Neil’s gear.
 
Neil Young appearing at last week’s Dive Into Media conference expressed his distaste for MP3’s in no uncertain terms.

Young, the perennial music purist, said that while modern music formats like MP3 are convenient, they sound lousy.

“My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years,” Young said. “We live in the digital age and, unfortunately, it’s degrading our music, not improving it.”

It’s not that digital is bad or inferior, it’s that the way it’s being used isn’t doing justice to the art,” Young said. “The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. … The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.”

Young proposed that fans stage a grassroots movement to demand higher-quality audio. “Occupy audio!” he urged.

Here’s Young talking about digital recording with The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka.
 

 
Noel Fielding’s new Luxury Comedy sees the Mighty Boosh’s “Vince Noir” going solo for a series of seven color-filled episodes on E4. Luxury Comedy is half-live action and half-animation. How can you not love something that makes overt references to Kennth Anger’s Lucifer Rising as well as Roy Wood within the first few seconds!?!?! (That’s a neat trick, I was duly impressed, Mr. Fielding.)

Fielding (playing “himself”) lives in a treehouse in a jungle, along with his band, a creature called “Smooth,” a German chick named Dolly and Andy Warhol.  Yes, THE Andy Warhol.  The music was co-written by Kasabian’s Sergio Pizzorno and Fielding.
 

 
Thank you Trey Lane!

 
Chris Marker‘s Bestiaire, three short video haiku:

Bestiaire 1. Chat écoutant la musique
Bestiaire 2. An owl is An owl is an owl
Bestiaire 3. Zoo Piece

Simple meditations that reveal a more intimate side to the enigmatic director, best known for La jetée (1962) (which later inspired Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys) and Sans Soleil (1983). Marker has said of his work:

‘The process of making films in communion with oneself, the way a painter works or a writer, need not now be solely experimental. Contrary to what people say, using the first-person in films tends to be a sign of humility: All I have to offer is myself.’

Now in his nineties, Marker the “mercurial international man of semiotic mystery” continues to work, details of which can be found here.
 

 
More animal haiku, plus bonus documentary, after the jump…
 

 
Pacific Glass Gallery designer “Mr. Gray” will be unveiling his latest glass pipes in the next few days, including this insanely intricate marijuana nugget puffer.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bowl quite this elaborate. I wonder if it’s difficult to clean?

It’s not listed on Pacific Glass Gallery‘s website yet, but if you’re interested, keep checking the website under “Mr. Gray.” (If you just can’t wait for this puppy to go up for sale, Illuzion Glass Galleries in Colorado has similar designs).
 

 
Via reddit

 
The latest 2-minute trash compactor from our friends at Everything is Terrible! This one is particularly… terrible, but, you know, in a good way!

For the next like four years or something the EIT gang will be criss-crossing America on their DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! traveling cinematic roadshow, featuring a screening of the aforementioned new film. DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! dares to pose the questions: “What if we make a movie composed ENTIRELY out of dog-related found footage?” and ‘‘What if this magickal movie, made up of thousands of other dog movies, is also a remake of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 masterpiece The Holy Mountain?” —and then answer them!

With our heroes, those gurus of found-footage viral videos back on the road again anything can happen, America.

Get a copy of the brand-new DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! DVD!

See the Everything is Terrible! roadshow in YOUR lousy town!
 

 
Whether you love or hate Michael Jackson, this painting of a young, innocent Michael holding a mask of his unrecognizable older visage speaks volumes. I don’t know who is responsible for it. If anyone knows, I’d love to credit the artist.

Update: “Boy Behind the Mask” is by Santa Cruz-based artist Sarah Weaver. Thanks, Siobhan Stofka!

 
The magus of American cinema turns 85 today. I had the good fortune to see Kenneth recently at his MOCA opening and he’s looking rather hale and hearty for a man his age, I must say.

