A short documentary that tells “the shocking but false story of America’s blackstronauts”:

In their quest for newsstand “pop,” many magazines design their covers in such a way that the logotype is almost an afterthought. Titles of magazines are often partly blotted out by celebrity heads, torsos, hair, and other body parts. This April 2005 cover of Parents magazine demonstrates the perils of this design technique:

(Note that I never said this was the real cover. You can find a lot more of my designs via the magazine covers tag.)

(Inspired partly by a brief moment in a recent episode of Arrested Development involving Buster and an alarm clock.)

UPDATE, June 2005: This cover escaped from its moorings several weeks ago and has traveled all over the net, creating a small urban legend in the process. See this June 14 post for the story of how Snopes.com stepped in to debunk it.

This weekend I had to go to The Container Store in Chelsea to return something, and it reminded me of my favorite thing about that establishment: The store itself is a container for all the containers. Not only that: The building contains the store.

Did I just blow your mind?

I had no idea that a Rutles sequel just came out on DVD. The Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch is apparently a blatant cash-in that was assembled from recycled old footage and recent mock interviews with Robin Williams, Conan O’Brien, and other celebrities. The reviews on the Amazon page are uniformly scathing. Those reviews serve as a slight corrective to the raves Eric Idle’s been getting for Spamalot.

I just discovered that most of the text of Steve Martin’s out-of-print 1979 book Cruel Shoes is posted on The Compleat Steve, a Steve Martin fansite. I’ve owned a tattered hardcover of this book since the mid-’80s, when, much like these guys, I was an adolescent Steve Martin fanatic.

The book was given to me by a fellow Martin fan named Liz. She apparently had a crush on me, because here is how she inscribed the book:

Hey Andrew!
You sexy guy. You look marvelous. See ya next year. Have fun with Angie in yr.book. Liz

Cruel Shoes is a collection of short absurdist bits with titles like “Women Without Bones,” “How to Fold Soup,” “What to Say When the Dogs Show Up,” and “The Gift of the Magi Indian Giver.” None of the pieces is more than a few hundred words long. A handful of the chapters, including the title piece, originated with Martin’s standup act; others originally appeared in Playboy and other magazines. I think the book has been out of print since the early ’80s. You can find used copies on Amazon.

“She Had the Jugs” is the sort of piece that made me cackle with glee when I was about 14 or 15. Here it is, in its entirety:

SHE HAD THE JUGS

Yes, she was witty; she was intelligent. She was born of high station. She spoke and walked proudly. She was the kind who displayed nobility, who showed style and class. But above all, she had the jugs.

Many people called her by her last name; some closer friends had a confidence with her and shared the intimacy of her first name. But to me, she was always “Lady jugs a-plenty.”

It is true. She was clever and she was charming, but above all, she had the jugs.

The guy who maintains The Compleat Steve also maintains a blog where he posts news articles about Martin.

I hardly know what to say about this, except that it’s bizarre and twisted and hilarious: House of Cosbys, an animated Internet series about a guy who clones Bill Cosby a bunch of times and then lives with the clones in a huge house.

There are two episodes so far (here’s the first and here’s the second). A third is on the way.

Simon Extreme, a free download for Mac OS X, is “a reinterpretation of the classic 1978 Milton Bradley game Simon, complete with authentic gameplay and sound samples from the original game.”

[Via Unbeige.]

Last night I went to P.S. 122 in the East Village to see All Stories Are Fiction, my friend Mike Daisey’s latest series of monologues. The show was FANTASTIC. He’s one hell of a talented storyteller. Here is a description of the format Mike is using for these shows:

Last spring monologuist Mike Daisey created 13 new shows in 13 weeks in a daring new series at P.S. 122 called All Stories Are Fiction. Plucking from events that befell him in the years, days, and sometimes minutes before he walked onstage, Daisey weaved together brand-new shows, creating one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-seen-again monologues before the eyes of the audience each and every time.

Now the creator of 21 Dog Years and the monologuist The New York Times has dubbed “the master storyteller” and The Seattle Times calls “a cross between Noam Chomsky and Jack Black” is back at P.S. 122, this time taking aim at nothing less than happiness itself.

