Radiohead's crooked eyed Thom Yorke has a solo album coming out called The Eraser. The website has lots of interesting stuff to look at. Including a card catalogue filled with notebook pages and scribblings that are related, however loosely, to the making of the album. (via metafilter)

The album is to be released Jully 11th. And to be sure, I'll be buying it. Want to catch a listen before July 11th? You can if you look hard enough.

After Further review, C-Dub and talked about this album. He says it almost seems like a step backwards from your typical Radiohead album. He thought Thom Yorke would use this solo album to "push the envelope." He makes a good point, especially when considering, as C-Dub did, the awesome guitars that are often featured in the best Radiohead songs, guitars that are all but absent in this Thom Yorke solo album. We think it shows that Radiohead as a whole is better than the sum of it's parts. But I would, and did, argue that it is in fact Radiohead that pushes the envelope. This album is Thom Yorke playing and pushing his personal style of music, that bloop-bloppy digital soupiness that I personally love in my Radiohead albums.

Sundance has been running some really weird movies in the mornings. I often catch them as I drink my coffee before I go to work. A few weeks ago they were showing The Gong Show Movie, which, from what I could tell, was about Chuck Barris getting fed up with The Gong Show, freaking out, driving across country while various Gong Show would-be odd-balls harass him into watching their act. The movie may have combined real, improvised, and staged footage, but to be honest it's impossible to tell the difference.

This morning I was lucky enough to stumble onto this little gem:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Movie)
"A Splendid Time is Guaranteed for All!"

I remember seeing parts of this movie when I was a kid... It thoroughly confused me. Here were the Bee Gee's, AND Eric Peter Frampton dancing and singing songs from The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's album? Yet nary a Beatle was to be found in the film. I just didn't get it.

What I didn't know then, that I do now... Was that this film, despite it's numerous high ranking guest stars, was hastily cobbled together to cash in on the musical disco movie craze started by Saturday Night Fever. I've seen Saturday Night Fever, and you Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band The Movie, are no Saturday Night Fever. Jesus, even Saturday Night Fever is no Saturday Night Fever.

Though I will say that if you happen to catch this film, be sure to check out Earth Wind and Fire's version of "Got To Get You Into My Life." Otherwise, prepare to be guaranteed a splendidly confusing time.

Tyger is a short film directed by Guilherme Marcondes, it combines video, animation and puppetry.

It's really pretty, and was inspired by William Blake's poem "The Tyger"

My advice? Make sure there are no police officers around.

New Jersey Library Director Michele Reutty is under fire for refusing to give police library circulation records without a subpoena. Or as the New Jersey Mayor calls it "a blatant disregard for the Police Department."

Has the whole world gone crazy?

From deep inside the space station cold storage archive, here are a couple of photographs from a breakfast my lady and I enjoyed at a local diner here in Atlanta called Java Jive. (some dicey reviews on that page, yikes! from what I remember we enjoyed our breakfast, but I was busy taking photographs)

We mentioned before that the actor who plays the "PC" in the Mac V. PC commercials is funnyman/author/NPR personality/lecturer/Daily Show corrispondant John Hodgman. But we never really went into how much we dislike those commercials.

It really all boils down to how much we hate the "Mac" character, and how much we love the "PC" character, when clearly the intention of the commercial is the excact opposite. However, Seth Stevenson of Slate wrote an essay that really gets to the bottom of why the commercials stink.

"My problem with these ads begins with the casting. As the Mac character, Justin Long (who was in the forgettable movie Dodgeball and the forgettabler TV show Ed) is just the sort of unshaven, hoodie-wearing, hands-in-pockets hipster we've always imagined when picturing a Mac enthusiast."

"Meanwhile, the PC is played by John Hodgman—contributor to The Daily Show and This American Life, host of an amusing lecture series, and all-around dry-wit extraordinaire. Even as he plays the chump in these Apple spots, his humor and likability are evident." [via boingboing]

We love science, and we love art. So when we draw images of space around here, it makes us really happy. Reeses Peanut Butter cup style.

The L.A. Times has an article about artists like Don Dixon, who specialize in realistic paintings of things we've never been able to photograph with our telescopes... up till now. [via boingboing] Cosmological phenomena so exotic, like far off Supernovas, or clouds of star incubating cosmic gases, that we needed a brilliant artist to bring them to life.

Like this image of an inclined Black Hole eating a small sun:

Now Dixon says, "Nasa has overtaken us."

"Images created from the Hubble data are what some of us jokingly call bad space art," Dixon said. "They are so fantastically weird, like the Eagle Nebula. Before Hubble took that picture, no astronomical artist worth his salt would have painted anything like that."

It is being compared to 19th century when photography threatened to kill painting, and a painter's livelihood. Artists had to evolve beyond simple portraiture. They were forced to develop styles like Expressionism, and it's evil twin brother Impressionism. We should now look to cosmological artists in the same way, not as recorders of what lives in space, but as interpreters of it.

On the subject of hip-hop history Chuck D says:

"[When] white kids got invited to the hip hop party through the portals of FLASH, RUN-DMC and The BEASTIES, [They] had to walk gingerly on the black paper rug laid down of afrocentricity. It was a entrance fee of respect beyond the registers of retail."

Have you picked up a Nintendo DS lite yet?

According to this report over 136,000 DS Lites were sold in the U.S. in just 2 days. Why?

