So far, all we’ve got are a few scenes. Contributions welcomed.

1. A street corner in Baltimore. Young men of various ages run to and fro, taking money from and drugs to buyers who drive up in big SUVs. As they work they sing:

[Chorus]
Pandemic! It’s the stuff that makes your juices flow,
Pandemic! It gives a golden glow to Baltimo’,
When you need a little something to brighten up your day
Just grab a spike and a spoon and a tourniquet
Pandemic!

[Bodie]
Watch out, it’s the fuzz!

Most of them scatter, leaving Bodie sitting nonchalantly on a stoop. Enter Officer McNulty.

[McNulty]
I’m Officer McNulty, how do you do?
If you’re recently deceased I got an appointment with you
I’m the smartest damn cop Homicide ever had
They say Jimmy Be Good, but I just wanna be bad!

[to Bodie]
All you drug dealing mopes, you just make me laugh
Dealing all kinds of dope, it seems like a faff

Don’t you know the risks, you’d be better off retiring
Just get your kicks from Nintendo and drink-driving

Then again, if you did, it wouldn’t be so fun,
And I mightn’t get to run around town with a gun,

Stuck behind a desk, it wouldn’t be the same,
Because you know what they say …

[Both]
The game is the game.

[Bodie]
Officer McNulty, it’s not my fault you see
My course was set from education primary
I’m a victim of poverty plus emotional privation
My peer group and neighbourhood have acute deprivation
We got racism, crime and municipal distress
Gee officer McNulty, no wonder I’m a mess!

2.
Bassoon solo, swish of leather overcoat, a figure flits from stage prop to stage prop, always out of reach of the moving spotlight

[chorus of cornerboys]
pack up your product, let’s move
something here just don’ feel right
the biggest punk on the street’s in town
and i think he might strike tonight

[1st cornerboy]
what was that?

[2nd cornerboy]
just a cat

[3rd cornerboy]
do i hear trouble?

[4th cornerboy]
nah that’s just bubbles

[1st cornerboy]
man i got fear …

The music stops. Omar walks in to the spotlight.

[Omar (basso contralto)]
Omar here.

3.
Stringer is counting money in the backroom of the funeral parlour

[Stringer]
Supply and demand, supply and demand
I like markets where I’m the invisible hand

Business is business, but what a trade to be in!
No need for micro-management or stimulus Keynesian

The customers never stop stuffing product down their gullets
And the velocity of money’s the same as a bullet’s

4.
Prop Joe struts across the stage, twirling a cane, to the sound of ’smooth jazz’

[Prop Joe]
They call me Proposition Joe
I’m the king of Baltimo’
I squeezed out the Barksdale crew
Easy does it, no to-do!

Their style, it was all just show,
Just not how it’s done, comme il faut
They’re such obvious criminal (I’m more subliminal)
So now I run this town - or didn’t you know?

Wait a minute, Dettol No Touch Handwash. You’re telling me the very thing I currently use to clean my hands of germs may be exposing me to even more germs *gasp*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcgpdI_2cko

But wait a minute, just last year weren’t you selling…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8vijCM5_SA&feature=related

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2ceCSb39NA&feature=related

(Funny, I can’t seem to find an English version of the Dettol hazardous liquid soap ad on YouTube. Well I guess that means they were only prepared to sell their hazardous germy soap dispensers to poor countries like Pakistan and… whatever that other country is)

I, for one, will be going down to the cash and carry to load up on some Cleanlinol - it’s next to Godlinol!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UjGwW9FN_4

Moonwalk One, the poetic, beautiful, fascinating film about the first moon landing was broadcast last night on one of the Discovery channels. Lost for 35 years and rediscovered about a year ago, it’s a mix of documentary and a sort of film-poem, both touching and informative.

Discovery decided to show the film with introductory and break segments, featuring an anonymous, young, doctor of space, telling us about times he spoke to a mission commander, or that the astronauts were spacemen, and you can see the moon if you go outside and look up. Banal stuff, especially in contrast to the film it surrounded.

Worse, though, was watching something really great, unlike the normal television documentary, only to have a presenter tell you what’s coming up, what you just saw, and what’s on now. Formula television, drab, pointless, half of its time spent pointing to the other half. In a way, it’s surprising, with more and more channels out there, more and more people making films, more freedom for people on the fringes or without a standard film education to take up their cameras and produce works interesting, works unusual, works defective or even imaginative, that we delve deeper into the world of structurally and formally monotonous television. Teenagers and their love triangles, cops and their murders, spies and their double agents, families and their comedic mishaps. All of them walking side-by-side, stopping, turning to face one another, and continuing their conversation in over-the-shoulder-shot-reverse-shot.

