Watching these Kodachrome color tests from 1922 actually took my breath away for a moment. I felt as though time had stopped and I’d entered a dream. The colors are so sensual I felt like devouring them, inhaling them like opium. This stunning footage is archived at the George Eastman House and is an early test of the Two-Color Kodachrome Process.
In these newly preserved tests, made in 1922 at the Paragon Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, actress Mae Murray appears almost translucent, her flesh a pale white that is reminiscent of perfectly sculpted marble, enhanced with touches of color to her lips, eyes, and hair. She is joined by actress Hope Hampton modeling costumes from The Light in the Dark (1922), which contained the first commercial use of Two-Color Kodachrome in a feature film. Ziegfeld Follies actress Mary Eaton and an unidentified woman and child also appear.
Read more about these gorgeous moving pictures here.
Dangerous Minds patron saint Brian Eno has signed with the revered and generally high-quality UK label Warp in order to bring us a new collection of well, I don’t know exactly since there are no previews or samples, sorry. It’s called, charmingly enough, Small Craft On A Milk Sea. Eno’s last high profile release was 2005’s Another Day on Earth, a fine album that, ahem, I also was lucky enough to contribute to. If this new one is anywhere near as good as that, I’ll be a happy Eno fan indeed. You’ll also note, as is de rigeur for your higher profile artistes these days, that there are a few different and increasingly more expensive/elaborate packages available including the ultimate: a limited edition of 250 LP/CD package which will include a unique, signed by the man screen print and a golden ticket inviting you to visit and eventually inherit Eno’s candy factory (OK, I made that last part up).
Italian video wizard Bante has taken classic Blue Note album covers and animated them in this totally groovy video promoting Italy’s Bellavista Social Pub.
New Yorker Judy Linn’s photographs of Patti Smith are an indelible part of the collective consciousness of Patti’s fans and admirers. But, the Dylan one is new to me.
A book of around 100 black and white photographs Lynn took between the years of 1969-1977 of Patti, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, Gerard Malanga, among others, is being published next March by Abrams.
More of Linn’s photographs of Patti after the jump…
Behold the perplexing multi-media underground electropop darlings of Tokyo, Trippple Nippple. Their stage show sounds like a J-Pop version of out-there 70s performance artists, The Kipper Kids, and features stuff like eggs, glitter, milk, blood and rotting food. From an interview posted today at the Dazed and Confused blog:
Dazed Digital: Is there symbolism behind your costumes and performances?
Qrea Nippple: Last time we were doing some guillotine things, and we cut so many heads off balloons. The helium goes to the ceiling. Yuka was crying like, “Oh I feel so guilty for killing so many balloon heads, so I drew some really wicked, bad faces on the balloons, so she wouldn’t feel guilty for cutting their heads off. ”
Dazed Digital: What were some of your most memorable performances?
Yuka Nippple: We have a lot of stories about making a mess. We played club Asia in Tokyo and our costumes were mud, just that. And we put on some blonde hair ponytails. We were just mud and blonde hair ponytail. That was our costume. It was a lot of fun as always. But in the morning when the lights turned on, the whole club was covered in dry mud. And everyone went mad, and everyone had to clean up until about 9am in the morning. We made a lot of people really upset. We didn’t mean to of course, but my bad, but I’d like to announce that we can do “Not dirty one” too! People sometimes misunderstand what we are, but we are musicians!
Dazed Digital: So where did you acquire all this mud?
Yuka Nippple: Amazing, amazing store called Tokyu Hands in Shibuya. It’s a department store with 21 floors of DIY stuff. We get everything from there. You can spend a day just looking for things. We found rice-field mud in a packet.
Photos of old school New York before they switched over to the subway trains that couldn’t be graffitied on. New York has sadly lost a lot of its character since then (as well as many of its characters, too!)