The Beatles played their last stadium gig in August, 1966 at Candlestick Park, then stopped touring altogether. At least publicly, they claimed that their new songs, coming off of intricately-produced albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, were just too hard to perform live.
Enter The Fab Faux, the greatest of all Beatles cover bands.
Featuring Will Lee (bassist for the Late Show with David Letterman), Jimmy Vivino (bandleader for Conan), Rich Pagano, Frank Agnello, and Jack Petruzzelli, The Fab Faux is all about one thing– performing live the most accurate reproduction of The Beatles’ repertoire. That includes songs that The Beatles never played live, and particularly songs off of the intricate later albums.
Above, you can watch them in action, playing the extended medley (16 minutes) that graces the second side of Abbey Road. Before you watch it, here are a couple things you need to know:
This Fab Faux recording of most of side two of ‘Abbey Road’ is a live, in-the-studio performance for a two-camera video shoot.… In the end, there were only three minor guitar fixes and each section was recorded in no more than three takes (most were two). There are NO added overdubs within this performance. The audio is pure — and mixed by Joe Chinnici.
The video was originally recorded for The Howard Stern Show. If you want to get a feel for how well The Fab Faux nailed it, watch their version played alongside the original below:
Many guys have man caves – a room, a basement, a shed where a dude can get away from the demands of domesticity and do dude things. Guillermo del Toro, the Oscar-nominated director of such movies as Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim and the upcoming Crimson Peak, doesn’t just have a cave. He has an entire house. It’s called Bleak House and it’s pretty amazing. In a featurette for Criterion’s release of Cronos (1993), Del Toro gives a guided tour. You can watch it above.
As you can see, the place feels less like a frat house than an eccentric museum. One of his inspirations was curiosity cabinets of old. Indeed, the walls are crammed with paintings, prints and curios and just about every corner is teeming with skeletons, skulls, tentacles and creepy things floating in bottles of formaldehyde.
Another inspiration was the original research library for Disney Studios, which fed the imagination of the studio’s artists with lots of art. So Del Toro has original frames from Gertie the Dinosaur by Winsor McCay, the first animated movie ever, along with drawings by Moebius and photographs of Alfred Hitchcock. He also has piles of books, magazines and DVDs. “Whatever it is,” says Del Toro, “it’s here to provide a shock to the system and get circulating the lifeblood of creativity, which I think is curiosity. When we lose curiosity, we lose entirely inventiveness, and we start becoming old. So the man cave of Bleak house was designed to be sort of a compression chamber where we can create a stimulating environment…” for artists.
Right above you even more about Bleak House in which Del Toro gives a tour to horror director Tim Sullivan. Not only is the place filled with strange and macabre curiosities but also mementoes from Del Toro’s movies. Want to see Del Toro brandish the original Big Baby from Hellboy II: The Golden Army? Check this video out.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Musicians can often become consumed by GAS—or “gear acquisition syndrome”—obsessing over equipment for years instead of making music with what they have. This is driven in part by the intimidating snobbery of gear elitists, and in part by consumer marketing seeking to convince us that we never have enough. It seems that the photography world also suffers from GAS, and, as a 1962 pitch letter to Pop Photo magazine by Hunter S. Thompson shows us—writes the photography blog Peta Pixel—“the landscape of the photo world half a century ago may not have been too different from what we see today.”
In such a landscape, gonzo journalist, “existentialist life coach,” and hobbyist photographer Thompson became a strenuous advocate for the spartan art of snapshot photography. He wrote his pitch letter to Pop Photo in response to an article by Ralph Hattersley called “Good & Bad Pictures,” and to propose his own essay on the subject with the possible title “The Case for the Chronic Snapshooter.”
He first describes the feeling imposed on him by the New York photo world that “no man should ever punch a shutter release without many years of instruction and at least $500 worth of the finest equipment.” In such an elitist environment, he became “embarrassed to be seen on the street with my ratty equipment” and “stopped taking pictures altogether.” Hattersley’s piece, however—which “cites Weegee and Cartier-Bresson”—convinced him that “snapshooting is not, by definition, a low and ignorant art.” He revisited his prints, he writes, “and decided that not all of them were worthless. As a matter of fact there were some that gave me great pleasure.”
