If you need a new URL in a pinch and every one of them that you’ve thought of, or have researched is already taken, never fear because Glen Maddern’s extremely helpful Dumb Domains has it all sorted out for you. Shockingly, no one has claimed these valuable pieces of cyberspace real estate yet. No one. Maddern even supplies a link and price to where you can purchase your new URL.

If you see one that tickles your fancy, you’d better hurry up, cos they ain’t gonna last (or maybe they will?)

Here are some choice selections for your consideration. I’m partial to Tit Guitars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Waxy

 
As we all know by now, or should know, crows are extremely intelligent creatures. In fact, these little high IQ sneaks are extremely resourceful when it comes to building their nests when natural materials like tree branches and twigs aren’t available to them.

In heavily populated and developed areas of Japan—where trees are scarce—crows’ nests have been spotted around town made almost entirely out of stolen wire hangers from nearby apartments. Apparently there are even “crow patrols” (sent by The Kyushu Electric) who destroy and dismantle the wire hanger nests sitting on their power lines.

More than anything, the intricacies and craftsmanship of these nests are impressive, like deliberate works of art. Just look at them!

 

 

 

 
Via Beautiful Decay

 
Although, this footage of Lou Reed performing live in Paris in 1974 on his celebrated Rock n Roll Animal tour has been around for years, it’s always been pretty much unwatchable tenth generation VHS garbage. In the early 90s I was thrilled to buy a bootleg copy of this for $16 from a street vender on Fifth Avenue only to get it home to find that it was a “one” on a scale of one to ten. Ten years ago I found a DVD boot at the Pasadena Flea Market, but that turned out to be bad quality, too. It’s been posted various times on YouTube in the past, but none of these versions were much of an improvement… until this one.

It wasn’t as if a freak like Lou Reed would have gotten on television all that often in the 1970s, and of course European audiences often accepted America’s wildest performers with open arms long before we ever did, so this could probably be counted as only Reed’s second major TV appearance (the first having been the Velvet Underground mini-reunion at the Bataclan nightclub with John Cale and Nico that aired on French TV’s POP2 series in 1972).
 

 
And then there is this. The infamously smartassed ‘74 Australian press conference has been on YouTube for years, and will be familiar to many readers, but take a gander at the live footage from Down Under that comes after that, at the 5:27 mark: An excellent “Walk On the Wild Side” (complete with Uncle Lou’s spazzy dancing) and “Rock and Roll.” And it’s great quality.
 

 
Thank you Chris Campion of Hollywood, CA!

Visiona 2, 1970
 
Danish designer Verner Panton’s dreamy colorful interiors are completely antithetical to the Scandinavian modernism that dominated contemporary design in the mid 50s. Panton, who was primarily an architect at the time, used to pack up his models in a Volkswagen and travel across Europe in hopes of finding a designer or manufacturer willing to produce his work on a mass scale. It was his famous cone chair in 1959 that really made his reputation as a groundbreaking designer—in New York police ordered it be removed from the display window, since the spectacle was causing an obstructive crowd on the sidewalk. From there his work advanced and matured into some of the most radical interior design on the 1960s. 

In addition to highly experimental ideas on housing (plastic, cardboard, and collapsible were all concepts he explored), Panton was known for designing absolutely everything—from futuristic light fixtures to conceptual furniture to loud fabrics. Though his work is still quite prized today, folks usually pick out a single Panton chair or lamp as a bold accent piece. It’s when he was given free reign to design a room from scratch though, that he was able to create these otherworldly spaces. Panton’s rooms—or environments perhaps—are certainly jolting, but they’re also cohesive, balanced and exotically beautiful.
 

Visiona 2, 1970
 

Visiona 2, 1970
 

Visiona 2, 1970
 

Spiegel publishing house waiting area, Hamburg, 1969
 

Spiegel publishing house swimming pool, Hamburg, 1969
 

Varna restaurant, Aarhus Denmark, 1971
 

Private apartment in Copenhagen, 1994-1999
 

Living Sculpture, 1972
 

 
In this fascinating document we can see the endlessly amusing and enigmatic mind of Mark E. Smith, founder and resident genius of The Fall, not even 20 years of age and several months before the Fall’s first gig in May 1977.

