This may be Abney Park’s best song to date, which is saying something considering their long line of Steampunk hits, but it is most certainly the best Steampunk music video ever put together. There is an amazing culture out there, and more of the outstanding people, groups, and projects are represented in this one than I have ever seen gathered together in one place. If you have not previously been exposed to Abney Park, this song is the opening track from their new CD coming out in June, but they have a boatload (my spellchecker didn’t like Airshipload) of previous releases you can enjoy right now. This is definitely my favorite Steampunk band, and one of my favorite band’s overall.
And a few other interesting videos used in its production, or just Steampunk oriented…
If you are a fan of Steampunk and Steampunk music, you will be happy to know there is a new Abney Park song posted online, Evil Man. And if you are a Steampunk fan, you want to go vote for the Steam Punk Chronicles Awards, letting them know what you favorite choice is for each category. Some of them are no-brainer’s but some are almost too close to call.
Best movie selection this week definitely goes to Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s stunning Steampunk homage to a pioneer in the film industry and to movies in general. This one blew me away in the theaters, it won a Golden Globe and it is nominated for 11 Academy Awards; we will find out tonight how many of those it is taking home. If you only get one DVD this month, this is the one that gets my strongest recommendation. On the other hand, if you just want something silly, Johnny English Reborn would be the way to go. Once more Rowan Atkinson delivers a world class comedic performance, this time bringing his anti-007 character back to life.
In western animation, the feature length film Justice League: Doom pretty much covers all the choices.
In anime, Fairy Tail – Part 4 continues the story of the battles between guilds of wizards out to earn a living and prove who is best with episodes 37 through 48. I was not completely certain that Princess Jellyfish – The Complete Series is genre. But it has hopeless nerds with bizarre hobbies and crippling social anxieties, coupled with a late night jellyfish rescue mission; plus it is based on an award winning Manga (the award being Best Shojo Manga), and the anime was made by the folks behind Baccano, Hell Girl, and Durarara. Taken all together, how could I not include it here? You can watch some episodes online at that link and decide for yourself if it deserves to be added to your collection; when I did and discovered all the primary characters were Otaku, it went on the must watch list right away. And for pure Otaku recursiveness, Bakuman – Second Issue brings 6 more episodes of an Anime all about making a Manga, and it doesn’t get much more recursive than that.
It is more Captain Robert, of course, than the band as a whole, but the first several chapters of The Wrath Of Fate are available to purchase, or to listen to online if you need a taste before making your decision. This is the fictionalized story of the origin of Abney Park, a kick-ass Steampunk band, and personally I love the way it is evolving so far. Just in case you didn’t know what kind of music a Steampunk Band plays, the second video shows them practicing one of their better songs, Airship Pirates, although the audio with it is from the studio version. This is the music you would have been listening to when the semaphores or telegraph finished sending the digitally processed signals, and Babbage’s Difference Engine used an array of tuned saw blades struck by hammers to play it back out to you. In those days, we would have been called clackers rather than hackers because of the sounds the steam-driven brass logic switches would have made while they ran our calculations, algorithms, and apps.
And a couple of pictures taken in London a few months ago; the first is a picture I took while staring at the actual, completed Babbage Engine (Babbage never finished building the full sized one himself, although he did have a bunch of smaller versions that allowed Ada to develop the worlds first programing language). I tried my best not to drool all over the case, but I may have failed in that particular.
Babbage Difference Engine
The second was a picture taken of me and the Babbage machine by my traveling companion, proving I was there with it. I know that in this era of photoshoping anything and everything this does not constitute proof in most peoples minds. Since I have the added data point of having been there and remembering the moment the photo was taken, I could really care less if you believe it; for me, this is the photo that locks it down in my memory.
Jer and the Babbage Difference Engine
Finally, a bit of Captain Robert’s own attitude, as distributed by G4, about what Steampunk really is…
I enjoy the heck out of online Virtual Reality environments, and this is a perfect example of why; I get to be the Death of Rats (one of my favorite Terry Pratchett characters from his Discworld series), flying one of the Airships featured in the recent Steampunk movie version of the Three Musketeers. The universe these pictures were taken in is Second Life, which has been around for a while but is still an awful lot of fun. I had found that ship an hour or two after the Role Playing class I attended (last picture; it is difficult to see me hidden by the wings of the fairy sitting behind me), where the instructor was a red demoness on a bar stool, with her assistant teacher being a 10 meter long yellow dragon. Some of the smaller non-humans brought their own seating arrangements, like the cushion the mouse lady in the lower right corner of the picture is using.
Steampunk Death of RatsFlying up to the AirshipRole Playing class
There is not the slightest doubt that Three Musketeers is THE movie to beat this weekend! Not only is it a classic, an epic fantasy, and visually amazing all at the same time, especially if you go to one of the 3D showings. But on top of that it is a Steampunk precursor, showing the kind of lighter-than-air craft that France pioneered in the 1600’s. But taken to the next level, to true airships that would have created the kind of parallel timeline that actual Steampunk would have evolved from a hundred or two years later when we hit the Victorian era. This movie will hopefully be something special; I have been waiting for it for quite a while.