Anger’s musical collaboration with Brian Butler, Technicolor Skull, has recently produced a limited edition blood red vinyl album available only at the Technicolor Skull website (I have one, it’s a cool looking object).

Below, Anger’s short film made for the 2010 fall/winter collection of the house of Missoni:
 

 
Usually their videos have millions of views on day one, but this one seems to have slipped out unnoticed, relatively speaking. There is also an OK Go color game at Sesame Street.com.

Directed by Al Jarnow, the animator responsible for the iconic “Cosmic Clock” short. This is his first new work for Sesame Street in over 25 years.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Cosmic Clock: The Passing of Time Visualized

Thank you Jesse Jarnow!

Production still from “Extracurricular Projective Reconstruction #35,” 2010

Sad news comes in twos today for the art world as the body of prominent LA-based artist Mike Kelley is found in his home by police. Details are scant, but some outlets are reporting the death as a likely suicide. Kelley was 57.

From the AP report:

Kelley was found at his home Tuesday and it appeared he had committed suicide, South Pasadena Police Sgt. Robert Bartl said, without providing further information on the artist’s death. An autopsy was pending.

“Kelley’s work in the 1980s was part of how one defined the Los Angeles arts scene. He had a remarkable ability to fuse distinction between fine and popular art in ways that managed to perturb our sense of decorum,” said Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

A family friend who was concerned about Kelley went to his home and called 911, Bartl said.

The friend told investigators that Kelley had been depressed because he had recently broken up with his girlfriend, but no note was found, Bartl said.

Mike Kelley is best-known for his punk rock-informed work which included large-scale installations and sculptures made from sewing ratty stuffed animals together. One of Kelley’s most famous images is on the cover of Sonic Youth’s Dirty album. He was also a founding member of influential Detroit avant garde rock group Destroy All Monsters in the 1970s.

Before his death, Kelley was in the process of putting together a show for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Mike Kelley’s work will be included in the upcoming 2012 Whitney Biennial out of New York.
 

 

 
This one pretty much speaks for itself. I really have… no words for this.

It’s as if the Las Faluas website just said “fuck it” and hired my 87-year-old grandmother as their designer .

Via PSD and Boing Boing

Birthday, a 1942 self-portrait

The great painter Dorothea Tanning died yesterday in her sleep at the age of 101. Tanning, who was married for thirty years to Surrealist Max Ernst, was herself part of a small cadre of female Surrealists (Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Lee Miller, Maya Deren, Remedios Varo, and Leonor Fini) judged by history to be as equally interesting as their male counterparts.

Jerry Saltz, writing about Tanning today on Vulture:

In her memoir, we hear how she and Ernst fell in love while playing chess, how the two of them lived in Arizona before moving to France, of their double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, of her friendships with Picasso, Breton, Magritte (“sweet”), Duchamp, Tanguy, Truman Capote (“a neat little package of dynamite”), Orson Welles (“scowler”), Joseph Cornell (“the courtly love of the 13th century troubadours”), and how she designed sets and costumes for the great George Balanchine. Noting how pleased she was that Ernst never called her “wife,” she observes, “He was very sorry about that wife thing. I’m very much against the arrangement of procreation, at least for humans. If I could have designed it, it would be a tossup who gets pregnant, the man or woman. Boy, that would end rape for one thing. And ‘woman artist’? Disgusting.” She writes about being alone on a bus in Chicago and deciding, with no plans or place to live, to go on to New York. There she “ate curry powder sandwiches, took Hindu dancing, read the ‘Bhagavad-Gita’ and Emily Dickinson, impartially.” In 1936 she saw the MoMA show “Fantastic, Dada, and Surrealism” and recalled that “here, here in the museum ... are signposts so imperious, so laden, so seductive, and yes, so perverse that … they would possess me utterly.”

Tanning’s memoir, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World was published in 2003.

