This song is really swinging. It was just shown to me, and I love it. Plus it’s about the sexiness of someone that smokes, and it’s true, there’s something very sexy about smokers. Sorry this video gets kinda screwy, and the sound sort of sucks. If I find a good mp3, I’ll post it soon.

Mina -Taratata

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Translation:

Con me tu puoi - with me you can
Fumare la tua pipa quando vuoi - smoke your pipe when you like
Perchè mi piaci molto di più - because I like you much more
E sei così romantico - and you are so romantic

Fumo blu, fumo blu - blue smoke, blue smoke
Una nuvola e dentro tu - a cloud an you inside
E poi, e poi se un uomo sa di fumo - and besides, and besides if a man smells of smoke
Ma sì ma sì è veramente un uomo - yes, yes, he is really a man
E ti amerò finchè vorrai - and I’ll love you untill you will want
proprio perchè sei così - exactly because you are like this

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For having worked sound, edited film and/or written original music for each of John Cassavetes’ masterpieces, it doesn’t peeve me so much that Bo Harwood wallows in obscurity as much as the fact that any information or music by the guy is so goddamn hard to find. Even the horror (not by Cassavetes) flick, Happy Birthday to Me, was stripped of Harwood’s soundtrack for VHS release. But both he and Cassavetes operated so far out of the mainstream, I really shouldn’t wonder…

The opening piano theme for Woman Under the Influence? Written and played by Harwood in Cassavetes’ office, having never played a piano prior to Cassavetes’ insistence. The background radio tune during the stripper’s audition in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie? Sung and written by Harwood. The operatic pieces in Love Streams? Harwood. And that old standard “Almost in Love with You”? Actually co-written by Cassavetes and Harwood and sung by jazz trumpeter, Jack Sheldon.

Bo Harwood - Almost In Love with You

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I stopped to look at the Moon last night, and guess what? There was no laser beam advertising on the face of the Moon. It was a hoax, and that seemed obvious. Rolling Rock (of all beers) claimed they were going to use laser beams to advertise on the Moon, and they created a (shitty) website for it (www.moonvertising.com) to gather interest, but even though it didn’t work, or couldn’t work, I was still hoping they would’ve tried. I mean, C’MON!

I’ve always hated Rolling Rock, they’re one step above Mickey’s Malt Liquor in way of taste, and I’ll bet it makes more sick for some reason. And now that they’re using false advertising to draw public attention, I hate their shitty beer even more. In fact, when I didn’t see the laser ad on the Moon, I came inside and opened a Labatt Blue out of spite, and that’s a shitty beer I’ll get behind.

But I guess as the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, can’t get fooled again”.

I wish Hillary Clinton would claim she’s going to advertise on the Moon…

Anyway, the website Bad Astronomy is around to tell us why the whole Moonvertising hoax should have been obvious.

Moondog - Enough About Human Rights!

Turn your Guitar Hero guitar into a midi controller, read how at Slapyak.

This was on Gizmodo yesterday, and I’m actually surprised that someone didn’t come out with this, like, right after Guitar Hero became sought after enough for bars across the country to start having Guitar Hero nights. I’m sure I’m not the only one that thought about this long ago. I would have made one, but you know… I’ve got no idea how to do that shit. BTW, is anyone impressed with watching people at bars do this? Its worse than that time I saw M83 play the Triple Rock Social Club.

M83 - Kim & Jessie

It’s a no-brainer. Obviously people want to rock out like they play guitar, but they don’t want to invest the years it takes to get any good at playing the damn thing, so why not turn the thing people are good at (i.e. a video game controller that looks like a guitar) into something they already pretend it to be (i.e. a real working instrument)?

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“He’s Just a Cub”

I first found out what Bears were about 5 years ago when I was working at a coffee shop in Southwest Minneapolis. Every Wednesday evening something like 30 or 40 husky men with beards would show up, order themselves some 20 oz. blended frappés, then hang out and give back rubs. All of them were super nice guys, and good tippers, so everyone at the coffee shop loved working on “Bear Night”.

Some of the regular non-Bear customers would swing through on Wednesdays and sort of freak out from what they were seeing. I remember one concerned regular asking me “what is going on here?” to which i replied, “What are you talking about? You mean all these big bearded guys drinking coffee? I think you can figure it out.”

