Month: November 2004

Pledge Bait

November 30, 2004

     Having fallen embarrassingly behind in the maintenance of Acmenoveltyarchive.org, I thought I would make an attempt at bringing the following item to people’s attention before its too late:

     Cartoonist Chris Ware and ‘This American Life‘ Host Ira Glass have collaborated on a DVD which is only available to those who donate to public radio. The DVD contains the narrated slideshow that Glass and Ware were presenting at various speaking engagements during the past year. I’ve pasted some background on the story below, taken from the official website for the DVD.

     “Ira Glass and cartoonist Chris Ware decided to co-report a story together. Ira does the sound. Chris does hundreds of drawings. The result is a 22-minute story, with sound and images, now on DVD for the first time.”

     “This story has never been on the radio. It was presented in pieces – as it was completed – on This American Life’s May 2003 “Lost in America” tour, and at Royce Hall in Los Angeles. It’s the true story of a boy named Tim Samuelson, who became obsessed with old buildings, especially the buildings of Louis Sullivan in Chicago, during the 1960’s and 70’s when they were being torn down.”

     “At one point, hearing that a favorite building at Clark and Adams is being demolished, a thirteen-year-old Tim demands to meet with the architect who’s designing the glass-and-steel building that’ll take its place: Mies van der Rohe, one of the most famous architects in the world. Tim finds van der Rohe’s office. The legendary architect meets with the teenager.”

     “Much more happens. It’s a very sad story, drawn with beautiful pictures.”

tim_looks_buildings.jpg

     The DVD is only available in exchange for making a hefty pledge to your local public radio station. If you’re interested, but your local ‘This American Life’ station doesn’t appear to be offering the DVD, they can probably still get it for you.

     A bit more on the DVD and packaging:

     “Audiences who saw the work presented onstage saw huge projections of Chris Ware’s drawings. The cartoon buildings were tall as buildings.”

     “To accompany the DVD, Chris has designed a 96-page book, full of never-before-published photographs of Louis Sullivan buildings, in their glory and in various states of demolition. Also, there are DVD extras: audio outtakes, a look at Chris’s pencil sketches, a high-resolution version of the movie that plays on PCs and Macs. “

     “As he worked on this, Chris said he wanted it to be the most beautiful thank you gift public radio has ever offered listeners. The whole package is this gorgeous little book, filled with photos, with the DVD tucked inside. It’s being released first and exclusively through public radio pledge drives, and not available anywhere else.”

     There’s a quicktime preview of the DVD available for viewing here.

Free SuperBowl Commercial Idea

November 24, 2004

     I can’t be the first person to come up with this idea, but I’m amazed it hasn’t actually been executed yet. Maybe it has and I just don’t know it.

FADE IN: CUBICLE.

BORED EMPLOYEE (ON PHONE): Yes. (LONG PAUSE) Yes. (LONG PAUSE) Yes. (REPEAT AND INTERACTS WITH CUBICLE FOR 27 SECONDS. CHECKS EMAIL, GOOGLE, ETC.)

CROSSFADE TO:

Verizon Logo: “Can you hear us now?”

     Do you have to have a specialized degree to be an advertising “Idea Man?”

Totally Gakken!

November 22, 2004

     I finally got my hands on that functional japanese gramophone model kit thing that I wrote about here. What follows is my review! Get excited!

     I’d previously been thwarted in my efforts to order it through Amazon Japan. A few weeks later, the kit showed up in an issue of Readymade Magazine, and they were apparently flooded with requests for further information. Several importers have since picked up the kit for distribution in the U.S. If you contact Readymade about where to purchase the kit, they refer you to verycoolthings.com, which is currently selling the kit for a ridiculous $70 US. Their page for the kit does offer this link to a pdf the English version of the instruction Manual. If you’re feeling thrifty, you can get it for ~ $30.00 (depending on the exchange rate) through Hobby Link Japan by clicking here. Both importers are awaiting November restock shipments.

     Once you tear into the box, this is what you’re left with – a bunch of plastic, some styrofoam, a motor, a thumb tack, two sewing needles, and a bunch of tiny screws encased in a blister pack. You also get instructions in both English and Japanese. If you’re the sort of music nerd who thinks this is the greatest thing ever, but you’re hesitant to order because of past issues with language incompatibility, rest assured that the translation of the English instructions is actually really, really good. I flew through the assembly in about an hour.

     Below is an image of the model after assembly. In short, you swing a weight into place above the needle, turn on the motor, and Speak into the horn. As the motor turns the platter, the sound vibrations striking the horn are transmitted to the needle, which scratches a linear representation of these vibrations into the surface of the media (In this case a CD-ROM, though several soft, white plastic discs are also included). For playback, the weight above the needle is reduced, and the needle rides in the grooves it had previously scratched out. The vibrations of the needle are in turn transmitted to the horn, producing the audible playback. Woo, science!

     I’ve only tested it once, but it works and that’s good enough for me. The audio is predictably thin and warbly, as should be expected when using a rickety plastic turntable and a sewing needle to cut grooves into a CD-ROM. This seemed like as good a reason as any to start figuring out iMovie, so without further ado, the reason you’re all here: A video of the model playing back audio of me singing a bit of ‘Young At Heart’ in a warbly Muppet voice.

Gakken Berliner Gramophone Model – “Young At Heart”
From: My Diningroom Table

     The most interesting bit of information I can add to all of this is that this particular model is part of a series of ‘adult education’ models – called Otona no Kagaku. On a whim, I searched the hobby link Japan website for the rest of the models in the series, and was rewarded with the following totally great news:

There’s an Edison Cylinder kit.


edison.jpg

     Oh, hottest of damns! Somehow I missed this when looking at the Japanese Gakken Website (It could have something to do with it all being in Japanese). It appears to be similar in abstraction to the gramophone kit, constructed of interlocking wood pieces, and the recording is scratched into a plastic cup. Some of the other kits aren’t too shabby either. Here are two ‘automaton‘ kits in the same series.

Clumsy conclusion: Four Stars!