An Interlude with Sugar Chile Robinson

(referral by Buzz)

New Drummer

Just got a 1972 Roland "Rhythm 33" and mounted it to the underside of one of my keyboard tiers.

It has a nice vintage sound, but it's only presets, and there's just a single audio out. No CV, footswitches or independent outputs. But I got it sort-of cheap, and it's great for improvisations.

Playing along is a Moog Source and a VST Minimoog.

HyperPin Table, Almost Done

The buttons are installed, but not yet hooked up; I'm still waiting for the plunger and interface to arrive in the mail, but that's plug-and-play, so I don't need to do anymore wiring or programming.

My cost was $300 for the computer and the backglass monitor combined, $150 for the electronics and controllers and $130 for all of the aluminum I used to frame out the table and the backglass, as well as to fabricate the legs. I already had the widescreen LCD monitor for several years, and the plywood and plexiglass came from scrap piles and recycled projects. A pretty easy cabinet to make; the hardest and most time-consuming part was installing and configuring the games.

It's Totally Not Punk Rock Week Anymore: "The Cat" vs. "The Fox"

Punk Rock Week: The Repo Man Soundtrack

In Summer of '85 a friend came back from a few weeks at camp and turned me on to Suicidal Tendencies:



It was something I immediately connected with. Before this, I was listening to songs by Iron Maiden and Dio, with lyrics about knights slaying dragons and whatnot. But this was direct and sincere, with emotions so strong that they could barely be articulated, via lyrics or instruments; the music was on the verge of disintegrating under its own weight. It was enough persuasion for me to buy the song on vinyl, via the Repo Man soundtrack LP at the Coconuts in the Forest Park Mall. The album contains a few duds, but some other tracks were a springboard to finding more music by decent bands, like "Let's Have a War" by Fear:



And "Coup d'Etat" by the Circle Jerks, the first punk band I saw live in concert:



Then there was Black Flag's "TV Party", but I don't like that single. It was definitely a gateway, though, since right after I heard it, I found a used copy of "Damaged". I still listen to it, because, "TV Party" excepted, it rules. So I'll cheat and include this video from the "Damaged" era.

Henry Rollins was definitely not my favorite singer; the band's output quickly went downhill after he signed on. Just a couple years later, he was reciting bad poetry on stage while Greg Ginn just stood there, silently regretting that he ever allowed this clown to join the band. I much preferred Dez Cadena, but he dropped out because the Black Flag concerts were getting to be too violent for him. So check out Rollins in this video. The dude is an asskicker. Few men could have fronted such a band in such a crazy environment. But I digress.



And although I didn't appreciate it as much at the time, Iggy Pop's theme is the best post-Stooges track he's recorded:

Punk Rock Week: The Screamers

The Screamers - a drummer, two keyboardists and one of the greatest frontmen of all time - never recorded an album, but they eclipsed the Germs and X as the biggest draw in LA clubs during the first wave of Punk in the 70's.

This may have been shot for the first commercial release they were intending, to be available only on video tape. A strange idea, considering that VCR's were uncommon and prohibitively expensive at the time, but as you can see, it would have been a shame to have limited the antics of singer Tomata du Plenty to just an audio recording.

Punk Rock Week: The Real-Life Young Ones

Punk Rock Week: I Dig Pain

Take a hunk of concrete
And stick it in my face
I like to play with razor blades
I hate the human race
Kick me when I'm down
Come up and rip my shirt
My dad will buy another one
Especially if I'm hurt
I dig pain

From the Punk Rock episode of CHiPs, of course. The one that ends with Eric Estrada singing Kool and the Gang's "Celebration" on stage at a club to convert all the punks over to feel-good music. You can watch the whole thing starting here.

Punk Rock Week: Flipper

I'm guessing this performance is a Target Video production from sometime in the early 80's.

Consistently one of my favorite bands for over 25 years now. I still listen to them all the time, and my guitar and drumming styles on the Metal Robots tracks are very inspired by them. They reunited in 2005 with three of the original four members (co-bassist / co-singer Will Shatter, the one singing in the above video, fatally overdosed in 1987), and they still sound great.

Related: Flipper Playlist

Punk Rock Week: Magic Makeover!

Thanks to this instructional clip from "The Day my Kid went Punk", a 1987 ABC afterschool special, you too can go from Zero to Hero within minutes:



Sadly, this is the only part of this sociological relic I can find online. But look, here is another fun makeover activity! Try it, won't you?

