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The ice bong
09.15.2011
07:31 pm
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Someone needs to patent an ice bong mold quick! I can’t find anywhere on the Internet where one exists.

Don’t say I never gave you nothin’...

(via reddit)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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09.15.2011
07:31 pm
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‘Who will live Aladdin Sane?’: Bowie building set for 2012 construction
09.05.2011
04:48 pm
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A portrait of David Bowie is to be emblazoned across the front of a five-storey apartment building in Australia. I’m a huge, huge Bowie fan, but this is just… tacky.

The original plans for the building’s facade called for Andy Warhol’s mug instead of Bowie’s. No mention of why Warhol was nixed. The 18-unit building is supposed to begin construction in February of 2012.

Via The Herald Sun/Thank you Spencer Kansa!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.05.2011
04:48 pm
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Weird silicone child’s hand attaches to iPhone
08.03.2011
03:35 pm
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I’m not exactly sure why anyone would want or need something like this? I can’t imagine a severed silicone child’s hand attached to your iPhone would somehow enhance your communication experience. I’m totally stumped here.

The Dokkiri Hand Case for iPhone 4 will be available in late-August, but it looks like they’re taking pre-orders now. I’ll jump right on that… 
 

 

Posted by Tara McGinley
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08.03.2011
03:35 pm
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Kubrick’s twisted dimensions: Why ‘The Shining’ is a masterful mindbender
07.29.2011
02:39 am
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Rob Ager has no academic credentials in the realms of psychology or film making, but he clearly doesn’t need them. He has an incredible intuitive grasp of the links between celluloid and the subconscious mind. He’s not only a brilliant thinker, he’s a tenacious researcher. In this fascinating study of Stanley Kubrick’s disruption of spatial logic in order to create a sense of unease in his film The Shining, Ager gets at the heart of what makes the movie so spooky - the fact that it’s so fucking disorienting, an Escher-like maze of endless corridors drifting into infinity. A terrifying dream folding into itself. Jung would have loved this movie and Ager’s take on it.

Ager wrote, narrated and edited this outstanding analysis of Kubrick’s much-maligned vertiginous masterpiece.
 

 

 
Via Mister Honk

Posted by Marc Campbell
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07.29.2011
02:39 am
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John Lautner Houses in the Movies: James Bond to Big Lebowski
07.21.2011
03:53 pm
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LA Curbed put together this wonderful video of famed modern architect John Launter’s sexy architectural designs as in Hollywood for his 100th birthday.
 

 

Posted by Tara McGinley
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07.21.2011
03:53 pm
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Smoke on the Water: The Porsche Hookah
07.21.2011
02:16 pm
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According to the Porsche website, the hookah “made out of TecFlex material,” will be available at the end of July. I wonder how much this sucker is going to cost?

The extraordinary Porsche Design Shisha combines high-quality materials such as aluminium, stainless steel and glass with the timeless and unique design approach of the luxury brand. Puristic and stylish at the same time. The Porsche Design Shisha is made in Germany and stands at a height of 55 centimetres. It only shows a discreet branding on the aluminium top of the Shisha and comes with a long flexible tube made out of TecFlex material, which is also used for the classic Porsche Design TecFlex writing tools.

(via Core 77)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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07.21.2011
02:16 pm
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1960 Plymouth Fury with dashboard record player
07.20.2011
03:26 pm
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The 1960 Plymouth Fury had the option of a dashboard record player: the RCA Victor “Highway Hi-Fi”. It could play up to fourteen “45” records consecutively.

To avoid records skipping this set of wheels had to have been a very smooth ride.
 

 
Via Afflictor

Posted by Marc Campbell
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07.20.2011
03:26 pm
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Los Angeles in 1972: Vintage video of Surfurbia
07.17.2011
04:42 pm
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In this entertaining BBC documentary from 1972, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, architectural critic/writer/professor Banham takes us on a tour of the four ecologies of L.A. which he described as Surfurbia, The Plains Of Id, Foothills and Autotopia. A landscape of mini-malls, strip clubs, tiki huts, Watts Tower and the Lovell “Health” House designed by Richard Neutra are among the many fascinating sights in this wonderful vintage video.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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07.17.2011
04:42 pm
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Bruce Conner: The Artist Who Shaped Our World
06.25.2011
04:37 pm
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image
 
I find it difficult to watch Adam Curtis‘s various acclaimed documentaries without thinking: how much has he taken from Bruce Conner?

Indeed without Conner, would Curtis have developed his magpie, collagist-style of documentary making?

I doubt it, but you (and Curtis) may disagree.

The late Bruce Conner is the real talent here - an artist and film-maker whose work devised new ways of working and presciently anticipated techniques which are now ubiquitously found on the web, television and film-making.

