Pinhole camera on turntable
Here’s a really cool image captured by a small pinhole camera on the top of a turntable. This beautiful photo was shot by photographer Tim Franco. I really dig it.
(via Mister Honk )
Here’s a really cool image captured by a small pinhole camera on the top of a turntable. This beautiful photo was shot by photographer Tim Franco. I really dig it.
(via Mister Honk )
What a brilliant antidote to the current highly lame trend of attempted personalised music selection software (Pandora,etc). This Brian Whitman fellow has got it right (even though he’s admittedly part of the problem, ha!). These services are only going to point you in the direction of some major label hackery you’d never notice on your own, anyways. Nothing will ever beat word of mouth and the recommendations of friends and relatives with excellent taste. Let the deletions begin !
I have a strong aversion to music recommenders and music similarity services. I especially deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance as the company I co-founded makes a lot of $$$$$ (that is 5 dollar signs) selling ordered lists of artists to multinational music streaming conglomerates.
Nonetheless, we recently completed our first live recommender system (to be announced near the Boston Music Hack day in October) and to perhaps get myself more comfortable with a future in which children will no longer ask their cooler older dope-smoking brothers what to listen to in lieu of some HTML table in a UL, I decided to really sign up wholesale to this movement. If we rely on these computer programs to learn about music, well we might as well rely on them to fix the sins of our past and delete the crap we are obviously not meant to listen to anymore.
“Future of Music (2010)” is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin. Just like other recommender systems, it uses a lot of fancy math (and data from Echo Nest and last.fm) that really doesn’t matter in the end. Just click the button and let it take care of your life. I want it to also delete scrobbles and spotify playlists that feature the artists. Maybe it should read your email too and tell you who you shouldn’t talk to anymore, i could use that
Absolutely gorgeous high definition video of The Honeycombs doing their Joe Meek produced hit “Have I The Right.” Honey Lantree on drums. Nuff said.
Previously on Dangerous Minds: The Incredibly Strange Life Of Rock and Roll Alchemist Joe Meek.
Stefan Nadelman’s Terminal Bar is a document of the infamous New York City dive located across the street from the Port Authority bus terminal near Times Square. Stefan’s father, Sheldon, was a bartender at the Terminal from 1972 to 1982 and took thousands of photographs of the drunks, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes that hung out at what was considered to be the roughest bar in NYC.
Sheldon also photographed the bartenders, bouncers and porters that worked the joint. I can’t imagine a tougher gig. I used to poke my head into the Terminal back in the late 70s. Its notoriety drew artists and punks and the curious. But, it wasn’t welcoming to slumming hipsters or bush league Bukowskis. It was an enclosed society with it’s own brutal code, not easily cracked by the voyeuristic aesthete.
Stefan recalls what it was like to live among the images of the Terminal:
Our house [was] basically my father’s gallery, I grew up looking at these faces of the Terminal Bar. My father would also paint on the matte around the photos to further make his point. He used a lot of wordplay…like GRAPE/RAPE/APE (the effects of wine). Each picture had its lesson or story and I think they subconsciously warned me of the ramifications of heavy drinking. Looking back, I can see how odd it may have seemed to have your house’s walls filled with 16x20’s of drunken strangers.
Terminal Bar is a stunning achievement, an evocation of a period in New York City’s history when the streets were wild with life and filled with the stench of garbage, booze, sex and death. The city is cleaner now, domesticated, safe, but lacking that certain soulfulness that is at the heart of Sheldon Nadelman’s dark and deeply human photographs.
Here’s the trailer and a clip from Terminal Bar. The entire 23 minute film is available on DVD here. Stefan is working on new video vignettes using his father’s photographs and I’m looking forward to future installments.
More of The Terminal after the jump…
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Chewbacca hairdid
The ultimate silent ‘Star Wars’
Sarah Brightman & Hot Gossip: I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper
Japanese ‘Star Wars’ Sea Chicken Commercial (1978)
70s French Disco Dance-Off Between Darth Vader And C-3PO
A-Team Intro vs. Star Wars
Darth Vader moonlights as symphony conductor
Star Wars vs. The Mighty Boosh
Star Wars: The Environmentalists Version
Robotic French Space Disco inspired by Star Wars (1977)
21-87: How Arthur Lipsett Influenced George Lucas’s Career
C-3PO Catches R2D2 Smoking
The director in a scene from Nice Bombs…
Chicago-based Iraqi director Usama Alshaibi seems to be one of the most prolific Arab filmmakers in the American independent film scene—and he’s almost certainly the most experimental. Working often in close collaboration with his wife Kristie, Alshaibi has jump-started the canon of what we might term transgressive Arab-American film.
In his over 50 short films, Alshaibi has updated the techniques of transgressors like William Burroughs and Kenneth Anger to transmit his obsessions with culture-clash, technology, religion, violence, sexuality and identity. He’s finished four features, two of which deal with porn and STDs, one with cross-cultural relationships and another with the personal reality of post-Saddam Iraq. He has three in production or post-production now, two of which—American Arab and Baghdad, Iowa—portray growing up Arab in the heartland in the in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and today, and the third, Profane, about a Muslim dominatrix in spiritual crisis.
As the news media shamelessly reduces the complex relationship between America and its Arab and Muslim communities into a dopey controversy over where to build a friggin’ cultural center or mosque, we need the perspective and imagination of Alshaibi’s work now more than ever.
