Holy smoke, Batman!

They kicked us off superhero school.

Pott Life

Photographer Reinhard Krause was wandering around the "Ruhrpott" (the coal and steel mining district in North-Rhine-Westphalia) with his camera in the mid-80s and made these interesting photos.
Admittedly, the above picture is a bit misleading and irrelevant, but it´s an attention grabber. No?

Watching these pictures, which he divided into sections such as "Landscape", "Trade-fairs" (which mostly consist of doggy-shows), "Pubs", "Celebrations", "City" and "Fairgrounds", you´ll see a world that seems strange and alien. Almost outlandish. Unless, of course, you have been there or you were brought up in a similar part of the world. But is the north of England or Pittsburgh comparable to the "Pott"?


The "Rhine-Ruhr Area" with its coal mines and steel mills and dense cities was almost levelled during WW2.
While the cities were mostly gone, the factories and mills have been saved from the bombs, because they were so valuable.
With the help of imported foreign workers, who came from Turkey, Greece and Italy, the area was quickly re-build. While the chimneys were smoking again, the cities would become a hasty hodge-podge of half baked architectonic ideas.
The need for decent housing left no time for decent architecture.


Universities would be build but by the mid-eighties the new won prosperity would crumble again. Coal mining had become too expensive. Steel mills were closed down, dismantled and shipped to China to be re-assembled. Naturally this happened without the workers.
"Structural change" was asked for. While the Cities tried to establish some sort of faux "Silicon Valley"-infra structure, a huge part of the population was unemployed and spent their days wandering around "re-naturated industry parks", which looked like amusement park ruins from an extinct race of giants.
The odd thing about these pictures is that they don´t look dated or old. Despite being around 25 years old, these photos just look strangely familiar, yet totally alien.

"Seeing everything makes you sad"

Seems I have missed this last summer.

German newspaper "Die Welt" posted a new JG Ballard interview, titled "Terror als erotisch aufgeladene Perversion" (transl.: Terror as erotically charged perversion).
I must admit that reading "Die Welt" is not my priority as it is one of those German papers published by "Springer Press" (aka THE ENEMY!").
Anyway, despite being fairly short its a nice and compact take on Ballard´s view of things and offers more of his brilliant, to-the-point quotes on terror, modernism, Tony Blair and Shanghai.

He uses as well some of his older, often cited phrases, such as "the future will be...like a suburb of Düsseldorf."
The lovely people at Ballardian have re-translated the interview into english. Highly recommended!

Oh!

The Office for Metropolitan Art (OMA) has just revealed their final design for the New Hamburg Science Center and Aquarium. The structure will house a science centre, aquarium, theatre, offices, laboratories as well as commercial and retail facilities. The structural design consists of 10 interconnecting blocks that will form the shape of a ring.


While it doesn´t look too bad I just don´t know how many more offices and retail space the new harbour city in Hamburg actually needs. The whole "harbour city" project that is currently under construction could turn out to be a massive failure and work against anything that will be required for urban architecture in the future. Right now there is a gigantic surplus in office space and they continue to build more and more.

Spomenik

These eerie pictures of strange monuments, called "Spomenik 1-3" are taken by photographer Jan Kempenaers. The word "spomenik" means monument. But what should they remind us of?




Are they reminders of the civil war in former Yugoslavia, anchors for some mayan spaceship or ruins of a forgotten amusement park?



The last picture is not by Kempenaers, but a result of a google picture search for "Spomenik".

Did I dream you dreamed about me?

The music, just a faint echo of a yet unborn melody, provides a fragile background for a strangely distant voice that forms words out of a seemingly semi-conscious, somnambulist state of mind. The "shipless oceans" it describes seem to have dried out a long time ago. The lovelorn, beckoning voices are floating over crystalline dunes like drifting scarves of some distant figurine.

"Did I dream you dreamed about me?"