The date is December 20, 1976. Smith is writing a letter to another founding member of The Fall, bassist Tony Friel—Smith refers to “your ‘bass’ pop guitar.” (Friel would remain in the band only for a few months.) Smith is referencing a gig held at the Electric Circus in Manchester on Thursday, December 9, 1976, featuring The Sex Pistols, The Damned, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, and The Clash—quite a lineup! (Which DM reader wouldn’t give about three toes to have seen that show? Then again, maybe one or two of you were there.....) The din of the show must have still been ringing in his ears—Smith starts the letter with a snippet from “Chinese Rocks,” the legendary Heartbreakers song jointly written by Dee Dee Ramone and Richard Hell.
 

 
The main purpose of the letter, in addition to waxing hilarious and weird in a way only Mark E. Smith was ever capable of, was to affirm his enthusiasm about this new band The Clash, who clearly made a huge impression on Smith: “New pop group the CLASH are going to be very big,once they do a tour of the Village,and then signed on to Village records Ltd.” But he wasn’t telling Friel about the band, surely. Smith and his buddy Friel had quite probably discussed The Clash already, both having most likely seen them at the Electric Circus. Indeed, later on he adds, “Combined, The Heartbreakers and Clash were better than Sex Pistols, doncha?” As in, “Right? You agree? You who saw them too?” Smith was putting on his oracle hat and predicting great things for The Clash. Seems like he hit that one on the head.

The postscript is a snippet of dialogue (real or imagined?) from the immortal 1960s TV series The Prisoner.

Here’s the full text of the letter:

? Dec. 76

for: No. 505048A99FU
from: the new number 2

Dear Above,

‘I’m livin on a Chinese rock/all my clothes are in the pawn shop’ WRONG.

And today, the new number two is wearing a ‘Healthiflex non-restricti Collar’ dark blue in colour.

New number two says “New pop group the CLASH are going to be very big,once they do a tour of the Village,and then signed on to Village records Ltd.”

Please find attached a rough ‘set’ for the Outsiders.Apologies for any ommissions. Also find attached a little pres for you,a sticker for your ‘bass’ pop guitar.Last night I did not notice any “plain clothes policemen in pop gear” did thou?

You had better stick the fucking syticker on your ““bass”” or your ass.Or I will tell news agency Tass.

I did not get any sleep last night as i was speeeeding maaaaaan.

Combined,The Heartbreakers and Clash were better than Sex Pistols, doncha? Je tres fatigue - non dormir!

too incoherent,sorry.

be seeing you,

the new number 2
20.12.76

No6: “How did that typewriter get here ? At night ???”
No.14: “I am not allowed to answer that.Be seeing you.”
No.6: “Moron”.

 
Here’s the letter (you can see a much larger version here):
 

 

 
I suppose I was in my teens, a student at university, when I first noticed the incredible array of Bollywood film posters pinned-up in neighborhood video stores, take-aways and corner shops. These posters were always dynamic, their frames filled with a whole opera of activity, usually depicting heroes with guns, sunglasses, cigarettes or pipes, sweaty villains with beards, beautiful women fighting or looking demure, all against a background of cars, helicopters, jets, and giant, flame-rippled explosions. This was real must-see action, and my surface impressions started me off watching Bollywood movies.

Often these films did not live up to the promise of their fabulously painted advertising posters, and many were slight imitations of American films, but there was always something of beauty and craft that made these movies worth watching.

Though “Bollywood” is a term is often misused to describe all of Indian cinema, it actually stands for the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai. Bollywood produces an incredible array of movies, a selection of which can be seen from the following array of posters.

As these images show the golden age of the Bollywood poster artist, who spent time painting an original image, which inspired me and millions of others to watch the films, has sadly long gone. In this digital age, the once beautiful hand-painted posters have given way to the westernized photographic reproduction, usually featuring a George Clooney look-a-like, or glossy latex superhero. Where once there was mystery, beauty and intrigue in these painted posters, there is now just a kind of homogenized advertising which could be selling anything.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Asia Obscura, Mr and Mrs 55, and Sound Horn Please
 
More Bollywood posters, after the jump…
 

 
Recently I posted what is surely the earliest professionally shot full concert by The Patti Smith Group, a gig taped in Stockholm in 1976 for Swedish television, but a few days ago some even earlier Patti footage surfaced. It’s not exactly professionally shot (it’s likely to have been lensed by rock photographer Bob Gruen), but taken as a whole the clips might represent the entire performance.

Smith, then 27, performs nine numbers backed by Lenny Kaye and Richard Sohl, including both sides of her “Hey Joe/Piss Factory” single as well as Rolling Stones and Velvet Underground covers. Within a year Clive Davis would sign The Patti Smith Group to Arista Records and they would be recording Horses with producer John Cale.
 

