June 1, 2011
Alex Grey (b. 1953) is an American artist specializing in spiritual and psychedelic art (or visionary art) that is sometimes associated with the New Age movement. Grey is a Vajrayana practitioner, one the three main sects of Buddhism. His body of work spans a variety of forms including performance art, process art, installation art, sculpture, and painting. He and his wife Allyson Grey are the co-founders of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, a non-profit institution supporting Visionary Culture in New York City.
Grey’s paintings can be described as a blend of sacred, visionary art and postmodern art. He is best known for his paintings of glowing anatomical human bodies, images that ‘x-ray’ the multiple layers of reality. His art is a complex integration of body, mind, and spirit. ‘The Sacred Mirrors,’ a life-sized series of 21 paintings, took 10 years to complete, and examines in detail the physical and metaphysical anatomy of the individual.
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June 1, 2011
The Ethiopians is a ska, rocksteady, and reggae vocal group, founded by Leonard Dillon, Stephen Taylor and Aston Morris. The group started out recording for Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd in 1966. Dillon had previously released some mento songs under the name Jack Sparrow. Around late 1966, Morris left the Ethiopians.
Having left Dodd, the Ethiopians started recording at Dynamic Studios for the W.I.R.L. label, releasing the rocksteady classic ‘Train to Skaville,’ which was their first success. In 1968 they recorded the song ‘Everything Crash,’ their first big hit. The song criticised the political situation in Jamaica at the time, such as water rationing and power cuts that led to unrest; such as an incident in which 31 people were shot by police.
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June 1, 2011
Toots and the Maytals are a Jamaican ska and reggae vocal group. The Maytals were key figures in reggae music. Formed in the early 1960s when ska was hot, the Maytals had a reputation for having strong, well-blended voices and a seldom-rivaled passion for their music. Frederick ‘Toots’ Hibbert (b. 1945) is the group’s frontman.
He met Henry ‘Raleigh’ Gordon and Nathaniel ‘Jerry’ Mathias, forming in 1961 a group whose early recordings were incorrectly attributed to ‘The Flames’ and ‘The Vikings’ in the UK by Island Records. The Maytals first had chart success recording for producer Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd at Studio One. With musical backing from Dodd’s house band, The Skatalites, the Maytals’ close-harmony gospel singing overshadowed Dodd’s other up-and-coming vocal group, The Wailers.
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June 1, 2011
‘54-46 (That’s My Number)‘ is a song by Fred ‘Toots’ Hibbert, recorded by Toots & the Maytals and originally released on the Beverly’s label in Jamaica and the Pyramid label in the UK. It was one of the first ska songs to receive widespread popularity outside Jamaica and is seen as being one of the defining songs of the reggae genre. It has been anthologized repeatedly and the titles of several reggae anthologies include ’54-46′ in their title.
The lyrics describe Toots’ time in prison for an arrest for possession of marijuana. The song features the same riddim (instrumental accompaniment) to a song as ‘Train to Skaville’ by Toots & the Maytals’ contemporaries The Ethiopians. Hibbert later admitted that 54-46 was not his actual jail number, and that he was not arrested for a crime related to marijuana.
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June 1, 2011
New Belgium Brewing Company is a regional brewery located in Fort Collins, Colorado. The brewery was founded by husband-and-wife team Jeff Lebesch and Kim Jordan in 1991 and emphasizes eco-friendly practices and employee ownership in its marketing materials. Fat Tire, an amber ale, is the company’s flagship beer. Its recipe originates from a co-founder’s bicycle trip through Belgium from brewery to brewery. The company promotes its Fat Tire ale locally by the public placement of colorful vintage bicycles outside its brewery, which is located adjacent to the public bike path along the Cache La Poudre River. New Belgium beer labels are designed by Anne Fitch, a watercolorist. Kim Jordan, the President of New Belgium Brewery, credits the success of New Belgium Brewery in part on Anne’s artwork, ‘Our beers were good, our labels were interesting to people, and we pretty quickly had a fairly robust following.’ In 2006, her artwork appeared on each of the over 125 million bottles sold by New Belgium.
Tour de Fat is a bicycle parade and festival sponsored by New Belgium. The events, which take place annually in various large- and medium-sized cities around the West, include music, New Belgium beer, circus- and -vaudeville type acts, bicycle dance troupes, and the main activist spectacle, a giant group bike ride/parade wherein the participants, many of whom are in fanciful costume, ride through town. The actual activist climax of the tour, however, is the bike trade, in which a local participant transfers the keys and title of their motor vehicle to New Belgium in exchange for a new commuter bike and trailer in order to promote bike riding and sustainability. The ‘Fat Tire’ bike is so strongly associated with New Belgium Breweries that employees of the brewery are given a ‘cruiser bike’ ‘like the one pictured on its Fat Tire Amber Ale label’ on their one -year anniversary with the company.
