2004's Scariest Halloween Costumes
via boing boing

by pat padua

sweet thunder - tape findings
new mp3 blog of found cassette recordings.
via rummage through the crevices

miss texas does chopin

avant-garden? I see I'm not the only one who is reminded of nancarrow ...

martin lutherrhea

Archaeologists in Germany say they may have found a lavatory where Martin Luther launched the Reformation of the Christian church in the 16th Century.

The stone room is in a newly-unearthed annex to Luther's house in Wittenberg.

Luther is quoted as saying he was 'in cloaca', or in the sewer, when he was inspired to argue that salvation is granted because of faith, not deeds.

The scholar suffered from constipation and spent many hours in contemplation on the toilet seat.

jandek live

Which is a big deal to very special people. I never got the Jandek cult, but the sample tracks here are listenable for at least minute, or even more! He could be bigger than Hanson. Really, they're ok.

more live grand funk railroad here.

heaven is a funky moose

steve perry grooves to wildlife theology

martha and the muffins!

have aged alright, and have their own website. mp3s are up at moistworks. Scroll down to Oct. 13th for Muffins.

Periodic Table of Atomic Music

Every art form of the early Cold War era had to deal with the arrival of atomic bomb in one manner or another. Some artists were reserved and intellectual in their approach to the awesome new phenomenon, others less so. The world of Pop Music, for one, got an especially crazy kick out of the Bomb. Blues, jazz, gospel, rock and country musicians embraced atomic energy with wild-eyed, and some might argue inappropriate, enthusiasm. These musicians churned out a variety of truly memorable tunes featuring some of the most bizarre lyrics of the 20th century.

The Internet Resource for collecting medical, surgical, apothecary, dental, and bloodletting antiques.

old cooties

Lice could have jumped from them on to our ancestors during fights, sex, clothes-sharing or even cannibalism.

cecil mcbee and the right of personality

Sometime after the jazz musician Cecil McBee played in Japan for the first time, someone opened a CECIL McBEE clothing store there and now it's a successful chain. McBee has sued in Japan under a theory of right of personality, with mixed success.

a depraved man commits bestiality and is berated by satan

(link is at bot ... lower right hand corner)
welcome perverted and/or bible-thumping googlers!

via koffeeklatsch

dog bless america

Tillamook Cheddar is a Jack Russell Terrier from Brooklyn, New York. She is widely regarded as the world's preeminent canine artist. In her native New York City she's already had six solo exhibitions. Tillie is five years old....she works with shocking intensity, sometimes to the point of destroying her creations.

via gothamist

bye bye superman (14 MB video)

sort of via boblog

dog-cam

TOMY of Japan are introducing a doggie 3.5 megapixel digital camera that can be worn around its neck, along with a remote control to trigger the camera. Photos can later be downloaded to a Mac or PC via USB. It’s unclear if it offers a timer function, but regardless that gave us an idea and we made our own version.

via engadget

skin flicks

an exclusive cinescene amalgamation of three filum reviews by pat padua:
in my skin, goin' coconuts, and the short film "How to drownproof your child."

Subject: definer the sinbarn: adlt 0rientd
Date: 24 Sep 2004 12:22:57 -0700

jakedukie, Nothin but farmgirls!

http: allthesuddenifeel
no more: tieingdowntables

autumn this neglect and galloping we ascending will slacksscarves and
galloping

Pebbles and friend.

King of the funny skin flicks

Russ Meyer is dead. The legendary independent director, who made exploitation films but was honored as an auteur, died Saturday at his home in the Hollywood Hills.

RIP

Sivan Lewin: Personal Work

via conscientious.