On record, Smith’s cover of “Hey Joe” begins with the addition of a spoken word bit about Patty Hearst (“Patty Hearst, you’re standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread, I was wondering were you gettin’ it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women?”) but this was before that became a part of the song.
 

“Piss Factory” is a powerful soliloquy about Smith’s horrible job working on a baby buggy assembly line when she was sixteen and dreaming of what her life was going to be like in New York City..
 

“Paint It Black”

You can see the rest at Historie du Rock.

Below, in this brief (mildly NSFW) clip from the Kino Library, we see a typical evening at Max’s Kansas City with the likes of Candy Darling, a topless, insane-looking lipstick-smeared Brigid Berlin, Paul Morrissey, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, Taylor Mead, Ray Johnson, Marisol and others. That’s Warhol’s Factory assistant Gerard Malanga who we see smoking as the voiceover reader says the word “pretentious.”
 

 
Via E.O.M.S.

 
Fellatio therapist (?) Auntie Angel is a firm believer that every man should be “grapefruited.” If you don’t know what grapefruiting is—don’t worry, I didn’t know until a few minutes ago myself—never fear, ‘cause Auntie Angel is here to perform a delightful, detailed tutorial and show you, dear reader, exactly what this so-called “grapefruiting” is all about and how you can “grapefruit” your man. “No better feeling will he ever get, than being ‘grapefruited!’” she claims.

According to Auntie Angel after performing the grapefruit technique, your man will think to himself that he, “could’ve been fucking grapefruit all these years.”

As a side note: I checked to see if Angel’s Erotic Solutions website is still operational, sadly it’s not.

Obviously, NSFW. Someone needs to sample the sound she makes on that dildo and remix it or something.
 

 
Via reddit

 
The pioneering color photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii was born in Kirzhachsky District, Vladimir Oblast, Russia in 1863. His parents were of Russian nobility with a long military history. The family moved to St. Petersburg, where Prokudin-Gorskii began his studies in chemistry. He was also interested in the arts, and enrolled for studies in painting.

Prokudin-Gorskii’s interest in chemistry and art fused with the study and practice of photography. By 1905, he had formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advances in color photography to document life in Russia.  Using different techniques, including those first formulated by Scottish pioneer James Clerk Maxwell, Prokudin-Gorskii started taking color pictures of his homeland in 1909.

Tsar Nicholas II supplied Prokudin-Gorskii with a specially designed rail-road carriage which had been converted into a darkroom. Prokudin-Gorskii’s intention in documenting Russian life was to educate children about their country’s rich history and culture. In 1917, the Russian Revolution put an end to Prokudin-Gorskii’s plans, and the photographer left Russia in 1918, eventually settling in France.

These beautiful color photographs were first recorded on glass plates. In 1948 they were purchased by the Library of Congress, who have since scanned the images, through a process called digichromatography, and made them available to the public. 
 

 

 

 

 

 
More beautiful color photos of Imperial Russia, after the jump…
 

 
I love everything about this story. I love what the Danish government did, in creating a perfect 1:1 Minecraft simulation of the entire country of Denmark, and I love what the users did, which is, by sheer inventiveness and determination, circumvent the Danish government’s well thought out measures to prevent people from messing with it. Well, maybe I don’t love the jingoistic instinct of the American gamer… Well, what are you gonna do?

About a week ago the Danish government made the meticulous simulacrum available to users. You can download sections of the Denmark map here. The simulation involved the use of “trillions” of Minecraft bricks, and although there have been similar real-life Minecraft simulations before, from all appearances this is one of the most ambitious and detailed areas of this sort yet achieved.

The Danish Geodata Agency, the creators of the simulation, intelligently disabled the use of dynamite so that users could enjoy the pixelated Scandinavian land unmolested. But the innate human need to fuck shit up prevailed. You see, the Danish Geodata Agency had neglected to disable the “minecart with dynamite” item. Oops. Users figured this out, blew up parts of a number of Danish towns, and put American flags over the main train station of Copenhagen (pictured above). In this reddit thread about the incident (in Danish), a Swedish user wrote in, “As a Swede, I’m happy to see this…..” (As usual, the Swedes and the Danes always get along under all circumstances…..)

Initially, the Danish government announced that it would reboot the map with add new restrictions to prevent the possibility of virtual vandalism. However, further investigation revealed that “only MINOR areas” of the map were destroyed, so they would leave the simulation intact. The simulation has been quite popular, having been downloaded 200,000 times already, so all in all it’s PR coup for the pleasant European nation that gave the world LEGO and Lars von Trier.

Here’s a little tour of the Minecraft Denmark (pre-vandalism) so you can see what it’s like.