the final programme

Adapted from the eponymous Michael Moorcock novel and premiering in UK cinemas on this day in 1973, the Robert Fuest sci-fi, action production (thanks to the introduction from The Flop House), the plot centring around the quest for post-humanism beings—perfect and self-propagating—is a post-modern Prometheus story that shares a lot of energy and aesthetics with the roughly contemporary Abominable Doctor Phibes. Bent on carrying out the taboo and contro-versial plan of a recently deceased mad scientist and bring human kind into a new age and out of an existence condemned to near post-apocalyptic wasteland, Miss Brunner—a sado-masochistic techno-magician—instigates the epiphanical sequence, causing her to merge with the protagonist, a suave playboy physicist and son of the man scientist called Jerry Cornelius and dispatching with the henchman named Dmitri who had helped bring their plot to fruition—briefly manifesting as some sort of messianic figure to herald a new age before devolving into a caveman (see also). The creature, as it escapes the secret lair, observes that it is indeed “a very tasty world.”

this ain’t no sunday school picnic

Having garnered quite a bit of experience and reputation in the Pittsburg market making television commercials, industrials and educational shorts with their production company The Latent Image, George A. Romero (previously) and John Russo resolved to make a full-length feature responding to audience interest in the genre of horror, realising their ambitions on this day in 1968—as our faithful chronicler informs, with the premier of the classic featuring a growing horde of the cannibalistic undead surrounding a group barricaded in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania. Though establishing the rules and conventions for future films of this type, zombies are never mentioned, and like all good monster movies allegorically tracks and critiques contemporary social mores including Cold War paranoia, Western hegemony and domestic apartheid.

7x7

pyroclastic flow: paintings of the 1776 eruption of Mount Vesuvius (previously)—via Everlasting Blört  

don jumpedo in the character of harlequin jumping down his own throat: an apology for the man in the bottle

twist and bend: superlative balloon art recreating iconic classics 

eisenbahnbetriebsfeld: a model railway in Darmstadt used to train train traffic-controllers  

store-brand: Kmarto table wine  

licorice pizza: a trailer for a 1970s coming-of-age film set in California’s San Fernando Valley—via Waxy

social justice: artist Kerry James Marshall designs new stained glass windows for Washington’s National Cathedral to replace Confederate ones

citation needed

Though many go beyond pettiness and pedantry and grow rather partisan in championing one authoritative version over another competing editor, we enjoyed a selection from Web Curios of what’s been deemed the most trivial debates when it comes to framing, contextualising and disambiguating topics in the Wikipedia community of devoted feuding (see previously) and upholding free knowledge. Topics of no consequence include matters on canonicity or fandom, the nobility of micronations and appropriateness of redirect. Not a style-guide, this Wikipedia page (see a sortable version here) of protracted disputes is meant to be humorous and a look at the tenacity of academic convictions, no matter the height of the hill one decides to die on.

6x6

central solenoid: installation of a powerful giant magnet brings experimental fusion project a step closer to completion 

cléo from 5 to 7: discovering an Agnes Varda classic 

la société du spectacle: an update of the 1974 Situationist Guy Debord’s critique of mass marketing and estrangements of modern society  

raise high the roof beam: experience a house inside a barn 

wtc: a profile of architect Minoru Yamasaki, best known for designing New York’s World Trade Center  

ccs: Iceland’s carbon capture and sequestration plant (previously) goes on-line

7x7

terrorstorm: the garbage documentaries that fulled the cult of conspiracy theorist, fragility and New Age Paranoia  

chestbursters and facehuggers:an official Alien xenomorph cookbook to liven up the dinner table  

en hobbits äventyr: Moomins’ creator Tove Jansson illustrates Tolkien’s work 

skeuomorphs: vestigial, hidden parts of consumer electronics  

docudrama: a guide to making a Netflix style serial on the topic of one’s choosing  

next sunday a.d.: a neglected remix, compilation of the MST3K Satellite of Love theme  

white rabbit: redpilling (previously) and the regime

why is there even a blue pill?

