Vincent D’Onofrio – Has He Really Been Overlooked This Much?

Source: Vincent D’Onofrio – Has He Really Been Overlooked This Much?

Collecting Advice: Don’t Make This Mistake With A Collection

I am posting only briefly to say that I am minorly traumatized by recent events that happened in the actual physical location of The Vault.

Upon opening a giant (4 foot long, i.e. so big it had handle openings cut into its ends so it can be moved) cardboard footlocker-sized box of posters I have not looked in since 2003, I discovered the remains of what was a rodent ‘condominium development’. I say the remains, because the mice responsible were evicted well over 2 years ago (their food source was eliminated as soon as I became aware of their presence in the house). So I wasn’t confronted with any actual mice or their corpses.

What I did find were some destroyed posters, thoroughly chewed and shredded. Color me upset and mildly grossed out.

Most of the posters I lost were thankfully not VDO related…in fact the only posters like that affected were my 3 US single sided styles A B & C posters for ‘The Cell’. Thankfully these weren’t expensive posters and will not be hard to replace (in fact I will probably go ahead and spend a little extra for the double sided versions I had wanted in the first place). But the mess that had to be cleaned up was not fun and took me several days to straighten out. And I lost some of my other lesser movie posters and many promotional and concert music posters (from an earlier collecting phase) which I liked and was saving to get framed at some point so I’m kind of mourning their loss and frustrated that it was so easy for the mice to ruin them.

At least I had the good sense to store the most important and/or valuable posters inside thick walled poster tubes with plastic end caps…mice were unable to enter these at all. The posters either not in tubes or in a few cases in partially capped tubes towards the bottom of the box were the ones that got shredded into confetti. But I have definitely learned not to store anything “shreddable” and “organic” like paper or wool or cotton in cardboard boxes in the basement (the same mice destroyed a few sweaters of mine stored in cardboard wardrobe boxes, the kind you get from a moving company that have a metal pole from which you can hang hangers and the same offending handle openings cut into two of its sides).

I think what happens with the violated cardboard boxes is some of the mice enter through the handle holes, get stuck in the boxes and shred up anything between them and getting back out of the boxes. They all eventually figure out how to escape but they leave a lot of damage in the aftermath.

This not so subtle wake-up call prompted me to upgrade every kind of item I am storing related to VDO that will fit into the following nifty storage container made by Sterilite:

I have invested in 9 of them so far and have plans to buy at least one more (for VDO TV appearances and movies on DVD, VCD, VHS tapes and laserdiscs which are currently split between 2 18 gallon Rubbermaid tubs). Unlike the locker pictured in the photo, the ones I found are black with a white handle although they also come in a deep blue with a silver handle. They strike me as extremely rodent-proof, easy to move around and easy to store. They’re not exactly cheap, but they are easy to find in my area and give me piece of mind should critters decide to try and move into the house again (living in the country this is always a strong possibility). And transferring everything into what I think of as safer containers has made me better organize and catalog what I have. So this is something of a blessing in disguise. I just wish these had existed when I started collecting…they would have saved me some grief (but then so would me packing away the posters more carefully in the first place).

I still need to find something more suited to posters that are more than 4′ in their smallest dimension (things like banners and subway sized posters) but I have some ideas about how to better protect those than with only capped cardboard tubes stacked on their ends in lidless plastic Rubbermaid tubs.

So I and the stuff are going to be okay. In the relative scheme of things, it’s not that big of a deal and it could have been worse. And 99.8% of my VDO stuff is unaffected although it’s been eye opening to find that I needed to get so many of these footlockers to house 6+ years worth of collecting efforts.

Still I don’t understand why the mice picked my collection to shred when they could have done the same to papers stored in cardboard boxes with handle holes…those they left untouched…go figure.

Music “Don’t Ask Me Why” Acoustic Version by The Eurythmics (from the promotional only ‘Acoustic Eurythmics’ CD Sampler released in 1989)

Wow! VDO Vault Celebrates 36,000 Hits on VDO Photos on Flickr.com

Some of you out there must really be bored and/or like looking at VDO-related pictures on Flickr.

As of sometime during the morning of Tuesday August 14th 2007, the VDO Vault photo account at Flickr.com reached over 36,000 hits. This is a pretty big landmark considering the 35,000 mark was passed less than two weeks earlier.

This means that since I started a Flickr account back in January of 2005, approximately 2000 visits each month are registered there of people looking at photos of the collection. That works out to something over 60 views a day.

I don’t really pay close attention to the numbers of people visiting this blog, the audio files I maintain at musicwebtown.com or the videos I have posted to YouTube. This is probably because Flickr makes it comparatively easy for me to keep track of page views there (everytime I log in I see the statistics). But they are high enough that I figure someone other than me is amusing themselves with what I do. So I’ll keep doing what I’m doing and keep somebody besides myself pre-occupied.

