Justin Bieber attempts to walk through glass
And fails. If you missed the Biebians here‘s your last chance.
And fails. If you missed the Biebians here‘s your last chance.
Using animation, sounds warping and time shifts, this video runs forwards and backwards looking for forgotten details, mimicking the way memories are replayed in the mind.
LoopLoop is made from a sequence captured in a train going to Hanoi in Vietnam. I filmed the houses boarding the railroad. The 1000 images of this sequence have been stitched into one long panoramic image. Into this long still image, I integrated other moving elements and built smooth transitions over it.
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)
Painting courtesy of Rosco Kickingstone at Le Voyeur Cafe and Lounge in Olympia. Photo courtesy of Robert Whitlock. Irony courtesy of Arizona.
As seen in an Olympia, WA coffeehouse.
Update: Xeni Jardin points out, “Y’all know the origin of that, right? Yolanda Lopez’ iconic mid-90s poster art.
(via Seattle Weekly)
Freakin’ brilliant!
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Why God created Photoshop
Us lucky Angelenos. Not only do we get free kid’s concerts by our favorite psych rock legends but we also have The Corpse Flower ! If you’re in the area in early June you too can witness, with multiple senses, The Titan Arum or “Corpse Flower” in rare bloom.
Native to the equatorial rain forests of Sumatra, the Amorphophallus titanum, or Titan Arum, can reach more than 6 feet in height when it blooms, opening to a diameter of 3–4 feet. But the plant is perhaps most famous—or infamous—for its exceptionally foul odor. Hence the nickname, Corpse Flower. Contributing to the plant’s powerful fascination is the fact that blooms are extremely rare. To date, only about 50 flowerings have been recorded in the United States. The 1999 bloom at The Huntington was the first ever documented in California. In its natural environment, the “Corpse Flower” is pollinated by carrion beetles, sweat bees, and flesh flies. It attracts those insects by sending off a foul odor like rotting meat. The strong smell can travel long distances in the Titan Arum’s native tropical forests, ensuring that insects can pick up the scent in time to pollinate the flowers during their short bloom time.
The Huntington: It’s Back! “Corpse Flower 2010”
thx Juan Gomez!
“Less Taxation, More Stimulation.” Yeah… right. I found this by accident today, I swear it. And you can believe me when I tell you this, because the idea of seeing Sarah Palin (or someone who looks just like her) naked is not something I’d personally find very exciting. (In fact, I’m not sure I’d find a nude, ready, willing and waiting Sarah Palin sexually enticing even if I’d spent the previous two decades in a state penitentiary… Thankfully this is not a dilemma I am likely to face in this lifetime).
Two amusing things: One, they extended the invitation for Sarah Palin to be a celebrity judge, “although no response was received” (offer her $100k next time and she might show up) and two, the strip club where this event takes place in Chicago, the Admiral X Theater, is offering to donate the proceeds from selling their “We support the Tea Party” tee-shirts to the local chapter of Tea partiers. Will they accept these tainted funds? Let’s hope so!
Holy, WTF! I’m not sure what’s more disturbing about the above clip: the 23-year-old woman’s screams, or the tattoo artist’s lack of any response whatsoever? Oh, and the saga continues: here’s the Part II of sorts.
The current Arthur‘s running a lengthy piece entitled, “Out! Demons Out!: An Oral History of the 1967 Exorcism of the Pentagon and the Birth of Yippie!” Dangerous Minds hero Kenneth Anger is just one of the many voices chiming in (Allen Ginsberg, Paul Krassner, and Ed Sanders are others), but, judging from the snips below, the filmmaker’s bluntly amusing jabs might be hard to top. Here’s his take on what it was like infiltrating the Pentagon:
There were a bunch of idiots there. I didn’t consider myself an idiot, but maybe other people would. [laughs] There were these hothead lefties, who, their idea was they would take over and kill the capitalists. Well, that’s not very practical. Then there were Hare Krishnas, peacenik idiots, saying peace peace, or something like that. I didn’t go for anything like that. It was so annoying.
I just walked right in. I had studied how the Pentagon staff were dressed, and I was just like them. I wore a dark blue conservative suit. I even had a small American flag on my lapel. I was attacking Mars, the god of War. He’s still our ruling god. If you think Mars is an extinct thing from the antique past that we can just laugh at now, forget it. Mars is still here.
I had a map of the Pentagon. I went into every single men’s room and left—in a place where it was bound to be discovered, usually on the seat where anyone using that stall would have to see it, not on the floor, of course! —a talisman which was written on parchment paper, drawn in india ink. Each one was drawn individually using one of Crowley’s talismans as my guide. I’m sure no one in the Pentagon could figure out what this thing meant. There was nothing like “War is bad” on it. There weren’t even English words. They probably could figure out it was something occult. They know about those things, and they have a reference library.
I went from one men’s room to the next. I didn’t stop until I had scattered all 93 of my talismans—because 93 is a sacred number for Crowley. Then I walked out, it was all very inconspicuous. The security guard looked at me and gave me a nice look, like we’re all looking after each other. If I’d been stopped and put in handcuffs that would’ve been unpleasant. That isn’t the way I want to spend my time in Washington—I had a ticket to the opera for later that week.
