Flotsam & Jetsam

2011-03-08T10:23:00.001-08:00

2011-02-07T15:02:00.003-08:00

Chris Marker & Walerian Borowczyk - 'Les Astronautes' (1959)

2011-01-27T11:36:00.001-08:00

2011-01-25T11:28:00.000-08:00

'This place is not a place of honour. No esteemed deeds are commemorated here. This is not a place for you. What is here is dangerous and repulsive. The danger will still be present in your time, as it is in ours.'

- Into Eternity

2011-01-18T12:39:00.001-08:00

2011-01-17T06:58:00.001-08:00

Future Shock

2011-01-12T13:13:00.001-08:00

2010-11-16T13:07:00.001-08:00

2010-11-14T08:08:00.001-08:00

2010-11-08T13:19:00.001-08:00

2010-10-17T08:48:00.001-07:00

2010-10-16T18:41:00.001-07:00

2010-10-16T11:21:00.001-07:00

2010-10-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

2010-10-09T05:59:00.000-07:00

2010-10-02T05:45:00.001-07:00

2010-10-02T05:40:00.000-07:00

2010-09-26T06:14:00.001-07:00

2010-09-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

2010-09-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

2010-09-11T18:06:00.001-07:00

Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic

2010-09-11T05:30:00.000-07:00

All the materials used in the piece are derived from research and speculations about the sinking of the "unsinkable" luxury liner. On April 14th 1912 the Titanic struck an iceberg at 11.40 PM in the North Atlantic and sank at 2.20 AM on April 15th. Of the 2201 people on board only 711 were to reach their intended destination, New York. The initial starting point for the piece was the reported fact of the band having played a hymn tune in the final moments of the ship's sinking. A number of other features of the disaster which generate musical or sounding performance material, or which 'take the mind to other regions', are also included. The final hymn played during those last 5 minutes of the ship's life is identified in an account by Harold Bride, the junior wireless operator, in an interview for the New York Times of April 19th 1912

"...from aft came the tunes of the band..... The ship was gradually turning on her nose - just like a duck that goes down for a dive. I had only one thing on my mind - to get away from the suction. The band was still playing. I guess all of the band went down. They were playing "Autumn" then. I swam with all my might. I suppose I was 150 feet away when the Titanic, on her nose, with her afterquarter sticking straight up in the air, began to settle slowly.... The way the band kept playing was a noble thing. I heard it first while we were still working wireless, when there was a ragtime tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating out in the sea with my lifebelt on, it was still on deck playing "Autumn". How they ever did it I cannot imagine."

- Gavin Bryars

Down with Demon Rum

2010-09-04T04:39:00.001-07:00

2010-08-12T14:47:00.001-07:00

The Calligrapher

2010-07-29T14:24:00.000-07:00

Jan Svankmajer - Food Pt:1

2010-07-24T07:43:00.000-07:00

2010-06-29T10:46:00.000-07:00

A Day in the Circus

"Good Move!"

2010-06-29T10:34:00.000-07:00

A collection of Blue Note covers.

2010-06-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

Classic computer games reimagined as books.

2010-06-21T14:50:00.000-07:00

- Soviet Science Magazine Covers

Plato's Cave

2010-06-08T12:11:00.001-07:00

"made by tobacco men, not medicine men!"

2010-06-06T05:30:00.000-07:00

"just radioactive enough..."

2010-06-06T05:29:00.000-07:00

Richard Dadd

2010-06-05T07:23:00.000-07:00

2010-05-27T13:19:00.001-07:00

The magical world of Yuri Norstein

2010-05-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

"Seasons" by Yuri Norstein

2010-05-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

2010-04-30T10:38:00.001-07:00

The Far Side

2010-03-24T13:18:00.000-07:00

Outsider art enjoys little favor these days in the professional art world, where the right to be crude, weird, and nasty is reserved for artists with master’s degrees from leading art schools. Sophisticates caricature a taste for outsider art, with some empirical justice, as a sign of patronizing sentimentality and populist resentment. But the intransigent grandeur of a Wölfli calls everybody’s hand. He seems to be at least as troublesome for outsider fanciers as for vocational élitists. Besides having an immensely complicated and subtle technique, Wölfli is scary. Trying to make a pet of him could get your hand bitten off.

