I’m not certain we should be thanking special makeup effects artist Kevin Kirkpatrick for creating these IRL prosthetic busts of Beavis and Butt-Head. This is going to give me nightmares!

I can’t unsee them!
 


 
(via Nerdcore)

Set list:

01: Devo - “Mechanical Man”
02: Venetian Snares - “Boarded Up Swan Entrance”
03: Serena-Maneesh - “Ayisha Abyss” (Lindstrom Remix)
04: Jason Forrest - “New Religion”  (Brad Laner Remix)
05: Third Eye Foundation - “Universal Cooler”
06: Space Needle - “The Sun Doesn’t Love Me Anymore”
07: Verbena - “Silver Queen”
08: Joe Potts - “Airway”
09: The Photon Band - “Superstard”
10: Nudge - “Blue ScreenBuy”
11: Jessamine - “I’M Not Afraid Of Electricity”
12: Totalrod2 - “Whisper 70”

 
I Am a Hotel is a rather odd (occasionally kitsch) musical written by Leonard Cohen which was broadcast on Canadian TV in 1983. The plot is composed of a series of five vignettes dealing with love, sex and longing. Each story is based on a Cohen song.

The action takes place in the King Edward Hotel in Toronto. Cohen portrays a character known simply as The Resident, a Greek chorus of one.

Co-written by Mark Shekter and directed by Allan F. Nicholls.

Scenes:

   1. The Guests - the characters enter via the lobby and are taken to their rooms; the bellboy and chambermaid meet in the corridor; and the manager and his wife apparently have angry words in the lobby after which she strides off.
   2. Memories - the bellboy pursues the chambermaid around the laundry and ballroom.
   3. The Gypsy Wife - the manager’s wife, in fetching attire, dances on the boardroom table.
   4. Chelsea Hotel # 2 -  two lovers try, and fail, to make love, and the admiral and diva at last face each other across the hallway.
   5. Suzanne - scenes of “Suzanne” with Cohen are interspersed with shots of the two couples reunited and dancing together, and the hotel manager distraught and then drinking at the bar.

A short epilogue repeats the opening material from ‘The Guests’.

 
Dangerous Minds pal artist/filmmaker/musician Brian Butler will be premiering an ambitious live performance art piece this Saturday, January 21 in Los Angeles at the Ruskin Theatre in Santa Monica. His muse, Annakim Violette (daughter of rockstar Tom Petty) will be at the center of this black magic occult ritual.

From the press release:

Union of Opposites is an experiment in ritual magick, combining the use of sound and light with the intent of creating a collective out-of-body experience. A film screening will transform into a live performance in which the artist and his team execute an occult rite inspired by Aleister Crowley’s mysterious Ritual of the Mark of the Beast. In this incantation, Butler explores ideas of reversal and the use of geometric figures as channels of occult power. The work will feature a spontaneously improvised soundtrack that experiments with the effects of sound frequencies and rhythmic chanting on our chakras and mental state.

Butler’s interest in expanded cinema will fold the performance space into the work. He views the film, performance and musical accompaniment as a singular entity, where the performers will “expand from two dimensional screen to three dimensional existence” as themes of astral projection and projective geometry interplay with the auditory and visual stimuli.

Butler—who has communed and consulted with occultists and magicians from Europe to South America—explains that “magick is an art unto itself. In a sense, is the art of living in a creative and free way.” Influenced by the work of British arch-occultist Aleister Crowley, Butler believes that magick is conducive to and “complements” all manner of creativity, helping practitioners access different parts of the mind as well as spiritual realms. Butler explains: “The occult is defined as the hidden levels of the mind or the hidden information about how things work…A really intense performance is like hypnosis. You go to a certain state of mind and your presence brings those around you to the same place.”

A part of Art Los Angeles Contemporary, in the Ruskin Theatre at the Santa Monica Airport, 3000 Airport Ave, 5pm. Produced in conjunction with Annie Wharton Los Angeles.

Below, Butler’s 42-second film “Night of Pan” from the OneDreamRush collective show, featuring Kenneth Anger, Vincent Gallo and Twiggy Ramirez.
 

 
Thank you Susan von Seggern!

