Superb animated timeline of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography by animator Martin Woutisseth. Music by Romain Trouillet.

 
(via KFMW)

 
Will Schofield over at 50 Watts currently has an awesome collection of scanned images from the late-60s French magazine Plexus. These are bloody brilliant! From 50 Watts:

John Coulthart at feuilleton turned me on to the late 60s–early 70s French magazine Plexus, a sexy offshoot of Planète. (John found it through DRTENGE.) It’s an intriguing mix of surreal-fantastic-psychedelic art, interviews with writers (Jacques Sternberg was the literary editor), Playboy-style comics and the occasional Popeye comic, science fiction stories, Gilles de Rais profiles, philosophy, and—though there are few traditional photo spreads—lots and lots of boobs. Each early issue features a full-color “pin up”: an erotic work by an artist like Leonor Fini.

I strongly encourage you to visit 50 Watts. Wow!

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Fresh from the Particularly Dangerous Situation in Atlanta comes this beautiful and haunting field recording made by mad genius composer/sound designer Richard Devine.  I only wish this went on for at least a half hour more !

Recording of Tornado Sirens in the distance tonight in Atlanta GA. The sounds of the strong winds and rain can be heard moving through the trees creating for a eerie atmosphere. Short recording made with the Neumann RSM-191 A/S and Sound Devices 702 Digital Recorder at 24-bit 96khz. Recorded at Midnight April 27th 2011.

  
 
Big thanks to Alessandro Cortini !

The following was written by Chris Campion and is taken from the liner notes of the CD release of Andy Warhol Presents Man on the Moon: The John Phillips Space Musical on Varese Sarabande Records.

The off-Broadway musical Man on the Moon was conceived by John Phillips and his third wife, the South African actress, Genevieve Waite, as a potential film or stage production originally entitled Space. John would spend more time trying to realize this project than anything else he worked on in his career; nearly five years all told, beginning in 1969 during the period he was recording his first solo album, John the Wolfking of L.A.

Space was born the day Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. Like millions of other people, John watched the 1969 moon landing on TV. He was living, at the time, on the Malibu property rented by British film director Michael Sarne, who was under contract at Fox to direct the adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel, Myra Breckenridge, with Rex Harrison, Raquel Welch and Mae West. Sarne had commissioned John to write songs for the film.

The Apollo 11 moon landing became an obsession. John would watch a recording of the TV transmission made on an early video tape machine over and over. The idea of exploring this new frontier - and particularly Neil Armstrong’s scripted aside as he stepped onto the lunar surface that it was, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” - fired John’s imagination, and he began to piece together ideas for a mythical space opera set to music. “He loved myths,” says Genevieve, who was first introduced to John by Sarne that summer. “He liked Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey.”

John first began performing a small song cycle he had written about “space exploration” as early as the fall of 1970, as part of the short tour he undertook to promote Wolf King. Over the next two years, he and Genevieve formulated ideas for the story, and created a theatrical treatment (later adapted as a screenplay). Seeking a backer, they pitched it to Michael Butler, producer of the stage musical Hair. He provided seed money to realize a book and a score for Space, and brought a young director called Michael Bennett on board.

For several months, the Italianate mansion at 414 St. Pierre road in Bel Air that John and Genevieve were renting became a hive of Space-related activity. Among their collaborators was British costumier Marsia Trinder, who had designed clothes for Elvis Presley and Raquel Welch. “It was a very creative period for about two or three months,” says Trinder, who moved into another wing of the mansion with her then boyfriend to work on costumes for the production. “John was the key person organizing it all and coming up with ideas. But everybody was feeding into it. John felt that with all the secrets in the world, there wouldn’t be wars if people didn’t have secrets. And then they kind of figured out the plot.”

The initial story for Space gradually took shape: When a humanoid bomb left on the moon by the Apollo space mission threatens to blow itself up and destroy the universe, an astronaut on Earth is tasked with leading a delegation of interplanetary dignitaries to travel there and defuse it. Humanity is forced to curb its destructive impulses for the universal good.

