the music.

My DW vids are typically 90 minutes long, and I aimed for that, but even by adding my own footage and animation, this time I only came up with about 75 minutes’ worth, or about 480 clips. These include:

all links open in new windows
1. TV commercials from Japan
2. clips from Design Ah
3. clips about infrastructure, communications, technology, and transportation from several countries, including France, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Finland, and Spain
4. footage from Expo 70
5. clips from video games and music videos
6. scenes from the 1981 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series
7. video animation and art by Jeffrey Plaide, Matt Henderson, Rhizomatiks, John Whitney, Taguchi Masayuki, and More Motion
8. video art created by Scanimate and similar apps

Here’s an abridged version of the video; music is “Insomnia” by Anton Lanski, used under the provisions of Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Germany.

Watch on YouTube

And here’s the playlist. Number links refer to previous playlists on which the artist appeared.

Song (Year)		Artist	Link
1.	“Information Superhighway” (2021)	Steve Moore	Link
2.	“Voyage” (2013)	Lunatique 4	Link
3.	“We” (2017)	1st Day Today 4	Link
4.	“Which One Is It” (2017)	Akusmatic	Link
5.	“Appropriate Position No. 5” (2015)	Manabu Shimada	Link
6.	“Intellect” (2018)	Archaic Revival 4	Link
7.	“Insomnia” (2008)	Anton Lanski 4	Link
8.	“Oráculo” (2020)	Francisco Pinto	Link
9.	“Insouciance” (2013)	Stoner Space Squash	Link
10.	“Gramazeka” (2008)	Mr. Pips 1 2	Link
11.	“Rain Tree” (2013)	Mike Blackmore	Link
12.	“Vobla Fish” (2014)	Faris	Link
13.	“Gloods” (2005)	Digitalis	Link
14.	“Trees in Bronze” (2016)	Bluescript	Link
15.	“Right of Way” (2005)	Social System	Link
16.	“Pole” (2004)	Holger Flinsch	Link
17.	“Other Side of the Game” (2010)	Spirit Catcher	Link
18.	“Black Saw (Pablo Caballero remix)” (2014)	Fcode 4	Link
19.	“Twilight” (2007)	Tatsu 1 2 5	Link
20.	“Angel Dark” (2006)	Zofa	Link
21.	“Ethereous Journeys” (2016)	Smooth 2	Link
22.	“Karmabro” (2007)	TEC 5	Link
23.	“Try and Error” (2014)	Tanaka Scat 2	Link
24.	“From Dusk” (2022)	Soichi Terada	Link
25.	“Sunset” (2002)	Nulleins	Link
26.	“Smitten Kitchen” (2012)	Tilman 4	Link

The result was a success! Great fun to watch while stoned and to let myself get lost. The added audio also worked well, particularly the penultimate clip, which features Trillian from the 1981 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, announcing a return to normal probability. Seemed an appropriate way to end a trip to Digital Wonderland.

I saw my first kung fu film while in high school. A local station (possibly KTTV or KCOP) had “Kung Fu Theater” every Saturday night at 8pm and again on Sundays at noon. While the fight scenes were usually impressive, I was more amused by the incomprehensible plots and weird dubbing that never synced up with the characters’ mouths. Sometimes all the females in a given film were dubbed by a single actress who didn’t bother to differentiate between little girls, young women, and old grandmas—conversations between these characters sounded like someone talking to herself, which added to my amusement. I preferred the films that took place in “ancient China”, where the action often featured fantastic or improbable fighting styles and weapons, and the stories were more about revenge than drug deals or prostitution rings.

I had initially assumed the dubbers were either Chinese and speaking in heavily accented English, or Westerners using stereotypical Asian accents: dropping articles, merging R and L sounds, that kind of thing—“I get revenge against man who kill teacher!” I think part of that was an unfamiliarity at the time with what seemed to be the (presumably) Australian accents of the dubbers, which rendered words like China or river as Chi-ner and riv-ah. The dubbers also used exaggerated voices, making the films sound as if they had been dubbed by Frank Oz, Gilbert Gottfried, and Nina Hagen.

But listening to these movies while on THC, especially when using earbuds, made me realize:

1. The dubbers were not speaking in broken English or with mock Asian accents at all, just regular English.
2. As strange as the voices might have been, I appreciated the hard work of the dubbers, not only in doing all the dialogue, but also all the other vocal sounds: eating and drinking noises, crowd chatter, laughter, sighs, grunts and groans in the fight scenes, etc.
3. By focusing solely on the voices (a result perhaps of “disassociation” caused by the THC), I was able to separate the action on the screen from the dialogue, and it was like listening to a very strange radio play:

MAN 1: But uncle, the money was stolen! The landlord will evict us if we don’t pay the rent!
MAN 2: Hmm, maybe that crazy monkey girl can help us!
MAN 3: No, no, she left this morning with that strange man with the sword!

(This, incidentally, gave me an idea for a future music project!)

