“Man About the House (V)/Three’s Company (A)”
Spurred on by this AV Club list of UK>US TV crossovers, the intro and theme to Man About the House (original intro here), which was Three’s Company’s UK forebear struck me as so unfamiliar and ridiculous I got curious about grounding it in familiar sound.
The result is surprising, mostly in that it’s completely unspectacular and was probably a huge waste of my time.
UPDATE: Oh, my. So it seems that not only was this media project a huge waste of my time, it also got me a big fat DMCA Copyright Infringement takedown notice from DLT Entertainment (whose logo I know only too well), and subsequently, my YouTube account has been permanently deactivated.
Come and knock on our door…
We’ve been waiting for you…
Where the kisses are hers and hers and his,
Three’s company too.
Come and dance on on our floor…
Take a step that is new…
We’ve a loveable space that needs your face,
Three’s company too.
You’ll see that life is a frolic and laughter is calling for you…
Down at our rendez-vous,
Three’s company, too.
(Lyrics by Don Nicholl and Joe Raposo)
“The Goodies” (1970) intro
I’ve just stumbled across what may be the single most British piece of television known to man. I think need a bit of a lie down.
From the wikipedia:
It was one of the first shows in the UK to use chroma key and one of the first to use stop-motion techniques in a live action format. Other effects include hand editing for repeated movement, mainly used to make animals “talk” or “sing”, and play speed effects as used in the episode “Kitten Kong”.
The threesome travelled around on, and frequently fell off, a three-seater bicycle called the trandem. One of these trandems was later cycled across Africa, a trip immortalised in the resultant book Three Men on a Bike.
Open Letter To Matthew Weiner & The Staff Of Mad Men
You should never use anachronistic music.
You’re better than that.
Using modern music takes us out of the show. Mad Men excels at demonstrating the perverseness of the culture using real artifacts from the time. No later indie rock or punk song will ever be as subversive or weird as ACTUAL MUSIC FROM 1962 which sounds so weird and alien and uncool to us.
Couldn’t agree more. The choice to go anachro lent itself to what I’m feeling is the ‘Sopranoization’ of Mad Men. Inherently, not a bad thing. Season two of any show will start to capitalize on our familiarity with its characters, to where we can take psychological leaps with them and remain enchanted despite their peccadillos.
The effect of introducing anachronistic ‘future music’ to the palette of the show is one of being submerged in the psyche of a character rather than the ambience of an era. And I don’t like it any more than you do, Molly, for its dispensing with the diegetic elements which have made up the style guide to which our show rigorously adheres. But I think its course is the natural one.
Semi-related, I wrote a little bit at the end of Season 1 about the music of Mad Men. Is it douchey for me to link to it here? I’ve been told it is. And I quote:
But to completely round out the sense of time travel, the music of ‘Mad Men’ has what its composer, David Carbonara calls on his site ‘period elements’. Typically, this could be understood as strictly musical elements: instrumentation and arrangment specific to the era. But in this case, to maintain period aesthetic, it crosses the line into the subtle and obscure territory of post-production, which is the part that fascinates me.
Almost wholly unrelated, I really REALLY like This Recording. If pressed to select a new favorite blog, I would say it’s my new favorite blog. This Recording really likes Mad Men.
Tilt Scrolling in Instapaper Pro
It’s such a simple idea: exploit the power of the iPhone’s accelerometer as an alternate means to control scrolling on the vertical axis of a page.
Previously the only method of scrolling has been grabbing the screen with your Cheetoh-stained finger and dragging. It’s a tried-and-true model which has held a firm place in the UI language along with its desktop-based cousins the mouse-based scroll wheel, the on-screen scroll bar, the up-and-down arrows and a number of other lesser-used options such as grab-and-drag. Yet on the iPhone, touch scrolling has had no viable competitor. As simple and elegant in theory as Tilt Scrolling sounds, no application (according to Instapaper’s developer Marco Arment) has implemented it.
Marco has implemented Tilt Scrolling in the newly-released $9.99 Pro version of Instapaper (the Free version has been in the App Store since almost the beginning), and its implementation is intuitive and functional. In fact, I wouldn’t mind having Tilt Scrolling in Mobile Safari.
After more than a year of owning and using the iPhone, it gets me all excited that people are still digging into its UI conventions and coming up with new ways of interacting with it. And I’m certain there’s much more of this to come.
Almost as impressive as the feature itself is its introduction in the brief promotional page included in Instapaper Free. A simple description of the feature is accompanied by a large green button linking to a demonstration video that opens and plays from within in Mobile Safari. Like everything else in this application, it’s well thought out and concise.
Find out more about Instapaper Pro by visiting the site.
Deceptive cadence
We call that a deceptive cadence ‘cause it deceives us. I always tell my students, “If you have a deceptive cadence, be sure to raise your eyebrows, then everybody will know.”
-Benjamin Zander at TED ~10:30
Last night, for my second time, I got to see Jon Brion perform at Largo, where he performs regularly. People enjoy his live solo show for many different reasons, most commonly his sense of play and experimentation, harnessed by the technology at his disposal to accompany himself as he improvises. I, for one, worship his composition, improvised and written, mainly because of his relentless and habitual use of what I think is deceptive cadence.
What he does is he takes it and he turns it. And when he turns it, he turns it in a way that makes you wonder why it hasn’t always been turned that way.
Check out his work on Punch-Drunk Love. Also, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
I Am the Night (2008) oil on canvas by Brandon Bird
“Phil Parma” costume, one in what could easily be a series of PSH characters for kids. I’d go as “Scotty J.” from Boogie Nights. Who would you go as? And you can’t say “Happiness” just because you have a proclivity for homemade adhesives.
via liana
Gratuitous Picture of Yourself Wednesday: Pantsless Edition (GPoYW:PE)
I didn’t know this was a meme, but apparently it is, so here I am and there they aren’t.
photo by Buzz via flickr/buzz
Season 2 is just 6 days away!
Muxtape nothin. This is real music.
“All networks support free advertising, but that doesn’t mean they’ve lost interest in quality control.
Fake Don Draper (in my book, the only real fake Draper), in response to the dust-up over Mad Men fan fiction in Twitter
I like the idea of Draper calling out the writers of this shitty fan fiction not for infringement of intellectual property, but for artistic ineptitude. (Have you looked at it? I’d rather read Obama’s boring-ass intern-scribed Twitter.)
That’s what Don Draper has done.
NOTE: I, however, am not Draper. Therefore, I will accept that there may be qualities of this fan fiction project that, while meaningful to many fans of the authorized work of fiction, is out of my grasp as an appreciator, and will henceforth refrain from ascribing it fecal properties. Love me.
“1: Take all your hopes and dreams and put them in a pile. 2: Stir in 1 pt freedom to 2 pts anxiety. 3: Love that shit like u love your lady.
Jeff’s recipe for a successful, or at least gratifying career as an independent whatever.
via DM on his Twitter/fedge