Won’t you now take some time out for a Puce Moment?
How the below clip escaped inclusion in my previous post on the stupendously great British actor (and even greater talk show guest) Oliver Reed is UTTERLY beyond me! So, with Ned’s Atomic Dustbin (?!) as his backing band, here’s a relatively coherent Reed taking The Troggs standby, Wild Thing, out for a spin. Oh, and please watch to the end. The Reedster makes a hysterically inappropriate comment regarding his Women In Love costar Glenda Jackson.
The first of these delightful video clips of Brazilian jazz genius Hermeto Pascoal has been circulating wildly amongst music fans for a while now, and for good reason. It’s one of the most lovely and entertaining bits of musical performance you’re ever likely to see. The other clips are equally fun: Hermeto playing his beard (!) and various dental tools. What’s not to love about this guy? Not to mention his role on Miles Davis’ wicked Live-Evil LP. A true creative master !
John and I wrote She’s Leaving Home together. It was my inspiration. We’d seen a story in the newspaper about a young girl who’d left home and not been found, there were a lot of those at the time, and that was enough to give us a story line. So I started to get the lyrics: she slips out and leaves a note and then the parents wake up ... It was rather poignant. I like it as a song, and when I showed it to John, he added the long sustained notes, and one of the nice things about the structure of the song is that it stays on those chords endlessly. Before that period in our song-writing we would have changed chords but it stays on the C chord. It really holds you. It’s a really nice little trick and I think it worked very well.
While I was showing that to John, he was doing the Greek chorus, the parents’ view: ‘We gave her most of our lives, we gave her everything money could buy.’ I think that may have been in the runaway story, it might have been a quote from the parents. Then there’s the famous little line about a man from the motor trade; people have since said that was Terry Doran, who was a friend who worked in a car showroom, but it was just fiction, like the sea captain in “Yellow Submarine”, they weren’t real people.
The Daily Mirror story that inspired She’s Leaving Home was about Melanie Coe, then aged 17. Wild child Coe snuck out of her parents comfortable North London home in February of 1967. She was pregnant and afraid of what her mother might do, but had not run off with the father of her unborn child—or “a man from the motor trade,” for that matter—rather with a croupier she’d met. They shacked up for a week before her parents found her. She later had an abortion.
But here’s the weird part: three years earlier Coe had actually met Paul McCartney when he was the judge of a miming contest that Coe won on Ready, Steady, Go! Coe mimed to Brenda Lee’s Let’s Jump The Broomstick and Macca gave her the award. Winning the contest meant Coe would be a dancer on the show for an entire year.
(Portrait of Nan, New Mexico, 1984)
How to now make sense of that master of the dark tableau, Joel-Peter Witkin? Unlike some photographers whom I seem to have an ongoing fascination with (Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin to name a few), Witkin came along in the ‘80s, and I’ve hardly paid attention to him since. His images, though, continue to startle and provoke—as does the rigor with which he makes them.
With his relentless focus on freaks, deformity, and the ravages of the flesh, Witkin’s obsessions back then overlapped a bit with ‘80s David Lynch. In fact, you could easily plop the Eraserhead baby into a Witkin still-life.
My entirely spontaneous—and possibly reductive—theory as to why Witkin peaked in ‘80s? AIDS was peaking, too. The horror of what the body was capable of was, sadly, all too apparent everywhere. Witkin perhaps was simply channeling that dread.
The photographer’s own version of what sparked his obsessions is as fitting as it is notorious:
It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it—but before I could touch it someone carried me away.
To hear, and see, more of what makes photographer Joel-Peter Witkin tick (including an account of his initiation into sex with a pre-op transexual), check out the following segment from Vile Bodies, a ‘98 Channel 4 documentary made on the body and the “crisis of looking.” A link to Part II of Witkin’s segment follows at the bottom.
I just did a quick search and to my surprise, none of us has ever posted about the magnificent spacerock maelstrom that is the Hawkwind sound. One of rock’s longest running groups, Hawkwind has always stood outside of any particular era or fashion. With their statuesque dancer Stacia Blake, a pioneer of onstage nudity (who often appeared buck naked except for body paint) and lyrical contributions from Michael Moorcock, there was noting even remotely similar to what Hawkwind was doing onstage in the early ‘70s. It’s apropriate probably, to compare them to the Grateful Dead, an act that was more about the live experience than the albums.
A big influence on groups like the Psychedelic Furs, the driving sci-fi metal drone of Hawkwind would eventually give rise to one of the heaviest combos of all time, when bassist Lemmy Kilmister would leave the group—after being arrested for possession of speed—and form Motorhead. (Lemmy once told me personally that speed did what cocaine is supposed to do. So now you know!).
Below is a mind-twisting live performance clip, originally shown on Top of the Pops in 1972 of Hawkwind performing SIlver Machine with the lovely Stacia in tow.
