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.
The three hairs on the tip of a kitteh’s tail are Teh Debbil’s hairs, driving cats to prowl the night when all Lard-fearing beasts should be abed. And while all of The Lard’s blessed wee lambs lie asleep and dreaming of teh baby Jebus, underworldly Seitanic dreck like THIS is holding a Sabutt in the depth of the night, dontcha know. Such unholiness is presided over by The Debbil Himself in the form of a Grand Black Kitteh. Filth! Unclean!
*and apparently, so is After Effects.
Once the host of witches and sorcerers swoop in on salve-anointed broomsticks, the infernal rituals begin. The coven pays homage to their enthroned Debbil Kitteh, making offerings to him of unbaptized children and reading particularly noxious passages from Teh Hairy Pooter seriez. Each minion of Seitan must renew an oath of fidelity and obedience, shuffling past the felonious feline in single file to kiss his dingleberry-ensconced bunghole (some witches claim that he keeps a second face under his tail that looks like THIS). They then celebrate Teh Black Mess, lighting black candles from a flickering torch balanced atop D0OM KITT3h’s head, and turning their backs to the altar. The Sabutt feast commences. The flesh of hanged men, hearts of unbaptized children, Twizzlers, and a variety of unclean animals (like THESE) are then consumed.**
**Text reiterated vaguely from SnikSnak‘s entry on Cat Devilry.
(This post brought to you by muscle relaxants and the finest pipe-weed in all the Shire. Meow meow meow meow…)
HOLY SHIT. I just discovered the website Everything Is Terrible (which should really be called Bad Touch Central, or Kill It With Fire). JACKPOT. I kind of feel like a kid who’s just come downstairs on Christmas morning and discovered grandma giving Santa a hummer a living room filled to the brim with goodies.
Be warned: at about 1:45, this clip gets downright demonic.
After discovering stuff like RE/SEARCH, those Incredibly Strange Music comps, zine culture, and wandering the specialty video store booths at the (then much smaller, homegrown) San Diego Comic Convention, I realized there were entire fringe communities of weirdos compelled to do exactly the same thing! I was so excited! We were all trading these grainy, janky 4th generation bootlegs of our favorite oddball material. Pre internet, those communities were more localized. One the internet kicked in, it went global. Of course, now we have YouTube [and better yet, Vimeo]…
…and Everything Is Terrible –bless their black, festering hearts– has a channel chock full o’ madness. These are only a few of the more soul-rending clips they’ve culled from the etherstatic for our pleasure. If you’ve got an hour (or several) to kill (as violently and memorably as possible), you should probably head on over there. Or, if you quailed upon viewing these clips, click here instead.
More Everything Is Terrible curated gems after the jump.
EDIT 1 2009/08/04 1:50pm: Oh no! YouTube just suspended EIT’s account. “[You] won’t be able to watch most of our videos until we find a new home for them. We’re working hard to rebuild, but it’s going to take a little while. Sit down, breathe into a paper bag, and try to relax. We will keep you updated. Don’t worry, we will continue to post new videos.”
Jimi Hendrix performs “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York, 1969. You can hear the bombs, screams and ear-splitting jetfire of Vietnam in that guitar.
At first, I just figured I’d take a minute to mark the occasion of this country’s birth with the above clip of Hendrix’s string/mind/soul-bending rendition of the U.S. National Anthem. It’s been almost exactly 40 years since the footage was shot at Woodstock, during late summer, in the astoundingly eventful year of 1969.
Then I got to thinking a bit more about 1969. Egads, what a dense historical American nerve cluster! Over the course of those twelve months, one seriously heavy, snaking cultural current swept humanity in some exhilarating and alarming directions. Countless aspects of life as we now know it were irrevocably changed, and it all happened overnight.
In a piece written recently for USA Today, cultural anthropologist Jeremy Wallach called 1969 “the apotheosis and decline of the counterculture” and Rob Kirkpatrick, author of 1969: The Year Everything Changedsaid: “I don’t think it’s even debatable. There’s an America before ’69, and an America after ’69.”