 
She may be only starting out, but Vera Brosgol is one of the most talented comic artists around. Her first graphic novel Anya’s Ghost kicked ass, and last month she made available the whole of her brilliant What were you raised by wolves? on-line. This is a fantastic story of a girl who….well, you’ll find out, and can be read here.

Born in Moscow, Vera moved to the United States when she was 5. She currently works at Laika Inc. in Portland, Oregon drawing storyboards for feature animation. For more information on the divinely talented Ms Bee (and on how to get started as graphic artist) here. And look here for her books and for prints.
 

 
With thanks to Steve Duffy
 

 
“Je suis fou du chocolat Lanvin!”—so claims Salvador Dali in this TV ad starring the surrealist master who was dubbed “Avida Dollars” by Andre Breton for his seemingly insatiable lust for money.
 

 
Dreams Money Can Buy is a 1947 film made by artist/author Hans Richter and collaborators like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Ferdinand Leger, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Paul Bowles, Max Ernst and others. There is a number by scandalous bisexual torch singer Libby Holman and popular African-American singer Josh White (who was later caught up in the “Red Scare” and black-listed) on the original soundtrack titled “The Girl with the Pre-Fabricated Heart” that plays during Leger’s segment.
 
Richter’s goal was to bring the avant-garde out of the museum and into the movie house and the results, predictably, are rather unique. Certainly Dreams Money Can Buy must have been a stunner at the time and it still is. The plot, such that there is one, revolves around a man who rents a room where he can peer into the mirror and see people’s dreams. He sets up shop and we meet his clients and see their surreal interior lives in the dream sequences. As you can imagine with the above list of collaborators, the film is a dizzying treat of audio-visual creation.
 

 
Marcel Duchamp’s contribution, “Discs,” is especially interesting. Here we see Duchamp’s famous Rotoreliefs in action, with a “prepared piano” soundtrack performed by John Cage. [I was once offered a box of glass and wood reproductions in miniature of Duchamp’s kinetic sculptures—at a good price, too—and like a fucking idiot I passed on it].
 

 
Below, Dreams Money Can Buy in its entirety on YouTube. If you want to watch with the original soundtrack, it’s here. The “modern” soundtrack, in the version embedded below, was recorded by The Real Tuesday Weld and is pretty faithful to the original music.
 

 
Thank you Vanessa Weinberg!

 
A new and as-always fun and functional project from New Orleans genius musician/inventor, Quintron. It’s really a beautiful idea, especially the rain drop trigger. In my perfect parallel universe every home would come equipped with this set of devices.
 

 
Thanks Stephen Fishman

Bruce White “Dr. Steve Brule” acrylic on velvet, 11 x 14 inches
 
Gallery1988 Melrose in Los Angeles is paying homage to all the wonderfulness on Adult Swim by featuring different artists interpretations of the TV shows. Great job!

It opened on January 13 and goes on through February 4, 2011.

Kiersten Essenpreis “Brock Samson & The Neighborhood Stray Cats”

(via Nerdcore )

 
Fifty years ago today Ernie Kovacs died in a car accident. He was 43-years-old. A tragic end for a hugely talented artist.

Kovacs elevated television comedy to a fine art. Innovative, subversive and diabolically funny, he created a surreal style of humor employing cutting edge visual techniques and envelope pushing irreverence that influenced a wide range of TV shows from Saturday Night Live and SCTV to Sesame Street and Monty Python.

In this six minute compression of cine-semiology, Kovacs pays homage to film noir classics such as Touch Of Evil (the tracking shots), Psycho, Asphalt Jungle and Night In The City with a hint (as I see it) of Jean Genet and Godard. The soundtrack is Béla Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra” and it creates a beautiful sense of dread.

This first aired in 1961 and it still seems fresh today. The highly-stylized sets, feral cat, dead-eyed baby dolls and hallucinatory effects have the eerie dreaminess and sense of camp that David Lynch, the Kuchar brothers and Kenneth Anger would explore years later.

No telling where Kovacs would have taken his art had he lived. Sadly, it came to an end on a dark street in Los Angeles on January 13, 1962 when Kovacs lost control of his car while allegedly attempting to light one of his ubiquitous cigars.