The rules are deceptively simple: 45 minutes before show time, Mike goes into his dressing room with a legal pad and a Sharpie and creates an outline. At 7:30 sharp, Mike emerges and tells his tale for the assembled audience for the first and only time. Over two months these monologues will address the essential question of happiness: what role does it play—or should it play—in our lives?

Mike’s doing a new show at 7:30 p.m. every Monday through May 9. I will definitely be going back for more. Tickets and other details are here.

Mike also has a blog.

Children of the 1970s who read this site: Did any of you make plates like this in art class? You drew a picture on a circular piece of opaque paper, and then your parents or your teacher sent the drawing off to a company that pressed the drawing into a plastic plate. A week or two after you sent off the drawing, the plate arrived in the mail. I ate off this plate every night for years:

To help the art historians who, decades from now, will be devoting themselves to analyzing the history and motivations behind my artistic output, I will record some background about this drawing—no, this “sculptured culinary tool.” I created this piece in 1976, when I was a seven-year-old kindergarten student. I was still flush with excitement from my recent trip to Australia with my family. There is a boastful, almost preening quality to this piece, as if I am trying to say, “Hey, look at me! I just went to AUSTRALIA! On a AIRPLANE!!!!!” Less-forgiving critics might use the words “sloppy” and “unrealistic” to describe, respectively, the colored line work and the questionable deployment of perspective; I prefer the terms “kinetic” and “imaginative.” Yes, it’s true, one could argue that my placement of my signature in the CENTER of the piece betrays some sort of narcissistic personality disorder, but I would argue that I was merely trying to save people from having to spend time figuring out who created the work. Why not be up front about it? I have never been one for willful obscurity, and this is evident even in my earliest works.

Careful observers will notice that the top instance of “TWA” is spelled backwards. When I was working on this piece, I was so cocky about my ability to write upside down that I didn’t bother to sketch the letters in pencil before finalizing them with magic marker. By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. This error will surely increase the potential value of this unusual, one-of-a-kind work of art.

UPDATE: Apologies to future historians: I may have given the wrong date for this work. It seems that I must have created it in 1975, or possibly even 1974. I think it was 1975. My college friend Peter, who is the same age as I am, wrote to offer this observation: “Seven-year-old Kindergarten student? Was that some Indiana thing? You date the plate to 1976. Personally, in the 1975-76 school year, I was in the first grade, and in the 1976-77 year, the second grade. Art historians and Hearst-ologists may be trying to clear up the date/grade correspondence for years to come.”

UPDATE II: Wait! Check this out! We have confirmation! In my files I found a notebook I kept during my Australia trip. This notebook proves that the Australia trip took place in February 1975, the month I turned six. The handwriting appears to be my mother’s, not mine. She must have served as the transcriptionist for my muse:

I can now say with great confidence that I created The TWA Plate sometime in March or April of 1975, soon after I turned six.

The Found Footage Festival is taking over Galapagos in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this Friday evening, March 25. I’m going to do my best to make it out there, because these guys clearly have some gems in their collection. Here’s the description posted on the Galapagos site:

The Found Footage Festival is a one-of-a-kind event that compiles over an hour’s worth of footage from videotapes that were found at garage sales and thrift stores, and in warehouses and trash bins throughout the country. … From the curiously produced industrial training video to the forsaken home movie donated to Goodwill, the Found Footage Festival resurrects these forgotten treasures and serves them up in a lively 90-minute celebration of all things found.

Among the new clips to be featured in the March 25th show:
-A preview for a VCR game about robots
-Homemade music videos by a middle-aged suburban woman from Illinois
-Outtakes from a pet-of-the-week segment on a local newscast
-A self-important video diary by one-time teen heartthrob Corey Haim

The FFF’s website has a five- or six-minute video preview of the sorts of things they’ll be showing. The preview contains a short excerpt from the Citizen Kane of underground video: the so-called Winnebago Man tape. Dating back to roughly the late ’80s or early ’90s, the Winnebago Man tape is an assemblage of outtakes from a promotional film for recreational vehicles. The host is having a really, really bad day, and every time he blows a line, which happens often, he lets loose with a stream of curses in his mellifluous, radio-ready voice. The amazingness of the Winnebago Man tape can’t really be captured in a brief excerpt—the sheer avalanche of invective is what makes it great. A fairly good copy of the entire video can be found here.

