Official (Scary) Holiday Season Kick-Off

Since Thanksgiving has been and gone, it is now acceptable to post our traditional Christmas season posting of the Carol of the Old Ones. The very scary version of the very scary Carol of the Bells.




Cthulhu themed ringtones and MP3s can be found here.

And don't miss the Misadventures of Hello Cthulhu!

Photoshop: Before and After

Via escapegrace comes this very interesting retrospective on photo doctoring from Lincoln to Today. Photoshop has only made it more accessible, but Stalin new how to do it quite well.

J. Paul Ferlinghetti

I have returned from my vacation to LA. Weston at the Getty, Dali at LACMA, fine dining in Pasadena and West Hollywood and escaped before the fires got too bad. A great trip had by all.

Here are some images from the J. Paul Getty museum grounds.

Coming into Los Angeles

The town is like an advertisement for itself; none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination...
~Christopher Isherwood

Heading south for a Museum weekend. I wonder if I'll run into this guy?


The May Company Department Store - Ansel Adams

HOWL

" I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked..."

So begins the iconic poem of the Beat Generation, Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Fifty years ago today, a San Francisco Municipal Court judge ruled that Allen Ginsberg's Beat-era poem "Howl" was not obscene. And on that 50 year anniversary, a New York public radio station has buckled to fear of the FCC and decided not to air a reading of Ginsberg's poem. You can read about the whole silly mess here.

In honor of the anniversary, Pacifica.org will post audio of a reading. Or you can read it for yourself here.

It is a sad time when fear of censorship does the censor's job for him.

I speak of the pompatus of love

What is a pompatus anyways? Well there is a Wikipedia entry to explain.

Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls!

Miatapalooza 2007

Couple of firsts. I took the "none more black" MX-5 to my first car show this weekend, Miatapalooza at Monster Park in San Francico (formerly Candlestick) and posted my first self made video to YouTube.

Jewish Sports Legends

Salon has a ranking of the best 18 Jewish baseball players of all time. The top 3 are pretty predictable, but it's a fun read.

And the author also provides a link to one of the funniest moments in baseball commentary ever. Where are you now, Mel Gibson?

There is no joy in Mudville

DVD Journal is shutting their doors.

This has been the go to site for what's new on the street, upcoming releases and reviews of the latest films on DVD. Sadly the proprietors have decided to cease publication. Hopefully someone else will take up the mantel.

Life Imitates Caddyshack

Bill Murray stopped in Stockholm, Sweden for driving a golf cart under the influence.

Pancho & Lefty

The greatest lefty of all time...

Death Knocks

What a day yesterday, we lost Ingmar Bergman, Tom Snyder and Bill Walsh. I was hoping to find a youtube posting of Dan Akroyd's great Tom Snyder skits, but nothing came up on my search. I did however find this wonderful Bergman parody featuring the film debut of Madeline Kahn. De Duva.

The faux Swedish might be the inspiration for the opening credits of Holy Grail.

Update: I guess it is open season on arthouse directors. I just read that Michelangelo Antonioni passed away as well.

Adventures in Cambria

Or a rare bit of Welsh Skunk....

This past weekend found team Gonzo meeting in the wilds of Cambria, California. A quaint coastal town in the middle of the state. A bit busy and touristy indeed, as it is just five miles from San Simeon, home of Hearst Castle, and it is a gateway to the Paso Robles wine region, where we tasted some very fine potions indeed.

L'Aventure is producing some amazing blends in the Rhone style. A bottle of their Optimus blend accompanied me home. And Windward is doing some very nice Pinots. Fucking Merlots were not to be found, but some delicious Viogniers and Rousannes were also sampled.

While walking along the bluffs near our hotel after a tasty dinner, we saw something posing on the beach side of the path. At first glance it appeared to be a statue or totem of some kind, but when it moved we realized that it was a skunk with tail in the air. In proper Pythonian fashion, we yelled "run away" and ran in search of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch (as seen in scene 21).

Sunday found us doing the touristy thing and visiting Hearst Castle. Well worth a visit. A fun tour and some interesting history. The legend has been cleaned up, as the Hearst family still owns the actual house and the State Park system's tour guides seem to leave out some of the darker parts of the Hearst saga.

The drive from San Jose along Highway 1 is one of the most spectacular roads in the world and other than a Winnebago driver that did not understand the concept of turnouts, the none more black MX-5 was a delight to drive along the twisties south of Big Sur.


Big Sur coast line.


Elephant Seals at play?


Along the bluffs near Cambria.


The view back towards the village.


