It’s with great sadness that the news came that Patrick McGoohan, the brooding genius behind The Prisoner, died yesterday. The second gut-punch came with word that the uniquely regal Ricardo (Mr. Roarke/KHAN!) Montalban had also passed. McGoohan was 80, Montalban was 88.
Despite his status as the epitome of ’60s Brit psychedelic cool, McGoohan was actually Irish American. He took his early fame as “Danger Man’s” secret agent and turned it completely around, creating The Prisoner, a stunningly strange and powerful statement on, well, this:
Ricardo Montalban arrived in Hollywood at a time when the only roles Mexicans could get were as Indians or Asians — and they wanted him to change his name to Ricky Martin. He persevered, eventually finding success as Fantasy Island’s suave host, Mr. Roarke, and becoming a supervillain for the ages as Star Trek’s Khan Noonien Singh:
Montalban worked up into his 80s, including some sly self parody in Freakazoid.
Both were excellent, oft-underrated actors. Both were true originals. Rest in peace, gentlemen.
As an age old battle rages amongst the stars, Kainan’s ship burns brightly as it crashes into the Nordic coast. As his space craft comes to rest in the fjords of ancient Norway, it’s with dismay that Kainan realizes that he wasn’t the only survivor. A second passenger, a Moorwen also emerges from the wreckage. A Fierce and animal-like creature, the Moorwen is intent on causing harm to those it perceives have wronged it. As the Moorwen kills everything in its path, Kainan must work together with the Vikings to destroy the beast before it destroys them all.
Okay, so there’s only one alien. And they probably should have found someone other than a 7th grade remedial English student to write their plot synopsis…
Inside your Issue 2 of Coilhouse Magazine you’ll find a love letter to Los Angeles that talks about some of my favorite places in this Angel City Desert. Near the top of the list is The Machine Project– a modern-day salon dedicated to zapping life into this city, one lecture/field trip/class/performance at a time. Art space, home of Dorkbot SoCal [another one coming up this Saturday!], miniature lecture hall and experimental kitchen, this place has hosted some of the best events in town. Visitors enjoy a friendly atmosphere and beer as the boundaries between art and science melt away.
Places like this are indispensable, especially here in big bad disjointed Los Angeles. They cultivate community, learning and provide outlets to brilliant outsiders rarely seen elsewhere. You want Alt Culture? Here it is. The Machine Project mission statement, from the Epic FAQ:
Machine Project exists to encourage heroic experiments of the gracefully over-ambitious. We provide educational resources to people working with technology, we collaborate with artists to produce site-specific works, and we promote conversations between scientists, poets, technicians, performers, and the community of Los Angeles as a whole.
I’ve been an occasional attendee for years now, but this is changed today, when I become an official Member. You see, I received some sad news in my inbox recently. It seems the economy is kicking my beloved Machine square in its mechanical nuts! This wonderful place need help, and it needs help now. Fortunately, helping such an awesome organization is easy and fun. Here are the ways you can be part of The Machine Project:
Rina Takeda stars in the most aptly named film since Snakes on a Plane.
Can we just take a moment to revel in how completely !@(&*#$% awesome the recent onslaught of kickass girly martial arts films hitting the international market is? There’s Chocolate, from Thailand, featuring the stunning muay thai stylings of Jeeja Vismistananda. Hong Kong’s national Shaolin Quan Wushu champion, Jiang Lu Xia, will blow your mind inCoweb. Denmark’s Fighter, directed by Natasha Arthy and choreographed by Chinese stunt actor Gao Xian, stars an impressive Turkish kung fu newcomer named Semra Turan. Now, Japanese will-o-the-wisp Rina Takeda has arrived on the scene to make us go SQUEEEE and wiggle and jump up and down and cackle.
Watch her flaunt some formidable (and flexible) karate skills in this teaser for High Kick Girl. The concept sells itself, really:
I mean, come on, what more could you want from the trailer for a movie called High Kick Girl?
Just in case you’re still feeling skeptical about Takeda (or the cutie pie seifuku stuff), fear not: according to recent reviews cropping up all over the internubs, Takeda, like the three aformentioned ladies, can really fight, and the choreography is off the hook. I’m so there.
Mer is incapacitated this morning from too much music-making, so it’s fallen to me to deliver you this segment of Better Than Coffee in her stead. What’s going on in the clip above has been described by photographer and Issue 01 contributor Clayton James Cubitt in the following terms: “Champagne, Wii Fit, Love, Cold NYC Nights, Nerds. In no particular order.” Looking at the clip, I recognize a few faces: Siege himself, his muse KT, Molly Crabapple, Ellen Stagg… the clip may be full of talented hotties, but its true beauty is the dizzy, dorky exuberance. Siege may be a brilliant photographer, but as this clip demonstrates, his video-editing prowess is not to be denied.
They say that how you spend your New Year’s Eve is how the rest of your year will go, and if that’s true, it looks like the folks in this clip are set. Has this belief held true for you? How did you spend your last night of 2008?