My very smart pal Peter Dizikes has a fine piece in The Boston Globe’s Ideas section about the way that popular representations of Albert Einstein—“the detached, elderly professor with unruly white hair, a lined face, sloping shoulders, and a contemplative gaze, occasionally given to bemusement”—have obscured the world-historical importance of the scientific work he did when he was younger:

Einstein’s has become the all-purpose face of genius. ”Like a logo,” says Peter L. Galison, a historian of science at Harvard and author of ”Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps” (2003). Used this way, adds Galison, ”Einstein is voided of any meaning at all. He’s just smart or wise.” A recent ESPN.com article wondering if New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick could be considered a genius featured photos of two people: Belichick and Einstein.

This iconography, though it may seem harmless enough, obscures the Einstein who actually revolutionized physics. In this, the 100th anniversary of the year Einstein announced his Special Theory of Relativity, the disparity between the aging celebrity scientist and the formidable young figure upending our conception of the universe seems especially jarring. In 1905, Einstein was an intense, even feisty young man of 26 with many worldly concerns, including a wife and a job. He had dark hair and a solid build. ”A massive body, very heavily muscled,” the English writer and physicist C.P. Snow noted years later.

Super cool: Someone has written an applet that searches Amazon and then, using cover graphics found in the search, slowly builds an image spelling out the word or words you just searched for. I used Kenzaburo Oe’s last name because it was the first one I thought of with only two letters:

When you’re on the site, you can zoom in on a cover by clicking on it. Clicking on it a second time takes you to the appropriate Amazon page.

[Via a friend on Echo.]

From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Yelling “Freebird!” has been a rock cliché for years, guaranteed to elicit laughs from drunks and scorn from music fans who have long since tired of the joke. And it has spread beyond music, prompting the Chicago White Sox organist to add the song to her repertoire and inspiring a greeting card in which a drunk holding a lighter hollers “Freebird!” at wedding musicians. …

Kevin Matthews is a Chicago radio personality who has exhorted his fans — the KevHeads — to yell “Freebird” for years, and claims to have originated the tradition in the late 1980s, when he says he hit upon it as a way to torment Florence Henderson of “Brady Bunch” fame, who was giving a concert. He figured somebody should yell something at her “to break up the monotony.” The longtime Skynyrd fan settled on “Freebird,” saying the epic song “just popped into my head.”

Mr. Matthews says the call was heeded, inspiring him to go down the listings of coming area shows, looking for entertainers who deserved a “Freebird” and encouraging the KevHeads to make it happen.

But he bemoans the decline of “Freebird” etiquette. “It was never meant to be yelled at a cool concert — it was meant to be yelled at someone really lame,” he says. “If you’re going to yell ‘Freebird,’ yell ‘Freebird’ at a Jim Nabors concert.”

But the origins are much older and more complicated than that.

Hey, check it out, a new magazine:

I did this one in Quark.

(See more stuff like this via the magazine covers tag.)

A few belated follow-ups to last week’s post about 5-25-77, the upcoming low-budget movie starring John Francis Daley (late of Freaks and Geeks) as a fanatical Star Wars fan in 1977:

First, my pal Rob was quick to inform me that it isn’t Martin Starr in the pre-production teaser—it’s Chris Owen, who’s best known for playing the Shermanator in American Pie. Owen really does look a lot like Martin Starr in that teaser, I have to say.

Second, I got a couple of nice emails from 5-25-77’s writer/director, Patrick Read Johnson. Based mainly on what I saw in the teaser, I wrote in my post that the movie is “apparently a Scary Movie-style spoof of ’70s culture.” Johnson made some clarifications:

The film, now in post-production, is actually NOT a spoof… We don’t focus on Smiley Face t-shirts or Earth Shoes. It’s not in the LEAST self-conscious in that sense (the teaser IS—) And though much of it is pretty damn funny (or so people are telling us) it’s not really even a comedy. It’s more like… American Graffiti in the months leading up to the release of the original Star Wars. Yet it’s not really ABOUT Star Wars… or Star Wars fandom, either, for that matter.