I could go on forever and wax poetic and make a fool out of myself.
But when I heard "Song to the siren" for the first time in 1984, i was reading the "Vermillion Sands"-stories by Ballard and "Pandora and the flying dutchman", a forgotten Hollywood melodram with Ava Gardner and James Mason was constantly on Tv. All this resonated heavily with me and it was like many different pieces were falling into place.
Of course, this song was a litmus test among my friends. Many considered it to be the peak of kitsch and pretentiousness.

Here is a rare live version which is remarkable for two reasons:
a) The haunting effect of "Song to the siren" was not made by studio trickery.
b) Liz Fraser sings it with a very strong scottish accent.

This mortal coil: Song to the siren


Although I always knew that it is a cover version of a Tim Buckley song, I haven´t heard the original until recently. I must say that i was not really floored by it.

During the last 10 years many different musicians like Robert Plant and George Michael have decided to cover "Siren", certainly more inspired by the success of the Liz Fraser version than the slightly jarring original by Buckley.
During the 90s it was also, quite fittingly, licensed for a perfume-ad and less effective in David Lynch´s "Lost Highway".


UPDATE: The latest brilliant moment thanks to "Song to the Siren" is the opening sequence of Michael Armfield´s 2006 drama Candy.

Of course its creators, Robin Guthrie and Liz Fraser, who usually recorded as Cocteau Twins, hated their version with a passion. They referred to it as "sludge to the siren", but this was nothing unusual, as they usually met their own back catalogue with disgust.

However, during the peak of the rave-scene producer duo Messiah sampled the famous "Did i dream you dreamed about me" and made it the central moment of their cut-up track "Temple of dreams". A few years before Fraser would work with The Future Sound of London and Massive Attack she became the siren of the amphetamine age and the queen of a million glow-sticks.

Messiah: Temple of dreams

Tom Middleton: Shinkansen

You might have been there too: You are in a commuter train, leaving or arriving at a station. The train rolls slowly over the track switches. You look through the window, listening to some music and watch as a parallel train comes into view.
It is a bit faster and proceeds to pass your window. Then it slows down until it travels at exactly your speed.
You can watch the people sitting and standing in the other train. You lost all sense of movement. Then the speed of either train picks up, but you don´t know if its "you" or "them".
While you watch dreamily, the trains are passing more switches and the trains move closer and closer until they are on parallel tracks.
For a moment it appears that your compartments will merge, but then one train picks up speed again and a seemingly endless stream of people and waggons are gliding past you.
Its the closest thing to a waking dream.

The Video to Tom Middleton´s "Shinkansen" catches this parallel trip in a simple, yet chilling way.
It reminds me of the 1934 short film "Le Metro" by french director Georges Franju (Eyes without a face). In this he follows a small girl through her dreamlike voyage through the deserted parisian underground.
We see her wandering through the endless, magically lit empty stations. Escalators begin to run as soon as she nears, doors open for her and she rides train after train with wide-eyed fascination.
Franju then mounts his camera in another train and films the girl in the adjacent train as they travel at the very same speed.
Sadly, I could not find this masterpiece of surreal film online.

But back to Tom Middleton: He is one of the heavy weights of the chill-out, deephouse and electrofunk scene. All through the nineties he and partner Mark Pritchard were recording under different monikers, such as Global Communication, Link & E621, Reload and Jedi Knights (they had to drop that name after George Lucas sued them!). Every project name was a synonym for a different genre and they excelled with everything they did.

In late 2007 Middleton released his first true solo album "Lifetracks". I found it a bit disappointing as some of the sounds and tracks are a bit too bland and wallpaper-ish for my taste.
However, the track "Shinkansen" is one of the highlights and was releases as a single. I was very surprised that the single was even accompanied by a promo-video. A rare thing these days.

Sarah Cracknell/St. Etienne: The journey continues...acoustic

This is leading to a very nice video, featuring Sarah Cracknell of Saint Etienne recording an accoustic version of "The journey continues".
Without the slightly tacky beats of the original version with Mark Brown, the song becomes actually very good. Even the capricous operatic singing, which I found too phantom-of-the-opera-esque are a nice touch here.

