Cory's post about the Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, one of my fave concert films too, reminded me of Laurie Anderson's fantastic Home Of The Brave movie. I distinctly remember seeing it for the first time when I was 14 at a midnight showing in my town's art house cinema and feeling very... avant garde. That was my first exposure to William S. Burroughs, whose quote "Languags is a virus from outer space" inspired the song performed in the clip above. Unfortunately, Home of the Brave never saw an official DVD release, just VHS and laserdisc. But according to Anderson's site, a DVD film/video box set collection of her work is on the horizon.
Home of the Brave (MP3 soundtrack)
Home of the Brave (VHS)
Previously:
- Laurie Anderson interviewed by Ken Goldberg - Boing Boing
- Laurie Anderson interview in Smithsonian - Boing Boing
- Laurie Anderson, NASA artist-in-residence - Boing Boing
Mark Ryden's Tree Show Postcard Microportfolio is a delightful set of 15 souvenir postcards. Published by the good people at 
Our pals at 
People here must think I'm a crazy man, as it's hard for me not to walk around London mumbling William Blake poetry; it just sorta burbles out of me as I walk by, for instance, the Gothic church only blocks away from where he used to live on South Molton Street. I'm actually staying across from that dingy church, at another poet's house, a B&B in what used to be the home of Edward Lear. Blake likely would have walked past this church, maybe even sketched it.
It's a secret world of strange, fast-moving creatures...
These stockings printed with veins and arteries are 41,00€ from UpFactory.
This is the 1942 yearbook from the Temple University School of Medicine. The design of the embossed leather cover drives me wild. It's on eBay right now with a buy-it-now price of $1495. 
Hang Ten aka US Navy Pacific Fleet Rock Band
The backrest and headrest are screwed together by a pair of aluminum supports. This unit is suspended on the seat via two connection points in the armrests. The armrests are screwed to shock mounts on the interior of the backrest shell, allowing the backrest and headrest to flex when the chair is in use. This is part of the chair's unusual design, as well as one of its biggest flaws. The rubber washers are solidly glued to the plywood shells, but have been known to tear free when excessive weight is applied, or when the rubber becomes old and brittle.
As part of the Tate Modern's forthcoming exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World, the London museum is recreating a 1992 performance/installation. Identical twins will sit for the entire exhibition, October 1, 2009 to January 17, 2010, below a pair of identical Hirst "spot" paintings. That's a long time, so the Tate Modern is seeking twins to sign up.
We're thrilled to introduce our new line of Boing Boing merchandise, designed by Boing Boing and made by our pals at GAMA-GO! Our plan is to create a small collection of wonderful products, from t-shirts to limited edition artwork, shiny gee-gaws to curious knicknaks. Folks from the happy mutants universe will do the designing and GAMA-GO is handling production, fulfillment, and customer service. We're also benefiting from GAMA-GO's helpful design suggestions, gentle nudges, and years of experience, to finetune our curious concepts. They're our co-conspirators in bringing Boing Boing's product pipe dreams into the physical world.
"Even a basic posture, or just going to a window and breathing deeply, can have big benefits."
Tim Biskup is issuing a new bronze sculpture of his popular Pollard character. There are only 44 in the edition.
I dig the design of this 
It is a gorgeous product produced in a rich pink, with high quality blue doll eyes rimmed in a deeper rose. There is an additional “special edition” that will be of 80 run in black and 80 in white, that will be signed by Ryden. The box itself is a piece of graphic confectionary itself, like a magical curio from a time gone by. Looking similar to a Chinese firework box, the box is embossed with gold leaf, and features hand wrapped paper. “ We really wanted to make this look like it was an artifact from a long time ago, like something that had just been sitting on a shelf for ages” John says. “We really made an effort to make it look not contemporary as much as we could.”
Iron Fist makes these "
This collection is discussed at length by Celeste Olalquiaga in a piece entitled Object Lesson / Transitional Object which ran in a 2005 issue of Cabinet magazine. Here is an excerpt from that piece, which discusses the original cabinet of Bonnier de la Mosson at great length:
Ever wanted to build a highly dangerous, inefficient, and essentially obsolete piece of electronics? Well, I have. That's pretty much what a tube amp is. Vacuum tubes are old electronic components that act like transistors, controlling a lot of current with a little current. You usually hear about tubes being used in guitar amplifiers, because they distort in a way that suits guitar playing. However, tubes can also be used to amplify a stereo signal from another audio source such as a CD or MP3 player. Tube amps, unfortunately, aren't the most practical things in the world; they consume a great deal of power, get very hot, and are big. That being said, they look damn cool, and some people seem to think they sound pretty nice too.