He also told me that among the many cameos in the film is one by Mark Borchardt, the subject of one of the best documentaries ever—no, one of the best FILMS ever: American Movie. Borchardt apparently has a small role as the manager of a movie theater.

Third, I discovered an extended interview with Johnson that makes it clear that 5-25-77 is at least partly autobiographical. When he was a movie-obsessed teenager growing up in Illinois, Johnson visited Los Angeles and got to hang out with Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters, among other adventures.

Some excellent guy has written a script that parses the Daily Show archive on the Comedy Central site and “renders it in a faster-loading multipage format, providing links to open each clip, without ads, in the user’s choice of external, resizable media player window.” There are more than 600 clips in the archive.

It filled me with glee to discover that one of my all-time favorite Daily Show clips is in there: a segment from eight or ten months ago where Stephen Colbert started laughing so hard that the show ground to a halt for several seconds—the only time I’ve ever seen that happen (and thanks to TiVo, I’ve only missed a handful of Daily Shows in the last four or five years). Colbert was reporting from “London” about the widespread rumors that Prince Charles may have had sexual experiences with men when he was younger.

[Update, July 2009: I’ve now embedded this clip from Hulu instead.]

[Via Boing Boing.]

This two-minute video curiosity is sophomoric and mean, but it’s also pretty entertaining. In December 1993, Michael Jackson videotaped an anguished public statement addressing the disturbing allegations that were then starting to swirl around him. At some point afterward, someone with access to video editing equipment twisted Jackson’s bizarre statement into an even more bizarre exercise in self-incrimination and self-abasement.

I have no idea who made this or when it was made. As usual, it’s from one of my Media Shower tapes.

(If you want to link to this, please link to this post, not to the file itself. Thanks!)

At the first magazine I ever worked for, the managing editor had a ritual of giving all newly hired interns and fact checkers a copy of a 1988 New Republic article called “Are You Completely Bald?” The three-page piece, by Ari Posner and a young, pre-controversy Richard Blow, is a funny, anecdote-filled overview of the subculture of fact checking at The New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and other elite New York magazines. I’ve never read an article that captures the fact checker’s duties and mindset as well as Posner and Blow’s piece does. The peg for the story seems partly to have been the recent film version of Bright Lights, Big City, whose protagonist was a fact checker played by Michael J. Fox.

After I left that first magazine and eventually began working in jobs where I needed to hire interns and fact checkers myself, I continued the ritual of giving out copies of this article. At one point I inadvertently gave away my last photocopy and had to replace it by xeroxing it off of microfilm at the New York Public Library.

The article doesn’t appear to be on the New Republic website, and I don’t think it’s on Nexis, either. So I’ll post some of it. I’ll leave it to others to comment on the exquisite irony of a few of the sentences here. I’m posting this partly because I think the Michael J. Fox anecdote is hilarious. This is roughly the first 20 percent of the piece.

[The New Republic, September 26, 1988]

ARE YOU COMPLETELY BALD?
Adventures in fact checking.

By Richard Blow and Ari Posner

When Moses climbed Mt. Everest to receive the Eleven Commandments, he didn’t submit them to “fact checkers” before delivering them to the Buddhists waiting below after their 60-year trek through the Mojave Desert. But “fact-checking”—a stage in the editorial process where someone attempts independent confirmation of every “fact” in an author’s manuscript before its publication—is an established and much-cherished institution of American journalism. Or at least some corners of American journalism, primarily magazines. For practical deadline reasons, newspapers don’t have independent “fact checkers,” relying instead on their reporters and editors to get things right. Nor do book publishers usually make any effort to reconfirm the facts in manuscripts they publish. Yet oddly, newspapers and books are the main sources fact checkers use to “check” the facts they approve for publication.

