{technology} – Page 35 – { feuilleton }

Viddy well: Back in the Chelsea Drug Store

The Chelsea Drug Store, 49 King’s Road, London, circa 1970.

How quickly things change. It was almost six years to the day that I posted an unapologetically sedulous analysis of the record shop scene in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, something that’s still one of the most regularly visited of all the entries here. That post concerned the excitement of being able to at last scrutinise on DVD a single shot whose details had earlier been obscured by no end of noise and interference, the embargoed film having previously been available in the UK on various bootleg videos. Fuzzy warbles indeed. The DVD wasn’t ideal, however, and many of the frame enlargements looked pretty shoddy. Last month I acquired a box of Blu-ray Kubrick films so all the images on that post have now been upgraded. There isn’t a great deal more to see in a shot that lasts all of sixty-six seconds, but John Alcott’s wide-angle photography is now crystal clear.

As for the location of the record shop, I noted in the original post that the famous Chelsea Drug Store building is now a McDonald’s. A place that once sold music and magazines becomes another outlet for an international burger chain; that’s the real future horror, not rampaging youth. See it up close on Google’s Street View.

Alex and the sounds of 1970.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kubrick shirts
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• Juice from A Clockwork Orange
• Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store

Hiatus

Oh look, it’s the train again… The site was down for a couple of days after my webhost decided to repair the server without giving any advance warning. My apologies. Everything should now be back to normal.

Weekend links 94

Mateo (2011), carved wood sculpture by Bruno Walpoth.

“Dennis Potter’s [The Singing Detective] is 25 years old but still feels avant garde,” says Stephen Armstrong. No fucking kidding, I watched the DVDs again last weekend. Potter’s drama featured non-linear flashbacks, song-and-dance hallucination sequences, an intertextual sub-plot, and a central character who was vitriolic, misanthropic, misogynist and covered from head-to-toe in flaking skin. This wasn’t exiled to an arts channel ghetto but was primetime viewing, Sunday evenings on BBC 1. • Related: “Is Dennis Potter’s singalong noir miniseries the all-time pinnacle of television drama? Graham Fuller thinks it is.”

• American band Earth are using Kickstarter to fund their next project, Wonders from the House of Albion, an LP/CD/DVD/book combining their music with “field recordings from various megalithic and other sites of human/fairy encounters across the UK, also the use of ritual and folkloric magical practices”. Dylan Carlson & Adrienne Davies discuss their work here.

…sort of like Nabokov’s objection to Our Lady of the Flowers, which he saw as a masterpiece but thought, “Why isn’t this book about women?” Nabokov hated homosexuality and was very edgy around it, partly because his own brother was homosexual and his uncle. And he believed that it was hereditary, so he was always nervous about it.

Edmund White chooses five favourite gay novels. Related: a dance adaptation by Earthfall of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys.

• “The Belbury Tales is the kind of record you feel should have come out on Vertigo around ’73, but never actually did.” Belbury Poly‘s Jim Jupp on ploughman’s lunches, prog rock and avoiding “Clarkson/Wakeman territory”.

• Morbid Curiosity: The Richard Harris Collection, an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center exploring “the iconography of death across cultures and traditions spanning nearly six thousand years”.

• Geoff Dyer’s Zona, an exegesis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, is officially out at the end of this month. The book is reviewed here and here.

• “Through a blurry electronic prism“: MetaFilter traces a history of analogue video synthesis.

• Dylan Ricci‘s wonderful photography of the male body has moved to a new location.

• Infinite Forest by Studio a+i, a design for an AIDS memorial in New York City.

• Susan Cain discussing “the power of introverts” at Scientific American.

• Strange Flowers on that icon of Middle Eastern music, Umm Kulthum.

• Ewan Morrison on “The self-epublishing bubble”.

• Winter Sleep (2007) by Valgeir Sigurdsson feat. Dawn McCarthy | Black (2008) by Ben Frost with Valgeir Sigurdsson, Sam Amidon & Sigrídur Sunna Reynisdóttir | Unbreakable Silence (2011) by Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason

In the Village

Ever fancied a wander around Portmeirion, aka The Village from The Prisoner? In the past you’d have to travel to Gwynedd in North Wales in order to do so but since August 2010 it’s been possible to roam the place using Google’s street view. This is somewhat surprising on two counts: firstly, while Portmeirion masquerades as a shrunken Mediterranean town it’s actually an open-plan hotel which visitors have to pay to explore. More surprising is finding the street view camera leaving the roads to follow many of the paths around Clough Williams-Ellis’s trompe l’oeil architecture. I imagine Google has done this elsewhere but this is the first instance I’ve come across. In addition to exploring a woodland walk it’s possible to follow the paths down to the beach, past the stone boat and along the coast for views of the Dwyryd estuary. There aren’t any white balloons or Mini Mokes in evidence, of course. If you want those you can always watch the TV series where the place appears larger thanks to camera lenses and some canny editing.

And speaking of lenses, ironies abound when you notice the surveillance cameras in the hotel car park, never mind the way the Google Panopticon has laid the place open to global eyes. In the Chimes of Big Ben episode of The Prisoner Number 6 asks whether Number 2 wants to see the whole world as the Village. “Yes,” says Number 2. Are we there yet?

The two maps here are from The Prisoner (1990), a book by Alain Carrazé & Hélène Oswald. Unfortunately the key to the map of Portmeirion wasn’t included. The following shots are my selection from the Google views starting at the toll booth and working down to the beach. Be seeing you.

The Toll Booth.

Battery Square.

Continue reading “In the Village”

Black Lodge 2600: The Twin Peaks Video Game

“That gum you like is going to come back in style.” Kyle MacLachlan and Michael J. Anderson in the Black Lodge.

After the chance discovery last week of photo panoramas by Twin Peaks “Giant” Carel Struycken I was doubly-surprised this week when random searching turned up a small Twin Peaks video game. Black Lodge 2600 is a free game for Macs and PCs that emulates the crude graphics and audio of an Atari 2600 cartridge. Jak Locke is the programmer, and his creation appeared last year which is again surprising since I’d have expected to hear about it by now.

The accompanying manual describes the challenge facing the player:

A day in the FBI was never like this before! You are Special Agent Dale Cooper and you’ve found yourself trapped inside of the Black Lodge, a surreal and dangerous place between worlds.

Try as you might, you can’t seem to find anything but the same room and hallway no matter which way you turn. Worse yet, your doppelganger is in hot pursuit! You have no choice but to keep running through the room and hallway (or is it more than one?) and above all else, don’t let your doppelganger touch you! Your extensive physical training in the FBI will provide you a seemingly limitless supply of energy to run as long as necessary, but running out of breath is the least of your worries!

You’ll find quickly that you’re not alone in the Black Lodge, though your friends are few and far between. Not only that, the lodge itself seems to be actively trying to trip you up at all times! You’ll be dodging chairs and crazed Lodge residents all while trying to keep your own insanity. How long can this go on?

I racked up 800 points before the Bad Dale caught up with me. Those who want to try their hands can download Black Lodge 2600 here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Carel Struycken’s panoramas
• Bohren & Der Club Of Gore
• Through the darkness of future pasts