Domestic, no?
 
If you’re like me and want to replace your extensive poster collections with something slightly more grown-up, you may want to go with these awesome embroidery hoops of your favorite pop culture icons. They might be a bit twee, sure, but I figure this is a nice compromise between decorating like I’m still in college and actually developing mature taste in art, which frankly, sounds like a lot of work and money.

I’m common and vulgar, but I’m common and vulgar with a Bachelor’s Degree, dammit.
 

 

 
A selection of drawings by James Dean.

For those with an interest in the charismatic actor, there’s an exhibition called Eternal James Dean, which opens at the Indiana State Museum from November 23, 2012, until June, 3rd, 2013.

Eternally young, sexy and intense. That’s the image of James Dean. But who was James Dean the man? Born in Marion, Indiana, Dean made just three films before his death in 1955 at age 24. Eternal James Dean will take a look at his Indiana roots, his brief time as an actor in California and New York, his films and his passion for motorcycles and racing.

More information here.
 

 

 
More drawings by James Dean, after the jump…
 
Via Retronaut.
 

 
Holy Motors opened yesterday at the Nuart in Los Angeles, as well as other cities in the US (click here). It’s a film I love and I’m on a mission to encourage Dangerous Minds’ readers to see this wonderful masterpiece. So, I’m re-posting a review I wrote a few months ago after seeing the movie at Fantastic Fest. Here goes:

Holy Motors screened several times during the fest and as a result a lot of people got to see it. A good thing for getting the word out on a film that is almost impossible to describe without waxing poetic. The most satisfying conversations I got into during FF were the ones in which people were trying to crack the Holy Motor code. While the film has an wonderful aura of mystery about it, the essence of the film is clear - it is a movie about the pleasures of seeing movies and making them. And part of the pleasure of the movies is having them fuck with your head. Holy Motors is a mindbender of a very rare sort. I include it among my favorites: Performance, El Topo and Enter The Void.

Holy Motors

Synopsis (from the press release):

From dawn to dusk, a few hours in the life of Monsieur Oscar, a shadowy character who journeys from one life to the next. He is, in turn, captain of industry, assassin, beggar, monster, family man…He seems to be playing roles, plunging headlong into each part – but where are the cameras? Monsieur Oscar is alone, accompanied only by Céline, the slender blonde woman behind the wheel of the vast engine that transports him through and around Paris. He’s like a conscientious assassin moving from hit to hit. In pursuit of the beautiful gesture, the mysterious driving force, the women and the ghosts of past lives. But where is his true home, his family, his rest?

When Holy Motors’ Mr. Oscar (the magical Denis Lavant) is asked why he does what he does, he replies that it’s for “the beauty of the act.” Director Leos Carax might reply similarly in describing why Holy Motors does what it does.

In his exhilarating new film, Carax seems to have tapped into cinema’s Akashic Record and brought it to Earth in distilled form. From the opening scene where Carax unlocks the door that opens onto the theater of his brain to the Amen choir of limousines at the end, Holy Motors is as pure as cinema gets. It is about the thing it is, not the thing it is about. It’s reference point is itself. Carax will pull any rug from under any scene to remind us that we are watching a movie and to glory in the artifice of it all. Holy Motors embraces the history of cinema like a drunken poet throwing his arms around the alphabet. The result is a mercurial mindfucker of a movie.

It’s been 13 years since Carax directed his last feature-length film, Pola X, and he’s returned to film making with the fervor of a man who has a lot to get out of his system. But like Holy Motors’  troll with the perpetual hard-on, Carax hasn’t shot his load recklessly or randomly. Carax is a Tantric Master fucking the sacred machine of his art with deep fluid strokes. He uses cinema like a particle generator creating a red hot beam of alchemical fire directed at the very center of the viewer’s pineal gland. His intent is to get you high and he does. He draws you to the screen like a moth is drawn to light. He draws you to the screen like a camera is drawn to a woman’s face, or the stars, in their sparkling suicidal glee, are drawn to blackness. He draws you to the screen with the precision of a Bunuelian razorblade tearing open the curtains of your eyes.

