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May 29, 2008

m:lls 1999 - CD mix for your ears

Mills 1999
Since I posted this cover of my 1999 m:lls CD compilation on Flickr, I've had some requests, so I've posted the 2-CD set to Megaupload. Feel free to download the mix and check out some still pretty good tunes from nine years ago. (148 mins in total, 31 tracks, 160kbps.)
Track list is here:
Mills 1999 back cover

SIDE ONE
I'm A Boy - Shinobu Yoshioka
Beginnings - Astrad Gilberto
Round Trip - Cosa Nostra
Darlin' Of Disotheque - Pizzicato Five
Mei Mei - Zhang Zhen Yue
Electric Ladyland - Fantastic Plastic Machine
Takarajima - Original Love
Jintsai - Faye Wong
The Revolution Was Postponed Because Of Rain - Brooklyn Funk Essentials
Seven - David Bowie
Salt In The Wound - Beck
Steal My Sunshine - Len
Nonstop To Tokyo - Pizzicato Five
Waters Of March (Aguas de Março) - Basia
Hum A Tune - Original Love

SIDE TWO
Millennium - Robbie Williams
Yubikiri (Demo) - SUGAR BABE
Touch Sensitive - The Fall
Hurry Up Lover - JuJu Club
Plash - Takako Minekawa
Tararan - Puffy
We Love Dancing - Arling & Cameron
I'm Your Cure - Valen Hsu
Xiao Tsong Min - Faye Wong
I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend - Petty Booka
Moonchild - Cibo Matto
Masked Ball - Jocelyn Pook
Take Your Partner By The Hand - Howie B With Robbie Robertson
Flowers Of Shanghai (Main Theme) - Yoshihiro Hanno
Locust - Ed Rush And Fierce
See You Again - Jason Falkner

Posted by Ted Mills at 10:52 PM | | Comments (0)

May 27, 2008

I made Fleshbot, and I didn't have to get naked


I know, *phew*, right? Anyway, I don't usually blog the porny stuff, so when I found this very WTF (and NSFW) video on YouTube...and then found 18 of the same thing, I sent in a tip to Fleshbot.com. And waddya know, they ran with it. First, BoingBoing, then the New York Times, and now Fleshbot, the number one adult blog on the web. I'm everywhere, folks. Excerpt:

A very confused tipster writes to us asking for an explanation of the following YouTube video. It starts off innocently enough, with footage of a random girl-on-girl makeout session: nothing confusing there, but then things take an abrupt turn when the show is interrupted by footage from late-70s schmaltzfest "Eight Is Enough." Then it's back to the lesbian makeout, accompanied by some adult contemporary/soft rock background music. Then you see the opening credits for CSI: NY. Then back to some more Dick Van Patten, then it abruptly ends. In other words, it's a big heaping spoonful of WTF?
When the boss isn't looking, click through to the link to see the clips. You know you want to, especially with that hot Van Patten action going down.

Posted by Ted Mills at 04:59 PM | | Comments (0)

May 25, 2008

3 Cities: 3 Choreographers


I went to Center Stage Theater to review the dance recital "3 Cities: 3 Choreographers" and encountered the choreography of S.B.'s Misa Kelly for I think the first time. What's even cooler (in lieu of my review that I am still writing as on this post) is that a lot of the work is online. Used to be that dance was impossible to see outside the live experience, but YouTube changed that.


Gypsy Dreams by Misa Kelly. Erika Kloumann danced this tonight instead of Shari Brookler in the video. Same idea though. Music by Iva Bittova.
Nadar Sabe Mi Llama el Agua Fría (Part One)
Nadar Sabe Mi Llama el Agua Fría (Part Two)
This was danced by Kaita Lepore this evening. I don't know who that is in the vid, but it may be her.

Le Jardin Rouge by Misa Kelly. Anaya Cullen danced tonight instead of Gwenna Devries.