Scarce Hatchable Liverish Oleo

...tamarin not epitactic untravestied. Miller not quantifier autopsychology? Revalenta; twifoil when fenceplay, counterfort or Benedict will startish. Underogating has anthropophagously after Embiotocidae, propugnation not peskiness am interpretableness lambly trichosporangial until centrifuge, Ancistrocladus would funnelwise redisbursement before autotomize unwarrantableness, disattaint -- conflictory. Germanic. Shortclothes having albahaca reconfess had exclusivism podgily unless haptometer thermochroic assibilation rehumble would Rivulariaceae scrollery. Zapotecan prepossess not transmissional and gusto may redfoot did untolerableness would outecho shrubwood is malati not reinspiration! Homoplasmic burkundaz would ilot.

found trying to googlewhack with "papist oleomargarine".

-:* Frisco's Kutna Hora - Sedlec Ossuary Page *:-

The Sedlec Ossuary (a.k.a. Kostnice) is a small Christian chapel decorated with human bones. It's located in Sedlec, which is a suburb in the outskirts of the Czech town Kutna Hora.

the godfather horsehead pillow.

The Tingha and Tucker Club was transmitted by ATV [television] between 1962 and 1970. Like the Ovaltineys that was transmitted by radio during the 1930s and 1940, it had signs (right forefinger placed vertically to the nose and the head then bowed), a motto, "Bear in Mind to be Good and be Kind", a magic password, "Woomerang Boomerang", rules, and a song.

photographs by : Amanda Tetrault :
via coincidences.

errol morris has a blog.
via design observer

jens lekman, "black cab"

Oh no, Goddamn/ I missed the last tram/ I killed the party again/ Goddamn, Goddamn

via salon's mp3 blog

Melody Nelson mashups
via moistworks

the 3-D photographs of jacques-henri lartigue

Few people realise ... that many of his most famous photographs have literally been cut in half for printing. These photographs were originally taken in stereo (also known as 3D) which requires a pair of images to work effectively. When properly reproduced, using both images, they show all the depth of the original scene.

smell the woofers

The therapeutic power of flowers takes on new meaning with a Japanese gadget that turns plants into audio speakers, making the petals and leaves tremble with good vibrations.

riverspam


Subject: thanks declaration practically gratefulness the spunkfarm: adlt
0rientd
Date: 10 Sep 2004 08:27:01 -0700

widen how easily and blot we relevances I relevances like easilyimminent
saulm001, Once you enter the spunkfarm you'll never want to leave!

http://.../fff/

n0 m0re plz: getmeathousandsixty.com/yeh/


sympathizer this blot and widen we relevances will imminenteasily and
widen

America: Collecting Telephone Books

For me, one of the best features of my collection was that it was a good ice-breaker. When a conversation lagged, I could say, 'I collect telephone books,' and it was usually good for at least a few minutes' chat. People might go away saying 'What a weirdo', but the awkward moment had been dealt with.

via itchy robot

no shoes, no shirt, no serbice

Filipino males often doff their shirts in Manila streets to beat the tropical heat. The practice has been outlawed in some suburban areas but this would be the first time it would be imposed city-wide with the help of police.

'If there are many shirtless men roaming around in a certain community, there are also many criminals such as thieves, snatchers and robbers in that area,' Manila police chief Superintendent Avelino Razon said, without elaborating.

So a guy walks up to an ATM...
A music video for "Experimental film" by They Might Be Giants.

Sovinec

For over 20 years, primary school teacher Jindrich Streit has been photographing the people of his home village Sovinec, a tiny hamlet in the north of Czechoslovakia. The area was inhabited for centuries by Sudeten Germans and was subject to the Munich agreement in 1938. Then, after the war, all Germans were expelled from the country, leaving behind a string of empty towns and villages. Eventually, a few Czech families from other parts of the country came to settle in Sovinec and the neighbouring village of Krisov.

toy music

bugs!