The New Yorker on Adolf Wölfli

"Manuscripts don't burn"

2010-03-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

In the Realms of the Unreal

2010-03-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

"Much of what we know about the life of the reclusive writer and artist Henry Darger comes from his memoir, The History of My Life, which at just over 5,000 pages was one of the shortest things he ever wrote. The first 200 pages relate the story of his troubled childhood. Born in 1892 on Chicago's north side, he loses both of his parents at an early age, and a sister, whom he never meets, is given up for adoption. At the age of twelve, due to his unruly behavior (many believe that he was caught masturbating at Catholic school), he is sent to the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, an institution which later attained local notoriety for its staff's abusive treatment of its patients, in a town over 100 miles south of Chicago. At age 17, Darger escapes the asylum and sets out for Chicago--by foot. He is on this trek home when, on page 206, he observes "a most singular and unbelievable phenomenon," his account of which tells us more about his personality and his art than any autobiographical detail ever could. The "phenomenon" that Darger sees is a giant tornado tearing across the plains. He does not try to contain his excitement:

It had far more wallop than even a powerful atomic bomb. However stupendous and shocking the many different catastrophes of the past may be, none of them can compare to this storm. It was a wind convulsion of nature tremendous beyond all man's conception, immeasurable beyond all man's conception, immeasurable beyond measure.

His description of this tornado, and the destruction it wreaks across southern Illinois, occupies the rest of his memoir--all 4,878 pages of it.

Although he never explicitly mentions it in the pages of his memoir, a different kind of storm did overtake Darger at this time in his life, a torrent of creativity that was itself a most singular and unbelievable phenomenon. Upon returning to Chicago after his cross-state trek he began work on The Story of the Vivian Girls, In What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, as caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. At 15,000 pages, it is by far the longest novel ever written.

- Nathaniel Rich on the outsider artist and writer Henry Darger.

(Full documentary above available on youtube).

Albert Robida, the man who dreamt the future

2010-03-12T14:10:00.000-08:00

"Albert Robida, like Jules Verne, enjoyed to fantasize about the future, but his was a much more lively and tongue in cheek approach, full of humor and grotesque ideas. The illustrations were stunning in their accuracy. There it was, circa 1870, and the man had conceived of the Telephonoscope, a screen on which spectators could see events taking place at another far away location, in real time. He apparently was the first human being to conceive of television in such a specific manner...

Perhaps had Robida’s work not been discounted in its day as mere flights of fancy by an overproductive imagination, and relegated to disposable cartoon art of the epoch, we’d have had TV, maybe even Web TV, and sadly biological warfare, generations before they materialized in real life."

- the prophetic steampunk genius of Albert Robida

(click images for full size)

the 'cursed bread' of Pont-Saint-Esprit

2010-03-12T13:18:00.000-08:00

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: "I am a plane", before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

Time magazine wrote at the time: "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead."

- CIA spike French bread with LSD

The Fall of Detroit

2010-03-11T12:23:00.000-08:00

"Approaching the derelict shell of downtown Detroit, we see full-grown trees sprouting from the tops of deserted skyscrapers. In their shadows, the glazed eyes of the street zombies slide into view, stumbling in front of the car. Our excitement at driving into what feels like a man-made hurricane Katrina is matched only by sheer disbelief that what was once the fourth-largest city in the US could actually be in the process of disappearing from the face of the earth. The statistics are staggering – 40sq miles of the 139sq mile inner city have already been reclaimed by nature."

Julien Temple on the last days of a city.

Further: Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline.

The Silent Noise Of Sinister Clowns

2010-03-10T14:15:00.000-08:00

"The Zoot-Suit was a refusal: a subcultural gesture that refused to concede to the manners of subservience... It was during his period as a young zoot-suiter that the Chicano union activist Cesar Chavez first came into contact with community politics, and it was through the experiences of participating in zoot-suit riots in Harlem that the young pimp 'Detroit Red' began a political education that transformed him into the Black radical leader Malcolm X. Although the zoot-suit occupies an almost mythical place within the history of jazz music, its social and political importance has been virtually ignored. There can be no certainty about when, where or why the zoot-suit came into existence, but what is certain is that during the summer months of 1943 "the killer-diller coat" was the uniform of young rioters and the symbol of a moral panic about juvenile delinquency that was to intensify in the post-war period."

