Funk Babblings

This one's for chronarchy....

This morning on the radio I heard about a film that will be shown tonight and tomorrow night at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque:
Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

After seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, three 12 year old friends, Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb, began filming their own shot-by-shot adaptation in the backyards of their Mississippi homes.

Seven years later their film was in the can.

Fourteen years later, in 2003, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin Texas was proud to announce the theatrical world premiere of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.

Apparently copyright and trademark restrictions require that all showings are for non-profits, so you won't find this at your local commercial theater or on DVD. Catch it when and where you can.

See also information at TheIndyExperience.com.

(And why did the WKSU reporter keep skipping the word "Institute" in the venue name this morning?)

This has been rattling around my head for almost a week now, so I might as well mention it here....

"This" is the great Prince song "When You Were Mine". (Which ranks up there with "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man" as one of his great often-overlooked songs.) And more specifically, some covers of it that I found at "My Old Kentucky Blog", a music blog that seems to like to post MP3s of lots of different covers of the same song.

(The link came from Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, linking to a list of covers of "The Most Covered Song in Indie Rock". Have I mentioned that I like reading Pandagon (usually via pandagon_net), especially Amanda's posts there, for the mix of feminist politics, music, and attitude?)

Anyway, check out the covers of "When You Were Mine", by Ani DiFranco, Teagan & Sara, and others.

One of the things I miss about Columbus is CD101. (The closest we have here is WAPS.) At least CD101 provides an internet feed (though it's Windows Media rather than MP3, Xine can play it on Linux), so I often listen at the end of the workday.

And this weekend is an "undercover weekend" -- all covers all weekend. My kind of covers, too, like Too Much Joy and Paul Westerberg. This even beats half an hour of covers every few days on the Coverville podcast.


BTW, I think I've finally recovered from last weekend, just in time for another -- hopefully a less crazy one.

On a recent edition of "Coverville", I heard the best, most haunting rendition ever of "Don't Fear The Reaper". (Makes me want to go watch a fun Peter Jackson film....)

The album seems to be available from CDBaby, but in this case having downloadable samples hurts them -- the other songs don't sound nearly as interesting to me. The band seems to have morphed into something else, with more songs to hear.


I'm listening to this on my new toy, an RCA Lyra RD2012 flash-based MP3 player. It has 256MB built-in capacity, but the best part is that it's expandable with SD/MMC cards, so at some point I'll add a gig to it. The bad news is that even with the latest firmware, which required Windows to install :-(, there are some display glitches, like the 3-line screen often blanking out less than a minute into a song with no apparent way to get it back other than a reboot. So I guess it's sorta like an iPod Shuffle that sometimes has a display and isn't dependent on iTunes (or even compatible with it, for that matter).
Update: I exchanged the Lyra for another one, which seems to behave much better. The display doesn't disappear or otherwise flake out on me like the first one did. It's still not my ideal player, but it works pretty well.


Oh, I also finally have my own copy of U2's third album, War, from 1983. I'd forgotten how awesome side 2 of that album is. Sure, the album has some big hits ("Sunday Bloody Sunday", "New Year's Day", "Two Hearts Beat As One"), but the more obscure songs (e.g. "The Refugee", "Red Light") are far from filler.