Happy new year?

What exactly does that mean? Or, more precisely,  what has been edited out of it to make it slide off the tongue in such a sweet and slippery way that melts the hearts of everyone who hears it? Merry honey, happy sugar. Super-mega blah-blah-blah. What if some daring soul tried to totally fuck up the season by greeting friends and relatives over the holidays with phrases like “Happy Exorcism Of Your Foul-Mouthed Pre-Pubescent Daughter” or “May all your cunnilinguses be blue” or “Hey, did you hear Marianne Faithful’s Christmas CD?” Or perhaps you were expecting cousin Ralph to want to sing “I Saw Mommy Rimming Santa Claus” over a cup of over-processed Egg Nogg?

Nogg? What the hell?

I really have tried (when able) to relay an uplifting personal seasonal greeting like “wishing you a peaceful and prosperous 2010″  because you can’t re-gift that greeting ever again. If it were a pdf or jpg you’d have to really go in there and change the numbers, and isn’t that what the spirit of the seasons is all about?

Digression is sad, isn’t it?

I digress.

I had a lovely holiday, and am already fast at work on whipping 2010 into shape.

Thank you for taking time out of your day to visit my website.

Come again soon, and clean up afterwards.

An Early Vangelis Recording

After the world-wide success of his score for “Chariots Of Fire,” Vangelis became extremely popular. Naturally, many people began to seek out his older, more obscure recordings and luckily Polydor kept 1973’s “L’Apocalypse Des Animaux” in print.

Originally recorded in 1970 for an episodic documentary series on animals and released as an album in 1973, “L’Apocalypse” is a quietly stunning album, only 35 minutes in length, that became a bit of a compulsive listening habit for me after I’d discovered it.

I became an admirer of Vangelis’ work…not from “Chariots” but rather from “Blade Runner,” which I would see almost yearly throughout the mid 1980s in full 70mm glory at the Cinesphere’s 70mm Film Festival. At the time, however, Vangelis’ actual recording of the “Blade Runner” soundtrack was not available commercially. (The version available at that time was credited to the New American Orchestra and billed as an orchestral interpretation. I knew immediately that these recordings were not the ones I’d hear in the film, and had a hard time loving the album. It wasn’t until 1994 that Vangelis would approve and release an official soundtrack recording.) In my search to find some other interesting recordings by the composer/producer lead me to find a very bad Canadian pressing of “L’Apocalypse” and quickly added the quirky, minimalist and ambient album to my list of quiet-time favourites.

Having a quick scan through the web gives me the impression that this recording has not yet been remastered. The CD still appears to be in print, and available on amazon.com, as well as in their MP3 download section. It’s also on iTunes, but no remastering information appears.

Highly recommended for ambient-minimalist music lovers. It’s perhaps not especially shocking that this recording is almost 40 years old. But then again, perhaps it is.

When I was a teenager, my friend Frank D. introduced me to some incredible music. Kate Bush, Roxy Music, classical, ambient…there really were no limits to Frank’s tastes, except that he tended to veer away from top 40. (I remember being shocked seeing him dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Starting Something” at Nuts & Bolts one night. It wasn’t that his dancing was bad, but rather that he was dancing to Michael Jackson, reigning prince of top 40 radio stations everywhere at that time.)

Frank had a Lada. I remember my favourite record shopping sprees were with him, in that rattling, manually-transmissioned-Lada. We would drive downtown and arrive back in Mississauga, hours later, with bags of vinyl goodies. I remember the day I came home with Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks album. Frank had put several tracks from it on an ambient mix tape he had made for me. My copy was imported from…England probably. Maybe Germany. It was probably available domestically, but I preferred the thicker, better quality imported vinyl.

In recent years Eno’s ambient recordings have been a little hard to find in their remastered versions. However, I’ve just come from both iTunes (Canada) and HMV’s new digital download section where the 2005 digitally remastered versions of many of Eno’s ambient collaborations are available.

Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks

So I’ve just bought Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks (one dollar cheaper on iTunes, but iTunes only offers the 8-minute “Stars” as an album-only track, while HMV makes it available on its own, but at an inflated $2.29!) and am listening to it as I write this.

My interest in ambient music re-ignited in the past few years. When I started making short films, I began recalling some of the great ambient music I listened to thanks to Frank D’s gentle urgings. I listened to the radio, like most people, but found a lot of time to listen to these less commercial recordings, in what I like to consider an adolescent form of meditation.

My friend Mark has been digging out his favourite records from his collection, and while I have purged my closet of all vinyl (except my Kate Bush and Roxy Music discs), I am revisiting some beautiful ambient music from my past. So I’m going to do a series of postings about ambient music. More to follow.

Richard at Cherry Beach

Today was the second day of filming for the video for Richard Delamar’s “Bad Boy Good” and I was in an agitated state because everything that could go wrong did. And then some.  The footage turned out even better that I had anticipated, but I’m still wanting to see dolly shots. So I’m going to start seriously practicing with my Merlin steadicam. Richard suggested going to the Cherry Beach area, to try and find some burnt out/industrial landscapes and I got fixated on this bridge. I am hoping we’ll be blessed with good weather next week so I can re-do some of the shots that are just too shaky with a hand-help camera. Once we were there, we ventured down to the Leslie Spit, which I’ve never been to before. (I always thought it was named after…oh well, never-mind that.)

Spent much of yesterday and this evening cooking, cooking, cooking! Soups and some very interesting dishes with lots of ginger in them. I’m experimenting like crazy. And the freezer is full.

That’s all for now.

Thanks for reading.