We’re SO stoked for Zo today! After a year in aesthetic stasis, her personal website, Biorequiem, has finally relaunched with a gorgeous new look. Our favorite cosmonomad is a busy bee; she barely has time to initiate her patented Zobogrammatronicambient energy battery recharge system, let alone find a spare moment to whip up sexy new design and code, so she enlisted Nubby Twiglet (our awesome Coilhouse Indie Ad Grid designer) and Star St. Germain to help her. And now the proud mama crows “here it is – hussied up, blushing and ready to be sent out center stage with a brisk slap on the ass.” Huzzah.
You’ll find all sorts of goodies at Biorequiem 5.0. Art! Photography! Illustration! Memoirs! Bewbz! Chihuahuas! Anthropomorphic cybercows! Go get some.
My voice has a quiver.
A quiver is where you keep arrows until you shoot them.
–Jim Carroll, “The Child Within”
Punk rock poet and memoirist Jim Carroll, best know for The Basketball Diaries and his band’s morbid 1982 hit single “People Who Died” just died of a heart attack in his Manhattan home on September 11th.
He was a prolific talent who led a fascinating life, and a true NYC iconoclast. The body of work he leaves behind is a bristling brew of passion and nihilism, low-balling humor and highbrow intelligence.
You gotta admit, sixty full years of life yielding an illustrious career in writing and music ain’t a bad inning for a scrappy juvenile delinquent who got hooked on heroin at 13. I’m glad he made it. Rest in peace, Catholic Boy.
I witnessed a bit of the “Voice of Gollum” contest while visiting friends at Weta’s Comic Con booth last summer. Imagine trying to work in the middle of this madness! No idea how anyone managed to keep a straight face. Vote for your favorite Gollum impersonator here. It’s a tough call, but my money’s on Piotr:
Have I mentioned lately that Archive.org is the sh…
…aving cream? It really is. You could stand to spend more time over there, trust me.
Avid listeners of Dr. Demento will recognize this song by Benny Bell. I’m too young to boast that I listened to Dr. D back in the day, when he first brought about the Jewish-American singer/songwriter’s revival. However, I was lucky enough to live down the block from one Mister Goodman, a charming alcoholic widower with a portable record player. On balmy late summer afternoons, he’d sit on his front porch nursing a tall glass of “ice water” and playing old LPs. Naturally, Benny Bell’s relentlessly juvenile double-entendres were a huge hit with the neighborhood kids.
Mr Goodman was more than happy to play us classic Bell ditties like “Without Pants”, “A Goose For My Girl” and “My Grandfather Had a Long One” over and over again, provided we promised never to sing them in front of our parents. We were more than happy to hang out on his lawn for hours, sipping cans of 7-UP and shouting “SSSSSHHHHHAVING CREAM” at appropriate (and inappropriate) intervals until Mr. Goodman fell too far into his cups and started muttering darkly about Korea. At which time we’d all claim we heard our mothers calling and head home for dinner.
Don’t let anybody steer you different; Andrew B’s x planesTumblr is straight-up anachro-airship porn. Andrew has been posting scores of “weird and wonderful aircraft pictures and stories found both on the web, and in print” over there for the better part of a year now. You can get lost in the archives for days:
Some more choice excerpts from x planes after the jump, but seriously, if you have a few minutes (or a few hours) to spare, just get over there and explore. Motherload.
Headed by Sam Easterson, the Museum of Animal Perspectives project involves the placement of tiny cameras atop various animals –everything from scorpions to frogs to lambs to wolves– and documenting short snippets of them going about their daily lives:
Be warned: it’s highly addictive fare.* You might very well lose hours watching footage of crocodiles blowing bubbles and moles scurrying through the earth. Here’s hoping there will soon be giraffes, platypuses and dolphins added to the mix!
*Speaking of addictive cam footage, remember Strange Days? The flannel-and-fanny-pack-sporting, mini disc-pimping, PJ Harvey song-ganking cyberpunk Neuromancer knockoff starring Angela Bassett and Ralph Fiennes? A humble request: can someone with more spare time and editing prowess puh-lease take this film preview and splice it together with various clips from the MAP archives? Comedy gold.
I have a grudging chanteuse crush on Kate Miller-Heidke:
Classically trained up the wazoo, this dainty blonde Aussie with golden pipes grew up and turned her back on the opera house in favor of becoming a pop star. It’s a bit difficult to explain why I like her so much. While her lyrics are sharp and hilarious, and I adore her voice, it’s impossible for me to actually sit through most of her songs. That slick, cloying, Dawson’s Creeky, top 40 adult contemporarybubblebathproduction treatment never fails to give me the green apple quickstep. Her website is arguably a ripoff of The Dresden Dolls‘. So far, she’s not doing anything Kate or Tori or Alison or Cyndi or Dolly hasn’t done better, or with more authenticity. But there’s a wit, warmth and mischief about her in her less affected moments that makes me sit up and take notice, and this morning, her Facebook piss-take “Are You Fucking Kidding Me?” has me laughing out loud.
I’d jump to watch her performing solo in some small, out-of-the-way piano bar.
The footage we’re watching aims to raise funds and support for The Tunnel, a documentary film project that could potentially solve one of America’s most notorious mysteries. Behind the wall in question may lie an overturned (but otherwise perfectly preserved) locomotive from the early 1800’s, as well as missing pages from the diary of John Wilkes Booth, naming all of the conspirators involved in Lincoln’s death. No one can know for sure unless The Tunnel’s production team is able to convince state and local officials to let them excavate, with the tape rolling. (No easy task, that.)
“At the heart of The Tunnel is a story that delves into mysteries, engineering feats, murders, and cover-ups. Some of the stories are completely true, some of them merely urban legends yet to be proven. Interviews with experts and modern day explorers will offer insight into the tantalizing traces of facts and fiction. There is no shortage of secret societies, bootleggers, pirates, mobsters, ghosts, and even Nazis in the Tunnel’s rich past and this story will shine new light on all the heinous details. One thing is certain – the tunnel is as much a physical place and place in history, as it is a doorway into a labyrinth of discovery.”
Tiny little hairs standing up on the back of your neck? Me too. Think it all sounds too juicy to be true? Maybe. Maybe not. Aren’t you dying to find out for certain? Put the word out. This is a film project worth supporting.*
The 2012 crackpots won’t shut up about Schumman Resonance and the earth’s racing heartbeat and how time is literally accelerating toward a zero point, at which time we will all apparently be escorted by luminous karmic god warriors from the 5th Dimension into a blissful, egoless Eternal Now paradise. (Weeee!) While the skeptic in me has trouble stifling her giggles, I have to admit something… I can’t help but feel like time really IS speeding up when I watch footage like this:
(This is another one of those times where turning off the sound and picking your own soundtrack may prove less monotonous.)
Wiki describes martial arts tricking as “a relatively new underground alternative sport movement, combining martial arts, gymnastics, breakdancing and other activities to create an aesthetic blend of flips, kicks, and twists.” There are no formal rules, no official regulations, no limitations whatsoever beyond those placed on a fit human body by gravity and centrifugal force. To a battered old gimp like me, it just looks impossibly fast and light. Some of these kids seem superhuman.
It’s not like I’m about to bust out a Mayan calendar or anything, but yeah. Is the human race –if not the planet itself– speeding up at an ever-accelerating rate? Food for thought while we sip our morning joe, grunt and crack our stiff necks, and hunker down in front of our computers for another physically strenuous day of farting around on the web.
