slo-mo brainwaves

Here are a couple of really beautiful trailers from ZF Films.

Brainwaves 2008:




darron barker . luis . jonathan mejia . ado ibrahim . carlos berrios:






You can see more of their work here.

zombie cucumber

Daturatron (1998) Fred Tomaselli
Leaves, Photocollage,Acrylic, Resin on Wood Panel

60 x 60 inches (153 x 153 cm)

country first?

I'm sure everyone is well aware of the recent comments by our ol' pal Rush Limbaugh regarding his hopes for the failure of our president. If not, have a gander at this:



Appalling, no?

I can only imagine that all of the leftover "Country First" signs and bumper stickers must be crumpled up and rotting next to all those pretty little outfits in those garbage bags at RNC headquarters because, if the revered Rush has stopped putting it first, I'm willing to bet there's a fair amount of Republican sheep not far behind. Yes, that means you too, Gingrey--those 15 minutes with a backbone must have been the scariest time of your life.

In 8 years of riding around on my bicycle with the homemade "FUGWB" sticker across my grocery-getter baskets, I never hoped that W would fail because by my logic, the failure of the president = the failure of the country. That's just me, though, I'm not a syndicated radio douche looking for ratings.

Anyway, if you'd like to let Limbaugh know how you feel, stop over to the DCCC and get in on the petition they've started.

(via Mudflats)

if we could only find a virgin . . .

Mount Redoubt Eruption April 21st 1990 (J Warren)

. . .

The Alaska Volcano Observatory is currently maintaining the threat level color code of Orange for a possble eruption on Mt Redoubt. You can keep an eye on things from the Redoubt Hut or from Cook Inlet webcams.

The folks at the AVO seem to think that an eruption is "possibly imminent, 'perhaps within hours to days'" which leaves us wondering about wind direction and ashfall.

According to shane over at animal god, my next trip up the hill to Fred Meyer is going to look something like this still from the upcoming (and, most likely, unfortunate) Hollywoodization of The Road:

instant voyeurism

Hand in the Swimming Pool by Phillipe

. . .

As if the internet didn't already provide enough fodder for us to kill time at work, someone had to go and create Polanoid, a website attempting to build "the biggest Polaroid-picture-collection of the planet to celebrate the magic of instant photography." If you've got an extra hour or two, take the jump, otherwise . . .

four cases of 16oz. schlitz malt liquor beer and 1 tube of ky jelly

WFMU's Beware of the Blog has a hilarious Diamond Dave/Runnin' With the Devil post that I couldn't help but to share. In it, they hook-up links to the infamous 53 page-long "No Brown M&M's" rider, Dave's isolated vocal track from RWTD which, in turn, spawned the David Lee Roth Runnin' With the Devil Soundboard (basically a bunch of MP3s of Dave's "Ah-ha's", "Oh, Yeahs" and "Goddamit BabyYou Know I Ain't Lyin' To Ya I'm Only Gonna Tell Ya One Time Yeeeeaahhhhs" that you can click on to highlight things such as cracking open a beer or swishing your cross-office shot into the waste paper basket or making it safely back to your apartment after scoring five bucks worth of grass in Washington Square Park, etc) and the beautiful and highly addictive Diamond Dave Edition Assteroidz. Enjoy.

dry humping red naughty monkey double-dare for $2,025 plus shipping

Anchorage's KTUU reports that a pair of red pumps supposedly worn by America's next President sold in an ebay auction last night for $2,025!!

Who the hell is the sucker that put up that kind of cash for a pair of pumps? I'm having images of the Wicked Witch of the West's feet curling up underneath the wreckage of a displaced Kansas home while Dorothy downloads photos of ruby reds on ebay for the auction.

Any guesses as to the winner? Is "winner" even the correct term to use here?

I can see Bill Kristol flicking his forked tongue in and out of the "peep-toe" hole as easily as i can see Meg Stapleton dry-humping them to sleep each night.

bringing in the ox (filipino style)

A Partial Eclipse Over Manila Bay Armando Lee (2009)

A killer photo of Monday's solar eclipse via APOD.

time to boycott Home De(s)pot

The Huffington Post has a pretty interesting/infuriating post (Bailout Recipients Hosted Call To Defeat Key Labor Bill) that includes excerpts from a conference call between, Bernie Marcus (asshole/co-founder of Home Despot), uber-asshole Rick Berman (a fella I just learned about here via his son, writer/Silver Jew DCB), and various other asshole-types from the likes of AIG & BoA regarding the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) and their shared hatred for it. Take the jump for the article and the audio.