Carax has made a film he obviously had to make. He is getting at something deep within himself and he takes us with him - into a place where others have traveled and are traveling still: Bunuel, Cocteau, Kubrick, Muybridge, Jodorowsky, Noe, Argento, Tarantino, Beineix, Franju, Roeg, Lisberger, Melville, Bertolucci, Donen, Godard, Powell and Pressburger, Marker…He is navigating a road trip through cinema and we are riding in the catbird seat of his dream machine as delighted as children with our heads out the window and our hair wildly blowing in the wind.

One of many goose pimple-inducing moments in Holy Motors is this musical interlude, an accordion cover of R.L. Burnside’s “Let My Baby Ride.”
 

 
Jason Mecier‘s portrait of Honey Boo Boo made of “two cans of hair spray, three tiaras, make-up, mascara, fake eyelashes, coupons, sketti, butter, ten cheese balls, two Red Bulls, one Mountain Dew, a McDonald’s chicken nugget, a pink Snuggy box, an empty toilet paper roll, one cabbage patch doll and a jar of Pigs Feet.”

Apparently it took Mecier over 50 hours to make it.

Via Boing Boing

 
When Hugh MacDiarmid died in 1978, his fellow poet Norman MacCaig suggested Scotland commemorate the great man’s passing by holding 3 minute’s pandemonium. It was typical of MacCaig’s caustic wit, but his suggestion did capture something of the unquantifiable enormity of MacDiarmid’s importance on Scottish culture, politics, literature and life during the twentieth century.

Hugh MacDiarmid is perhaps best described by a line from his greatest poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), in which he wrote:

‘I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur
Extremes meet - it’s the only way I ken
To dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt
That damns the vast majority o’ men.

It explains the contradictory elements that merged to make him a poet.

Born Christopher Murray Grieve, on August 11, 1892, he changed his name to the more Scottish sounding Hugh MacDiarmid to publish his poetry. He was a Modernist poet who wrote in Scots vernacular. One might expect this choice of language to make his poetry parochial, but MacDiarmid was a poet of international ambition and standing, who was recognized as an equal with T. S. Eliot, Boris Pasternak and W. H. Auden.

In politics, MacDiarmid had been one of the co-founder’s of the National Party for Scotland in 1928, but was ejected when he moved towards Communism. He was then ejected from the Communist Party for his “nationalist deviation.” He maintained a Nationalist - in favor of an independent Scotland - and a Communist throughout his life.

As literature scholar and writer Kenneth Butlay notes, MacDiarmid was:

..as incensed by his countrymen’s neglect of their native traditions as by their abrogation of responsibility for their own affairs, and he took it upon himself to “keep up perpetually a sort of Berseker rage” of protest, and to act as “the catfish that vitalizes the other torpid of the aquarium.”

 
In 1964, the experimental film-maker Margaret Tait made short documentary portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid, which captured the poet at home in Langholme, his sense of childish fun, his socializing his the bars and public houses of Edinburgh (the Abbotsford on Rose Street).
 

 
More on Hugh MacDiarmid, plus poetry and reading, after the jump…
 

 
The “American Girls” series by Ilona Szwarc takes a look into the world of the American Girl doll craze and the young girls who own them. Each doll can be customized to look like its owner.
 

 

 
More photos after the jump…
 

 
Photo by Francesco Scavullo.

Via No Good For Me / With thanks to Niall!

 
As Geekologie points out, most objects turned into a TARDIS by Whovian fanatics are kind of, well… crappy. But this TARDIS refrigerator painted by Blake “to look like the wall so his roommates would stop eating all his food” is pretty special.

I dig it.

 
If you haven’t seen this yet, Redditor Liammm posted this photo on reddit with the title, “Tried taking a picture of a sink draining, wound up with a picture of an eye instead.”

Click here to see larger image.

Via Laughing Squid

 
Jack Bond’s 1965 documentary Dali In New York is a loosey goosey affair which fits its subject quite nicely.

Beautifully filmed by Jim Desmond who went on to shoot Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.