I ran across this new interview with E about a week ago.
Tomorrow Morning is something to look forward to. By the way, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives has become available again on YouTube after having been taken down sometime after I last referred to it. ("This video has been removed due to a copyright claim by the BBC.")You may want to DLHelper yourself to those mp4s before they get taken down again, because the price of buying the dvd ($40.49!) is a ridiculous price to pay for not recording it when it was broadcast on TV.
Just for the hell of it, here's an NPR interview from June 2009.
...and an official Eels video from April 2009.
Mac Tonnies-tagged content continues to be created on the internets despite his physical death. Below are some recent YouTube movies.
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The whole 1982 film is on Google Video in what seems to be a fairly low resolution (because it's a very cinematic movie). You can download the whole mpeg4 after it loads in the browser, too. I think in Wikipedia or somewhere it was suggested that this was a "cult film". I must be a member of the cult, then. It isn't really about Hopi prophesy despite the title and some carefully selected Hopi wisdom. To me, it is a document of life in the United States in the early 1980s from an unusual point of view. Too cinematic and nonverbal to be anthropological, but perhaps it could be described as late 20th century America as seen and captured by a Hopi anthropologist visitor from an alternate timeline?
You may be able to find it on YouTube, but I'm informed it is blocked in my country "due to copyright restrictions." Too late for that kind of talk now that Google handed me the mpeg4.
B Is For Bob. Thank you, Facebook. Thank you, Ziggy. I'm not sure that I like that idea but I have bought and loved other music released by the dead Bob Marley. "Death is only the beginning," as mummy used to say.
In this screen shot of a frame around 1:59 in this video at the BarackObamadotcom Youtube channel, big brother Barry holds his sister Maya by the Golden Gate Bridge. I love this picture. Since Maya was born in August 1970, I'd guess this could be the summer of '72? I tried to restore my screenshot of the lo-res video of the faded photo to what I imagine the scene actually looked like. Despite some artifacts in the sky and under the bridge, I think this is about right.
The shirt was (Vietnam) camouflage green, not (Desert Storm) brown, as it appears in the reddened photo. I used to have one like it around the early 70s, shortly after I ruined the paisley one by forgetting some chewing gum in the pocket. Some green light reflected off the shirt onto Maya's arm, Barack's face, and the side of Maya's face. Young Barack's hair was more of a deep rich brown with reddish highlights in the bright sun, if these colors are right, and Maya's hair was a lighter brown with a reddish tinge, too. They are both squinting under a bright late-morning sun. I guess they are in a spot Golden Gate Park, facing south. I don't know the area well. It's a really nice snapshot of (the universal) brother and sister.
What's this I hear about McCain suspending his campaign and possibly not showing up for the debate? Does this mean he is no longer contesting the election? Will Obama debate his empty chair, a spokesdrone, or YouTube videos of McCain? Or is this McCain saying that this "election" stuff just isn't all that important. "I'm far too busy spending ONE TRILLION DOLLARS of your money bailing out some good buddies back in Washington DC and I just don't have the time to explain it all to you little people! I'm a busy man!" Would McCain just suspend the election itself if he thought he could?
I was at tv-intros.com today through a google search gone astray and really enjoy that site altho I basically hate(d) TV. There are many downloadable WMV files of virtually every TV intro I know of. I stopped watching TV in the 1970s so the ones I am interested date from that era. With McCain in mind, I drew up a TV line-up which would be the ones approved by the Homeland Security team during the McCain administration, presumably after the government bailed out all of the failing TV networks and the production of new TV series died out in favor of pre-millenial nostalgia.
Based on the chilling Richard Matheson science fiction Classic "I am Legend" and later remade as "The Omega Man" starring Charlton Heston. This classic features Vincent Price as scientist Robert Morgan in a post apocalyptic nightmare world. The world has been consumed by a ravenous plague that has transformed humanity into a race of bloodthirsty vampires. Only Morgan proves immune, and becomes the solitary vampire slayer.Downloads and streams
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I have a bunch of these View-Master reels at home. They date from around 1948, through the 1950s when my mother collected them, to some from the 1960s and 1970s that my siblings and I bought and received, and a few more that I bought a few years ago. They fall into such categories as funnies/comics/nursery rhymes/folk tales and the like, cowboys and indians (a 50s thing, I guess), and world tour (places around the world). I think the idea was to provide a fake memory of world travel so you could save money by not going, but the designers hadn't developed scratch-n-sniff in time for this, so without the olfactory input, the illusion is incomplete. Had they been able to provide not only a 3D view of, say, an Istanbul market, but also include a scratch-n-sniff portion of the disc that would present the appropriate scent to your nose in the binocular viewer's nose-place and mechanically scratch it for you as you advanced the reel, they might have beaten that newfangled TV thing.