A few weeks ago, I found a film called Shaolin Drunkard which featured, among other things, a man-sized frog using martial arts! It was quite a hoot, to say the least. I immediately recognized some of the music on the soundtrack. Many kung fu films of the 70s and 80s often “borrowed” music, probably without permission. I’ve heard everything from The Twilight Zone theme by Marius Constant to Klingon Battle (from Star Trek: The Motion Picture) by Jerry Goldsmith; from that old standby, Mars, the Bringer of War from The Planets by Holst to, perhaps most notoriously, several tracks from Neu!’s album Neu! 2 and Kraftwerk’s Autobahn in Master of the Flying Guillotine. Shaolin Drunkard was no exception. In addition to music from the Flash Gordon soundtrack by Queen and the Thief soundtrack by Tangerine Dream, there were many Vangelis pieces from the albums Spiral (1977) and Beaubourg (1978). What sets Shaolin Drunkard’s soundtrack apart is whoever edited the music didn’t just tack on music where it was needed—he or she even did a little remixing: for example, at 10:10, when a villain sneaks into a temple at night, there is an excerpt from Beaubourg (starting at 2:48) accompanied by deep synthesized tones which were not part of the original. The night scene, with the synthesized music and surreal imagery, was like something out of one of my digital wonderland vids.

There were a lot of pyrotechnics used in the film, more than I’d ever seen in a kung fu film before, and an extensive use of puppets: finger puppets, paper cut outs, two—how can I describe them?—“butt puppets” that looked like something out of Lidsville, a sort of metal shadow puppet used to steal a key (and pee in someone’s pipe!), and a fire-breathing “marionette” that battles a giant dragon dance puppet that shoots water. And in one of the most imaginative fight scenes I’ve ever seen, the villain uses a series of large metal rings to create traps for the heroes. The heroes are aided by an old woman who uses several bracelets to recreate the traps then “solve” them like doing a Rubiks cube (“The right ring is the key!”).

“Unfortunately”, after the mid-80s or so, the dubbers, or at least their dubbing style, changed. All the outlandish voices were gone. They were not necessarily better actors, however. The crazy radio play dialogue just doesn’t work when spoken in normal, everyday, placid tones.

Finally, a list of some of my favorite films:

Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976)
Return of the Kung Fu Dragon (1976)
Shaolin Temple (?) The title in the film is indeed Shaolin Temple, but it is neither the 1976 film nor the 1982 film with the same name. This one concerns a prince who is poisoned, and two sisters have to search for the antidote. Their journey eventually takes them to a “Pagoda of Death”. Viewable on YouTube here.
Tiger and Crane Fists (1976)
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, aka Shaolin Master Killer (1978)
Amsterdam Connection (1978)
Five Deadly Venoms (1978)
Image of Bruce Lee (1978)
Sleeping Fist (1979)
Return to the 36th Chamber, aka The Return of the Master Killer (1980)
The Snake, The Tiger, The Crane (1980)
Fury in Shaolin Temple (1982)
18 Bronze Girls of Shaolin (1983)
Shaolin Drunkard (1983)
Shaolin Soccer (2001)
Kung Pow! Enter the Fist (2002)
Kung Fu Hustle (2004)
Unknown Title (year?) a reverse of Seven Samurai: two bums come to a village and pretend to be kung fu masters so the villagers will give them food and lodging. Everything goes well until a posse of bad guys show up and the villagers expect the “masters” to save the day.

My brother and I were given a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder when we were of elementary school age. We didn’t begin recording music together until 1985, but before then we sure recorded a lot of what we called “radio plays”—basically improvised (and usually silly) versions of our favorite shows and films. One was the sci-fi film THX-1138 (1971, dir. George Lucas), which we saw on TV in the early 80s. We were amused by the strangely placid music* playing in the dystopian setting, and too young to know that elevator music (or muzak) was an actual genre. In one part of our radio play version, one of us said, “Production is up 72%, and now for the enjoyment of our listening audience, we present (dramatic pause) mall music.”, then sang a made-up tune—using the syllable “ding” to imitate a vibraphone—that went something like this:
 

Jump ahead many years later. I don’t recall exactly how I came across “mallsoft”, but probably from listening to chillwave music, which led me to vaporwave, and then to the latter’s various sub-genres. I was fascinated that anyone would take elevator music, slow it down, add lots of reverb, then call it new music. Why, anyone could do that, right? It wasn’t until I saw a video explaining the motivation behind mallsoft that I got intrigued and began exploring the genre in depth. This led me to a number of artists, but my favorite was someone named Yu, who recorded an album entitled 過世的購物中心蕭條導瀉檔案完畢世界 / Blue Album or, roughly translated, “dead mall depression archive catharsis end world”. Yu seemed to go a little further than mere slow-down plus reverb, making some almost monstrously haunting pieces, with brass instruments sounding like dinosaurs in agony.

So—what if I took that silly little tune from our THX-1138 radio play, expanded it into a proper piece of music, then “slowed it down and added lots of reverb”?

I started with a bossa nova arrangement, but even when slowed down it sounded too boisterous, so I recorded a more languid ballad version. It came out fine, but just didn’t have that haunting quality present in Yu’s music, so I added a few elements.

