Discover Magazine reports on a new military-grade Taser which has a 200-foot range and has raised concerns about lethality. As opposed to what, um, guns and all that OTHER stuff the military uses? Hey, I just hope mall cops don’t end up with them…
If you?
This image, found via Ectoplasmosis, should properly excite the Masonic conspirators over at Boing Boing.
New work from Jeff Koons will be on display at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills from Nov. 14 through Jan. 9, 2010. The gallery?
If you call yourself a music fan and you’ve not taken a pilgrimage over to Wolfgang’s Vault, then make a move, stat, hippie! The sprawling website is a veritable treasure trove of classic rock concerts, many from the archive of the late, great San Francisco-based concert impresario Bill Graham (real name: Wolfgang Grajonca). It’s the Ft. Knox of live music.
Graham began recording rock shows at his Winterland, Fillmore West and Filmore East show palaces and stored the tapes in the basement of his Bill Graham Presents offices. These 2,500 hours formed the basis of the Vault’s collection, but the archives of the “King Biscuit Flower Hour” radio show, the Dawson Sound collection, the Ash Grove (a L.A. 60s folk club, now known as the Improv) archive, the Newport Jazz archives and tapes from the Record Plant have been added in recent years. Meticulous restoration work is done on the well-preserved, but aging, material by an army of recording engineers who will even resort to slow baking the tapes for several days so they can be played just one time and captured digitally.
From the acid rock of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix on to the punkier sounds of the Sex Pistols, the Clash and beyond (‘80s New Wave groups like Culture Club, Duran Duran and ABC are represented too), much of the 3,500 concerts on Wolfgang’s Vault stream free for members (it costs nothing to sign up, but you do have to register to listen) and the audio quality is top-notch. Additionally Wolgang’s Vault boasts a streaming radio station and an online store with what is probably the single best source of rock and roll memorabilia on the Internet. New concerts are added weekly. There’s even a Wolfgang’s Vault iPhone app for listening to concerts on the go, which was named the best app of 2009 by Macworld.
Cross posting this from Brand X
Or so says Australian psychologist, Joe Forgas, who seems to think a case of the “grumps” can, in fact, make us think more clearly. The University of New South Wales researcher says grumpy people, rather than happy types, are better at coping with demanding situations because of the way the brain “promotes information processing strategies.”
He asked volunteers to watch different films and dwell on positive or negative events in their life, designed to put them in either a good or bad mood. Next he asked them to take part in a series of tasks, including judging the truth of urban myths and providing eyewitness accounts of events. Those in a bad mood outperformed those who were jolly—they made fewer mistakes and were better communicators.
Professor Forgas said: ‘Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world.’
Bonus: Grumpy, Yet Clear-Thinking, Max Von Sydow In Hannah And Her Sisters
BBC News: Feeling Grumpy Is Good For You
Beautiful in a ?
If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats has a sweet collection of images titled, “Artists and Animals.” It’s worth a click!
UPI says,
Italian scientists say CAT scans have helped them uncover an “inner statue” under one of the world’s best-known faces, the bust of Queen Nefertiti of Egypt.
The bust, about 3,400 years old, was discovered in 1912 by German archaeologists in what had been the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose. It is now in the Neues Museum in Berlin.
Franco Crevatin , an ethnologist at Trieste University, and Stefano Anselmo, an expert in the history of cosmetics, have created a computer-generated image they believe is closer to Nefertiti’s actual face than the one shown in the finished statue. Their findings were published this month in Focus Storia, a history journal.
The researchers added skin color to the image picked up by CAT scans and studied surviving Egyptian portraits of Nefertiti’s relatives. Their image makes the queen’s nose somewhat less perfect and adds laugh lines around her mouth. The cheekbones are less dramatic and the eyes shallower.
We haven’t had a Stones related post in days now, time to remedy that with this fantastic live (not lip-sync) performance of Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Keith Richards describes who inspired the songs cryptic lyrics
Jack Dyer, who was my gardener, an old English yokel. I once said, ‘ave you ever been to town? Town, to an Englishman, means London, right? He says, Oh Yea, I was up there when war finished. That cathedral’s something. He meant Chichester, the local big town, seven miles away…We’d been up all night and it was in the morning. Suddenly this sound of boots went by the window, clump clump clump and woke Mick up, What was that?! I looked out, that’s Jack, that’s jumpin’ Jack. Well he’s leaping about a bit. Yeah, I said, it’s “jumpin’ Jack” and then “flash” came and suddenly we were wide awake and we started to work, you know. You never know when they’re going to come.
Jonesborough resident Jim Stevens admits he?
Although most American?
Some provocative pictorial context for the swine flu, via InformationIsBeautiful (click here for a larger, more illuminating image). Given that far higher spike on the left for cardiovascular disease, rather than line up for a flu shot, looks like you’ll ultimately fare far better by putting aside the Chunky Monkey. Possibly even more revealing? Death-by-swine flu these last 300 days ran neck and neck with death-by-leprosy.
Check out this (full-length, linked below) BBC Four documentary about Krautrock. The BBC says:
Documentary which looks at how a radical generation of musicians created a new German musical identity out of the cultural ruins of war. Between 1968 and 1977 bands like Neu!, Can, Faust and Kraftwerk would look beyond western rock and roll to create some of the most original and uncompromising music ever heard. They shared one common goal - a forward-looking desire to transcend Germany’s gruesome past - but that didn’t stop the music press in war-obsessed Britain from calling them Krautrock.
