Sometimes, a piece of video comes along that just needs to be shared.

I guess this has been around for a while, but if, like me, you've somehow missed it, you should have another chance.

Please enjoy this fine fine superfine cover by Mr. David Hasselhoff . . .

So, sad story - some poor dumb schmuck decided to try walking across the Brooklyn-Queens Expresssway not too far from The Brick last night (no info given out on him except, 23 years old, Massachusetts native). I checked out the story because I drive that stretch of road every day. Poor guy got hit by one car (which kept going) then another, which stopped, but he was apparently pretty well gone after the first car hit him.

As this article from WNBC puts it so clearly in its title: "Body Parts Strewn on BQE After Deadly Hit-and-Run." Ewww.

However, another line used not only in the article, but as the caption to the photo below which accompanied the story, makes me wonder if something ELSE was responsible, and a police coverup is in effect:

A "grizzly" scene? Dear sweet merciful gods in heaven, there are BEARS roaming the streets of Williamsburg, tearing innocent tourists to bits! And THEY don't want us to KNOW!

(this is actually the THIRD time in as many months I've encountered a news organ that apparently doesn't know how to spell "grisly" - come on, GET IT TOGETHER, people!)

Operated board twice yesterday for a show - Big Bang - in the Clown Festival - last two shows for that one. In between, I saw another show - Bury My Heart at Dumbass Cowboy - which is one of the funniest damned things I've seen on a stage in FOREVER. Loved it, loved it, loved it, though I also kinda had the same reaction I had when I first saw The Big Lebowski on opening night in the movie theater - David LM Mcintyre and I were sitting there, laughing so hard at the movie that it was nearly over before we realized that we were the only people in the entire audience laughing, and that everyone else HATED the movie.

I don't think the rest of the audience HATED Dumbass Cowboy, but I did eventually realize that the loud laughter I was hearing came from me and about four other people in a packed house, and everyone else was smiling kinda strained or looking confused and disturbed. Oh, well, whatever, it was great and it plays one last time, tonight at 7.30 pm.

I'd go see it again and drag Berit along - she's working board for the show before it tonight, Kill Me Loudly, a Clown noir, which she tells me is really good and I'll be seeing - but we're off to see, as mentioned, Arnold Dreyblatt at The Knitting Factory.

Arnold's playing on an interesting bill, with several other performers, including a three-man band out of North Carolina called Megafaun, who will be backing Arnold up on this occasion as The Orchestra of Excited Strings (Arnold's name for whatever group is doing his music with him at the moment). They just did a residency and played up at the Salem Art Works together, and I like what I hear in these videos - the first of Arnold and the group, the second of Megafaun:

( Arnold Dreyblatt & Megafaun )

In other music news, I do indeed like the theme song created by Jack White (and co-performed by him and Alicia Keys) for the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace (which, luckily, only mentions "solace" and doesn't try to get the film's title in there) - you can hear the real theme, where White Stripes meet James Bond, HERE - however, Joe Cornish, British comedian, has created his own theme for the film that may top it:

( The Something of Boris )

And finally, continuing the "Ian and Hooker the Cat at the Computer" series that I've been posting, for those who enjoy cats, computers, me, or any combination thereof, I let the video run the other night to capture how Bastard Kitty demands affection from me in more detail. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn on the microphone, so I just grabbed a Pixies song I liked that fit the video exactly, timewise (and seemed to work otherwise as well) and put it behind it.

( La La My Cat Loves Me, Even When I Don't Want Him To )

That's my cat. Some other time I'll post one with the sound so you can hear the yowls . . .

Bob Dylan is 66 years old today.


Happy birthday, Bob!


Thanks for keeping it up.


"Bob Dylan is the man. Bob Dylan has always been the man. Bob Dylan will always be the man." - George Harrison


Here's the man in 1965:



"It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" (London)


Here in 1966:



"Ballad of a Thin Man" (Copenhagen)

(sorry the performance cuts off - I wanted to include the press conference at the start - the full performance is HERE)


A music video/movie tie-in, 2000:



"Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys


Live bootleg video, 1994:



"Ballad of a Thin Man" (Nashville)


Live bootleg video, 2007:



"It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" (Stockholm)


(what would a Dylan tribute be without low-quality bootlegs? enjoy.)

