Music Video of the Week: Portishead

This week's Music Video of the Week is Only You by Portishead. Portishead are a real rarity these days - a totally original band, seemingly sprung from nowhere. It's rare that you cannot hear the influences of a band, but this is one group that seems free of association.

This is a great video, and was shot underwater, giving it the odd slow motion effect. Amazing.

Hey, Great Signage!

I Love Movie Titles

I love movie titles. Here's a couple great ones.

More Welles Genius

I've always been a huge fan of Orson Welles. I mean come on, Citizen Kane? It isn't my favorite film of all time (that would be The Godfather, Pt. II), but I can fully understand when people select it as the greatest film ever made. It so far ahead of it's time it's silly - they didn't even begin to catch up to what he was doing until the 1970's, and it was made in 1941!

Basically everything I have seen him direct is stunning. I watched his spectacular opus Lady From Shanghai and Touch Of Evil on the big screen in my Classics of Film Noir class at Central Michigan University (which was a great class by the way, where we also watched the great Double Indemnity with Fred McMurray). I was also fortunate enough to have screened The Magnificent Ambersons on the big screen as well at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in my History of the Hollywood Film Score course. At various points I've caught Macbeth and Journey Into Fear also.

So it was a real treat to see the restored version of his 1962 adaptation of (the aforementioned) Franz Kafka's The Trial. The film features (the very, very underrated and unfairly typecast) Anthony Perkins as Josef K. A man caught in a nightmare as he is convicted of a crime he does not understand. Welles himself stars as the advocate to Josef K. It's a brilliant film from start to finish, one long high contrast, three point perspective visual extravaganza. The film is extremely Kubrick-esque, full of mid-level shots and long hallways of repeated lines. Man, it is a treat for the eyes for any movie buff. Superb.

Penguin Cover Design Does It Again

OK, I love these in every conceivable way. They are beautiful, obscure, and feature excellent hand type. And you really can't go wrong with Kafka. Fin.

You Know Who Rules?

Yep, still Brando, that's who.

Camus and These Covers Are Awesome

When I was an angry young man studying literature at the University of Cambridge, I would walk the ancient streets late at night, with my discman (yep, I'm that old) turned up to 10, playing A Design For Life by the Manic Street Preachers over and over and over. There was a particular night there, and I don't know exactly why, but I lost something. I've never been able to really describe or understand it, but I lost some strange innocence about myself. I seemed to care less, or become just really weary. It was very bizarre feeling that I will never forget.

Anyway, this was my soundtrack at the time, and I kept read The Stranger by Albert Camus. I felt like him, the stranger, lost and anonymous in a world I didn't totally understand. I had read that book several years earlier, but it was then, in that place that I felt a greater understanding of it. I drifted up to Scotland on a train on my own, walked another city streets, silent and alone, taking it all in. These were very formative experiences for me

Anyway, these great book covers have been released for several Camus novels. They are kinetic and high contrast, which are a couple of aesthetic aspects I enjoy.