I've but one degree of separation from the feared Schwa Corporation - a Dutch acquaintance of mine having made First Contact years ago - and as a result of the meeting, I get a missive from their adminisphere every blue moon or so. Now, I wouldn't term what the Corporation employs as mind control per se, but I feel awful good about telling you about the opening of Schwa's nifty new Schwatown Midway. A lot better than I would feel if I hadn't told you. The Space People - they're good folks.

I'm not saying whom, but some of you have tagged the grandiose electronic music of Orbital as "New Age music with a techno beat." Pardon my simplicity, but wha? That's like calling Roy Lichtenstein "Warhol with a rhumba beat," or George Lucas "Kurosawa with a skiffle beat." Orbital's gorgeous instrumental tracks recall Jean Michel Jarre and Kraftwerk at their best; going back further still, you'll find pieces of the sound of the brothers Hartnoll in Stockhasen and Stravinsky. Orbital's music has provided dramatic counterpoint to the action of recent sci-fi hits "Pi" and "Event Horizon"; the techno duo has played to hundreds of thousands in their native England; critics on both sides of the big pond have them figured as the future of electronic music. Their spot on the "Community Service" tour currently navigating the states - with Crystal Method and Lo Fidelity All Stars in support - is just the cherry on the digitized cake of the effing future, boyo. New Age? You had better believe it. The new age is coming down the pike at full throttle, the lifeless body of Yanni spread across its grill like a 10-point buck. Guess who's driving?
 

I obtained a three-year subscription to the New Yorker for the cartoons. Actually, that's not true - how can I deny the best writing in the goddamn world? The cartoons are an indispensable plus, though - a feature that is given proper tribute on the magazine-sponsored Cartoon Bank site. The gang's all here - Jack Ziegler, Robert Mankoff, Liza Donnelly, Mike Twohy, the incomparable Roz Chast - and more. A short registration process puts you up to your neck in funnies, nearly all of which can be licensed for commercial use or purchased as artwork. These cartoons and cartoonists are the cream of their crop - sophisticated, literate, funny above all. The Passenger's personal favorite resides in the "gallery" section: Mick Stevens' "Take the Author to Lunch." Obvious reasons. Renew my subscription, ladies and gentlemen!
 

The Passenger has mixed feelings about the website of volunteer organization MODCOM (The Modern Committee), a group dedicated to the preservation of post-WWII modernist architecture. On one hand, it cheers me - after all, I live in Las Vegas, where the modern aesthetic bloomed way back when, and I'm a big fan of the look of the 1964 New York World's Fair. Reading up on the LAX Theme Building - recently renovated by Walt Disney Imagineering - and the Cinerama Dome puts me closer to an era where buildings - all buildings - could telegraph information about what they had inside from 100 feet out. On the other hand, most of these buildings are in serious danger of becoming extinct; that makes me furious, considering the ugly crap that passes for an aesthetic these days. (Don't even get me started on half the hotels on the Strip; many of them - The Venetian, in particular - replaced some truly handsome structures.) If the goal is to get the reader fired up, the site succeeds admirably. Who do I have to browbeat to save the Cinerama?
 

When I was a kid, there were commercials looping endlessly on every channel that featured skinny girls in form-fitting jeans and haltertops, all declaring ebulliently, "I love you, Sergio." Even then, I knew - they were referring to late director Sergio Leone, the acknowledged master of the so-called "Spaghetti Western." Leone had a singular gift for creating atmosphere - dusty streets, sweaty, anguished faces - that other filmmakers have copied, and copied, and copied until the seams became transparent. The best of the recent crop of Westerns have featured Leone alumni (Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven") or aped Leone's style almost to the point of parody (Sam Raimi's "The Quick and the Dead"). This comprehensive Leone tribute site firmly establishes the man's genius - actually, a 30-second clip of "A Fistful of Dollars" establishes the man's genius. The rest is purely academic. No wonder those girls in the haltertops loved him so much.

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