Via Super Punch, we are treated to this sincerely, unintentionally unfortunate juxtaposition with this teaser landing spot for the upcoming Matrix sequel, in which actors from the original reprise their roles. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

intolerance

Though not to be understood as a receptive apology or contrite response for his stereotyping and racist portrayals of his previous spectacle that glamourised and revived America’s Klu Klux Klan—quite the opposite as the direct was fervent that he had nothing to be sorry for and that his critics were the intolerant ones, the silent film epic from D. W. Griffith subtitled variously either A Sun-Play of the Ages or Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages certainly undertook a grander focus, premiering on this day in 1916. 

Though punctuated with several intermissions and interludes, the three-and-a-half-hour film consists of four stories separated by millennia and mores that trace how intolerance has informed human history and suffering through the ages. The first chapter, the “Babylonian story” depicts the fall of the civilisation due to a sectarian fight between followers of rival gods Ishtar and Marduk. The next recounts the Bible passages of the Wedding at Cana and The Woman Taken in Adultery and how religious and unneighbourly bigotry and small-mindedness led to the crucifixion of Jesus. The “Renaissance story” recounts the persecution of the Protestant Huguenots by royalist Catholics that led to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The final contemporary story set in America shows how petty crime, moral puritanism and capitalism conspire to keep the downtrodden marginalised. Transitions are marked by an image of the Eternal Mother rocking a cradle to represent the passing of generations.

i never had one myself, enough to remember. i was torn from the thigh of zeus.

Airing for the first time on this day in 1993, Sam Newfield’s 1944 juvenile delinquency exploitation flick was rediscovered through its MST3K lampoon (from the same director as Lost Continent and RADAR Secret Service) and elevated to the status of a cult classic, when defendant and mild-mannered teen Jimmy Wilson indicts his absent and alcoholic parents and lays the blame for his charge of manslaughter squarely on his substandard upbringing. Wilson is unwittingly recruited into a ring fencing stolen jewellery whose activity eventually results in the killing of a security guard and fearing reprisal and the consequences of associating with these criminal elements becomes a fugitive from justice for an indeterminate length of time. Jimmy is convinced to return to stand in court for his involvement.

coming attractions

 

Again via ibīdem, these movie posters generated by a neural network struck us as intriguing, created after being feed a brief description of the film, and while the range was wide and varied and saw some of the elements that the artificial intelligence may have been picking up on retrospectively after the answer was revealed, we admit to really only getting without being told though still needed to verify Monty Python’ and the Holy Grail (1975, see also) and Space Jam (1996) for their cinéma vérité and appreciable observation mode. 

 

6x6

this slaps: the Kiffness and friends (see previously) remixes the little melody of a harmonica playing rat—debuting here

à la recherché du temps perdu: wondering how Marcel Proust’s Instagram might look is a pathway into memory in the age of social media 

melts in your mouth: the long and cursed history of the sexy green M&M—via Things Magazine  

development hell: scores of unfinished films that we would watch  

sit a spell: a visual essay on the American porch 

latch-mediated spring actuation: scientists engineer a robot that packs the wallop of the powerful punch of the mantis shrimp

a smattering of spots

Our thanks to Fancy Notions for referring us to this reel of cartoon commercials from the animators at Storyboard, Incorporated, the studio of John Hubley (*1914 - †1977, creator of Mister Magoo and under the employ of Disney painted backgrounds for Snow White, Fantasia and Bambi as well as director for the animated adaptation of Watership Down) with a cavalcade of 1950s advertising—no product endorsement intended or implied.

the devil at four o’clock

Peaking on this day in 1883 with the destruction of island and surrounding archipelago, the violent eruption of Krakatoa in the Sunda Straits is among the largest and deadliest in recorded history, some forty thousand lives lost to the volcano and subsequent tsunamis and the sonic wave of the blast heard around the globe seven times over. Seismic activities continued for weeks with destructive after-shocks and environmental effects, climate-change from the released ash lasted for years afterwards, captured in the painting The Scream, it is theorised. The title refers to the prequel to the 1968 disaster film that notoriously got the geography wrong, and when the error was pointed out to them, the producers still went with east, feeling it sounded more atmospheric and exotic, released in the seventies amidst a spate of other disaster films simply as Volcano.

a.i.

