My brain just went *pop*.
[via colossal]

“Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe.

Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others.

Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds.

Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.”

POWERS OF TEN © 1977 EAMES OFFICE LLC
www.eamesoffice.com http://powersof10.com/

The Cramps live at Napa State Mental Hospital
Bryan Gregory in all his glory, someone reading a newspaper, the man in the dress, the man in the suit miming along.
“Somebody told me you people are crazy – but I’m not so sure about that”

Domino:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In June 1978, The Cramps played a free concert for patients at the California State Mental Hospital in Napa, California. The Cramps were at the peak of their engaging sound. They had just finished recording “Gravest Hits.” Midway through the second song, a young woman commands the stage and begins sharing the mic with Lux. By the time the “Human Fly” is played a real ho-down is occurring on and off stage with the audience members dancing about, grabbing at the mic and embracing each other – all of which adds to the spectacle of this once-in-a-lifetime performance! Songs include: “Mystery Plane,” “The Way I Walk,” “Human Fly,” “Domino,” “Garbage Man,” and more.

Found via Street Anatomy:

Sembler, a design group “focused on sound and vision in a spatial context,” created this music video for Darkstar’s “Gold” off their new album, North. They used a combination of specialized 3D lighting, “Gold” code, and data from the Visible Human Project to represent the concept of an idea infecting multiple hosts. The “idea” is represented by gold particles in the music video.

From Sembler’s website:

Titled ‘Gold’ the video is an artistic representation of the concept of memetic contagion i.e. an idea as something that you can catch, that finds a host in the mind of a person.

Weirdly enough, being a Human League completist I bought the 12″ of Mirror Man – not my favourite of their tracks – a couple of weeks ago mainly because of the dub of the B-side “You Remind Me of Gold“, which is great [youtube clip here] – and which this Darkstar track is based on:

The Human League track was given to me by a friend, he used to play the dub at 33rpm instead of 45 so the break would be real slow and crunchy, he lent me the tune and i put the flip on 33rpm too, the vocal line was how you hear it in the single, the original is much quicker and it’s a pretty obscure one from the Mirror Man ep. The Human League are great. We paid more attention to them after making the track, throughout the album we listened to four or five albums regularly and Travelogue was one of them. I’m not sure if we are real fans to be honest, I listen to some of it and think that it’s brave but sometimes they get it so right. They’ve obviously got a strong vision to create a sound so uncompromising. Even though they were consistently in the charts it’s a very particular way of writing, mixing and arranging. I don’t think I’ve heard anything like it before or since. I don’t neccesarily enjoy listening to it a lot of the time. It interests me though.

[see halfway down the interview here]

Found via the ever-awesome Voodoo Village.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“This conceptual video is a corporate collaborative research project
initiated by Bonnier R&D into the experience of reading magazines on
handheld digital devices. It illustrates one possible vision for
digital magazines in the near future, presented by our design partners
at BERG.”

via

[I could listen to that awesome accent all day..]

Of course we are challenging nature itself, and it hits back, it just hits back that’s all, and that’s grandiose about it, and we have to accept that it is much stronger than we are.
Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements, I don’t see it so much erotic, I see it more full of obscenity, it’s just… and nature here is violent and base – I wouldn’t see anything erotic[al] here, I would see fornication and asphixiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away.

Of course there is a lot of misery but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery and I don’t think they sing they just screech in pain.

It’s an unfinished country, it’s still pre-historical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape, and whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse – so we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It’s the only land where creation is unfinished [yet].

Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of a harmony; it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder . And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.

And… we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe, we have to get aquainted with this idea; there is no real harmony as we have concieved it.
But when I say this I say this full of all admiration for the jungle, it is not that I hate it, I love it; I love it very much – but I love it against my better judgement.

From another segment of ‘The Burden Of Dreams’:

It’s not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well, and the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about; it’s as simple as that. And I make films because I have not learned anything else, and I know I can do it to a certain degree, and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves otherwise we would be cows in the field.

A good article by Jessica Hopper here: ‘In Which Nature Is Lars Von Trier’s Satanic Church‘, where she puts Herzog’s comments into the context of what she sees as Lars Von Trier’s misogynist ‘Antichrist‘ [I haven't seen it - and not sure I really want to], and argues that here “nature = evil, nature = woman’s nature, women = naturally evil”.

There are lots of other examples of the same single perspective theme, often with circles, on his website.

This reminded me of a few other examples of this; firstly Esther Stocker, which I saw recently on But Does It Float:

And this video for Etienne De Crecy’s “Le patron est devenu fou!” from the excellent (and none more ‘French Touch’) album Super Discount:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And this, which is I think the first example of it I saw, from David Carson’s book 2nd sight:

02-06-10: just found another nice one:

from / via here.

22-11-10: and some more, from a photographer called Georges Rousse:

via here, here, here & here.

I loved this part of the BBC 4 documentary ‘How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin‘, where they described how they used to cut flexidiscs of Beatles music recorded from the radio onto old x-rays, then illicitly sell the ‘records on ribs’ on the black market.

See here (very badly recorded):
[See post to watch Flash video]

“me [Joseph Pelling] and Dan Britt made this, each frame was coloured in with pencils by hand. The audio is from The Shining.”

Awesome.

Via