Category: Robert’s Blog

Ennio Morricone Box Set Mania!

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Ennio Morricone CD Box Sets

Lately, I have been stocking up on Ennio Morricone movie soundtracks from the late sixties and early seventies. This been a pretty easy task since Dagored records has released a trio of great 3-disc Morricone boxed sets. Each filled with wonderful packaging and liner notes, and is well worth the $25 price tag.

Like most people, my introduction to Morricone was in his scores for the Sergio Leone Dollars movies. Those soundtracks are known for their sinister baritone guitar sounds, howls, operatic vocalization, percussive bursts, and other genre defying/redefining motifs. Morricone, it turns out, has an extremely wide stylistic range. From his pop roots to his experimental soundscapes, these box sets showcase much of the diversity of his style.

Maestro leans towards his pop side. The soundtracks included here are La Donna Invisible (The Invisible Woman), Le Foto Proibite di una Signora per Bene (Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion ), and Slalom. La Donna is pure pop bliss, with a melody that is repeated throughout most of the disc. There are a few tracks that come close to sounding like the Theme from the Love Boat, but the vast majority of the disc is more e-z than cheesy. Le Foto is a bit more experimental, and Slalom is a solid space-age bachelor pad disc very reminiscent of another disc I have by The Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra.

Crime contains the soundtracks for Revolver (AKA: Blood in the Streets), Gli Intoccabili (AKA: Machine Gun McCain), and Giornata Nera per L’Arete (AKA: The Fifth Cord). These soundtracks have a lot more variety within each disc and are therefore not as consistently good as the other discs in this series, but they are very fine nonetheless. Gli Intoccabili has nearly the same feel as Morricone’s western soundtracks with several great vocal numbers about a man called “McCain.” I think it’s the same fellow who sings “Lonesome Billy” if you are familiar with that song by Morricone.

Fear is my favorite of the three sets. It contains Una Lucertola con la Pelle di Donna (AKA: Lizard In A Woman’s Skin), Il Gatto a Nove Code (AKA: The Cat O’ Nine Tails), and Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura (AKA: Cold Eyes of Fear). These discs are filled with erie soundscapes and experimental improvisations. Many of the tracks would not be out-of-place on an early Cabaret Voltaire, Can or Kraftwerk album, except that these sounds are being created with traditional acoustic instruments. Great stuff.

These are the first CDs I have bought in a long time, and are worth every penny. Viva Morricone!

Challenge of the Tiger

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I watched a great piece of eighties cheese this week, Bruce Le’s (that’s not a typo) Challenge of the Tiger. This movie is part of a Mondo Macabro double feature DVD along with vertically challenged spy thriller, For Your Height Only.

Both films were produced by Dick Randall, the writer and producer of the legendarily so-bad-it’s-good giallo, Pieces. Challenge features lots of bad dubbing, plenty of gratuitous nudity (worth watching just for the completely unnecessary topless tennis scene), some fast-kicking kung-fu, and some slow-punching speedo-fu (pictured). The plot is so dumb it forgets it’s even there. Most of the plot is simply a means of getting Bruce to his next batch of thrift store clothed baddies or Richard Harrison to his next greasy bedroom conquest. Highly recommended.

Philips DVP3040 Tweaks

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Having in previous postings expounded about the greatness of my Philips DVP3040 DVD player, I thought it a good idea to reveal some of the problems I have had with the player after a month or so of use. The main problem has been jittery or jerky video playback on various DivX or XviD files. Some files worked, others were unwatchable. Turns out the player does not like the encoding on specific files. The issue is video that uses a “packed bitstream.” There is, thankfully, an fairly easy solution. There is a small, free piece of software called MPEG4 Modifier that can analyze a video file, and re-save it with an “unpacked bitstream.” The re-saved files are actually a tad smaller than the packed ones and work perfectly in the DVD player. The application is tiny, does not require an install, and very easy to use.

Nonagon: Live, August 5th 2006

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My band, Nonagon, will be playing a live show on Saturday, August 5th at The Note in Chicago’s trendy Wicker Park neighborhood (1565 N. Milwaukee). The show starts around 9 o’clock PM and the line-up is as follows:

Please, please come to the show if you are in town on that weekend. It will be much better than the lame-o-rama Lollapalooza crapfest that will be going on at the same time. And our crapfest is much less expensive.

Easter Fun

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One of the first Flash animations I ever created was for a site that Ajenda produced called Easter Fun. Well, six years later, we still get about a thousand or so hits a month. In an attempt to squeeze some money out of this Internet relic, we are redesigning it to fit in some Google AdSense ads. In the process, I have completely revamped the look of the menu animation. Check out those gradients! And, as an added bonus, the chick doesn’t squawk at you every 3 seconds. Go to Easter Fun… and click on the ads for Christ’s sake (or, more accurately, Ajenda’s sake)!

I Love My New DVD Player: A Philips DVP3040

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This past weekend I made an impulse purchase in the form of a new DVD player. My previous player (a Samsung DVD-P421 from 2001) seemed okay, but recently it was hiccuping on the many-a-DVD layer switch. This always seemed to happen at a key moment in whatever movie I was watching. A minor glitch, but annoying nonetheless.

While off in the ‘burbs running errands, I decided to pop in to Best Buy to see if there was a cheapo DVD player for sale to replace my ailing Samsung. I’m not too hip to what makes a good DVD player these days. My only requirements where that it be progressive scan (even though I have a crappy 19″ NTSC television), be priced under fifty dollars or thereablouts and that it be able to play computer video media like AVIs or Quicktime. Lo and behold I fould what I was looking for in a Philips DVP3040.

Compared to the Samsung, this player is tiny, quiet (you can hear the high pitched buzz LASER on the Samsung) and it managed to stay near room temperature when watching a long DVD! It jumps from chapter to chapter very quickly. The remote is compact and easy to use. Again, this is comparing it to my Samsung which had an awful joystick-type of menu controller. It plays DivX movies effortlessly, subtitles and all, and they look great on my small TV screen. Now I can watch all my crappy video podcasts in the comfort of my living room. The photo and .mp3 playback capabilites are an added bonus.

On top of it all, it is region-free hackable! Just press setup and then navigate to preference. Press in the code 138931 and set the region you want. Awesome. It also claims to be able to play both PAL and NTSC media. I will have to find a PAL disc and test this out someday.

My only gripe so far is that, if you stop a DVD and power-down, it won’t pick up the movie where you left off. I thought that was a standard DVD functionality. I guess not. But, all-in-all a great bargin at about fifty dollars.