There are certain truths regarding the 1970s:
1. Everyone was ugly.
2. Musicians were even uglier.
3. European musicians were especially ugly.
4. The greatest concentration of 1970s European musician ugly was in Sweden.
Lest you challenge me on any of these points, I have copious evidence to back up my claims.
Step 1: Consume caffeine too late in the day/evening.
Step 2: Stay up much later than normal because of the effects of the caffeine.
Step 3: Explore the dark recesses of my mind and the Internet; shudder at what I find.
Tonight is one of those nights. And through a bizarre chain of links that, among other things, taught me that the late jazz multi-instrumentalist (as in simultaneously) and all-around weirdo Rahsaan Roland Kirk played the lead flute part on the 1964 Quincy Jones track “Soul Bossa Nova” — probably best known as the theme song from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, I also discovered this little gem by the Swingle Singers.
I don’t know if you know much about the Swingle Singers. I know just enough to know I don’t want to know more. (And if you know what that sentence means, let me know.) But as of tonight I do know more, and it isn’t pretty.
Step 1: Take an already insufferably cheesy theme song from a ’70s cop show.
Step 2: Give it the full-on a cappella vocal group treatment (including “wacka-chicka” guitar parts).
Step 3: Add a human beatbox, because steps 1 and 2 just weren’t enough already.
Enjoy. Here’s the original, in case you’ve forgotten it:
[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/55-starsky-and-hutch.mp3]
And here’s an excerpt of the new version, courtesy of the record label’s website:
[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/sigcd104_10.mp3]
Oh yeah… I almost forgot. The album’s called Beauty and the Beatbox. Clever!
Yesterday I needed to go downtown. Specifically, I needed to go to the Hennepin County Government Center. We’re still waiting for our new Fit to arrive, but in the meantime I needed to apply for a duplicate title for our old trade-in because for whatever reason I just can’t find the original title.
Anyway, downtown. I normally would have taken the light rail, as I live within walking distance of a station, and the Government Plaza station is about 100 feet from my destination. But there were just enough extenuating factors to make it seem like a good idea to drive instead. The ultimate determining factor was that it probably wouldn’t cost much more to park than to ride. I would’ve spent $4 on a 6-hour pass, and I expected parking to be somewhere between $10 and $13.
So off I went on my merry way. After conducting my business with the county, I decided to stay downtown for a while, to have lunch at one of my most-missed lunch spots since I stopped working downtown last March, and then to do some work at a nearby Caribou. Such is the luxury of being able to carry your entire office in a messenger bag.
In the end I spent a total of 3 hours downtown before heading back to the parking garage. When I put my ticket in the pay machine, I was aghast — aghast, I tell you! — to see the price for 3 hours of parking adjacent to the government center. $23. Let me repeat that in a more suitable fashion:
$23. For 3 hours of parking.
Assuming that these exorbitant rates are only in effect between the hours of, say, 7 AM and 5 PM (and not even considering evening and weekend parking), and assuming that there are approximately 500 spaces in the garage (which seems a reasonable, conservative estimate, having been inside it), then Allied Parking is raking in over $38,333 per weekday, or $9.97 million per year, on this one garage alone. I realize it is a large physical structure and it requires maintenance, but the parking and payment process is fully automated, so they’re not even paying someone minimum wage to sit in a little glass box and collect their ransoms for them.
Contrast this with the apartment building I used to live in downtown. Our rent was something like $1200 per month. There were 24 apartments per floor, and 28 floors of apartments. Even assuming everyone was paying that much (which probably isn’t the case, since ours was a 2-bedroom but 20 of the apartments on each floor were only 1-bedroom), the apartment building’s revenue would work out to only $9.67 million per year (but like I said, in reality it’s probably significantly less than that), and they had a staff of maybe 20 or 30 people, and a lot more maintenance than a 6-story parking garage would require.
Bottom line: if you want to make money in downtown real estate, just build a parking garage. Frankly I’m surprised there’s anything downtown but parking garages.
OK, this is not something I do (or plan to start doing) every day, but well, just ignore that title and read on.
I’m listening to one of my favorite songs (“Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect”) by one of my favorite bands (The Decemberists) and I had to marvel once again at one of my favorite “clever” lyrics among Colin Meloy’s vast body of clever lyrics:
But the angles and the corners
Even though my work is unparalleled
They never seemed to meet
I love the double meaning of the word “unparalleled” here. Brilliant.
Once again I fail to provide anything profoundly new or original here: I found this on BuzzFeed, but I hope to add some value to the extent that I can supplement what you’re seeing with my own witty commentary, and I’m assembling items from a few separate pages that took me some time to find, but now they’re in one place for your convenience.
The topic of the day is the wonderful tilt-shift, time-lapsed videos of Australian photographer Keith Loutit. Tilt-shift is a photographic technique that is a popular trend these days, wherein some sort of focal adjustment (beyond my knowledge of the technical aspects of photography) is used to bring sharp focus to a particular portion of the photo, while blurring the background. The resulting effect is that the objects in the photo look miniaturized. I think this is a learned response we have to these photos, because we’re used to this focal effect occurring naturally when a macro lens is used to photograph actual miniatures up-close.
Whatever the cause for our perception of the photos, the effect is undeniably cool. Here’s one of my favorite examples:
Time-lapse photography is a much more familiar (and much older) technique, wherein individual frames are shot at specified intervals (say, one per minute), then played back at regular motion-picture speed, to allow the viewer to perceive very slow changes (such as the blooming of a flower) in a comparatively short period of time.
Put these techniques together, though, overlay a wicked techno soundtrack, and you’ve got pure genius. Here are two examples from Keith Loutit’s website:
This one is cool to me because it features the Circular Quay region of Syndey, Australia, home of the famous Sydney Opera House. I spent a few days in this area around Christmas of 1995 and it has always stood out in my mind. It’s great to see one of my favorite spots on the planet in a whole new way. (Now, if only I could be sipping a nice chilled Victoria Bitter as I watch it…)
This is the video that was featured on BuzzFeed, and was my introduction to Keith’s work. I was a bit surprised to see that he was in Australia — I didn’t realize Brisbane was so redneck (googling the phrase “Brisbane redneck” yields only this, which just leads back to us anyway) — although it explained why the chalk-paint flags on the dirt track were U.S. and Australian instead of U.S. and Canada. (For those who have not had the unique pleasure of attending a monster truck event, apparently here in the U.S. they always involve an absurd trumped-up rivalry between the U.S. and Canada.) Anyway — this piece is absolutely brilliant.
You can read more about — and see more examples of — tilt-shift photography at Cheapshooter. Also be sure to check out the Keith Loutit PhotoBlog.