Via Waxy, we are treated to another instalment commemorating half a century of text gaming (see previously) with a retrospective look at the first major Alternate Reality play and the community of enthusiast who first embraced it with. The elaborate internet scavenger hunt called the Beast was made to promote the Steven Spielberg production the story of the then recently departed Stanley Kubrick touted as the blockbuster of the summer of 2001 about a sentient machine that wanted to be a real boy.  The curious were encouraged to search for hints by phone, fax and web and engaged with this immersive entertainment experience.

non più andrai

Always appreciative of learning that that the villainized and vilified come down to a matter of apocryphal license, we enjoyed disabusing ourselves of this staple fact of pop-culture (see also) in that there’s no substantiating the feud between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri and their vying for the position of court composer. The narrative was first introduced in a two-act opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov with book by Alexander Pushkin in 1897 with the elder dedicated maestro scheming to poison his younger rival, inspiring the 1984 film Amadeus by Miloš Forman.

羅生門

Premiering in cinemas in Tokyo on this day in 1950, the classic psychological thriller by Akira Kurosawa and Kazuo Miyagawa, Rashōmon (previously), is the recounting of various testimonials about the murder of a samurai, witnesses betraying their ideal self-images through embellishment and omission. The film’s enduring legacy includes its narrative arc of self-serving and contradictory accounts, refuted through a Shinto medium channelling the spirit of the killed victim, and was one of the first Japanese movies to garner international acclaim, subtitled in a host of other languages and honoured at the Venice Film Festival the following year.

wadi musa

Familiar to only a few locals and unknown to the West until its rediscovery on this day in 1812 by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, the capital of the Nabataeans called Raqmu by its denizens is commonly referred to Petra (Al-Batrāʾ) after its designation as a client state of the Empire after Rome annexed their kingdom as Arabia Petaea.

The settlement in southern Jordan between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqada is only accessible via a narrow gorge and was a major regional trading hub in antiquity, controlling routes from Gaza to Damascus and onto the Persian Gulf. Accustomed to privation and periods of drought and deluge, the Nabatean city includes advanced methods of gathering and storing rainwater and flood control, allowing the population to thrive and supporting numbers approaching twenty-thousand residents at its height. A marvel of engineering and with many cameos in popular culture, in most years, Petra greets over a million international tourists annually.

fantasmagorie

Caricaturist and member of the mostly forgotten art movement the Incoherents (les arts incohérents in opposition to les arts décoratifs—contributions later described as surreal) Émile Cohl (*1857 - †1938) created was is commonly accepted as the world’s first animated film, debuting at the Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris on this day in 1908. Consisting of seven hundred hand-drawn images on glass-plates (cels) and running about two minutes, it is evocative of the magic lantern shows from which it takes its title and is executed in a stream of consciousness style without narrative.

veruca salt

 

Released in cinemas in the United Kingdom on this day in 1971, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder and Peter Ostrum was a commercial success, the box office taking in more than the film’s budget in its first run and was produced over the course of five months at the City of München gasworks in West Germany, costs at the time being significantly cheaper than elsewhere with the final sequence of the Wonkavator flying over the rooftops an aerial shot of Nördlingen, the town built in an ancient meteor crater. The author of the original story, Roald Dahl, ultimately disowned the finished product with the over-emphasis on Wonka rather than Charlie and the addition of musical numbers outside the Oompa Loopa choruses, including Ach, so fromm from the romantic opera from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha during the rather terrifying Wonkawash segment, appearing in Phantom of Opera, re-worked as a swing song, performed on the Disney short “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met”.

555-2368

The single released by session guitarist and song writer Ray Parker Jr as theme to the eponymous film (see previously) on this day in 1984 climbed to the top of the US charts and held that place for three weeks. In the UK, it reached the number two spot in mid-September, staying there for the same amount of time. The Oscar-nominated song lost to Stevie Wonder’s Best Original Song, the ballad for The Woman in Red “I Just Called to Say I Love You” (see also) and was the subject of a lawsuit—settled the following year out of court, Parker accused of having plagiarised the melody of Huey Lewis and the News’ “I Want a New Drug” by the band.