continued brewing after that last batch of beer, so here’s the bottle label for my hard cider.

click to enlarge

i just got this copy of The Getaway by Jim Thompson in the mail thinking the cover artwork was so badass. Then I came across this gallery of his vintage editions that is completely next level:

You should watch this cool 1954 semi-abstract animation of Edgar Allan Poe’s legendary short story, preferably while while sipping on a cask of Amontillado.

Laugh at McSweeney’s:
It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherf***ers.

An excerpt for your enjoyment:

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is – it’s fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

Here’s another blatant steal from my friend Joy. I’m loving these images by Mark Weaver. They look organic and analog, not too graphic designey at all…

Now that I got a hold of the 10CD 13th Floor Elevators Box Set, I can share two incredible previously unreleased live versions of songs that sound so amazing and dynamic from the disc titled “Death in Texas” recorded in Houston in 1967.

Turn the volume knob to 11 and set your lasers to stun:

“She Lives in a Time of Her Own”
[audio:shelives.mp3]
“Reverberation”
[audio:Reverberation.mp3]

God I adore this band.

I watched a really disgusting horror flick called The Ruins recently that I thought would be interesting because of the Yucatan locale and the plot centered around Mayan ruins, but it was way too fucked up. I love a good old fashion bloodbath in the David Cronenberg or John Carpenter vein, but these new school horror movies are much too sadistic & cringeworthy for my blood with all the torture devices and bones breaking. What happened to squibs?

Anyway, it’s October. Time for getting lost in a corn maze, passing out candy to lil monkeys, carving pumpkins, eating more stuff with squash in it and… watching scary movies. Here are five spooky horror films i love that freak me out cerebrally instead of making me want to vomit:

1) Rosemary’s Baby starring Mia Farrow (dir. Roman Polanski 1968)

2) Don’t Look Now starring Donald Sutherland & Julie Christie (dir. Nick Roeg 1973)

3) Hour of The Wolf starring Max Von Sydow & Liv Ullmann (dir. Ingmar Bergman 1968)

4) The Tenant starring Roman Polanski (dir. Roman Polanski 1976)

5) Eyes Without a Face starring Alida Valli (dir. Georges Franju 1960)

have you been following my photo tumblog? well, if not no worries. me and el novio have been homebrewing a batch of pale ale. it’s not ready yet and probably won’t be done until at least another 2 weeks, but here is the label we made for the bottles. arrrgggh!

click to enlarge

The photos I’ve seen from this Sydney dust storm are amazing. They remind me of this science-fiction short story I read as a young teen where Earth became inhabitable and people had to live on Mars.

Pics via Flickr

9 feet tall

…and here’s a neat site devoted to strange ones

Strange Maps

many thanks to Joy for sharing this link.

Meredith Dittmar

Marrying my love of movies and animated gifs, Three Frames is a fantastic tumblr site that publishes one animated gif a day from a classic movie, using only three frames total for an awesome herky-jerky effect. It’s pure genius.

//from Close Encounters of the Third Kind

//from Play Time

these scuptures constructed from colored pencils are just so mindblowing that i think that my brain just fell out of my head. they remind of sea corals

www.jennifermaestre.com

One my favorite film noir flicks ever is this relatively obscure one made in 1950 in San Francisco called Woman on the Run. I discovered it by chance and watched a beautifully restored print many years ago during a noir festival at our historic rep movie house, the Castro Theater. It has never been released proper with a good print, which is a crying shame because the film is so suspenseful with an exciting cat & mouse plot, the dialogue razor sharp and the execution is crazy nontraditional in terms of the standard noir formula for the time. Most women in noirs were strong but morally ambiguous & semi-villainous femme fatales that couldn’t be trusted and you could never feel completely good rooting for them without feeling slightly dirty/criminal. Ann Sheridan’s character is not this at all – she is flawed but 100% good, completely coolheaded & guarded at all times, in control, street smart and never once uses her sexuality to influence others, which is seriously weird for this genre.

//Ann Sheridan outfoxing the fuzz in the name of love

Aside from Douglas Sirk films which had hopelessly romantic plots that were sometimes surprisingly sexy and complex addressing issues like racism & class during a very repressed era in US history, it can be harder for me to be engrossed in movies from the 40s and 50s because I cannot relate to them in modern terms. Woman on the Run has a great plot and is something special though, and I love seeing San Francisco streets and locales during this time.

Her alienated & lonely husband witnesses a murder and is on the run (and he is awesome, unrequitedly affectionate, & creative). Her character is, on the surface, cold and seemingly indifferent as a wife and when watching sometimes I think she’s insane for getting into that complacent lull during marriage you always hear married folks complaining about. But it is understandable because he is an escapist dreamer who goes nowhere and she a realist who keeps the house alive. A weird match-up for sure, but interesting and somehow, as a whole, makes for a strange & cosmic balance (the chemistry is really satisfying to watch when they are on screen together). Because of this murder he witnessed and him fleeing from the cops who want him to testify (and risk his life), she is forced awake out of her emotional slumber on this mission to find him because he has a bad heart and needs to get his medicine to him… the possibility of him dying scares her straight. It is really a great film and I highly recommend it if you are into film noir or films set in San Francisco (or both).

before lego gets all litigious and pulls this (they’ve been doing a lot of that lately), here’s an amusing video that is a few weeks old. a lego rendition of wu-tang’s mystery of chessboxin:

this guy also has two good scenes from star wars done in the same manner on vimeo

my 2nd plate

I went to this mac & cheese competition last Sunday where 2 of my friends were competing and am paying for it in the gym this week. There were 20 competitors and I ate about 18 of them. I am still thinking about the duck one that Jesse from Beer & Nosh put together:

Jesse Friedman of Team Beer & Nosh used confit’d duck legs, duck skin crackling, a duck demi-glace, and Parmesan–duck fat croutons in his mac. So bad for me, yet so so good

oh man, i’m daydreaming again. really not into the way most modern cars look and think the lines on cars from the 60 and early 70s are pretty much untouchable.

Ford Econoline Pickup

AMC Pacer

NSU Prinz TT

Goggomobil Dart

Volkswagen Type 3 Notchback