Some insects are adopting protective coloring to camouflage with our industrialized environment. The classic example is the white birch moth of Manchester, England; which quite suddenly changed to black, in order to blend with the soot laden trees. Biologists have given this phenomenon the name "Industrial Melanism". Insects continue to evolve despite the fumbling of man. Although they appear so small and fragile, their species will most likely exist after we cease to.

season of a young mouss

by handsomeboy technique, a japanese soft rock hip-hop outfit. apparently unrelated to handsome boy modeling school.

happy like bejeesus.

buy it from second royal records.

digital images by ray caesar:

First the models are sculpted similar to pushing and pulling the surface of a piece of clay. I am often reminded of being in preschool with my huge chunk of plasticene. I once modeled a plasticene shoe but my father forbade me to wear it in public. I then create an inner structure of joints similar to a skeleton that allows me to pose the figure with a spine, shoulders, elbows and even finger joints. Many heads are modeled with many a different expression and these can be blended to create a subtle look similar to the one my wife has when I have done something suspicious.

tower of hambabelerger

This set of pages was inspired by a visit to McDonald's in May 2004. Along with our son's Happy Meal, we got a small playstation-type game where you have to help a monkey catch bananas as they fall from the sky. I was amused to note that the instructions came in no fewer than 34 languages...

via Crooked Timber

the digital fish library

The new project, called the Digital Fish Library, aims to scan representatives of every one of the 482 families of fish known to science. The Marine Vertebrates Collection at Scripps holds specimens from 455 families.

by pat padua

sunday afternoon bingo by timothy archibald
via conscientious

eau de shania

Shania Twain uses music as a means of personal expression. Scentstories by Febreze enables her to use scents in a similar way, creating the multiple scent experience of a real environment at home or on the road.

via boing boing

CANINUS - Pit Bull Grindcore

The majority [of] grindcore and fatal metal strips (orchestras) have ... singers [who try to sound like] broken (upset) deranged animals ... [we] have decided to use [the] real thing. Vocals are executed by two pit bull terriers. Both were rescued days before euthanization from refuges. Caninus - all strict vegans. It has come time really to allow the animals to have their say.

..:Julia Fullerton-Batten:..

Paola Ferrario - Traveler
via coincidences

WFMU Remixes the RNC 2004

A Grand Old Audio Party

Five days of political music, comedy, commentary, audio art, and Republican re-mixes streaming on the web.

william eggleston has launched his own website.
via coincidences

pomo english title generator

The Seductive Building The Disenfranchised: Donny and Marie, Goin' Coconuts and Penetration

Degeneration as Borderlines: Reclaiming Perverted Frustration in Donny and Marie's Goin' Coconuts

The Labial Constructing The Other: Donny and Marie, Goin' Coconuts and Appropriation

Figuring Gentility: Monologic (Author)ity in Donny and Marie's Goin' Coconuts

Colluding, Identifying, Speaking: Authority in Donny and Marie and the Suppressive Transgression of Diaspora in Goin' Coconuts

nyt: the cry of wild neighbor

NEW YORK'S apartment dwellers are often plagued by neighbors who sing like frogs, dance like bison or play the trumpet like antisocial mandrills...people of all descriptions often take drastic measures to cope with fellow tenants who impose a musical reign of terror upon their neighbors.

But an entirely different problem presents itself when these neighbors are gifted...

Goin' Coconuts

A short film produced in the 70's by Encyclopedia Brittanica took us behind the scenes of a hit tv show: the Donny and Marie show. Among the talking heads is a producer who earnestly tells the camera, "the show is about *ideas* ... and I try to convey that philisophy to our writers..." One idea is found in the recurring bit where Marie is in grave danger (there's a sequence of stills from different skits that have Marie tied up and screaming, baring those teeth for any would-be rescuers); Donny would sidle along and remain oblivious to his sibling's crisis of faith. In another piece, guest star Paul Lynde runs a refreshment stand in the middle of a desert, and refuses Donny a drink of water unless he coughs up the dough. Obviously, family entertainment and sadism are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Goin' Coconuts was the first and only feature film vehicle for Donny and Marie Osmond. By any standards, its a lousy movie. Jokes are badly timed or just bad: in a chase scene, one of the baddies hijacks a car with a little old lady in the passenger seat (reinforcing the subordination of women in the patriarchal society); the car takes a bad turn and rolls over, the little old lady peering out of a broken window with what one assumes are massive internal injuries. This and other chase scenes are shot at what look to be breakneck speeds upward of 20 mph. Editing is crude. As Donny sings a ballad to his love interest in the hotel lounge, the song is rudely interrupted with badguy cat-and-mouse scenes in hotel hallways. I got a kick out of this - the transition from song to action is so abrupt as to be aggressive, as if the editor was thinking, "I'd rather watch the most boring establishing shot than listen to any more of THIS pap."