Conner was “a heroic oppositional artist, whose career went against the staid and artificially created stasis of the art world”. Which is academic poohbah for saying Conner kept to his own vision: a Beat life, which channeled his energies into art - with a hint of Dada, Surrealism and Duchamp.

Conner was cantankerous and one-of-a-kind. He would wear an American flag pin. When asked why, he said, “I’m not going to let those bastards take it away from me.”

He kicked against fame and celebrity, seeing art as something separate from individual who created it.

“I’ve always been uneasy about being identified with the art I’ve made. Art takes on a power all its own and it’s frightening to have things floating around the world with my name on them that people are free to interpret and use however they choose.”

Born in McPherson, Kansas, Conner attended Witchita University, before receiving his degree in Fine Art from Nebraska University. At university he met and married Jean Sandstedt in 1957. He won a scholarship to art school in Brooklyn, but quickly moved to University of Colorado, where he spent one semester studying art. The couple then moved to San Francisco and became part of the Beat scene. Here Conner began to produce sculptures and ready-mades that critiqued the consumerist society of late 1950’s. His work anticipated Pop Art, but Conner never focussed solely on one discipline, refusing to be pigeon-holed, and quickly moved on to to film-making.

Having been advised to make films by Stan Brakhage, Conner made A MOVIE in 1958, by editing together found footage from newsreels- B-movies, porn reels and short films. This single film changed the whole language of cinema and underground film-making with its collagist technique and editing.

The Conners moved to Mexico (“it was cheap”), where he discovered magic mushrooms and formed a life-long friendship with a still to be turned-on, Timothy Leary. When the money ran out, they returned to San Francisco and the life of film-maker and artist.

In 1961, Conner made COSMIC RAY, a 4-minute film of 2,000 images (A-bombs, Mickey Mouse, nudes, fireworks) to Ray Charles’ song “What I Say”. With a grant from the Ford Foundation, Conner produced a series of films that were “precursors, for better or worse, of the pop video and MTV,” as his obituary reported:

EASTER MORNING RAGA (1966) was designed to be run forward or backward at any speed, or even in a loop to a background of sitar music. Breakaway (1966) showed a dancer, Antonia Christina Basilotta, in rapid rhythmic montage. REPORT (1967) dwells on the assassination of John F Kennedy. The found footage exists of repetitions, jump cuts and broken images of the motorcade, and disintegrates at the crucial moment while we hear a frenzied television commentator saying that “something has happened”. The fatal gun shots are intercut with other shots: TV commercials, clips from James Whale’s Frankenstein and Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The film has both a kinetic and emotional effect.

REPORT revealed “Kennedy as a commercial product”, to be sold and re-packaged for arbitrary political purposes.

REPORT “perfectly captures Conner’s anger over the commercialization of Kennedy’s death” while also examining the media’s mythic construction of JFK and Jackie — a hunger for images that “guaranteed that they would be transformed into idols, myths, Gods.”

Conner’s work is almost a visual counterpart to J G Ballard’s writing, using the same cultural references that inspired Ballard’s books - Kennedy, Monroe, the atom bomb. His film CROSSROADS presented the 1952 atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll in extreme slow motion from twenty-seven different angles.

His editing techniques influenced Dennis Hopper in making Easy Rider, and said:

“much of the editing of Easy Rider came directly from watching Bruce’s films”

The pair became friends and Hopper famously photographed Conner alongside Toni Basil, Teri Garr and Ann Mitchell.

Always moving, always progressing, having “no half way house in which to rest”, Conner became part of the San Francisco Punk scene, after Toni Basil told Conner to go check out the band Devo in 1977. He became so inspired when he saw the band at the Mabuhay Gardens that he started going there four night a week, taking photographs of Punk bands, which eventually led to his job as staff photographer with Search ‘n’ Destroy magazine. It was a career change that came at some personal cost.

“I lost a lot of brain cells at the Mabuhay. What are you gonna do listening to hours of incomprehensible rock’n’roll but drink? I became an alcoholic, and it took me a few years to deal with that.”

Conner continued with his art work and films, even making short films for Devo, David Byrne and Brian Eno. In his later years, Conner returned to the many themes of his early life and work, but still kept himself once removed from greater success and fame. He died in 2008.

Towards the end of his life he withdrew his films from circulation, as he was “disgusted” when he saw badly pixelated films bootlegged and uploaded on YouTube. Conner was prescriptive in how his work should be displayed and screened. All of which is frustrating for those who want to see Conner’s films outside of the gallery, museum or film festival, and especially now, when so much of his originality and vision as a film-maker and artist has been copied by others.
 

‘Mea Culpa’ - David Byrne and Brian Eno.  Directed by Bruce Conner
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

‘The Loving Trap’: brilliant Adam Curtis parody


 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.25.2011
04:37 pm
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