Well, the price is right, the improvements to the design are spot on, and the games are tiiiiiight. It won Gadget of the Week from Time magazine. Both C-Dub and FlaCo got DS Lite's at work, and we play tetris during lunch, wirelessly, and only one of us bought the game, the rest play for free!

I've been playing the new Super Mario DS game. It's great. It captures the fun and simplicity of the original Super Mario, but with updated graphics and game play. There's a Zelda game in the works for the DS that looks like it's in the same vein as Mario. With an updated/old school feel.

Here's the coolest thing... The web browser Opera is coming to the DS... I'm very eager to see how well it works. With Nintendo making the wireless connectivity so simple, and with the touch screen being used a keyboard, a DS would then be the best/cheapest piece of email/web browsing hardware out there... that can also play Metriod!

We mentioned this band before...

The Rentals.

Mixing powerful pop music with dorky synthesizer and the most meaningful lyrics since Rivers Cuomo had his leg lengthened, The Rentals are legendary. Sadly, The Rentals came and went before most people, including us, could experience their beauty and wisdom.

True Rentals facts:

[A] The band was founded by Matt Sharp, seminal bassist for the influential and genre setting band Weezer. [B] The beautiful Mia Rudolph of Saturday Night Live was an original member of this band. [C] We were introduced to The Rentals by Brian Griffin, formerly local award winning playwright and experimental musician. [D] We opened our saturday night improv show with The Rentals song "Getting By" for 3 years. [E] We spoke to Matt Sharp after both of his solo shows here in Atlanta (he was: thoughtful, charming, soft spoken, brilliant, brimming with Art) [F] We have never seen this band live.

That last one is about to change. Earlier this year The Rentals announced a new studio album, now they have announced a new tour. We bought our tickets immediately. So should you...

Rentals @ The Masquerade
Monday, August 7

The Rentals Tour page.

C-Dub and I have been working away deep in the drawing rooms of the space station. Along with the help of Pleaseeasaur himself drawing from Psaur HQ underneath the city streets of Seattle.

We're hoping to have the whole first scene of the animation all drawn and set up in the animation program Adobe After Effects by the middle of next week. It's a tough deadline. We'll call it wednesday.

Also we're traveling to Michigan this weekend to attend a friend's wedding reception. So I'm packing up the science machine, and my drawing tablet, and moving the whole operation to the Mitten State. It should be kind of cool.

This is serious.

filed under.. music?

Last week we heard about a guy who was stopped and searched by Virginia State Police because he had burned CD-R's in plain view in his car. Police used this as "probable cause" to search his vehicle based on a suspicion of piracy.
WHAT?!
How does having burned CD-R's in your car = probable cause? We buy most of our music online, legally, then burn a CD so we can listen to the music in our car. What makes that "probable cause?"

This webpage is a supplement for a DVD you can order about "flexing your rights." I didn't buy the DVD, but the website gives lots of great advice about how to not get tricked and scammed by The Police. Because that's PART OF THEIR JOB... to trick you into stuff like "legal" searches because we are afraid to refuse a search consent. Well, refusing a search is a right granted to us by the Constitution, specifically the 4th Amendment. The trick, I've learned, is to exercise that right while remaining polite and courteous.

"A majority of avoidable police searches occur because citizens naively waive their Fourth Amendment rights by consenting to warrantless searches. As a general rule, if a person consents to a warrantless search, the search automatically becomes reasonable and therefore legal. Consequently, whatever an officer finds during such a search can be used to convict the person."

They also give you advice like:
"How to answer a question with a question."
or how to politely say things like:
"I know you are just doing your job Officer, but I do not consent to any searches, Sir."

I know the real life application of these techniques gets trickier. Often Officers have cultivated a style of intimidation and fear... after all, it's also part of their job to be suspicious, however, you can never be too aware of your rights, and how to politely exercise them.

This movie was made by some friends of ours when they were kids. It's charming in a way that only movies made by kids are. Like the horror movie me and my friends made when I was younger, with both a vaguely defined monster, and equally hard to follow plot-line. This movie here, is better than ours was.

In this movie, a young Matt Chapman dreams of what it would be like to actually be the main character in Nintendo's Punch Out, be on the lookout for a young Mike C, who was apparently cut back in the day. Taken on it's own this movie is great for nostalgia's sake, but the little video game elements they've added really make it shine.

Puch Out!! The Movie:

Remember when we said Best Buy Sucked just because they had piss-poor costumer service?

Well now we can say they suck because they lie, cheat, and steal from their customers. In this case, the company promises to destroy a hard drive they removed from a customer's computer, only to have the same hard drive bought later at a Flea Market. The flea-market purchaser was kind enough to inform the previous owner that all of his personal information was still on the hard drive...

for seriously, shop with Best Buy at your own peril.

The Other Side of the Glass is a musical made by Lighthog Films for the 48 hour Film Project. Film makers draw genres out of a hat and have 48 hours to cast, write, direct, and film a short movie. [via kraftblog: The German Actor's Web Portal]

Other Side of the Glass was Directed and by Keith Hooker. I've improvised a buncha times with Keith, and his wife Leslie, they're great and funny people. This film also stars a couple of our friends here at clunkyrobot.com. Including our old roomate Zebbie G, playing the Morning Zoo Crew DJ charatcer he was born to play, Mary K: Rookie Blogger of the Year, and Dan Triandiflou: local commercial actor and President of The Daughters of Dad's Garage Improv Ensemble Foundation Society.

Keith talks a bit about the making of the film on it's webpage, I hope they do well in the competition.