Beatlemania

The one time in history that hordes of hysterical 14-year-old girls were right about music.

Chaplin on Relevance:

"I am surprised that some critics say that my camera technique is old-fashioned, that I have not kept up with the times. My technique is the outcome of thinking for myself, of my own logic and approach; it is not borrowed from what others are doing."

-Charles Chaplin, 1966

I'm still deciding how I feel about this. On one hand, yeah, why should he have to ape Godard to be relevant? On the other hand, how can you communicate with an audience when you refuse to innovate on the advances made by your peers and likewise refuse to speak the cinematic language of the time? If Chaucer had lived into the 21st century, but never learned to speak modern English, who would read his new books? That is, assuming the books weren't titled "How I Got to Be 700."

Count Barackula

Here's something to consider next time you want to make a joke/slogan/catch phrase out of Barack Obama's name: It's all been done. Google can confirm this for you:

Obamarama

Barack O'Bama

Barack & Roll

Between Barack and a Hard Place

Obamanation

Maraca Kabob

Count Barackula

Seriously. TRY and come up with something original. If he's elected, I estimate that by February 2009 creating name-inspired puns for Barack Hussein Obama will be literally impossible.

Clear Channel's 166 Inappropriate Songs for Post-9/11 America

I find this list truly fascinating. (Sorry if this is very old news to some people.) The list clearly wasn't paid much credence, as 3 Doors Down's revenge-themed "Duck and Run" was ubiquitous around that time.

Some of the connections to 9/11 are obvious (Bruce Springsteen's "I'm Goin' Down"), others (Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World") not quite as much. But I like the fact that ALL of Rage Against the Machine's songs are inappropriate.

Old Man from "Abbey Road" Dies

This actually happened back in February, but the old man in the background on the cover photo for Abbey Road passed away not long ago in Florida, at the ripe old age of 96. This article about how he wound up in the photo and how he found out about it months later is pretty funny:

On a London vacation with his wife, [Paul] Cole — then a resident of Deerfield Beach — declined to enter a museum on the north London thoroughfare.

"I told her, 'I've seen enough museums. You go on in, take your time and look around and so on, and I'll just stay out here and see what's going on outside,'" he recalled.

"I just happened to look up, and I saw those guys walking across the street like a line of ducks," Cole remembered. "A bunch of kooks, I called them, because they were rather radical-looking at that time. You didn't walk around in London barefoot."

About a year later, Cole first noticed the "Abbey Road" album on top of the family record player (his wife was learning to play George Harrison's love song "Something" on the organ). He did a double-take when he eyeballed McMillan's photo.

"I had a new sportcoat on, and I had just gotten new shell-rimmed glasses before I left," he says. "I had to convince the kids that that was me for a while. I told them, 'Get the magnifying glass out, kids, and you'll see it's me.'"

Metropolis

I LOVE it when this sort of thing happens! But especially for Metropolis, easily one of the best silent films ever made.

From IMDb:

Lost footage from cult sci-fi film Metropolis has been discovered in Argentina.

The director's cut of Fritz Lang's 1927 classic, featuring an extra 30 minutes, was believed to have vanished forever after it was cut by Paramount bosses because of bad reviews.

However, the curator of the Buenos Aires Film Museum discovered a copy of the movie in his archives - and a projectionist noticed it was longer than all other versions of the iconic film.

Film restorer Martin Koerber, who is one of the few people to see the lost footage, says, "No matter how bad the condition of the material may be, the original intention of the film, including all of its sub-plots, is now once again tangible for the normal viewer. The rhythm of the film has been restored."

Musing

Man, it was fucking cocky of us to eat hamburgers on the last day of the blog contest before we'd posted.

Free!

It's nice being free from the confines of a blog contest.

This post was just to make sure...