To give me and mah feller ‘Merkins something to chew on today besides corn on the cob, here’s a list of just a few of the country’s more momentous occurrences, circa 1969:
The whole world watched, breathless, as the lunar module Eagle landed and Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the Moon. Dr. Denton Cooley successfully implanted the first temporary artificial heart in Texas. Four months after Woodstock, the infamously violent, miserable Altamont Free Concert was held at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, ostensibly bringing an end to the idealistic sixties. In NYC, the Stonewall riots kicked off the modern gay rights movement in the U.S. Members of the Manson Family cult committed the Tate/LaBianca murders, horrifying Los Angeles and goading a prurient media circus. The first message was sent over ARPANET between UCLA and Stanford. L. Ron Hubbard had his organization’s name officially changed to The Church of Scientology, and they started litigating. Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography and the Thoth Tarot Deck were both republished, and Kenneth Anger shot his lesser known –but deeply resonant– film Invocation of My Demon Brother. Barred from reentering the states to hold their planned New York City “Bed-In”, John Lennon and Yoko Ono relocated the event to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Quebec, where they recorded “Give Peace a Chance”. Everybody got nekkid in the Broadway muscial production, Hair…
Ah, the iPhone, near ubiquitous accessory of the hipster elite and tech obsessed, it seems to be everywhere. When I first arrived at the Catacombs I expected to see the vile object somewhere in its vast warrens, and prepared myself to deal with people intently glazing the surfaces of tiny screens with their filthy finger oils, not bothering to make eye contact. I was not to be disappointed. In fact, one of the first sights to greet me upon my arrival was that of Miss Ebb. She was in an alcove off the main hall. The entryway had no door, but in its stead a yellowed and moldy sheet was hung. This was pulled to the side and I could see Zo sprawled upon a filthy mattress; a soiled nightgown, which at one time may have been white but had long ago darkened to a grimy beige, clinging to her emaciated frame. Her loyal servant girl, Jing Hua, knelt in stoic silence at her side, tending an enormous, ornately carved opium pipe. The odor coming from that alcove smelled of the drug and sweat and urine, all combining into a faint but unmistakable scent, like death.
Zo was gazing languidly at her phone’s screen and it was several seconds before she noticed me. Slowly raising her head she looked at me through half-closed eyes and from her chapped and crusted lips she said, “I’m in Paris. I told everyone on Twitter that I was, so it must be true,” before her head lolled back and she let loose a loping, dizzy giggle. She stopped suddenly, as if she had forgotten what she had found so funny, and let the phone slip from her fingers. She then rolled on her side and Jing Hua, obviously aware of her mistress’s subtle signals, placed the pipe in her mouth, letting her inhale deeply. I turned as she exhaled a massive plume of thick smoke and continued on down the hall, the sounds of a dry, spastic cough echoing behind me, having gotten the distinct impression that this particular conversation was over.
As I walked I thought that there had to be something to Apple’s gadget, if even a spaced-out dope fiend could navigate its surface competently while in the midst of chasing the dragon. It was interesting to note, then, The New Yorker — that bastion of culture and obtuse cartoons — touting that the cover for this week’s magazine was digitally crafted by artist Jorge Colombo using Brushes, and recorded with Brushes Viewer so that we can all see how absolutely mind blowing and future-fabulous it is.
All sarcasm aside, I actually wish they could have filmed his fingers as he painted it. I can’t help but think that my own, clumsy digits would allow for lines too fat and globular for even The New Yorker’s Impressionist leanings.
Charley Bowers ain’t even half as widely known as Ray Harryhausen, Georges Méliès, Winsor McCay, Buster Keaton, Jan Švankmajer, Ladislaw Starewicz or Willis O’Brien, but damn it, he should be! WACK-A-DOODLE-DOOOO:
It’s a Bird, featuring Charley Bowers and a scrapyard metal-eating, proto-Seussian “Metal Bird.” Directed by Harold L. Muller. (Thanks to longtime Coilhouse friend Mark P. for the heads up on this one!)
Once championed by the likes of Andre Breton, quite possibly an early inspiration to the likes of Theodor Seuss Geisel and Chuck Jones, this gonzo animator and comedian had fallen into obscurity by the time of his death in the mid 40s. Bowers’ work didn’t resurface until decades later, when a French film archivist sleuthed him out. Via mediascreen.com:
Raymond Borde of the Toulouse Cinemateque began the search after discovering a collection of rusty canisters simply labeled “Bricolo.” After discovering that Bricolo was the name given to an American comic named Charley Bowers, Borde began to scour the world archives for Bowers films. As usually the case in film preservation, Bowers films were located throughout the world in the archives of France, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia and only one film found in Bowers’ own native country of the United States. Eleven of Bowers’s twenty shorts are still considered lost films.
Bowers’s original claim to fame was as the animator and producer of hundreds of “Mutt and Jeff” animated films from 1915 until the early twenties. In the mid-20s, Bowers switched from pure animation to a hybrid mixture of live action and animation… comedy shorts starring himself as an obsessive inventor of gadgets, gizmos, contraptions, and crazy machines. Bowers continued with these shorts until after his first talkie short — “It’s a Bird” from 1930 (much admired by surrealists like Andre Breton). After “It’s a Bird,” Bowers dropped off the map, heading to New Jersey, working in advertising and industrial shorts, and drawing cartoons for local New Jersey newspapers. He reemerged in the late thirties as the animator for a short subject about oil for the New York World’s Fair (the film was also the first film produced by Joseph Losey). But after a few other animations in the early forties, Bowers contracted a debilitating illness and died in obscurity in 1946.
