The Shopper Who Came In From The Cold

This morning i walked to Sittingbourne to collect a recording device dongle from one of my research companies  to do a covert shop next week at my bank, That is all i did today.

I am going to test the audio recording dongle , which looks like a memory stick on a key fob, before i do my visit next week. Smacks of international espionage with such devices and claasic spy films,

Dr Who News

Steven Moffat quits Doctor Who.

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-01-22/doctor-who-showrunner-steven-moffat-quits-to-be-replaced-by-broadchurch-creator-chris-chibnall

Saturday Music Selection - Soundtrack Music

The musical selection today is all about film soundtracks ,as this was another genre that the Wire magazine alerted me too so many years ago now.

So for starters, latest suite from the Star Wars franchise (thanks to elisi ) -

Rey Medley - Star Wars The Force Awakens Soundtrack Suite

( More soundtrack music here )

The Most Taught Books

The Open Syllabus Project Gathers 1,000,000 Syllabi from Universities & Reveals the 100 Most Frequently-Taught Books/

http://www.openculture.com/2016/01/the-open-syllabus-project-gathers-1000000-syllabi-from-universities.html

Lady Lazarus, a film spoken by Sylvia Plath

An experimental film based on the poet Sylvia Plath

Fifty years after the death of Sylvia Plath, we present Lady Lazarus, a film made by Sandra Lahire in 1991 using footage of the poet reading her own work as well as an interview she gave in 1962. With excerpts from poems recorded in 1957 and 1958 including Ouija, Cut, Daddy, Lady Lazarus and Ariel, Lahire's 24-minute film creates a dreamlike series of images that evoke the elemental world of Plath's poetry.

Quest

Short 30 min. film based on a Ray Bradbury story.

Saul Bass was one of the greatest graphic designers who ever lived. He revolutionized the art of movie titles in such films as The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo and West Side Story. He may or may not have designed the famous shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. His design work was always marked by a clean, highly graphic style that you can pick out a mile away.

Yet when Bass got a chance to actually direct, he didn’t make slick movies with simple plots and great visuals, as you might expect. Instead, he made profoundly trippy movies with great visuals. His one and only feature film, Phase IV (1974), is a deeply weird movie about evolution. Think of it as a low-budget 2001: A Space Odyssey. With ants. The movie was butchered by scared distributors and consequently, it bombed at the box office. Almost a decade later, Bass, along with his second wife Elaine, made a short film called Quest, based on Ray Bradbury’s story “Frost and Fire.” You can watch it above.

The film centers on a tribe of robe-sporting people who live for only a mere eight days. If you’re an infant on a Monday, you will be elderly by the time the next Monday rolls around. At the opening, a nameless child is born as his elders ask in hushed tones, “Is this the one?” Of course he is. The reason he and his tribe have a shorter shelf life than grocery store sushi has something to do with a gate that blocks life sustaining light. “Beyond the great gate,” intones one elder, “people live 20,000 days or more.” The problem is that gate is five or so days away by foot.

So after a very brief training montage, the youth sets off across strange and fanciful landscapes that recall Yes album covers. Along the way, he faces down a beast that looks like a bear crossed with a lamprey, plays a video game with a Yeti on top of a ziggurat, and stumbles across a wizened old man who only the previous week was the tribe’s golden boy.

The movie is incredibly, hilariously dated, so much so that it goes right past kitsch into something close to sublime.