Photo by Ana Bustilloz/LAist

Driving down La Brea Avenue in Hollywood the other day, I did a double-take when I spotted this amazing gleaming bust of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

What’s a massive chrome bust of the Bolshevik leader of the October Revolution doing chilling on one of LA’s premiere shopping strips catering to bourgeois hipsters who want to purchase expensive lamps, rugs and designer furniture, you ask?

“Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin’s Head” is by the Gao Brothers, Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, who have made quite a name for themselves by making controversial art focusing on the mixed legacies of some of world Communism’s historical figures.

From the LA Times:

Their specialty, however, is Mao. The Beijing artists have created works including a sculpture of the former chairman kneeling on the ground (and with a removable head), a series of torso sculptures of Mao sporting large female breasts, and another sculpture depicting Mao in a submissive sexual position.

One of their best-known works is a sculptural installation called “The Execution of Christ,” featuring the Messiah in front of a firing squad. One member of the firing squad is Mao.

Their work also verges into performance art. On their website, the artists report on one such performance in which they smashed one of their big-breasted Mao sculptures while wearing Mao masks.

This sculpture is really amazing. It’s presently sitting in front of the Ace Museum at the corner of La Brea and 4th Street.

 
I saw Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Play At Home Channel 4 television special when it originally aired in 1984, and as a rather enthusiastic aficionado of LSD at the time, it was immediately apparent to me that this trippy trip down the rabbit hole was a program made for acidheads, by acidheads. No other drugs could explain this one! I’d have to say that this was probably in the top five of the very oddest things I’d ever seen on network television at that point. I can’t imagine what “normal” people must’ve made of it at the time.

The Play At Home series offered four musical acts—New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, Virginia Astley and the Banshees, during the period that Robert Smith of The Cure was in the band—an hour of TV to do pretty much whatever they wanted. When they saw what the Banshees cooked up, I’m sure the execs were both thrilled and nervous (What happened to Channel 4 over the years???).

The Banshees’ Play At Home episode was finally released as a DVD extra on the reissue of the 1983 Nocturne concert film in 2006. Note inclusion of music from side-projects The Creatures and The Glove. Longtime Banshees producer Mike Hedges makes an appearance as the Queen of Hearts and Annie Hogan, once Marc Almond’s musical collaborator, can be seen as the Doormouse.

According to Slicing Up Eyeballs, Banshees bassist Steven Severin is preparing a 20 disc mega-box set including all eleven Siouxsie & the Banhsees albums and DVDs of vintage live performances. Twenty discs! Can’t wait.
 

 
For five years starting in 1994 Leonard Cohen lived at the Mount Baldy Zen Center 40 miles east of Los Angeles. There he studied with and assisted Zen Master Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. 

In the Spring of 1996, French artist Armelle Brusq filmed this documentary of Cohen going through his daily routine at Mt. Baldy.

Cohen’s cabin with his Technics KN 3000 synthesizer and computers are shown, and he sings his new song “A Thousand Kisses Deep.” He also recites three unpublished poems, two telling about Roshi (one titled Roshi at 89). The third was titled “Too Old.”

The camera also visits the office of Stranger Management: Cohen demonstrates his archives (lots of boxes full of notebooks, he shows a poster of his first book Let Us Compare Mythologies and a painting made by Suzanne, the mother of his children). Later a studio session is going on, he is working with Raffi Hakopian (violin) and Leanne Ungar (his sound engineer). Afterwards Cohen and Brusq dine at Canter’s.

In this documentary Cohen tells about his life, his memories, why he lives at the Zen Center. He suggests that some kind of a circle has been closed and now he can do something else.

Cohen will release his 12th studio album, Old Ideas, tomorrow. Its current rank on Amazon is #1. Clearly, Cohen’s second coming is just a continuation of a long and venerable path by one of music’s wisest elders.
 