That’s my idea in a nutshell. When photography gets so technical as to intimidate people, the element of simple enjoyment is bound to suffer. Any man who can see what he wants to get on film will usually find some way to get it; and a man who thinks his equipment is going to see for him is not going to get much of anything.
The moral here is that anyone who wants to take pictures can afford adequate equipment and can, with very little effort, learn how to use it. Then, when the pictures he gets start resembling the ones he saw in his mind’s eye, he can start thinking in terms of those added improvements that he may or may not need.
You can read Thompson’s full letter here. His advice to would-be photographers not only offers inspiration to amateurs and hobbyists; it also gives us a philosophy of photographic art (and art more generally) as an extension of our natural sensitivities, or “mind’s eye.” His “moral” might apply broadly to any creative endeavor likely to be stymied by GAS.
Thompson makes the case that whatever we can afford can get us where we need to go: “Why give up because you can’t afford a camera with a 1.8 or 1.4 lens?” he writes, “First push 3.5 to its absolute limit, and if it still bugs you, you’ll find some way to buy that other camera. If not, you don’t need it anyway.” He acknowledges that his thesis “will rub some of your high-priced advertisers the wrong way,” but writes that shutterbugs who cannot get results on lower-priced gear will only be disappointed when they fail similarly with the high-priced stuff.”
The push to shop instead of create compels us to obsess over what we don’t have—Thompson urges us to learn to make the very best with what we do.
We previously thought that the first use of the “F word” dated back to 1528 — to when a monk jotted the word in the margins of Cicero’s De Officiis. But it turns out that you can find traces of this colorful curse word in English court documents written in 1310.
Dr. Paul Booth, a former lecturer in medieval history at Keele University, was looking through court records from the age of Edward II when he accidentally stumbled upon the name “Roger Fuckebythenavele.” The name was apparently used three times in the documents, suggesting it was hardly a mistake. According to The Daily Mail, Booth believes “Roger Fuckebythenavele” was a nickname for a defendant in a criminal case. And, going further, he suggests the nickname could mean one of two things: ‘Either this refers to an inexperienced copulator, referring to someone trying to have sex with the navel, or it’s a rather extravagant explanation for a dimwit, someone so stupid they think this that is the way to have sex.’ Booth has notified the Oxford English Dictionary of his discovery.
Evoking the playful grotesques of Shel Silverstein, the gothic gloom of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, the occult beauty of the Rider-Waite tarot deck, and the hidden horrors of H.P. Lovecraft, Harry Clarke’s illustrations for a 1926 edition of Goethe’s Faustare said to have inspired the psychedelic imagery of the 60s. And one can easily see why Clarke’s disturbing yet elegant images would appeal to people seeking altered states of consciousness. Clarke, born in Dublin in 1889, came to prominence as an illustrator of imaginative literature—by Hans Christian Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe, and others—though he worked primarily as a designer, with his brother, of stained glass windows. Faust was the last book he illustrated, and the most fantastic.
Clarke (1889 — 1931) drew his inspiration from the Art Nouveau movement that began in the previous century with artists like Aubrey Beardsley and Gustav Klimt. We see the influence of both in Clarke’s gaunt, elongated figures and his interest in unusual, organic patterns and ornamentation. We can also see—mentions an online Tulane University exhibit of his work—the influence of his own stained glass work, “through use of heavy lines in his black and white illustrations.” The blog Garden of Unearthly Delights notes that “initially Harraps, the publisher, did not like the drawings (Clarke recalled that they thought the work was ‘full of steaming horrors’), and many of the illustrations were finished under pressure.”
Despite the publisher’s reservations, reviews of the 2,000-copy limited edition were largely positive. Reviewers praised the drawings for their “distinctive charms” and “wealth of fantastic invention.” One critic for the Irish Statesman wrote, “Clarke’s fertility of invention is endless. It is shown in the multitude of designs less elaborate than the page plates, but no less intense.” The “page plates” referred to eight full-color, full-page illustrations like the painting of Faust and Mephistopheles above. Additionally, the book contains eight full-page ink wash illustrations, six full-page illustrations in black and white, and sixty-four smaller black and white vignettes.