If we sound a bit defensive on this point, it’s because The New Republic has no fact checkers either. This is partly for deadline reasons, partly for financial reasons, and partly because of philosophical doubts about whether devoting limited resources to catching the kinds of things fact checking catches is the best way to serve the larger cause of printing the truth. TNR does make mistakes, often embarrassing ones. A while back, for example, we called the victim of New York’s famous “preppy murder” Jessica Levin, not Jennifer. A few weeks ago we gave one of our own authors a middle initial he does not have.

[Continue reading "“Are You Completely Bald?”"...]

Cityrag reports that the Shake Shack, Danny Meyer’s hot dog and burger kiosk in Madison Square Park, is set to reopen on April 1 after shutting down for the winter. I’ll probably be going there for lunch the first week of April to get myself a couple of the Shack’s remarkable Chicago-style hot dogs and an order of fries.

[photo from Curbed.]

According to Cityrag:

called Danny Meyer’s management company (everyone we spoke to was very helpful) and were directed to a woman in operations. she told us that… the Shake Shack will reopen on Friday, April 1st! for the first month they will only be open for lunch (11-4). then around May 1st they will extend to full hours (which they anticipate being 11-10.) she also told us there won’t be any menu changes right now, just the same great stuff….

The Shake Shack not only has great food, it’s beautiful to look at, too. I’ve become sort of obsessed with Neutraface, the elegant typeface used for the Shake Shack’s metal signage, its menu [PDF], and elsewhere in and around the Shack. Neutraface is retro, it’s modern, it’s gorgeous. It’s also in danger of becoming overexposed: I see it everywhere these days. It was used for onscreen graphics throughout Inside Deep Throat, for example, and it’s also found in House and Garden and lots of other magazines. I love the way the middle line sits below center in the capital E, the capital H, and other letters. Neutraface costs $249 from the designer, House Industries, which is too much for a hobbyist like me to spend on a single typeface. If it were $50, I’d probably plunk down the money.

Following up on the previous post: The official Vegemite site contains lots of weird and interesting stuff, including a gallery of Vegemite print ads dating back to the 1920s and photos of historical Vegemite memorabilia.

The history page gives some background about this weird food:

> Vegemite dates back to 1922 when the Fred Walker Company, which became Kraft Walker Foods in 1926 and Kraft Foods Limited in 1950, hired a young chemist to develop a spread from one of the richest known natural sources of the vitamin B group - Brewers Yeast.

> Following months of laboratory tests, Dr. Cyril P Callister, who became the nation’s leading food technologist of the 1920s and 30s developed a tasty spreadable paste. It came in a two ounce (57g) amber glass jar capped with a Phoenix seal with the label "Pure Vegetable Extract."

> In an imaginative approach, Walker turned to the Australian public to officially name his spread. He conducted a national trade-name competition offering an attractive 50 pound prize pool for the finalists. How the 50 pounds was distributed or who was the winning contestant has unfortunately been lost in history, but it was Walker's daughter who chose the winning name out of the hundreds of entries.

> That winning name was Vegemite and in 1923 Vegemite first graced grocers' shelves. It was described as "Delicious on sandwiches and toast, and improves the flavour of soups, stews and gravies." However, it took 14 long years of perseverance from Walker before Vegemite finally gained acceptance and recognition with the Australian people.

My mother is Australian, but I wasn’t raised with much awareness of Australian culture. My mom occasionally served us Vegemite when we were kids, but that’s about it. (If you’ve never tasted Vegemite, it’s about as gross as you’d think: It has the color and consistency of smooshed ants, and probably tastes about as good. But I remember liking it fine as a kid.)

I still possess one hyper-Australian cultural artifact from my childhood: a mid-’60s album called Join Rolf Harris Singing “The Court of King Caractacus” and Other Fun Songs. The cover is sublime:

Rolf Harris is a household name in Australia, and I think he’s also pretty well known in the U.K. But I’d be surprised if many people here in the United States have heard of him. He sings, he does comedy, he paints, he hosts goofy TV shows for children. His official site has loads of info about his long, oddball career.