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May 31, 2011
Destino is an animated short film released in 2003 by The Walt Disney Company. The six-minute short follows the story of Chronos and the ill-fated love he has for a mortal female. It is unusual in that its production originally began in 1945.
The project was a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí, and features music written by Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez and performed by Dora Luz.
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May 31, 2011
Edward Tufte (b. 1942) is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization.Tufte’s writing is important in such fields as information design and visual literacy, which deal with the visual communication of information. He coined the term ‘chartjunk’ to refer to useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of quantitative information displays. Other key concepts of Tufte are the ‘lie factor,’ the ‘data-ink ratio,’ and the ‘data density’ of a graphic.
He uses the term ‘data-ink ratio’ to argue against using excessive decoration in visual displays of quantitative information. Tufte states, ‘Sometimes decorations can help editorialize about the substance of the graphic. But it’s wrong to distort the data measures—the ink locating values of numbers—in order to make an editorial comment or fit a decorative scheme.’
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May 26, 2011
Lowbrow describes an underground visual art movement that arose in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Lowbrow is a widespread populist art movement with origins in the underground comix world, punk music, hot-rod street culture, and other subcultures. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor – sometimes the humor is gleeful, sometimes impish, and sometimes it is a sarcastic comment.
Some of the first artists to create what came to be known as lowbrow art were underground cartoonists like Robert Williams and Gary Panter. Early shows were in alternative galleries in New York and Los Angeles such as Psychedelic Solutions Gallery in Greenwich Village, La Luz de Jesus, and 01 gallery. The lowbrow magazine Juxtapoz by Robert Williams, first published in 1994, has been a mainstay of writing on lowbrow art and has helped direct and grow the movement.
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May 26, 2011
Todd Schorr (b. 1954) is an American artist and one of the most prominent members of the ‘Lowbrow’ art movement or pop surrealism. His work combines a cartoon visual vocabulary with painting methods of the Old Masters with large canvases (+80″), and is darkly satirical.
His piece, ‘Clash of Holidays,’ aroused controversy when it was exhibited in 2002. It depicts Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny locked in mortal combat. Santa’s wielding an axe, and the rabbit has a knife. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Baby Jesus, who’s munching on an ear from a chocolate rabbit, stand by. Schorr was accused of blasphemy by civic leaders in South Florida. ‘It was just a joke, really, like lot of my paintings that poke fun at things,’ comments Schorr, who completed the piece in 2000, then sold it to Courteney Cox.
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May 26, 2011
Addictive TV is a UK film remixer and chop-up duo formed in 1992. The DJ/producers and audiovisual artists are the team behind Optronica – the visual music and VJ festival held in London. In 1998 they produced Transambient for Channel 4 in the UK and from 2000 – 2005 produced the ground-breaking DJ:VJ music series Mixmasters for the UK’s ITV1. In 2003, working closely with the R&D area of Japanese manufacturer Pioneer Electronics they became instrumental with the testing and development of their DVD turntables, the first being the Pioneer DVJ-X1 released in 2004.
They are known for their bootleg film remixes, and in 2006 they became the first group to officially remix a Hollywood film, reworking New Line Cinema’s dance-centric Take the lead into an audiovisual Viral video. In 2006 they also worked on Snakes on a Plane remixing the film for its TV commercials.
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May 26, 2011
Snakes on a Plane is a 2006 American action and horror film starring Samuel L. Jackson, which follows the events of hundreds of snakes being released on a passenger plane in an attempt to kill a trial witness. During filming, Jackson did not come into contact with any live snakes, due to a contract clause preventing snakes from being within 25 feet (8 m) of the actor. The story is credited to David Dalessandro, a first-time Hollywood writer. He developed the concept in 1992 after reading a nature magazine article about tree snakes climbing onto planes in cargo during World War II.
Taking advantage of the Internet buzz for what had been a minor film in their 2006 line-up, New Line Cinema ordered five days of additional shooting. While re-shoots normally imply problems with a film, the producers opted to add new scenes to the film to change the PG-13 rating to R and bring it in line with growing fan expectations. The most notable addition was a revision of a catchphrase from the film that was parodied on the Internet by fans of the film, capitalizing on Jackson’s typically foul-mouthed and violent film persona: ‘Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!’
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May 25, 2011
Alex Pardee (b. 1976) is a freelance artist and writer born in California. He runs the website EyeSuck Ink. Through his art he has admitted to overcoming depression and anxiety disorders along with emotional struggles.
He uses pens, ink, watercolors, dye, acrylics, oils, and latex. Pardee’s influences include 1980s horror movies, pop art, graffiti and gangster rap.
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