- The Zoot Suit & Style Warfare

Further: The Zoot Suit Riots

"Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"

2010-03-08T15:24:00.000-08:00

"The Hatter is focused on time, understandably, since the Queen of Hearts has accused him of being a time-murderer. This has added heft to the theory that a top-hat wearing inventor, Theophilus Carter, was the inspiration. Mr. Carter had displayed his Alarm-Clock-Bed — which was supposed to tip the sleeper out at the correct time — at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851.

Next we come to the notorious “hatters’ shakes,” a result of poisoning from mercury used in the early days of hat manufacturing. At a recent news conference, Johnny Depp suggested that that was where “mad as a Hatter” came from. The Hatter is “this guy who literally is damaged goods,” he said. In the British Medical Journal in 1983, however, H.A. Waldron concluded that the Hatter did not have mercury poisoning. The principal psychotic features of this type of poisoning are “excessive timidity, diffidence, increasing shyness, loss of self confidence, anxiety and a desire to remain unobserved and unobtrusive.” The Hatter, he states, was “an eccentric extravert.”

- The origin of the Mad Hatter.

The Woman Who Shot Mussolini

2010-03-02T05:06:00.001-08:00

"The Hon Violet Gibson shot two people at point-blank range, herself and Benito Mussolini. Both survived. After the first (attempted-suicidal) shooting, Violet, alive because the bullet had bounced off a rib, lived quietly in a convent in Rome, doing jigsaws with her Irish maid, until the day she set off for the Capitol with a gun in her pocket. After the second shooting Mussolini, alive because he turned his head just as Violet fired, set out for a triumphal visit to Libya with a sticking plaster on his nose. Meanwhile Violet was half-lynched, then dragged, badly battered, into a room containing the colossal marble foot of the Emperor Constantine, there to be revived with brandy before being dispatched to prison. It was the end of her life in the world."

- the unlikely assassin Violet Gibson

"fucking ego"

2010-02-24T09:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Ben Myers.

The Self-Mummified Monks of Japan

2010-02-21T07:57:00.000-08:00

For three years the priests would eat a special diet consisting only of nuts and seeds, while taking part in a regimen of rigorous physical activity that stripped them of their body fat. They then ate only bark and roots for another three years and began drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the Urushi tree, which contains Urushiol (same stuff that makes poison ivy), normally used to lacquer bowls. This caused vomiting and a rapid loss of bodily fluids. Finally, a self-mummifying monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely larger than his body, where he would not move from the lotus position. His only connection to the outside world was an air tube and a bell. Each day he rang a bell to let those outside know that he was still alive. When the bell stopped ringing, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed...

- the cult of Sokushinbutsu.

8 rooms, 7 mirrors, 6 Clocks, 2 minds & 199 Panes of Glass

2010-02-20T12:44:00.000-08:00

The incredible art of Lauren E. Simonutti.

From Battleship Potemkin to a chip shop in Dublin

2010-02-19T11:48:00.000-08:00

"We remained outside the port for three days. We needed supplies, water and coal, and the people of the city had given these to us. The nobles, against whom we were fighting, had fled from the city. There was no point therefore to bomb and kill our working brothers”.

We arrived at Odessa by the Black Sea, returning from the mutiny on the Potemkin which in part reflected the conditions of Tsarist Russia. This first mutiny woke up the people who were sleeping. The revolt started at lunchtime, at 12 o’clock. There were maggots in the food. The meat was rotten and the bread was hard. The officer had ordered the cooks to cook it nevertheless. At that time no one could speak up or contradict an order. They would be immediately arrested and put shore, where they would be sentenced to 30 days in prison. But Varukinciuk, a sailor friend of mine, had the courage to protest against these living conditions to an officer whom he found on the bridge at the time.

This man, a real tyrant, a Polish man, suddenly took out his pistol and left Varukinciuk laid out on lifeless. This was the beginning of the rebellion and the crew mutinied. Matiuscenko took command of the mutineers and ordered them immediately to force open the armory on board and to take possession of the arms and munitions. Some officers opposed this and a scuffle broke out with continuous gunfire in which the some ended up in the sea, alive or dead."

- the extraordinary life of the late Ivan Beshoff, last surviving sailor of the Battleship Potemkin Revolt.