Still, Coconuts is not without its charms - and provocations. The plot revolves around an airport incident. On her way to a tour stop in Hawaii, Marie encounters a priest who gives her an ugly necklace. Naturally (subversively?), the priest is really one of a group of badguys who try to gain control of this necklace (the virtue of a Mormon girl? the triangular shape of the necklace suggests a bejewelled vagina). Marie is painfully aware of the fight for her treasure, but neither Donny nor her agent take her concerns seriously. Marie sports a short coif that further infantilizes her; a key shot follows Marie through the halls of a hotel room; these touches cement one's suspicion that Goin' Coconuts takes inspiration from no less than Rosemary's Baby.

Like their tv show, the Osmonds' film projects a surprising hostility. Not just the old lady in a car crash, but racism, with stereotyped Asians, Hawaiaans, and Germans (Kenneth Mars, clumsily playing out the mind-body duality of Dr. Strangelove). Are we to be reassured that Donny tries to "get down" with the savage native dancers?

Coconuts was the last of four features directed by Howard Morris, perhaps best known as the actor behind the lunatic Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show. (He was also the voice of the Hamburglar.) The thing drags, and aside from a promising disco routine behind the opening credits, and the hit title theme behind the closing credits, the musical numbers fall flat. But despite it's badness the Polanski and Kubrick references indicate a *kind* of intelligence at work. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

spaaam medjucation

Nid the cheepast mads on wab? We gut them! buzzword

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dovetail impeccable brandon hail wobble davies. [2

monkey portraits

via boing boing

oh baby

"long tall sally" in tagalog. by the reycard duet with tony maiquez and his ukelele gang, on specialty records. rock on.

highlights from little steven's underground garage festival

blair, the Christian dominatrix

Lisa Whelchel, actress and author of 'Creative Correction: Extraordinary Ideas for Everyday Discipline' (Focus On the Family/Tyndale House), defends the practice. 'A correction has to hurt a little,' she said. 'An effective deterrent has to touch the child in some way. I don't think Tabasco is such a bad thing.' Her book suggests a 'tiny' bit of hot sauce be used, and offers alternatives such as lemon juice and vinegar. Discipline involves 'drawing a line to protect the child,' Whelchel said, 'and if they cross that line, there will be pain.' Whelchel said she believes that disciplinary methods should be left up to parents -- who know their child best, are devoted to the child's well-being and can administer punishment with love.

it gets better ... via uggabugga

Cristian Stan Photography

Train-Surfing Dog Rides 500 Miles atop Coal Car

Last month, Jenny the Cairn Terrier decided to go spelunking in a coal shaft for 2 weeks (read 'Cairn in a Coalmine'), and now we've got a terrier who takes the Canadian Pacific Rail halfway across British Columbia, balancing precariously on a pile of coal the whole way.

via the new york subway riding dog, gothamist

by pat padua

Conjoin yourself

BBC News | ASIA-PACIFIC | Snap! It's the conjoined crocodiles

Staff at a Thailand crocodile farm are nursing an unusual new arrival: a pair of conjoined crocodiles.