I couldn't find any vids by choreographer Kerstin Stuart, tho' I'd love to see her dance with Ana Flecha set to Massive Attack's Teardrop, which was brilliant. However, I did find the above rehearsal vid of Louie Cornejo's Weathering. But its' very hard to see what's going on and it's not very representation of the finished piece.
Kelly's work is great, though. My job is writing about dance...not always the easiest of things.

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:10 PM | | Comments (0)

You gotta have Seoul!

Me and the mural
In 1995, I went to Seoul, Korea, with this new friend I'd met in Japan called Jonathan Crow and another English teacher called Katy. The full photoset of all five days (well, three main days) is now up on Flickr for your perusal.

Posted by Ted Mills at 10:48 AM | | Comments (0)

May 22, 2008

Colin Hay live at SOhO, 05.22.08

Colin Hay!
Men at Work was the first concert I saw back when I was a wee lad. Tonight at SOhO I got to see Colin Hay play solo and I got a photo with him at the end. Cool! In this setting he's very funny and tells a lot of amusing anecdotes. For a sample of what that sounds like, check out this mp3 of a TV interview with him on Andrew Denton's Enough Rope show from ABC Australia.

Set List:
Going Somewhere
What Would Bob Do?
Who Can It Be Now
Melbourne Song
Conversation
Norwegian Wood
Get Over You
Maggie
Death Row Conversation
Beautiful World
Looking for Jack
Down Under
Overkill (yes! my favorite!)
Are You Looking at Me?
Waiting for My Real Life to Begin

Only 15 songs, but understand that with all the storytelling, this was a two hour plus concert. If you get a chance to see him play in this kind of setting, I highly recommend it, even if you're not much of a Men at Work fan.

Posted by Ted Mills at 10:58 PM | | Comments (0)

Santa Barbara makes CNN news with Cat, Dog, and Rat guy

This guy on State Street has trained a rat, and cat, and a dog to sit on top of each other, in that order (well, the dog stands on the ground, but you get the point.) And now CNN has the video. It's good that we're known for something other than unaffordable rents.

Posted by Ted Mills at 03:00 PM | | Comments (0)

Simple and Plain

The title of the book tells it all. Oh what a consummation devoutly to be wished. The Huffington Post has an excerpt.
I mean, in America, we apparently impeach presidents for having consensual sex outside of marriage and trying to cover it up. If we impeach presidents for that, then if the president takes the country to war on a lie where thousands of American soldiers die horrible, violent deaths and over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, even babies are killed, the punishment obviously has to be much, much more severe. That's just common sense. If Bush were impeached, convicted in the Senate, and removed from office, he'd still be a free man, still be able to wake up in the morning with his cup of coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice and read the morning paper, still travel widely and lead a life of privilege, still belong to his country club and get standing ovations whenever he chose to speak to the Republican faithful. This, for being responsible for over 100,000 horrible deaths? For anyone interested in true justice, impeachment alone would be a joke for what Bush did.
.

Posted by Ted Mills at 02:08 PM | | Comments (0)

May 20, 2008

It's not porn


Porn photos hastily Photoshopped to not be porn. Some of the choices are hilarious.
By way of Fleshbot.

Posted by Ted Mills at 02:08 PM | | Comments (0)

May 19, 2008

What a Day That Was


Time for some music. This here's the version of "What a Day That Was" from the Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense" movie. Bela Lugosi lighting, powerful performances, transcendent. Everybody in the band is in top form and the group funks out as one big unit. I especially like the sideways glance Tina Weymouth gives somebody (David Byrne?) at 2:25.

Searching for that easy-to-find/rent/buy video, I came across a rarity: the Heads performing "My Big Hands Fall Thru the Cracks" from a 1982 UK doc. I saw this once on UK TV in 1984 and never saw it again. I thought I knew all their songs and I couldn't find a studio version. Turns out both this and "What a Day..." are from the Catherine Wheel Soundtrack. Goddamn if this isn't a beauty of a version.