A brief history of pretty much everything (via flipbook)

2010-02-19T11:47:00.000-08:00

2010-02-19T11:21:00.000-08:00

50 Stunning Political Artworks via the wonderful ampere's and.

Paris Drowning

2010-02-13T14:44:00.000-08:00

He made his way to L’Opéra, where the pavements were like jelly. A chasm had opened up in the square in front of the opera house. Before the police roped it off, people could look down at the drowned world of a work-in-progress destined to become the Opéra Métro station. ‘Would whole pieces of Paris collapse?’ Jerrold wondered. Perhaps the whole of Paris really was doomed...

- London Review of Books

2010-02-06T03:11:00.000-08:00

Saw a clip of this gentleman on the tv recently. Note Patrick Moore's resemblance to the guy from Eraserhead. The whole thing isn't a million miles from David Lynch as it goes.

2010-01-24T14:24:00.000-08:00

Coney Island Playground of the World

2010-01-14T12:15:00.001-08:00

The Man with the Rubber Head

2010-01-13T10:48:00.000-08:00

- The Genius of Georges Méliès

The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

2010-01-13T10:22:00.000-08:00

"Joey Grimaldi, the greatest clown of the 19th century, made his debut at the age of four in The Triumph of Mirth. The triumph was hard-won. His father, a fine and original clown himself, was a monster Dickens would have been proud to have invented, a savage brute (known as the Signor, but more generally referred to as Grim-All-Day) whose idea of training children for the theatre was to put them in the stocks or suspend them in a cage 40ft above the stage. He routinely beat his wife and terrified the household with his obsession with his own death. The devil had informed him in a dream that he would die on the first Friday of the month, whereafter the Signor kept vigil on that day, every month, in a room filled with clocks, gibbering till dawn. His favourite reading was The Uncertainty of Signs of Death; his dread of being buried alive led him to stipulate in his will that when he died his children should sever his head from his body, a task duly performed by his daughter, who kept a hand on the saw worked by the surgeon hired for the purpose."

2010-01-13T10:19:00.000-08:00

"For Poetry, This"

2010-01-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

A tribute to for the forgotten writer Delmore Schwartz by the poet Tony Curtis and Tim Phelan.

75 years of Elvis Aaron Presley

2010-01-08T16:59:00.001-08:00

Book Autopsies

2010-01-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

Book Autopsies by Brian Dettmer.

2009-12-20T06:28:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Declan McDaid for this.

2009-12-08T13:31:00.000-08:00

Death Masks of the Famous

2009-12-06T08:08:00.000-08:00

"The making of a death mask is a messy business – literally. They are difficult to make and the best position for the corpse is not lying down but sat up (as you can see in the picture). The shift from sculpture to masks came about in the Middle Ages when the art of waxwork and plaster casting became more sophisticated. The tradition evolved from royalty to eminent people and continues to this day. Another use, rather than in memoriam for an individuals was for the scientific study of human physiognomy. It was said that experts could tell criminals from the shape of their heads. Casts were also used to record and collect data on the racial differences in the human head."

- More

2009-12-04T16:16:00.000-08:00

"Trimble made a grand total of two albums in his early 20s: the last was released in 1982. He never had a record deal. The albums were privately released in minuscule quantities: he can't remember whether there were 300 or 500 copies pressed of his debut, Iron Curtain Innocence, but either way, there weren't many takers for his brand of lush-yet-disquieting Beatles and Pink Floyd- influenced psychedelia in early-80s New England. He never performed live outside of the central Massachusetts area. "We just played Worcester County, we didn't even play Boston," he says.

The problem was Trimble's habit of employing backing bands largely staffed by schoolchildren: fearing for their liquor licenses, clubs were disinclined to book Trimble if he insisted on working with the Kidds, whose average age was 12, or the Crippled Dog Band, with their 15-year-old rhythm section. "A few places let us in that sold alcohol, but it was like pulling teeth, it really was, they told us to get the hell out when we were done," he says. He doesn't sound like he sees anything unusual about a 23-year-old man forming a band with a bunch of 12-year-olds, either, although the parents of the Kidds apparently begged to differ, pulling the plug on the band."

- "He's for real. Or should I say surreal?" - the forgotten world of Bobb Trimble.