I haven’t owned a turntable since about 1991, so it’s been at least that long since I last played my copy of Join Rolf Harris. But a couple of years ago I discovered that an audiophile friend on Echo owns a copy of it, and he was nice enough to digitize it and send me a CD. My desire to hear the record was motivated primarily by nostalgia, but I was amazed to discover that it’s actually a great album. Seriously. He’s a great singer (or he was 40 years ago) and a charming, funny showman. Join Rolf Harris is mostly a collection of Australian and English music hall songs, some of them classics and some of them Harris originals. I loved all of these songs and often sang along to them with great brio. I loved “Gosport Nancy” without having any idea it was about a prostitute (or at least a very, very friendly gal):

Now Gosport Nancy keeps a parlour
Where the lads can take their ease
She’ll wake you, she’ll shake you
She will do whate’er you please
Now all the Gosport ladies
They does the best they can
But at makin’ a bed for a sailor’s head
There’s none like Gosport Nan

The album contains the single best version of “Waltzing Matilda” I’ve ever heard. Because I aim to please, I’m posting it here:

There’s crowd noise on the recording, so it must be from a concert, but it also sounds like some overdubs were added later. Before the song starts, Harris spends a couple of minutes outlining a glossary of some of the terms used in the song.

Join Rolf Harris Singing “The Court of King Caractacus” and Other Fun Songs isn’t mentioned on Harris’s official site, and a Google search only pulls up a handful of references to it. It was probably a compilation assembled specifically for the American market. (My copy says “Printed in the U.S.A.” on the back.)

Here are the liner notes, which are credited to someone named Bob Goldstein:

Rolf Harris is a troublemaker. He makes people nervous. Well, not all people—just the bunch that gets edgy when they see or hear something they cannot easily label. You know the type: they’re the ones who call all popular music “rock and roll,” who dismiss all Broadway shows as “loud and brassy,” and who brand all wearers of shaggy haircuts “Beatles fans.” Well, this bunch is very upset because the only name that fits Rolf Harris is his own, and the only label he’ll readily wear is Epic’s.

[Continue reading "Best “Waltzing Matilda” Ever"...]

Bring me the head of the numbskull responsible for labeling this door:

It’s the front door of my local Hot ’n’ Crusty bakery. (Most of the food there is bad and overpriced, but I go there a couple of times a week to get a salad.) The PUSH label is on the outside of the glass, the PULL label on the inside. Every single time I’m about to enter or exit the store, my brain freezes for a moment as it tries to process which of the letters are backward and which are forward—and therefore whether I need to push or pull to open the door. The problem is compounded by the fact that the letters “U” and “H” look exactly the same backward and forward. Fixing this would require nothing more than a strip of thick white tape behind each of the two labels to hide each one from the opposite side of the glass.

In 1983 and 1984, long before he became famous as the star and co-creator of the genius BBC comedy The Office, Ricky Gervais was the singer in an obscure synth-pop duo called Seona Dancing. I’ve seen some pictures of him from that period, but nothing as mind-blowing as this one, which Maura just alerted me to:

In other Office-related news, Gervais and his Office co-creator, Stephen Merchant, are developing a new sitcom called Extras for BBC Two:

Extras is the new sitcom he is writing with Merchant, in which Gervais plays a struggling film and TV comedy actor.

“My character is a moaner who bitches about the stars and laughs in the face of adversity,” Gervais said. “It’s not filmed as a documentary this time, but fans of The Office should like it.”

Movie stars Jude Law and Kate Winslet have signed up for cameo roles in Extras, which is being filmed in March and is due to be broadcast on BBC Two this summer.

I’ve been falling into the trap of not posting until I have the time and energy to post something substantial, which means I’m often not posting about various excellent things I come across. I’m going to try to start posting a handful of quick links at least once or twice a week. Efficiency! And so:

• The best picture EVER. [Via Kottke.]
• Attention music software geeks: The great little Swedish software company Propellerheads has just released version 3.0 of Reason, its amazing software-based music studio. Propellerheads has an obnoxious but droolworthy Reason 3.0 trailer on its website.
• Kinetic wood sculptures (a.k.a. “spring-driven escapement mechanisms”) by a Connecticut-based artist. Gorgeous and magical and hypnotic. [Via Clive, who posted about this guy sometime last year.]
• I love this guy’s photos.
• Bad book covers.
• Album covers from the pre-irony age.

