Complete

The music that has been wrought upon this earth by Complete is like nothing you have ever heard. Marvel at its intensity.
Beautiful sunrise all the time. beautiful sunrise for me!
From Fort Worth, TX

Halloween

Today children across the country will dress as things they are not and take candy from strangers.







images via picture is unrelated
video via failblog

Gentlemen Broncos

Gentlemen Broncos is the new movie from Jared and Jerusha Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre). It's kind of like Napoleon Dynamite with a plot. A quiet lonely kid lives with his mom in a geodesic dome, writes a sci-fi story about a hairy, monotestacled space warrior who rides missile-firing deer in battle against cyclopes, and enters it in a contest. Celebrity sci-fi writer ( Jemaine Clement of The Flight of the Conchords and Eagle Vs. Shark) plagiarizes it while the boy's strange friends adapt it into a homemade movie. Sam Rockwell plays Bronco/Brutus, the space warrior who is fighting to get galactic, life-sustaining yeast back, in the sci-fi portions of the movie.

There is a good amount of Wes Anderson type eccentricities and details. The plagiarist, celebrity author character's last name is Chevalier (as in Hotel Chevalier, the prelude short to Anderson's Darjeeling Limited), the shot of him reading in bed is strikingly similar to a shot of Jason Schwartzman in Hotel Chevalier, and the opening credit sequence, a series of straight down shots of sci-fi book covers, recalls the opening credits of The Royal Tenenbaums. For every Anderson-inflected piece of this movie, though, there are at least three to five that are pure Hess. Good ugly clothes and accessories, amusingly peculiar mannerisms, a big snake taking a giant dump, odd looking extras, and almost-swears in place of any genuinely foul language.

I give it a 93%. There is a bunch of explosions and a revolver versus blowgun fight and hilarious weirdness, and even a little Black Sabbath.


I went to the screening at the Arclight. My mom brought shepherd's pie into the theater, and ate it with a giant spoon, passing it to my dad and brother to share. Jemaine Clement came out in character and introduced the movie. We watched it and laughed (and I think I cried a little - touching cry, not laughing cry). Then I rode home in the seatless back of their minivan. It was a fitting way to envelope the experience.

The movie comes out in New York and LA on Friday, with a wider release following.
Hopefully it picks up like Napoleon Dynamite.

Also, stay after the credits.

Pocket Book 3 by Andrew James Cox

For the third year in a row Andrew Cox has released a mini comic called Pocket Book, each one twice the size of the one previous. This one contains 36 pages of black and white drawings and sentences that are sometimes childlike in their simplicity and humor, sometimes detailed and dark like black metal. The work lies somewhere between David Shrigley and Mike Mignola.

You can buy a signed copy directly from Andrew Cox for only three bucks!

Buy here!

Where Bas Jan Ader is with the Wild Things Under Polaris

The blog page of Bas Jan Ader's website is maybe the saddest place on the internet, in a beautifully haunting way. He set sail from the east coast of the United States in a 12 1/2 foot sailboat which was found partially submerged off the coast of Ireland six months later. The videos he left behind are pitch perfect most of the time. He falls down a lot in them.


Another recent experience involving small boats on rough waters, Where the Wild Things Are, scored about a 94% with me. Almost nailed the high expectations I had thanks to the trailer. You can't put together the Arcade Fire and beautifully shot, Henson-made monsters and get anything unawesome. Spike Jonze is about to steal away my movie watching heart from Wes Anderson.

The evening after I saw the movie I attended a performance at Redcat by Cloud Eye Control called "Under Polaris" in which Anna Oxygen huffs up to the north pole singing sparkling avant orchestral poprock songs and trying to plant the seed of the human race, all while overlaid and interweaving with intricate projections on shifting surfaces. She even takes a boat over the ocean.

Under Polaris-fixed from citrusink on Vimeo.

RIP John Hughes

Kids, the 80s are gone for good. John Hughes AKA the writer of every best 80s movie with a heart has shuffled off this mortal reel. He was responsible for Home Alone, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Uncle Buck, and the National Lampoon Vacation movies, as well as a bunch of others that you probably watched repeatedly on VHS.

He was only 59.

He will have fun with John Candy in heaven.

His IMDB page is here.

Sour

This junk is crazy. Synchronized webcams.



via weloveyouso.com

Dead Gnomes

Morbid garden gnomes. Oh, how jolly they look as they undergo their travails.






Available on amazon.co.uk

via boingboing.net

Fireworks!

Happy Birthday, America! Let's explode stuff!

Destroy Build Destroy

Dear kids of today,
I am sorry that your cartoons are not as good as they were when I was your age, but at least you have a ridiculous game show that kicks Double Dare in the teeth. It's even hosted by Andrew W.K.





via weloveyouso.com

Mount Eerie black metal album "Wind's Poem"

So Mount Eerie's new album Wind's Poem is being touted as black metal, which, judging by the black metal influence evident on the previous release Black Wooden Ceiling Opening, will probably be awesome. Phil Elverum's music is generally haunting and personal, but coupled with the intensity of black metal (the upcoming tour will include two drummers, gongs, and walls of amps) this is going to be the perfect soundtrack for sitting alone in the dark.
Besides CD and digital releases there will be a clear vinyl 2xLP in a gatefold jacket with bronze foil stamping and a pull out lyric poster.
Unfortunately, there is no news on whether Elverum will don corpse paint.

P.W. Elverum & Sun, ltd.

Marnie Stern

Dear World,
If you have not yet listened to Marnie Stern, you need to get on that auditory train to terrific. Layers upon layers of quick guitar fingers congealed into an electric stormcloud of mania with an undercoat of frenetic drumming courtesy of Zach Hill (Hella, a buttload of other bands). Marnie scores one for gender equality in the department of guitar shredding, probably one of the departments most in need of ratio adjustment. It never feels like affirmative action, there is no "... for a girl" appended to the exclamations of wonder at her prickly guitar lines. Her music is like being caught in a casino where all the slot machine sounds are syncopated and in key, and some gangster is upstairs with his snare-drum machine gun destroying everything.

Her albums In Advance of the Broken Arm and This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That are blissful art-rock overload and available on vinyl from Kill Rock Stars (whose mailorder department is awesome).

Marnie Stern's Myspace

Big Business

Big Business at the Troubadour last night. The songs from the new album Mind the Drift wreck just as hard live as they do when I am shouting along to them alone in the car.


photo via panorady

myspace.com/bigbigbusiness

Official Website

Here is a video for Hydra Head's direct mailorder featuring Mind the Drift vinyl. You should buy it.

Point Blank

I watched Point Blank, primarily because it was the primary influence on Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control (featuring music by Boris and Earth). There is a good article in the May 2009 issue of Artforum. Point Blank was directed by John Boorman and stars Lee Marvin. The opening shots are brilliant, as are most of the rest, and the vengeance tale is pretty well put together. It is paced, not a blistering streak of excitement, but a steady advance through the steps Marvin's character takes to repay his betrayers. The weakest link is probably the ending, which I replayed to make sure there was nothing I missed (there wasn't). Still a recommended viewing.

IMDB page

Vomit Rollercoaster

I always wondered how this would work. Apparently just how I imagined it.


via thisisphotobomb.com