And if, as they say, we're turning into France, can we christen the guillotines with the blood of these heads first?

fer fuck's sake, when will it end?

As we can see from the above image, Palin’s true vision is to turn Alaska into a giant hole in our nation.

gumption in limbo

Tom Cora with The Ex

I came into Tom Cora via the excellent Scrabbling at the Lock the first of 2 waxed collaborations he did with The Ex. His raw and aggressive cello playing is a fine match for the Dutch punkers and prompted me to search out other works by him. In addition to working w/ The Ex, Cora brought cello to the honky-tonks with Eugene Chadbourne, played home-made instruments w/ his feet while bowing alongside Fred Frith in Skeleton Crew, worked on The Hat Shoe's quirky Differently Desperate (also featuring This Heat's Charles Hayward) and was a fixture in the downtown NY improv scene to name just a few.

Well I came across this killer vhs recording of Tom playing solo in Italy:

Tom Cora - The Passing - Live in La Spezia (Italy) 1993

and this excerpt of Skeleton Crew playing an old Turkish song (note that these guys are playing the percussion with their feet):

Skeleton Crew - Dere Geliyor Dere - Paris 1983

and was inspired to share this, the opening track from Scrabbling at the Lock:

State of Shock -- The Ex & Tom Cora

also and too

Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm slipping into pretty well-tread territory here if I hop on the Palin-bashing blogpost wagon so I'll spare you another tirade against my fine state's halfwit of a guv and point you over to Wonkette for this hilarious piece by Sara K Smith (it's really a piece about Kristol that digresses into the seemingly inevitable Palin). It should also be noted that I borrowed the same image they borrowed.

Strange Maine

This is quiet possibly my favorite cover ever:

Big Blood- Vitamin C (Can)
from Sew Your Wild Days Volume 1

For the uninitiated, Big Blood is Caleb Mulkerin & Colleen Kinsella (also of Fire on Fire and Cerberus Shoal). Not only were they part of 2 of my favorite releases last year (Fire on Fire's EP and full length The Orchard) but they have been putting out some pretty stellar CDR's over the last few years under the moniker Big Blood.

In addition to the great sounds they produce, the CDR's come beautifully packaged in Kinsella's artwork:

The runs are very limited so, unless you're a Mainer, you'd be hard pressed to gets your hands on most of the releases but Northeast Indie has copies of the highly recommended The Grove.

Here's an original:
In the Shade from The Grove


And here's a 2007 interview over at Foxy Digitalis.

Merrill's bane: John Thain

I usually try to stay away from endorsing violence but if you see this man on the street, please, punch him really, really hard in the face:

Can we bring back the tar and feather? The ol' riding out on a rail?

What kind of person can spend $1,400 on a trash can while cutting the jobs that thousands of people depend on to pay the mortgage or to put food on their reasonably priced tables?

Certainly not a humane one.

Certainly not a man with any shred of empathy or compassion.

Definitely one that deserves to be punched really, really hard in the face. Really hard.

wherever i go, there i am (in a bike lane)

a cool concept (especially if they can run it off a tire driven generator) but it must look a little funky when you swerve around glass or hop a pothole. and what's with the fella on the bike in this photo, anyway? shouldn't he be rocking some reflectors on that thing?

Text from the photo:

"A close brush with a distracted driver is enough to intimidate the most avid bikers from riding at night. The problem isn’t just about visibility, as safety lights are effective at capturing the attention of a driver. However, these lights are typically constrained to the bike frame, which highlights only a fraction of the bike’s envelope. Bike lanes have proven to be an effective method of protecting cyclists on congested roads. One key is that the lane establishes a well defined boundary beyond the envelope of the bicycle, providing a greater margin of safety between the car and the cyclist. Yet, only a small fraction of streets have dedicated bike lanes, and with an installation cost of $5,000 to $50,000 per mile, we shouldn’t expect to find them everywhere anytime soon. Instead of adapting cycling to established bike lanes, the bike lane should adapt to the cyclists. This is the idea behind the LightLane. Our system projects a crisply defined virtual bike lane onto pavement, using a laser, providing the driver with a familiar boundary to avoid. With a wider margin of safety, bikers will regain their confidence to ride at night, making the bike a more viable commuting alternative."