Those of you who’ve listened to some of the commentary tracks on the Freaks and Geeks DVD set know that John Francis Daley, who played Sam Weir on that brilliant show, is no longer a squeaky-voiced adolescent. Daley’s voice has dropped at least an octave since 2000, when NBC cancelled Freaks and Geeks after a single near-perfect 18-episode season. I hadn’t seen a recent picture of Daley until I discovered the photo at left.

It’s a still from an upcoming movie, a low-budget comedy called 5-25-77. The title is a reference to the original release date of Star Wars. The plot description on the movie’s IMDb page simply says this: “Pat Johnson has things get in the way of him seeing Star Wars.” Daley stars as Pat Johnson, and Christopher Lloyd plays a character called Herb Lightman. The movie’s official site doesn’t have much more than stills, behind-the-scenes photos, and a list of the cast and crew, so it’s hard to tell exactly what the deal is with this movie. But it’s apparently a Scary Movie-style spoof of ’70s culture. Weirdly enough, one of the producers of 5-25-77 is Gary Kurtz—the actual producer of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. The movie’s original music is being composed by Alan Parsons, which is just totally hilarious and perfect.

The movie’s IMDb page links to a pre-production teaser, and this is where things get especially weird. The teaser was made before John Francis Daley was cast in the film, so he’s nowhere to be seen. But another Freaks and Geeks alum is in the teaser: Martin Starr, who played Sam Weir’s eccentric friend Bill Haverchuck. Starr, however, isn’t listed in the credits on IMDb or the movie’s official site; he apparently doesn’t have a role in the actual film. (At one point during the teaser, Starr and another character talk about the fact that Gary Kurtz was the producer of Star Wars, and one of them holds up a picture of Kurtz. Very, uh, Being John Malkovich.) Also in the teaser, for literally a second or so, is none other than Carrie Fisher herself. She’s listed in the teaser’s closing credits but not in the credits on IMDb or the official site. I have no idea if she does a cameo in the actual film. Also in the teaser’s closing credits, but nowhere else, is Joe Pantoliano. The teaser is packed with snippets of ’70s culture, including brief clips from Logan’s Run, Jaws, and The Six-Million-Dollar Man. (There are also a few ’60s and ’80s references in there, too.)

Chatter in the movie’s IMDb message boards indicates that the filmmakers are hoping to release 5-25-77 in time to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, which opens in May. The director of 5-25-77, Patrick Read Johnson, has occasionally been popping up in the IMBd boards to answer questions or clarify facts.

In other Freaks and Geeks-related news, Newmarket Press recently published the show’s complete scripts in two volumes. My pal Emily Nussbaum wrote about the show in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times a year or so ago, when the DVD set was released, and the back cover of volume one of the scripts features this blurb from her piece: “Even among good series that died young, Freaks and Geeks stands out. A brilliantly funny and poignant high school comedy-drama … The show attracted a fan base that identified strongly with its obsessive, loyal, pop-culture-loving characters.”

UPDATE: I did a follow-up post about 5-25-77 a week later.

This is fantastic: On transom.org, a site devoted to “channeling new work and voices to public radio through the Internet,” the film editor and sound editor Walter Murch is spending several weeks as a sort of philosopher-in-residence. I learned of Murch’s transom.org appearance through a guest post by the former New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler on one of my favorite sites, Design Observer.

Murch has won Oscars for both film editing (The English Patient) and sound editing (The English Patient and Apocalypse Now)—a remarkable achievement, given some of the very different skills those two jobs require. Murch is responsible for at least one of my all-time favorite film sequences: the scene in The Conversation where the surveillance expert Harry Caul (played by Gene Hackman) assembles a listenable mixdown from several shoddy recordings of a single conversation. The sound editing in that scene is a perfect example of Murch’s genius.

