Simply put, John Nolan‘s 2010 reel for his animatronic creations is amazing. You may recognize some of John’s work from Clash of the Titans, Where the Wild Things Are and the television series Being Human.
BTW, there’s a blobby thing with lips that’s rather disturbing in this video. Just wait for it.
(via Nerdcore)
In the past few weeks I’ve dug through boxes of my old records and dusted off my turntables. Right now, sitting a few feet away from me, are stacks of vinyl that I’ve been collecting since I bought my first record, “Return To Sender” by Elvis, when I was 10 years old. While I’ve got a CD collection that numbers in the 1000s, I still love my vinyl. And I’m not the only one. Records have been making a comeback for the past decade and stores like Waterloo in Austin (one of the last record stores standing) devotes close to half its square footage to vinyl.
Of course much of the pleasure of collecting vinyl records is the thrill of the hunt, going to stores and searching through bins of musty merchandise hoping to score something offbeat or a sentimental artifact. Sadly, those days are mostly over. It’s a rarity to find a record store anywhere anymore.
While I appreciate the convenience of ordering music online and the swiftness of downloading, the experience of browsing in a record store is a unique pleasure that is irreplaceable. I miss it and I know that the death of the record store diminishes the experience of being a music fan. What have we sacrificed for speed and laziness? For me, record stores, like bookstores, have always been a great place to gather with people who love art and a place where I might encounter something unexpected among the those mystical slabs of plastic and cardboard.
Record lovers, these 40 photos of shuttered record stores will probably make you misty-eyed. Most of you will recognize among them one or two that are connected to your rock and roll heart.
Via The Daily Swarm
Los Angeles DM readers ! Come on out tonight for lovely records and adult beverages.
From the darkest depths of hipster Brooklyn comes this head-scratcher of a faux-public access half hour by one B.J. Rubin and a gang of amiable hangers-on. Highlights include a seemingly endless stream of half-remembered old time-y piano tunes, an annoyingly circular and obsessive grade-school poetic remembrance, a live cat, and most notably, a 15 minute (!) drum performance by one Kevin Shea that may be one of the most relentlessly funny and potentially self-destructive things I’ve ever witnessed. Seriously, just go ahead and skip to around the 14 minute mark and marvel at the madness.
Thanks Cory Flanigan !
Who wouldn’t want to try this? Ten years on, Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers is still gob-smackingly good fun.
Six drummers participate in a well planned musical attack in the suburbs. As an elderly couple leave their apartment the drummers take over. On everyday objects they give a concert in four movements: Kitchen, Bedroom, Bathroom and Living-room.
With thanks to Duke Sandefur
Clips from low-budget and very bizarre children’s movies of the 1950s and 60s with a Bollywood mix by Madlib.
Bollywood soundtracks and children’s fairytales seem to have an affinity for each other.
Puss N’ Boots - Mexico
Tom Thumb - Mexico
The Brave Little Tailor -Germany
The Wonderful Land Of Oz - USA
There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times, That Noisy Woodpecker Had an Animated Secret, about Shamus Culhane, a pioneer of modern animation, who slipped homages to avant-garde artists into several Woody Woodpecker cartoons in the 1940s.
Sixteen years ago Tom Klein was staring at a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, The Loose Nut, when he started seeing things. Specifically, Mr. Klein watched that maniacal red-topped bird smash a steamroller through the door of a shed. The screen then exploded into images that looked less like the stuff of a Walter Lantz cartoon than like something Willem de Kooning might have hung on a wall.
“What was that?” Mr. Klein, now an animation professor at Loyola Marymount University, recalled thinking. Only later, after years of scholarly detective work, did he decide that he had been looking at genuine art that was cleverly concealed by an ambitious and slightly frustrated animation director named Shamus Culhane.”
Culhane was an admirer of experimental film makers, Eisenstein in particular, as well as abstract painters and managed to work some of his artistic obsessions into his commercial work.
High art meets popular art inThe Loose Nut when Woody “is blown into an abstract configuration…a convergence of animation and Soviet montage.”
In lowbrow mode, Culhane enjoyed pranking Universal Studios and Walt Lantz by throwing not-so-subtle sexual imagery into his cartoons. In The Greatest Man In Siam, Culhane’s libido goes nuts in a veritable onslaught of genitalia. You don’t need to be Freud to notice the erect phalluses and vaginal doorways. At the 4:36 point in the clip, there’s a glimpse of a pink passageway that incorporates both yin and yang.
Nicole Belle put it nicely at Crooks and Liars:
Man, conservatives sure do want everyone to buy into the notion that the only answer to Medicare is to not have it. They go on and on about how Medicare is going to go bankrupt. But what is never mentioned is the actual end of that sentence “...under current spending levels.”
Let’s remember that there are two sides to that coin. One way to deal with rising costs is to drastically cut benefits. But that doesn’t reduce the existence of the need for those benefits, it simply transfers the costs to the individual, who is on Medicare because they cannot afford private insurance. As in our current system with those who are uninsured, if those individuals can’t pay those costs, they get passed on to everyone else in the form of increased premiums and bloated medical charges (nothing like paying for a $20 box of tissue during a hospital stay).
But the other way to deal with it—which is apparently unthinkable to George Will and Chrystia Freeland—is to increase spending, in the form of tax increases. Yes, I said the dreaded phrase: tax increases. At the time that Medicare was enacted in 1965, the top marginal tax rate was 70%. Now it’s less than 40%. Of course there’s no money…we’re too busy allowing the uber-wealthy and corporations to skate on their share of the social fabric to create huge population-sized holes in the safety net.
I do have to credit the GOP with the talking point that it won’t affect anyone currently getting Medicare or scheduled to receive it for the next ten years. *Wipes brow* whew! I guess that leaves me—in my mid-40s, with a history of cancer and without a steady paycheck for 15 years, so I’m imminent competitively hire-able—in the perfect spot to afford private insurance policies as a senior? I guess it’s a good thing I had children…I’ll need somewhere to live when my IRA (since Social Security is in the crosshairs as well) goes almost exclusively to my medical needs. Multiply that over tens of millions of Gen X-ers and Y-ers and Millennials and suddenly, that doesn’t seem so sustainable for the economy, does it?
And can we please call a moratorium on calling Medicare and Social Security “entitlements”? I’m so sick of that bull excrement. There is nothing “entitled” about having taxes taken out of every paycheck to a trust fund that will enable one to live through one’s golden years without resorting to eating catfood or wearing a Walmart greeter’s vest because the idea of a true retirement is out of the realm of possibility. The only entitlement I see is the white privilege of the Beltway establishment, unwilling to actually be honest about the consequences of such destructive Republican policies.
Below, Rep. Eric Cantor says things that will make you want to vomit on Fox News.
Cartoon via Bart Cop
Now in its 80th year, Afri-Cola, Germany’s answer to those other well-known soft drinks, has used some wonderfully thirst-quenchin’ advertising to promote itself over the years. None more bizarre than this lip-smackin’ beauty from 1968, which says everything you need to know about the sixties and the “sexy-mini-super-flower-power-pop-op-cola”, Afri-Cola in sixty seconds.
With thanks to Steve Duffy