"In my research for a game, i began writing a guide to The Shining, which i discovered is a part of a glyphic continuum.
The Colorado Oil and Gas Commission leaders say it's tried to find the origin of the leak. Director Dale Neslin says "We've looked at well compilation reports, taken gas samples to look for a match, done pressure testing and we've not been able to find the well that appears to be causing the problem."
The arrest report says that the couple were arguing over drugs, and during the fight at their home, Gellert screamed in his wife's face, threw things, grabbed her neck and strangled her, and knocked her to the ground.
The man who called 911 about the incident admitted attaching the sex toy to the saw and then using the high-powered, homemade device on his partner, according to the St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office.
We make 50's and 60's space music, library/mood music and a hint of psych. We just released our first single which is a switched on/moog cover of Jimmy Castor Bunch's 'Its Just Begun'. The original has legendary status due to its popularity with the hip hop b-boy crowd who dug its heavy drums and breakdowns. Our version is heavily
inspired by the Switched On craze of the late 60's/70's which saw a whole host of silly Moog cover albums - most of them pretty poor apart from the odd album by Dick Hyman.
Paul at Old School Tattoo in Bellingham, Washington inked this tattoo, adding a bit of Salvador Dalí's "
Like Soundies (the films made for the Mills Panoram film jukebox in the 1940s), Cinebox films were printed so that the image is projected backwards when shown on a normal 16mm projector. The soundtrack is also printed in a non-standard manner, with the result that the sound lags behind the image by about half a second when projected on a normal 16mm projector. Perhaps because of these oddities, or because the Cinebox was never as popular in the United States as the Scopitone, Cinebox films are much harder to find than Scopitone films.
Using as his point of departure Lon Chaney's chilling observation that "there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight," Dery deconstructs the postmodern archetype of the psychopathic clown. In this perversely funny, closely argued essay, Dery ranges broadly over the psychic geography of American culture. Balm for the souls of those scarred for life by childhood encounters with balloon-twisting bogeymen in fright wigs.
Released from 1965 through the iconic Orwellian year 1984, these films present not-too-distant worlds that reflect extremes in the social, moral, and political trends of their time. These imagined tomorrows are more often dystopian than hopeful, with the world as we know it exhausted and collapsed. The resulting new architecture — glass domes, surveillance corridors, solitary structures — is the means of future survival and evokes a world of bleakness and sinister intent.
A fan of the 1970s televsion series "The Six Million Dollar Man" (still at left -ed.), Spence said he had an epiphany when looking at his cell phone camera and realizing something that small could fit into his empty eye socket...
The Hanshin Tigers have not won the Japan Series since 1985, a fact attributed by some to the "Curse of Colonel Sanders."
This gentleman held a woman hostage for ten hours. His weapon? A Sega light gun. Rob has the details over at Boing Boing Gadgets. "
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Thought you might be interested to know that we & our collaborators recently put together a DNA sequence for the 
Unmanned and remote-controlled aircraft have a surprisingly long history. "The technology that goes into a UAV has been around for 100 years," (museum curator Dik) Daso says, "since before World War I." Henry Ford and other top engineers helped to design both full-size and scale planes that were radio-controlled. The Great War ended before any of them could go into action. Now, Daso adds, "there are so many UAVs in the air, it's hard to keep track of them all..."
"Of the 100 existing copies, 80 percent have been restored, but people want an untouched copy," (Comic Connect owner Stephen) Fishler said. The book is listed in "fine" condition, a six on the 10-point rating scale...
Australian artist Pul(sew)idth crafts fantastic fabric model synthesizers (and guitars and pedals too). Seen here is a Minimoog. Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Rob has details on where you can see, and even buy, these fine creations.
The likes of Genesis P.Orridge and Throbbing Gristle in London, Cabaret Voltaire in Sheffield however, were... performing a UK brand of what would soon be termed ‘industrial’, and these seeds collectively not only assisted and influenced the rapid rise of that period’s Punk assault, they also moved electronic music into a new era. This new era would run its own course and influence greatly an American drift in the mid-1980s towards a home-grown, danceable variety of electro-industrial rock, with the remarkable Nine Inch Nails at its heart and soul.