It's hard to believe that if a 10-year-old started buying these in 1948, they'd be 70 now, nearly as old as John McCain. I just mention that to emphasize what an ancient technology this is. But although it is ancient, it is still around and hasn't changed much. And although I keep a sharp eye peeled (ouch) for the imminent arrival of low-cost stereoscopic (or stereo, binocular, whatever you want to call it) 3D digital cameras for consumer use, they continue to fail to appear on the market. Most of the 3D cameras on the market are semi-antiques from the 1950s.
The existence of these reels provides a good excuse to mess with the film-scanning feature on my Epson GT-9700F scanner. Hmmm. "Flatbed" would be a good prompt. If the subject responds with "truck" or "mattress" you know they are not a computer(-literate) person. Here is the front of the reel folder, printed in an ancient font.
They came outta Portland. I need a camel's-hair brush. (Punctuationists will note the contrast with Camel's Hair-brush.) Pictures taken with your own personal stereo camera make wonderful additions to your View-Master reel library. Rub it in, why dontcha? I wish I could. I can't see the word "Kodachrome" without hearing the Simon and Garfunkel song of the same name, btw.
I don't remember this reel of Japan making much of an impression at the time. It's interesting that the postcard-like views haven't changed much. "Boats in Tokyo canal, Cana" seems to be a mis-print.
I lightened the disc above enough to read the front faintly.
This scan below has been lightened just in the center portion.1200x194WL.jpg)
I do remember being impressed by the Navaho, for some reason.
Even more impressive was the story of Little Black Sambo. I remember being transfixed by the discovery that fast-running tigers looped around a tree could be transformed into a nutritious, spreadable fat compound called "Tiger Butter". How I longed to eat the famous "Tiger Butter Pancakes." I think they probably did serve me some, since my grandfather was always in the mood for a good mind-f prank.
Is Little Black Sambo racist? It may be, but I am providing it here for its value as a cultural artifact. I don't really see anything racist in the story except for the name itself, which seems to unnecessarily call undue attention to Sambo's blackness. His skin tone should be evident enough already. I don't recall reading "The White Boy Who Cried 'Wolf'" or that "Little Red Riding Hood" was actually "Little Native American Girl in a Hoodie". So I guess it's racist on that level. It's also possible that they just called people by their color in a straightforward way as in Brazil, or the modern American use of "Black" i.e. without necessarily being racist. (Black Uhuru…?) Anyway. I am much more concerned about "Popeye" on the Cartoon Network. The Popeye program shows children that black people always have a bone through their noses, and collectively attempt to cook Popeye or his romantic interest "Olive Oyl" in a large black pot. I don't think this is what we should be showing pre-schoolers in 2008, and I have to change the channel and would never want my kids or any other kids see it. They also have insulting stereotypes of Native Americans on Popeye. I don't remember seeing insulting Asian stereotypes but it's probably an oversight on my part.
Of course, all of the View-Master literary adaptations suffered somewhat from being reduced to seven stereo photos with about 5 to 8 words of description under each one. Think of it as a haiku (actually closer to tanka) or short-short-story version, a cultural expression of mid-20th-century America. Or an early attempt at a DVD, with text instead of audio. It did have the advantage of being three-dimensional!
Click on any of these for a larger version. It has been formatted to fit your screen.
Postscripti:
Speaking of smell, they smell alot like old super-8 film. Hopefully that is not explosive.
Later discs ("reels") are no longer from Sawyer's, Inc. out of Portland 7, Oregon, but belong to Fisher-Price out of New York. VIEW-MASTER is a trademark of Mattel, it seems.
Al Gore's Oscar-award winning film An Inconvenient Truth has been released on DVD, but has not been released in Japan as a film or dvd, at least to my knowledge. Amazon.co.jp had only a few US editions of the dvd. I asked a friend to bring me a copy from the US and created a locally viewable region-free version for personal archival research promotional purposes only. Disclaimer: decoding even a single bit or letter from a dvd before the media conglomerates decide it has been "released" in your dvd zone may result in severe penalties and may not technically be "legal" even if you follow the precaution of doing so in international airspace, Antarctica, or from outside Earth orbit.
It is a good film, mixing autobiographical segments of Al Gore's life into documentary segments about global warming, while subtly promoting the Apple PowerBook and Keynote presentation software. The Al Gore parts do support the main points of the movie, but it would be better if there were an alternate version on the dvd which cut out Al Gore's boyhood reminiscences so it could be shown in classrooms as a straight-up educational documentary. There is a little too much of Al Gore in it now to be able to do that without controversy in, say, a Kansas science classroom. I like (shadow) President Gore, and support his re-election with a Supreme-Court-coup-resistant super-majority of voters next time, but not everyone is as crazy about the Al Gore Rhythm as I am.
There was something vaguely familiar about the cover art. Finally I realized that it was a blatantly subliminal rip-off of the 1976 Pink Floyd album cover for ANIMALS, designed by Hipgnosis, which caused nightmares for British air traffic controllers and vegans. Shocking, isn't it?