If only we knew.

Okay, I couldn’t leave it there. What if Woody Allen had a childrens’ television programme? Hot Dog! If you look at the third video, it also appears to feature Stalin in the cast of thousands. I always wondered what he did after he was finished making the USSR.

There were of course a series of TV panel-game-shows of questionable merit featuring Herr Allen, including I’ve Got a Secret, and the now uncommissionable Password, and a meat version of Through the Keyhole called What’s my Line? . Then movies came along for Woodles, and he had to undergo the trauma of scatalogical promotional interviews, including one for Bananas.

Naturally, many of these links have been culled from a more thorough post to be found on WMFU, which tells of the early career of Mr. Konigsberg, in lengthy, almost obsessive, detail.

So, I went to IBC last week, and walked about the show floor looking at the various bits of technology, weaving between the suits talking about quarterly turnover and the like. The most notable trend that at the convention was the profusion of 3D related equipment, for the creation, editing, and display of that tricky third dimension. While 3D has been the new thing in movies for a few years, with films on a dual 2D/3D release taking more per screening in the 3D theatres (most of these movies are the animated features which are easily adapted to a 3D release). Studios thought that 3D would be the gimmick to lure people away from their TV and back to the cinema, while consumers thought it was another gimmick that would last as long as the previous 3D craze in the ’50s.

What is different this year is the move towards 3DTV, taking the experience to the home, and in many cases, live. 3D sports broadcasts work well, and seem to be the method of introducing 3D and the consequent equipment upgrades, and wallet-gougings, consumers will have to undergo. Several recent events were shot and broadcast in 3D, including last years Superbowl and some of Sky’s football coverage.

The boring engineering and cables stuff was naturally evolving the capacity to handle two simultaneous HD streams anyway (that is, 3Gbps - watch out for the advert and the heavy number content on the linked page). The problems of shooting 3D have largely been solved, although there are some glitches with jitter and field order in 3D video to be sorted out. And the various problems of creation have generally been solved.

What is an unknown is the rate of consumer adoption. And this will depend on the experience of viewing, and the available content. The viewing experience is still a little bit inconvenient, since glasses need to be worn, and the content is the superbowl, a film about dinosaurs, and a Three Stooges movie. The introduction of lenticular screens, for goggle-less viewing, while still in the early stages (as it suffers from low resolution and limited viewing angles) at just a few years old, will soon take care of the viewing problem.

The content problem lies in the fact that for true 3D all that is shown needs to be shot with that in mind, which discounts about a hundred-years-worth of film and television. Since lots of broadcasters rely on repeats to fill their schedules this is a major problem. If TV is 3D only some of the time, many will decide it’s not worth changing their TV or set-top box. I stumbled upon the stand of a research group from Canada showing a box that converts 2D  to 3D on the fly. They happened to be showing Spiderman, played on a normal DVD player and out through their machine, which showed as a very convincing 3D movie on their lenticular display.

The convergence of these different technologies makes 3D in the home a viable proposition, and increases the likelyhood of widespread adoption by consumers in the next five years or so (or whatever happens to be the standard TV recycling time).

Look here for my reel, since it’s a private video for now, the password is “reel”. Have at your criticism, and don’t tell me the music sucks because I hate it already.

I found this on The Chancer, an apparently ‘banned’ clip from Star Trek TNG wherein Data muses on the IRA and terrorism. I bet it’s even more banned now. Of course, the ma was Irish.

Today, I watched the “classic” British spacefihorror movie, ‘Lifeforce‘. To put it bluntly, this 1985 production is the greatest movie of all time, at least in that it contains all other scifi and horror movies. It has alien vampires; zombies; space-flight; soldiers; masochist nurses; regular nudity; scientists with a grip on history and literature; an institute for the criminally insane; shapeshifting; psychic connections; flashy optical effects; and flying furniture, all wrapped up in neat Golan-Globus package (a sure sign of quality).

