Wagner Today

Today is Wagner's 200th birthday.

Porn Vortex: Hometape's "Redtube Album"

NSFW, obviously.

What could be a more apropos experiment for our time than an album composed of nothing but samples from a free porn site? Is it a critique of the male gaze or a celebration of online eros? The opening track "Hey There" and its video suggests the former, while the song "Rec" (my favorite on the album) seems more like the latter. More likely it's all in the eye/ear of the beholder, and the intent of the album was simply, as the artist says,  "a technical exercise to teach myself how to sample" that "got a bit carried away." Happens to the best of us.

Read more at Disinformation.

Drumslinger

Elvin Jones is one of the greatest jazz drummers of all time, noted in particular for his work with John Coltrane, but I am also in love with his late work with Sonny Sharrock on Ask the Ages. He also apparently did this thing:

Eddie Harris, "Silver Cycles"

Uploaded by Christomacin, with imagery from abstract filmmaker James Whitney. 

Techno Animal, "Catatonia"

A great track played to the imagery of Russian filmmaker Vladimir Kobrin, who applies his avant-garde style to educational science films. Thanks to humoongus.

The cinema I'm engaged in can be called 'psychedelic puppet action,' where the characters-both the live and the lifeless-behave according to the laws of a cosmic theater . . . To my mind, an artist is a person whose mission is to close the space between Earth and the Cosmos. Otherwise he can't be called an artist. That is why I see my task as a film director to consist of wiping off the mirror in which man and mankind as a whole look, and to show that this world (this performance without God, that is, without the point where all our puppet threads come together) is senseless and deserves no sympathy or pity.- Vladimir Kobrin, program notes, "HomoParadoxum V Kobrin," ArtWorkshop

Joseph Gordon-Levitt Reading from Finnegans Wake

Captain Murphy, Duality

The Residents, "Eskimo"

Hat tip to Space Cadet Moon. Uploaded by Virgil Pink.

Balinese Monkey Chant

From the film Baraka. Hat tip to Space Cadet Jason.

Stanley Kubrick's Diaries

The other day I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time in years. This, more than any other film, opened my eyes and my mind to the possibilities of the medium. I've often cited it as my favorite movie, but I've only seen it a handful of times. At any rate, I've gotten back into Kubrick in a big way. In fact, last week I had a dream that Kubrick was driving me in a truck at high speed down a highway at night and demanding that I play all of my cassettes. Then I decided to make this little tribute video using the song "Stanley Kubrick's Diaries" by the German postpunk band Janitors of Lunacy.

Not Coming to a Theatre Near You

I haven't seen any of these movies. But I love the trailers. Good music, good editing, freakish imagery.