What if Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s The Simple Life was directed by Jean Luc Godard?  Well, it might come out looking something like Věra Chytilová‘s ‘66 Czech gem, Daisies.  If you’ve never seen it on the small screen (it makes a great, Sunday afternoon pairing with another favorite Czech film of mine, 1970’s Valerie and Her Week Of Wonders), Angelenos can skip right to the big screen experience this Saturday night at Cinefamily.  Playing as part of their “Czech Your Head” series,

Daisies is a bubbling and buoyant spring of irrepressible female creativity; it is an overflowing audio-visual bouquet of color, music, and texture; it is a freewheeling and effervescent farce, a formal free-for-all, a paradoxical mixture of bourgeois indulgence and cultural critique, and it’s your next favorite movie.  Two young Czech girls (both named Marie) decide that the world is so corrupt that they might as well join in, and they do so with wild abandon—prancing, food-fighting, pranking old men, carousing in nightclubs, and creating anarchy everywhere they go.

 
Given that the financing of Daisies was furnished by the Czech government, it probably came as no surprise that the film was promptly banned upon its release—and not solely for reasons of content.  With its blatant wasting of food, serious objection was made to the “food orgy” that ends the film.

Daisies screens at Cinefamily, Saturday, 02.06 @ 7:30pm.

 
Wonderful! I laughed like hell at this!
 
(via Graham Linehan’s Why, That’s Delightful!)

 
Charles Johnson posted this today over at Little Green Footballs, I’m sure he won’t mind me sharing it here:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said today that there is no difference in beliefs between the GOP and tea partiers.

“There really is no difference between what Republicans believe in and what the tea party activists believe in,” Boehner said during an appearance on the conservative Mike Gallagher’s radio show.

Boehner said his advice to Republican lawmakers going into this fall’s elections has been to “prove it to the tea party activists that we really are who we say we are.”

If you take Boehner at his word, then, here are some of the things Republicans believe in.

The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America. Original and necessary scholarship, one of the best books of the season. An in-depth interview with author Don Lattin.

 
Genius.
 
African Apparel

 
Quirky French director Michel Gondry’s new music video Open Your Heart for L.A.-based musician Mia Doi Todd. Shot in various Los Angeles locations with a small army of extras, including Dangerous Minds pal Erica Krumpl (she’s Mia’s main dance partner throughout the piece).

Wonderful, yes, in that signature Gondry style, and colorful too. Make that muy colorful.

 
Forget “Look Around You” (or don’t, ‘cuz it’s brilliant), this is the real thing: a couple of breathless and highly charming glimpses into the future of music circa late 70’s/ early 80’s featuring composer Suzanne Ciani. I have to say I’m quite smitten with Ciani’s stoney/ laconic/ hair twirling demeanor but not enough to dive into her discography of new age masterpieces. I have the feeling these fantastic clips are all I really need anyway.
 

 
Update: much better quality version of the 3-2-1 clip here (embed is disabled)

via Joseph Stewart’s Electronic Music Teacher blog. Thx Tara !

 
If you find yourself looking for unusual Valentine’s Day cards, look no further, because pop culture-obsessed artist Brandon Bird has come up with what are probably the most unusual valentines you are likely to find—ever! Yup, the kitschmeister supreme responsible for the classic painting No One Wants to Play Sega with Harrison Ford has done it again with: SVU Valentine’s Day cards, or, as Brandon prefers, “Saint Victims Unit” cards.

Nuthin’ says lovin’ like a DNA specimen jar or a spiteful Fred Thompson scowl, are you with me? And what’s more, there are high-res versions you can download and print out yourself that are 100% free on his blog.

P.S.: When you visit his website, do not miss the Letters to Walken section documenting an art project of Bird’s that saw schoolchildren writing their annual Christmas letters to ... Christopher Walken.

Cross posting this from Brand X

Check out these full-color, large-size reproductions of pages from the Dresden Codex, a Mayan magical script. Pages include invocations of gods and planetary energies. Fascinating stuff.

“The height of Maya civilization in what are now parts of Central America and Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula lasted for most of the first millennium CE, and elements of Maya culture survived until the arrival of Europeans in the early sixteenth century.

Among the greatest accomplishments of the Maya was the development of highly sophisticated mathematical and astronomical systems, both of which played an important role in their religious beliefs and practices.”

The Dresden Codex (named for the city where it is housed) is a fig bark paper manuscript in concertina style, produced around the beginning of the 13th century (a contentious point). The seventy four pages are sewn together producing an eleven foot document which was originally folded up between protective wooden covers bearing engraved jaguars. As the most complete of the few remaining Maya manuscripts, it is a comprehensive source for Maya calendar and astronomy systems and an aid to glyph interpretation in the wider iconography of the Maya culture.

“The Dresden Codex was written by eight different scribes using both sides. They all had their own particular writing style, glyphs and subject matter. [..] Its images were painted with extraordinary clarity using very fine brushes. The basic colors used from vegetable dyes for the codex were red, black and the so-called Mayan blue.”

(BibliOdyssey: The Oldest Book in America)

(Amazon: The Dresden Codex)