Kanye West Cartoon Video for "Good Morning" from the "Graduation" Album

This is Kanye West's latest video for his song "Good Morning" from his "Graduation" album. The video/animated cartoon, which was created by Japanese contemporary pop artist Takashi Murakami, depicts Kanye as a cute teddy bear encountering some serious obstacles in a surreal environment as he struggles to make it to his graduation.

Kanye West |MTV Music

Tempestad and Dreams - Eugenio Recuenco's Amazing Photo Exhibit

I published some amazing photos from brilliant Spanish photographer Eugenio Recuenco a couple of days ago and promised to add more stuff. This very evocative and absolutely magical photo exhibition is Recuenco's latest work. The exhibit is called Tempestad and Dreams and it was presented at the Galerie Bertie-Toublanc in Paris in February/March of this year. These images are not yet in Recuenco's website but the site is worth visiting here.



















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Rain of Madness - A Hilarious Mockumentary for Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder

Rain of Madness is a mockumentary for the comedy Tropic Thunder starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downing Jr. and Steve Coogan supposedly chronicling the behind the scenes filming of Tropic Thunder which made its USA theatrical debut on August 13th. I think I got to the party a bit too late by posting this video now after the movie premiered but I think it is so funny! Juvenile as heck but funny to me nevertheless. The fake documentary mocks Hearts of Darkness which is a real documentary that chronicles the making of Francis Ford Coppola's epic war film Apocalypse Now.

"Tropic Thunder is a 2008 action comedy film directed by Ben Stiller and written by Stiller, Justin Theroux, and Etan Cohen. The film stars Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. as a group of prima donna actors making a Vietnam War film when their fed-up writer and director decide to abandon them in the middle of the jungle, forcing them to fight their way out."

-Wikipedia

Check out the trailer for Tropic Thunder if you have not done so already or watched the film. I think its totally hilarious!

Rain of Madness


Tropic Thunder trailer

Eugenio Recuenco's Amazingly Beautiful Photography

This is the work of 38 year old Spanish photographer Eugenio Recuenco who is considered by many to be the most important photographer on the international scene. Mr. Recuenco's amazingly evocative, pictorial photography and unique chiaroscuro style have earned him comparison with such great Spanish masters as Goya, El Greco and Zurbaran. Mr. Recuenco,who has earned multiple accolades for his fantastic work such as the Lion of Gold and Bronze for his work for Playstation at the 2005 Cannes Festival, has done work for such powerhouses as Lavazza, Nina Ricci, Pull & Bear, Magnum, Mango, Le Bon Marché, Vogue, Maxim, Saint Laurent and many others. This is a 2003 campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes.

I hate the cigarettes but I absolutely love the amazing photographic work! More to come from this fantastic artist. For now I leave you with this small gallery.










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Eugenio Recuenco

Destino - A Short Animated Cartoon by Salvador Dali and Walt Disney

Salvador Dali and Walt Disney collaborated on a short cartoon called Destino(Destiny). I personally can't imagine radical, chaotic, subversive Dali doing a collabo with Disney but it seems that the Spanish painter considered Disney (along with the Marx brothers and Cecil B. DeMille) to be some sort of a kindred soul in the surrealist movement. Destino is currently being shown at the MoMA in NYC as part of an exhibit called "Dalí: Painting and Film".

"Destino is a short animated cartoon released in 2003 by The Walt Disney Company. Destino is unique in that its production originally began in 1945, 58 years before its original release. The project was a collaboration between American animator Walt Disney and Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, and features music written by Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez.

Destino premiered on June 2, 2003 at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, France. The six-minute short follows the love story of Chronos and the ill-fated love he has for a mortal female. The story continues as the female dances through surreal scenery inspired by Dalí's paintings. There is little dialogue, but the sound track features a song by the Mexican composer, Armando Dominguez."

The film was shown as part of the exhibition Dali & Film at Tate Modern from June to September, 2007, as part of the Dali exhibit at the LA County Museum of Art from October, 2007 to January 2008, and at an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art called Dalí: Painting and Film from June to September 2008."
-Wikipedia

MoMA Exhibit
Dali's storyboard and inspirational artwork for Destino








Images via movie.net

The World's First Motion Pictures - Muybridge and Le Prince

Eadweard J. Muybridge (April 9, 1830 – May 8, 1904) was an English photographer, known primarily for his early use of multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the celluloid film strip that is still used today" according to Wikipedia.

In 1872 Muybridge, acting on a request by then governor of California Leland Stanford who wanted to know if at any point a galloping horse did not have all four hooves on the ground, filmed this animated sequence of a race horse galloping. The resulting 24 pictures taken as the trotting horse raced past, was the beginning of what is generally recognized as stop-action series photography. "In 1877, says Wikipedia, Muybridge settled Stanford's question with a single photographic negative showing Stanford's racehorse Occident airborne in the midst of a gallop."

