January 31, 2011
Ennio [en-yo] Morricone [mor-ee-cone-ay] (b. 1928) is an Italian composer and conductor, considered one of the most prolific and influential film composers of his era. He is well-known for his long-term collaborations with international acclaimed directors such as Sergio Leone, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, and Giuseppe Tornatore.
He wrote the characteristic film scores of Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). In the 80s, Morricone composed the scores for John Carpenter’s horror movie The Thing (1982), Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1986), Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
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January 31, 2011
Spaghetti Western, also known as Italo-western, is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western film that emerged in the mid-1960s, so named because most were produced and directed by Italians. The typical team was made up of an Italian director, Italo-Spanish technical staff, and a cast of Italian and Spanish actors, sometimes a fading Hollywood star and sometimes a rising one like the young Clint Eastwood in three of Sergio Leone’s films. The films were typically shot in inexpensive locales resembling the American Southwest, primarily the Andalusia region of Spain, Almería, Sardinia, and Abruzzo.
Because of the desert setting and the readily available low-cost southern Spanish or southern Italian extras, typical themes in spaghetti westerns include the Mexican Revolution, Mexican bandits, and the border region shared by Mexico and the United States. Originally, spaghetti westerns were characterized by their production in the Italian language, low budgets, and a recognizable highly fluid and minimalist cinematography which eschewed many of the conventions of earlier Westerns. This was partly intentional and partly the context of a different cultural background.
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January 29, 2011
Duck Sauce is an American-Canadian DJ duo consisting of Armand Van Helden and A-Trak. The duo are signed to Fool’s Gold Records.
In the summer of 2010, Duck Sauce released a track ‘Barbra Streisand,’ named for the singer of the same name. The track heavily samples Gotta Go Home by Boney M, which is based upon the original tune Hallo Bimmelbahn by the German band Nighttrain.
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January 29, 2011
The Valknut (Old Norse for ‘slain warriors knot’) is a symbol consisting of three interlocked triangles, and appears on various Germanic objects. A number of theories have been proposed for its significance. The name is an unattested modern invention used to describe the symbol, and was not used contemporaneously when the symbol was used. The Valknut has been compared to the three-horned symbol found on the 9th century Snoldelev runestone and may be related to it.
The symbol plays a role in modern Germanic Neopagan faiths, where numerous explanations and interpretations of the symbol are given. The Swedish paper manufacturer Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget uses a triquetra Valknut as their logo. The symbol has also been used by a number of neo-Nazi groups. It is also represented in the Deutscher Fußball-Bund logo for the Germany national football team.
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January 26, 2011
The Shard is an 87-story skyscraper in London that forms part of the London Bridge Quarter development. The Shard’s construction began in 2009 and finished in late 2012. Standing approximately 306 metrs (1,004 ft) high, it is currently the tallest building in the European Union. It is the second-tallest freestanding structure in the UK, after the concrete tower at the Emley Moor transmitting station.
It was designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, and replaced Southwark Towers, a 24-story office block built on the site in Southwark in 1975. The Shard was developed by Sellar Property on behalf of LBQ Ltd, and is jointly owned by Sellar Property and the State of Qatar.
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January 26, 2011
Henry Charles Bukowski (1920 – 1994) was a German-American poet, novelist and short story writer.
His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually having over 60 books in print. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife.’
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January 26, 2011
Henry Charles ‘Hank’ Chinaski is a semi-autobiographical protagonist of several works by the American writer Charles Bukowski. He appears in five of Bukowski’s novels, a number of his short stories and poems, the 1987 film ‘Barfly’ (played by Mickey Rourke and featuring a script written by Bukowski), and the 2005 film ‘Factotum’ (portrayed by Matt Dillon).
The works featuring him are ‘Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live With the Beasts’ (1965), ‘Post Office’ (1971), ‘South of No North’ (1973), ‘Factotum’ (1975), ‘Women’ (1978), ‘Ham on Rye’ (1982), ‘Hot Water Music’ (1983), ‘Hollywood’ (1989), and ‘Septuagenarian Stew’ (1990). He is also mentioned briefly in the beginning of Bukowski’s last novel, ‘Pulp.’
