For that special Whovian in your life: A handmade Doctor Who chess set by Emmi Visser.
In time for Christmas, this is a completely unique, highly detailed, high quality chess set inspired by Doctor Who. Every single one of the 32 pieces is handcrafted from scratch. Finally you will be able to have your own adventures in time and space! And when you have briefly set your interstellar quarrels aside, this set is sure to attract the attention of your visitors!
Only ONE set will be sold. I will NOT make another set! So this one is completely UNIQUE. (I did make a chess set last year featuring the tenth Doctor. This one features the eleventh Doctor.)
The chess set is for sale at Visser’s Etsy shop, priced at $949.00 + shipping. Damn, I wish I had the money for this.
British food sculptor Paul Baker has recreated The Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover using the main ingredients of an English breakfast with garnishes - beans, mushrooms, bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, toast and fruit.
Note that he used mushrooms to create Paul McCartney out of respect for McCartney’s vegetarianism.
When asked how he felt about the fact he’d received £400,000 to make Caravaggio in 1986, and the director of Chariots of Fire, Hugh Hudson had received 4 million to make his film, Derek Jarman replied, ‘Fortunately, I’m one hundred times more intelligent than Hugh Hudson, so it doesn’t matter.’
It certainly didn’t matter as Jarman’s output, during his 20-year career, pisses from a great height on Hudson’s work. What Jarman would have made of this year’s London Olympics, with its recurring reference to Chariots of Fire, would certainly have been interesting. Yet, Jarman was never fooled by his position as an outsider, he was well aware that there ‘is a complicity between the avant-garde and the establishment, it’s symbiotic, they need each other,’ as he explained to Peter Culshaw in the NME, April, 1986.
‘..all avant-garde gestures have been appropriated by just those people they sought to undermine. Dada was conceived as a full-scale assault and now Dada sells for millions. But what people never point out about me is that I’m probably the most conservative film-maker in the country. I’m not talking about Thatcherite-radical conservatives, who are anti-traditional and destructive, and who see progress as heaven, I mean more like the conservatism of groups like the Green Party.’
The artist Caravaggio fascinated Jarman, because ‘he was the most inspired religious painter of the Middle Ages and was also a murderer.’
‘Imagine if Shakespeare had been a murderer - it would completely alter the way we see his plays. [Caravaggio] was particularly taken to heart by the Romans because he painted real people. The girl next door was Mary Magdalen. Or in Death of a Virgin he painted a well-known prostitute as a virgin. It was the equivalent of Christine Keeler being put up over the high altar at Westminster Abbey.’
Jarman felt a tremendous parallel between Caravaggio and his own life, and he believed that ‘the cinema of the product precludes individual voices…’
‘...and I think unless one can put one’s own voice into a film, then there’s an element of dishonesty in it.’
In this short interview Derek Jarman talks about his life and films, Caravaggio, The Last of England and War Requiem, taken from Spanish TV’s Metropolis from 1989.
According to the description on Amazon for these Motörhead Russian nesting dolls:
“Hand made hand painted ** Limited addition ** Quality - excellent. ** Very colorful, detailed artwork. ** Lacquer finish. *** Signature on the base. **”
Artist and flameworker Robert Mickelsen makes these rather intricate, fully-functional machine gun glass pipes. Mickelsen’s been working in the torchworking trenches for four decades.
See more machine gun pipes and other glass works by Mickelsen here.
So rarely have I ever been quite beautifully claw hammered by a movie than I was by the 1965 film, Who Killed Teddy Bear? It’s one of those films that can leave you slack jawed over what you have just seen and all the while it just seeps further and further into your consciousness. It’s been days since I last watched it and I still cannot stop thinking about it.
The basic plot revolves around a young, beautiful DJ and aspiring actress, Norah (Juliet Prowse), who soon becomes the focal point of a stalker. He starts off as a creaky voiced, hot and heavy breathing obscene phone caller, making comments like “I know what you look like right now” and “I can make you feel like a real woman.” She’s annoyed at first but gets progressively more rattled as the number of calls grow and violence starts to blossom around her.
Where things get really interesting is that instead of building up the identity of Norah’s mystery obsessive to the very end, we find out who he is midway through the film. The lithe but muscular figure, often shiny with sweat and clad in white briefs, turns out to be the boyishly handsome busboy, Lawrence (Sal Mineo), who works with her at the discotheque. The jolt of seeing former teen idol and Rebel Without a Cause star Mineo as the sexually damaged obscene phone caller with homicidal tendencies is as strong now as it must have been back when it was originally released.
But Mineo’s performance is much more than just a teen dream novelty. He brings some serious depth and layers to Lawrence, creating a character who is alternately sad and frightening, mostly due to his childhood rooted dysfunction. Whether he is taking his mentally challenged sister to the zoo or working out with an intensity that precedes either the hottest sex act or the worst murder, Mineo is a powerhouse here. His Lawrence is right up there with Anthony Perkins in Psycho and John Amplas’s titular role in George Romero’s Martin.