You can read the Clarke-illustrated poem online here, with the illustrations reproduced, albeit badly. (Also download the text in various formats at Project Gutenberg.) To see many more higher-quality digital scans like the ones featured here, visit 50 Watts and The Garden of Unearthly Delights, which also brings us more quotations from reviewers, including “a negative review of the drawings” that sums up what we might—and what those 60s revivalists surely did—find most appealing about Clarke’s illustrations. They present, wrote a critic in the magazine Artwork,
A dream world of half-created fantasies; the powerless fancies of senile visions; misshapen bodies with wormlike heads; staring eyes of octopuses and reptiles gaze like ponderous saurian of the lost world, while half-finished homunculi change like “plasma” in forms unbound by reason.
That last phrase, “unbound by reason,” could also apply to the weird, nightmarish pilgrimage of Goethe’s hero, and to the shaking off of old strictures that artists like Clarke, his fin de siècle predecessors, and his psychedelic successors strove to achieve.
By the time she got the all clear, both of us had large portions of it committed to memory.
Christopher, I treasure the memories of those long hours spent together on cassette, but I’m afraid I’ll be spending the 150th anniversary of Alicewith Sir John Gielgud, below.
The celebrated dry wit that served him so well throughout his illustrious career keeps this 1989 Alice very easy on the ears. He takes the opposite approach from Plummer, underplaying the character voices. It’s rare to find a gentleman of 85 who can play a 7‑year-old girl so convincingly, and with so little fuss.
A bustling seaport city on the west coast of Canada, Vancouver is a big movie production town. In fact, it’s the third biggest film production city in North America, right behind LA and New York. And yet you wouldn’t know it. Because Vancouver never plays itself. It always masquerades in movies as other cities — New York, Seattle, Santa Barbara and beyond.
Zhou shows you just how this deception gets pulled off, again and again.
It is the year 2019. The world is overcrowded. Decaying. Mechanized. Android slaves, programmed to live for only four years, are technological marvels — strong, intelligent, physically indistinguishable from humans. Into this world comes a band of rebel androids. Desparate to find the mastermind who built them, bent on extending their life span, they will use all their superhuman strength and cunning to stop anything — or anyone — who gets in their way. Ordinary people are no match to them. Neither are the police. This is a job for one man only. Rick Deckard. Blade Runner.
Thus opens the novel Blade Runner: A Story of the Future. But even if you so enjoyed Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner that you went back and read the original novel that provided the film its source material, these words may sound unfamiliar to you, not least because you almost certainly would have gone back and read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the real object of Blade Runner’s adaptation. When the movie came out in 1982, out came an edition of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? re-branded as Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — and out as well, confusingly, came Blade Runner: A Story of the Future, the novelization of the adaptation.
Who would read such a thing? Movie novelizations have long since passed their 1970s and 80s pre-home-video prime, but in our retro-loving 21st century they’ve inspired a few true fans to impressive demonstrations of their enjoyment of this specialized form of literature. “They’re special to me because when I was younger there were a lot of films I desired to see but didn’t get to, and the novelizations were sold at the Scholastic Book Fairs,” says enthusiast Josh Olsen in an interview with Westword, who describes his books of choice as “adapted from films, or early drafts of films at least, locked with short deadlines and printed cheaply and perfunctorily and end up being part of the movie’s massive marketing universe. Basically, it’s the literary equivalent of the McDonald’s cup from back in the day.”
And so we have Audiobooks for the Damned, Olsen’s labor of love that has taken over thirty of these novelizations (all out of print) and adapted them yet one stage further. You can hear all of them on the project’s Youtube page, from Blade Runner: A Story of the Future(an easy starting place, since the novelization’s scant eighty pages make for a listening experience considerably shorter than the movie itself) to The Terminator to Videodrome. And if you’d like to spend your next cross-country drive with such cherished kitsch classics as Poltergeist, The Brood, Over the Edge, or The Lost Boys in unabridged (and unsubtle) prose form, you can get them on their featured audiobook page. This all delivers to us the obvious next question: which bold, nostalgic Millennial filmmaker will step forward to turn all these extremely minor masterworks back into movies again?
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