Drive Train

There is an organization with a  website out there called the Prelinger Archives, and they have thousands of old films available for viewing and downloading.  Most of these films are of the type you would have seen in school growing up, such as "It's Tough to be a Teen", or "What's Going On Down There?"  Others are films created by corporations either to be viewed by their employees, or as advertisements between movies at the theater.  Most of them were made from the 1940's through early 1970's.  All of it is in the public domain, so you can download these films for free and do whatever you want to do with them.

In 2006, as I periodically do, I was browsing through some of these old films and I got to watching a lot of automobile advertisement clips produced by the major auto manufacturers.  Feeling creative, I decided to make a music video using clips from these car ads. 

I sat down with my guitar and wrote some music that was supposed to give the feel of a carefree ride in a vintage car.  Using an electric guitar, bass, synthesizer, and drum machine it took two or three nights to record the song.  I consider this song to be by one of my musical alter egos- Optic.  That is the band name I use for recordings in which I play all the instruments myself. 

Next, I downloaded a bunch of the old car ad films, which averaged about 5-7 minutes long each,  and set to work editing it all into a video.  To edit the video, which took several days of work, I went through all the car films and chopped them up and created a bunch of short clips.  On some of them I altered colors or did other editing tricks like speeding them up to enhance the presentation.

  This is my first attempt to post a video to this webpage.  The video looks ok, but the sound of the recording is a little distorted to me.  Nevertheless, I present to you "Drive Train"

Drive Train, by Optic. Written, recorded and produced by Darren Danger in 2006.

A Bullish Situation

This pic is from July, 2009, and it is of the daily cattle drive in Ft. Worth, Texas.  Each morning, in the old stockyards section of Ft. Worth, several attending cowboys drive about 12 or 15 longhorns a few blocks down the street to a corral, and in the afternoon they drive them back again.  Crowds of people gather along both sides of the street to watch.

 Ft. Worth was an important location in the days of the huge cattle drives of the Old West.  Thousands of cattle were driven into Ft. Worth along the Chisholm Trail.  The stockyards that held these cattle still stand, but most are now converted to shops.  The daily cattle drive for tourists is all just for show now.  It was pretty impressive standing just a few feet from those huge steers.  I can hardly imagine what it would have been like to stand there and watch hundreds go by.

Video Games- More Important than Ever

As a person who has spent about a billion hours playing videogames, I love this cartoon.

Osage County Courthouses- Lyndon KS

These photographs on a fine fall day are from October 17, 2009.  Lyndy, Evan and I found ourselves in Lyndon, Kansas, county seat of Osage County.  This shot shows the current courthouse, which opened in 1922.  This courthouse replaced the previous building, which is still standing next door.

This courthouse opened in 1887, replacing an even earlier one which had been built in 1875.  This is a beautiful building, and very well preserved.

This is a close up of some of the decorations on the very top of the building.  If you look closely at the top of the previous picture you can see what I zoomed in on.  This kind of ornamentation is long gone in architecture.

Darren Danger and Musical Gear

Lyndy took this picture of me this evening hiding behind some of my musical gear. 

Stacked on the left are my Pearl Export drums, with the snare drum at bottom center.  Behind the snare are a couple of guitar cases. 

The guitar on the left, a 1987 Gibson Les Paul, is leaning against a small Fender Sidekick 15 Reverb practice amplifier.  The middle guitar is a 2003 Fender Jazz Bass.  On the right is my 1989 Fender Stratocaster.  These two guitars are leaning against my 1998 Fender Hot Rod Deluxe guitar amplifier.

I am leaning on a Yamaha EMX 88S club mixer/amplifier.  It is sitting on top of one of it's two speakers.

On top of the EMX is a lamp that I bought at an auction in the early 1990's, and a bronze sculpture of a guitar player that my Mom gave me for Christmas this past December. In the back right, Darren Danger himself is a 1963 model.

A Snowy View Out Our Window

A couple views from our balcony of the lovely snowscape.  It's pretty the way the snow is stuck to every limb of the trees, but it's getting harder to appreciate all the time.



Hutchinson Kansas Trip

I'm writing this in the lobby of the Ramada Inn hotel in Hutchinson, Kansas.  Lyndy, Evan and I are in town for a family getaway.  We are mainly here to see the Cosmosphere.  We did that yesterday.  Today we drove downtown and visited some antique malls.  We left there, stopped to eat, and were headed toward our hotel when our Jeep started making a bad noise and then suddenly the surpentine belt that drives everything on the Jeep engine broke, along with one of the pulleys. 

Lyndy's insurance has roadside assistance, so they sent a truck to tow the Jeep, and some guys from the local Jeep dealer came and got us and took us back to the hotel.  They are repairing the Jeep at this very moment.  We are hanging around in the comfortable seats in the sunny lobby waiting on the call from the shop that they are done with the Jeep.  Meanwhile, I am posting here some of the photos we have taken so far.

All but a couple of these were taken by Lyndy.  I've been focusing on video for the upcoming theatrical release.

Our hotel in Switzerland, I mean Hutchinson.

The actual seat I am writing this update from.

Joe Cool Evan in the hotel parking lot.

The next photos were taken at the Cosmosphere.

Evan pretending he's about to get ejected.

Two famous Americans.

This is part of the Berlin Wall.

Lyndy and Evan in front of one of an Apollo Capsule.

These next photos were taken this morning downtown.

Evan and Darren Danger in the snow downtown Hutchinson.

Snowscape downtown.

The Jeep at the place we last saw it.