When seen through the Zoopraxiscope (as early as 1879), Muybridge's "Horse in Motion" photographs are considered by many in the know to be the world's first motion pictures.




This is ”Walking and turning around rapidly with a satchel in one hand, a cane in the other”, 1887




I absolutely love this sort of stuff and since I'm in the mood for delving into the fascinating history of cinematography, l decided to post this piece of history. The really, really short YouTube video below is the earliest surviving film. It is called "Roundhay Garden Scene" and it was shot at a house in Leeds, England in 1888 by French inventor Louis Le Prince.

The film was recorded at 12 frames per second and Le Prince is said to have succeeded in making pictures move before the Lumieres and Thomas Edison.

Levi van Veluw's Landscape Self-Portraits

Levi van Veluw is a young Dutch artists who does miniature landscapes/self portraits on his face and head complete with trees, lawn, lamp lights, sheeps, snow and other stuff. His latest work is the 4-piece "Landscape" series presented here. Fascinating and Weird.

"Levi van Veluw´s photo series are self-portraits, drawn and photographed by himself: a one-man-process. His works constitute elemental transfers; modifying the face as object; combining it with other stylistic elements to create a third visual object of great visual impact. The work you see therefore is not a portrait, but an information-rich image of colour, form, texture, and content. The image contains the history of a short creative process, with the artist shifting between the entities of subject and object.

Besides the four landscapes, Levi van Veluw will also present a new video piece, landscape installation and works from two other series of photographs."
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Madonna Kicks off her Sticky and Sweet Tour with a Bang

Madonna kicked off her "Sticky and Sweet" tour at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Wales on August 23rd to critical acclaim. The Material 50 Year Old danced, skipped double dutch rope and is said to generally have kicked up a storm at the concert.

I am a Madonna fan but I know that the pop queen has perhaps as many detractors as she does admirers; there is something about the woman that rubs some people the wrong way. That's just as well. As far as I'm concerned, I get a kick out of the way Madonna manages to manipulate the general public with her antics on and off stage. Whether she's wearing pointy bras outside her clothes or getting crucified or making out with her female dancers or Britney Spears, the pop icon thrives on creating controversy. That's what she does best. Create controversy to remain in the public discourse. And people eat that stuff up and fall for it over and over and over again. LOL. In the YouTube videos below, Madonna performs "Vogue" and "Get Stupid"



"Get Stupid" is a quasi-political song of sorts which ends with an image of presidential candidate Barack Obama. The video shows lots of images of Madonna singing, of people, dead animals, Adolf Hitler and a whole lot of other shit. Furthermore, the video's quality is not that great but there are some really cool images.


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Oktapodi - Animated Film about 2 Octopi in Love - Winner of 2008 Computer Animation Festival

"SIGGRAPH (short for Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics (CG) convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization says Wikipedia".

This year, the Computer Animation Festival was just held in Los Angeles about a week ago and the Best of Show Award went to Oktapodi, a well-made, really cool French animated short film about two octopi in love as they try to escape from a cook determined to capture them.

Peter Greenaway's "The Last Supper" Installation

British filmmaker Peter Greenaway's projection onto Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper in Milan was unveiled in that city for one night only.

"On the occasion of Saloni 2008, Peter Greenaway gives new life to the world’s most celebrated masterpiece "The Last Supper" by Leonardo Da Vinci, merging an extraordinary wealth of languages including visual arts, cinema, poetry, music and some of the most cutting-edge new technologies.

"Leonardo’s masterpiece "The Last Supper" has survived both the fast natural ageing process caused by experimental painting techniques conceived by the artist and the many attempts to restore its initial aspect, as well as having outlasted bombings during World War II. The Biblical scene will come to new life under the spectator’s eyes thanks to live projections of images and light bouncing on the very painted surface, accompanied by a soundscape of voices, music and noises. The performance will take place in the Refectory of the Dominican Friary in Santa Maria delle Grazie Church: on the very wall of the refectory, Leonardo portrayed the moment when Christ announces one of the apostle will betray him, causing disruption and dismay among them."
Source

Sin City Disney Characters

Curt Rapala, a very good graphic artist, merged the Frank Miller-created and Robert Rodriguez-directed film noir classic Sin City with some iconic (and oh so perfectly innocent!) female Disney characters. As a result, the mermaid Ariel is Jessica Alba's uber sensuous bar dancer Nancy, Snow White is Rosario Dawson's nasty-ass Gail, head of the all-women clan of sex workers, Aurora is Jaime King's Goldie who gets murdered by some bad people, Cinderella is Brittany Murphy's sexy bartender Shellie and Jasmine is Devon Aoki's deadly little assassin and clan enforcer Miho.





















If you have time and don't care about the spoiler alert, watch the YouTube video below for some cool scenes from this 2005 cult classic.
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