Richmond Fountaine Clip

"The Ghost I Became" clip by the Richmond Fountaine is another Willy Vlautin stunner. I just love the complicated simplicity and shallow depth.

Just like life itself.

Jeremy Clarksen of BBC's Top Gear is in pain - so is everyone who ever fell in love with technology that might vanish for good for so many reasons.

I have a special feeling for this part of this Epsiode of Top Gear's Season 13. As Jeremy takes out the Aston Martin Vantage V12 or Baby Aston, fitted with a V12, Brian Eno's tune "An Ending" serves a sad and disturbing undertone in reflection of an ending of an era whereas mankind prepares to stop putting dreams into technology as it seems for so many reasons.

Watching this show with my son (12) the other day (and he's a true automotive maniac) he was sitting silently next to me on the sofa. A bit too quiet for my taste. Midway through the segment I felt him shaking with tears and shortly after he broke down crying his soul out, the little fellow.

Silently he asked me whether I believe that beauty like the Baby Aston would disappear any time soon. Trying to comfort him I responded: "as long as there are boys in this world, devestated by such potential loss, it will be exactly fellows like you who won't allow it!". He wants to become a test driver now.

Being a Junior in a bi-lingual class of a Gymnasium in Germany's South (Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, Maybach, Audio reside all there); with an English spoken technology track from next year, is a first good step I reckon, for him to transform his tears of sadness into streams of sweat to become one of the rescuers of such stunning technology, have a look:

Y'all know how much I admire Willy Vlautin. Found another clip at Youtube by the Richmond Fontaine written by Willy while the camera seems to be an impression of an ordinary day. Only with the unmistaken romantic normalcy as dictated by Vlautins vision of the small people's live.

There is nothing staged about this clip, nothing artificial about Vlautin's lyrics that reflect on seemingly simple but truly deep felt emotions expressed through a smooth collage of pictures on a tired morning.

Coming home 3am in the morning, nursing the last beer from the fridge before hitting the sack after a busy night, meeting your lover or spouse in the kitchen to reflect on the most basic of all feelings in a relationship: "God I'm glad you're here - right now - like that"...

Doesn't get any simpler than that, or deeper and honest... Gotta love Vlautin for that!

Today this is the photo with the highest resolution ever taken in a city. Printed with regular photo quality it would be more than 50 feet wide!

A stunning experience is this photo taken in Prague. You can use the Google Earth like controls to wonder around in 360 degrees and zoom in to people's kitchen, literally (wondering when privacy issues mount over there).

Find thousands of 360 degrees photos at the site here.

I love both: the movie and the band. Mad at Gravity only released on single album but it is one of the best debut albums ever in my opinion. The movie Reign of Fire has always been one of my all time favorites for the costumes, plot idea and execution.

Here is a live song / video compilation from Mad at Gravity / Reign of Fire. This is NOT the original traler.

Mad at Gravity was only active between 2000 and 2003 as singer and song writer Lynn Johnston buggered off for reasons of artistic differences with the band. Two of their songs got really famous as they were selected for the Hollywood flick Reign of Fire featuring Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey (in my opinion his best performance ever!).

Lynn remained idle for the longest time (really sad this) and only comes out of the hole these days with some self recorded clips. Voice is still there and he's still got it but a new album doesn't seem to be in the works very soon. Below one of his latest feeds, enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOgz3vtqrZ0

Now I don't have the foggiest idea about that girl, her heritage or even the song. But this one made it to the top of my cute list right away.

There is nobody these days who impresses me more than Willy Vlautin when it comes to unbiased reflection on the lowest of the low, the outlawed and the broken.

Weeks ago I ran into a radio show when driving home through the Vailais Alps at night about Richmond Fontaine and its lead singer and text writer Willy Vlautin. Ever since I have been listening to their albums, to Vlautin's solo songs and I simply had to buy his books as well - I am obsessed with Vlautin.

The simple honesty and unshaded truth about the unlucky of us, widely referred to as white trash people or worse, the brutal reality visualized in words so powerful they make you scream when reading Vlautin's tales of restless search for sense and humanity in drowned existences, make him an artist of value and a hero for the small people.

Having lived and worked in the Southern U.S. I have seen and experienced what it must be like to walk through life without a lot of hope and on 3 dollars a day if that much.

Vlautin's poetry comes from he simplicity of his words and sounds that do not compete with but compliment the exhausting battle of daily routines without a job, without a clear vision of goals and without a future that excites.

It is the very complicated existences that fail on simple truths, the absence of hope and support, the missing link to the motivating example or role model - the reflection on dull, dusty and rotting dreams, far astray from reality that create this utterly sad romance between failed lives and the solidarity of hopeless stigma that gives way to predictible tragedy in Vlautin's texts, lyrics and songs.

I will keep daydreaming about this other side of earth that hides in shame or screams in pain without us ordinary or blessed people even comprehending the meaning of the pain felt by Vlautin's characters that are as real and as many as broken dreams in our days.

Someone posted this epic clip onto Youtube performed by one of my favorite Skandinavian bands Sigur Rós joining forces with the main actress from Dancer in the Dark, Islandic singer Björk.

Sigur Rós provided some of the film music. There is no other band around these days that is that dense and passionate in instumental music. After watching that clip you might want to pick up the movie as I have - nothing short of stunning!

Nick Vujicic is an amazingly inspirational fellow, a motivational speaker and owner, director of LifeWithoutLimbs.org.

Staying at this hotel this week in Amsterdam for a conference I always ran the in-room entertainment menu option as I liked the little self-promo video they played there while piling through email at night or recovering from some late tours with CI friends.

The Krasnopolsky has a somewhat surprising history I learned there being half German, half Polish. A beautiful experience at a busy conference in the middle of the steaming core of Amsterdam, this NH Hotel was neatly facilitating our needs to exhibit to our members (some 150 participating at this year's European Competitive Intelligence Summit). Check out the stunning exhibit hall (huge winter garden that sounded just awesome in the rain):  

More photos from the NH Krasnopolski Amsterdam here.

For the more serious conference reflection I'll need a couple of days to summarize, stay tuned at thie.me...