Like most hard-working indie filmmakers, Alshaibi can always use financial help making his vision manifest. Click to donate to help him finish Profane or American Arab.
After the jump, check out a clip from American Arab…
Anthony Newley’s misbegotten take on The Beatles’ “Within You Without You” is so stunningly bad it has a certain hideous allure. It’s from the 1977 TV special The Beatles Forever, which featured Newley, Tony Randall, Ray Charles, Bernadette Peters, Paul Williams, among others, eviscerating Beatles classics. It doesn’t get much worse than this…and that’s why I dig it.
The Youtube description of the video is almost as amusing as the clip itself:
Movietone News footage of Sunbury 1974 (the end of the 60s) with Mr Newley’s epoch defining reading of George Harrison’s exotic toe-tapper from the Beatles Pop Art album Sgt Peppers. Newley is magnificent as always.
Tony Randall introduces the song.
In 1969 Apple Records released Maybe Tomorrow by The Iveys, a band that was poised to be the next big thing.
Although the album was scheduled to be released worldwide, the release in the U.S. and the U.K. at that time was halted without explanation. Many reasons for halting the album have been suggested by the band and Apple employees, but the most common theory in that Apple’s newly-hired president, Allen Klein, stopped all non-Beatle releases on Apple until he could examine the company’s finances, which were in disarray at the time.
Dismayed by the failure of their first album to get a proper release and the general consensus among band members that the name The Iveys was a bit too twee, the group changed their name to Badfinger and later re-released most of the songs from Maybe Tomorrow on Badfinger’s Magic Christian Music.
The song “Maybe Tomorrow” is a decent little pop tune. “Tube Train” is a standout raver with a distinct Who vibe. A lost gem.
Maybe Tomorrow was released on CD in 2004 but has gone out of print. It’s available at a price here.
“Tube Train” after the jump…
Welsh born Paul Bradley Couling (Mal Ryder) never made it as a rocker in Britain, but with his band The Primitives he became a superstar in Italy during the sixties.
I took part in four international Sanremo festivals, and all the top Italian TV shows, photo’s on the covers of all top magazines, scandals in the papers of my supposedly flirts, there were paparazzi everywhere, my private life was non-existent, my shows, full houses, and I was getting mobbed everywhere I went. I drove fast sports cars, well, you name it I did it !!!!! I was doing so well in Italy by this time, that it was pointless going back to England, as I had nothing going for me there, and I was making one hit after another in Italy, at first with The Primitives cover versions of a Young Rascals song called ‘I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore’ in Italian ‘Yeeeah’. Success was growing every day, so much so that every song got in the charts, most to N° 1. and selling a million copies, like my version of the Bee Gees song ‘I’ve Got A Message To You’, in Italian ‘Pensiero d’amore’, after which I made a musical film, one of four I made in my career as an actor.”
Mal’s stardom would remain an Italian phenomenon. Try as he might, success in Britain eluded him.
At one stage I tried to make it back in England, with a record, using part of my real name Paul Bradley for the Baby Records. We recorded it in London’s PYE Studio. All songs where in English. This LP came out in 1980 called Silhouette from which was taken some singles which got into the charts in Italy and in many other countries, (but not England.)!!!”
“Yeeah” is so good I’ve included two versions in the following montage, which also includes a raunchy cover of The Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin”, with Ryder sounding like his Welsh brethren Tom Jones, and “Pensiero d’amore”. The first 100 seconds of this video is among my favorite rock moments of all time - Mal emoting like a motherfucker while a stoic Italian audience responds with bemused indifference.
Super stella!
Noted fashion photographer Terry (“Call me Uncle Terry”) Richardson is a man well-known for his special brand of zaniness. Terry, you see, likes to bring the fun.
Seen here, in a video promoting his new book from Tashen, Richardson lets his id hang all the way out as he performs an acapella version of a punk song he wrote with the apparent title, “Child Molester’s Coming For You.” If it gets to be too much, you can stop watching at any time. Might not be appropriate for children susceptible to nightmares.
Via Jezebel
Two years after the Summer Of Love, Andy Williams drops acid and organizes a be-in on his network TV show.
I experienced the things that most people did when taking psychedelic drugs – the intensely heightened senses, the beauty of colours and sounds, the contrasting phases of feeling. One moment, I would feel like I was a lord of the cosmos, the next I would be focused on a microscopic detail – a coloured thread fluttering in the breeze, or specks of dust hanging in the air.”
In this clip from Andy’s NBC variety series, which aired in March of 1969, Donovan and his parade of flower children create some Aquarian vibes and the audience is swept along on a contact high.
40 years later, Andy’s warm relationship with Rush Limbaugh and comments about Obama suggest he might be be due for another consciousness raising session.
“Obama is following Marxist theory. He’s taken over the banks and the car industry. He wants the country to fail.”
Andy, we love you. Come back. Grooviness awaits.
Compendium of often amusing Doctor Who bloopers snipped from Great TV Mistakes. Narrated by Robert Webb of Peep Show fame.
Via Blogtor Who
Strange, but true, in the early 80s, Frank Zappa joined showbiz celebs like Nipsey Russell, Scatman Crothers, Erik Estrada, Henny Youngman, and One Day at a Time mom, Bonnie Franklin, to record radio PSAs for the American Dental Association. The spots admonished kids to brush, floss and go for regular dental check-ups. Here are three of them: “Dental Floss Tycoon,” “Trick Or Treat” and “Keep Your Teeth.”
Thank you Wilson Smith!
