Leslie Shatz and the scattering of my undead brainsssshhhh...

Leslie in studio..maybe recording pool table' sounds??!

In a moment of boredom at my parent’s house back in Italy I turned on the TV and started zapping through the tragedy of the Sky channels. Suddenly everything stopped and I snapped out of the room and found myself underneath a shower of broken glasses cutting through my brains. This is kind of what I felt the first time I watched the shower scene from Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park. Without taking away any credits from Van Sant’s amazing visuals, what makes this scene so special to me is the sound design and the resulting perfect synesthetic marriage between the image and the sound.  Searching through the imdb database I soon found out that the man behind this sonic magic is a regular Van Sant’s collaborator called Leslie Shatz. One of his first jobs was as dialogue editor for ‘Apocalypse Now’ and the year after for ‘Star Wars: the empire strikes back’. Since then it seems like he worked in loads of productions that I really enjoyed. As sound designer for The assassination of Jesse James, Gomorrah, The Road, Elephant, Dracula, and only as sound re-recordist for others, which are definitely not in my top 10 best films ever (Rambo 4, Van Helsing, Hidalgo). Finally I’m watching Paranoid Park from beginning to end for the first time. Because last time I started watching more than half way through, many things now start to make sense, but hey! If you didn’t watch it yet try to do it from the shower scene and then rewind to the beginning the second time around. So here’s a video of the scene. Enjoy. Ps Crank up the volume pleeease!!! Signing off..

The Red Coca Cola Cans Only Bins Legacy..

As I pretty much reached the amount of red coke cans that I needed for the ‘CANCAN’ installation, I think it is now time to draw conclusion on how the three red bins that I installed around London worked out in the end.

RED BIN 1 – installed at HFC Halal Fried Chicken Shop, Whitechapel: didn’t go well at all. Loads of chicken bones and residues of half eaten burgers and few cans, and the owner threw the bin in the street after a week (luckily I managed to recover it).

RED BIN 2 – installed at  PFC2 Perfect Fried Chicken Shop, Whitechapel: this was excellent!!! For some reasons the owner convinced the customers to use it only for cans – not only red of course, but this is the place from which I collected most of them. It worked so well that the owner decided to start recycling, and as a gift I left him the bin. Thanks Abdul. You’re a good man.

RED BIN 3 – LCC Canteen, Elephant and Castle. This was actually the worst. Even with the red signs all around the college student just couldn’t get it – or they couldn’t give a damn about it, or simply they can’t read, they’re just pretending.

I was gonna take it away, but Simon –the manager- asked me to keep it there, as he’s also into recycling and he exclaimed: they MUST learn to use it!

So this is the results, and the unexpected legacy that this bin created.

I’m a pessimist, and I don’t think recycling will save the world, but it doesn’t take much effort to throw something in the left hand side bin instead that in the right hand side one.

A big thanks to all the people and friends that collected empty cans for me, especially Drew and Giovanna. Great score. Some more cans might come from outside London, but not sure if they’ll make it on time. Signing off..