The film is at its finest in the second act, after the vampiress alien escapes London’s space research centre. She stalks the city and environs consuming the life-energy of various disposable characters. However the heroes give chase, as an officer of the SAS; an astronaut; and the Home Secretary, Sir Percy, track her psychic energy (using some telepathy) to the aforementioned institute for the criminally insane, where they beat a confession out of a masochist nurse, hypnotise the possessed director of the institute, and lose the Home Secretary to the hazards of telekinetically-powered flying furniture. Sadly, upon their return to London soldier and astronaut find the city overrun with zombies. What can possibly save the day? Why a little rumpy-pumpy with a she-beast-space-creature, of course.

A mere description of the film cannot do it justice. It has that curious mix of Golan-Globus overreaching, attempting the grand but achieving only the absurd; that peculiar britishness of hammer horror; a healthy dose of classism; proper dispersal of boob; and white polo kneck jumpers. If one wishes to hold onto one’s eyeballs, this would certainly be an appropriate accompaniment.

Since we got two kittens and then called them Cagney and Lacey, I’ve been looking up old episodes.

I was only allowed to stay up for the music when it originally aired, so I caught up with repeats on RTE in the 90s. There’s only one episode - one scene even - that I vividly remember, and here it is, 6 minutes of self-contained and still actually pretty good melodrama.

It’s not embeddable so click on the kittens to watch.

Turns out all the cool stuff you wish they’d put on TV they probably tried to but it never got past the pilot. Behold Lookwell!

There’s an advert showing on TV at the moment [1] from Orange about its new price plans in which a bunch of people turn up in the desert and erect giant balloon animals representing the different options (raccoon, dolphin, mantis etc) congratulating each other all the while on their cleverness, though it doesn’t seem to me to be that much of an achievement. It’s of a piece with a trend in advertising which I’m sorry to say has caught on enough to be almost considered a genre now, so let’s give it a name - I suggest ‘The Ironic But Mawkish Festival of Pseudo-spontaneous Order’.

Basically if you’re flogging high-end consumer electronics it seems the done thing is to depict groups of either (a) sensitive trendies or (b) white-coated scientists coming together to create some colourful over-sized novelty structure or civic disturbance, each individual contributing their Own Special Talent to the grand scheme which only becomes clear when they’re all done, and all set to the sound of either plaintive nu-folk or a child singing a nursery rhyme, whichever’s more twee. The high-end advertising world appears to have gone mental for this style and is busily engaged in producing iterations on the theme, with superficial changes to setting and costumery applied to mask the dearth of creativity at work.

Orange are probably the most egregious offenders, churning out thinly disguised variations on the theme in which superficially diverse hipsters (or the entire world, yes even African children forgetting about their lack of adequate sanitation for a while) smirkingly collaborate in the kind of disruptive but whimsical behaviour which in any right-thinking society would result in a jail term or at least a severe pounding. Sony, Guinness and even fucking Skoda have gotten in on the act too, and this Honda one is so tired a knock-off I think it might have originally been intended as a spoof.

Honda should get part of the blame actually as their ad showing a Tom and Jerry-style series of minutely balanced mechanical interactions combining to no purpose whatsoever seems to have inspired a lot of the genre. The other daddy of them all is the Sony Bravia ‘bouncing balls‘ spot, which it should be said is genuinely wonderful. Both of these left the ‘creators’ out of the picture but the various copyists are keener for you to empathise so they cram their ads with either grinning tools in jeans and t-shirt or furrowed-brow boffins presumably intended to indicate that it’s okay to be a nerd as long as your skills extend to helping bake a giant cake in the shape of a car or something.

What kind of twisted sub-Jungian impulses are all these ads meant to be playing on then? Well they hit various Zeitgeisty buttons such as social networking and user-generated content, and they seek to persuade you that their products embody both play and craft, imagination and technique. But they also play on people’s insecurity [2]. Want to be seen as creative but too dull to come up with any ideas yourself? Don’t worry, buy a mobile phone and a bunch of strangers will rope you into some brilliant wheeze involving balloons, and what’s wrong with that?

[1] Can’t find it online. Why don’t companies make their ads available on their sites or YouTube or something? You’d think after spending so much money on something like that they wouldn’t try to hide it under a bushel.
[2] Though maybe I always think this because I’m insecure? No, it’s everyone else that’s wrong.

