Saturday Imagery.

-  KanyeWesAnderson Tumblr takes Wes Anderson movies and superimposes Kanye West lyrics over the stills.  It works… surprisingly well:

-  Also from THIS thread at WhiteChapel… this movie description:

-  It never ends… wow:  Portraits of American Mass-Consumption:

-Sonny

Three FREE Full-Lengths.

-  Really insightful post from my guy PEESHE (over in Australia) about using the MPC for live shows.   Specifically the MPC2000XL.   Number 5 is something I always try to remind myself of.  This is where he blogs now, mostly.  What an excellent collective site.  Dang.  Beautiful design.

-  And speaking of collectives, the new Minneapolis/St. Paul collective F.I.X. (“F to the I to the X”) is giving away three free albums in one nifty package until their debut collective show Friday the 17th: No Bird Sing’s “Theft of Commons”, Kill The Vultures’ “Ecce Beast”, and Kristoff Krane’s “Hunting For Father”.  The last I’ve spoke of on here before.  Probably multiple times.  It’s an awesome album.  The other two are as well.  And hey, the shit is FREE.  Here’s the Bandcamp stream:

-  Hey, independent comics retailers/press… wanna know a good way to not sell your shit?  By ripping on any of Warren Ellis’ friends in the public net-square.  This includes blogs, Facebook, in this case Twitter.  His wrath will be swift and severe.  And I’m betting his site gets more views than yours.  Not to mention that is just being an asshole.  Saying that shit on Twitter.

-  Very interesting interview about the global impact of Underground bookstores.

The social, cultural, and political turbulence chronicled by such off-radar newspapers as Rat Subterranean News, Screw, San Francisco Oracle, East Village Other, Black Mask, and Los Angeles Free Press, to name only a few, is commonly overlooked in mainstream histories. As a result, what often remains is the same scattershot of familiar imagery from the late 1960s/early 1970s that’s lingered in the nation’s collective memory: hippies dancing with flowers in their hair at the Monterey Pop Festival during the Summer of Love; Timothy Leary at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in 1967, urging the Haight-Ashbury crowds to “Turn on, tune in, drop out”; U.S. military tanks on city streets during the race riots in Detroit and Newark; the rise of the Hell’s Angels as the new American outlaws; and the Kent State University shootings and Mary Ann Vecchio’s haunting scream.

-Sonny

Glass Half Empty.

-  ARTIST OF THE DAY: Roxie Vizcarra.  That will take you to her official site, she also has a blog (though she hasn’t updated since April; probably because she’s incredibly busy for being a BOSS artist).  Roxie’s art is mildly surrealistic, but her figures always seem to be anatomically spot-on.  Just check out some of her NSFW pieces.  Her use of color is great, it hearkens back to pop art a little, though her designs and compositions are much more sophisticated than that would lead on.  One word I would use for her stuff is energy.  All her art has this wicked sense of energy flowing through it.  Here’s one from her site called “Adulthood”:

-  New poster for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master”:

-  The story about the comments sections getting closed on Rotten Tomatoes “Dark Knight Rises” page has more to it than it seems.  Initially I had read that ardent fans of Nolan’s Bat-films had been so disgustingly brutal — some going so far as to offer death threats — to ANYONE who didn’t like the film, that the Admins shut down commenting.  That is true.  But there was/is a twist: film critic Eric Snider (who’s had his share of controversy before), put up a review saying this…

“The Dark Knight Rises is easily the most disappointing Batman film so far – and I’m including Schumacher’s Batman & Robin in that statement.”

Not a big deal, right?  Snider, with the power he had been granted by RT, uploaded this mini-review and when clicked, it would bring viewers directly to his site.  To up his traffic count.  Also — what’s worse — he hadn’t even seen the film yet when he posted that.  He was trolling.  For hits on his site.  Ugh.

Why does everyone get so fucking weird about these movies?  I don’t get it.  I wrote extensively about the hubub surrounding The Dark Knight upon release back in July of 2008, I may have to do that again soonish.  There are lots of cultural ticks at play with things like this.  If you’re a fan, why the hell do you care if people don’t like the movie?  I would love it if everyone didn’t like this movie… the theaters would be way less crowded.  And annoying.