Here's my entry. Awww, he's so much less angry-looking now:

Draw / Photoshop your own, mail it to coloring_contest@stexe.net, and if your makeover is chosen, you just might win a prize!

(Disclaimer: there will be no prizes.)

Punk Rock Week: Fear

From Wikipedia:

Fear reached national notoriety after the Halloween, 1981 episode of Saturday Night Live, in which they were introduced by guest host Donald Pleasence. Fear was booked only because former cast member John Belushi had insisted upon their booking as a condition of his return to appear in two skits in cameo parts. The band played two songs, during which hardcore members of the audience, many of whom traveled to NYC from Washington, DC, slam danced and stage dived damaging the set. As the band began a third song, SNL producer Dick Ebersol ordered the live feed stopped, and a taped rehearsal performance played after a brief black-out delay.

Punk Rock Week: Quincy

I picked up Destroy All Movies a couple months ago based on strong online reviews, and have been flipping through it nearly every day since. It's a true labor of love, exhaustive and well-written.

A term that keeps coming up is "Quincy Punks", originally coined to describe the outrageous characters that didn't exist outside of Hollywood film and television studios. Not, at least, until impressionable children (like myself) saw these TV shows and started imitating them. Now "Quincy Punks" is synonymous with "poseurs", thrown around to describe naive suburban kids who dress up and go to all-ages venues in the city to act tough.

My favorite is the dude with Little Orphan Annie hair and King Diamond facepaint. Haw!

Saturday Morning Synchro-Vox: Clutch Cargo

Movie of the Week: Hawk the Slayer

80's British Sword and Sorcery with The Great Jack Palance, Patricia Quinn (of the Rocky Horror Picture Show) and a really good original score. A favorite of mine since I first saw it on cable in 1981, after school in the sixth grade, when I was still a Dungeons & Dragons Dweeb.

Work in Progress 6-15-11

I've fit the monitors and CPU into the plywood cabinet and configured the software. For now I'm playing the games with just the computer keypad. The Hyperpin menu works nicely. Only three buttons are used: the left and right flipper buttons to scroll through the different games, and the start button to select. I only need to add another button for exiting the games, so the control panel can stay as minimal I had hoped.

Bracing up the cabinet to height I want, using all sorts of random junk. For the legs, I decided to go with this 1" aluminum corner stock, 1/8" thick. Easy to work with, and easily strong enough to hold a small game like this. A bonus is that it's about half the width of a real pinball leg, matching the half-scale proportions on the rest of this device. I like the aluminum enough to also frame out the plexiglass on the playfield surface with it. Adding some chrome self-leveling feet at the bottom of each leg to better allow the machine to be nudged.

Still have to wait another week or two for the controls to arrive in the mail, during which time I can continue finishing out the cabinet and tweaking the software.

Trailer Trash: Infra-Man

Work in Progress 6-13-11

My half-finished pinball simulator, which I just started throwing together on Saturday morning. It's from scraps of plywood, and a widescreen LCD television that had been sitting in our garage for the last three years. It has stereo speakers (spliced from the TV's built-in amp). The computer is a moderately fast dual-core PC, with a graphics card added to allow two monitors. I got a computer repair guy to hack it together, out of used parts, for $300, including the second LCD monitor that I'm using for the backglass.

I'm already in $150 for the kit that will include the interface, digital plunger and motion sensors. But after that, all I should need are five or six arcade buttons ($2 each) for flippers and credits. I also have to buy aluminum stock, so I can start custom-fabricating the legs. I already had the wood, plexiglass and paint on hand, so this will be a relatively cheap project, especially when you consider that a full-size pinball emulator with these features costs $4,000. And like the last machine I built, I intend on selling this.

I'm going to configure all of the software before I start laying out the control panel. The finished machine will be standard pinball height, but with a half-sized table and backglass (in fact, I simply took measurements from my Pin-Bot machine and divided them in half for this design).

Sunday Safety: One Got Fat

(thanks to the hafosafo blog)

Saturday Morning Screen-a-Show

Trailer Trash: Mob Boss

Stoned

The beginning and ending are missing, and the VHS transfer is awful, and it's broken up into eight chapters of a few minutes each, but this 1980 afterschool special starring Scott Baio is rare enough, and funny enough, to be included here in the esteemed halls of Futurechimp. And for you youngsters out there who are just starting out, the first few minutes give some helpful tips.