Funny coincidence: just yesterday I was reading the bit in the script for Annie Hall where Alvy finds a copy of the National Review in Annie’s apartment and suggests she gets William F. Buckley to come round and kill the spider in her bathroom. I thought “Hee hee, brilliant! Wait, who’s William F. Buckley?”. Well, now he’s dead, but apparently he was a leading conservative intellectual in the days before that was a contradiction in terms. Tyler Cowen links to some interesting YouTube clips, including this interview with Chomsky. Buckley’s persona is pretty odd: he’s obviously clever, but (to me, anyway) he comes across as a pompous and somewhat oleaginous bullshitter who in this case has his rhetorical ass handed to him by young Noam.

Update: some considerably less superficial analysis here

it would probably be something like this:

From Classic Television Showbiz.

Yesterday, after a year and three-quarters, two fifty degree summers, endless arguments, two corpses, and many millions of monies, the station went on air. The opening ceremony featured a passive crown prince enjoying the delights of a poorly rehearsed children-are-the-future style song and dance routine. Kids and adults shambled around confused, rarely dancing in time, while the singers made great strides in advancing the art of poor lip-synching.

Cut to the news, where shambolic rehearsals led to the director throwing a chair around and banging the production desk so hard it buckled. The weather lady was so frozen in the headlights that she was cut, the anchors had to talk nonsense about how great the station is because the satellite feed of the reporter live from the ceremony didn’t show up.

In the evening, the news ran six minutes long, a cardinal sin in telly, and was barely any better. It didn’t go out live, but even with that, it was still broadcast in an awful state. They spent three hours doing it again and again and again, and couldn’t get it right. Edited items didn’t come in on time, the weather lady couldn’t do her bit again, the interview guest couldn’t hear anything, because the battery ran out in his belt-pack, and said so on camera, lines were fumbled all over the place, and cues weren’t hit.

It was declared such a success that everyone got the day off today.

Also, I’m bitter because I didn’t get an invitation to the party afterwards. Gits.

This blog’s “YouTube clips of 1970s American TV ephemera” content has now been outsourced to www.classicshowbiz.blogspot.com. Unless they miss something really good.

There’s a wealth of reminiscences from Simpsons insiders in this Vanity Fair piece, but the thing that really struck me (from the first few thousand words, anyway) was this remark by an acquaintance of Matt Groening about the very start of it all, when he had just agreed to start doing one-minute animations for the Tracey Ullman show:

Polly Platt: What’s funny now, because he’s so rich, is that I was driving home from my office at Paramount, very shortly after that, and I saw Matt sitting at the bus stop. He didn’t even have a car. I had no idea he was so poor.

Which says a lot about the US, or maybe just LA.

Jayne Mansfield in “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” I’m not used to things from the 1950s being this funny or strange.

Marlon Brando interviewed by Larry King

The long-lost classic finally surfaces! I’ve long seen this as a litmus test for YouTube and the Internet at large: all that processing power, information and social networking doesn’t mean much if it can’t bring me Marlon Brando wearing red braces and kissing Larry King.

Feeding orphaned alpaca

Doesn’t get much cuter than this. I’ll be seeing these strange, lovely creatures when I visit the farm in July. And the alpaca.

Shaun Hutson in an old interview with Jonathan Ross. Make sure you stick around for the clip from ‘Slugs’

I think it’s time to say hello to Mystery Science Theater 3000:

Loads more MST3K shorts here.

This site is, well, fascinating. Entirely dedicated to a love affair between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

http://www.thyla.com/

Here’s a few pictures:

Mr. Spock dressed as a Can-Can girl.

This picture is called At the Rennaissance Faire on Shore Leave.

Which begs the question… do Kirk and Spock have such a in-depth love affair that they attend Medieval festivals with eachother?

I liked this bit from The Wire so much I uploaded it to YouTube:

Uploadin’ to YouTube is one complicated bidness, so I got much love for those who been there before me. Here’s McNulty and Bunk going about their work, and here’s the bit where Bodie learns chess. And I suppose I have to mention this Wire piss-take, which is mostly so-so but has a great interrogation scene: “Here, fifty glamorous getaways - places you won’t be going!”.

Great discussion of Irish Public Service TV ads over at Crooked Timber. The one that really sticks in my mind is described by commenter shane h:

A seemingly harmless family dog turns into a bloodthirsty killer after dark. Joins a roving gang of similarly un-tethered dogs for a sheep-killing rampage. I can still picture the field full of sheep lying with their throats torn out. I think it left quite an impression on anyone who was young at the time!

You can say that again. It was fucking terrifying, and I don’t think I’ve ever trusted a dog since.