Hip hip hoorah!


Not only do I have the Intarwebs back and working at CollisionWork Central, but we now haves the DSL and the wireless, enabling both our fine fine superfine computers much faster access.


This allows us now to view such fabulous videos as this one, a very special piece promoting the Pretentious Festival:





Which features Berit, myself, and a number of Brick Irregulars. Enjoy, if you must.

UPDATE: Pardon me while I fix this -- for some reason the YouTube videos vanished from the entry between the Preview and the Posting. I'm going back to find the problem in the code. Thanks.


UPDATE 2: Dammit! No matter what, I can't get the embedding to work, either in LJ's Rich Text or HTML entry formats, or by entering the code myself -- I did this last originally, and it worked perfectly in "preview" but when I posted it altered the code for some reason and won't keep it the way it was; I've been having this happen a LOT with LJ recently when it comes to paragraph/line breaks, too.

I'm inserting the links to the videos I was trying to embed instead, as what was supposed to be a quick half-hour post winds up eating several hours . . .


Okay, woke up, got the coffee, opened the email, and wound up with a couple of links to follow, taking me to a game and a video.

The coffee not having kicked in, the video led to other videos, and it's become a morning of sleepy wandering through an abstract game and some Peter Greenaway videos. At home in Brooklyn, we only have a dial-up connection, and I'm enjoying this brief time of being able to watch videos and play games.


So why not share?


First the game, a link sent to me by Daniel Kleinfeld, which was created by Jason Nelson, and is called game, game, game and again game. Maybe I'm still just sleepy, but right now it's my favorite videogame ever.


And someone in the Yahoo email group for Peter Greenaway passed on a piece of stop-motion animation created by what appears to be a group of Dutch film students, based on imagery from Greenaway's great film The Falls. Unfortunately, embedding is disabled on their film, but you can watch it HERE.

You don't have to know The Falls to enjoy it, I think, though knowing it makes some of the images have more resonance.


This led me to look for actual Greenaway pieces on YouTube, coming up with a section of M Is For Man, Music, Mozart, a film of his I still haven't seen:



LINK


And from there led to the first part of Vertical Features Remake, a film I've written about before HERE in some unfinished notes on the early films of Greenaway as part of my Luperist study with the VFI and the IRR -- and I thank again my occasional collaborator Dr. Martin I. Wesley of the Institute for Applied Neocollisionism (who sometimes appears in my stage work under the name "Doctor Memory") for his assistance in editing the notes when I succumbed to pernicious VUE symptoms.

Here is Part One. When I first saw this film, about 15 years ago, I completely loved the "narration" sections and was deeply bored by the "film recreation" sections (while recognizing they had to be just as they were). Now I'm not bored by any of it anymore after many viewings, but YMMV:



LINK


If you want to go on (it's worth it), here are PART TWO, PART THREE, PART FOUR, and PART FIVE.


And if you don't want to sit through an hour of Greenaway on a computer screen, here's a complete, earlier, shorter film:



LINK


The kindly YouTuber who has uploaded most of this Greenaway, Armeror, has also included what appears to be the entirety of The Falls in easily digestible, bite-size segments, which may be a good way to watch it on a computer, bit by bit, each of the 92 biographies of the VUE-afflicted people whose last names begin with the letters FALL as a separate file.

If you wish, you can start watching the film at THIS PAGE (if it doesn't move as he uploads new videos) with the "Opening Sequence," then move backwards to "Orchard Falla" and on, eventually leading to "Leasting Falvo," "Anthior Fallwaste" and the "End Credits."

Here's a sample biography from The Falls, perhaps of interest as it features (in photographs) the then-obscure animators The Brothers Quay:



LINK


Enjoy.