This Drawdio kit can be yours for $17.50 at Adafruit Industries. Creator, Jay Silver talks about Drawdio:

Imagine you could draw musical instruments on normal paper with any pencil (cheap circuit thumb-tacked on) and then play them with your finger. The Drawdio circuit-craft lets you MacGuyver your everyday objects into musical instruments: paintbrushes, macaroni, trees, grandpa, even the kitchen sink…

One day I bought a “harmonium” kit at the street market in Bangalore. I hacksawed the keyboard off to make the first ever Drawdio circuit. We played with it at a local school in the slums using plants, water, our foreheads, etc. My friend told me graphite would work too. Meditating on it, I realized the Drawdio circuit should be literally attached to a pencil to “draw audio,” and that’s where the name came from: Draw + Audio.

Drawdio

I like this this! Pulp Book is collaboration between supermodel Joni Harbeck and photographer Neil Krug. The book will feature 200 pulp inspired images. Neil Krug explains his book:

Pulp is an upcoming photo book of psychedelic images made to look like old school paperback covers. The book features supermodel Joni Harbeck exclusively as the heroine in a world of fabricated dramas. Everything in the book has been photographed with expired polaroid film to put across the mood of looking at a beautifully beat to hell dusty LP cover.

Putting this book together has been my favorite project to date. The book reflects our love for artists such as Robert McGinnis, Tanino Liberatore, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and a slew of others. Their work is a major influence for this project.

Pulp by Neil Krug

Mini Interview: Neil Krug

The death last month of Hugh Hopper saw me pulling out my Soft Machine CDs and giving them a listen again. I go through a Soft Machine phase every couple of years and Hopper’s passing was a good excuse for another. It was also an excuse for me to pull “Out-Bloody-Rageous,” Graham Bennett’s exhaustive Soft Machine’s bio off the shelf again, too. It will forever be the definitive book on the band.

Eccentric pioneers, first of psychedelia, then prog rock, then of jazz-rock fusion, the innovative avant-garde onslaught of the Soft Machine was probably best encountered as a live experience.The odd time signatures and sheer complexity of the music would have been almost stressful to play. This musical tension was probably personally wearing as the band went through 24 different line-ups in its long career.

Sadly, I never had a chance to see the Soft Machine play live, it was before my time, but I have had a chance to see Gong and Kevin Ayers and both shows were delightful experiences. Here’s a particularly hot performance of the Soft Machine performing “Ester’s Nose Job” from French TV circa 1970:

CAT LADIES is a one hour verit?ɬ

Tiny Tim sings and dances to his mutant psychedelia “The Other Side” with an audience of little girls.  I wonder what the kids were thinking?

Here’s a website dedicated to the art of “Asian posing.” The creator of the site, Steve, claims to suffer from a condition known as the Cute Asian Girls Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (CAGOCD). Steve says:

Simply smiling in a photo is so boring, why not strike a pose? Asians are notorious for their quirky and cute poses and this site focuses on documenting these poses. To help you recognize various poses, visual aids will be provided courtesy of popular Korean, Japanese, and Chinese models. The site?

Jesper Kirkeby Brevik created this wonderful film as contribution to a class assignment at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.  Jesper Kirkeby Brevik describes his project:

I have chosen to base my film on a classical orchestrated piece because of the unique sound and personality that comes with each acoustic instrument. I wish to extract these qualities and transfer them into the different colours in my film, and thus give them personality. Looking at it the other way around I will also affect the instruments personality by choosing the colour to represent it and conducting that colours movement on the screen. I will naturally choose bright colours for instruments such as flute or violin, while cello or contrabass will be represented by black. The reason why I?

From one of our most astute (and hilarious) political observers (and a personal hero). I can’t believe I missed this when it was posted, but I hardly think it matters as it’s still entirely relevant today:

Other countries prefer a healthy workforce and are willing to pay for it. Here we stick our workforce with fat, greedy insurance companies who serve no purpose but to act as a tollbooth or a gatekeeper and charge exorbitant fees before a person can even see a doctor. The result, of course, is the most expensive healthcare system with the least benefit for the buck of any in the industrialized world. You say the big insurance companies “should have a place at the table.” Aren’t these companies the problem?

Other counties want their workforce to be as well-educated as possible to better care for themselves and compete in the global economy. So they are willing to pay to make sure this happens, instead of kicking them in the face with back-breaking student loans and cutting school funding to the bone.