I think the dvd cover could be improved by adding the flying pig, for the "hip" or "hep cat" effect among market demographic segments old enough to remember the late 1970s, vinyl, and 8-track. Naturally, the package should be square, not rectangular. Either round or square. No triangles or rectangles, please. This is a dvd after all. Finally, get all that annoying text and blather about how it doesn't matter if you are a replicant or a demigogue liberite conversative mindchange nanoparticle blah blah blah out of there. Do we have to assume people don't know what the product is unless it is written there? They didn't need letters for Animals in 1976; why should we need them now? 
Actually, since most people no longer read, words just get in the way, and mess up the image. Plus you wouldn't have to localize the language for all the international releases, if there ever are any.
This much-improved prototype cover goes out as a suggested alternate version.
I must leave to soundsmiths geekier than I the more technically challenging task of remixing the movie soundtrack so as to incorporate the entire album of Pink Floyd's Animals.
Even before downloading the movie, I grabbed the official soundtrack for The Corporation, composed by Leonard J. Paul. It is available from two sites, Kikapu or the Internet Archive. The liner notes are a great insight into the composer's creative process, and the audio is released with cover art.
While at the Internet Archive, I visited the Live Music Archive and looked up a few concerts. I found that the collection had grown. I downloaded some recent shows by 311, Cowboy Junkies, Rusted Root, Death Cab for Cutie, String Cheese Incident, Dear Leader, and Blues Traveler. I think it is the first time to add those last three artists to my collection. I just chose Dear Leader from their name and because they had a fair number of concerts available. They are not bad, a good discovery. Found out more at last.fm. Similar to The Corporation, downloading a zipped folder of the entire show encoded as variable bit rate mp3s seemed like the best file choice to me. Most of the ID3 tags were in order most of the time, except year and genre. Too bad there are no jpegs of the live shows bundled in there.
I could be wrong, but I get the feeling that the Live Music Archive isn't terribly popular. That could be good if the artists worry less about the massive availability of recorded shows diminishing demand for live performance tickets. I don't think they approach it that way, more as promotion for the concert. Note that many of the bands such as SCI, RR, and CJ are known for doing good live shows. You do need to have your lo-fi toleration filter turned up to get into these; the audio is as bad as a real life show, only without the visuals.
A friend informed me that the 1992 Canadian documentary, Manufacturing Consent, about Noam Chomsky, has been released in Japan and is being shown in Shibuya (#25). He also told me that the wikipedia page of Chomsky's political side is also getting built up and may be a good starting point for people who haven't read his writing. It has links to the most useful Chomsky sites.
Unable or unwilling to attend a screening, (and since maybe it is a movie that is better on DVD anyway,) I found that another Canadian documentary, The Corporation, by the same director and producer, Mark Ackbar, had been released by the filmmaker on bittorrent for free download (mininova, for example). I used a considerable amount of bandwidth this weekend slowly pulling it down. 
(By the way, NeoOffice, OpenOffice, and Ubuntu 6.10 are other free wares you could find and legally download from bittorrent.) The legal download includes an interview with author Joel Bakan by Sam Seder and co-host Janeane Garofalo of The Majority Report on AirAmerica Radio. This avi file is videoed rather amateurly (in my amateur opinion) and adds another 400 MB to the two 700 MB files which make up the movie. It is not so bad to have the extra as video, even though it could have been audio, but it should have just been compressed to something like 100 MB. It may be nice if you are a fan of the show and want to see them doing the radio interview, and have broadband, but it probably added another 10 hours to my download time, and I could hear the iLamp's fan going full power all day and night.
http://www.timelife.com/checkout/micro.jsp?pageId=1183
http://www.wouldyoubelieve.com/dvd.html
Thanks, Mel. Maybe they'll help you to get it right once again in 2008.
"Our Man Perv" makes love in 47 languages!(Actual text from OUR MAN FLINT movie poster. It fits Perv, too, especially the Nuclear Physicist bit.)
He's a Karate Champion, Brain Surgeon, Swordsman and Nuclear Physicist…
He's the top Master Spy of all time, with his Cigarette Lighter containing 82 Death-Dealing Devices, his 2 Man-Eating Dogs, his 4 Luscious Playmates and his Love Nest –Built-For-5………
The Robert Greenwald documentary film Iraq For Sale is also online.
Iraq for Sale site.
Via Bob Geiger.
Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election documents the destruction of democracy in the United States, with a focus on the electoral corruption in Florida.
Also available for viewing at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5278.htm
The official web site is www.unprecedented.org/.
Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties shows how the Patriot Act has led to the arrest and indefinite detainment of American citizens and non-citizens without trial, illegal under the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.
It is also available at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13176.htm
Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War (also titled Uncovered: The War on Iraq) tells the story of the Iraq war through a series of interviews.
You can also find it at: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6423.htm
The official web site for the film is: www.truthuncovered.com/
Producer/director Robert Greenwald (blog/wiki/imdb) has generously made the raw footage of interviews with former government officials such as John Dean, Madeleine Albright, and Admiral Stansfield Turner available for download and editing at www.archive.org/details/uncovered_interviews.
Greenwald has also produced Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006), The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress (2006), Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005), Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (2004), and The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron (2003).