Here's another version of the song attached to somebody's homemade Kenneth Anger-esque experimental movie. The song is from the 1982 Montreaux Jazz Festival. Feel that funky bass!

Posted by Ted Mills at 01:41 AM | | Comments (0)

May 15, 2008

Will Elder dead at 86


Will, or "Wild Bill" Elder died today, so I feel I must note this, as he was one of my main inspirations for drawing comics and, along with the Pythons, informed my sense of humor when I was growing up. His work for the early Kurtzman issues of Mad blew my mind when I read them at 8 or 9 years old (the reprints would come in Mad's "Super Specials" that I could find at the supermarket, as well as some of the trade paperbacks). Unlike Wood or Davis (or Kurtzman, when he drew), Elder gave you the biggest bang for your buck, filling in every nook and cranny with visual gags, word play, running jokes, and none of it beholden to physics or linear narrative. More than any other comics that I was reading, this was art that you had to go back and study. For the uninitiated, check out this reprint of Dragged Net, a parody of the TV show Dragnet. It's chock-a-block with goodness, and shows the difference of the early Mad parodies (all written by Harvey Kurtzman) compared to the flat and dull ones that they've done since.

After Mad, Elder's main art was devoted to Little Annie Fanny, that ran in Playboy from 1962 to 1988. I wasn't a fan so much of these, despite how dearly I love breasts. The panels are not as crazy, and the jokes--obviously because of its subject matter and its venue--are mostly sexual based. But I have to admit, look at the beautiful work in the above splash panel. Elder didn't work in such painterly color in Mad, and his use of a weird perspective, distortion, color, and weight (Annie's voluptuousness changes in the gravity of the water) are masterful for the medium.

You can look at my own (very few) comics and see where I've stolen from him, sometimes blatantly. So rest in peace, Mr. Elder.

UPDATE 05.16.08: Fantagraphics have posted a link to a once-banned (copyright infringement) Kurtzman/Elder parody of Archie/Playboy that appeared in Humbug, post-Mad.

Posted by Ted Mills at 05:12 AM | | Comments (0)

May 14, 2008

Holy Freakin' Shite!! Byrne/Eno reunion


[Spit take of my morning coffee]Whaaaaaaaaa????
Yes, David Byrne and Brian Eno are making music together, and an album is set for the end of the year. Ooooooh!

Speaking at an event in New York, Byrne revealed that the duo had rekindled the relationship they formed in the late 70s/early 80s which resulted in three Talking Heads records and 1981’s classic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
“I’m finishing up a record with Brian Eno, a musician that I worked with 30 years ago,” Byrne said following an appearance with Paul Simon at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on the 9th of April. “We did a record together of songs, and that’ll come out.”
I have to say I was very disappointed with the last batch of songs from Eno, Another Day on Earth, so even though I must now clean the coffee off my keyboard, I will be cautiously approaching this release.

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:15 AM | | Comments (0)

Tiny Choices, big results


I came across the Tiny Choices blog when I was researching alternative to plastic sports bottles. I've seen the Siggi ones and such and I'm thinking I may buy one. Anyway, this blog is all about the little things we can start doing to help the Earth before we all get drowned by rising tides, beaten to death in food riots, or die working in the Dick Cheney Memorial Salt Mines. I've starting to use canvas bags instead of paper bags at the supermarket (the Trader Joes ones are great, the ones at Vons are balls). If I lived in a bigger apartment I would compost, but as it is, I don't have room. There's a tendency on the blog to fuss over really tiny things (plastic straws!) and some people seem to have a big problem learning to cook for themselves (something I've been doing for ages and have to remind myself is still rare). But still, you may find one or two things that you can start doing now. I mean, NOW!!!

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:10 AM | | Comments (0)

May 13, 2008

All not well in Mordor


Okay, so it's not Mordor, it's Chile's erupting Chaitén volcano, which is blowing its stack after 9,000 of just chillin' out all dormant like. The heat and the ash and the SOULS OF DEAD THETANS have created these amazingly beautiful photos, taken for National Geographic. (However, I found more photos at this site, something about NG's interface is booty.) The morning after: not-so scenic.