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January 26, 2011
The Ouroboros [or-oh-bohr-ohs] is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, which often represents self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things perceived as cycles that begin anew as soon as they end (compare with phoenix). It can also represent the idea of primordial unity related to something existing in or persisting before any beginning with such force or qualities it cannot be extinguished.
The ouroboros has been important in religious and mythological symbolism, but has also been frequently used in alchemical illustrations, where it symbolizes the circular nature of the alchemist’s opus. It is also often associated with Gnosticism, and Hermeticism. The earliest known representation of the Ouroboros is contained in the Egyptian Book of the Netherworld. The self-begetting sun god Atum is said to have ascended from chaos-waters with the appearance of a snake, the animal renewing itself every morning, and the deceased wishes to turn into the shape of the snake Sato (‘son of the earth’), the embodiment of Atum.
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January 25, 2011
An upturned collar (or popped collar) is an otherwise flat, protruding collar of either a shirt, jacket, or coat that has been turned upward. Before the early 20th century, most shirt collars were turned up in some manner. Men and women alike wore tall, stiff collars (as much as three inches tall), not unlike a taller version of a clerical collar, made either of starched linen, cotton, or lace. The writer H. G. Wells remarked in his 1902 book ‘Kipps’ that these ‘made [the] neck quite sore and left a red mark under [the] ears.’
Between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, men’s collars were often detachable from their shirts, connected only by two removable collar studs (one in front and one in back). Detachable collars were very stiff, and either stood straight up (Hamilton collar) or were pressed over at an ironed-in, starched crease (Fremont collar). After WWII, mass-production gradually phased out detachable collars from ordinary dress shirts. Occasionally, one can still find detachable collar formal shirts, designed to be worn with a tuxedo or evening dress.
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January 25, 2011
‘Ambient 1: Music for Airports‘ is an ambient album by Brian Eno released in 1978. Of four albums released on Eno’s own, then new, Ambient label, ‘Music for Airports’ was the first to carry explicitly the name ‘ambient’ – a term which he coined to differentiate his minimalistic approach to the album’s material and ‘the products of the various purveyors of canned music.’ Notice of similarly quiet, unobtrusive music had been given on his albums such as ‘Evening Star,’ ‘Discreet Music,’ ‘Music for Films,’ and Harold Budd’s ‘The Pavilion of Dreams’ (which Eno produced), but in this album it was given precedence as a fully developed concept.
The music was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent to defuse the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal. Eno conceived this idea while being stuck at Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany in the mid 70s. He had to spend several hours there and was extremely annoyed by the uninspired sound atmosphere. It was installed at the Marine Air Terminal of New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
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January 24, 2011
A keytar is a relatively lightweight keyboard that is supported by a strap around the neck and shoulders, similar to the way a guitar is supported by a strap. Keytars allow players a greater range of movement compared to conventional keyboards, which are placed on stands. The instrument has a musical keyboard for triggering musical notes and sounds. Controls for pitch bends, vibrato, portamento, and sustain are placed on the instrument’s ‘neck.’ Keytars may either contain their own synthesizers, or simply be controllers, triggering notes on another MIDI capable synthesizer.
In early 1970s, Edgar Winter often performed with keyboards slung around his neck, but they were not technically keytars because they had no ‘neck.’ One of the earliest keytars commercially released and widely known was be the Moog Liberation in 1980. Notable manufacturers of keytar models have included Moog, Roland, Yamaha, Korg and Casio. As of 2010, the Roland AX-Synth and the Roland Lucina are the only mass-manufactured keytars on the market, but with the Synthpop revival of the late 2000s, keytars are enjoying a mild resurgence.
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January 24, 2011
Electro (short for either electro-funk or electro-boogie) is a genre of electronic music directly influenced by the use of funk samples, Roland TR-808 synthesizers, and Moog keytars. Records in the genre typically feature drum machines and heavy electronic sounding deprived of vocals in general, although if present, they are delivered in a deadpan manner, often through an electronic distortion such as vocoding.
This is the main distinction of electro from previously prominent late-1970s genres such as disco and boogie, in which electronic sound was only part of the instrumentation rather than basis of the whole song. In 1982, Bronx based producer Afrika Bambaataa released the seminal track ‘Planet Rock,’ which contained elements of Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express and ‘Numbers’ (from Kraftwerk’s Computer World album). ‘Planet Rock’ is widely regarded as a turning point in the electro genre.
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