The role of the astronaut was originally written for Elvis, whom John and Genevieve had befriended in 1971, while living in Palm Springs shortly after the birth of their son Tamerlane. “John was trying to sell him songs,” says Waite. “They would sit around and John would sing him different songs.”  At one point, Ricky Nelson was also approached for the part.

Read more about the ill-fated musical (with a second exclusive video clip) after the jump…

 
I was really hoping that amazing looking Houdini show from The Jewish Museum in NYC, Houdini: Art and Magic would make it out to Los Angeles and before I could even say “Abracadabra,” poof it shows up at the Skirball Cultural Center, opening tomorrow, April 28th. Featuring Houdini memorabilia galore, the show also has a number of pieces by contemporary artsts like Joe Coleman, Raymond Pettibon and Matthew Barney that attest to the enduring cultural fascination with the legendary magician and escape artist who is still a household name nearly a century after his death.

The Skirball have actually added a second attraction, another magic-related exhibition called Masters of Illusion: Jewish Magicians of the Golden Age. They’ve done up the museum in “period” settings reminiscent of vaudeville stages and Victorian-era parlor rooms to display what remain of the almost forgotten careers of over 40 other stage magicians who were Houdini’s friends, rivals and predecessors. Stage props, photos, original posters, costumes, letters, newspaper clippings and even, I’ve read, some nearly century-old “robots.”

The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero by William Kalush & Larry Sloman is the definitive Houdini biography.
 

 
Below, silent footage of the great escape artist, Harry Houdini.
 

 
My post yesterday about the disposable inserts from blank cassette tapes got me thinking about this interesting album from 2000. It’s by the now defunct Argentine band Reynols and it’s called Blank Tapes. Starting with a solid three minutes of truly blank tape it then moves through a monochromatic rainbow of different processes with blank cassette ness as the root source. Hear it in its entirety right here:
 

 

 
The band Reynols itself is fascinating. Consisting of a few special education teachers and one of their star pupils, Miguel Tomasin, who happens to have Down’s Syndrome, Reynols released tons of records to much acclaim within the experimental music community and even did a few collaborative recordings with the great composer Pauline Oliveros. Legend has it the name Reynols was arrived at by allowing a pet Chihuahua to step on a TV remote which randomly brought up an image of Burt Reynolds. Can you make things like that up ? I suppose so, but I’m still buying it.
 
Reynols - 10,000 Chicken Symphony 7” also from 2000

 
What’s that, a new album? Guess I spoke too soon!

 
Jason Williams, a.k.a. Revok, one of the best known graffiti artists in Los Angeles, was taken into custody Thursday at LAX as he prepared to board a plane bound for Ireland. The arrest was for an outstanding warrant he had failed to pay restitution on.

WIlliams is a member of the Mad Society Kings, or MSK, graffiti crew. He is being held in the Los Angeles County Jail in lieu of $320,000 bail, according to the Los Angeles Times.
 

 
Special for Easter, here’s a rarely seen document from the bowels of the New York No Wave scene: Ecstatic Stigmatic directed by Teenage Jesus and the Jerks member Gordon Stevenson and starring his wife Mirielle Cervenka (older sister of Exene). Both of whom would be dead within 2 years of the film’s completion, he of AIDS and she of a hit and run driver in Los Angeles. Also appearing is DNA’s Arto Lindsay. Despite the home made proto-goth silliness this is actually pretty relentlessly creepy and the music is fantastic. Definitely worth at least one viewing and/or skimming. Extra huge thanks to our own Marc Campbell for hunting down the best possible version, cleaning it up and uploading for your viewing displeasure. Probably NSFW.
 


 
Via Deface Value comes this marvelous collection of authentically found and intentionally altered LP sleeves.
 

 

 

 

 

 
Many more after the jump…

 
These wonderfully bizarre ads for Mentos Marbels were illustrated by artist Deelip Khomane for advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather in Mumbai, India.

Imagine a candy so sour it will drive you to suicide. An odd approach to selling a product, but it got my attention. The wheel of life and death spins off some dark humor.
 

 

 
Via copyranter