However, at the end Sarah gives some new info about the future of St. Etienne, the best pop-band in the known universe:
A new Richard X produced single "This is tomorrow" will come out this year. It will be tied with a further greatest hits album, which will be the follow-up to "Too young to die" from the mid-nineties. (I thought that "Smash the System/Travel Edition" was a greatest hits too, but anyway...).
Furthermore their old albums will be re-released in a re-mastered and re-packaged form. AND as if this was not enough, an all new album will probably come out in the "not too distant future".

Not bad at all...

Comin´at ya!

Who would have thought that stereoscopy, or 3d photography started 150 years ago? Beginning with the delicate invention of Louis Daguerre it was constantly re-invented and bettered by David Brewster and first shown to the public at the 1851 World Expo in London.
I always loved those red-green, seemingly out-of-focus pictures. Even without the special viewing glasses, those photos have their very own haunting quality.

A collection of old 3d-pictures can be seen here.


I used to spend hours of my childhood staring into my bright-red "Viewmaster", imagining myself strolling through Disneyland whenever I wanted. When the first prototypes of "virtual reality machines" appeared in the early 90s, they looked like a hi-tec version of the "Viewmaster". Inspite of very creative and seductive ideas, the "vir2l" craze was over before it actually started.



Of course I went to see ANY 3D movie that was released during its short renaissance in the early eighties. It started with "Comin at Ya!", a late sgaghetti-western with the abominable Tony Anthony (!). This ultra-cheap flick had so many 3-D effects, it would have been enough to bury the genre afterwards, but it made money and so the same team came up with the Indiana Jones rip-off "El tesoro de las cuatro coronas". And then Hollywood must have seen the green/red light and greenlighted three 3-D sequels, each being the third installment of played-out horror franchises: "Jaws 3-D", "Friday, 13th 3-D" and "Amitiville 3-D".
You had to see thmem quick, because the movies were so bad, that they usually vanished from the cinemas after one week.



Aound this time German TV had a short 3-D fad. Green-red glasses would be distributed with the tv-guides. They aired some Jack Arnold movies and inbetween they bored you to death with small experiments and mostly scientific talk instead of throwing everything at you. Either way: I was exstatic!

Small art-house cinemas would sometimes dig up the great Arnold movies as well as "Andy Warhols Frankenstein". Of course the didn´t show "The Stewardesses".
The nearest I ever came to see the full 3-D version of the 1973 german soft-sex flick "Liebe in drei Dimensionen" was at Alton Towers Theme Park! Believe it or not, they had a harmless scene cut into their 3-D, 180°show-reel.
Sadly I have never had the pleasure to see "Heavy Equipment", a gay porn which you should enjoy with glasses on!

Isn´t it strange that after all this time and progress there is still no REAL quantum leap in 3d technology? Of course we now have shutter glasses and simulated 3d, but apart from some recent Imax releases the big impact on the entertainment industry has yet to happen.

When sound- and colourmovies were invented, many people in the industry were convinced that people would reject those innovations. But they were wrong. Once the movies talked and became colourful, nobody wanted to go back. But even after 150 years, 3d is still regarded as a gimmick!

This is tricky!

Wonder Sauna Hot Pants

Yes Björk, I can boogie

This is Baccara!


They had this massive worldwide Disco hit in the late 70s. Their singing style was obviously so avantgarde that they were shamelessly ripped of by Björk (or something)

Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio

Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days; the home is going to be a TV studio. We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be strange sit-coms, too, like the inside of our heads. That’s going to come, I’m absolutely sure of that, and it’ll really shake up everything…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Andrea Juno and Vale’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

The future shines so bright, I gotta wear shades.

LEDs are small, use little energy, last much longer than ordinary lightbulbs, and -since 1993- they can produce white light.

