Better start drinking!

[Thanks to Grant.]




(Dang, this picture cracks me up every time.)

Watching the Detectives Crash and Burn

Elvis Costello and Ministry. Not your ordinary juxtaposition, but I dare!
Good pop and good avant-garde.
Warning, the second one (Twitch Version 2) is really noisy. (Twice while I was listening to it a lot back in the day, my sister called on the phone, and both times she said "what's that noise in the background?!") But I think it's genius. (The sound quality could be better in the youtube version, but you should get the idea.)





("It ain't nothing but a show! Entertainment!")

Placebo - Running up that hill

This is not one of my favorite Kate Bush songs, but this is an interesting cover (and video) which shows some very emotive aspects of it. Very nice.

I don't know Placebo, but it from the youtube numbers it looks like they are big, and clearly they have respect and understanding for this woman's work.



Here is Kate's version. (Thanks TC.)
Undoubtedly it is a very good song. Only I think the repetitiveness of it rubs me a little bit the wrong way.

Bushie girl

Three of my many favorite Kate Bush songs.

Them Heavy People:


Wuthering Heights:


The Dreaming:


And an interview from 1980, oh was she young (22):


It's another example of somebody's voice being very different when they sing. When she speaks, Kate sounds like just another young woman, when she sings her voice has an unbelievable richness and range.

The 15 Most Expensive Paintings in the World

The 15 Most Expensive Paintings in the World.
I wonder what ole poverty-stricken Vince would have thought about his having four paintings on that list, 120 years after his death. I suspect he would have chuckled and then shook his head, and then gone back to his easel.



Especially since just one of those sales could have supported him and his whole family for three generations.

Jesus outta here

After flipping his hydrofoil, Jesus quickly leaves the scene before his Father finds out!

Plastic surgery out of control

Plastic surgery out of control. Warning: some of these pictures are really gross. OK, maybe not as bad as a severe traffic accident, but bad enough.
And what fascinates me is that typically these are people who consider it improvements and still go out in public! There seems to be a genuine type of addiction in play here.

Sinead o'Connor

Sinead o'Connor, Elton John's Sacrifice (from the docu Two Rooms):



And Mandinka, live:



(I think the album version is much superior, though.)
---
And of course there's the wonderful Kate Bush doing Rocket Man.

Reindeer singing

This is popular on the Net at the moment, and for good reason; it's a good version of White Christmas, it's funny, and the drawings/animation are great. In fact I think they are a wonderful example of how a master of his craft can communicate very strongly with very few lines indeed and a lack of "craft" which would be disastrous in the hands of a less skilled person. (Look at how the stars are drawn for instance.) It's like driving a car: if you're highly trained and experienced, you can drive it with at speed with one finger on the wheel, but if you're not, you better have both hands firmly on it.

Marcel Duchamp

"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
- Marcel Duchamp

That's a brilliant observation.

I found this picture of Duchamp and a chess set he designed. Isn't it funny how geniuses often look unbearably smug?


Duchamp was a genius of the rare caliber who only needs to do something once to achieve something excellent and unique. I am sure he used at most a week's preparation before he made his seminal Nude Descending a Staircase no 2, which to my taste is at least as good as anything Picasso ever made.


It is interesting that "Nude..." was seemingly very controversial partly due to the title. Clearly nobody would have thought of a nude if it had been called "Figure..."

It is not the prettiest painting ever made, but it is more visually pleasant than most abstracts of the time, and it's a good study of lines, movement, and space. Much ahead of its time.

Knittiti

Knitted graffiti. Knittiti?

Puppets in CGI

An early sequence in the Hellboy II movie (blogged below) has a story-telling flashback to "magical times" done entirely in CGI... but with puppets. This was done for budget reasons, but it works really well, and I think they may have invented a new medium of sorts.

Think about it, when doing puppets in CGI you get all of the charm of puppetry, but without the limitations that gravity and physical space impose on real puppets. And then you have all of the freedom of CGI, but at less cost because puppets don't have the complexity of muscles and semi-translucent skin, etc etc.

It would be a clear step down from full CGI movies if it was not for the interesting fact that puppetry has a centuries-old tradition, everybody has seen puppet shows/TV-shows/films from childhood and we are trained to react emotionally to them. So I think that this could really work if somebody put their mind to it.

It would be like a Tim Burton puppet movie, only much more alive and without all the f***ing singing puppets. :-)
(But seriously: a puppet musical?? Twice??)