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Amazing Live Music

Truly amazing live music; David Byrne (Talking Heads) and Annie Clark (St. Vincent) did this concert just a few months ago at Strathmore Hall in Rockville, Md, and NPR was there to capture it. Most of this show was from their 2012 album Love This Giant, but they each did a track or two from their previous groups, like Talking Head’s Burning Down the House and St. Vincent’s Marrow.

This is a single instance of the huge collection of concerts and music from around the world that NPR makes available. Today alone, NPR will be doing Nick Cave and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s live from SXSW. Please tell me you are checking these out when they happen, and supporting NPR with whatever resources you have available, so they continue this wonderful work.

Pictures of London

A picture I took in London, and then processed a bit. This was a photo of Winchester Cathedral, processed as a watercolor/sketch combination. I obviously need to play with the processing some more to get the setting’s just right to create the image I have in my head, but this isn’t a bad start, all things considered. And it does have the advantage of being something I created and therefore own the rights to, so I can use it in other projects as I see fit. I am going to play with some others to see what I can come up with, and share some of them here.

Winchester Watercolor
Winchester Watercolor

Something to Do: Movies, 15Mar13

The obvious choice would be The Incredible Burt Wonderstone this week, with some great comedians doing an excellent job of showing us exactly how professional magicians deal with the real world. The cast for this flic is amazing, I can not imagine the creators getting all these excellent actors assembled for the project if they didn’t have a story worth telling. But it is not the only offering this time around; Vanishing Waves is in very limited release, but it has already won a ton of awards on the Film Festival circuit. It is about making neuro-enhansed real time contact with a coma patient, and exploring all the ways that might go in a non-physical environment. And then there is Noise Matters, which I swear reminds me of nothing so much as the comically brilliant indi film from Sweden, The Sound Of Noise. The core of both films center around people who take what most folks hear as noise, and weave them into complex musical presentations of scope and beauty. Where the films go from that starting point is radically different, but they do seem to share a bit of an attitude no matter how much they diverge.

Something to Watch: DVDs, 12Mar13

The most interesting movie this week is about a man who made interesting movies; Hitchcock. Anthony Hopkins does an amazing job in the role title role. Someone is releasing the 1962 movie Jack The Giant Killer, probably in the hopes you will confuse it with Jack The Giant Slayer which hit theaters last week and buy it by mistake. Rise of the Guardians is a fun little animated film from Dreamworks you might enjoy, with various mythical characters teaming up together to fight evil.

In TV Ripper Street is a crime drama in Victorian London with a Steampunk edge, as the law enforcement team struggles to keep control of the streets of the city. And always, they keep an eye out for the one that got away… Jack the Ripper.

Anime brings us Bleach: Season 16, with episodes 230 through 242. Of course, we still have a ways to go there; Japan just watched episode 366 last week. Penguindrum: Collection 2 brings us closer to Himari’s appointment with Death by supernatural forces.

There are also a few re-releases worth noting; Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars and Trigun: Complete Series each bring their entire stories out in box sets. If you have missed them so far, now is your chance to pick them up.

Ravi, Robot, Rubik

Ravi Fernando is a Stanford undergrad who can actually solve a Rubik’s Cube while juggling it. When he doesn’t juggle it, he can solve it in as quick as 10.49 seconds. Pretty amazing to watch, isn’t it? Back in 2011, Mike Dobson and David Gilday built CubeStormer II from a Lego Mindstorm set, a smart phone, and a custom written android app that solved it in 5.32 seconds. I used to be so proud of being able to solve it in 10 to 15 minutes… ah, well. Thanks to Open Culture for the heads up on this one.