Month: January 2025

Karlheinz Stockhausen at Disneyland

So I’m browsing through someone’s Tumblr archive just now, and one picture catches my eye, and I wonder “is that Karlheinz Stockhausen? And why does that building behind him look like something from Disneyland?”

And that was because it was in fact a picture of Karlheinz Stockhausen at Disneyland, apparently in 1966. Yeah… um… I don’t know what to say about this, other than this is one of the most incongruous things I’ve seen since that photo of Ingmar Bergman inspecting the shark on the set of Jaws. This is a weird head scratcher.

Last idiot on the right

The critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who I follow on Bluesky, highlighted this old review there today:

Not a fan, apparently (admittedly, neither am I, but that’s beside the point). I always think it’s bad form for a professional critic to walk out on a film and then still write about it (I only ever walked out of two previews, but I was never a pro critic as such and I never reviewed either film); Howard here seems to have found the whole thing so brain-scrambling he forgot the scene involved disembowelment, not dismemberment (I looked him up on Wiki, and apparently he began as a clerk for Bosley Crowther, who famously got let go from the NYT for not being hip to the violence of Bonnie and Clyde; Howard doesn’t seem to have been any less lily-livered about it either). But apart from any other considerations of, you know, lack of professionalism, there was another thirty-plus minutes left. There was vengeance still to be enacted on the rape gang. There was a penis to be bitten off, and an electrocution, and a chainsaw death. If he’d just stuck around another thirty-odd minutes he could’ve had SO MUCH MORE to complain about…

Savagery

So “The Savages” is apparently going to be the next animated Doctor Who ’60s story… only discovered this somewhat randomly by looking at Rarewaves to see what’s coming up on that front; haven’t seen any formal announcement of it, nor indeed an informal one, though I now see there was one just before Xmas and I evidently wasn’t paying attention. Interesting choice that I wouldn’t have expected to appear on the schedule so soon, I’d have thought there’d be more demand for “The Highlanders” (cos Jamie’s first story) or “The Wheel in Space”, given that someone did do a partial animation of the first episode years ago as a sort of demo, I’d have thought that we’d have seen that finished first. I don’t think “The Savages” has ever been considered a classic or anything that audiences were clamouring for, but here it is anyway…

On the plus side, I was very concerned about the animation style after the… controversial 3D work done to “The Celestial Toymaker”, but it looks like they’ve stepped back from that to 2D. I’ll take that. Apparently it comes out in the UK near the end of March, so fuck knows when it’ll be out here, and I presume it’ll just be easier to get it via Rarewaves when the time comes.

Another bit of my handiwork

I saw an author on Threads a couple of days ago grumbling about paying a thousand pounds to an artist to do the cover art for her book, and being furious when the artist sent her a bunch of AI bullshit. The artist claimed that the author’s ideas for the cover couldn’t be realised any other way… fortunately there seems to be a happy ending to the story, in that the artist seems to have agreed (probably reluctantly) to a refund, but someone asked the author what their cover design concept was, and she replied “A ring, a crown, and a sword.” To which I replied “Good grief. I can barely draw and I could still do that without AI.”

And then I actually DID do that without AI, scribbling this bit of nonsense on the back of a handy envelope:

As you may be able to tell, there are multiple good reasons why I never went into book cover design as a career. But at least I was honest about my lack of skill.

Live music!

Goddamn, I actually LEFT THE HOUSE last night and SOCIALISED! I can barely believe it myself, and yet here is photographic evidence… I don’t do a lot of socialising like this any more, usually when I do go out it’s to a club, and actual live music is something I do even less (last gig I went to was in August last year). But a bunch of friends’ bands were playing at Moshpit in Newtown, so I decided to take the opportunity to go see some people I know at a venue I’d never been to before and give the new phone camera a test drive… click to embiggen.

First up, Moroderhead, who weren’t quite as heavy as their amusing name may suggest, and who only lacked mullets to complete their overall 1986-ness. I was thinking this was the first time I’d seen Alberto not playing as half of Neuropa, but now that I think of it I have very vague memories of seeing him at the Hopetoun in 2006 when he was still doing Junk Circuit as well…

I got this shot of the stage backdrop while waiting for Burnt Souls to start…

…Which they did a few minutes later. Lineup’s changed since I last saw them at the Town and Country a couple (?) of years ago—new guitarist, new bassist, no more drummer—but at least Colin’s still got the tallest hair in the room…

…And finally Sounds Like Winter, who I was mainly there for, cos Ant has also recently reconstituted what he calls “version 3.0” of the band, though the band’s always had a somewhat wobbly lineup including a Spinal Tap-esque revolving door of bassists, so I think “version 3.0” was technically about eight or nine years ago… anyway, whatever number the new arrangement may or may not be, they’ve had a similar change to Burnt Souls (new guitarist & bassist, no drummer) and it sounded good. New album is apparently about half done, so presumably we’ll have that by the end of the year.

RIP Richard Perry

Now here’s a man with a hell of a career. Seriously, just look at that list of production credits… great list of production clients—Tiny Tim, Captain Beefheart, Leo Sayer, Barbra Streisand, Nilsson, Fats Domino, Ringo Starr, a whole bunch more—and a stack of hit songs, plus an eight-year romantic relationship with Jane Fonda:

And somehow, despite all of that, until news broke of his death a few days ago, I’d never heard of the guy to the best of my knowledge. I suppose it’s good to be reminded sometimes of how little I actually know…

Come out, come out…

I knew about “Emergo”. I knew it was the gimmick thing that William Castle came up with for certain showings of House on Haunted Hill, involving a skeleton being pulled out at a certain point in the film on a wire over the heads of the audience. I had heard of it, obviously… I had not, however, actually seen what it looked like until now. It is… not what I expected somehow from the descriptions I’ve read, and I don’t know how I feel about it.