I haven’t managed to sit down and watch this yet, but I hear it’s great. Join me, won’t you ?
 

Watch the full episode. See more American Masters.

 
This is sort of a dark and depressing take on mental disorders by Winnie the Pooh and characters. I don’t know about you, but these kinda gave me a serious case of the sads.
 

 
More after the jump…

Lori Davenport of St. Petersburg, Florida is the first in the nation to camp outside a Best Buy for this year’s Black Friday sales. The retailer gave her an iPad for her dedication.

Watch this. This fuckin’ says it all. And it says it so much better than any commentator could. Kudos to whoever produced this segment for leaving out the voice over and just letting this batshit crazy lady talk about “firstness.”

This is POETRY (of a fashion). American poetry.
 

 
Here’s an odd clip of a woman with lethal razor blade tassels. I have no clue what film this is from. If you know, do tell!

Update: The clip above is from the film The Man From S.E.X., directed by Lindsay Shonteff.

(via Unique Daily )

 
Philip K. Dick’s third wife Anne R. Dick has written “a biography dressed as a memoir” called The Search for Philip K. Dick which has just been published by San Francisco press Tachyon. Anne and Philip were married for only five years but it was a very vital period in Dick’s evolution as a writer. As poet Jack Spicer said in regards to his own Muse (and this could certainly apply to Dick) “the Martian kept rearranging the furniture in his head.”  In Dick’s case, the Martian was moving at the speed of sound.

Any new book on Dick is an event as far as I’m concerned and this one looks to be a significant contribution to the understanding of one of America’s most underrated and least understood writers of major distinction.

The book, while refraining from literary analysis, is invaluable for Dick fans and scholars because it’s told by the one person he was close to at an important turning point in his career. He wrote or developed roughly a dozen novels during his time in west Marin, including “The Man in the High Castle” (1962), his only novel to win the Hugo Award, science fiction’s biggest prize.

The writer Jonathan Lethem, who included five novels from this period in the Library of America anthologies he edited of Dick’s essential works, calls it Dick’s most fruitful time.

“The river of his literary ambitions — his interest in ‘respectable’ literature — joins the river of his guilty, disreputable, explosively imaginative pulp writing,” Mr. Lethem said in a phone interview. “It’s the most important passage of his career — more masterpieces in a shorter period of time.”

Read the NY Times piece on The Search For Philip K. Dick here. And to purchase it click here.

 
Rare color footage of The Doors performing on September 7,1968 during their two night stand at London’s Roundhouse.

Other than when and where it was shot, I can’t find any information about this video. I know it’s not from the Roundhouse footage (‘Doors Are Open’) which was broadcast on Granada TV. I know that the sound source is not the mixing board and may have been synched after the fact. And I know as a Doors fan I dig it.

If anyone knows more about the history of this footage, please share.
 

 
Hands down the best version of “This Is How We Do It” you’re ever going to hear. Indeed, this is how we do it.

It feels so good in my hood tonight
The summertime skirts and the guys in kani
All the gang bangers forgot about the drive-by
You gotta get your groove on, before you go get paid
So tip up your cup and throw your hands up
And let me hear the party say

Im kinda buzzed and its all because
(this is how we do it)

(via Certified Bullshit Technician)

 
This video for ‘Thin Moon’, from James Pants’ album Seven Seals, brilliantly captures the lo-tech weirdness you’d see on Public Access TV back in the ‘80s. I’d say it’s just about perfect. One of my favorite videos of 2010. 

Seven Seals is available here. At times sounding like a mashup of Joy Division, Boney M, The Flying Lizards and Passenger-era Iggy, Pants conjures up intergalactic road trip music and electronic soul for the lounges of Venus. Neo-neo-spaceage bachelor pad music.
 

 
National Geographic is holding its annual Photo Contest, with the deadline for submissions on 30th November. Alan Taylor over at Boston.com has published an excellent selection of some of the entries so far, on his always wonderful The Big Picture.

National Geographic is gathering entries in categories of People, Place and Nature, and is showing some of these on their website for readers to rate them. Below is a small selection of this year’s entries.

If you would like to submit a photograph for the National Geographic Photo Contest, please check details here..
 

 
More entries from this year’s National Geographic Photo Contest after the jump…
 

 
It wasn’t the good old days for everyone…
 

 

 
More after the jump…