In several essays and a discussion thread in his special transom.org section, Murch relates a number of details about the ways the human brain processes sound. He then explores how these details inform the arsenal of techniques a sound editor must use to impart complex, multilayered audio information without smothering the listener in a gelatinous blob of noise. The extraordinary centerpiece of Murch’s transom.org residency is his detailed breakdown of the various threads of sound that run through the monumental “Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter sequence in Apocalypse Now. Murch demonstrates his concepts with a series of videos of the scene, each one isolating a separate component of the audio track. As Murch explains, he originally set up the sequence’s audio as six separate layers of sound. But he eventually realized that six layers was one too many: “[A]t any one moment (for practical purposes, let’s say that a ‘moment’ is any five-second section of film), five layers is the maximum that can be tolerated by an audience if you also want them to maintain a clear sense of the individual elements that are contributing to the mix.” In the case of the helicopter sequence, he writes,

I found I could build a “sandwich” with five layers to it. If I wanted to add something new, I had to take something else away. For instance, when the boy in the helicopter says “I’m not going, I’m not going!” I chose to remove all the music. On a certain logical level, that is not reasonable, because he is actually in the helicopter that is producing the music, so it should be louder there than anywhere else. But for story reasons we needed to hear his dialogue, of course, and I also wanted to emphasize the chaos outside—the AK47’s and mortar fire that he was resisting going into—and the helicopter sound that represented “safety,” as well as the voices of the other members of his unit. …

Under the circumstances, music was the sacrificial victim. The miraculous thing is that you do not hear it go away—you believe that it is still playing even though, as I mentioned earlier, it should be louder here than anywhere else. And, in fact, as soon as this line of dialogue was over, we brought the music back in and sacrified something else. Every moment in this section is similarly fluid, a kind of shell game where layers are disappearing and reappearing according to the dramatic focus of the moment. It is necessitated by the “five-layer” law, but it is also one of the things that makes the soundtrack exciting to listen to.

In 2002, Knopf published The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, a collection of transcribed dialogues between Murch and Michael Ondaatje, the author of The English Patient.

When it comes to graphic design, guitar magazines have historically been about as tasteful and restrained as a ten-minute Yngwie Malmsteen solo. Tackiness tends to drip off the page like sweat from Carlos Santana’s brow. I’m talking about this sort of thing (and this isn’t even an extreme example):

Granted, it was the ᾿80s, and granted, it’s mainly the photo that makes it so awful and comical. (Doesn’t Vito Bratta look like a hirsute cousin of Radar editor Maer Roshan?) But really, folks, this sort of thing is grounds for a war-crimes tribunal. The issue above was published in September 1989, soon after I finished an editorial internship at Guitar World. The magazine’s editor at the time was a guy named Joe Bosso, who eventually left to become an A&R guy at some major record label. In the late ’90s he achieved a small measure of immortality by co-writing episode 10 of the godlike first season of The Sopranos.

For some reason I’ve always felt compelled to save every guitar magazine I’ve ever acquired. In my apartment are five or six boxes filled with hundreds of guitar magazines dating back to about 1984. There is some very unfortunate and hilarious content in those issues, especially the ones from the hair metal era.

All this is why Guitar Player’s recent covers have been such a nice surprise. This is a very elegant and balanced design:

This new cover format is totally unique, at least in the context of guitar magazines. The subject of the cover story is photographed in a tight close-up, and one of his or her guitars is presented against the white background above the photo. I love the black-and-white shot of Nels Cline; I love the fetishization of his instrument; I love the understated logo; I love the way the type is arrayed; I love the white space at the top. More than anything, I love that this cover does not scream at me. The art director’s name is Alexandra Zeigler; I may send her flowers.

Guitar Player has always been the most intelligent and tasteful of the guitar magazines, but even it has perpetrated plenty of design atrocities over the last few decades. I stopped subscribing to it several years ago, so I’m not sure when the redesign happened. I think it was about a year ago. I don’t how these covers are selling on the newsstand, but I hope they keep it up.

This is really cool: an applet that animates the popularity of baby names over the past century. Plug in your name and watch what happens. My name jumped from the 38th most popular in the 1960s to the fifth most popular in 2003. Who knew?

[Via a friend on Echo.]