In the recent competition "bright LED" organized by desingboom.com and Gwangju biennale foundation, Korea over 3400 designers from 92 countries showed what the future of light could look like.

The results show a fascinating variety of commercial use that could really change the way we light up our homes and even ourselves.

You can put the LEDs practically everywhere - attach them to adhesive tape, sew them into cloth or carry them with you as an elegant object.

Because they are so small and light, you can create little fluffy cloudlike lamps that sway on fragile pylons as you walk past them.


Shimmering, touchsensitive plankton lights will adjust to your mood.

Minimal antenna-like sculptures which amplify and focus the light of a single LED by an elegant system of lenses and mirrors will substitute clunky lamps.
Cables are not required. Use rechargeable batteries or just charge the LED when you are not using it.





You can even display pictures in flashy 8-bit style or can read books under your blanket without a torch, because your blanket IS the torch.

Can "light-couture" be that far off?

Somebody came up with the idea to stick a LED into a bottlecap. This way the only light you´ll need in your bar would provided by the glowing bottles themselves.



A polish designer applied an old tradition of paper carving, called Wycinanki to LED lit plexiglass that is carved with intricate lines to a stunning effect that will throw any lava-lamp back to the stone age.

An expansive picture gallery of the contest can be seen here.

Religion is the first and most successful viral marketing campaign

Painting by Shag.

UnkleJam: Why aren´t they MASSIVE, EMI?!

UnkleJam have released three fantastic singles last year and everybody expected them to take the world by storm.

The first single "Love Ya" is an amazing in-your-face electrosoulfunk monster that throws everything at you in only 2:2o minutes, "What am I fighting for", the second release, is a dirty disco jam that had excellent remixes. This should have been a worldwide hit!
With the third single, "Stereo" which was released before their debut album "Songs", they played it a bit safe and turned down the funkfactor. Its a catchy, sultry hitsingle that sounds like Terence Trent D´arby came back through a time-hole.

All three singles came with expensive and showy Videos. It was obvious that UnkleJam were going to be BIG!

And then we waited for the album and waited some more. It should have been released in october and then it was alledgedly pushed back to february. Once again EMI managed to kill any buzz around a band everybody went apeshit for. As far as I know the album has never seen a physical release outside of Japan! So if you actually want to own the album and see the artwork instead of buying compressed and useless files: Forget it!
How can EMI cry that nobody buys musci anymore because of evil filesharers, when they just refuse to offer their products in acceptable formats?

I hear they are a great live-band and obviously this is much more important these days than selling lots of units. But still, after they opened for Justin Timberlake there must be a market for their album.

This is the promo for "What am i fighting for". A futuristic pop dream.

Yazoo: Ode to boy

Today news are making the rounds that Yazoo (or Yaz as they were called in the USA, for reasons still unknown to me) are releasing a 4-disc Box Set. Not bad for a band that was active for only 18 months and released just two albums during this time!
The Box will be called "In your room" and a UK tour will acompany the release. This is quite a surprise, since Alison Moyet is active as a solo artist and Vince Clarke is still part of Erasure.

I don´t know anybody who didn´t like Yazoo, but I do know lots of people (me included) who could never get into Erasure.
I still remember that "Alf" and Vince ended their collaboration because they didn´t get along too well. Maybe this was exactly the key to Yazoo´s fantastic sound. The toylike sounds of Clarke combined with the dark, overpowering soul voice of Moyet, who dressed up like a cleaning woman.

"Only you" is one of the most covered pop-songs ever and her dirty laugh on "Situation" can be heard as a sample in hundreds of dance songs, after the song became an influential electro/breakdance hit in the early 80s.

A huge part of their ballad "Midnight" was sampled by Mute records based dance/electronic duo Fortran 5 as "Midnight" (ahem) in 1991.

