Adam Curtis, It Felt Like a Kiss
Sheila suggested I check out documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis’s found footage montage, It Felt Like a Kiss. A collaboration between Curtis and improvised theater company Punchdrunk, I’m not quite sure what the immersive experience would have been like, but I have rounded up the various pieces of it available on YouTube, and if you are interested — you’ll only need to watch a few minutes to know if it’s right for you — you can take a look.
Here is what the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker had to say:
One particular segment, set to River Deep, Mountain High, feels like being repeatedly stung on the mind by a hallucinogenic jellyfish while inhaling huge clouds of history through a pipe. The marriage of Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Curtis’s wall of images is so perfect, so strange and striking, it jangled around my head for hours afterward. And I only saw it in a tiny window on an Apple Mac, in a corner of Curtis’s tape-strewn “lair” at BBC Television Centre. God knows what it’ll be like on a big screen as part of a live-action, funhouse-style experience. It’ll probably kill people.
higgledy-piggledy, 1
His particleboard furniture looks like it was salvaged from a rural roadside free pile; a power strip is bolted arbitrarily to the wall; wires are strung higgledy-piggledy as if by an adolescent hobbyist; and this former heir to a multimillion Saudi fortune gets relegated to watching standard def video on a TV you couldn’t get $5 for on Craigslist. It seems only a matter of time before we’re told they found porn on his computer.
What I saw when I went to make coffee this morning
wanted misc garbage (my treasure items)
kids
wagon tonka
toys funnels clay
pots
concrete statues chandelier (or
chandelier parts) clear
glass plates metal pipes
mailboxes
twigs large plastic spice
containers
lattice tea
cups with saucers bottles
different shapes and sizes extra
large metal cans license
plates
coffee
containers
scrap wood door knobs/handles (any kind)
old pool liners (can not have holes in the bottom)
like the kind with the blow up ring at the top
the ring can have holes
just not the bottom
bird
baths wind
chimes metal trash
can
lids marbles
shed storm
doors sliding
glass
doors will pick up in a central location (like at walmart or krogers)
unless you have a lot of item
Marzipan Babies
via Pat Castaldo
Update: Totally fake.
I don’t remember where I found this
headline of the day, II
54 Bags of Heroin, Pills & Loose Change Found in Woman’s Vagina
twitter? (I hardly know her)
from the archives: March 18, 2010
Damn, this was fine.
Like you’d expect, it started out good and the comments made it all more betterer.
searching for the house of Ruben Bustes
Daryl, Sheila and I saw something today we think is the setting for a story. Driving through an old Oak Cliff neighborhood, looking for the house of Ruben Bustes (that’s a story in itself), we came across a one story ranch on a corner lot. The back was fenced with low chain link fortified inside with cactus. Inside the yard was another fence, also fortified with cactus, that housed a small dog house. I think that’s all we’ve got. Please tell us what it means.
Lost and Found
For some reason, I can’t find the original post, but remember the roll of film that was lost in Prospect Park during the snow storm? The guy found the owners and returned the pictures to them.
Historic Property for Sale
Old Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas.
Ten-plus bedrooms. Seven-plus bathrooms. Twenty-five thousand square feet.Three-plus acres.
Kinda pricey for the likes of us, though. Listed at $975K.
But maybe we could bargain ‘em down. The seller is described as “very motivated.”
Oh, and there’s this: “The fort sits on the banks of the Rio Grande River across from Ciudad Juarez.”
Spelled Cuidad Juarez in the listing. Indeed.
On Arcade Fire and “Never Heard of It”
“Never heard of it”: This has been the natural and traditional response of all sorts of ordinary American humans to all sorts of phenomena. It’s not really about knowledge or information. It’s an argument, for the most part, and a faintly aggressive one — a way of insisting that what you pay attention to really does define the world. What you’ve heard of is real, and everything else is marginal. The center holds, and you are that center. You are normal and aware, and not just some tiny atomized entity that can only hope to know one tiny corner of the universe.
(via)
Mashups we actually like
Since Sheila revived the discussion of bad mashups a few days ago, I thought it’d be fun to post some examples of *good* mashups.
Mighty Mike – Imagine a Jump (Van Halen vs John Lennon), via Merlin Mann
ToTom – Knockin’ on Ziggy’s Big Ego (Dr. Dre vs. David Bowie vs. Bob Dylan)
Coney Island Hot Dogs
Distraction: An occupational hazard of visual research. I was looking for cowboys.
Carry on.
Dear Clusterflock
If you found a wallet in a fast-food restaurant, would you be inclined to just turn it in or try to return it to its owner yourself?
This American Life Knows the Coke Secret Recipe
The formula for Coca-Cola is one of the most jealously guarded trade secrets in the world. Locked in a vault in Atlanta. Supposedly unreplicable. But we think we may have found the original recipe. And to see if the formula actually might be Coke, we made a batch. Or, anyway, we asked the folks at Jones Soda and Sovereign Flavors to whip up some up, to see if it tastes like Coke.
The recipe is here.
Scottish Highlander Pipers
The University of Iowa, between 1936 and 1941.
Found: Lost Pictures of New York Blizzard
from the comments
The Iowan likes Dubuque, but only for the name. He and his brother (and Mr. Boudreaux, now) will find a word or phrase that has a certain ring and say it over and over to each other and crack up. Corinthian leather is one such phrase. Sometimes around them I will hear a person saying a word and think “oh no, please don’t say that word again.” Then, it happens, a light in the eyes. And they are off.
costume documentary screenshot
costume documentary screenshot
STILL LOOKING: More Mystery, Less Romance
Posted to Dubuque Freecycle group Fri Jan 14, 2011 5:34 pm (PST):
My mom is stuck inside most of the winter and is looking for books to read. She likes mystery/romance novels. She doesn’t like Silhouette. They don’t have enough mystery and too much romance. If anyone has any they would like to get rid of, please let me know. I can pick up in Dubuque.
old wine
The earliest known winery has been uncovered in a cave in the mountains of Armenia.
A vat to press the grapes, fermentation jars and even a cup and drinking bowl dating to about 6,000 years ago were discovered in the cave complex by an international team of researchers.
While older evidence of wine drinking has been found, this is the earliest example of complete wine production, according to Gregory Areshian of the University of California, Los Angeles, co-director of the excavation.
Busy Bone
A possible 400,000-year-old human
Israeli archeologists have found what they believe to be a 400,000-year-old human tooth — doubling the age of modern humans.
The accepted scientific theory is that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and migrated out of the continent. Gopher said if the remains are definitively linked to modern human’s ancestors, it could mean that modern man in fact originated in what is now Israel.
Sir Paul Mellars, a prehistory expert at Cambridge University, said the study is reputable, and the find is “important” because remains from that critical time period are scarce, but it is premature to say the remains are human.
“Based on the evidence they’ve cited, it’s a very tenuous and frankly rather remote possibility,” Mellars said. He said the remains are more likely related to modern man’s ancient relatives, the Neanderthals.
The comments on the article are pretty good too.
