Daft Punk - Interstella 5555

Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger von Darksith47

Interstella 5555 is an animated film for the album Discovery of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, better known as Daft Punk. It is a bitter-sweet story of some alien musicians who are abducted from their home planet to be brought to Earth and form a band here. The animation was supervised by Leiji Matsumoto, a veteran of animated space sagas. I have chosen two tracks to post here. "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", which I often hear when I work to give me the feeling that my work is great and important... :) The other is "Aerodynamics", which simply just communicates something exciting to me... like my electric nerve impulses were part of the music, and somebody was able to play something nice using them...


Daft Punk - Aerodynamic von EMI_Music

Columbo And The Case Of Intelligence, Talent And Genius

The above video is from the Columbo episode "The Bye Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case", which actually made me think about this question of intelligence, talent and genius. In fact, there is some difference between these terms, tho they overlap, as people often seem to freely exchange them. There is this notion of intelligent people as being the great puzzle solvers or others that can tell you the square root of a 40 digit number up to 10 decimal places... Intelligence has to do something with the ability to give some proper reaction to situations. If we look at it like that, puzzle solving may indeed have something to do with it, and yet I don't think it is just that simple. Not everything can be included in a puzzle, and I would even venture that some very intelligent people would have hard time with them. We are different... Also being able to deal with large numbers, is what I would rather call a gift, a talent, it does not necessarily mean intelligent behaviour otherwise. And if they asked me which is a genius, who can deal with large numbers or who, while not being able to do so, invents the pocket calculator, I would tend to pick the latter. Tho, "genius" is perhaps the hardest of all. Talent is perhaps the easiest to realise. Intelligence may take a while to see and could come in many forms... But genius... is more like being able to do something unique with either or both of these. The genius must create to make himself known, otherwise he has buried his talent. He may not be successful tho. Success depends on politics at least as much as on whether you are genial or not. I do think that there are quite some intelligent and talented people who cannot get along well, whom we know nothing about, because they cannot handle people. And then there are those who adapt in some way... And this is the story and method of Columbo, a disguised intelligence, who anticipates people looking down on him, even annoys them with it... The video below is from the very first Columbo, "Prescription: Murder" in which he is analysed by a wife murdering psychiatrist.

Misery

Misery is originally a novel written by Stephen King, about a writer who suffers an accident and is rescued by a fan. The writer soon has to realize that he is actually a captive, and forced to correct his mistake of killing off his heroine... The film version here was made in 1990, and is usually remembered for the award winning performance of Kathy Bates as the obsessive fan, Annie Wilkes. About what I have read of Stephen King, I often felt the urge to describe his work as "the horror of stereotypes". A sort of small town environment, with people and situations intensified to a grotesque and often supernatural level, which still remains recognisable. Sometimes they are so well written that it hurts me to read, because the fact that people can live following and make others follow a mindless pattern, as often they do, though they have the ability to do better, just annoys me. In this case, however, there is no supernatural, just plain obsession. The book was planned to be one that King wrote under the pen name Richard Bachman, which he used for these less supernatural, and more explicit writings, until the identity of Bachman was revealed. The horror is based on the entrapment of writer Paul Sheldon in a hopeless situation. In his isolation and helplessness, he must find a way to break free. King builds up new and new hopes to achieve this goal, and breaks them one after the other followed by some not too pleasant retaliation from the captor. This builds up tension and hatred up to the point where there is no choice left for either of the characters, and hell breaks loose... I find the story interesting for many reasons. First, because of the way Wilkes "loves". I think this is a far more common way people think of love as it may seem at first sight. People often love what they imagine another person to be, and not what he is. They are not afraid to cause pain in the interest of the "beloved", so that he could become the image they love. There cannot be love without the possibility of change, and perhaps loss. Misery is a nightmare of being a helpless victim to such a love. On the other hand, if anybody ever tried to create something, they will know that sometimes it goes only if one has no choice. With choice come other things to do. Of course what one creates may or may not be what he wanted or what he likes... but high impact events tend to open up new ways. There is some difference between the film and the book how the experiece influences the creative artist, and also the amount of violent love the nurse is willing to give... but still, I think has more than enough to make the point... If I had to pick a Stephen King film at this very moment, Misery would be my choice.