-  To cope with the genocide and war and terror of the Congo, some citizens are turning to art.  Specifically, making socially conscious hip-hop music.  It makes sense, it requires the least money to manufacture.  It has always been a voice and/or outlet for the oppressed.

“Rap music provided escape and inspiration. The young men listened to it on the local radio and when the Institute’s internet connection was working, they watched videos on YouTube of American and French rap groups. Many of the youth she met were in rap groups themselves. They had organized a concert with cash prizes for winners, around $100; a large sum in a country where the average monthly salary for a teacher is around $50. The two-day event took place at the Kaoze Community Center in the village of Rutshuru, Nord Kivu.

The shows, which took place during the day due to security concerns, were full of the euphoria of youth anywhere. Using pre-recorded tracks, they sang and danced until sunset, when the Community Center was cleared.”

-Sonny

Late Halloween.

-  Jim Rossignol sent Warren Ellis notes from his upcoming book for Warren’s “Guest Informant” series on his website.  What followed is a clever, thoughtful analysis of one thing that constantly brings us together as human beings: escapism.  If this is how Rossignol writes notes (notes??) for one of his books, then I can’t imagine how dense his analysis/content is when finished.  Strongly recommended reading.

“Could there be a connection between what motivates us see a movie or play Tetris on a train, and the what caused evolution of humans from wandering tribes to civilised city-dwellers? Could the impulse that drove our ancestors to create shelter from the raw materials of the world around them be the same impulse that causes you to want to read a novel or follow a TV series? I think there is a connection, and it is found in an under-identified human fundamental: escapism.“

It is Halloween…

-  And just in time, The Guardian has got a neat little quiz of scary opening lines from horror novel.  Yes, I realize I’m late.

-  New Dustmotes album is free, and the shit.  Highly suggest checking it out.  This guy is for real.

Second release from the producer and sound designer Paul Crocker (a.k.a. dustmotes) for Dusted Wax Kingdom.
“None For The Crow” EP is a magical ambient, lo-fi, abstract hip-hop sound-therapy medicine, boosting the spiritual energy and turning the state of mind in a lovely hypnotic reverie.

-Sonny

Aaron Jasinski Paintings and Tunes.

Aaron Jasinski is an artist (and sometimes musician) based out of Seattle, WA.  His paintings are surreal, dense, kinetic, and drippy.  His work is sometimes emotional (as in the one he did after 9/11); and sometimes pop-cultural (can you say Excite Bike?).  And his music is really, really cool.

Here’s a painting I really dig utilizing what I imagine sound waves to look like:

Go and see him.

Go and hear him.

-Sonny

Nuclear Black Moths.

-  I’m just learning of the band Black Moth Super Rainbow and boy have I been missing out.  They do this crazy psychedelic, spaced-out pop stuff that is catchy and experimental at the same time.  The singer is almost always hooked up to a vocoder, which I can take or leave I suppose, but it actually fits very well into the backing landscapes. The band recently played a show here, at a place called The Turf Club in something called “Frogtown” (or… “Midtown”), which apparently was a massive success.

Here’s their official site.

- One thing that was lost in the 10 year anniversary of 9/11 is the fact that Kabul is still massive mess of a war-zone.  Indeed, the entire country of Afghanistan is.

-  “The head of the National Transitional Council in Libya is promising the creation of a modern democratic state based on ‘moderate Islam’.”

-  The city of Tomioka, Japan is a virtual ghost town months after the nuclear accident at Fukushima.

That’s the problem (one of the many) with how we consume our media today, we forget about things only weeks after they happened unless they’re affecting us directly.  I suppose that might happen without our system of consumption anyways, but it is very hard to think about how Japan is doing in the September world of global news.

-Sonny

 

SGIs Haunt the Future.

-  In this, the New Age of Revolution, a supercomputer in a lab at the University of Illinois is predicting world events.  Hundreds of millions of articles are inputed to the seven-foot tall machine (covered in a coat of fine metals — clean and sophisticated)… Sentiment mining then follows, “mood detection”… Locations are tracked… And through an inter-connected web of over 100 trillion complex relationships a picture of the world is born, what’s happening now and what will happen in the future.  The computer, a Nautilus SGI, predicted (to some degree) the revolution of Egypt and also helped narrow down the location of Osama Bin Laden.  Kalev Leetaru, the operator of the device, says: “I liken it to weather forecasting. It’s never perfect, but we do better than random guessing.“

Egypt and Libya are both in a panic.  Who, or what, is next?