and at the London review of books

On page 38 of this book appears one of the most remarkable photographs I have seen. It shows a young mother playing an energetic game (tag, perhaps, or pig-in-the-middle) with her three children, two girls and a boy. There are four lively, happy people in the photograph, but only six arms and six legs, for the two girls share a body. Between them they have two legs and two arms, but above a single pair of shoulders there are two necks, two heads, two smiling faces. One of Us is about conjoined twins, and its starting point is the conviction that often such twins should be thought of as two people inhabiting one body, not as two people inhabiting two not-yet-separated bodies. Clearly Abigail and Brittany Hensel (the six-year-olds to whose photograph I keep returning) can never be separated (though they do have two hearts); nor need they be, for they have a fit and healthy body, in which they can do all the things people normally do, except, of course, get away from each other.

sp am log

Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2004 12:41:46 -0400
From: Virgil Thomason
Subject: addenda

nabla, i must speak, nabla, i must speak, nabla, i must speak. nabla, i must
speak, nabla, i must speak.

Lots of William Eggleston links today at coincidences, incl. more from the Guardian:

Eggleston's pictures have been described as "anti-heroic", "vulgar" and "boring". He typically focuses on details of the everyday environment that go unnoticed: shoes and clutter underneath a bed; a naked lightbulb in a violently red ceiling; a dog drinking from a muddy roadside puddle. At first glance, they could be amateur snapshots, albeit brightly coloured. (Eggleston dye-transferred his prints for exhibition, achieving a degree of colour saturation no printing process can match.) On closer inspection, they're the opposite: precise compositions, graphically sophisticated and laden with implied narrative, sometimes even violence. There are rarely people in his pictures, but there is always evidence of human presence, and of the tension between the natural and artificial.

but i don't care on them - 'cause i am just a mops!

yo la tengo's live covers are hit and miss, but this is a hit:

yo la tengo - i am just a mops

via largehearted boy

Tim Davis Art Images

All of these images are from the sides of boxcars, coal cars, miscellaneous freight cars and a caboose. These cars have been scratched, gouged, painted, scraped, rusted, and repainted over the course of their lifetimes.

nyt: I lost it on the Cyclone

"They lose cameras, jewelry - you name it,' Mr. Menditto said. 'Hats, wigs.'

Few come asking about those wayward wigs. 'When the ride is finished,' he said, 'they run out; they're embarrassed.'"

nyt: Exhibit Offers a Peek Inside the Lives of Outsiders

...when a 29-foot section of bright yellow PVC pipe appeared at the front of the building, snaking from a spot next to the front door and into a corner of the second floor lobby, it was cause for plenty of comment.

'Nobody really knew what it was at first,' said Earl Simpson, 67, a resident. 'They thought it was some kind of weird periscope.'

They were right, sort of. The tube, which was commissioned by The New Museum of Contemporary Art as part of an outdoor exhibition on and near the Bowery, allows people on the sidewalk to see and converse with residents inside the hotel. Both parties, as viewed through the tube's mirrors, appear upside down. Voices that travel through the tube are muffled but audible. When no one in the lobby is at the mouth of the tube, sidewalk viewers see a vase of sunflowers.

by pat padua

Nineteenth Century Images of Albinism

Two worm species discovered in the dark recesses of the deep sea could rival the macabre beasts of your childhood nightmares. Scientists have named a new genus, Osedax, which is Latin for "bone devourer", for worms that thrive by excavating the bones of fallen whale carcasses.

old signs

EAT. BOWL. FOOD.

via foreword

slow chimpunks

The Chipmunk Song [slowed down]'. Yes, hear Simon, Theodore and Alvin at their true speed, sounding respectively like an accountant, a hot-dog vendor, and a lunatic. Put it on repeat and you'll drift gradually into madness - it's like an acid flashback to fetal languor, the surreal sounds that filtered through the uterine wall.

via said the gramophone

william eggleston in the guardian

...William Eggleston is perhaps the most innovative American photographer of the past 50 years; [his] unique style has transformed the way we look at the world. His influence on our visually led contemporary popular culture is now so pervasive that it goes unnoticed. In fashion shoots and films, advertising and art photography, Eggleston's everyday view of things, initially dismissed by critics in the mid-Seventies, is now the prevalent aesthetic. Put simply, it would be difficult to imagine the world according to David Lynch or Gus Van Sant or Juergen Teller or Sofia Coppola without the world according to William Eggleston.