Drawing A Face

It's been a while since I draw a human face, until I have decided to sit down and do it again last year, based on a bw image of a friend. I used a mechanic pencil (and rubber), on simple office print paper (about 15x20 cm). These are normally available when I am at work, and I often draw, though mostly only things that others would not recognise or make no sense at all, except perhaps in some far corner of my mind, like the image in one of my first posts. Nevertheless, sometimes I get the motivation to make something that actually expresses something out of me in a more approachable fashion, or just simply create the likeness of something to see if people recognize it. A human face is an ideal subject for that, but then it can be a very hard combination of 3D shapes one has to project to 2D. I had a somewhat easier task here since I worked with a photo. It is still a challenge to give a perception of light and shadow, which defines a nose, or in the case of such a smooth face, the presence of a sublime smile. After scanning, now that I can see the drawing in a much larger size than the original was, I can also discover some places of possible improvement. First of all, I draw faintly, I always did. Somehow I find faint things more attractive, but it may also be true that stronger lines are harder to control. I am not sure if I want to change this, but seeing the scanned image, and comparing it to the original, I can only see some of the subtler details if I tilt the screen due to the stronger brightness. I normally start from an eye, and measure distance in "eye-widths". I started off from the left eye this time, and I can sense a slight disproportion looking at the right, though this may be due to the fact that the head was slightly turned on the photo, which I tried to mimic on the drawing. And how to draw the hair when at moments it appears to me that each piece points to a different direction, in a somehow naturally arranged disorder? All in all, I am not sure if I served full justice to the qualities of the model... but it was recognised, and I should not disappointed at least about this. Maybe next time I will experiment with a 3D model...

French and Saunders

French and Saunders is a long running British comedy show of the duo Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. They often did spoofs of movies and celebrities. I have just collected here a few I especially liked. The first one is a Kill Bill parody, with all the gestures and sound effects... Then there is a parody of Björk, whose style seems particularly suitable for this sort of parody. And finally a more complete spoof a Whatever happened to Baby Jane?, a Robert Aldrich thriller from 1962, featuring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

La Môme Piaf

Nowadays I spend a lot of time listening to Édith Piaf before or after, or even during and instead of work. I have already posted her "La vie en rose" earlier. It made me think what makes me listen to her music so much. Not only her voice, as I realized after watching the movie about her life, which bears the same title as her signature voice just mentioned made in 2007. Actress Marion Cotillard has also a nice song, and yet I was always waiting to hear Piaf singing her songs (actually some of them were dubbed indeed). No, I think it is rather the intensity that she put into singing that is addictive.

Piaf had a very stormy life. Her career started in 1935, when a night club owner discovered her after hearing her singing on the streets. Despite some hardships (including her being considered as a suspect in the murder case of her patron), she continued to become the most popular French singer during and after the second world war. It was in the euphoria over the end of the war that she wrote the lyrics for La vie en rose. In 1949, "the love affair of her life", the boxer Marcel Cerdan died in a plane crash while on the way to meet her. This marks the beginning of the most intense period of her life, paralleled by the fast deterioration of her health, due to sickness, a series of accidents and addiction. She died at 47, looking some 20 years older. I have the intention here to show a number of video recordings from this period showing not only the dramatic changes she went through, but perhaps more importantly the unaltered intensity of her singing throughout. She sang the first song posted here, "Hymne à l'amour" only a month after Cerdan's death. The second one "Padam... Padam..." is from 1951, and I have chosen it for its intensity than for anything else.

In the 1950s she had several near fatal car accidents, breaking her ribs at one time, and leaving her with addiction to morphine and alcohol. The recording of "l'Accordéoniste" is from this period (1954). I am simply amazed by the strength of her delivery... Another song "La Foule" is of Latin American origin. The recording is from 1961, one of Piaf's attempts to save the L'olympia music hall from bankruptcy.

The series of performances she began in 1961 are sometimes called the suicide tour. Indeed, she died in 1963 in liver cancer wanting to perform until the last moment. One of the new songs written to her in this final period was "Non, je ne regrette rien". This song was in a sense the final stroke in her carrier, and it is only fitting to finish this collection of recordings with it. The recording is one of her last perfromances from 1962 in the Netherlands.

Applied Gymnastics

I am nothing like an athletic person, but I have always appreciated the combination of strength and flexibility... well, the sort of body language it conveys. The same is true for dancing and martial arts, I am much better at watching it, seeing the details, than actually doing it... :) But if this is a language, then what you are going to see here is a whole conversation. Recorded straight from the streets, as a matter of fact... I mean you rarely see athletes climbing over whole buildings during contests, don't you? ...and who said ninjas don't exist anyway???