Here is my favourite, the minimal and haunting, Moyet penned "Ode to Boy". It was a b-side to "The other side of love" and remains a timeless classic in my collection. Despite Alisons later attempts to destroy it with a rock version during her solo career.
Looking back at their records, its really their torch songs and ballads that stood the test of time, because the almost experimental arrangements always stayed clear of sappiness and kitsch.

K-Tel!

What a great idea! The compilation label from hell "K-TEL" gets compiled here.


Nowadays K-tel sells electric can openers. Back then they had the flashiest ads to sell you the trashiest pop compilations. With names like Ripper, Zipper and Sizzler, which sounded more like the rides on a funfair, they threw anything together that was somehow contemporary and apparantly sold truckloads of them.

My first purchased album was a K-tel compilation: Disco Fever! It contained 20 "hits", about ten of them were actually disco, the rest was a strange melange of rock and country ballads.

In order to fit all this music on one record, K-tels sound engineers were quite versatile in editing the songs in very creative ways. Knowing the originals and hearing the shameless, but seemless cuts, impressed me more than the actual music. I began editing my music as well with the aid of the pause button on dad´s tape recorder and his reel to reel machine. I was exstatic when I managed to get the "unhearable edit". For years to come i used to chose my new tape-decks by the reaction time of the pause button. Everybody else had high-end machines with more knobs to shake a stick at, but i had the fastest pause button and I was not afraid to use it!

Check out Kay-tel blogspot. Maybe you´ll find a long lost compilation, or something you have buried in the back of your mind for decades.

Sarah Cracknell: The journey continues...in a good way

Sarah Cracknell might have another hit in the british charts again soon, as she is singing on "The journey continues" by Mark Brown. The song, which is apparently used in a bank-advert in the UK, will be released in february. I am not really into it and she only appears in the video for one second. So here she is with the best pop-band in the known universe instead:
Saint Etienne: You´re in a bad way

Acapella Holodeck

The year is 1966 and it´s the height of the space-age. TV-shows looked like they were broadcasted from an orbital space station and to be invited you had to do something amazing. This is Marcos Valle and the girls from Bahia on the Andy Williams Show. Once you get past the corny introduction (ending at 01:30) its all pure brilliance!

Update: It was pure brilliance. Sadly someone decided to remove the clip from Youtube. Idiots.

Pump up the Moloko!

Moloko had some fantastic and some annyoing moments. But shortly before they called it a day, they were obviously at the height of their game. "Forver more" is an instant classic. It creeps up on you an will never go away. The video is another example that something so simple can have such a haunting effect. Roisin Murphy really owns this one!
Here is a high-quality version which even appears to be in stereo!

Moloko: Forever More (High quality)

The clonking bass instantly reminded me of this "milestone" in dance music: "Pump up the jam!" and the slightly more sophisticated "Get up!" by Technotronic have the same bass that sounds like a ton of bricks falling through the floor. t´s not all that surprising if you consider that Mark Brydon, the guy in Moloko, used to be an accomplished engineer at legendary FON Studios in Sheffield, were many of the groundbreaking britsh dancetunes were made.
It´s as well a dance video and both singers are asking for "more". In one way or the other.

Technotronic: Pump up the jam!

White car in Germany

"If I have to make a guess. I´d say the future was going to be like a suburb of Düsseldorf. The whole of Germany is like an enormous well-heeled housing estate. There are all these immaculate, brand-new suburban houses in nicely wooded suburbs; every house has a boat and a BMW in the driveway. The schools are built according to the most advanced thinking about what a school should be like; there are recreation aids and sports facilities. Even a drifting leaf looks like it´s got too much freedom! And this all ads up to the death of the soul in the whole place. There´s a desperation just waiting to be born there. If you live in a totally civilized society, madness is the only way you can express your own freedom."
(J. G. Ballard, in "Heavy Metal", 1982)

The Associates: White car in Germany.

