Japan is far from the only country in Asia, and the culture is influenced noticeably by their neighbors, including the Middle East. The band Beats Antique does the best job I have heard so far at fusing Middle Eastern musical styles with western rock and jazz, and does it from an Alternative Rock perspective. Kind of like Daft Punk Meets Scheherazade. Not as surprising as it might be, considering the band is from Oakland, California. Here is a taste of their recent live performance on KEXP, Seattle’s amazing NPR-style music station.
I just stumbled into this show, and it is excellent! TECHNE: The Visual Workshop Special on NHK Premium is an experiential creative education TV show. In each episode they focus on one one visual technique and shows a whole lot of short video pieces made using that technique. The reason they have all those pieces is they challenge people to create their own new films using it, and then submit it to them. While the show is in Japanese, it runs English as its SAP or Second Audio Program. A lot of the entries are folks using the TECHNE logo in their pieces.
The first video is from NHK Online, and is a bunch of those short logo videos by a boatload of people strung together. The music video I am including is by Masashi Kawamura, one of the shows creators, and it gives you a feel for the kinds of things the program is doing.
SOUR / 日々の音色 (Hibi no Neiro) MV from Magico Nakamura on Vimeo.
It is a serious treat to learn they recently recovered 11 old Doctor Who episodes from a storage closet in Nigeria, 9 of which have not been seen since they originally aired! And now we can watch the first few.
They have already digitally remastered two of them and made them available for download on iTunes, both Patrick Troughton stories. The Web of Fear previously existed only as a rumor except for episode 1, usually mentioned when talking about how Pertwee’s end as The Doctor came at the mandibles of his old spider foes, who we had never seen before. Every so often someone mentions that was also the episode where we were introduced to Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, later to be promoted, and mostly referred to as The Brigadier. Episode 3 is still MIA, but they have the original audio track and 11 stills to use to reconstruct it, so the story will be intact. How nice to have the rest of them back for the first time in forever, and the missing episode partially reconstructed!
The Enemy of the World has Patrick Troughton being both the Doctor and the bad guy, the first time that had happened (Tom Baker was later to reprise that in The Mind Of Evil). This one they only had episode 3 of previously, with this discovery they now have all 6. Companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Victoria (Deborah Watling) are in both of these stories, and while we have seen a lot of Jamie, most of Victoria’s stories were lost, so I look forward to the opportunity to learn more about who she was and what she brought to the role of a Companion.
I also have to mention that the link to download them from iTunes didn’t work for me. The link did launch my iTunes app, but then I had to search for each title before I could find the correct link to buy and download it from. A bit of a pain, but I am willing to go through a lot more than that to get Doctor Who episodes I have not already watched dozens of times each!
My apologies for posting the moral equivalent of commercials this time,but the on-screen words pretty much matched up to my attitude on each episode, so I just posted them as is.
Someone took the stand alone Mario Paint Composer and transformed the Daft Punk song Get Lucky into an 8 Bit game sound composition. This is not a simple song either, very layered and complex, and they pretty much got it all in there. I threw in the original track for comparison purposes.
This one looks very tasty, I Frankenstein has the monster as the hero, much as Dean Koontz portrayed him. This isn’t quite the same one, as this is based on the Darkstorm Studios graphic novel I, Frankenstein created by Kevin Grevioux.
This week Big Ass Spider looks like the camp comedy winner, with several of my favorite actors in it. The Carrie remake is also this Friday, proving yet again that religious brainwashing, school bullies, and telekinetic power are not a good mix. My favorite choice this time around has to go to Chinese Zodiac, with Jackie Chan leading a team of mercenaries out to recover the stolen artifacts.