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May 1, 2011
Wallaby Beat is a blog dedicated to punk, DIY, powerpop, grillfat (pre-punk Australian hard rock) and NWOAHM from Australia 1975-1984. It follows projects like
Do The Pop,
Lethal Weapons, and
Inner City Sound in documenting Australia's fertile underground rock and roll scene. While those blogs and books are focused on the past,
I-94 Bar is documenting the scene as it stands today and interviewing the various survivors.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 10:20 PM PST - 17 comments
Daughter of Horror (original title: Dementia) was a 1955 avant garde film featuring a
noir style, a surrealist sensibility, and virtually no dialogue. A later version of the film even included an over-the-top voice over by none other than Tonight Show sidekick
Ed McMahon, but like Blade Runner the flick is better off without the narration.
Daughter of Horror is probably most famous for being the film playing in the theater overrun by
The Blob. And with a few more surrealistic elements and peculiar dialogue added, this could have been done by David Lynch in a later decade. The film, recently featured on Turner Classic Movies, is
available for free on archive.org.
posted by Celsius1414 at 7:56 PM PST - 7 comments
Father and son, bunking in G block. "Scott Peters and his father, Bernard, eat dinner together at night, then watch bowling or classic boxing matches on television together into the evening. They have an extremely close relationship: They have seen each other for at least part of nearly every one of the last 5,455 days. Every night, they sleep together in an 8-by-12-foot room, where the alarm bell rings in the morning but also at 10:30 p.m., when the guards turn off the lights in G Block, at the Elmira Correctional Facility." via
NYT
posted by Xurando at 5:42 PM PST - 55 comments
Before Qaddafi, the closest thing to a national icon that Libya had was
Omar Mukhtar, the Lion of the Desert. Mussolini thought of Libya as the
Fourth Shore of Italy; the natives were not pleased with this idea, and under the leadership of Mukhtar, a school teacher, successfully resisted the Italians for twenty years with almost no resources. Italian rule in Libya was harsh: Libyans were rounded up into
concentration camps, tanks and
aerial bombardment were used against civilians, and half of the population of Cyrenaica - the eastern part of Libya - died. To stop Mukhtar from receiving supplies from Egypt, the Italians built a
168-mile long barbed-wire fence essentially dividing the country in two. Mukhtar was finally captured and hung on September of 1931; he remains a
symbol of Libyan independence.
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posted by with hidden noise at 1:41 PM PST - 15 comments
The Edgewise Guide To Filmmaking. Screenwriter Lisa Morton kept a diary while making the very, very strange 1989 movie
Meet The Hollowheads (
trailer). The low-budget sci-fi/horror/social comment/sitcom takes place in a dystopian underground suburb whose entire infrastructure, operated by monopolist corporation United Umblicial, consists of flexible tubes which carry waste, energy, and slimy and sometimes still living comestibles. The movie, the one and only directorial effort of
horror FX and make-up man Tom Burman, inspires
confusion and
dismay in most viewers.
Hollowheads stars
John Glover and features a 14-year-old Juliette Lewis, her big brother Lightfield,
a musical instrument made out of a live chicken, an eyeball attached to a large intestine that lives in a glass tank, and an uncredited Bobcat Goldthwait as a lascivious cop, whose few lines include "When will children learn to just say no to butt polish?"
posted by escabeche at 11:45 AM PST - 52 comments
Art. 6(2)(c) of
Directive 98/44/EC, passed by the EU Parliament and Council back in 1998, ruled that, among other things, "uses of human embryos for industrial or commercial
purposes" were to be considered unpatentable because of their being contrary to "ordre public" or morality. After German researcher
Prof. Dr. Oliver Bruestle was granted a
patent concerning a method for creating nerve precursor cells on the basis of embryonic stem cells,
Greenpeace Germany (in German) filed a lawsuit for annulment of the patent. The German Federal Court of Justice then referred to the European Court of Justice the question of whether embryonic stem cell therapy constitutes such a use of human embryos for industrial or commercial purposes, under Directive 98/44/EC.
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posted by Skeptic at 8:50 AM PST - 45 comments
