Hard Cold, Sell outs and a Godzilla Goodbye
Cold this morning – an Alberta clipper, a steel hard cold with a biting wind that sucks the warmth out of you in about 10 seconds. Well it is February yes? It’s winter. This is the way it is supposed to be yes?
We finished most of the mixing and most of the recording over the weekend – now the only thing that remains is trying to get one decent vocal take of Stacy before we die (or it kills us – the betting line is about 50-50 each way) and then master the whole puppy. Then we have to do the art work, get it duplicated, and find someplace to have a cd launch party and hotcha! We have a cd.
The album sounds very very good – like scary good.
There is a Cartoonist called Tom Tomorrow who does a weekly comic strip called “This Modern World” it’s unabashedly left wing so before warned – anyway in this week’s strip he boils down the right wing of the gop’s perfect candidate – a Neanderthal named Ogg – Ogg’s campaign slogan, as you might expect is rather simple; “Vote for Ogg. Ogg smash enemies with big rocks. John McCain to old to lift rocks!”
Well I found it funny.
Meantime the Senate and the House is selling us down the river – it looks like the Tele-communication companies will be getting their retroactive immunity from the illegal spying they did – apparently even before 9-11 (but now we’ll never know). I hope Harry Reid is proud of himself. And maybe Nancy P might be able to figure out why congress’s rating is lower than the president’s (namely you do everything he wants – nobody likes a bullying jackass but people really can’t stand the bullying jackass’s enablers. I swear to god it’s like the end of Animal farm and you can’t tell who the humans are and who are the pigs (with the twist that the humans are trying to act like the pigs)
That I don’t find so funny.
Well enough of that – I’ll be turning Jacobin in a minute and let’s not have that happen again.
Saw over the weekend for the first time the uncut Japanese version of The Terror of Mechagodzilla – which I don’t think is the actual title in Japanese but I don’t know Japanese well enough to know for sure. Still in English it’s a bit ambiguous – is it about the terror that Mechagodzilla causes or is it the terror that Mechgodzilla feels?
Anyway this was the last film in the first Godzilla series and the Godzilla film for Ishiro Honda, the director of many of the films including the first one and Akihiko Hirata who played the eye patched Dr. Serizawa who’s oxygen destroyer killed the first Godzilla at the end of the 1955 film (the Godzilla that showed up in the sequel Godzilla raids again was explained as a second Godzilla) and it was the last film where Godzilla is an out and out good guy – later films would cast him as heavy or at best neutral about humanity.
There is a sadness to endings of things - to jump to the sublime from rubber monsters – there is a melancholy that flows all through the second side of Abby Road – this was it, they all knew it and they all felt it and it shows in the performances. Here the story concerns a doomed love between the daughter of a mad scientist recruited by the aliens to help repair Mecha-godzilla (destroyed in the earlier film) and the biologist Akira who is investigating the destruction of a research sub by a huge dinosaur.
There are lot of things silly and wrong with the film – like alas Akikiko’s absolutely over the top reading as the mad scientist and the females lead’s tendency to milk her falls for all they were worth – I mean were talking silent film hammy here.
In a weird plot twist the daughter is revealed to be a cyborg – a gift from the aliens when she managed to get herself electrocuted some years back in one of the mad scientist’s experiments. (A genius but not so good with wiring I guess). The sequence is a bit odd – made even odder when later you see the clockworks installed in her as they repair her after a fall off a cliff (in the process they install some kind of control mechanism for Mechagodzilla in her making her a kind human cyborg control I guess).
Anyway it all ends quite badly for most concerned – The Dinosaur gets stomped (as does much of Tokyo yet again) The aliens are killed off (again) the mad scientist after all his aid to the aliens ends up dying as the leader of the aliens uses him as a shield against a hail of bullets (nobody likes a rat I guess) and the daughter realizing that the only way to turn off the Mecha Godzilla control mechanism she has inside of her is by having her die, promptly shoots herself – at which point Godzilla destroys Mecha Godzilla again.
The last scene shows Godzilla (who has been rather distant as a character in this film) as he wades back out to sea watched by the male lead as he holds the daughter’s body in his arms – it’s a real downer moment.