I mean, it’s sort of weird or funny because we live in a world that views fat hairy guys as something undesirable, but there are so many of them (especially in the U.S.) that it only makes sense for there to be a fetish based around it.

Whenever I was scheduled for one of the Bear nights, I would make sure not to shave, and I’d throw on my old Cubs hat, just hoping that some of the guys might find it “cute” or something, and throw me a $20 tip. It worked, but I’m pretty sure those dudes knew I was just playing with them, at least that’s what I assume since I never felt like any of them ever hit on me.

Anyway, aside from working at the coffee shop, I have also come in contact with a number of Bears (or maybe just men with Beard fetishes) through starting up a Flickr account and adding pictures of myself growing out my beard. I was in a 5 month long beard growing contest with a co-worker, so I thought I should post pictures of development. And even though it wasn’t my intention, I started getting all these comments from guys with beard fan screen names, and once I realized what was going on, it sorta took away my picture posting innocence. After that, I would post just a regular picture of myself with just a little scruff and guys would leave comments like, “ohh, I hope this is the start of something good!”. I pretty much gave up on Flickr after that.

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For someone my age to get a really good idea of what Joy Division was really like, I think it’s best to check out some of the groups live recordings. Because of their song “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, Joy Division has got grouped in with the pasty faced goth kids hanging out in graveyards, and all that darkness bullshit. Imagine if Nirvana was remembered as a pithy goth act just because Kurt got depressed a lot and ended up killing himself. It just isn’t right. And like Nirvana, it’s in Joy Division’s live shows that we see how raw and raging they were.

There is a really awesome live Joy Division recording called Les Bains Douches 18 December 1979, which has been out of print for a little while and sells for a lot. Well, I guess we’ll see how much it sells for, since I just added one to eBay yesterday. Check the auction here.

Here are a couple songs off that recording.

Joy Division - Disorder

Joy Division - Transmission

With HD TV and radio rolling out up everyone’s wazoo, we’ll soon be missin’ the soothing sounds of white noise and visual arty-facting with TV antenna “snow” and other interference. This week, I’m trying to track down some info and clips on Bo Harwood, composer and sound engineer for later John Cassavettes films and numerous TV shows. So in the meantime check out this nifty and totally accidental VCR edit that was made while I was flipping channels and watching a hilarious episode of “Green Acres.” And yes I always record myself channel surfing.

I sat in as a guest DJ at the Kinda Cloudy Radio show on KFAI here in Minneapolis. We played a nice selection of soul, jazz and funk. It was my second time doing it, and I’m getting a little more comfortable with being in the studio with all the controls, which is nice. It’s a little weird talking into the microphone when you didn’t have a speech prepaired, but this week I was ready, a little. You can stream the entire show at the shows website www.kfai.org/node/3921

Nagra, is Polish for “[he/she/it] will record.” It’s also the name of a series of well-known tape recorders which were the standard in sync-sound recording from the 1960s till the 1990s. Hence, a series of posts on music and sound in film.

The Amphibian Man, a well-known Russian sci-fi novel published in 1928, was brought to film in 1962, directed by Vladimir Chebotaryov, and quickly became one of the most beloved movies in the USSR. If you were lucky enough, last year, Seagull films had a number of old Soviet sci-fi 35mm prints travelling around U.S. cinematheques. In the film, a young man named Ichtyander has a set of shark gills grafted on by his maverick-surgeon father to cure a pediatric lung disease. As with many Soviet and Soviet-satellite-states-era films, the suggestions and allegories are under layers and layers of censorship and state-controlled cinema. Suffice it to say, there is a “greedy” fish merchant, who won’t give fish to the poor, and the surgeon/scientist tries to create an underworld Utopia.

Shot in fellow communist Cuba, and a product of the late ’50s and early ’60s Eastern European pop-culture thaw, the movie is packed with gorgeous underwater footage, Latin song & dance numbers, Russian actors in brownface, and an eerily Arian-featured Ichtyander. The first song and the musical theme of the movie - “The Sea Devil” - became a hit that was sung well into the 90s, as we’ll soon see…

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