1. Effects like record de-centering, and wow and flutter.

2. A phased noise effect, which can be heard on Yu’s tracks, though I have no idea if that’s something that was added or the result of slowing down the original tracks.

3. I would’ve sworn in court that, the first time I listened to Blue Album, I could hear a man, buried deep in the mix and nearly inaudible, slowly counting beats in Spanish (“uno, dos, tres, cuatro”) on one of the tracks. Upon successive listenings, I couldn’t hear it any more, so maybe it was my imagination, but I decided my song should have that.

4. While filming the video at a shopping mall, a security guard interrupted me and made me stop—I didn’t have permission to shoot there, after all. Her “Excuse me.” can be heard towards the end.

Here’s the result and music video!

Links: download the ep from archive.org or Bandcamp.

*Particularly around 7:30 when THX finishes his work shift and heads for the mall. The music that’s played does not appear on the THX-1138 soundtrack, but it’s “Elevator Music” from the 1956 film “Miracle in the Rain” by composer Franz Waxman. The music appears at about 3:45 in the film.

Scroll to the bottom of this entry if you want to skip all this blah-blah-blah and just hear the song! 😄

A chance remark by my doctor led me to Operation Failed.

I had my first doctor’s appointment in Portland a few months ago. During our conversation, my doctor asked if I had any hobbies. “Music, for one,” I said.

DR: Nice! What kind?
ME: Well, right now I’m concentrating mostly on electronic music.
DR: Oh, like being a DJ?
ME: Oh no. I can’t see myself doing that. I’m more interested in music production.

I really had no plans of becoming a DJ, but her remark stuck in my head. By chance, not long after that chat, I came across a video featuring Sama’ Abdulhadi doing a set in Palestine. I thought yeah, maybe I could do something like what she was doing.

Years ago, I had purchased a Yamaha SU700 sampler. I used it for a couple of projects but it seemed very complicated and I didn’t think it was suitable for the kind of music I was doing at the time. Also, three of the knobs were erratic: I would try to increase, say, the volume of a sample from 80 to 85, and the value would jump all over the place to the point the knob was useless. I just assumed this was dust or dirt inside the machine, but since I was barely using it, I didn’t bother trying to clean it out. Still, I wasn’t ready to let go of it, so I kept it.

After seeing Sama’s set, I searched on the ’net for someone using an SU700 live and found this by Microesfera—yes! This was exactly what I wanted to try.

I unpacked and opened up the SU700, gave it several bursts of canned air to clean it out, but to no avail: the three knobs were still erratic. When I looked online to see if there was some way to correct this, I discovered this was a problem with all SU700s, not just my particular machine.

But before I went to all the trouble of trying to fix it, I was curious to see if I could even attempt what Sama’ and Microesfera were doing, so I created several clips and samples in Audacity and loaded them onto the sampler (using the knobs that still worked). The SU700 doesn’t have a lot of memory, so I sampled most of them at 11K, 8 bit, mono. Everything had a very lofi sound but that was okay, I wasn’t trying to create a polished piece. There is no internal memory on an SU700; you save your work on good old fashioned floppy discs. I also discovered some of the other knobs were beginning to fail.

After about two weeks of fine-tuning the samples and effects, I was nearly ready to go live: my intent was to video the session and post it like Microesfera had done. I just needed a little more practice on the transitions. Alas, disaster struck. I was trying to load the song from the discs and got an OPERATION FAILED message. I tried repeatedly, tried turning the machine off and starting over, even tried loading an older floppy (from when I was trying to learn how to save to and load from a floppy) and that one worked, but no matter what, the DJ project was gone forever. The only “advice” I could find online merely pointed out floppy discs were notoriously unreliable.

Sure, I could’ve started over from scratch by resampling all the clips (although three of the samples were created directly on the SU700, so they weren’t in Audacity) and to be sure I didn’t have another disc failure, I also could’ve saved the project on multiple discs. But who was to say those wouldn’t all fail too? And I was just too crestfallen to start over. At least I’d proven to myself maybe I could improvise a set. I’m still not sure if I want to be a live DJ, but at least I discovered another way to make music, and frankly, using the sampler with all its buttons and knobs is far more intuitive than making changes on my DAW with a mouse.

So, to repair or to replace? I’m only just learning hobby electronics: I need to master soldering, first of all! If I can do that, then I might see about replacing the knobs on the sampler. If that’s not viable, then I’ll think about buying a new machine. But I hope I can salvage the SU700—I’m sure I’ve seen blogs about how to connect a more reliable external memory. It’s such a groovy little machine, and I like that it’s completely standalone. And I hate to see an otherwise functioning powerful piece of equipment go to the electronic waste dump.

Meanwhile, I imported all the clips into my DAW and tried to recreate what I had come up with during the practice sessions. I also created three new samples to replace the SU700 created ones. Nothing fancy here, not a polished production, but here’s “Operation Failed” (originally titled “Drill”). Enjoy!