Happy birthday to Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, patron saint of computer programmers. “The Enchantress of Numbers” was born this day in 1815, in London, the only legitimate (tch, what an insulting term that is!) child of Lord Byron. Her mother, Isabelle –a math whiz in her own right nicknamed “The Princess of Parallelograms” by P.M. Benjamin Disraeli– separated from Byron shortly after Ada’s birth, and raised her to be unlike her eccentric poet father, emphasizing tutelage in music and math. (Ada never met Lord Byron, who died in Greece, aged 36.)
Ada Lovelace is best known for her work describing the Analytical Engine, an early mechanical general-purpose computer conceived by mathematician/inventor/philosopher Charles Babbage. Today, she’s recognized as the “first programmer” for her work on the computing machine that Babbage hadn’t even built yet. Unlike Babbage or anyone else, she had the foresight to recognize the potential for computers to evolve past simple calculations and number-crunching. Her voluminous notes included predictions for future developments as far-out as computer-generated music! She accomplished this in an era where, to put it gently, noblewomen were not encouraged to engage in such rigorous intellectual pursuits.
Like her father, Lovelace was headstrong, prone to fits of melodrama, and she died young. Her family buried her next to Lord Byron in the yard of the Church of St Mary Magdalene in 1852.
Oh… my. Wayne just memed my ass out with the most astonishing OMGWTFBBQ music video of the year. Imagine what might happen if the rennies spiked your mead with DMT at Medieval Times. It is Epic. It is Über.
Meet Chris Dane Owens. He is here to fuck you, amigo. Fuck you earnestly, somberly, savagely, without the courtesy of a reach-around. For he is Legolas on a meth binge. He is Limahl with brass balls. His “Shine on Me” video is the prodigious, tumescent, chain-mail-piercing, pirate-booty-plundering, Adobe After Effects-abusing, alligator-exploiting, stock footage-pillaging D&D Destructo Dildo to the insidious butt plug of Brokencyde’s “Freaxx”.
Keep watching. Don’t click away. Follow that sparkly green Gretsch all the way to the finish line. Take it to the hilt, paladin.
Forrest J Ackerman: literary agent, magazine editor, writer, actor, producer, archivist, curator, and so much more, too much to pack into a brief obituary. He was a crackpot visionary to the max, to be sure, and deeply loved by millions of fellow freakazoids the world over. Tip o’ the iceberg: he discovered Ray Bradbury, represented Isaac Asimov, Ed Wood and L. Ron Hubbard, founded Famous Monsters of Filmland and is widely acknowledged as the man who coined the term “sci-fi.”
Ackerman cultivated one of the most enormous private collections of science-fiction movie and literary memorabilia in the world, cramming his hillside “Ackermansion” with 50,000 books, thousands more science-fiction magazines, and such priceless collectibles as Bela Lugosi’s cape, actual Star Trek tribbles, and original props from War of the Worlds.
He sold off quite a bit of his collection back in 2002 and moved to a smaller place, but schedule permitting, continued to open his home to strangers every Satuday afternoon to view his remaining treasures. He greatly enjoyed sharing his many colorful stories and anecdotes with fellow Hollyweird aficionados. Speaking to the AP during a lively tour of the Ackermansion on his 85th birthday, Ackerman said “My wife used to [ask] ‘How can you let strangers into our home?’ But what’s the point of having a collection like this if you can’t let people enjoy it?”
Bear with the somewhat sluggish posting schedule, folks. We’re slogging through last-minute corrections to the final proofs of Issue 02 and losing our minds in the process. I do mean that literally. Earlier tonight, poor Nadya sneezed and a big chunk of her frontal lobe fell out. I called her just now to discuss a kerning issue and the conversation went a little something like this. Meanwhile, Zoetica’s delicate alien grey matter has liquefied entirely from overexposure to laptop radiation. As for me, well, I’m having flashbacks of that one time I accidentally took ‘shrooms laced with bathtub LSD and ran out into traffic on the I-580 yelling “FLESH TETRIS, FLESH TETRIS, EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE MATH, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP THE FLESH TETRIS, STOPPIT, HNNNGH” until someone threw a tarp over my head.
It certainly doesn’t help that this 8-Bit version of “Angel of Death” has been lodged in my noggin for several days now.
A very wise, oft-quoted fellow named Joel Hodgson once said “we never ask, will anyone get this? We just assume the right people will get it.” On that note, without further explication, here’s the infamous “Twelve Tone Commercial” raillery (recorded back in 1977 by some super-awesomely eggheaded musicians) more recently set to an inspired collection of moving pictures by some wacky genius who may or may not reside in Austria:
The audio on this was recorded 40 years ago by Robert Conrad, founder of WCLV classical radio. A prolific American conductor named Kenneth Jean produced it, and revered Swiss composer/conductor Matthias Bamert is said to have had a hand in it as well. Bless ’em all.
To anyone peeing their pants and rolling on the floor laughing right now: you are officially the nerdiest music nerd that ever nerded from Serial Composition class.
