Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
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Horrorthon Posts
I can’t get over The Real Tuesday Weld (the London band that may just be one guy, Stephen Coates) and the incredible music and animation that those four words continue to mean. Octopunk introduced me to them years ago by walking into my house, opening his laptop and insisting (before even taking his coat off) that I watch the animated video for their “Bathtime in Clerkenwell” (one of several collaborations with Russian animator Alex Budovsky). (The sequel, “Last Time in Clerkenwell“, is even weirder, and its music is vastly more complex.) The below is the first of two new TRTW videos by Giant Squid Eye, who take a completely different approach to a far more conventional song (or is it?)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9ZiZ9p2aDo&hl=en&fs=1]
The entire thing is completely fascinating. Coates calls the style “antique beat” (kind of a musical steampunk? Or would “musical steampunk” be fucking Victorian CoE hymnals?) since it’s built on clarinet, acoustic guitar etc., but it’s also heavily dependent on an old Roland analog synth (the famous MC-303, the foundation of all Acid House). (!). The cartoon is pretty deep stuff, in my opinion…the Biblical lounge atmosphere is surreal. Anyway I thought you ‘thonners might enjoy it all.
UPDATE: Here’s the other Giant Squid Eye/RTW video, “Kix,” in which they violate the basic laws of space and time.
Sunday, December 28th, 2008
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Horrorthon Posts
Since this is Horrorthon, the “season of giving” means “giving” the gift of ultimate horror (unless there’s something wrong with my logic). Anyway here’s four minutes and forty-six seconds of pure unspeakable dread. I’d say the body count for this clip dwarfs every horror movie seen by every Horrorthon participant this year (and it takes less than five minutes). Whoever added the Floyd had the right idea. You won’t even see bacteria again for a few million years. Merry Christmas!
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
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Horrorthon Posts
Hi everybody! (Dr. Nick Rivera voice)
Barney (my current co-writer) and I have been holed up for months working against a book deadline, so I missed all of Horrorthon, to my intense regret. But the good news is that we made our deadline, and submitted the first draft of our teen supernatural thriller 7 Souls (Random House, 2010). (I’d show you the cover, but I don’t think I’m supposed to.) We’ve received our editor’s notes etc. and are beginning to re-plot for draft 2, but I figure I’ve got a little free time to drop by and say hello to my long-lost Horrorthon brethren.
I was putting off posting because I wanted to come in with something really good. Then I thought, Does that ever even happen? I mean, we could be waiting a long time, is my point. So I don’t have anything good to provide here…except for one minor thing.
I’ve always hated Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, but I grudgingly admit that they’ve got some game (as octopunk would put it). (They’re pioneers in the art of trailer-making, for one thing.) Godzilla is a terrible, terrible movie, but it’s got some seeds of genius that have been very influential, in the decade since. At the time, I said that Godzilla sucked but “had about five minutes of total brilliance” in the first third of the movie (in which, among other things, the monster drags its tail through the Phillip Morris building, which makes me very happy).
Looking at the movie again, I maintain that it sucks but that those same five minutes are still totally brilliant. They achieve something that’s the direct predecessor of similar sequences in The Return of the King, Cloverfield (obviously), War of the Worlds and a bunch of other movies.
So here’s my famous “brilliant” five minutes from Godzilla (trimmed down to three to remove the extraneous material that isn’t cool). They still kind of screw it up: the movie is very badly edited and many of the effects shots are arbitrarily cut in half or interspersed with mismatched stuff, and the actors veer into Superman II “crowd” behavior too often. But it’s a progenitor to a lot of great cinema to come.
http://www.jordanorlando.com/ns/godzilla
I’ll check back in, before going back “in the tank” to write draft 2 (due in March). And I have to go read everyone’s reviews…I can’t wait for that! Anyway, I’ve missed you guys; hope all’s well in Horrorthonland. (Which is like Disneyland except not quite as expensive.)
PS. As a bonus here’s Vic Mizzy’s “Spider-Man” theme song.
http://www.jordanorlando.com/ns/vic_mizzy
