Haven't seen a theremin before? It's the high point of electronic music geekdom. Invented in 1919 by Léon Theremin, the theremin works with a series of antennas - you play it by moving your hands closer and farther from the two antennas to change the pitch and volume. It's similar in theory to how your TV antenna (for those of you old enough to remember TV antennas) works better if you move your hand closer to it.

The theremin entered into pop culture when it was used to make that weird "oo" solo in the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (you know which one I'm talking about).

(Information courtesy of my sick little brain and Wikipedia.)

Here's a clip of Léon Theremin playing his own instrument in 1928. (The tune, if you care, is "The Swan" by Camille Saint-Saëns.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xd2hoILOSI

Ben, unrepentant music geek

Un Chien Andalou (1928) Directed by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel

From wikipedia:
The film opens with a scene in which a woman's eye is slit by a razor (the man with the razor is played by Buñuel himself), and continues with a series of surreal scenes

"American film critic Roger Ebert called Un chien andalou "the most famous short film ever made, and anyone halfway interested in the cinema sees it sooner or later, usually several times."[1]

Critics have suggested that Un chien andalou can be understood as a typically Buñuelian anti-bourgeois, anticlerical piece. The man dragging a piano, donkey and priests has been interpreted as an allegory of man's progress towards his goal being hindered by the baggage of society's conventions that he is forced to bear. Likewise, the image of an eyeball being sliced by a razor can be understood as Buñuel "attacking" the film's viewers. Also, Federico García Lorca viewed this film as a personal attack on him."

other images to look for!
* an androgynous woman pokes at a severed hand in the street with her cane
* a man drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys, the tablets of the Ten Commandments, and two live priests (Dalí plays one of the priests in this scene)
* a man's hand has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge. The French phrase "ants in the palms," (which means that someone is "itching" to kill) is shown literally.
* a woman's armpit hair attaches itself to a man's face.