The Wilhelm Scream

2009-12-04T15:51:00.000-08:00

“He always used to joke about how he was so great about screaming and dying in films,” she said. “I did know that his scream had been in some films, the older westerns, but I did not know about Star Wars and all. He would have got such a kick out of this. He would say, ‘I may be old but I’m still in the movies’.”

- AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!

Arcade Expressionism

2009-12-04T15:42:00.000-08:00

By Brock Davies

Thanks to Susan Tomaselli for this.

2009-11-26T12:42:00.002-08:00

2009-11-26T12:42:00.001-08:00

Bill Plympton

2009-11-26T12:18:00.001-08:00

The Mad Baron

2009-11-25T11:13:00.000-08:00

"For the next six months, a surreal existence fell over Mongolia as the Baron and his army, now dubbed the Order of Military Buddhists, performed every type of atrocity imaginable including torture and cannibalism. He believed himself the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. He became a convert to the eightfold-path. Interpreting the Buddhist scriptures in his own manner, he believed that in the act of killing the weak he upgraded their position in the universe and they would be reborn as greater beings. He therefore felt that by washing Urga with the blood of innocent people he was saving the world in a cosmic sense, one bullet at a time."

Baron Ungern von Sternberg

2009-11-23T12:51:00.001-08:00

2009-11-22T14:41:00.000-08:00

Ekaterinburg, Russia

2009-11-22T14:17:00.000-08:00

"The unusual graveyard in the industrial Uralmarsh area of Ekaterinburg, Russia, sits in a tree-lined reserve in what became one of Russia's most violent gangster zones following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Now the gangsters who operated around the nearby complex of military factories stare out at the world from a special area of the cemetery - reserved for mafia bosses and henchmen.

In true gangster style the showy tombstones display many of the men they symbolise wearing clothing preferred by mafia men during the bloody era...

"Some of them even had their speciality etched on the tombstones such as 'judo sixth dan' or an 'expert in the use of knives'."

- Russia's gangster graveyard

William Hope spirit photographer

2009-11-14T10:39:00.000-08:00

"At the very beginning of the 20th century, and after capturing the supposed image of a ghost while he was photographing a friend, carpenter William Hope became interested in spirit photography and founded the Crewe Circle. When archbishop Thomas Colley joined the group, the spirit photographers started to publicise their work.

As the grieving relatives of those lost to the Great War sought ways of contacting their loved ones, the Crew Circle became quite succesful and by 1922, Hope moved to London and started a professional medium business.

The Society for Psychical Research sent Harry Price to investigate the work of the Crew Circle, and he collected evidence that William Hope produced his spirit photographs with a little help from some glass plates and the spooky images on it. Price exposed Hope as a fraudster, but many of his supporters defended him fiercely. Among the most famous was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the spiritual father of Sherlock Holmes and an ardent spiritualist."

William Hope

More "Phantom" Photographs

"Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time."

2009-11-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

"I'm into swing. I get that from the American Indians like the Sioux, the Arapahoe and the Apache. They have this drum-beat, heart-beat. Bom, bom, bom... The beat is always in the background. I sit down at my desk and write as I get different ideas and phrases. I don't compose at a piano, it's mostly in my head. The classical masters, like Mozart and Hayden, would sit at their desk and write a string quartet like somebody would write a letter... I was in Hamburg in '75 and I was working on the overtones and I finally realized that I had something interesting here. It was a code. I didn't know it was a code but I cracked the code and found out how to develop it. Ten years later, I found out what it was. I wasn't looking for a code.

That code proves that not only whoever created the universe does exist but he, I call him the mega-mind, wants us to know he exists. Within this code, it also proves that contraction must come before expansion. It also proves that a cause can become an effect and an effect can become a cause. It proves the two-directionality of time. It proves that the past is the future and the future is the past. All this flys in the face of what Hubble did, saying that there was a big bang and an expansion of the universe. His is a theory but mine is a fact. A fact incontrovertable, as I call it. They talked about these theories of mine on National Public Radio." - Moondog

Courtesy of Adelle Stripe

The BQE

2009-11-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is an incidental 12.7 miles of urban roadway built over the course of several decades (1939-1964), spear-headed by the master architect Robert Moses to accommodate for the increase of commercial and commuter traffic in New York City's outer boroughs. The roadway was a painstaking piecemeal project, poorly planned, badly built, and relentlessly encumbered by the obvious obstacles of the era: red tape, neighborhood protests, World War II, and a congested borough whose sequestering layout proved ill-fitting for the automobile. The resulting expressway-a pockmarked, serpentine, congested BQE-has become one of Brooklyn's most notable icons of urban blight. And, for Sufjan Stevens, an object of unmitigated inspiration.

