Chicago Screenshots
Chicago Screenshots is a (slowly growing) collection of Chicago-centric movie and television stills, presented as architectural and urban landscape photography.
Films sans subtitles
My friend Charlie is now living in Buenos Aires in a house full of folks from all over the world, and among them is Lauren Stephenson, whom some of you may know. The other night Charlie and Lauren went to the movies. Their command of Spanish was not up to the task of following the film as its makers intended, and Charlie reflected on the experience of watching a talkie without a solid grasp on the words the characters spoke.
There were a lot of solitary and broody fishermen in boats and seaside bars. And one mouthy whore. There was a girl thrown into the mix, but her character stared vacantly into the distance so often that I wondered what she was looking at. Was she psychic? Did she make that guy have a heart attack just by squinting through the window? What was she looking for in the distance anyway? Did she like to find beavers in clouds? Again, not sure.
I really shouldn’t post this . . .
You might actually look at it, and that will be bad. Worse, posting may generate more attention and more traffic. But I’m thinking that maybe Christmas light-lookers aren’t hanging out here with us.
This is the spectacle that nearly blinded us as we turned onto the block for Pam’s and Jam’s Christmas Eve party.
They’ve been living near this since Thanksgiving.
I am thinking they would rather have Carole for their neighbor.
Charles Coleman, the celluloid adventurist
Coleman, 47, is film programmer for Facets Multimedia.
One thing being lost is the art of conversation, of people seeing a movie and then actually having a good talk afterwards. — As told to J.R. Jones.
Man, does this put me in mind of my friend Charlie’s thoughts re: the “hidden cinema” he frequents in Buenos Aires.
Funk songs from Vietnam GIs
If you didn’t get a Christmas present from me, it’s because I’m waiting till the New Year to buy you East of Underground: Hell Below. (Thanks to Valerie for the tip.)
In 1971 the US was pulling troops out of Vietnam, and its bases in Germany were full of draftees at a loose end. “You were painting shovels, picking up cigarette butts – it was a lot of busy-work,” remembers former serviceman Lewis Hitt. “There was a longing by everyone, especially the draftees, to get home and go back to what you were doing before.”
This was the crucible in which were formed scores of raucous funk bands made up of servicemen, four of which have just been compiled by Now-Again Records. Adoring crowd noise was crudely dubbed on top of their records, which were then distributed in recruitment centres. These bands were used by the army to present service as varied, even hip. But the songs they cover – the bitter, suspicious likes of Backstabbers and Smiling Faces Sometimes – undermine any potential propagandising.
12 Indicted On Hate Crimes Charges For Hair Cutting Assaults Led By Break-Off Amish Group
I think this is my favorite story of 2011.
I am posting this post
because to now I have posted 1964 posts. So this will be 1965. And that was a beautiful year. I was just old enough to know that I wanted to be a grown-up woman. In 1965.
At least one of those grown-up women in the movies. Or to have a hit record.
Damar, Mon Amour (out of context)
In context: Starlingo ii.
Damar torn from the flock.
What is Damar? Who is Damar? What is Damar?
Art Institute adds Warhol’s ‘Empire’ to Chicago skyline
From 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. [Friday, December 9], the modern skyscraper [the Aon Center] overlooking Millennium Park will be acting as a movie screen onto which the Art Institute of Chicago will be projecting Andy Warhol’s eight-hour silent, black-and-white epic “Empire,” which consists of one long, unbroken shot of New York’s Empire State Building. Said to be the first outdoor U.S. screening of this landmark — if not exactly action-packed — film, the event marks the very public, logistically challenging kickoff to the Art Institute’s new exhibition Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977, which opens to members Saturday and to the public Tuesday.
Wil Freeborn’s Drawings Mapped
Our Wil is working on a new book of drawings that will include a map, and he’s been using Google Maps to create a place for his drawings.
Viva la Sauna Svedese (Mah Nà Mah Nà)
Ponder this if and when you view The Muppets.
