Look at this astonishing music video from a Japanese breakbeat duo called Hifana. It explodes.
Author Archives: Editor
Gojin Ishihara’s Freak Art for Kids
Pink Tentacle has an amazing collection of freakishly bizarre Japanese children’s book illustrations by Gojin Ishihara from the 1970s. His marvelously comforting work features various humans being eaten, strangled, decapitated, tortured and generally threatened by every sort of demonic beast possible to imagine.
Well worth your time.
Film: Electro-Magnetic Flight And You!
A fantastic low-budget retro science fiction military training film for our brave UFO-fighting squads! Electro-Magnetic Flight And You! was made by Angus Lyne in 2006.
Film Noir: The Big Combo
A great old film noir from 1955 starring Cornel Wilde. The Big Combo, directed by Joseph H. Lewis is about a tormented detective, Leonard Diamond, who becomes obsessed with taking down a nasty gangster called Mr. Brown. There’s a woman stuck in the middle and Diamond wants to save her.
The film is loaded with superb noir imagery and maintains a good level of tension all the way through. There are also lots of choice tough-guy lines.
Kenneth Anger Makes a New Film for Missoni Fashion House
The great American filmmaker, Kenneth Anger, has made a new film called Missoni. He shot it for the Italian fashion house Missoni as part of their Fall 2010 advertising campaign. The film includes members of the Missoni family engaged in dance-like movement and poses. Can advertising be art? Yes, when it’s done by an artist.
Anger has made another beautiful and mysteriously layered film. Apparently, he has gone digital, using something called a RED digital camera. It has some characteristics in common with 35mm cameras. Anger appears to be using it as freely as he used 16mm cameras.
What’s really interesting about this whole project is its reason for existing. I think the Missoni advertising angle is just an excuse. I think they just wanted to be in a film by Kenneth Anger.
Gallery of Pinhole Camera Photos
Here’s a gallery of photographs made by pinhole cameras. This image is by Noriko Ohba.
Making a pinhole camera is pretty simple. In some cases you can simply take the lens off of a camera and replace it with some tape that has a hole in it. Here are some instructions.
Via Submitterator
Film: The 1910 Challenge
As the 2010 Tour de France bike race winds its way through the French Pyrenees mountains, cyclists and fans everywhere are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first time a stage of the race went up the Pyrenees. The range is rugged and steep, presenting the riders with a greater challenge than the more gradual ascents of the Alps. In 1910, riders first hazarded the devastating climbs. Now, bike clothing manufacturer Rapha has produced this beautiful film about four riders celebrating the Tour’s Pyrenees anniversary by riding up a mountain called the Col du Tourmalet. That’s the mountain that the current Tour de France race is on at the moment. These four riders pay their respects to the 1910 racers and their equipment by enjoying every hardship presented to them by the mountain and the wet weather.
I do a lot of mountain road riding in California and I can appreciate the difficulty of this incredible Col du Tourmalet climb. I’d love to do it myself. Equipping yourself with water, food and repair items to set out over remote slopes is a very focused and exciting thing to do. I recommend it to anyone.
Animation: How To Feed The World
The real problem with feeding the world properly is the production of meat. Meat is a very destructive product because it is a huge polluter and uses land inefficiently. Denis van Waerebeke made this instructive short film about world hunger.
Animation: Table For 2
A nice little love couple enjoying a simple meal together with plenty of food and knives and forks to throw. A messy relationship. Strong table required. Israeli filmmaker Dafna Axel made this as her graduation project film.
I Write Like David Foster Wallace
Apparently, I write like somebody named David Foster Wallace. I know… it’s weird. Who would have thought? Who is David Foster Wallace? I think he’s kind of high literary serious-minded and wild sort of college professor type stuff. I should just do a Wikipedia on him, but I don’t really want to know who this person is that I supposedly write like. Below, you can see my official badge that proves the Wallace connection:
I write like
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
I got my writing-like-David-Foster-Wallace badge from I Write Like. It could not have been easier. I simply pasted several of my very opinionated and slightly acidic blog posts into the I Write Like form and then pressed the button. Each time, this David Foster Wallace guy popped up. One blog post that I dribbled out because I had nothing of interest to say on that day came up as Dan Brown. No surprise there because Dan Brown is so numbingly uninteresting that his brain should be transplanted into the body of Tom Hanks where it would dwell very contentedly for some time I would suppose.
I Write Like is really loads of fun. I could paste entries into it all day long and feel that I had spent my time well. That’s what I’m doing today. For the entire rest of the day I’m going to sit here dropping my blog posts into this machine to find out if maybe I really am David Foster Wallace. I may even start to make stuff up just for this writing machine and eventually maybe I’ll see my own name pop up: I write like…
Film: Outer Space
Marc Campbell posted this 1999 film called Outer Space by Australian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherassky. Using found footage from something featuring actress Barbara Hershey, Tscherassky creates a jumping and jittering psychotic version of a haunted house movie. The simplest of shots showing a woman entering a house, sitting down, looking into a mirror, looking out a window, are turned into extravagant, multi-layered cubist visions from a nightmare.
Picture Book by Terry Bisson and Rudy Rucker
Billy’s Picture Book by Terry Bisson, a collection of jarringly twisted short stories for adult children, has a set of illustrations by Rudy Rucker. The stories follow one precocious Billy through the harrowing and sickening ordeal of being a kid. If your kid has a mind that is easily warped or disturbed or if your kid is just plain crazy, don’t read these stories to them! But if your kid has a casual interest in murder and mayhem, well this might be just the book for the little monster.
The book is available as a free e-book and as a paperback for purchase.
Comics Author Harvey Pekar Has Passed Away
American comics genius Harvey Pekar has passed away at the age of 70. I think Pekar was the greatest writer of comics because he treated the form as literature – for real – not like most of the dimwits writing ‘graphic novels.’ Pekar was serious and nervous and funny and angry, with very little separation between. His observations of everyday life run a full range from fixing a flat tire in a snow storm to surviving cancer to trying to find a file folder at work. He looked at his life and wrote it all down for his comic books.
His comic books appeared in a series called American Splendor.
Do Books Work as Memory Theater?
Open Letters Monthly has an article called In Defense of the Memory Theater, by Nathan Schneider in which he argues that books on shelves perform the function of reflecting memories back at us. They are a constant reminder of the various events, stages, and emotional states of our lives. We look at our shelves and can instantly catapult ourselves back in time to events surrounding our reading of various volumes.
Schneider mentions a 16th-century memory theater that used images and symbols of the cosmos to inspire observers and enhance their intellectual powers. Books, for Schneider, do something similar when they are visible on our shelves. I agree up to a point. I am often taken back in time by my own books upon their shelves. But so am I transported by nearly every object in my home. Objects all have this power. Books are not exceptional in this regard.