via consumptive

today's voices

...the contained herein recordings are all of cellular phone conversations that were picked up via scanner between 1997 and 2000 (apparently the advent of digital cellular phone technology has made such scanning of cellular phones impossible). Clocking in at just over 70 minutes, there's enough strange, absurd and disturbing material within to satisfy even the most thirsty voyeur...It may not come as a surprise that a goodly fifty percent of the tracks are sex related; be they the belligerent rantings of young men trying to impress (?) the ladies on a party-line by calling them minotaurs and threatening to call CYS on them, the tentative musings of a straight man exploring his sexuality, or a phone sex chat line first date (complete with climax). While some of the phone sex tracks may put to test even the most iron willed, there are respites of interesting slices of life that are both intriguing and beguiling. There's the two old black guys complaining about the youth of today being nothing but 'Charlie's children', a coked up soccer mom rambling from gift baskets to reject fortune cookies in under two minutes, bizarre nuage philosophy & advice, incomprehensible noises and more! Comes packaged with silk-screened artwork that's made to look like it could be a Folkways record. Great! Upsetting! Or just greatly upsetting!

"stag line 2"
another one from aquarius records

highway chamber music

KUWAYAMA - KIJIMA 01.06.16 (Trente Oiseaux)

A slight departure from the silence and drones that often-inaudible composer Bernhard Gunter's Trente Oiseaux label is known for, this disc by Japanese cello and violin duo Kuwayama Kiyoharu and Kijima Rina is a live acoustic improv set. Not exactly jazz improv, though! More of an avant-garde modern classical chamber improv thing, but minus the actual 'chamber', 'cause the real twist is that '01.06.16' isn't just live, it's what you might term a 'field recording' -- they recorded it outdoors, beside a highway at midnight! So you get the sound of passing cars and trucks, adding a whooshing, rumbling texture to the proceedings. We're not sure if they're really listening to the traffic and interactively improvising with those sounds -- although it seems that way at least some of the time -- but the ambient (and very present) pulsation of the highway noise makes a nice setting for the creaking, scrabbling, droning interplay of their strings.

via aquarius records

pinnate o'er belmont

From: Rupert Morgan
Subject: pinnate o'er belmont

Wheelbarrow about find lice on razor blade beyond bubble bath, or near
insurance agent eat paper napkin related to. Furthermore, parking lot
inside omphalos feels nagging remorse, and recliner for apartment building
pee on stovepipe from. Gypsy toward blithe spirit procrastinates, and
starlet for give a pink slip to behind bubble bath. From reactor rejoices,
and taxidermist related to ceases to exist; however, cough syrup living
with avocado pit admonish. Class action suit for is uxorious. puppeteer
henley balinese upstand curtis.

Unlike so many haunches who have made their psychotic looking glass to us.
When dahlia for guardian angel is precise, pit viper over play pinochle
with toward bodice ripper. Sometimes of somnambulist laughs out loud, but
from bartender always host graduated cylinder beyond diskette! Gonads
remain green.

by pat padua

spam haiku

From: Odis Piper
Subject: aboveboard

icosahedra
did he chase, reign, in his twen-
ty, brian, being

a generally
mecca, the doctor bowed, del-
icate, but the conversa-

tion.

after the beep

These answering machine excerpts are taken from old episodes of WFMU's The Audio Kitchen, a program which showcases a wide range of found audio. The archives containing these particular calls are no longer online, but the most recent season of the program (summer 2003) is available on the Audio Kitchen website.

via fluxblog

PhotoPermit

It's easy, sad to say, to collect a lot of stories about the abuses of local authorities and harrassment of photographers. This is an important function for photopermit.org, but not the only purpose. Even more importantly, the site is here to help photographers to avoid hassles and have the means to respond intelligently in the face of abusive authority figures. Photographers are not terrorists, and they need to be able to convince others of that fact.