 
Ossie Clark was a master cutter, who could run his hands over a figure and cut a dress to fit perfectly. He liked his dresses to lie next to the skin, nothing in between, capturing the wearer’s form, beauty and shape. Clark’s inspiration was dance, his idol was Nijinsky, and the movement, flow, and freedom of dance inspired his clothes to enhance the female form. At the height of his success, in the early 1970s, his clothes were worn by some of the world’s most beautiful women - Ali MacGraw, Patti Boyd, Gala Mitchell, Twiggy and Elizabeth Taylor. His leather jackets were worn by Keith Richard, while he designed a jump suit for Mick Jagger to wear during The Stones Exile in Main Street Tour. His favorite model, the beautiful Gala Mitchell said in 1971:

“Usually I lack confidence, but when I wear Ossie’s designs I know I’m beautiful and sexy. His clothes are like a play. I act to suit the mood of the dress. Fashion now is very sophisticated - as always Ossie had that feeling first.”

The magic of Clark’s fashion was the cut, the shape, the heart-tugging style, and the beautiful prints designed by wife Celia Birtwell. Together, Ossie and Celia brought a fabulous, ethereal beauty to fashion in the late 1960s, early 1970s, which has often been copied, but rarely equalled.

Here’s a small selection of Ossie and Celia’s fashions from German TV, circa 1969. Painting above David Hockney’s Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1971).
 

 
More of the Clark’s beautiful fashions, after the jump…
 

 
Fans of Japanese graphic design, rejoice: René Walter, of Germany’s Nerdcore website, has amassed an amazing collection of vintage Japanese advertisements on Flickr. He’s certainly found a lot gems.

Here’s a taste of René‘s Vintage Japanese Advertising (Misc).
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Alice Cooper performs “Black Juju” during the Midsummer Rock Festival on June 13, 1970 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Cooper claims Pink Floyd as an early influence on his music and it certainly can be seen in this video, which has never been officially released on VHS or DVD.

At the 4 minute mark watch as Cooper gets hit by an upside-down pineapple cake.
 

 
A rather rotund rendition of Tony the Tiger by Ron English. Inspired by his cereal box hack, Fat Tony will be making appearances at local toy stores soon. You can pre-order one at Big Bad Toy Store.

Fat Tony will be sold in limited quantities.
 

 
Via Laughing Squid

 
Leonard Cohen’s new album Old Ideas is being released next Tuesday. The critical reception has been ecstatic. Which thrills me because I have loved Cohen from the moment I heard “Suzanne” when I was 15 years old. He’s been a massive influence on my own music. My debt to him is deep.

Here’s something to hold you Cohen fans over until Old Ideas release: a brilliant performance by Mr. Cohen on Austin City Limits from 1988.
 

 
Here’s something quite lovely, a tour inside of Salvador Dali’s Spanish home.

Open Culture provides some history and description:

Along the Costa Brava in northern Spain, in the little seaside village of Port Lligat, sits the house that became Salvador Dalí’s main residence in 1930. It started off as a small fisherman’s hut. Then Dalí went to work on the structure, renovating it little by little over the next 40 years, creating a living, breathing, labyrinthine home that reflects the artist’s one-of-a-kind aesthetic. Writing about the house, the author Joseph Pla once said:

  The decoration of the house is surprising, extraordinary. Perhaps the most exact adjective would be: never-before-seen. I do not believe that there is anything like it, in this country or in any other…. Dalí’s house is completely unexpected…. It contains nothing more than memories, obsessions. The fixed ideas of its owners. There is nothing traditional, nor inherited, nor repeated, nor copied here. All is indecipherable personal mythology…. There are art works (by the painter), Russian things (of Mrs. Gala), stuffed animals, staircases of geological walls going up and down, books (strange for such people), the commonplace and the refined, etc.

For many, it’s a long trip to Portlligat, and only eight people can visit the house at a time. So today we’re featuring a video tour of Dalí’s Spanish home. The interior shots begin around the 1:30 mark. If you love taxidermy, you won’t be wasting your time.

Nicely photographed. But I find the music a bit distracting.