I’ve been meaning to watch Bodysong (the Simon Pummell stock footage documentary set to Johnny Greenwood’s score) since I missed it at the MFA a few months ago. Instead it’s been collecting dust with the other sad Netflix rejects. I shouldn’t have waited – this is actually pretty fascinating per initial inclination. Somehow in this short little film they manage to summarize the entirety of human existence – a birth/kids/sex/art/war/religion/death kind of swirly-smorgasbord. Many of the clips are shown in either slow or accelerated motion which is mesmerizing whether source is bizarre or mundane. The first words (actually, more accurately just vocalizations) in the film don’t appear until and hour or so into it, and when they come it’s kind of a shocking transition towards the last more modern third of the film.
Here’s a bit from Pummell FAQ on the team’s filmmaking workflow.
This team produced a massive flow of possible footage. At one point we were running three cutting rooms simultaneously to be able to sort and select from this mass of material. The image overload was sort of exciting and nauseating at the same time – the richness of it and yet the randomness of it. All the time we were looking for the patterns, the hidden signs, the connection with the story.
Each clip in the film has a short backstory described on their website if you’re willing to install Shockwave (which I wasn’t aware still existed). To be honest enjoyed it more when each scene was out of any kind of real historical context – a strength of this film is the lack of voiceover explaining what the heck is going on.
I didn’t go see Radiohead last night at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in St. Louis. This is my karmic penance for mocking the city’s cultural offerings. But luckily enough, I am going to see Beck, Manu Chao, David Byrne, The Raconteurs, Gnarls Barkley, N.E.R.D, Erykah Badu, Iron & Wine, G. Love & Special Sauce, Neko Case, Band of Horses and the Silversun Pickups this September.
Oh, and The Swell Season, Drive-By Truckers and Roky Erickson.
Radiohead’s All I Need from In Rainbows serves as the audio track for some time-lapse footage of cranes I shot yesterday. This is one of my favorite songs off the album, I love the patient progression of the bass line.
Other random stuff is on my youtube & blip channels.
The transaction has cleared my bank. Apparently I’ve paid $4.87 for Radiohead’s In Rainbows (plus a $0.04 ATM fee); this has already been recouped by one listen through this morning. This is a happier, more uplifting album than other recent work, and nicely mellowed the anxiety and frazzledness one acquires from riding the MBTA each morning. I’ve already found myself reflexively thinking I should purchase other albums I’ve known but missed getting in this way, but of course cannot since only Radiohead has seen the light on this particularly satisfying sales mechanism. There are a good number of albums I’ve been meaning to buy but am not particularly interested in having any more iTunes DRM. The Amazon MP3 download store is better, but definitely lacking in breadth based on the ten or so searches I’ve made there so far. But even if Amazon worked perfectly, there’s something inherintly satisfying about naming one’s own price. I’ve decreed my personal value of this album at $0.491 per track, so be it.
While this strategy clearly wouldn’t work for everyone, there are slight modifications that could work as pre-order mechanisms for less well known bands. A band could make the market inelastic by limiting supply to 100,000 downloads, and letting the aggregate market bid up the per unit worth. Or reverse that, one could do a Dutch auction of the first units at 50 or 100,000, incrementally lowering the price thereafter for additional units sold.
One possible scenario for web strategy for a touring band hoping to sell 10,000 copies of a new album, at $10 per album for a gross of $100,000. For every 1,000 units presold on their website past that first lot, 1% of the most recent purchase price could be removed from everyone’s order automatically. As the price goes down, orders go up. If sales exceeded expectations by ten-fold, they’d only clear just over $4/album, but they’ve now got $400,000+ rather than $100,000.
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