Lewis Carroll Scrapbook

The Lewis Carroll Scrapbook at the Library of Congress is an original scrapbook that was kept by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Better known as Lewis Carroll, the Victorian-era children’s author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Dodgson was a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Oxford. The scrapbook contains approximately 130 items, including newspaper clippings, photographs, and a limited number of manuscript materials, collected between 1855-72.

moog avoirdupois

To subject The Band's 'The Weight,' with all its mythic American resonance, to the analog chill of the Moog synthesizer just seems plain wrong. But here it is anyhow, from The Moog Machine's 1969 album Switched-On Rock, in all its inexplicably funky glory, with a killer, fat bass line and panning swooshes galore. Bunuel and Christian redemption aside, only the melody remains.

via the wily filipino

by pat padua

more than a turnpike

"New Jersey Turnpike in the wee, wee hours, I was rolling slowly 'cause of drizzling showers," wrote rock legend Chuck Berry in his 1956 song, "You Can't Catch Me." Berry may have been going slowly—but he was actually on a road made for speed. See how the history of cars, roads, traffic, and ideas about service all came to bear on the Turnpike driving experience.

via New Resources at FREE

i am a pilgrim state asylum

A photo essay that would seem to scream b&w, but which is mostly in a muted color that works out alright.

From a site auspiciously titled Mustard Gas Party, whose motto should be, "There's a party in my lungs - and everyone's invited."

BOOM! (1968; Dir. Joseph Losey)

Wasn't nearly as bad as its rep. Not that it's any good.

The movie opens and waves crash on the rocky shore under the the title: BOOM! The overbearing tone is set from frame one. A beautiful widescreen landscape gradually narrows into a vertical sliver, until the camera zooms back to place you in the turret-window of a Mediterrranean villa. This is the island kingdom of Sissy Goforth (Liz), a faded, dying, beauty (though Taylor, not quite faded yet, is too young for the role) and bitch. (The term is used by all three principal characters - even Noel Coward's; oh for the days before bitch-and-ho). Goforth is nasty to the servants and to the flunkies who serve as her security force on the island; the latter are led by a bereted dwarf commander with a pack of dogs bigger than he is (nature=bigger than man) at his beck and call (man=domain over nature?). The only person among this small parade of humanity who she's even vaguely happy to see is the Witch of Capri, played by Noel Coward. The role was originally intended for Katherine Hepburn. Richard Burton, looking like The Prisoner, is Goforth's uninvited guest - the Angel of Death.

You get the idea. It's later Tennessee Williams (who wrote the screenplay, based on his play The milk train doesn't stop here anymore). But if you accept that tone, the movie's not *that* bad. It looks great. When I told a friend I thought it was visually compelling - the widescreen compositions, the rhythm of closeups - he said oh, those tricks are straight out of Sergio Leone. But isn't that interesting - using the visual language of a spaghetti western for what is essentially a chamber piece? I mean, the island *is* big enough for the two of them.

The trouble is with the acting. Not that it's over the top - this is later TN Wms after all. But sparks don't fly. The mannered superstar accents of Liz and Dick should be perfectly suited to Wms outrageous theatricality, but these voices also get shrill. Wms once said that every one of his plays is about one human being trying to make a connection with another, and I just didn't get that here. Taylor plays the prima donna all too well, but there's little sense of the loneliness of a self-cloistered aging star. She's not desperate enough - and how hard can it be to drum up tension in a battle with death - played by your husband? Autopilot isn't enough. And if Taylor is too young for her role, Burton is too old for his, unable to summon a physical panache on a par with his vocal panache (the person jumping off a railing onto Goforth's terrace is obviously a body double).

I'm glad I saw it. I only looked at my watch five or six times.

hasn't he been punished enough?

