Japanese artist Takanori Aiba built this unbelievably intricate mini-castle in and around a potted Bonsai tree using stone clay, epoxy putty, copper line, plastic, and resin. I can’t get over the amount of time and effort this must have taken.
Via Daily What and My Modern Met
Jewelry designer, Josephine Ryan, is making these delicate, silver Darwin Fish necklaces. I like it.
If you’re interested in one, hit her up on Facebook. It looks like she’s taking orders there.
Via reddit
Cool film footage of Greenwich Village in the Sixties.
The Village has always been a vortex for cultural energy and you can see it in these images. Soulful young longhairs, wide-eyed teenyboppers and angel-headed hipsters cruising the streets looking for something, not sure what it is, but knowing there was something magic in the air and if you walked along MacDougal or Bleecker street long enough you’d connect with it.
Music: “Summer In New York” by The Imaginations.
A trippy alchemical potion of a movie, Space Is The Place inhabits an alternative reality that could only exist in the Afrodelic cosmology of Saturnian jazz priest Sun Ra.
Directed by John Coney in 1974, the movie is a hybrid of B-grade sci-fi, Blaxploitation flix (on shrooms), the films of Kenneth Anger and surrealist head trips like El Topo and the electric western Zachariah.
In the film, as in life, Sun Ra is the quintessential outsider and space is a metaphorical Eden for this much put upon black man. The plot is threadbare, involving villainous pimps and dealers, Black Panther avenger protagonists, local nightclubs, pool halls, cat houses, and, of course, an Outer Space Employment Agency that Sun Ra sets up after coming to Earth from a faraway planet. To recruit a new colony, he espouses racial freedom through Egyptian epigrams, Stockhausen-like jazz and a spirit filled Rocket Ship. Of course, Ra is challenged by establishment agents and a supreme villain, the Overseer (Ray Johnson), who lures impressionable black men away from Ra’s brand of truth with the vices of sex and money. Ra preaches against decadence and hits a nerve when showing the pimp and his followers that they are no different than the White Man (Nixon, here) they rage against. Ra promises a land of racial harmony and social justice lies within the Milky Way’s stars, and who are we to argue?” - Alfred Eaker
The cinematic equivalent of one of Sun Ra’s free jazz improvs, Space Is The Place is all over the cosmic map so it helps to find that Zen spot where you just lock into the frequency and go with the flow. As Sun Ray instructs, get in tune with the universe.
“The people have no music that is in coordination with their spirits. Because of this, they’re out of tune with the universe. Since they don’t have money, they don’t have anything. If the planet takes hold of an alter destiny, there’s hope for all of us. But otherwise the death sentence upon this planet still stands. Everyone must die.” - Sun Ra
Set your controls for the heart of the Sun Ra.
Lifestyle pet photographer, Seth Casteel, captured these amazing images of dogs fetching their toys underwater. I can’t get over how the water transforms, what is probably a sweet pooch’s face, into something so ferocious and shark-like.
Seth should photograph our dog, Tong Tong in a parody of the Nirvana album cover…
Prints are available for purchase at Little Friends Lifestyle Pet Photography website.
More after the jump…
Neil’s gear.
Neil Young appearing at last week’s Dive Into Media conference expressed his distaste for MP3’s in no uncertain terms.
Young, the perennial music purist, said that while modern music formats like MP3 are convenient, they sound lousy.
“My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years,” Young said. “We live in the digital age and, unfortunately, it’s degrading our music, not improving it.”
It’s not that digital is bad or inferior, it’s that the way it’s being used isn’t doing justice to the art,” Young said. “The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. … The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.”
Young proposed that fans stage a grassroots movement to demand higher-quality audio. “Occupy audio!” he urged.
Here’s Young talking about digital recording with The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka.
Noel Fielding’s new Luxury Comedy sees the Mighty Boosh’s “Vince Noir” going solo for a series of seven color-filled episodes on E4. Luxury Comedy is half-live action and half-animation. How can you not love something that makes overt references to Kennth Anger’s Lucifer Rising as well as Roy Wood within the first few seconds!?!?! (That’s a neat trick, I was duly impressed, Mr. Fielding.)
Fielding (playing “himself”) lives in a treehouse in a jungle, along with his band, a creature called “Smooth,” a German chick named Dolly and Andy Warhol. Yes, THE Andy Warhol. The music was co-written by Kasabian’s Sergio Pizzorno and Fielding.
Thank you Trey Lane!
Chris Marker‘s Bestiaire, three short video haiku:
Bestiaire 1. Chat écoutant la musique
Bestiaire 2. An owl is An owl is an owl
Bestiaire 3. Zoo Piece
Simple meditations that reveal a more intimate side to the enigmatic director, best known for La jetée (1962) (which later inspired Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys) and Sans Soleil (1983). Marker has said of his work:
‘The process of making films in communion with oneself, the way a painter works or a writer, need not now be solely experimental. Contrary to what people say, using the first-person in films tends to be a sign of humility: All I have to offer is myself.’
Now in his nineties, Marker the “mercurial international man of semiotic mystery” continues to work, details of which can be found here.
More animal haiku, plus bonus documentary, after the jump…
Pacific Glass Gallery designer “Mr. Gray” will be unveiling his latest glass pipes in the next few days, including this insanely intricate marijuana nugget puffer.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bowl quite this elaborate. I wonder if it’s difficult to clean?
It’s not listed on Pacific Glass Gallery‘s website yet, but if you’re interested, keep checking the website under “Mr. Gray.” (If you just can’t wait for this puppy to go up for sale, Illuzion Glass Galleries in Colorado has similar designs).
Via reddit
The latest 2-minute trash compactor from our friends at Everything is Terrible! This one is particularly… terrible, but, you know, in a good way!
For the next like four years or something the EIT gang will be criss-crossing America on their DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! traveling cinematic roadshow, featuring a screening of the aforementioned new film. DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! dares to pose the questions: “What if we make a movie composed ENTIRELY out of dog-related found footage?” and ‘‘What if this magickal movie, made up of thousands of other dog movies, is also a remake of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 masterpiece The Holy Mountain?” —and then answer them!
With our heroes, those gurus of found-footage viral videos back on the road again anything can happen, America.
Get a copy of the brand-new DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! DVD!
See the Everything is Terrible! roadshow in YOUR lousy town!