Bonus Baio! He's so dreamy! A reinterpretation of my favorite movie, Zapped. Starring Eddie Deezen, Heather Thomas (and her body double), Scatman Crothers and LaWanda Page. Filmed at John Marshall High School in Silverlake, which was around the corner from my old house. Also served as the location for Grease, starring Eddie Deezen.

Futurechimp Theater: Perils on the Beach

The Virtues of Not Having a Job

Played a once-in-a-lifetime game of Centaur on the pinball emulator of my arcade machine (above), more than doubling my previous record! I'm so proud! Here is photographic proof:

2,807,550 is now the score to beat! Can you do better? I sincerely doubt it.

And here's more trouble:

This kit that I just discovered makes up the interface for a home-built pinball machine emulator. A real plunger and motion sensors for X and Y axis allow you to "launch" the ball with an incremental controller and coax it around the table by nudging the machine.

I have a very small (19") LCD widescreen monitor in the garage that has no value, waiting to be hacked. I just need to add a second-hand 14" LCD computer monitor for the backglass, get a used, stripped-down CPU and build a cabinet. Most Hyperpin tables use 46" plasma screens for their playfield, which are crazy expensive. Such a completed cabinet usually goes for over $2,000. I'd be making something this size, and don't plan to invest much more than the cost of the interface. The only concern is the CPU, which has to have enough processing power for pinball software. But I don't need any media drives, or even a case, so I hope to find something from a reseller.

My cocktail cabinet turned out great. It's the same height as a real arcade machine, but much smaller in its other dimensions. I plan to do the same with this; a pinball machine that you can stand in front of, but only takes up a couple of square feet in its footprint. And like the cocktail machine, I plan to come up with an original design, learn from the experience, play it for a few weeks, then sell it off.

Movie of the Week: Horrors of Spider Island

This amusingly-dubbed 1960 German Horror-Nudie was released in American adults-only theaters in '62, then had its nude scenes removed for re-release on the monster matinee circuit a few years later. It also was on Mystery Science Theater 3000, but don't let that dumb show keep you from seeing this. It's a highly surreal and unique experience.

Do you know how many video rental stores I scoured in the 80's and 90's searching for this brain-scrambler? But now that we have the internet, this public domain film can be streamed anywhere, and you can even download the whole thing at archive.org.

Website Updates

It's been a mad blur of activity / unemployment here, and I took a few hours from innovating to upload all the new stuff to the website.

The Diver Damned diorama is ready to take the art market by storm...

Zombie Roach is now on sale, which brings the etsy store up to ten different novelties available for discerning collectors...

...and to the Circuits page I've added the Mame Cocktail Cabinet (for sale), The incredible FrankenRibbon synthesizer (videos coming soon) and the Brain Machine. I've also updated photos for a few other items throughout the site.

Work in Progress 6-5-11

Glowworm 2.0

I sold several Glowworms a couple years ago, then discontinued them for being too time-consuming. But I have a new design that's easier to make, as well as a better final product all around.

As before, the Glowworm is made of vacuum-formed PET and cast urethane. It stores solar energy during the day and lights itself up at night. But now, instead of a remote solar panel + battery attached by a wire, all of the electronics are contained inside the shell.

The plastic I formally used for the head and legs was clear. But that was always too viscous for these thin castings, and it's also pretty toxic, and after curing, it's brittle enough to shatter if dropped. So I switched over to opaque white urethane, which is much more durable.

Best of all, there's now a power switch, which helps to prolong the battery's lifespan if you go out of town, or just tire of a glowworm lighting up in your yard / house every night of the week.

Be warned: someday this glowworm will die. The battery eventually peters out, and replacing it would mean snipping open his exoskeleton (which you could do somewhat inconspicuously on his underside). But my prototype glowworm from a couple years ago still stays illuminated until dawn. So I can't tell you how long one of these will go. It's too bad he won't live. But then, who does.

Buy it HERE.

It's Vibrant. It's Urban. It's You.

Aw look, my alma mater sent me a letter of appreciation for taking so much of my money all of those years ago and giving back nothing in return. They want to say they're sorry.

Wait a minute....

And there you go... a better work of art than anything I did as a Columbia undergraduate, and it didn't cost me $6,000 a year. I just needed a little inspiration.

(click to enlarge)