Open up your ears and clean out your eyes

Music video addicts, meet your new crack. WFMU alerted me to the existence of this ILX thread linking to about a metric gazillion rare/underground music videos on YouTube. (YouTube's previous claim to fame was being the world's number one place to watch bored teenagers crack fart jokes and injure each other without the multiple horrors of interacting with actual bored teenagers.)

Thrill! to quasi-blues wierdnik Captain Beefheart on some circa-1966 Dick Clark Beach Hullabaloo show!

Spill! to Iggy and the Stooges' proto-punk/free-jazz mashup, with helpful play-by-play during Iggy's crowd-surfing antics! ("That looks like peanut butter, folks!")

Chill! to the Miles Davis quintet doing "So What"--but remember, you're never gonna out-cool Miles. Not when John Coltrane whips out the sax. You'll be thinking bluelight revelations from an elder god, Miles was thinking "Smoke break!"

Hang around the arcade and Mill! about to Rush's spot-on evocation of '80s suburban teen angst, ennui and maybe even some emotions that have names in English, Subdivisions.

All of which might drive you to take a Pill! to the trippy backdrop of Yo La Tengo, Spacemen 3 and, er, whatever the hell this thing is. (Remember, kids, song titles and band names are good, unpronounceable jumbles of punctuation not so good.)

You might wanna avoid the drugs, though. Otherwise you're gonna wind up killing your neighbours over a dandelion, or worse yet sharing an awkward cab-ride with John Lennon and Bob Dylan. Don'r say I didn't warn you.

Put the needle on the record, and the drumbeats go like this

Most people see the teeming, unsorted pile of LPs at the back of every thrift store and garage sale in the world as something to be avoided.

A tiny few see it as a chance to score some classic rock n' roll for pocket change, or as a potential source of that one killer breakbeat sample no other DJ on Earth will know about.

Vinyl Odditites, on the other hand, sees a comedy goldmine.

On Disco Tex and his Sex-O-Lettes' self-titled LP:

AN LP FROM the only time in human history when you could dress like Truman Capote and, with the addition of some gold jewelry, look like a pimp.

On psychiatrist Dr. Murray Banks' comedy album:

HOW WE PINE for the days when neuroses were cute. During the Fifties and Sixties, comedians mined their petty ticks and anxieties for a comedy motherload. Where you a nervous, stammering Jew with a persecution complex and a problem with women? You were Woody Allen! Were you a milquetoast, overly deferential nobody terrified of authority? You were Bob Newhart!

Pixel pushin'

Playing around with photochopping some cars using the Gimp. Neat details about this one: Chrome grille and headlights using Alien Color Map (they were body colour on the original pic), metalflake paint using one of the noise generation tools and some creative airbrushing and transparency hacks.

Oh yeah, and it was beige originally, on ugly '80s wheels.

(Car is a '47 Chevy Fleetline, original pic is I think from Carnut.)

The rain in Svensh0lm falls mainly on the plain

Swedish flatpack furniture + post-Eliza AI = The IKEA dialogues. Hilarity ensues. [via a whole lotta nothing]

I'm leaving on a jet plane...

Off to Vancouver for a week. Expect posts here to be even more sporadic than usual.

Bettie Page has a posse

Playing around with the Wacom and Inkscape vector drawing software. I'm kinda diggin' high contrast black & white right now.

You can't do that on stagerecord store shelves anymore

"You've got a naked woman on all fours, wearing a dog collar, with a man's hand pushing a black glove into her face, forcing her to sniff it? You don't find that offensive? You don't find that sexist?"
"What's wrong with being sexy?"

52 banned album covers. [via vidiot]

(also, on a completely unrelated tip, why the f. is the track listing wrong on the new Kanye West? Seriously, record labels of the world, if we wanted bad metadata and virus infections, we could get that for free.)