Required reading

Further proof that Saul Bass' PHASE IV is the best movie ever, here.

THE S FROM HELL

THE S FROM HELL is a fantastic short I recently saw at the BAM Film Fest comprised of disturbed phone interviews with the childhood victims of a post-cartoons corporate logo. Right? Remember all those? "Sit, Ubu, sit! Good dog." Check out the fantastic website created for the movie with links to a variety of spooky brands and logos.

Let them eat brands

Interesting bit about some branding statistics. Also, interesting to consider some glasses cost between $100 and $200...much less $600 and above.

Lost Sounds and Soundtracks: THE DUELLISTS

How do you pull off an historical epic film in just over an hour and a half? Ridley Scott did so in his 1977 Cannes-honored The Duellists working from screenwriter Gerald Vaughan-Hughes' adaptation of a Joseph Conrad short that deftly dashes across 58 scenes spanning 6 discreet epochs inside 16 years, all within a 96 minute movie (not counting credits). Call it "The Mini-Epic."

Full article with five great stream-able tracks here!

Lost Sounds and Soundtracks: HEAT

The precisely hodge-podged sources for Michael Mann's musical cues—sometimes original compositions, sometimes culled from pre-existing pop, rock, industrial, and/or electronic groups—are as diverse as the dusty Los Angeles turfs he agilely vignettes in his consummate epic crime male-odrama Heat.

Check out the full article with tracks here.

Spacerock Score of the Day: Loop's John Peel Sessions-WOLF FLOW

Great music. Great palindrome. Linked here.

Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and THE IDIOT

Great blog about the recording of THE IDIOT here.

SHUTTER ISLAND's most interesting second of film

Unfortunately, that's only 1/496,800th of the otherwise overlong runtime.

The Art of Victorian Photocollage

...in the exhibit PLAYING WITH PICTURES currently at the Met. Loved this and am inspired to do my own, and just really think everyone should go see it.

Post-mortem retinal images

A lot of articles that look to be worth reading over at Bill Jay's website, but of note on page one of the essays, IMAGES IN THE EYES OF THE DEAD, a comprehensive study of the historically misinformed notion that the final image before death is captured on the retina.

File in the "Extremely disappointing that this phenomenon isn't real" category right next to this debunking of archeoacoustics/paleoacoustics being recorded upon the pottery of antiquity. Well, crap.

However, retinal photography for strictly medical purposes remains a valid field, yielding some incredible images.

The screwed up sounds of THE SINFUL DWARF

"Won't it be funny to see a Danish movie titled The Sinful Dwarf? In a theater?" my friends and I mused, sallying forth towards a midnight screening at the original Alamo Drafthouse.

Well, it wasn't funny. It was really messed up, actually...

Find out what happens here!

Watch the skies!!!

Paul Davies, collaborator with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has just published a book I really want to get, THE EERIE SILENCE: RENEWING OUR SEARCH FOR ALIEN INTELLIGENCE.

Perhaps in reaction, Stephen Hawking has made a public statement about his concerns for attempted contact with extraterrestrials.

Is it too late? Have we already put the last nail in the coffin with the Voyager Golden Record launched in 1977? Check out it's awesome content on this fantastic site devoted to it.

Philip K. Dick EXEGESIS to be published: About Fucking Time

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/books/30author.html?hpw

Now I don't have to figure out how to initiate a publication of it myself, something I was contemplating a strategy for as recently as yesterday while looking through the VINTAGE PKD publications short section of 2 letters to VALIS editor Mark Hurst. Of note, that the protagonist--a fellow named Huston Paige pre-dating Horselover Fat--in the original draft transforms at book's end into a ventriloquist's dummy!!!! (awesomely terrifying TWILIGHT ZONE twist-esque and dropped from the final publication totally), and the following tantalizing quote: "The cooperation of discrete objects: a possible clue to high-order mimicry?" Reminiscent of Jung's SYNCHRONICITY.

However, I can always still edit an annotated VALIS. Maybe on the web, elaborating upon this online version of the entire book.

"Commonalities between western and native science"

"Cosmic Serpent is a Collaborative project led by Indigenous Education Institute and UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. Cosmic Serpent is funded by the National Science Foundation under grants No.DRL-0714631 and DRL-0714629." Awesome.

Kerry Tribe's H.M.

Kerry Tribe's H.M. is an amazing 16mm film installation described by my buddy as "projectionist porn" due to the incredibly rickety and complex contraption rigged to run a single strip of film between two projectors at a 20-second delay (the duration of memory left within the titular subject's perception after his experimental 1953 brain surgery resulted in unexpected damage) while a single fixed soundtrack is mixed to sync up alternately with one side or the other of the resultant split-screen, echoingly staggered, pseudo-documentary images...all the means to the end of creating a formally imitative examination of memory, brain lateralization, aging, neuro-plasticity, and the impermanence of consciousness and identity.

Wafaa Bilal

Caught a talk this week by Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal, and was fascinated by his incredibly committed and at the very least literally uncomfortable performances (SHOOT AN IRAQI and ...AND COUNTING) and other video-gaming inspired pieces (VIRTUAL JIHADI, presented with great difficulty and eventual/inevitable censorship in Troy, NY, and scourge of the RPI College Republicans organization, per their blog). Bilal's evening of discussion was presented as part of the ongoing series "You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago" organized by Arturo Vidich of Culture Push which also did a fantastic evening of workshops as part of The Whitney Biennial two Fridays ago where I observed how to properly suture a pig's trotter, how to cut a single bagel into a linked chain, and how to make ravioli from scratch.

Score of the day: Vangelis THE DRAGON

Album of great long-form jams by Vangelis recorded shortly after the break-up of Aphrodite's Child with a pick-up studio crew organized by master prog-rock mover-and-shaker Giorgio Gomelsky (Magma and Gong) and then released without Vangelis' approval alongside HYPOTHESIS, an album of material culled from the same sessions and very similar but for a misguided sci-fi themed cover that pales in comparison to this amazing image of a Lovecraftian nightmare emerging from the seething ocean. Check it out. It includes an Aphrodite's Child cut only recently unearthed a few years ago on one single compilation.

Info about a different incarnation here.

My initial search today into Vangelis-related blog-posts turned up this amazing entry that purports the numerological relevance of a bunch of arbitrary, random digits on Vangelis' final release with Aphrodite's Child, 666. Turns out it was an Illuminati conspiracy the whole time.

Further fascinating numerological malarkey per Kubrick's THE SHINING here and a few days earlier by the same fellow here.

I'd hate to have to be the one to explain to him how PAL conversion rates and the 25-minute-shorter UK cut would radically change all of these research findings...

Score of the Day: Virgin Prunes' A NEW FORM OF BEAUTY

I learned about Gavin Friday through the soundtrack to IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER on which he does a fantastic, raspy duet with Bono for the title track. Always kind of wondered how and where he fit in alongside U2 in the grand scheme of things till stumbling on the Trouser Press Guide and hearing about Virgin Prunes. A stint at a radio station with a well stocked collection of vinyl provided a little research, and from what I've been able to listen to, here's their most fascinating material: A NEW FORM OF BEAUTY, released over 4 EPs and/or cassettes.

Will the real Michael Moorcock please step forward

Always nice to see an author participate in the ongoing promotion of his works...in the Amazon review section.

Mars, Antarctica provide inspriation for Brooklyn rooftop gardens

...I can't say it any better than the headline. So check it out.