Mark Dery has posted his 1997 interviews with two of my favorite creators of weird fiction: science fiction author JG Ballard and filmmaker David Cronenberg. Of course, Cronenberg was the director who brought Ballard's deeply disturbing novel 
Carl Bidleman of 
Uncrate offers spotted this "Bigfoot vs. Bunyan" t-shirt for $10. It's cute, but of course Sasquatch would win.
Arkham Studios sells limited edition bronze statues of such dark cult characters as Aleister Crowley (left), Anton LaVey, Edgar Allen Poe, HP Lovecraft, and, er, Cthulhu. They're 12" tall and $200.
Two guys at Germany's Research Center for Artificial Intelligence are using a Wii Balance Board to "surf" Google Earth. Brandon has the details and video at Boing Boing Offworld.
Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com is profoundly different from other dating sites. We're dealing with people who know they are facing imminent death. They are aware that their days are numbered and they know, more or less, how long they have to live. This service does not require members to answer the frivolous questionnaires other dating sites provide, although they can if they want to. We are not interested, as we are sure our clients are not either, in the inane, trivial and essentially meaningless come-ons and delusional fantasies of finding the perfect mate. We assume our members don't care if someone's eyes are blue or green, whether they wear glasses or not. According to Marketing Director Joseph DiAngelo, "This site is designed to cut through the superficiality and embrace issues we think are most meaningful -- the desire and need for understanding, compassion, empathy and comfort between human beings facing their greatest challenge..."
Mazikin are a class of sheydim (animistic spirits) that pervaded the natural world in the Rabbinic Jewish worldview of late antiquity. From תלמוד בבלי ברכות ו א (Talmud Bavli Tractate Berakhot, 6a):
"The idea they came up with was kind of radical: If you can sell kids sugared cereal and toys using Madison Avenue techniques, why couldn't you use the same techniques for teaching counting, the alphabet and basic social skills? And it works," (says Syracuse University pop culture professor Robert Thompson.)
Thaemlitz is a transgender/transgenre computer musician. A pomo-sexual producer wading through Marxist theory while a soundtrack of Styx, Stevie Wonder, and Japanese techno-pop plays in the background at home. A creator of cultural commentary in the form of computer-generated hard-listening anti-Muzak.
This handmade corset was inspired by the uniforms on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's available on Etsy for $200 and can be made in any of the Star Trek colors.
In honor of Oregon's 150th birthday, Portland's Grass Hut Gallery is holding a "Sesquatennial" artist exhibition opening tonight and running through March 1. There happen to be several Yeti/Sasquatch pieces in the show, but I'm particularly fond of this graphite drawing by Carson Ellis.
(The Ripper) was developed over a period of about six months, during which the basic concept of a skull breaking through a barrier evolved through a number of evolutions, each of which simplified and strengthened the basic image. It was purposely undertaken as a follow up to the tremendous success of Court’s first graphic, the Skull and Sword, which had been drawn for our first pro skater, Ray Rodriguez, the year before.
Drugs are a common topic in my classroom. The students have questions and I have answers, and if I can prevent one less overdose or drunken driving death, it's worth it. My students get fucked up. We live in the wine country, and whenever you live in a booze-based economy, kids are going to grow up with issues. Acid, mushrooms, meth, coke, prescription drugs and a whole lot of weed are what the students are into. You would think it would change after 25 years, but it's just the same as when I was in high school.
Please don't use objectionable words and phrases. No obscenities or inappropriate images. We don't want to leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth.
My old friend 
Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon has details on Guitar Hero for the NES! Guns N' Roses and Michael Jackson chiptunes? Indeed.
The archaeologists (from the Israel Antiquities Authority) believe a merchant family from the eastern part of the Roman Empire most likely passed down the "precious object" through the generations until the fourth or fifth century, when an unfortunate family member had it with him at a public building, perhaps a hostel -- and an earthquake struck...
Champion of Guitars, a reinvention of Guitar Hero as a text adventure, is now playable online. Brandon has the details over at Boing Boing Offworld. From the game:
"...It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom."
So are we doomed?
I was lucky enough to get a tour with a bunch of other SRL people in the
90s. amazing collection. he had 2 scuds at the time. we got to see this bridge building tank that he turned on for us! also anti-aircraft tanks with matching satellite truck, tanks from russia, britain, us, etc. he even has a huge pipe organ and built a separate earthquake proof building to house it and has a miniature steam train running thru his property that we got to ride.