Anyway yesterday in honor of the 36,000 milestone, I posted a several more photos of Japanese items in my collection. There is one whole new set of items to look at: Japanese movie programs (or more correctly their covers). That brings the total number of photos you can browse at Flickr to 938. If I get a little more motivated this month, I might shoot for bringing that total number of photos up to 1,000 (or more). Since it is summer though and most everyone is spending time outside, I have slowed up a bit, well, that and I have been staking my claim to some more Web 2.0 real estate for the VDO Vault ‘brand’ as well as vegging out a bit and enjoying the weather.

And FYI there’s been another 150 hits in one day at Flickr even though I’ve been really slow to get this blog entry written and posted!

Music to goof off by: ‘Foolin’ Around’ by Freddie Mercury

Fan Folly FeeBay Auction of 2007: ‘Salt On Our Skin’ German Press Kit Worth $510.01?!?!

Yikes!

Well some fangurl with a far greater limit on her credit card than amount of common sense just ‘won’ a German press kit on ebaY for $510.01 (that’s *before* shipping)!

I don’t follow feebay auctions all that religiously, but that’s got to be some kind of record. It surely breaks the $400+ ‘Guy’ press kit record I blogged about several months ago.

In my case, I got my first German ‘Salt On Our Skin’ press kit back in 2001 for what I though (then) was a hefty $25.00 including shipping. Of course mine came with the booklet (which I have yet to upload an image of because it won’t fit on my scanner, it’s the size of a vinyl record album or a laserdisc) 2 more black and white 5×7″ photos than what the high bidder will receive (6 vs. 4) plus 13 different slides (the winner is not getting any slides but at that stupidly high price, she should be getting everything I got hand-delivered to her by VDO himself).

My second copy of the same kit only has one photo and 2 slides and thus cost me $10.00. However that one has already been passed on to another owner who wisely wishes to remain anonymous.

Looks like VDO has become more popular and profitable than I would have predicted…boy if I had the email address of the winner I could *seriously* cash in (I do have other extra press materials etc acquired at less spectacular prices from many different countries that I put away for many reasons, just one of them being an educated guess that VDO’s popularity would soar thanks to LO:CI)

But I’ve at least scanned the photos so that if you’re not the auction ‘winner’ you don’t have to spend muy mucho $$$ to see them for yourself…they’re in my 100th flickr photo set at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vdo_vault/sets/72157600298064868/

One of the nicer ones this winner isn’t getting is:

Appropriate music ‘Deeper And Deeper’ by Madonna (as in the winner is putting herself ‘deeper and deeper’ in debt to a soul-stealing corporation)

Stuff To Hear: The *Original* Soundtrack To’The Winner’

Well in today’s mail I received what I presumed might be a mythical object. Luckily this object is actually 100% real and I now have a copy in my hands (which will be joining others of its kind very soon).

Behold the CD soundtrack to ‘The Winner’ as Director Alex Cox intended it to be:

The story behind my “relentless” search for this CD is that many months ago I learned from Alex Cox, the director of ‘The Winner’ via an answer to an email of mine, that the way ‘The Winner’ was released in most every region is a butchered up, badly edited and incorrectly scored film. In fact if you look at Alex Cox’s website entry for ‘The Winner’:

http://www.alexcox.com/dir_winner.htm

you will see that Alex Cox doesn’t really count it as a film he directed because of just how bad a job the film’s producers did in reediting ‘The Winner’ and changing it’s score behind Cox’s back.

Luckily the Japanese had the good sense to let Cox try to reedit the film and put back Dan Wool, Pray For Rain and Zander Schloss’s soundtrack and gave the film a special theatrical run as the Japanese flyer (chirashi) here shows:

Anyway after much searching and following a cryptic clue on Pray For Rain’s website (where unfortunately Dan Wool and Pray For Rain do not have any mp3 files from ‘The Winner’ available for listening), I finally located what I presumed was something that didn’t exist, a commercially available release of the correct music for ‘The Winner’

The full soundtrack (Toho/Coeur Records CR-0011 if you feel inclined to order a copy for yourself from Japan) is available for your listening enjoyment is here

http://www.musicwebtown.com/vdovault/59419

But you know me, I can’t help posting highlights in my blog entries

Lights Of Las Vegas

Relentless (Main Title)

Phillip Meets Joey

$10,000 De Recompensa

Finally this makes some sense of something that’s always intrigued me about the trailer for ‘The Winner’ (a version of which you can see over at VideoDetective.com)

http://www.videodetective.com/titledetails.aspx?publishedid=8282

This CD explains why the trailer actually has good music (Cox’s intended humorous good music was used) and the film’s music is just awful (the producers put in a cheap crappy substitute soundtrack).

Oh and if I were Cox I’d disassociate myself from what was released everywhere but in Japan…the soundtrack to ‘The Winner’ as the rest of the world has experienced it is only outdone in awfulness by the soundtrack for ‘It Don’t Pay To Be An Honest Citizen’. Frankly a lot of ‘It Don’t Pay’s’ problem is that the sound mix is bad; the soundtrack drowns out a lot of important dialogue which I presume is a problem of the film having such an extremely low budget that the director couldn’t afford to fix the sound problems in post-production. With ‘The Winner’ the problem is apparently artistically challenged interfering producers with zero sense of irony or humor.