All-you-can-eat brain mulch. The creative process stripped open and the wires fiddled with. Free chunks of media: animal, vegetable, musical, printed and tangible.
Dangerous Minds tipped me off to this particular piece of cinema history. (Oh, NSFW, by the way… there’s like, four nipples shown). The trailer for Skateboarders from Hell is one piece of 1980′s Loose Shoes, a movie composed of genre spoofs filmed as trailers for nonexistent movies. Kind of like a whole movie made out of the intermission of Grindhouse.
What really grabbed me, though, was the motorized skateboarders these feral thrashers use to reach the podunk town they terrorize. They give a quick closeup at about 0:19 in the video above. They appear to be the lovechild of a weedwacker engine and a skateboard, complete with a handheld throttle and some kind of brake.
Besides wracking my brains for a plan to make one, what struck me was the similarities to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s ride of choice: The Cheapskate. (Image from Amazon)
While the toy sports some dumb, oversized hardware add-ons (the spotlight, the fan, a flag…c’mon, aren’t sewers too cramped for this Winnebago of skateboards?) I dimly recall that in the comics and the cartoon, the turtles carvied up the sewer pipes in more compact versions that closely resemble the sweet boards sported in Skateboarders from Hell.
While at first blush these boards look like the sort of backyard engineering that chews off limbs and makes legends, these motorized skateboards are MotoBoards, a product that debuted in 1975, apparently still made to this day. If you’ve got a spare $750 hanging around, these guys will get you on your way to full body road rash. Other Wile E. Coyote-style transport like gas powered skates are available too.
By no means are MotoBoard and Donatello’s workshop the only game in town for motorized skateboard enjoyment. There’s an electric version on offer by some Australian fellas that looks pretty slick. (watch out for those shipping costs before you do some drunk eBaying)
For an exhaustive video survey of motorized boards, look no further than this here link.
And if you’re dying to make one of your very own, after the jump there’s a gentleman with a duct tape band-aid who will walk you through how he made his own death machine out of a skateboard and a chainsaw. (hint: it’s helpful to have a friend who’s a machinist)
Iain Anderson‘s 2005 short Airport makes use of the copyright free AIGA/DOT universal symbol system to chronicle a journey by air. Click here to watch. Nice bit of inspiration for what you can do with the public domain and a bit of digital manipulation.
Wow. Someone finally made something beautiful and true with blobby lumps of clay.
BLUE: An Erotic Life is a stop motion animation that narrates the life story of a blob of clay dealing with sexual addiction. The piece plays on the contrast between graphic adult content and grotesque stop motion. The combination of the two makes for an absurd, dark humored short film.
BLUE: An Erotic Life is my BFA Student Thesis from Parsons School of Design.
Bill Brown is the sort of guy we all wanted to be in film school. Traveling incessantly, chronicling the ride with a trusty Bolex and a rolling narration that chronicles the corners, the details, the little things and carefully arranges them into constellations to invoke The Big Cosmic Everything. He makes zines, fills his website with vignettes from Detroit, Lubbuck, Texas and California City, California. Rust, decay, space, dust, emotion, travel.
May I recommend his compilation DVD The Next Best Place? A better 25 dollars you are not likely to spend with an education on Spring-Heeled Jack, nuclear missiles, the Roswell crash and the little joys of being in motion in North America.
I found the above Cinemassacre experiment via Make: an exercise in decaying video footage by redubbing it over and over. Maybe I’m weird but I found the deterioration fascinating, watching the colors mutate and the details dropping out until I was following the action by the motion rather than the forms.
A similar tactic but an aesthetically different experience than watching Bill Morrison’s film Decasia, clip below.
You can also see echoes of both in the Very Small Array post where a picture is run through every (default?) Photoshop filter. Shape and form decays while the decay produces accidental new forms. Click here and look at the whole thing to see this man and this cat transform.
Mark Twain had his nut together, as the feller says. In perhaps the classiest move in the realm of tell-all books, Twain added a stipulation to his reputedly vitriolic autobiography for a hundred year delay in publication, saving all but perhaps the youngest of targets of his invective the embarrassment of still being alive.
This year that century is finally over. No longer shall Twain’s crankiest gripes be denied us. The manuscript is still being polished, at the moment, giving us a golden window of irresponsible speculation as to the contents.
DOES IT…
reveal Twain as the true lyricist of “Hey Man Nice Shot“, originally a scandalous tribute to Leon Czolgosz, assassin of William McKinley?
uncover lost secrets of mustache maintenance, long since outlawed? (hint: spare the placenta, spoil the ‘stache)
sketch out an unpublished novel that served as inspiration for Jurassic Park, entitled A Connecticut Yankee in a G_____n Reptile Orgy!?
serve as the text for a book cipher that reveals bosom buddy Nikola Tesla’s suppressed formula for free energy?