(via Dustbowl)

piercing the sublime

Philip Taaffe, Red Caliph, (2002).

"I was going to see movies in the afternoon and then I'd come home and I'd try to work at night. I had a small room, and on one wall I mounted drawing paper, and using paint sticks and a little cassette tape recorder I'd start to work myself into a frenzy, describing a part of the film that I had seen. When I started to induce this activity I was making lines on the paper, and as the lines suggested certain pictorial memories, I began to speak into the microphone. Then I'd throw another piece of paper over the paint-stick and start another one. I did this for a couple of months—not every night, because it was a very intense activity. After a while I noticed that as I was murmuring into the microphone and making these lines and describing what I was trying to get at in the painting, the words would fall away and the gestures and images would take over..."

Philip Taaffe (2002)

plastic bags

a consistent frustration for me at my local grocer is the automatic bagging of items that i could easily carry without the aid of a plastic bag. while i am fumbling for my cash or entering my pin number, the cashier will, without fail and without asking, place my item(s) in a bag. doesn't matter if it's a loaf of bread, a twelve pack of beer or a single 12oz bottle of juice it's automatic--so much so that they do it even when i request otherwise. if i catch them early enough, they can remove it from the bag before they pull it from the bag holder. if they've already pulled the bag, i just bite my tongue and take it because on more than one occasion, i've witnessed a cashier take my goods out and then throw the bag away. my guess is that it is just too difficult to place items in a plastic bag once said bag is removed it's holder/opener.

well, it happened to me again this morning. this time with a bagel that was already inside the small bag i put it in at the bakery section and after i asked for no bag prior to the transaction. there's just no winning i suppose.

anyway, i left the store with the below images by Chris Jordan flashing through my mind. i'm not sure when exactly i stumbled across Jordan's work but it has definitely left a lasting impression. it's one thing to read that, say, americans use 60,000 plastics bags every 5 seconds but it's another thing to see what 60,000 plastic bags looks like while you count to five.

maybe we all need to have a look at this stuff:

Plastic Bags (2007)
Chris Jordan

partial zoom:

detail at actual size:

from jordan's website:

"Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibililties of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming."

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008

mosey on over to his site and have a look at some of the other images. you won't soon forget them (plus, the pictures are bigger).

when the dog barks, bark back

if you find yourself in anchorage on saturday 24 january, come check out orion (the loud one from stubby's crack co. and the spenard satans old timey clubhouse band) as he opens for stuck in reverse (cd release) at mcginley's pub . 9pm. no cover.


check out one of Orion's tunes:
Life On Earth Ain't All It's Cracked Up To Be -- Orion Donicht

i'll find you and i'll kill you

i've somehow managed to not see/hear this man's work until about 15 minutes ago when i happened upon this video. this is impressive:

Chad VanGaalen -- Molten Light

clare rojas & beautiful losers

just recently got hip to the excellent work of Clare Rojas. her art is a beautiful amalgam of the geometry of quilting, pennsylvania dutch hex signs and invented mythical creatures and is yet another good reason to track down Beautiful Losers (see trailer below). in addition to the dope images, Rojas also makes some pretty great music under the guise of Peggy Honeywell.

untitled (2005) Clare Rojas

Beautiful Losers film trailer from beautifullosersfilm on Vimeo.

RIP Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)

Jack Be Nimble (1976)

. . .

"People only make you swerve. I won’t show anybody anything I’m working on. If they hate it, it’s a bad thing, and if they like it, it’s a bad thing. An artist has to be ingrown to be any good." Andrew Wyeth

6 months of sky over bristol

Suspension Bridge Solargraph by Justin Quinnell

"The six month long exposure compresses the time from December 17, 2007 to June 21, 2008 into a single point of view. Dubbed a solargraph, the remarkable image was recorded with a simple pinhole camera made from a drink can lined with a piece of photographic paper." (via APOD)

long live blind joe death!

at long last, a john fahey documentary:


and while we're on the subject of fahey, this is probably the dopest footage i've seen of the man.