"We trundled through endless immaculate suburbs of executive housing...There was a Mercedes or a BMW in every driveway...identical children identically dressed. We might have been looking at a population of brilliantly designed robots placed there merely to establish a contextual landscape! And this went on and on. I suddenly realized that the future of this planet was not going to be like New York City or Tokyo or London or Moscow but rather like a suburb of Düsseldorf. And you know, most of the Baader-Meinhof gang in fact grew up in these suburbs, and I realized why that kind of terrorism erupted from this kind of landscape. Because in that world, madness is the only freedom.
(J. G. Ballard, in "Rolling Stone", 1987)

Ledernacken: "Amok"!

Kelis: Young! Fresh! New!

Kelis has a lot going for her, but this is by far my favourite moment in her already 9 year old career.

"Young, fresh n´new" was the one and only single that came off her second album "Wanderland". It is a bold song about running away from home and being young and fresh and new. Why this never got a proper release in the USA is really beyond me. It´s not that her first album was in any way a flop!

In 2001 the Neptunes/Timbaland production style had already caught on in the mainstream. Aaliyah`s "Try again" brought the year 2000 to a minimal funky, futuristic kickstart. But it sounded almost conventional compared to the squelching, dirty particle-storm the Neptunes cooked up with "Young, fresh n´new".

The video is a candy-coloured rebellion with Kelis as the pied-piper, crashing through neatly manicured frontlawns in her monster-truck and dancing in front of giant slo-mo explosions. It´s a pop dream come true and a briliant match to a song which opens with the memorable lines: "Young and different. She looked at a condom. And could still see the sun."

But maybe it was just bad timing. I remember seeing this phenomal video shortly after the horrors of 9/11 and rebellion, monster truck destruction and slo-mo explosions were not considered to be entertainment in the aftermath.

However, Kelis left Virgin records who were nearly wrecking her career and came back as schoolyard dairy-queen with the sonic onslaught that was "Milkshake". From the healing shock of "looking at a condom" without getting blind to "I can teach you, but i have to charge". Kelis rocks!

Human beings have a terrible temptation to imagine a happier past.

Quote by J.G. Ballard, 1996

Tonight is forever!

I love the idea of people being so into certain songs that they make their own, alternative videos. Sometimes its a cutting exercise that just needed some music, sometimes its a carefully edited montage that puts things into a new perspective, like the "Fly me to the moon" video I wrote about yesterday.

"Tonight is forever" uses a different, very simple approach to a stunning outcome. The author uses one of the great, early Pet Shop Boys songs "Tonight is forever" and plays it over an unedited excerpt of Godfrey Reggio´s "Koyaanisqatsi". Now, one of the things "Koyaansiqatsi" is famous for is the soundtrack by Philip Glass. The track that is used during the wonderful timelapse shots of Chicago(?) by night is called "The Grid" and is known for its relentless, minimal rhythms and melody fragments.



By replacing the original music, which is an essential part of the whole film, with the somehow elegic pop of the Pet Shop Boys, we see a non existing promo-clip to a non-existing single. The effect works so well, that many people on YouTube believed that this is actually an official release by the band. This is not surprising since PSB themselves let photographer Wolfgang Tillmans direct a video for "Home and dry", which shows nothing more than mice running around a London underground station. However, this concept is broken up with a 20 second scene of the band playing. As if some record company executive got cold feet at the last moment.

The song "Tonight is forever" appeared on the first Pet Shop Boys album "Please" in 1986.
It is somehow a "prototype" PSB song, as it uses imagery and the sentiment of rock music but turns it completly upside down by refusing to play to the rules of rock.
The thin, distant voice, nearly drained from emotions or a gender determination glorifies the decadence of nightlife while wishing to fall in love to be saved from it.
The elegic chords seem to slow down the driving disco beat, which cites the Hi-NRG era but also anticipates the upcoming house-sound that was about to dominate pop-music in the near future. There are also echos of italo-disco and the Bobby O. songs they wrote in the beginning of their career.