A History of the Sky
A time-lapse study of the sky for a year. By Ken Murphy.
A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds for a year.
[A History of the Sky] is a mosaic of 360 time-lapse movies, each showing [a] single day. They are arranged chronologically, and are synchronized by time-of-day, beginning before sunrise.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo.)
Red trousers!
So I’ve been, like, trying to get some work done today, but I keep drifting off to look at all the fucking red trousers on the Look at my fucking red trousers! blog.
(Thank you, clusterflock friend @peteashton.)
What a lovely way to burn
Miss Peggy Lee. “Fever.” 1958.
(Courtesy of Tom Sale, the Texas artist a/k/a Pinky Diablo.)
quote out of context
Using Einstein’s E=mc² formula, which states that energy and mass are directly related, Prof Kubiatowicz calculated that filling a 4GB Kindle to its storage limit would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram, or 0.000000000000000001g.
The world of the heterosexual
Commentary courtesy of Aunt Ida (Edith Massey), “Female Trouble” (John Waters).
Peely
From the old blog of clusterflock friend Pete Ashton, his post in the aftermath of John Peel’s death seven years ago today:
In fact I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s not really about the music. The music is a conduit for something else, something quite intangible which I think comes down to that fucked up sense of juxtaposition he imposed on us. He made having an open mind cool, which is saying something when you think about it. Once you’d accepted that you could listen to every form of every form of music and appreciate it on its own merits then you could apply this to everything else in life. Any form of creative endeavour is worthwhile. The fact that someone, anyone, is doing something different and interesting becomes vital.
Clark
That is all.
You’re built like a car (You got a hubcap diamond-star halo)
Europeans have all the fun: lower drinking ages, funner beaches, easier lifestyles and . . . dinosaur skeletons having sex in their museums. This exhibit, which clearly shows two T-Rexes “mating”, is located in the Jurassic Museum of Asturias in Spain.
Via @leatherarchives.
from the moderated comments
Well, Fuck me… your still as stupid as before.
(Im)possible Chicagos is a series of hallucinatory joyrides through one hundred and twenty five asynchronous Chicagos.
Alexander Trevi‘s first joyride through (Im)possible Chicago traversed Acer Necropolis.
Trevi recently completed his nineteenth, wherein:
At night when you’re out driving, you can tell which neighborhood you’re in by the light of the streetlamps, because each ward basks in its own different hue. For instance, if the streets are all aglow in azurite, you’re definitely joy riding around Marquette Park.
Zoning codes require that windows are tinted according to the neighborhood’s chromatic identity, so no matter how the interiors are lighted, houses, skyscrapers and 7-Elevens do not give off wayward wavelengths.
Even your car lights beam out the same color. But when you cross over into another ward, they instantaneously switch filter to match that ward’s assigned spectrum.
Wading birds
Pa’ Cindita, who grieves and delights in the sad and beautiful aspects of dead birds.
Artifice and foam rubber
In fact, so much artifice and foam rubber is often used to create the sexually alluring woman that it’s sometimes difficult to know where the lady ends and the foam rubber begins.
Via dangerous minds by way of Roger Ebert.
Tat Musing
“O, lady on bus, I think one day you will regret your cupcake tattoo.”
My friend Alison. Musing en route home.
I told Alison I’d thought long and hard before I got my own tat back in the wayback days.
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Las Reinas Chulas: “Que Suave Patria”
Please don’t turn aside take a look even if no hablas español (not even dumbass texan spanish).
¡Las Reinas Chulas reglan!
Dozens of plastic foam heads rain onto the stage. Four drug traffickers in fringed jackets and sparkly pink cowboy hats bat them into the audience with toy AK-47s. All the while, the cast croons, “Let them slit our throats, let them pack us up . . . let them not ask any questions, let them not investigate.”
This is cabaret, Mexico style. Las Reinas Chulas, or the Beautiful Queens, parody drug violence in a show the women first produced in 2005 and that still fills nightclubs around Mexico, including a performance in the tourist town of Taxco this weekend.