Thanks to Sketchup, I’ve knocked together a 3D model of the studios I’m working on. It’s a great little programme; it let me put these together in record time, and really accurately (I cheated, I took someone’s CAD file as a base, which is another nifty feature).
Also, I thought I’d show off the massive studios I’m working on…yeah.

The Irish National Lottery last year awarded advertising contracts worth some €20 million to two agencies, DDFH&B and Carat Ireland, to develop “advertising, media and promotional materials” for the lottery.

The result is a campaign on web and TV featuring three semi-adorable fuzzy bears created by Brown Bag Films. Bears which, er, bear more than a passing resemblance to those previously created by Matt Clark and Matt Everitt (two friends of my housemate Ian) which were used in animations for Ricky Gervais’s site.

For the sake of comparison, in the stills below, the bears created by the two Matts are top and the ones from the Lotto ads bottom.

Oh and here’s a page from the wonderfully named youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com with videos just in case there was any doubt left that the Lotto ads were fairly directly inspired by the Matts’ work.

Some of the people on creativeireland.com noticed the resemblance too, and the ensuing discussion brought up the following:

I know two other post houses that pitched on it, the bears were a definite reference as part of the brief but no one wanted to directly rip them off. Any time different character designs were presented though, they kept being brought back to the bear designs by the agency

This really does look like the most blatant ripping off of someone else’s work. The two Matts seem to be taking it rather better than I would, but I hope they end up getting more out of it than sympathy.

In a way, this kind of stupidity is almost endearing. Here’s George W. Bush being interviewed on ‘60 Minutes’:

PELLEY: Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?

BUSH: That we didn’t do a better job or they didn’t do a better job?

For anyone who didn’t see Ricky Gervais meeting Garry Shandling, some brief highlights …

Much less brief highlights, but with more time to savour Ricky’s acute discomfort, are here.

From The Office, Christmas episode 2006

Another reason to love YouTube: whole episodes of Samurai Jack! I’ve just watched number 48, Jack vs Aku, in three parts here, here and here. It’s great stuff, mostly because it features a lot of Aku, who as a Shape-Shifting Master of Darkness naturally has all the best lines.

Aku was brilliantly voiced by the great Mako Iwamatsu, who sadly died this July, though not - you’ll be relieved to hear - before recording the dialogue for his role as Splinter in the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. Yes.

Ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and several of his henchmen have been sentenced to hang for the revenge killing of 148 Iraqis in 1982, which they committed after an assassination attempt on the dictator’s life.

This sends a strong message to Iraqis, currenly locked in a bloody cycle of revenge killings, that revenge killings are no longer acceptable and will be avenged with more revenge killings.

Meanwhile (my favourite phrase right now), this documentary on Channel 4 on Tuesday night called The Death Squads claims that a minister in the current, er, democratic Iraqi government is behind the recruitment into the police the death squads which are going around beheading hundreds of people every week as well as torturing people to death with electric drills.

Horray!

My second favourite phrase right now: “Celebratory gunfire”.

Steve Irwin has died:

‘Crocodile Hunter’ Irwin killed

Australian environmentalist and television personality Steve Irwin has died during a diving accident.

Mr Irwin, 44, was killed by a stingray barb to the chest while he was filming an underwater documentary in Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.

Paramedics from the nearby city of Cairns rushed to treat him at the scene but were unable to save him.

Mr Irwin was known for his television show The Crocodile Hunter and his work with native Australian wildlife.

Police in Queensland confirmed the naturalist’s death and said his family had been notified. Mr Irwin was married with two young children.

“It is believed that Mr Irwin collapsed after being stung by a stingray at Batt Reef off Port Douglas at about 1100 (0100 GMT),” a police statement quoted by AFP news agency said.

“His crew called for medical treatment and the Queensland medical helicopter responded. However Mr Irwin had died.”

The stingray is a flat, triangular-shaped fish, commonly found in tropical waters.

It gets its name from the razor-sharp barb at the end of its tail, coated in toxic venom, which the animal uses to defend itself with when it feels threatened.

Although deadly, such attacks on humans are a rarity. David Penberthy, editor of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, told the BBC he had never heard of anyone in Australia being killed by a stingray before.

“You know we still at this early stage don’t know what type of stingray it was, or, you know I guess given the bloke’s track record, whether he was getting up close and personal with it as well,” Mr Penberty said.

Maybe he jammed his thumb somewhere he shouldn’t have? Poor Steve, he was a lot of fun while he lasted.