Fairly recently, Image Entertainment produced a lavish two-disc collection The Complete Charley Bowers: The Rediscovery of An American Comic Genius, which includes nearly all of his surviving films. They’re a frisky mixture of live-action slapstick, stop motion, uncanny SFX, talking cockroaches, Rube Goldberg shenanigans, and more.
In Now You Tell One, possibly Bower’s most over-the-top and mind-boggling film, a “gentlemen’s Liar’s Club” known as The Citizens United Against Ambiguity gathers for a storytelling contest. Wonky stop-motion animated cats and mice battle for dominance; bizarre botanical grafts yield impossible fruits; elephants and donkeys appear to stampede the Capitol building.
In Bowers’ world, a maternal Model T Ford hatches dozens of baby cars; a rapacious ostrich gobbles up inorganic matter and dances to a phonograph; a mad inventor labors to invent the world’s first “no-slip banana peel”; a sentient, white-gloved robotic creature runs amuck in what one reviewer refers to as an extraordinary “comical-bizarro poetic representation of the industrial age.”
The man’s talents as an actor/comedian may not have been on par with his idols Keaton and Chaplin, but his imagination certainly was. This is gloriously demented stuff deserving of far more cinematic acclaim.
Go ahead. Read it. Just don’t send me your psychiatric bills.
-from the Analog review of Antibodies
Welcome back, dear Coilhaüsers, to All Tomorrows. This time we’re going a bit outside of our usual Deviant Era range to take a deep, long (yeah, you’ll never forgive me) look at David J. Skal’s 1988 novel Antibodies. A little later than the usual works, yes, but if anything gets captures the guts of Deviant Era’s transgressive glories, it’s this pitch-black wallow on the wrong side of Transhumanism.
Skal, mostly a horror historian, wrote only a handful of science fiction novels, and this was the last. It’s not hard to see why. Antibodies is a horror tale in future clothing: a detailed examination of how nasty it gets when humans try to permanently scrap flesh for metal, and how easily believing plebs are still led to the slaughter by their puppet-masters.
I’ve recommended a lot of disturbing books in this column and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon, but I will warn you right now: Antibodies is not for everyone. It is a deeply disturbing, brutally unsparing book. The anonymous reviewer from Analog wasn’t fucking around. This is a tale with no mercy and no illusions. You’ve been warned.
Left: Weta’s design. Right: Vessey swimming with a fully functional prosthetic tail. (Photo by Steve Unwin.)
As if we didn’t already have a bounty of reasons to love Weta Workshop, this just in via the Dominion Post in New Zealand:
Nadya Vessey lost her legs as a child but now she swims like a mermaid.
Ms Vessey’s mermaid tail was created by Wellington-based film industry wizards Weta Workshop after the Auckland woman wrote to them two years ago asking if they could make her a prosthetic tail. She was astounded when they agreed.
She lost both legs below the knee from a medical condition when she was a child and told Close Up last night her long-held dream had come true… [Read more]
Some mornings are much easier to wake up to than others, eh? Other Coilhouse posts of possible interest:
Writer, speaker and techno-progressive guru Jamais Cascio is one of the most inspiring people I know. Guess what his day job is? Basically, it’s Trying To Save The World. (I mean, I doubt that’s on his business card, or how he introduces himself at dinner parties, but it’d be a pretty accurate title.)
“Pessimism is a luxury in good times… In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence.” –Evelin Linder (as quoted by Jamais Cascio during his 2006 talk at the TED conference)
On any given day, Jamais keeps busy wrangling with a wide variety of ideas that may help keep our “hellbound handbasket” from going down in flames. He speaks and writes frequently on the use of future studies as a tool for anticipating, combating or averting all manner of crises, be they related to environmental change, exponential technological growth, natural and man-made catastrophes, or global development. We’re talking Serious Business.
What do we do if our best efforts to limit the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere fall short? According to a growing number of environmental scientists, we may be forced to try an experiment in global climate management: geoengineering. Geoengineering would be risky, likely to provoke international tension, and certain to have unexpected consequences. It may also be inevitable. Environmental futurist Jamais Cascio explores the implications of geoengineering in this collection of thought-provoking essays. Is our civilization ready to take on the task of re-engineering the planet?
Pay attention to the nice futurist. He’s here to help. Buy the book.