Posted by Ted Mills at 02:21 PM | | Comments (0)

May 12, 2008

She comes in colours everywhere

The new, completely crazy Play-doh bunny ad for Sony Bravia. (Thanks, Jon!). I searched about and found the ad with the making-of at the end of it, because you *know* you're gonna want to see this. Seems like a lot of money spent for something meant to sell televisions, but on the other hand, who would fund this if it was "just" a short film? The bunnies are very cute. I especially like the yellow one waiting to cross the road.

Posted by Ted Mills at 03:52 PM | | Comments (0)

May 11, 2008

Video of a sad, unaware person projecting his self-loathing

When he's not pleasuring himself with a vibrator during non-consensual phone sex with a workmate, Faux News Propaganda Channel windbag Bill O'Reilly does things like this.

This is awesome...how long before the mashups/remixes?

UPDATE: Someone's knickers are in a bunch. The original YouTube got taken down. I've replaced it with one from Break.com. Also try here. I may even have the original Flash file kickin' around...but no need for that yet.
UPDATE: Well, that took all of 12 hours. It's the Fuck It! Remix of Bill O! by Revolucian. Word.
UPDATE 05.14.08!: Stephen Colbert exposes the video to the television audience--how's that feel CBS?--and then parodies it. Brilliant.
UPDATE 05.14.08 PART DEUX: The Fuck It! Remix video.


UPDATE 05.16.08: CollegeHumor.com has a behind the scenes look at the producer of Bill O's show. This too is brilliant.

Posted by Ted Mills at 07:11 PM | | Comments (0)

Tintin in Thailand


Tintin in Thailand is a 1999 era bootleg comic--and a labor of love--that parodies the globe-trotting antics of Herge's boy reporter as he and the usual cast of characters explore the sleazy side of Bangkok. My memories of traveling in Thailand are tied up in the bootleg Tintin t-shirts I saw for sale everywhere, so this seems quite appropriate. The parody did not sit well with the Belgian authorities or the Herge Foundation.

A police unit which specialises in investigating counterfeiting mounted an elaborate sting operation in which officers posed as potential buyers and chatted with smugglers in the town of Tournai, near the French border, before revealing their true identities.
Two men were arrested, and a third from Antwerp, after they confessed to having produced around 1,000 copies of the unauthorised tome in Thailand for resale in Belgium.
Thanks to the Bravojuju blog, you can now download a copy and see what all the fuss was about.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:13 PM | | Comments (0)

May 08, 2008

Portrait of an Oil-Addicted Former Superpower

Michael T. Klare has an excerpt from his new book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet over at TomDispatch, and it's a quite telling history of how our continual wars, our hubristic dismissal of Russia, and other egotistical blunders have bankrupted our country and sent it backwards. And so quickly!

Every day, the average G.I. in Iraq uses approximately 27 gallons of petroleum-based fuels. With some 160,000 American troops in Iraq, that amounts to 4.37 million gallons in daily oil usage, including gasoline for vans and light vehicles, diesel for trucks and armored vehicles, and aviation fuel for helicopters, drones, and fixed-wing aircraft. With U.S. forces paying, as of late April, an average of $3.23 per gallon for these fuels, the Pentagon is already spending approximately $14 million per day on oil ($98 million per week, $5.1 billion per year) to stay in Iraq. Meanwhile, our Iraqi allies, who are expected to receive a windfall of $70 billion this year from the rising price of their oil exports, charge their citizens $1.36 per gallon for gasoline.
Klare also points out how Bush just assumed that a post-Berlin Wall Russia would become another outpost of the American empire.
In line with this outlook, President Bush believed that he could convert an impoverished and compliant Russia into a major source of oil and natural gas for the United States -- with American energy companies running the show. This was the evident aim of the U.S.-Russian "energy dialogue" announced by Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in May 2002. But if Bush thought Russia was prepared to turn into a northern version of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela prior to the arrival of Hugo Chávez, he was to be sorely disappointed. Putin never permitted American firms to acquire substantial energy assets in Russia. Instead, he presided over a major recentralization of state control when it came to the country's most valuable oil and gas reserves, putting most of them in the hands of Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas behemoth.
That was the meeting when the ChimpFascist looked into Pootie-Poot's eyes and saw what a wonderful man he was. Oops!!

