Here is the bottle label for my strongest homebrew yet.

click to enlarge

This guy has taken it to the next level recreating covers in MS Paint and I especially appreciate his subject choices. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.

you can also find a huge collection of these MS Paint renditions in this set which has been collected from various user submissions on music forums. it’s a goldmine!

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:

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…

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

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

Strange Maps

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

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

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

I don’t remember how I stumbled upon this guy’s site of nicely designed vintage books, but his collection is pretty impressive. This one for Thomas Pynchon’s beast of a novel is so brilliantly sexy and strange:

Doesn’t it make you curious enough to dive right into the 700+ pages and attempt to keep track of all the 400 characters mentioned in it? That’s not an exaggeration.

For years I was indiscriminate about hoarding vintage books in thrift stores and yard sales until I finally ran out of physical space to contain them and sadly ended up re-donating a lot of them. However, I held onto these because I adored the covers:

My dear fat frienemy created a blog where he posts photos of everything he ate right from his phone as it is happening. So blah blah I’m-a-sheep-when-it-comes-to-technology blah and I started a cameraphone one myself. It’s easy since I can just send an MMS from my phone to Tumblr and it publishes it automatically. I’m such a sucker for this kinda stuff.

In celebrating the 40th anniversary of the First Man on the Moon, the NYT blog recently posted about this Pink Floyd Moon-Landing footage that I had no idea about. This atmospheric instrumental aired on BBC TV during live coverage of the moon landing.

David Gilmour had this to say:

We were in a BBC TV studio jamming to the landing. It was a live broadcast, and there was a panel of scientists on one side of the studio, with us on the other. I was 23. The programming was a little looser in those days, and if a producer of a late-night programme felt like it, they would do something a bit off the wall.

Pretty amazing, because that would never fly on network tv these days. God bless the 60s. I get goosebumps watching this.

This is a blatant steal from Jesse Pollock, but it’s okay because real friends steal from each other. This group called Steel Harmony played Joy Division’s Transmission during this artist Jeremy Deller’s Procession in Manchester earlier this month and it’s blowing my mind.

I don’t know how to explain my feelings. I’m laughing because it’s such an odd and joyous rendition due to the inherently beachy & carribean nature of the instrument but it also is pretty freaking good and fun to hear it in this context. I would be in heaven if I were walking down a street in Manchester and randomly stumbled upon this performance. According to Jesse, this band also played other Joy Division songs as well as the Buzzcocks. Man oh man.

Today is the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11 mission. Check out these amazing photos.

the object fetishist in me can’t stop thinking about this limited run 13th floor elevators box set. it’s 10 discs. 10 DISCS! remastered to their full potential (if you know these orig mono recordings, you know how much better they can sound) and a beautiful comprehensive hardbound book too boot. It will be mine!

They were the first to introduce me to the fact there was a creative psych scene in TX during that time and I had a nice WTF moment recently when I heard a Spectrum cover of one of these obscure TX psych bands. Maaaaan, some of these innovative music scenes in townie settings like cleveland and austin make me really proud of american rock music.

Man, I’m really obsessed with this Victorinox edition Airstream trailer. It’s soooo beautiful.

This is the same idea as the Cover Versions post, but instead of records in book format it is now movies. Killer