Eric Kleptone and Chief Crumbs continue to amaze me with their stunningly inventive mashups. Eric mixes the music and Crumbs does the video.  Come Again combines the music of The Beatles, Boston, Cypress Hill, Daft Punk, Beasties, Criminal Element Orchestra, Freeez, among many others, with dance scenes from West Side Story, Hair, Bye Bye Birdie, Pulp Fiction, The Red Shoes, Across The Universe and many many more. The precision of the editing, coupled with the intelligence and imagination that informs the selection of music and video at work in Come Again,  is absolutely awe inspiring.

This should dispel any doubt as to whether or not mashups are art. They are!

 
This is the most exciting music related news I’ve heard in quite awhile.

A 1972 Leonard Cohen documentary, that was long thought to be lost, has been re-discovered and restored. Bird On A Wire, directed by Tony Palmer, follows Cohen during his 1972 tour of Europe. It was last screened in 1974 and then disappeared. A year ago, Bird On A Wire footage was found in 290 rusting film cans in a warehouse in Hollywood. Frank Zappa’s manager, who knew Palmer from his work on 200 Motels, sent him the film. Palmer painstakingly reconstructed the movie.

Palmer on the restoration of Bird On A Wire:

It has been a joy — although an exceedingly expensive one — to slowly but surely restore the original film. My admiration for Leonard’s music and the group of highly skilled musicians who accompanied him on that European tour has again been rekindled. Above all, my love for the man: a good man and a great songwriter.

Bird On A Wire includes 17 performances of Cohen classics and is being released on DVD on August 21. It will include a limited edition tour poster.

Leonard sings the title song from the film after the jump.
 

 
(via Mister Honk)

 
A rare and wonderful video of public access superstars Elton and Betty White has just popped up on Youtube (literally a few hours ago). As far as I can tell tell, it has never appeared on the internet before.

Elton and Betty, who hailed from Little Rock, Arkansas, moved to Los Angeles in the early 90s. In L.A. they had a surreal cable tv show and were popular performers on the boardwalk at Venice Beach. They recorded over 200 songs, many of which were sexually explicit and quite funny. Though Betty was 30 years years older than her husband, their marriage was a sublimely happy one, which is quite evident in the video.

Betty died in 2003. Elton is in the process of reviving his music career.

More information on this lovably weird couple can be had at their myspace page.

There’s also a nice piece on the Whites at the always fabulous Boing Boing.
 

 
Stu Mitchell was the drummer for Edmonton, Alberta instrumental rockers Wes Dakus’s Rebels. He had a brief solo career, releasing a handful of singles for Kapp Records. Acid was the B-side of a 45 released in 1967.

Mitchell, sounding a whole lot like Jim Morrison, takes us on a trip down “nowhere street in a town called LSD.” While the lyrics seem to be a cautionary tale about the hazards of acid, the end result is actually pretty psychedelic. I can imagine Scott Walker covering this.

An interview with Nicholas Schou, author of Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World. The inside story of the infamous gang of dope-dealing surfers who played a key role in the counterculture of the Sixties. It’s a mindblowing—and improbable—tale of drug smuggling, large scale marihuana farming and LSD distribution—basically, it’s the hidden history of how America got turned on. The story of the Brotherhood might’ve gone to the grave with the participants if not for Nicholas Schou’s intriguing history. Highly recommended.
 

 
Anyone who had any doubt about nasty man Andrew Breitbart’s crazypants bona-fides needs to watch the below CNN clip, wherein the strident rightwing windbag proves that he and reality are no longer on a first name basis! From Wonkette:

Yes, how do we know that is the farmer’s wife wife? Does the cow say “moo” or does it say “conspiracy”? What do the letters in the acronym EIEIO mean? The farmer says he was in the dell, but, hi-ho, the derry-o, was the farmer in the dell, or does CNN even know? We can sit here and say the farmer takes a wife, but why does the cheese stand alone, media? WHY?

Breitbart has decided to drown in liquid shit on national television and use the fact that we “can’t” really know if anything is “true” as a life raft. Does somebody with a gun mind shooting this life raft for us? It’s okay if you accidentally “miss” and hit Breitbart. Nobody will ever know if you were aiming for him, because who can say what truth is?

Passive aggressive mindrot at its finest! The thing is, Breitbart has nothing to fear: Anyone dumb enough to care what this well-fed Archie Bunker-manqué thinks was busy eating junk food and watching Fox News and will never, ever hear the truth about l’affair Sherrod, anyway! Life is a win-win situation when you’re a rightwing opinion maker!
 

 
Breitbart: Is the Farmer’s Wife Really His Wife? (Wonkette)

 
I think that those of us who are old enough to remember hearing actual Muzak in public places were in fact hearing one of these diabolical devices: The Seeburg 1000 background music system. Essentially a stackable spindle record player that played Seeburg’s specially produced 16rpm, big hole in the middle LPs chock full of motivating background music, sure to bring out the productivity in your employees and the wallets from your customers. I was delighted to find literally hundreds of clips of these records, alas mostly being played on conventional players, on the youtubes. For the pupose of this post I’m concentrating on a few examples from Seeburg’s long running Industrial library:

Average tempo: medium fast. Predominantly instrumental,with a light seasoning of great vocals. An occasional polka or march. Emphasis on popular music. Minimum of stringed instruments. Unusually rhythmical. Over-all lively character but never a rock ‘n’ roll. Designed for Industrial plants only.

 
Much more after the jump…

 
One of several extraordinary portraits of Michael Jackson currently being exhibited at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York City by David LaChappelle. Longtime admirers of LaChappelle’s work, will note the reappearance of the angel wings that were once almost his trademark in the 1980s.

Shown for the first time in New York is part of a series which began over a decade ago including three large-scale photographs depicting Michael Jackson as a modern day martyr. Of all of the subjects LaChapelle has portrayed, Jackson unquestionably lived one of the most epic and dramatic lives of our time. Such sentiment is shown with biblical connotations and is hauntingly represented in these images.

The Meth Project is the largest advertiser in Montana, reaching 70-90% of teens three times a week. This is saturation-level advertising.

I wonder if teens find these ads scary or just more of the same old slasher and torture porn shit they watch on tv and at the multi-plex. The ads radiate the same butcher shop verite of Hostel and The Saw series.

Meth is a dirty drug, but I’m not sure the scare tactics of The Meth Project are going to be very effective in a world where kids are no longer easily spooked.
 

 
Will these videos, like the drug scare films of the sixties, become instant camp.