Ectoplasmosis: Friday Fez Fetish
This image, found via Ectoplasmosis, should properly excite the Masonic conspirators over at Boing Boing.
This image, found via Ectoplasmosis, should properly excite the Masonic conspirators over at Boing Boing.
New work from Jeff Koons will be on display at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills from Nov. 14 through Jan. 9, 2010. The gallery?
If you call yourself a music fan and you’ve not taken a pilgrimage over to Wolfgang’s Vault, then make a move, stat, hippie! The sprawling website is a veritable treasure trove of classic rock concerts, many from the archive of the late, great San Francisco-based concert impresario Bill Graham (real name: Wolfgang Grajonca). It’s the Ft. Knox of live music.
Graham began recording rock shows at his Winterland, Fillmore West and Filmore East show palaces and stored the tapes in the basement of his Bill Graham Presents offices. These 2,500 hours formed the basis of the Vault’s collection, but the archives of the “King Biscuit Flower Hour” radio show, the Dawson Sound collection, the Ash Grove (a L.A. 60s folk club, now known as the Improv) archive, the Newport Jazz archives and tapes from the Record Plant have been added in recent years. Meticulous restoration work is done on the well-preserved, but aging, material by an army of recording engineers who will even resort to slow baking the tapes for several days so they can be played just one time and captured digitally.
From the acid rock of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix on to the punkier sounds of the Sex Pistols, the Clash and beyond (‘80s New Wave groups like Culture Club, Duran Duran and ABC are represented too), much of the 3,500 concerts on Wolfgang’s Vault stream free for members (it costs nothing to sign up, but you do have to register to listen) and the audio quality is top-notch. Additionally Wolgang’s Vault boasts a streaming radio station and an online store with what is probably the single best source of rock and roll memorabilia on the Internet. New concerts are added weekly. There’s even a Wolfgang’s Vault iPhone app for listening to concerts on the go, which was named the best app of 2009 by Macworld.
Cross posting this from Brand X
Or so says Australian psychologist, Joe Forgas, who seems to think a case of the “grumps” can, in fact, make us think more clearly. The University of New South Wales researcher says grumpy people, rather than happy types, are better at coping with demanding situations because of the way the brain “promotes information processing strategies.”
He asked volunteers to watch different films and dwell on positive or negative events in their life, designed to put them in either a good or bad mood. Next he asked them to take part in a series of tasks, including judging the truth of urban myths and providing eyewitness accounts of events. Those in a bad mood outperformed those who were jolly—they made fewer mistakes and were better communicators.
Professor Forgas said: ‘Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world.’
Bonus: Grumpy, Yet Clear-Thinking, Max Von Sydow In Hannah And Her Sisters
BBC News: Feeling Grumpy Is Good For You
If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats has a sweet collection of images titled, “Artists and Animals.” It’s worth a click!
UPI says,
Italian scientists say CAT scans have helped them uncover an “inner statue” under one of the world’s best-known faces, the bust of Queen Nefertiti of Egypt.
The bust, about 3,400 years old, was discovered in 1912 by German archaeologists in what had been the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose. It is now in the Neues Museum in Berlin.
Franco Crevatin , an ethnologist at Trieste University, and Stefano Anselmo, an expert in the history of cosmetics, have created a computer-generated image they believe is closer to Nefertiti’s actual face than the one shown in the finished statue. Their findings were published this month in Focus Storia, a history journal.
The researchers added skin color to the image picked up by CAT scans and studied surviving Egyptian portraits of Nefertiti’s relatives. Their image makes the queen’s nose somewhat less perfect and adds laugh lines around her mouth. The cheekbones are less dramatic and the eyes shallower.
We haven’t had a Stones related post in days now, time to remedy that with this fantastic live (not lip-sync) performance of Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Keith Richards describes who inspired the songs cryptic lyrics
Jack Dyer, who was my gardener, an old English yokel. I once said, ‘ave you ever been to town? Town, to an Englishman, means London, right? He says, Oh Yea, I was up there when war finished. That cathedral’s something. He meant Chichester, the local big town, seven miles away…We’d been up all night and it was in the morning. Suddenly this sound of boots went by the window, clump clump clump and woke Mick up, What was that?! I looked out, that’s Jack, that’s jumpin’ Jack. Well he’s leaping about a bit. Yeah, I said, it’s “jumpin’ Jack” and then “flash” came and suddenly we were wide awake and we started to work, you know. You never know when they’re going to come.