Posted by Ted Mills at 02:01 PM | | Comments (0)

My Dead Morning Jacket


I don't really know where to start getting my head around this one.

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened.
And furthermore:
Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat...That thing was never alive before it was grown.”
I also heard that the coat, all cramped up in its incubator, started shrieking "WHY? WHY??? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE KILL ME!!!" Okay, that's not true, but if it was, wouldn't that be cool? I'd wear that.

Surely this will make us question preconceived ideas about science, life, art, fashion, laboratories, pleather (That's enough - Ed.)

Posted by Ted Mills at 01:02 PM | | Comments (0)

Continuing...the Endtroducing...


We're gonna continue on an Endtroducing tip with a few links.

An after-school percussion group at Minnetonka High School, Minneapolis, play two tracks from Endtroducing, over on this page, circa 2005. Word. The drummer even keeps in the weird drum edits. Big version of file here. Hot damn. Sounds like Steve Reich.

Eliot Wilder wrote a whole book about the album.

There's also this very long review of Entroducing over at PopMatters by Tim O'Neil.

Endtroducing... was a field report from the frontlines of a brave new world, a world which has now become slightly less strange but no less visceral. It would have been hard to rank it above similarly important albums by artists like Orbital, the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, New Order and Kraftwerk, but while each of those artists have produced albums which are perhaps the equal of Endtroducing..., there's not a one of them I could in good conscience put squarely above it.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:07 AM | | Comments (0)

May 07, 2008

Building a Classic with a Batch of Samples


DJ Shadow's 1996 Endtroducing... is a masterpiece of sound collage and turntable skills and still sounds incredible 12 years later. The sheer number of samples place this album up there with the Beastie Boys "Paul's Boutique" and Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet". And now blog Goons Dancing Under Full Moons has compiled all the samples into one large 250mb file for educational purposes.

This was a monster. When I saw the sample list I almost gave up before I started. These samples took me to the bowels of the internet and on the way I think I learned enough German and Portuguese to talk my ass out of a fight. If I tried to remember and list all of the different blogs and forums that helped me in my search my brain would bail out my ears. So here goes nothing and everything. 70 mthrfckng samples.
Interesting artists on the list: Metallica, Tangerine Dream, Meredith Monk, Roger Waters, Alan Parsons Project. Who knew?

Posted by Ted Mills at 06:02 PM | | Comments (0)

Melbourne - See what a sane and sensible city should be


Thanks to homeslice Jon Crow for sending me this. Check out this vid from the StreetFilms group that promotes sensible living in urban areas. More rooms for pedestrians, more bikes, friendlier neighborhoods, more culture, more nightlife, less crime. Melbourne (yes, the one in Australia) took on very simple and easy changes and transformed their city. It gives one hope that many places could be like this.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:31 AM | | Comments (0)

May 05, 2008

Prince, Radiohead, the Oneness

"WOOOOOOOO!!!! EPIC!!!!!" So says the man who shot this audience video of Prince covering "Creep" at Coachella two weeks ago. I just heard about it over the weekend, and then all the YouTube versions were down, but then I found this. I like how the Purple One changes the lyrics to suit his needs. I couldn't imagine him singing "I'm a loser" or "I wish I was special," and he didn't. Shoop-shooooo!