Note the first: You are not into Krautrock unless you have heard Deluxe
Note the second: You are not into Krautrock unless you have read Krautrocksampler
Note the third: You are not into Krautrock unless you ARE Julian Cope.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the passing of poet Lenore Kandel, a SF beat and anarchist who provoked censorship furor with her graphic poetry compilation The Love Book
Lenore Kandel hung out with Beat poets and was immortalized by Jack Kerouac, wrote a book of love poetry banned as obscene and seized by police, and believed in communal living, anarchic street theater, belly dancing, and all things beautiful.
Ms. Kandel, a lyric poet and one of the shining lights of San Francisco’s famous counterculture of the ‘60s, died on Oct. 18 in San Francisco. She was 77 and had been diagnosed with lung cancer two weeks earlier.
“I met Lenore in 1965 at a citywide meeting of artists opposed to the war in Vietnam,” said actor Peter Coyote. “Lenore was physically beautiful and physically commanding. She had this voluptuous plumpness about her and an absolute serenity.”
Via Copyranter:
Pretty scary Ad Creepage currently up in Rio de Janeiro for the Mayan calendar Apocalypse flick, (I hope Woody Harrelson bites it hard) opening here in the States on Friday the 13th, of course. First off, when the Evil Doers next blow up and flood an underground tunnel somewhere in the world, my bet is, that ‘somewhere’ will be ‘here.’ Secondly, our tunnels already leak just fine, thx.
Last night I almost hit a bus crossing in front of me with a giant 2012 sign on the side. Doesn’t get much funnier than that.
Aaaaand OK, I might as well throw in my 2 cents about this one since it’s a hot topic: 2012 is a transition and demarcation point past which our culture will hit a certain no-return-point in shifting towards spirit and away from matter (read, on one level, as: life becoming almost completely Internet-mediated, while economy and physical infrastructure continues to fall apart by dint of being less exciting than Twitter). It is NOT the end of the world and one of the more productive things to think about around the whole issue is why, exactly, people are so addicted to apocalyptic thinking (as Alan Moore pointed out somewhere?
Pastor Eddie D. Smith Sr. explains the use of the Hindu term Namaste to his congregation. Right on!
Reverend Billy, an anti-capitalist activist turned anti-capitalist preacher, is a pillar of the New York (and American) activist community. A Coney Island resident, Reverend Billy leads a one-man crusade against consumerism. He even officially wedded a couple I know. Check out this excellent, in-depth interview with the Rev. Billy at Coilhouse:
Q: Where, when and why did you first become politically active?
A: We were always political, the Church of Stop Shopping, which became the Church of Life After Shopping during the recession. I was complaining to the choir that I was screaming ?
Sheldon Dorf, the co-founder of the San Diego Comic Convention, has died. NPR reports:
As The San Diego Union-Tribune says, “Dick Tracy, Charlie Brown and the entire comic strip pantheon lost a friend” this week.
Sheldon Dorf, who founded the hugely successful Comic-Con International comic book convention, died Tuesday at the age of 76. A friend, Greg Koudoulian, tells the Associated Press that Dorf succumbed to kidney failure. The wire service adds that Dorf “had diabetes and had been hospitalized for about a year.”
NPR’s Ina Jaffe reminds us that Dorf founded the convention in 1970. The four-day event, which pulls in about 125,000 people, is held in San Diego each year. The next is scheduled for July 22-25, 2010.
Dorf ran Comic-Con for 15 years. He told the Union-Tribune that over time, “it’s just become an ordeal. ... It’s become too much of a success.”
Having attended the San Diego Comic Con
Today’s NYT shines some light on a new print campaign created for the Boulder-based Hapa Sushi chain. Hoping to lure customers to Hapa, a map was created which shows the area’s 59 medical marijuana dispensaries (blue dots) and their close proximity to the 4 Hapa outlets (red dots).
As Hapa owner Mark Van Grack told the Times, ?
“I could seduce the President of the United States…but I have no political ambition.” For you LA connoisseurs of obscure ‘70s gems, get thee tonight to the Egyptian Theatre! For the first time in 38-plus years, Nelson Lyon’s The Telephone Book will be playing its first big screen engagement.
Much like ‘69’s Midnight Cowboy, The Telephone Book was branded in ‘71 with an “X,” but now probably plays as no more risque than an episode of Sex Rehab With Dr. Drew. What a cast, though: everyone from Warhol superstar Ultra Violet, to character actor’s character actor, the great William Hickey.
The film presumably involves a woman (Sarah Kennedy) who falls in love with the world’s greatest obscene telephone operator. Here’s what the excellent resource VideoUpdates has to say about it:
The opening quickly establishes a style and mood somewhere between Soviet Montage and a 16mm student film. While its (literally) X-rated nudity and frank discussion of sexuality are hardly shocking in the 21st century, the offbeat humor and profound strangeness seem amplified by the decades. Beyond that, there seems to be a very intelligent undercurrent to the madcap randomness.
Regarding writer-director Lyon, not much comes up on him beyond a brief, early writing stint on SNL, but he was also one of the people doing coke with John Belushi on his last night on earth. He’ll be in attendance tonight (Lyon, not Belushi), so maybe not bring that up during the Q & A? A trailer and clip from The Telephone Book follow below.