Thirty years ago people certainly never dreamed of going on holiday and crawling around the bleached and rusting skeletons of the Cold War’s blackest secret weapons, their inner reaches utterly exposed for our delectation. Yet here we have one of the largest Soviet ekranoplans (ground-effect vehicles nicknamed by American intelligence agencies the ‘Caspian Sea Monsters’) laid up in drydock and apparently available for curious tourists to crawl around on.
And photograph exhaustively, for which I am supremely grateful to LiveJournal user igor113 as he has given us a detailed gallery of a journey into the belly of the beast. These images of the great beast could have been taken straight from the pages of Warren Ellis’s IGNITION CITY, filled with product of the finest minds of their generation left rotting and useless in drydock. They should have converted these beautiful, exquisitely weird craft into high-speed passenger ferries.
In 1988, actor Bill Paxton and vocalist/guitarist Andrew Todd Rosenthal formed a short-lived rock duo, Martini Ranch. They recorded and released just one album, entitled Holy Cow, which included inputs from Devo members Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob Casale and Alan Myers (all of whom contributed to the album’s hit “How Can the Labouring Man Find Time For Self-Culture?”), along with Cindy Wilson of the B-52’s as a back-up vocalist, and actor Judge Reinhold is credited as a whistler. The video was directed by James Cameron, director of Terminator & Aliens. It is remarkably, the only music video he ever shot.
The video includes cameos from director Kathryn Bigelow, as well as Aliens and Terminator alumni Lance Henriksen, Paul Reiser, Mark Rolston and Jenette Goldstein (from Aliens), Brian Thompson (can you spot him ? He got gutted at the beginning of T1 and was the great bad guy in Cobra), Judge Reinhold, and Adrian Pasdar who had appeared in Bigelow’s Near Dark) with Paxton, Goldstein and Henriksen.
According to many of the gorgeous girls appearing in this video who mailed us, we might be one of the last few owning a playable VHS of this video. Ours was duplicated by Bill Paxton himself back in the late 80’s, and given us for promotion.
And yes, this is Mike Cameron with several Tarantulas on his face! Here it is for all those who starred in it, and have junked their tape Bill made for them, and all those who never got to see it.
Behold, the Trylon Viper, a three wheeled commuter vehicle created in the 1990′s by one Rick Murphy. Inspired by the Colonial Viper from Battlestar Galactica the Trylon Viper can seat two — one behind the other — can be fitted with either a 1600cc or 1835cc Volkswagen engine, giving it a top speed of 120 miles per hour. Should that prove too slow, it can be fitted with an optional 250hp rotary RX-7 motor. The vehicle’s efficiency is better than many hybrids, with an impressive 45-48 miles per gallon. Completing the entire geek package is a mandatory 5 digit code for start-up and an interior featuring any number of lights, switches, and gauges; infinitely invaluable when hurtling down the highway at near light speed in a fiberglass spaceship tricycle.
Up until now the only way one could see Metropolis — Fritz Lang’s cinematic masterpiece — in its original, uncut form was to build a time machine and travel back to Berlin between January and May, 1927. When it was released in America, Paramount edited it considerably, leaving us with the beautiful, yet confusing, version we have today. All this has changed recently with the discovery of the previously lost footage in the film archives of Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires by the current curator Paula Félix-Didier.
Among the footage that has now been discovered, according to the unanimous opinion of the three experts that ZEITmagazin asked to appraise the pictures, there are several scenes which are essential in order to understand the film: The role played by the actor Fritz Rasp in the film for instance, can finally be understood. Other scenes, such as for instance the saving of the children from the worker’s underworld, are considerably more dramatic.
ZEITmagazin has a number of stills from the newly found footage available to peruse and one can see that they show a fair degree of wear. This does little to diminish my excitement. Metropolis has always been a movie that I have loved and the opportunity to see Lang’s original vision is simply fantastic.
I can’t help but think that, were these mechanical cops to have been produced, they would have immediately been drafted into service by private entities. Indeed, the inset in the upper left of this illustration brings to my mind, not of the police sedating a mob — something that, along with “war purposes”, it is well suited for, according to the numerous mentions of each in the write-up — but of the private security forces of the Ford Motor Co., tearing through the picket lines of striking employees. The idea of, say, John Pierpont Morgan, his rhinophyma riddled visage contorted in murderous glee, controlling an army of unstoppable automatons, chills me to the bone. At the very least it would keep the machines from helping those in who are truly in need of robotic justice, like the young lady being harassed by this floating Rape-Bot. Maybe it’s just me, but I wonder just who was looking forward to the future of 1924.
There are people — some of whom I know — who are champions of the toggle switch. In their opinion it is blasphemy to use a cheap, plastic or rubber button when one could instead opt for the tactile thwack of a ponderous, metal toggle; and while I feel a certain apprehension at, say, replacing all the switches in one’s family mini-van with the intention of giving the driver an impression of piloting a slower, less attractive and Earth bound version of a DC-3, I can see the appeal. Certainly we here at Ectomo have a certain affinity for retro-futurist artifacts and these adding machines by Andy Aaron fit the bill marvelously featuring not just the aforementioned toggles but an array of cranks, knobs, keys, and blade switches that would look lovely in one’s office.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
