Bored & Old*

Horace Silver, the hard bop master. Few artists had so long a...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 05:59:00 +0200

Horace Silver, the hard bop master. Few artists had so long a run of classic albums as Mr. S. had in the fifties & sixties as both instigator and sideman, and precious few ever made music with so much energy and joy of invention. When the setting called for restraint and depth of feeling, though, he was unmatchable in his delicate intensity. Either way, he made the piano sing.

Enjoy your retirement, Mr. Silver.

Scott Miller 1960 - 2013

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:17:40 +0200

Scott Miller 1960 - 2013

Brigitte Bardot et Pablo Picasso, 1956

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 10:52:49 +0100

Brigitte Bardot et Pablo Picasso, 1956

Photo

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:15:20 +0100

revolights: Too early for New Year’s resolutions?

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 22:36:04 +0100

revolights:

Too early for New Year’s resolutions?

Charly Gaul & Federico Bahamontes

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 23:47:35 +0100

Charly Gaul & Federico Bahamontes

Dave Brubeck 1920 - 2012

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 23:15:39 +0100

Dave Brubeck 1920 - 2012

Sonny and Cher, 1966

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:16:18 +0100

Sonny and Cher, 1966

are2: Badassery

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 21:49:12 +0200

are2:

Badassery

are2: Lost in translation

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:36:06 +0200

are2:

Lost in translation

Andy Williams 1928 -2012

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 16:31:58 +0200

Andy Williams 1928 -2012

Photo

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:42:27 +0200

awesomepeoplehangingouttogether: Buster Keaton and Samuel...

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:48:44 +0200

awesomepeoplehangingouttogether:

Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett

Neil Armstrong 1930 - 2012

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 10:55:00 +0200

…even Mission Control was in the dark. All they knew was that the plan had been ditched and Armstrong was now on his own, a quarter of a million miles from home. There was nothing they could do to help. Duke whispered to Kranz, “I think we’d better be quiet.”

Three hundred and fifty feet up, Eagle skimmed over the boulders. Armstrong pitched her back to a rearward angle in order to avoid picking up too much speed. He banked left to skirt another field of rocks as the Moon seemed to rear up at him and telemetry showed his heart surge.

“How’s the fuel?” he asked Aldrin. An unnatural calm in his voice masked the fact that his pulse was now racing at over 150 beats per minute.

“Eight per cent” came the reply. Less than in the simulations.

At 250 feet, Aldrin stole his first glance out of the window, then quickly returned to his instruments. Armstrong was still searching for a landing site: he chose one, the discovered it to be flanked by another crater. There was now ninety seconds’ worth of fuel left, but twenty of those had to be saved for an abort: if they got to that stage and still hadn’t landed, the computer would automatically try to shoot them back into space and putative safety, no matter how close they were to the surface. Back in the control room, an automatic sequencer had begun counting down to such an eventuality, and everyone knew it. Armstrong edged forward and saw a clearing of about 200 square feet, bounded by craters on one side and more boulders on the other. The Moon was 100 feet beneath them. This had to be the place.

Eagle needed to be brought down in a straight vertical line. Any horizontal movement at the int of impact could snap off one of her matchstick legs. Yet, as he listened to Aldrin reciting his litany of figures - “sixty feet…down two and a half…two forward…two forward…” - Armstrong suddenly found his view stolen by an eruption of dust and rock that arced away in dense sheets, obscuring the landing area completely. Momentarily unsettled, he was training his eyes on some distant rocks in order to maintain his bearing when he heard Charlie Duke’s voice in his ear, warning “sixty seconds”. No one in Mission Control knew about the craters, the boulders, the dust. All they knew was that in every successful simulation Armstrong had landed by now. The years of preparation, the billions of dollars, the lives that had been sacrificed on the way most notably the crew of !Apollo 1! thirty months previously - all that energy and ingenuity and life was now compacted into the next sixty seconds and the judgement of one man. The room was held in an agonized silence.

At thirty feet, Armstrong found Eagle to be drifting backward. He didn’t know why, but knew that landing while he couldn’t see where he was going would be extremely dangerous. He wrestled with the controls, eventually halting the backward movement, but picking up a horizontal drift in the process. He felt frustrated that he wasn’t flying well enough, and would have given anything to buy more time, but there’s was none to buy. They were now hanging twenty feet above the surface of the Moon and had entered the “dead man’s curve” - the point at which bailing out becomes impossible and if the manoeuvre doesn’t work, you crash.

From the earth: “Thirty seconds”.

Aldrin: “Contact light”.

Through the storm of dust, whiskery probes attached to the LM’s feet had made contact with something. The pilot had been instructed to cut Eagle’s descent engine at this height, because engineers calculated that it could be blown up by the back pressure from its own exhaust if he didn’t. But Armstrong didn’t do it. In his fight to keep the thing steady, he failed to hear Aldrin’s call.

Fortunately, the engineers were wrong about the back pressure. Still firing, Eagle settled into the dust so easily that neither man felt the impact. Armstrong’s hand flew to the Engine Stop button and he announced “Shutdown”. There was a whirr of action as he hit more switches and buttons and Aldrin ran through the post-landing checklist. Then there was a moment of stillness. The two men turned to face each other, grinning through their helmet visors, and clasped hands. After what seemed like an age, Armstrong advised a waiting world that the Eagle had landed.

- from “Moondust”, Andrew Smith

Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters band (Bennie Maupin, Paul...

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 11:38:34 +0200

Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters band (Bennie Maupin, Paul Jackson, Mike Clark & Bill Summers) jam on themes from 1974’s classic “Thrust” and “Headhunters” from two years earlier. It’s a good hour long, so settle in, but if 70’s jazz-funk is your thing, this is the deepest and best (and best quality) film I’ve ever come across from this band and that era. Immense.

Photo

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 09:36:26 +0200

Photo

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 10:27:40 +0200

Gorgeous Otl Aicher poster design from the 1972 Munich Olympics....

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 10:08:36 +0200

Gorgeous Otl Aicher poster design from the 1972 Munich Olympics. More here.

I’ve been near obsessed with Todd Terje’s...

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 12:08:42 +0200

I’ve been near obsessed with Todd Terje’s “Inspector Norse” these past couple of months. I love the way it patiently settles into an unassuming, appealing groove before unfolding a big unexpected widescreen payoff in the middle, then slowly sinking back to earth. Pop perfection.

It was hard to imagine a video doing anything to improve or enhance this experience, then, but this wonderful clip does both. This (among many other reasons) is why I’m not a music video director.

Photographer Gjon Mili shot this short film in 1944 featuring...

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 08:55:07 +0200

Photographer Gjon Mili shot this short film in 1944 featuring many of the top jazz artists of the day. It was decades ahead of its time in technique and composition and still looks astonishing. The best 10 minutes you’ll spend today.