This film was the least successful of the original Godzilla films – and Toho decided to suspend the series as a result – reflecting the dire conditions of the Japanese film industry in the late 1970’s.
Peace love Cyborgs
We finished most of the mixing and most of the recording over the weekend – now the only thing that remains is trying to get one decent vocal take of Stacy before we die (or it kills us – the betting line is about 50-50 each way) and then master the whole puppy. Then we have to do the art work, get it duplicated, and find someplace to have a cd launch party and hotcha! We have a cd.
The album sounds very very good – like scary good.
There is a Cartoonist called Tom Tomorrow who does a weekly comic strip called “This Modern World” it’s unabashedly left wing so before warned – anyway in this week’s strip he boils down the right wing of the gop’s perfect candidate – a Neanderthal named Ogg – Ogg’s campaign slogan, as you might expect is rather simple; “Vote for Ogg. Ogg smash enemies with big rocks. John McCain to old to lift rocks!”
Well I found it funny.
Meantime the Senate and the House is selling us down the river – it looks like the Tele-communication companies will be getting their retroactive immunity from the illegal spying they did – apparently even before 9-11 (but now we’ll never know). I hope Harry Reid is proud of himself. And maybe Nancy P might be able to figure out why congress’s rating is lower than the president’s (namely you do everything he wants – nobody likes a bullying jackass but people really can’t stand the bullying jackass’s enablers. I swear to god it’s like the end of Animal farm and you can’t tell who the humans are and who are the pigs (with the twist that the humans are trying to act like the pigs)
That I don’t find so funny.
Well enough of that – I’ll be turning Jacobin in a minute and let’s not have that happen again.
Saw over the weekend for the first time the uncut Japanese version of The Terror of Mechagodzilla – which I don’t think is the actual title in Japanese but I don’t know Japanese well enough to know for sure. Still in English it’s a bit ambiguous – is it about the terror that Mechagodzilla causes or is it the terror that Mechgodzilla feels?
Anyway this was the last film in the first Godzilla series and the Godzilla film for Ishiro Honda, the director of many of the films including the first one and Akihiko Hirata who played the eye patched Dr. Serizawa who’s oxygen destroyer killed the first Godzilla at the end of the 1955 film (the Godzilla that showed up in the sequel Godzilla raids again was explained as a second Godzilla) and it was the last film where Godzilla is an out and out good guy – later films would cast him as heavy or at best neutral about humanity.
There is a sadness to endings of things - to jump to the sublime from rubber monsters – there is a melancholy that flows all through the second side of Abby Road – this was it, they all knew it and they all felt it and it shows in the performances. Here the story concerns a doomed love between the daughter of a mad scientist recruited by the aliens to help repair Mecha-godzilla (destroyed in the earlier film) and the biologist Akira who is investigating the destruction of a research sub by a huge dinosaur.
There are lot of things silly and wrong with the film – like alas Akikiko’s absolutely over the top reading as the mad scientist and the females lead’s tendency to milk her falls for all they were worth – I mean were talking silent film hammy here.
In a weird plot twist the daughter is revealed to be a cyborg – a gift from the aliens when she managed to get herself electrocuted some years back in one of the mad scientist’s experiments. (A genius but not so good with wiring I guess). The sequence is a bit odd – made even odder when later you see the clockworks installed in her as they repair her after a fall off a cliff (in the process they install some kind of control mechanism for Mechagodzilla in her making her a kind human cyborg control I guess).
Anyway it all ends quite badly for most concerned – The Dinosaur gets stomped (as does much of Tokyo yet again) The aliens are killed off (again) the mad scientist after all his aid to the aliens ends up dying as the leader of the aliens uses him as a shield against a hail of bullets (nobody likes a rat I guess) and the daughter realizing that the only way to turn off the Mecha Godzilla control mechanism she has inside of her is by having her die, promptly shoots herself – at which point Godzilla destroys Mecha Godzilla again.
The last scene shows Godzilla (who has been rather distant as a character in this film) as he wades back out to sea watched by the male lead as he holds the daughter’s body in his arms – it’s a real downer moment.
This film was the least successful of the original Godzilla films – and Toho decided to suspend the series as a result – reflecting the dire conditions of the Japanese film industry in the late 1970’s.
Peace love Cyborgs
posted by Unknown at 1:00 PM
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