A man who shot himself in the testicles with a sawn-off shotgun was jailed for five years yesterday.

via tmftml

paul is dead , kitty kitty

For all the Beatles freaks, here's DJ Roby Yonge's original Paul Is Dead radio broadcast from the wee hours of October 21, 1969---the one that started it all. It's a 28 meg file, but it's worth it just to hear Roby talk about how you can see numbers in the text of the Magical Mystery Tour album cover if you 'really get very very high on some mind bending drug.'

via kittytext; audio is here

breakfast in america

To The Editors:

So what do I think of the new smaller sized Portland Press Herald?

I would say there are some good things and some bad things.

I always read my paper at the breakfast table all alone. And wow! There's a lot more room for my waffles, coffee, juice, etc. That's good.

But when I finished reading the paper, I spotted a housefly on my refrigerator, so I rolled up the paper and tried to whack it. I missed by about 1.25 inches. That's bad.

Paul Blaisdell
South Portland, Maine

via design observer

US soldiers are to have abused arrested children

More han hundred children are after information of the international red cross in Iraqi prisons arrested, among them also in the notorious prison Abu Ghureib. As the TV magazine "report" reports, it is to have come also to abusing of children and young people by coalition troops.

via this modern world and sadly, no.

download Fahrenheit 9/11

Michael Moore says: 'I don't agree with copyright laws, and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it...as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labor.... I make these movies and books and TV shows because I want things to change, and so the more people who get to see them, the better.'

via boing boing.

"Pussy" galore
Or, language and the two-yr old.

He searched around the room, trying to find an object to attach to the two syllables. My wife is a folk artist and there were many objects among our many collections for him to choose from -- bottle-cap men, ceramic cars from Mexico, strings of red chile lights. He spun around and then pointed at me. "You!" he said gleefully. "You are a pussy!"
...
...(I'd recently purchased a meat mallet, and couldn't stop using the term -- saying it at home, in my classroom, in my car: Where is my meat mallet? Who stole my meat mallet? Have you met my meat mallet?)

spamalia

blithe spirit tea parties near 0

Now and then, living with football team satiate for nation. And organize the dark side of her blithe spirit. Sometimes living with pork chop self-flagellates; but abstraction behind mirror always teach from cyprus mulch! Rangy, conduct dictatorial apostate calumniate.

Amalia and I took around piroshki (with clodhopper related) to microscope, over pickup truck. Amalia and I took cargo bay around (with toward clodhopper) cough syrup about chestnut. Amalia and I took bodice ripper about tuba player (with from sandwich, toothache) living with midwife sell to defined by gonad.

William Gedney Photographs and Writings

From the mid 1950s through the early 1980s, William Gedney (1932-1989) photographed throughout the United States, in India, and in Europe. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment to the daily chores of unemployed coal miners, from the indolent lifestyle of hippies in Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers, Gedney was able to record the lives of others with remarkable clarity and poignancy. These photographs, along with his notebooks and writings, illuminate the rare vision of an intensely private man who, as a writer and photographer, was able to reveal the lives of others with striking sensitivity. Included here are selections from Gedney's finished prints, work prints, contact sheets, notes, notebooks, handmade photographic books, book dummies, and correspondence.

So Many Signs, So Little Time

An archaeologist of signs has set himself the task of photographing every old sign in Manhattan between 14th and 42nd Streets...

...Peering into one such stack of signs for cloak makers and cloth cutters on 29th Street, Mr. Grutchfield pointed out the name 'Pollack and Feldman,' barely visible against the old brown bricks. 'It says he makes muff beds,' he said. 'Now what the hell's a muff bed?'

Eddytor's Dozen by Chuck Eddy

Now Albert Ayler and Skye Sweetnam have in common both alliterative names and superbly noisy new releases you have to consult eBay for!

flea market photos. click on the bespectacled temptress for more.

found photos: digital edition
via consumptive

Iranian woman 'gives birth to frog'

While it is unclear how this could have happened, the paper carries quotes from medical experts who say there are human characteristics to the animal.

It has been speculated that the woman, who has not been named, unknowingly picked up the larva while she was swimming in a dirty pool.

via metafilter