Vampire Music

I had a dream about Vampires last night. Part of the dream involved deciphering the secret Vampiric message in the Nirvana song "Dive". When I woke up I thought it was funny, but now I've decided that I was right. I tried to think of some more Vampire songs and I came up with a few good ones. One in particular is a song called "The Age of Backwards" by The Spells. They only put out one record and they were a side project of Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney and Mary Timony from Helium.

Here are the songs, let me know what you think.

Storms on Other Planets

MARS

JUPITER

SATURN

APOD

Films by Joseph Cornell

UBUWEB has a bunch of Joseph Cornell films for your viewing pleasure.

Includes collaborations with Rudy Burckhardt, Stan Brakhage, and Larry Jordan.

Watch them here.

Siege 1984

Another reason to love public access television.

Siege playing live in an empty room in 1984.

Bad sound quality, goofy dancing, shirtlessness.

Siege page

Marbles

19th century marbled paper from the Decorative Paper Collection at the University of Washington.

Hoops

Check out a post I did for Teenage blog here.

A clip of Shaq playing in the McDonald's High School All-American game in 1989.

I remember watching the game with my brother and being amazed by that play.

"Based on a groundbreaking book by the punk author Jon Savage, Teenage is an unconventional historical film about the invention of teenagers."

Arbol de la Vida

Ceramics from Metepec, Mexico

"After the Spanish conquest, friars destroyed articles, including ceramics, that depicted the old gods, and replaced them with images of saints and other Christian iconography. The depiction of a “tree of life” in paintings and other mediums was introduced as a way to evangelize Biblical stories to the native population."

wiki

Modoc Basketry Hats

1. Stereoview of four Modoc women - Eadweard Muybridge, 1872

2. Detail showing three of the women wearing tule basketry hats

3. Illustration from "The Material Culture of the Klamath Lake and Modoc Indians of Northeastern California and Southern Oregon" by S.A. Barrett, 1910. Bottom row shows women's hats.

4. Modoc and Klamath hats at the Maryhill Museum. photo by Mary Harrsch

Man with Dog, Man with Bicycle

Top: Sigmund Freud with his dog, Jofi

Bottom: Emperor Joshua Norton photographed by Eadweard Muybridge

Regarding Some Rubens

Recently visited the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota Florida.

Spent some time looking at these XXL paintings by Rubens.

Also impressed with the circus model built by Howard Tibbals.

Willem van de Poll

Portraits of an Irish Traveller family

Willem van de Poll (Dutch, 1895-1970)

From a trip to Ireland in 1946

found here: National Archive of the Netherlands

inspired by a Nothing Is New twitter post

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

First time seeing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Amazing sets and supposedly the first "plot twist" ending.

It's always interesting to read about the people involved in making Weimar era movies.

Some of them had to leave and some of them stayed.

stills from DVDBeaver

Santa Lucia

Did you observe St. Lucy's Day?
My parents used to belong to a church with a penchant for Scandinavian culture, and December 13th is the only saints day they recognized. I used to love the white robes and candle-wreath, but it was a girls-only affair so I never got to wear a pointy wizard hat. These days I'm more interested in the pre-christian origins of the celebration.

Photo credits:

Stockholm Club Lucia Fest, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Herman Larson, 1932 (from the Minnesota Digital Library)

Female students dressed for Bethel's Festival of Christmas in St. Lucia costumes, St. Paul, Minnesota
Kurt Christenson, 1980 (from the Minnesota Digital Library)

Luciafeier in einer schwedischen Kirche
Claudia Gründer, 2006 (from Wikimedia Commons)