The overall feel of the song - despite its easy going positivity - is sad and there is a strong sense of loss. The singer is undecided and passive. He "could be wrong", he "could be right", he doesn´t work and is content with going out every night. He is waiting for somebody else who "holds the key" and "opens the door", so that things will never change but without staying the same.
These metaphors are actually pulled from the bottom drawer of pop-cliches and are begging for cheap laughs. However, as soon as Neil Tennant claims that "I don´t think of the future tonight", nobody is laughing anymore!

It was the height of the AIDS crisis and the carefree hedonism of the seventies disco-era was gone. While pop music was all the rage during this time, dance music was in a stage of transition. Italo and Hi-NRG was more or less over, (acid)-house had not yet arrived.
Clubmusic was dark and agressive. It was the time of Electronic Body Music (EBM) , Industrial and Gothic.
The urban melancholy of "Tonight is forever" really stands on its own. It is a timeless pop song that, despite its 80´s production values, still triggers strong emotions today.

As with so many PSB songs of this era, supressed or alledged homosexuality always looms under the surface.
This theme is often recurring in Tennants lyrics of that time: "Two divided by zero" suggests that "someone started a rumour" about the protagonist and his partner and they decide to run away before the news spread.
It´s one of the best "escape" songs ever: "We´ll catch a plane to New York and a cab going down across the bridges and tunnels, straight into town. Tomorrow morning we´ll be miles away, on another continent on another day."
Of course the "rumour" could be anything, but gay listeners immediately got the message.

The titles of some of the b-sides are even less cryptic: "I bet she´s not your girlfriend" and "It must be obvious" are nearly giving it all away. But then the ambivalence of the lyrics are shying away from a real statement.

Before "Very" which was sort of an "official coming-out" album, the lyrics of the Pet Shop Boys were much more satisfying, because they had more poignancy and were open to interpretation. After the masterpiece that was "Behaviour" and their finest hour "Being Boring", they made sure that the message of "Go West" was clear to everybody.

But instead of the over the top campness of their Village People cover, i could listen to "Tonight is forever" over and over while gazing at the detached time-lapse of the city at night. Thinking about the time when I was actually going home from the clubs while everybody else was going to work. The time when you were really living for the night, and when you knew - deep inside - that all this was just a passing phase. But for the moment you accepted that your life would go on like this. For ever and ever.

Fly me to the moon

This is another reason why Youtube is the best thing since the invention of chocolate.
I was actually looking for Julie London on Youtube, but there was not much to find, apart from a sensational b/w live appearance in Japan, which cannot be embedded. So I came across this selfmade mash-up. Its made out of footage from "Barbarella" and "2001" set to Julie´s wonderful rendition of "Fly me to the moon". It´s really, really good!

The sexy future fun of Barbarella versus Kubrick´s underlying message that the future will be boring, combined with the sultry space escapism of the well known pop standard is a great companion to todays J.G. Ballard-Quote: "Sex times technology equals the future".

Here is the link to "Julie in Japan". It will melt you!
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=1U7APF1HuQE

Duffy: Rockferry cross the Mercy REMIX

I first became aware of Duffy around a year ago when "Rockferry" was appearing around the net. But then nothing happened for a long time and I had nearly forgotten her. Some weeks ago she was back and with her an annyoing campaign that tries to herald her as the "new" Amy Winehouse. Quite sad, actually.
So now Duffy released her official first single and its not Rockferry but "Mercy", a - surprise - 60´s Soul hit tune which will certainly be a smash in the UK.

EDIT:
The ever talented DJ/Remixer Dunproofin´ has done a chunky remix, which can be heard here. I think it´s a very nice version, banging it up for the clubs without taking too much away from the original. I am following Dunproofin´s work since the glorious GYBO days and he has done amazing stuff. Don´t know why he is still relatively unknown.


Here is the original:

Sex x technology = the future

Quote by J. G. Ballard

Said hello to lots of people who said hello to me.

Quote by Andy Warhol.