Whatever this bitchy chronicle will hold, I guarantee you it will contain fewer WTFs per minute than this clip from The Adventures of Mark Twain.
Just had my theremin lust reignited by this 3 minute history/build video from G4′s Attack of the Show, via Create Digital Music. Oh man. I’ve been planning to build one of these since a random reference on the Slanky-L* to a theremin sample sent me off in search of just what this weird musical instrument could do.
Turns out the history is just as fascinating as the ghost sound machine’s electronic guts. Here’s an excerpt from the first interview with the Theremin’s inventor, Leon Theremin, after he first emerged from the U.S.S.R. after 51 years of state arrest:
Mattis: When did you first conceive of your instrument?
Theremin: The idea first came to me right after our Revolution, at the beginning of the Bolshevik state. I wanted to invent some kind of an instrument that would not operate mechanically, as does the piano, or the cello and the violin, whose bow movements can be compared to those of a saw. I conceived of an instrument that would created sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry [of the orchestra].
Mattis: Why did you make this instrument?
Theremin: I became interested in effectuating progress in music, so that there would be more [musical] resources. I was not satisfied with the mechanical instruments in existence, of which there were many. They were all built using elementary principles and were not physically well done. I was interested in making a different kind of instrument. And I wanted, of course, to make an apparatus that would be controlled in space, exploiting electrical fields, and that would use little energy. Therefore I transformed electronic [equipment] into a musical instrument that would provide greater resources.
Mattis: What did Lenin think of it, and why did you show it to him?
Theremin: In the Soviet Union at that time everyone was interested in new things, in particular all the new uses of electricity: for agriculture, for mechanical uses, for transport, for communication. And so then, at that time, when everyone was interested in these fields, I decided to create a musical use for electricity. I made a few first apparatuses that were made [based on principles of] the human interference of radio waves in space, at first used in [electronic] security systems, then applied to musical purposes. I made it, and I showed it at that time to the leaders. There was a big electronics conference in Moscow, and I showed my instruments there. It made a big splash. It was written up in the literature and the newspapers, of which we had many at that time, and many doors were opened [for me then] in the Soviet Union. And so Vladimir Il’yich Lenin, the leader of our state, learned that I had shown an interested thing at this conference, and he wanted to get acquainted with it himself. So they asked me to come with my apparatus, with my musical instrument, to his office, to show him. And I did so.
Mattis: What did Lenin think of it?
Theremin: I brought my apparatus and set it up in his large office in the Kremlin. He was not yet there because he was in a meeting. I waited with Fotiva, his secretary, who was a good pianist, a graduate of the conservatory. She said that a little piano would be brought into the office, and that she would accompany me on the music that I would play. So we prepared, and about an hour and a half later Vladimir Il’yich Lenin came with those people with whom he had been in conference in the Kremlin. He was very gracious; I was very pleased to meet him, and then I showed him the signaling system of my instrument, which I played by moving my hands in the air, and which was called at that time the thereminvox. I played a piece [of music]. After I played the piece they applauded, including Vladimir Il’yich [Lenin], who had been watching very attentively during my playing. I played Glinka’s “Skylark”, which he loved very much, and Vladimir Il’yich said, after all this applause, that I should show him, and he would try himself to play it. He stood up, moved to the instrument, stretched his hands out, left and right: right to the pitch and left to the volume. I took his hands from behind and helped him. He started to play “Skylark”. He had a very good ear, and he felt where to move his hands to get the sound: to lower them or to raise them. In the middle of this piece I thought that he could himself, independently, move his hands. So I took my hands off of his, and he completed the whole thing independently, by himself, with great success and with great applause following. He was very happy that he could play on this instrument all by himself.
A more thorough history can be had in the 1995 documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey. Oddly, I can’t find any video clips of it online, but if you’re dying to see it, I’ll gladly mail you my VHS copy. Just leave a comment and I’ll email you for mailing details.
* remember listservs? remember Soul Coughing? that’s ok.
I have little to add beyond advising you to clear out an hour to watch this Dutch documentary about the collection of people, practices and ideals that came together to form the punk band Crass. With a militantly anarchist outlook and a very DIY devotion to living what they screamed, Crass was one of the very few in art who lived their ideals 100%. A great hit of inspiration if you’re feeling like you’ve got no option but the treadmill you’re on.
I’m not sure if this is the official video or not. Wait, I am sure. I have certainty.
I guess the real question here is, what are you doing this weekend? If you answered anything but “making an awesome video that involves fake beards”, then you’re wrong.