The official album release of The BQE follows nearly two years after its original performance at BAM, providing the songwriter (and his various collaborators) ample time to wrestle out all the thematic incarnations of the project, and to attempt an appropriation of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work"). The resulting album might be best described as a grand creative franchise-incorporating movie, symphony, comic book, dissertation, photography, graphic design, and a 3-D Viewmaster® reel-in which a songwriter's interrogation of one of New York's ugliest landmarks expands athletically to forums and formulas outside of the song itself. In fact, the BQE is everything but a song...

Sufjan Stevens - The BQE (Asthmatic Kitty)

2009-11-03T10:29:00.001-08:00

Serge Gainsbourg - animation des graffitis sur 5 ans du mur rue de Verneuil from Arnaud Jourdain on Vimeo.

2009-10-31T11:31:00.000-07:00

Pompeii Graffiti

2009-10-24T13:39:00.000-07:00

"Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!"

"We two dear men, friends forever, were here. If you want to know our names, they are Gaius and Aulus."

"Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog!"

"Antiochus hung out here with his girlfriend Cithera."

"O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin."

A glimpse into the real Roman Empire.

Hobo Symbols

2009-10-24T06:46:00.000-07:00

"To cope with the difficulty of hobo life, hobos developed a system of symbols, or a code. Hobos would write this code with chalk or coal to provide directions, information, and warnings to other hobos. Some signs included "turn right here", "beware of hostile railroad police", "dangerous dog", "food available here", and so on."

Hobo Alphabet.

2009-10-24T06:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Susan Tomaselli for this.

2009-10-15T11:51:00.001-07:00

2009-10-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

On October 24, 1888, only ten days after being filmed in Roundhay Garden Scene, Sarah Robinson Whitley, featured actress and Le Prince's mother-in-law, died aged 72 and was buried nearby on October 27 at St. John's Church, Roundhay, Leeds.

On September 16, 1890, while about to patent his invention in London and to perform his first official public exhibition in New York, Louis Le Prince, director, mysteriously vanished in a train between Dijon and Paris.

In 1902, two years after testifying in the Equity 6928 brief, Alphonse Le Prince, featured actor and elder son of the inventor, was found shot dead in New York.

- Roundhay Garden Scene

American researchers have pieced together a 10-second audio clip of a French folk song which they believe is the oldest recognisable recording of the human voice.

The recording appears to be of a young woman singing a couple of phrases from the 18th century folk song Au Clair de la Lune. It was made in 1860 by Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and librarian, on a Heath Robinson-style device he called a "phonautograph"...

"Mr Giovannoni sent scans of the recording to the Berkeley Lab where they were painstakingly converted into sound by scientists using technology designed to salvage historic recordings.

That technology allows the voice of a young French woman, recorded in Paris in the months before Abraham Lincoln's inauguration as President of the United States, to be heard again."

- The Times

Zager and Evans - "In the Year 2525."

2009-10-01T14:08:00.000-07:00

Trapped in an Elevator for 41 Hours.

2009-09-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

"The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped..."

New Yorker article

2009-09-26T18:05:00.000-07:00

"Look who's here..."

2009-09-18T16:01:00.000-07:00

"One famously shot dead a fellow gangster in an East End pub for a verbal sleight. The other knifed to death another gangland member at a party.
But it appears Ronnie and Reggie Kray also had a more sensitive side as landscape painters..."

Via The Daily Hate.

Stooky Bill

2009-09-18T15:48:00.000-07:00

"...then suddenly, one day in 1925, success. John Logie Baird transmitted the first ever recognisable TV image across his attic workroom. The image was of his ventriloquist's dummy Stooky Bill. It was a great day for both of them.. The machine, the screen. The opaque, the transparent. Fact as fiction, fiction as fact. First TV, first interruption, first illusion. Dummy illusion, double illusion. The grand illusion, dummy TV..."
DH, LVA Catalogue, 1991.

