Okay, so it’s not Mordor, it’s Chile’s erupting Chaitén volcano, which is blowing its stack after 9,000 of just chillin’ out all dormant like. The heat and the ash and the SOULS OF DEAD THETANS have created these amazingly beautiful photos, taken for National Geographic. (However, I found more photos at this site, something about NG’s interface is booty.) The morning after: not-so scenic.
Month: May 2008
She comes in colours everywhere
The new, completely crazy Play-doh bunny ad for Sony Bravia. (Thanks, Jon!). I searched about and found the ad with the making-of at the end of it, because you *know* you’re gonna want to see this. Seems like a lot of money spent for something meant to sell televisions, but on the other hand, who would fund this if it was “just” a short film? The bunnies are very cute. I especially like the yellow one waiting to cross the road.
Video of a sad, unaware person projecting his self-loathing
When he’s not pleasuring himself with a vibrator during non-consensual phone sex with a workmate, Faux News Propaganda Channel windbag Bill O’Reilly does things like this.
This is awesome…how long before the mashups/remixes?
UPDATE: Someone’s knickers are in a bunch. The original YouTube got taken down. I’ve replaced it with one from Break.com. Also try here. I may even have the original Flash file kickin’ around…but no need for that yet.
UPDATE: Well, that took all of 12 hours. It’s the Fuck It! Remix of Bill O! by Revolucian. Word.
UPDATE 05.14.08!: Stephen Colbert exposes the video to the television audience–how’s that feel CBS?–and then parodies it. Brilliant.
UPDATE 05.14.08 PART DEUX: The Fuck It! Remix video.
UPDATE 05.16.08: CollegeHumor.com has a behind the scenes look at the producer of Bill O’s show. This too is brilliant.
Tintin in Thailand
Tintin in Thailand is a 1999 era bootleg comic–and a labor of love–that parodies the globe-trotting antics of Herge’s boy reporter as he and the usual cast of characters explore the sleazy side of Bangkok. My memories of traveling in Thailand are tied up in the bootleg Tintin t-shirts I saw for sale everywhere, so this seems quite appropriate. The parody did not sit well with the Belgian authorities or the Herge Foundation.
A police unit which specialises in investigating counterfeiting mounted an elaborate sting operation in which officers posed as potential buyers and chatted with smugglers in the town of Tournai, near the French border, before revealing their true identities.
Two men were arrested, and a third from Antwerp, after they confessed to having produced around 1,000 copies of the unauthorised tome in Thailand for resale in Belgium.
Thanks to the Bravojuju blog, you can now download a copy and see what all the fuss was about.
My Dead Morning Jacket
I don’t really know where to start getting my head around this one.
One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened.
And furthermore:
Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…That thing was never alive before it was grown.”
I also heard that the coat, all cramped up in its incubator, started shrieking “WHY? WHY??? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE KILL ME!!!” Okay, that’s not true, but if it was, wouldn’t that be cool? I’d wear that.
Surely this will make us question preconceived ideas about science, life, art, fashion, laboratories, pleather (That’s enough – Ed.)
Continuing…the Endtroducing…
We’re gonna continue on an Endtroducing tip with a few links.
An after-school percussion group at Minnetonka High School, Minneapolis, play two tracks from Endtroducing, over on this page, circa 2005. Word. The drummer even keeps in the weird drum edits. Big version of file here. Hot damn. Sounds like Steve Reich.
Eliot Wilder wrote a whole book about the album.
There’s also this very long review of Entroducing over at PopMatters by Tim O’Neil.
Endtroducing… was a field report from the frontlines of a brave new world, a world which has now become slightly less strange but no less visceral. It would have been hard to rank it above similarly important albums by artists like Orbital, the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, New Order and Kraftwerk, but while each of those artists have produced albums which are perhaps the equal of Endtroducing…, there’s not a one of them I could in good conscience put squarely above it.
Building a Classic with a Batch of Samples
DJ Shadow’s 1996 Endtroducing… is a masterpiece of sound collage and turntable skills and still sounds incredible 12 years later. The sheer number of samples place this album up there with the Beastie Boys “Paul’s Boutique” and Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet”. And now blog Goons Dancing Under Full Moons has compiled all the samples into one large 250mb file for educational purposes.
This was a monster. When I saw the sample list I almost gave up before I started. These samples took me to the bowels of the internet and on the way I think I learned enough German and Portuguese to talk my ass out of a fight. If I tried to remember and list all of the different blogs and forums that helped me in my search my brain would bail out my ears. So here goes nothing and everything. 70 mthrfckng samples.
Interesting artists on the list: Metallica, Tangerine Dream, Meredith Monk, Roger Waters, Alan Parsons Project. Who knew?
Prince, Radiohead, the Oneness
“WOOOOOOOO!!!! EPIC!!!!!”
So says the man who shot this audience video of Prince covering “Creep” at Coachella two weeks ago. I just heard about it over the weekend, and then all the YouTube versions were down, but then I found this.
I like how the Purple One changes the lyrics to suit his needs. I couldn’t imagine him singing “I’m a loser” or “I wish I was special,” and he didn’t. Shoop-shooooo!
John Fogerty at the Bowl
Being an arts writer means going to concerts that you’d never really pay for, but have nothing against. So a chance to see John Fogerty was duly taken. After all, Fogerty’s string of hits with CCR from 1968-1972 is pretty formidable. So, it was a good time to see him in concert, still with that same voice. My mom–yes, my plus-one free ticket–was gobsmacked at the opportunity to go too.
Review coming soon…
Update: A setlist, as found on Fogerty’s own site.
Born On The Bayou
Bad Moon Rising
Green River
Longshot
Who’ll Stop The Rain
Lookin’ Out My Backdoor
Cotton Fields
My Toot Toot
Ramble Tamble
Midnight Special
Susie Q
Don’t You Wish It Was True
Southern Streamline
Broken Down Cowboy
Keep On Chooglin’
Creedence Song
Have You Ever Seen The Rain
Blue Ridge Mountain Blues
Almost Saturday Night
Down On The Corner w/Shane & Tyler Fogerty
Good Golly Miss Molly
Old Man Down The Road
Fortunate Son
Up Around The Bend
Proud Mary
THIS ARE SERIOUS THREAD
Not one, but FIVE! FIVE!!!! cats that look like Wilford Brimley.
By way of BoingBoing