Return of the Son of Monster Magnet

[collisionwork]

Been gone from too long here -- primarily because our primary computer broke down after 5 years of mostly faithful service. I had been worried this was going to happen, and had ordered up an external hard drive to backup (and extend) the internal drive -- unfortunately it showed up two days after the drive crashed and would just crash every time it was booted up (due to "kernal panic," which Berit notes sounds like a line of EXTREME popcorn flavors).

So . . . we were down a computer for almost two weeks, and while we now have it back, with a spanking new drive, some nice system upgrades and other fixes, which is great, we are still waiting to find out if the last five years of our lives in digital data will be recoverable from the old drive (probably yes, we're told, but who knows).

Artistically, while worried about the loss of most of the Gemini CollisionWorks documents from 2006-2010, it's been an effective inspiration in continuing to write the play ObJects, which is in no small way about loss and the loss/divesture of personal possessions, and what it means when many of them are virtual, non-meatspace ones. So, personal potential disaster had led to a kind of artistic focus. Still, inspiration or not, I want my years of theatre and music stuff back.

The last thing done on the computer before it broke down was a little editing experiment that was meant to be part of a Film Noir blog-a-thon going on, but as the computer broke after uploading it, but before I posted it here, I missed out on the reason for making it. Still, it was nice editing footage again, even if it was stock footage from the classic noir D.O.A. set to the Rev. Fred Lane song "Dial 'O' for Bigelow" from the album Car Radio Jerome (which, after loving for years, I only realized was based on this film while making World Gone Wrong in 2005). So here's my little video, "Better Make it D.O.A." (which won't be visible, like all videos, if you're seeing this on Facebook; you'll have to go to the original Livejournal post):

While this main computer was down, I still wrote down an iPod Random Ten from last week in a notebook, and here's what it was . . .

1. "Peewee's Groove in D" - James Brown - Plays the Real Thing
2. "Miniskirt Blues" - The Cramps with Iggy Pop - Look Mom No Head!
3. "(I'm a) Road Runner (live)" - The Who - Who's Next
4. "Walk Like Me" - Blondie - Autoamerican
5. "Strike It While It's Hot" - Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks with Bette Midler - Beatin' the Heat
6. "Theme from 'Let's Go Native'" - Passengers - Original Soundtracks 1
7. "1978" - Kleenex/LiLiPUT - Kleenex/LiLiPUT
8. "Noses Run in My Family" - Martin Mull - Days of Wine and Neuroses
9. "Wild in the Streets movie promo" - trailer - Psychedelic Promos and Radio Spots 3
10. "Hair" - PJ Harvey - Dry

And here's the video playlist of most of the above, with bonus track:

Hmmn. I really liked editing that piece above, and every week there's always at least one song that I can't find on YouTube that comes up in the Random Ten, so maybe I'll try to keep my editorial skills up by taking one of the songs I can't find each week and making up my own stock-footage edit for it. So, maybe next week I'll have some kind of video to go with the James Brown instrumental (likely) or the Dan Hicks song (unlikely) in an entry to come . . .