Posted by Ted Mills at 10:23 AM | | Comments (0)

May 04, 2008

John Fogerty at the Bowl

John Fogerty! No, really!!
Being an arts writer means going to concerts that you'd never really pay for, but have nothing against. So a chance to see John Fogerty was duly taken. After all, Fogerty's string of hits with CCR from 1968-1972 is pretty formidable. So, it was a good time to see him in concert, still with that same voice. My mom--yes, my plus-one free ticket--was gobsmacked at the opportunity to go too.

Review coming soon...

Update: A setlist, as found on Fogerty's own site.
Born On The Bayou
Bad Moon Rising
Green River
Longshot
Who'll Stop The Rain
Lookin' Out My Backdoor
Cotton Fields
My Toot Toot
Ramble Tamble
Midnight Special
Susie Q
Don't You Wish It Was True
Southern Streamline
Broken Down Cowboy
Keep On Chooglin'
Creedence Song
Have You Ever Seen The Rain
Blue Ridge Mountain Blues
Almost Saturday Night
Down On The Corner w/Shane & Tyler Fogerty
Good Golly Miss Molly
Old Man Down The Road
Fortunate Son
Up Around The Bend
Proud Mary

Posted by Ted Mills at 03:03 PM | | Comments (0)

May 02, 2008

THIS ARE SERIOUS THREAD


Not one, but FIVE! FIVE!!!! cats that look like Wilford Brimley.

By way of BoingBoing

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:31 AM | | Comments (0)

Eastern European Matchbox Design, '50s/'60s


A tres cool Flickr set.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:19 AM | | Comments (0)

May 01, 2008

Marcus Keef: That '70s Guy


Who was the photographer, Marcus Keef? I'd like to know, but the Internet is rather quiet. What I do know is that his album cover art for the Vertigo, Neon, and Nepentha labels of the early '70s is very distinctive. Often gatefold, widescreen works, Keef's photos usually manipulate color, obsess about old British households, creepy interiors, dusty attics, and occasional shots of the band members sitting around looking lost and/or freaked out. I'm sure a lot of kids were weirded out by their older sibling's/family member's copy of the first Black Sabbath album, with that witch/old hag/meth head/Ozzy in drag on the cover, waiting outside her dilapidated old country barnhouse, waiting for you to come in for tea.

To me, it's like the dark flipside of the late '60s interest in nostalgia, all 1920s funfairs and post-WWI memorabilia. No, those people didn't come back from the war, and we shuttered up the attic with a dead man's things. Going to look for the past, these people found that it's, well, past. And dead. And eldritch, which is a perfect word for this.

Of course, not all of Keef's works were like this, like the awful bloody clown cover for Jimmy Campbell's "Half Baked" or the studio shot for Raw Material's "Time Is...". But for the most part, these two galleries show a definite style that evoke a certain period in British rock. You can almost feel the album covers with their matte finish, their musty, unplayed smell, and tiny detritus of hand rolled tobacco/weed that's fallen in the inner sleeve.

No album dates past 1976, and the best work is 1970-1973, so I wonder what became of him. Is he still alive?

Posted by Ted Mills at 02:14 AM | | Comments (0)

Tim Flach and Equus


This horse fetus thingamydooder is the cutest, most angelic thing I've seen in a long time. All together now: awwwwwwwwwwwww.
However, it turns out that photographer Tim Flach, who took this and other amazing horse-themed photos, has an amazing eye for more than just the awwwwwww-some.

The method I used was to ask people who have spent their lives with this subject: what is it that really touched you about the horse? What is it that you remember? And as you ask people, they'll recount stories or things they experienced about a particular breed or how when they were a child they rode a Shetland pony, and what it meant to them. Shetlands are very intelligent and they also have the tendency to be very challenging. Most people who become quite good riders often start out with that kind of pony. If you ask them which pony has significance to them, they'll often cite the Shetland pony over all other ponies. So then what I did was I went to Shetland and spent a week literally within the Shetland islands to find the origin of each horse, and where it came from. So that you could be a child in an arena in Moscow and see a picture of where your pony had really come from and the environment that created it.

Posted by Ted Mills at 01:27 AM | | Comments (0)