Hearst's pool.


Antiquities.


Hearst's other pool.

Bialy you can be

From Wikipedia's entry on Robert Heinlein is a link to the Google satellite photo of his circular house that he and his wife Ginny built in Bonny Doon, California.

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is probably the most subversive children's books ever written, being largely about sexual awakening and atheism. Now they are coming to the big screen beginning this winter with The Golden Compass. See the spectacular trailer here.

This has been mentioned by two of my blogroll regulars recently, Escapegrace and Tony Pierce; LAist has begun a series on LA Neighborhoods beginning with Little Armenia. My old neighborhood, which could be termed little Brooklyn, around Fairfax and Beverly used to stretch to at least Pico, but much of the southern portion is now Little Ethiopia. Nice to see a series like this.

In spite of Ms. Stein's famous quote that "there is no there there", there is indeed many theres there, you just need to know where there is.





Fairfax district of Los Angeles aka Kosher Canyon according to Wikipedia, though growing up there, I never heard it called that.

And for more info on thing Jewish in LA, there's the LA Jewish Guide.

Roadtrip this weekend down the coast in the none more black MX-5, hopefully some photos to share next week.

Jesus of Cool

A short interview with one of the greatest music producers and writers of great pop songs, Nick Lowe, over at the Onion AV Club.

I especially enjoyed his assessment of Punks who pretended to be bad musicians.

Well The Damned were really good, and Elvis was Elvis. Ian Dury and The Blockheads were really, really great. You know, the actual punk music, I didn't care for at all. I thought it was all rubbish, really. It was the attitude, the way that things were being shaken up, that excited me more. I still liked people who were good, you know? Who could actually play. Even though The Damned were a punk group, they played great. As did Elvis, and as did Ian. They were the ones who interested me. Not some of those daft punkers, especially the ones who had people who were actually pretty good musicians sort of pretending to play badly. That was just so stupid, and missed the point completely, I thought. So it was the people who were true to themselves, I think, that were the exciting ones.

Cruel to be kind, indeed.

Ah, synesthesia

The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco is presenting Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings. A kaleidoscope like installation of evolutionary art by the ambient one.

Eno says of this show, "They are living an independent life, and they keep doing things that still surprise me. I've watched this program now for thousands of hours, because I have it running in my studio, normally, when I'm working there, and occasionally I'll look up and I'll see something really completely unlike anything I've ever seen before and think, 'Bloody hell!' I know all of the elements in the piece, of course, because I made them all, so you would think that I wouldn't be particularly surprised by any of the combinations of them, but I'm very surprised, actually."

More can be read at SFGate.com.

77 Million Paintings: Flat-screen installation by Brian Eno. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday (Sunday show at 7 p.m. is for members of the Long Now Foundation) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, 701 Mission St., San Francisco. Tickets $20-$25. Call (415) 978-2787 or visit www.longnow.org.

Cult of Steve

They get this just about right.

Smell the Glove

via Tom Tomorrow, Amex has co-opted Spinal Tap's Gimme Some Money (actually the Thamesmen). It seems that only two responses are in order and both have already been taken; "excuse me while I choke on someone else's vomit", and "have these people no sense of irony?"

And Venus Was Her Name

Recent Netflix viewing has been quite tasty. The Good Shepherd, De Niro's history of the CIA as seen through the eyes of Matt Damon, though lengthy and a bit dry, held my interest throughout. The Queen, starring Helen Mirren in a stellar performance. Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro's dark fairytale about the Spanish Civil War. These are just a few of the highlights of my recent viewing. All recommended to varying degrees, depending on your tolerance for violence and British royals.



The last DVD I viewed was Peter O'Toole in his Oscar nominated performance as an aging actor who falls in love with a young girl in the film Venus. It is one of those character driven British films that you don't see very often any more. Not much happens and it takes its time in doing it, but it is such a pleasure to watch a great actor like O'Toole, who is still at the top of his game, do that thing that he does best.

The scenes between O'Toole and Vanessa Redgrave as his estranged wife, are worth the price of admission. Lordy, these people can act. And how refreshing it is to see.

What's round on both ends and high in the middle

A few weeks ago, the wife and I made a whirlwind trip to visit relatives of hers in Southwestern Ohio. While there we took a couple of drives to see a bit of America that us coastal types don't often see.

In Adam's county along the Kentucky border, there are a number of what they call "quilt barns". Traditional quilt pattern panels have been painted on the front of the building.











Shooting a bit of video out the window of the car (I was not behind the wheel) as we drove along inspired this bit of nostalgia.