Falling Sky

Future Sound of a Sunken London

This clip's quite a few years old - it's from Werner Herzog's 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World (best known for the deranged penguin) - but popped up on Sully's blog earlier this week. These are recordings from Antarctica of seals communicating underwater, sounds the burble, pop and boom through the ice. It's compared to Pink Floyd in the clip but to my ears it's pure FSOL (particularly circa Lifeforms).

And Everything Is Going According To Plan

Blogs! Remember them? With so much gibbering about social networking, good old-fashioned blogging seems to have fallen by the collective wayside, but there's still so much good stuff out there. I do most of my blog reading while commuting thanks to the splendid Byline app, but some posts just have to be savoured on a big computer screen. Adam Curtis - he of the awesome BBC documentaries - has turned out to be one of the best bloggers out there, making full use of the ability to embed video, to link and (like fellow Beeb types Robert Peston, Stephanie Flanders and Paul Mason) to use the format to take time to discuss subjects free of the time (and perhaps editorial) constraints of a broadcast slot, covering as diverse a range of topics as you can imagine. And, being Curtis, these are all researched to the nth degree, the embedded video footage having been dragged up from the archives and edited together with the same energy and unpredictability of his television work, free of the usual stock imagery or clichéd clips. For example, a five minute segment on Rupert Murdoch for Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe Review of the Year (posted below) was distilled down from a brilliant 45 minute 'rough cut' posted in July last year.

 

Just before Christmas he wrote a fascinating piece on a time when hauntings in suburbia - particularly poltergeists - became news items, leading to the mockumentary terror of Stephen Wolk's Ghostwatch (which, twenty years on, remains a genuinely scary piece of work and is available to watch in full here - here's a cracking 2003 article from Volk, and there's more on Ghostwatch to come later this year, it seems)

 

His latest blog post went up a couple of weeks ago, with the following introduction:

Everybody is always remarking about how stuck our society feels these days. The music doesn't change, the political parties are all exactly the same, and films and TV dramas are almost always set in the past.

We are also stuck with an economic system that is not delivering the paradise that it once promised - but is instead creating chaos and hardship. Yet no-one can imagine a better alternative, so we remain static - paralysed by a terrible political and cultural claustrophobia.

I want to tell the story of another time and another place not so long ago that was also stifled by the absence of novelty and lacking a convincing vision of the future. It was in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and 1980s. At the time they called it "the years of stagnation".

What follows is a thrilling and eye-opening blast through Russia in the second half of the 20th century, as a system - The Plan - designed to plan and organise the whole of society started to collapse. It shows the despair this system wrought, and the desparate attempts made to paper over this through appropriating culture - see the sad story of Dean Reed, an American pop-rocker singing Soviet propaganda to American rock'n'roll - and invading Afghanistan.

But it also shows how protest movements grew through punk music and the avant garde - the clip where Curtis has cut a couple of these songs to 1989 footage of the collapse of the Soviet Union is particularly arresting - and then what happened to these movements protesting against a system that was no longer there. This leads to Lenin the mushroom, Serbian sniper rifles and Putin with a poodle. All in all, it's a thrilling reminder of the strength of proper blog-writing (as opposed to this one, which mainly exists for pointing at stuff other people have done) and well worth a good wodge of your time. Pour a cuppa, settle down and enjoy.

Muppets 1 - Fox 0

Via Dangerous Minds:

Jim Henson’s Muppets have been in London this past week for the UK premiere of their new movie, simply called The Muppets. On Thursday, Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog gave a press conference at the May Fair Hotel, and one of the questions raised was how they reacted to the recent claims by Fox News’ Epic Trolling Eric Bolling that the Muppets “brainwash children” with a “dangerous liberal agenda”.

"Maurice... Sendak... Children... Meh!"

This could possibly be the perfect Stephen Colbert interview - the mighty Maurice Sendak is a crotchety joy to behold, eyes sparkling with the mischief and humour that was lacking from this Guardian interview last year. Highly recommended, right to the very end of part 2 where Sendak gives his opinion on ebooks. Colonials can watch it via Colbert Nation, but us foreign types must rely on the charity of YouTube. 

 

Warm Colours, Chilly Fingers

Or, as a great man once said, orange!*

Seems that the deeper the frost, the more colourful the sunrise over the Forth. It's -3 outside this morning, which makes standing out on the balcony in a dressing gown taking a photo an exercise in stupidity idiocy endurance, but it's worth it for such colours. You can see the Aberdour obelisk on the very far left, and there's Arthur's Seat off in the distance on the right. I miss these sunrises during the week thanks to an early commute, so I'm pleased I caught this beauty today.

In further news, today's Google logo is a fun little animation, nicely stylised. Do see.

*That's the first great 'orange' in music - here's the second. Yeah, that's right.

What Texting Was Made For

I'm not normally one for pranks, but this made me laugh (probably because there's no meanness behind it, beyond driving someone to distraction with cat stuff). As BuzzFeed explains...

After Redditor frackyou's little cousin posted his phone number on Facebook, he came up with the purrfect prank.

For more cat facts, see The Oatmeal's 17 Things Worth Knowing About Cats. Love the Tesla one.

Earth - Now In HD

This 'thumbnail' is impressive enough, but you REALLY need to click here for the jaw-droppingly detailed 8000 x 8000 pixel version. You colonials can probably see your house from there.

via www.flickr.com

A 'Blue Marble' image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed 'Suomi NPP' on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.

Suomi NPP is NASA's next Earth-observing research satellite. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.

Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board. The biggest and most important instrument is The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS.

To read more about NASA's Suomi NPP go to: npp.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html

Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

Eternal Sunshine Of The Japanese Foot

I'll always love Michel Gondry for the wonder of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (even if it did spawn this über-whiny post from yours truly eight years ago - ah, I was so young...), but his last couple of films haven't appealed much.

HURRAH, then, for this minute-long absolutely-goddamn-barmy advert he's made for a Japanese department store, posted on Film Drunk. Contains much shouting, shrieking, big feet and HAHAHAHAHAHA, which is as close to heaven as you're likely to get on a Wednesday.

 

Peek-a-Moon

Saturn's moon Mimas peeks out from behind the night side of the larger moon Dione in this Cassini image captured during the spacecraft's Dec. 12, 2011, flyby of Dione. 

Dione is 698 miles, or 1,123 kilometers, across and its day side dominates the view on the right of the image. Smaller Mimas is on the left and measures 246 miles, or 396 kilometers, across. 

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute 

The Sound Of Years

A fascinating post from Laughing Squid of a video that was posted up at Vimeo three months ago (it can take time for these things to spread). Created by German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck, it's a record player... that plays wood.

To be more precise, cross-sections of trees rotate on a turntable (one of Pro-Ject's if I'm not mistaken) while the 'stylus' translates any marks/darkness on the wood, such as rings or whorls, into sound. As Traubeck describes on his website here:

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music.

You can watch a video of the turntable in action below. A smart idea, stylishly done.

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.