The film itself is a powder keg of beautifully moody B&W cinematography and the grimy underbelly of the human condition. The opening credit sequence alone sets the tone, featuring a blurry undulation of bodies as a little girl watches, clutching her cherished teddy bear. She turns away, only to fall down the stairs, with her face now suddenly blank, as if she is dead or brain damaged. Without a breath of relief, the actual film starts in a cramped, shadowy bedroom, complete with a nightstand littered with lurid publications, featuring titles like French Frills and When She Was Bad. A mirror reflects the image of a man caressing his bare chest while looking at photos of Norah, right before calling her up.
The elements of sleaze continue as Norah encounters police Lieutenant Dave Madden (Jan Murray), a single dad whose fascination with all manners of sexual deviancy infects his home life. (At one point, one of his coworkers mentions how Dave’s young daughter talks like a “vice squad officer.”) Even Norah’s boss, the glamorous ball buster Marian (Elaine Stritch), comes across like an uneasy mixture of maternal and less than pure motive. We even get some now-historic footage of a seamier New York City, with the highlight being Lawrence’s jaunt to an adult bookstore. Seeing shelves lined with girlie mags and books ranging from Fanny Hill, William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch, Hubert Selby Jr.‘s Last Exit to Brooklyn to more purple prose titles like Dance Hall Dyke and My Naughty, Naughty Life is a much beloved peek into the pre-gentrification and Disneyfication of Times Square.
Who Killed Teddy Bear? is a brave film that gives you no easy answers. Sadly, it didn’t really do a thing for anyone that was involved, career-wise. Mineo did continue to do film, TV and theater work, including staging a controversial version of the prison drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes that featured a young Don Johnson. All of that was cut short in 1976, when he was murdered by a drifter. Elaine Stritch continues to be a monolithic character actress on Broadway, film and TV. Juliet Prowse, Jan Murray and Daniel J. Travanti, who has the small role of Carlo, Marian’s deaf bouncer, all went on to have healthy careers in television. The same could be said for director Joseph Cates, though perhaps that is the biggest shame given that he never was given the chance again to direct anything as nuanced and challenging as Who Killed Teddy Bear?. In an ideal world, this film should have forged a different career direction for Cates and certainly for Mineo, whose wounded eyes and brutal actions are hard to forget.
Who Killed Teddy Bear? is ripe for proper rediscovery. It’s a mystery why this great film is still not available legally on DVD here in the US. (It did get a release in the UK, though that appears to already be out-of-print.) It is viewable on YouTube, for anyone who does not have access to the UK, PAL formatted disc. Hopefully, it will someday get the proper release that it so justly deserves.
This 11″x17″ Little Golden Book-style painting of Björk was done for an independent record store by Mike R. Baker. According to Baker’s site, there are prints available.
“A very large poem handwritten by Captain Beefheart on the back of a concert poster, signed “Don Van Vliet ‘75,” with a drawing of a foot surrounded by musical notes. This is the most extraordinary Beefheart item we’ve seen, and the letter of authenticity from music writer and label executive Bill Bentley explains it all: “In 1975 I interviewed Captain Beefheart at the Armadillo World Headquarters for the Austin (TX) Sun. Beefheart was appearing there with Frank Zappa’s band, recording a live album (Bongo Fury.) After the interview I asked Captain Beefheart to draw me a picture, since he was doodling as we spoke. He got a poster from another Armadillo show and on the back quickly wrote out this poem. The words flowed out of him spontaneously. He signed it and handed it to me, and then took it back. He added at the end, “Progress is Channel No. 5 on the rocks,” and then drew a foot around those words with notes circling it. He called it his “footnote.” As I got ready to leave, I started to fold the poster. He said very loudly, “No!” He took it from me and rolled it up before handing it back, and said “Some day you’ll thank me.” He didn’t want me to crease the poster, knowing it would adversely affect the value. We ran the poem along with the interview shortly after in the Austin Sun.” Written on the back of an Armadillo poster for the band Greezy Wheels, 11 1/2” x 17 1/2”, in very good plus condition with some tape pulling around the edges and a missing bit of paper on the top right edge. Unique. With our written lifetime guarantee of authenticity.”
I highly recommend you watch Mitch Schultz’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule. It’s thoroughly engrossing, well-rounded, deeply insightful and goes directly to the folks who know the subject well for perspectives that are informed by experience, both scientific and metaphysic.
Drawing information and inspiration from Rick Strassman’s research on DMT and psychedelics and utilizing lysergic imagery created by Scott Draves, The Spirit Molecule takes us close to the edge and let’s us peer into an almost unfathomable mystery…one that ultimately must be experienced to be appreciated. Consider this film a springboard toward the infinite.
With Joe Rogan, Alex Grey, Rick Strassman, Terence McKenna and Ralph Metzner.
for these Motörhead Russian nesting dolls: 