Beebe and the Bathysphere

2009-09-11T11:49:00.000-07:00

"What Beebe saw on that trip—and reported with such vividness—was a glowing world of creatures so astonishing that for decades many doubted his veracity. The clear sea stretched endlessly, and was so full of luminescence that it sparkled like the night sky.

Cavalcades of black shrimps, transparent eels, and bizarre fish approached the descending sphere, and when Beebe used his spotlight to see them, great shadows and shifting patches of light hovered just out of view, leading him to postulate the existence of giants in the Bermudan depths. And below the bathysphere? There, said Beebe, lay a world that "looked like the black pit-mouth of hell itself."

Where Wonders Await Us

"If we hadn't been forced to split up, we would be more famous today than The Beatles."

2009-09-10T12:26:00.000-07:00

"They became stars. A great variety of audiences found them irresistable, and the Comedian Harmonists were at home in theaters all over Europe. In 1934 they were a huge success in New York. They were popular on radio and in recordings. Including the legendary hit comedy Die drei von der Tankstelle, they appeared in as many as 13 films in the early days of the movie industry; unfortunately, none of their films have been found since the war.

But the picture-book career of the apolitical Comedian Harmonists did not survive the changing political climate in Germany. Their songs -- most were by Jewish composers -- were criticized by the Nazis as early as 1932, when they were not yet in power, as "Jewish-marxist noise." Indeed, three of the group -- Frommermann, Collin, and Cycowski -- were Jews. Cycowski's wife Mary had converted to Judaism, and Bootz's wife Ursula was Jewish. The popular, politically naive musicians ignored all the warning signs. But then in 1934 the unapproved Jewish members of the group were forbidden to perform, and the Comedian Harmonists were given Auftrittsverbot by the Reichskulturkammer. The Comedian Harmonists split up. They gave their last concert in Munich on March 25, 1934."
- Carol Traxler, Quarter Notes.

Tarsem Singh's "The Fall" (closing montage)

2009-09-07T04:06:00.000-07:00

Official site.

The Devil's Note

2009-08-30T02:43:00.000-07:00

"There shouldn't, theoretically, be anything scary about a musical interval. Just as turning round three times with your eyes closed while reciting the Hail Mary probably won't make the devil appear before you, despite generations of schoolchildren believing otherwise, so playing the note of C followed by F sharp shouldn't encapsulate the essence of evil - but somehow it does. The movement from the first tone in a scale to the fifth, known as the perfect fifth, was the first accepted harmony of the Gregorian chant after the use of the octave. It was discovered in the 11th century that moving down a semitone to the diminished fifth created dissonance, and a nasty feeling of foreboding and dread. The church of medieval Europe quickly banned it, reputedly relying on torturous methods to ensure that the ban was upheld...

The Devil's Interval does, however, have a foreboding history. The 18th-century violinist Giuseppe Tartini claimed that he composed his Devil's Trill Sonata after Satan himself gave him instructions on how to do it, which might help explain why this piece of music is so incredibly difficult to play. In Wagner's Götterdämmerung, the diminished fifth illustrates a scene of pagan excess; Camille Saint-Saëns used it to tell the story of skeletons coming alive at Halloween in his Danse Macabre. Jimi Hendrix nailed it in the intro to Purple Haze to bring home the message that hallucinogenic drugs may be exciting but they're scary, too..."

Will Hodgkinson on the diabolical Tritone.

1960s Shrine Parade

2009-08-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

An 8mm home movie of an African-American Shrine Parade from the early 1960s (filmed in Pittsburgh, PA).

The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, commonly known as Shriners and abbreviated A.A.O.N.M.S., established in 1870 is an appendant body to Freemasonry, based in the United States. The organization is best-known for the Shriners Hospitals for Children they administer and the red fezzes that members wear.

Don't Think I've Forgotten (Cambodia's Lost Rock And Roll)

2009-08-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

Don't Think I've Forgotten (Cambodia's Lost Rock And Roll)

"London after the Rain" - Ben Olszyna-Marzys

2009-07-29T12:09:00.000-07:00

Via The Glass Hombre and Ballardian.

Liu Bolin the Invisible Man

2009-07-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

Gallery

"Tastes good like a cigarette should"

2009-07-25T13:53:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Kevin Williamson for this.