Other countries want their children to grow up well-nourished and loved instead of dysfunctional. They are happy to pay welfare for single parents to stay home with their little ones, and for 12-18 months maternity leave with 80-90% pay for either parent to make sure no child is left behind.

Traveling overseas it is not hard to notice that many European countries, and not just Scandinavia, have a higher standard of living than we do, and the gap is widening. The reason is they are willing to pay for it.

OPEN LETTER TO BARACK OBAMA from Jello Biafra

New research shows babies have a handle on the meaning of different dog barks ?

This really happened!

“It was fantastic to be thinking that we were in there making up a piece of music, while the astronauts were standing on the moon. It doesn’t seem conceivable that that would happen on the BBC nowadays.” —David Gilmour of Pink Floyd

No shit! This is amazing!

My moon-landing jam session by David Gilmour

Thank you Chris Campion!

For the smart people at Criterion, summers of late usually mean Godard, and today fills in some gaps in the Jean-Luc oeuvre with the simultaneous release of Made In U.S.A., and 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her.  Like my personal Godardian favorite, La Chinoise (also made in ‘67),  2 Or 3 Things is another (I know, some of you are sighing, yet another) Critique of Consumer Culture.   But, unlike Chinoise, where Godard seems to waver between scorn and sympathy for the revolutionaries and their urge to rip things up and start from scratch, 2 Or 3 seems to make no bones about the absolute futility of such exercises to begin with.  Consumer culture, in short, is inescapable.  That being said, the film is a treat to behold, with typically gorgeous cinematography from Raoul Coutard (for his famous “swirling espresso,” see below).  Whether you appreciate mid-era Godard or not (and Romanian new wave aside), the days of directors pairing “film” with “consumerist critique,” seems very far away to me now.  The days of even talking about it seem farther.

Square America has a series of vintage photos, all taken by amateur photographers, documenting Christianity in America. Square America says:

A slideshow of about 60 photographs documenting Christianity in America. Expect holy rollers, crazy preachers, and ordinary folks gathered at the river to wash their sins away.

Square America “In God’s Country”

I probably should have blogged about Torchwood: Children of Earth yesterday, when it started its five consecutive nights run, but BBC America (and the newly launched BBC America HD channel) is airing the previous night’s show before the new episode starts each night (and there are plenty of other ways to catch up obviously).

For those of you who agreed with me about how much I hated the new Harry Potter movie, believe me again when I tell you that the new Torchwood season three mini-series is one of the finest, most action-packed, unpredictable, FREAKY and most deeply moving sci-fi tales I’ve ever seen. Totally raises the bar for the genre in so many, many ways.

Torchwood: Children of Earth boasts one of the most intelligent and sophisticated long form scripts in the history of the genre. I don’t want to give anything away to American viewers who still have four shows left to go, but my god when you find out what the aliens really want with the kids, WHOA, it is fucking dark! The lead actors John Barrowman, Eve Myles and Gareth David-Lloyd are terrific and guest star Peter Capaldi proves once again that he’s one of Britain’s finest acting talents. It’s truly a milestone.

It’s also a new high water mark for the already illustrious career of creator, lead writer and executive producer Russell T. Davies (“Queer as Folk,” “Doctor Who”) who had this to say about his multi-layered tale: ?

Pagan lord of Britain Julian Cope’s new double album Black Sheep is his best, and most vitriolic, effort since 1992’s Jehovahkill. If shamanic screeds against religious fanatics, the G20 and modern man are your idea of a party, this is the one. Check out this outstanding track from the album, Black Sheep’s Song.

The album demands serious listening. If you throw it on casually in the background, it’ll sound like crap. I was underwhelmed by it the first few times until I sat down with it on headphones and actually listened to every word he was saying. It’s an incendiary classic and a perfect statement of protest?

Bobby Conn isn’t just a genius. He’s a midwestern genius. His albums (like “The Homeland,” with the Glass Gypsies) are some of the best protest music that came out of the Bush years, and he’s still going strong. The man is a one-man culture destroyer that apparently they’ve never let out of the gate because he’s too dangerous. They keep him penned up in Chicago somewhere and I, for one, believe the man is criminally overlooked and that they should let him loose.

He is, however, apparently famous enough to make this list of bands that can make your children gay. It’s actually a great checklist. Apparently Morton Subotnick makes you gay, too!