(Roughly) Daily

Movie: Inception
Actor: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Location: Paris, France
Photographer: Jazz Gabriel

How does one combine one’s loves of movies and travel?  Allen Fuqua created Movie Mimic.

Movie: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Actress: Rebecca Hall
Location: National Art Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Espanya)
With: Juan Sánchez
Photographer: Felipe ?

More, at Movie Mimic.

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As we position ourselves carefully, we might send terpsichorean birthday greetings to Frederick Austerlitz; he was born in Omaha, Nebraska on this date in 1899.  Despite a producer’s verdict on an early audition– “Can’t act, can’t sing, balding. Can dance a little.”– Fred Astaire, as he was better known, prospered.  In a career that spanned 76 years, the film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer, and actor starred in 31 musicals– and has been named the fifth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.

Gene Kelly, another major innovator in filmed dance, said that “the history of dance on film begins with Astaire.”  And beyond film and television, many classical dancers and choreographers in other forms– Rudolf Nureyev, Sammy Davis, Jr., Michael Jackson, Gregory Hines, Mikhail Baryshnikov, George Balanchine, and Jerome Robbins among them– also acknowledged Astaire’s importance and influence.

As for Ginger Rogers, with whom he co-starred in 10 films, her admiration was qualified:  ”I don’t know why everyone makes such a fuss about Fred Astaire’s dancing. I did all the same steps, only backwards. And in heels!”

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Humankind’s remotest relative is a very rare micro-organism from south-Norway. The discovery may provide an insight into what life looked like on earth almost one thousand million years ago… ”We have found an unknown branch of the tree of life that lives in this lake. It is unique! So far we know of no other group of organisms that descend from closer to the roots of the tree of life than this species. It can be used as a telescope into the primordial micro-cosmos,” says an enthusiastic associate professor, Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi, head of the Microbial Evolution Research Group (MERG) at the University of Oslo…

Life on Earth can be divided up into two main groups of species, prokaryotes and eukaryotes. The prokaryote species, such as bacteria, are the simplest form of living organisms on Earth. They have no membrane inside their cell and therefore no real cell nucleus. Eukaryote species, such as animals and humankind, plants, fungi and algae, on the other hand do.

The family tree of the protozoan from the lake starts at the root of the eukaryote species.

“The micro-organism is among the oldest, currently living eukaryote organisms we know of. It evolved around one billion years ago, plus or minus a few hundred million years. It gives us a better understanding of what early life on Earth looked like,” Kamran says…

More– including how newly-developed techniques in genetic analysis enabled the “decoding” of the organism, first discovered in the mis-Nineteenth Century, and how the protozoa might be useful in purifying drinking water– in this article in Science Daily.

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As we marvel at the miracle of mutation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1887 that ”Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,” including “the selected representatives of several nations, including the Sioux, the Cheyennes, and the Pawnees,” sharpshooter Annie Oakley, and  Colonel William F Cody– Buffalo Bill– himself, opened in London.  As The (London) Times reported:

Its great object is to illustrate the wild life of the Western frontier–its Indians and cowboys, its buffalo-huntings and cattle-ranches, its pioneering and its horsemanship, its dangers and its joys.

And so, for nearly a year, it did.

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From The Economist:

The British Parliament’s Clock Tower (more commonly known as Big Ben) is leaning north-west by 0.26 degrees, or 17 inches (43.5cm), according to documents that were recently made public. But Big Ben isn’t alone; architects have been correcting the Leaning Tower of Pisa since the 1170s when it was still being built. Germany’s Leaning Tower of Suurhusen, which at an angle of 5.19 degrees holds the Guinness World Record for the most tilted tower in the world, dates back to the 1450s. In modern times, many buildings have been designed at a deliberate slant. The 165-metre Montréal Tower, finished in 1987, is the world’s tallest man-made leaning tower and inclines at a 45-degree angle. In 1996, the Puerta de Europa in Spain was completed with two towers sloping towards each other at a 15-degree angle. Late this year the Capital Gate is set to be finished in Abu Dhabi at a slant of 18 degrees.

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As we hum “Lean on Me” to ourselves, we might send soulful birthday greetings to Robery Leroy Johnson; he was born on this date in 1911.  A master of the Mississippi Blues, Johnson’s guitar work and vocals have been hugely influential: he ranks fifth on Rolling Stone‘s list of all-time greatest guitarists, and is cited by Eric Clapton as “the most important blues singer that ever lived.”  But this regard developed posthumously; during his lifetime, Johnson was effectively unknown– an itinerant, playing juke joints and street corners.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that a legend has arisen around Johnson: as a young boy committed to music, he was “instructed” to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight. There he was met the Devil who, after bargaining for Johnson’s soul, took the guitar, tuned it, played a few songs, and then returned it– giving Johnson his otherwordly mastery of the instrument.

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Revenge may be a dish best eaten cold; but its best-known agents, The Avengers, are hot:  Joss Whedon’s superhero mash-up is breaking box-office records at home and abroad.

Vancouver-based artist Jer Thorp has immersed himself in the foundation of the film, the Marvel series that has been published pretty much continuously since 1963…

All 570 Avengers covers (to date)

The blockbuster that opened in the U.S. this past weekend features five Avengers– Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hawkeye, and Black Widow. But lest we worry about available grist for sequels, Thorp reminds us that there are 127 more Avengers… The featured five appeared early and often; but as this plot suggests, there are plenty more heros where they cam from:

Number of appearances of each Avenger

Much more (sequence of appearance, gender balance, etc.)  here.  And that’s not all: in the best Hollywood tradition, Thorp teases his own sequel…

…the clever ones among you might be wondering if these patterns are tied to historical periods, or if they are linked to the preferences of specific writers, editors, or artists. Is that crowded patch of Gods in 1985 due to a cultural fascination with myth? Or do Mark Gruenwald & Jim shooter just really, really like Thor? Great questions, and ones that I’ll take a look at Part 2 of this post.

Like S.H.I.E.L.D., Thorp is just getting started…

[TotH to Flowing Data]

Fans of the other, wonderful-in-a-completely-different-way Avengers might go here.

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As practice our Tony Stark impressions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965, in the wee hours, in a motel room in Clearwater, Florida, that Keith Richards awoke, grabbed his guitar, turned on a small portable tape recorded, laid down the signature riff of ”(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”… then dropped back into the arms of Morpheus.

“When I woke up in the morning, the tape had run out,” Richards recalled many years later. “I put it back on, and there’s this, maybe, 30 seconds of ‘Satisfaction,’ in a very drowsy sort of rendition. And then suddenly—the guitar goes ‘CLANG,” and then there’s like 45 minutes of snoring.”

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 click here for video

Young LA- based animator David O’Reilly has created a lovely short that is, at once, a history of animation and a glimpse at its future.  More amazement on his web site.

[Thanks to CE]

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As we watch out for sentient banana peels, we might send bombastic birthday greetings to actor, director, writer and producer Orson Welles; he was born on this date in 1915.  Welles was a pioneer in the theater (e.g., his Broadway adaption of Julius Caesar, the debut of the Mercury Theatre) and on radio (e.g., his 1938 The War of the Worlds, the most famous broadcast in the history of the medium).  But it was his films (his first, Citizen Kane, is regarded by many to have been the greatest American film) that gave lie to his own observation that ” movie directing is the perfect refuge for the mediocre.”

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