-  Check out these photos from the “Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2011″ on BBC.  Excellent slide show, well worth 6 minutes of your life.

-  Warren Ellis is featuring guest writers (“Guest Informants”) on his site right now.  They are all very, very interesting but this one from Richard J. Lockley-Hobson of the Hauntological Society is absolutely fascinating.  This is from Lockley-Hobson’s site:

“To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration” Derrida, Specters of Marx, pg.202

-Sonny

Julian Callos Prints.

SuperPunch informed me this morning of an artist named Julian Callos.  He does clean, surreal stuff that is (according to him) influenced by “comics, cartoons, and pop culture“.  He seems to have had most of his exhibitions at Gallery 1988; a Los Angeles gallery that I know I’ve seen on around the net (particularly on SuperPunch) quite a bit.  Here’s a few examples of his stuff:

(“What Develops”; prints on sale starting at $20 HERE)

(“Death, or a Murder of Crows”; again, prints on sale starting at $20 HERE)

(“Quiver II”; prints starting at $20 on sale HERE)

And this is Julian Callos’ Official Site.

Here is his Blogspot Site.

-Sonny

MIA Shop; Ancient Tapes.

Apologies.  I’ve been hard at work recording my next album.  The basement’s a mess right now.  A quarter stack is sitting between the love-seat and the coffee table.  The coffee table which I’ve converted into my little workstation.  So I want to work hard and get through this.  It’s coming along very well though.

-  Jackie Onassis apparently believed that Lyndon Johnson conspired to kill her husband all those years ago in Dallas, TX.  This is to be revealed in a set of secret tapes she recorded back in the 60′s, which will be released by ABC.  She had asked, in the tapes, for them not to be released until 50 years after her death, for fear of reprisals on her family.  Daughter of Jackie O/JFK, Caroline Kennedy, has decided to release the tapes.  Will we ever know what happened that day?  For real?

-  The WeLoveFine Shop! now has Star Wars apparel and most of it is awesome.

-  Topless Robot has a list of “6 Ancient Things That Were Probably Built By Aliens“.  Among them are the Trilithon at Baalbek, Pumapunka in Bolivia, and the Great Pyramids of Giza.  But none are more strange or convincing than the flat mountain of Nazca. No debris or signs of natural erosion on this scale have been found around the site, and it looks as if the mountain has been sheered off.  There’s also straight lines carved into the rock, the same kind found just miles away in the same region (some stretch for 15 miles and stay perfectly straight).  There’s also large rocks and boulders piled around the mountain, not at random; the patterns represent Phoenician writing (which began in 1050 BC, across the Atlantic in the Middle-East).  Here’s the photo:

-Sonny

Virtual Record Rooms.

Been playing around with Turntable.fm lately, a neat little idea that might turn into something big (or, like many things that deserve so much more, fall by the wayside).  I suppose one would probably categorize under one these “social media” sites of sort.  Users sign up, create an avatar of a character, then join “rooms” with rotating sets of DJs (5 maximum) to simply listen to the music they play.  That, or you make a room and DJ yourself.  Right now I’m “standing” in front of a stage of 5 DJs who are playing Electronica for me… umm, or us.  Someone called “Propaghandi” just played a Electro’ed out Zelda theme song, which I enjoyed quite a bit.  When you do enjoy something, you say so by clicking, and you’re avatar nods his/her head to the tune.  You can also express dislike of a song.  DJs earn “points” based on this system which allows them a few — albeit borderline meaningless — site perks.

It’s a decent idea.  It is, at the very least, something to throw on the computer for a variety of radio-free tunes while doing other things.

Which is what I’m doing now.

(One gripe: when hosting a site specifically designed for music listening, DO NOT have an annoying beep sound every time someone enters text in the chat box.  Seems a bit counter-productive.)

(OK, maybe two: I’m finding it hard to believe any of these people who have lots of “DJ Points” can actually do anything with a real set of turntables.)

-Sonny