Video « Wow Cool

Help Complete Alan Moore’s Jimmy’s End Film Cycle

Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins have turned to Kickstarter to fund the final chapter of five in their film cycle Jimmy’s End. “His Heavy Heart” is in need of £45,000 to complete filming. £30 (currently about $47) appears to me to be the sweet spot with the inclusion of a DVD and illustrated book – although the cheaper digital download option and the much more expensive signed edition are currently more popular. All the info you need, including the full video for part one “Act of Faith” and a trailer for the second installment, are on the Kickstarter page. Wow Cool carries a large selection of Alan Moore’s books and CDs, including a number of harder to find items.

Steven Cerio in Beacon New York Friday

Steven Cerio will be showing his film The Magnificent Pigtail Shadow and performing with his band Atlantic Drone Friday night, June 7 at the Dogwood in Beacon, New York. Get the soundtrack to the film here.

Our Summer Intern covers Scott Pilgrim’s Sex Bob-Omb

Or Beck’s, as the case pretty much is… Maggie is helping us out with something mysterious known as spreadsheets, or something like that. It’s all very timey-wimey strange stuff… data base is possibly the new thing after dubstep. No idea. We hope she sorts it out for us. We’ll let you guess which one she is in this video.

Guy Debord Was My Landlord

“The art of the future will be the creation of situations or nothing”. Go watch “On the Passage of a few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1956-1972″ Hopefully the audio will be less dodgy for you than it is for me. Enjoy it for what it is otherwise. Via former bandmate Adam who found it on the McDonald’s sponsored Dangerous Minds.

Gabrielle Drake in JG Ballard’s Crash 1971

Moving together through an elaborately signaled landscape.

See Previous.

Brown Cuts Neighbors at 2013 New York Electronic Art Festival June 28

Brown Cuts Neighbors “Channel 16″ – as presented by Jason Martin, with program materials selected and sequenced by Jason and myself – have been invited to be part of the latest edition of the biennial New York Electronic Art Festival. The talk and screening will be on Friday, June 28 at Harvestworks in SOHO. Full details, press release and website to be released soon.

John le Carré’s A Delicate Truth

The new novel by John le Carré is out in much of the world today. Available in the US and Canada on May seventh. Dedicated visitors to this site will immediately know that this much tape player porn makes our boy parts excited.

Pat Povilaitis in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!

In a classic case of ‘It always comes back to comics’ in my life, Pat ‘The Human Vise’ Povilaitis – who was the star of the Great Black Swamp Olde Time Strongman Picnic DVD that I made a few years ago with Atomic Athletic and Tiger Claw Martial Arts – appeared a few days ago in the very long-running cartoon feature Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. Adding unbelievable to weird, I discovered that Pat was also the subject of a feature on the History Channel’s Stan Lee’s Superhumans show. Pat is in episode four of the second season (available on iTunes). Iron Mind talked to Pat about the show. Some out-take video I made of Pat at New Jersey’s (now sadly much washed away by Hurricane Sandy) Seaside Heights is below, followed by Pat’s segment on Stan Lee’s show with awkward French overtalking (sorry, best I could find). One thing I seriously miss from moving back to the west coast is getting to regularly see the indie strength training crew that is so well represented by Pat and Atomic Athletic.

The Shape of Pop To Come

Back in the early 00s I used to pass around an audio CD called “Pop” that I made containing “Words Disobey Me” and “We are Time” from the 1978 Pop Group Peel Session, Khalid of Space Part Two by Larry Young (featuring James Blood Ulmer), and either the 1995 or 1999 Autechre Peel Session (you get both here). The cover art was a street level photo of the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. Recreated here is the YouTube version. Enjoy.

The Place Beyond The Pines Opens Nationwide

As mentioned here recently, the film The Place Beyond The Pines, which opened nationwide today was co-written by Ben Coccio (shown above), who was a major part of the cast and crew on Brown Cuts Neighbors second and third series of TV shows in the early 1990s. The film was shot in and around our hometown of Schenectady, New York. Go see it.

Jason Martin Warhol Museum Screen Test

Jason Martin in a typical structuralist film moment. Jason has been giving talks and conducting workshops at Trans-Q TV and Carnegie Mellon and Youngstown Universities this week. You can make your own screen test while visiting the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

R.I.P. Documentary Filmmaker Les Blank

Berkeley’s own Les Blank – director of Gap-Toothed Women, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe and many other great American documentary films has died at 77. He will be much missed. New York Times Obituary.

Lady Starlight and The Easter Family Band – Death Birth Death Birth Etc

It’s a video response to yesterday’s post! Lady Starlight with her Aunt Theresa, Aunt Mary, Cousin Michael and non-performing 2nd Cousin Caidence perform a killer cover of her brother Jason Martin’s song Death Birth Death Birth Etc.on Easter Sunday.

Jason Martin – Death Birth Death Birth Etc

This one’s for all the peeps! Jason Martin live at the Silent Barn, March 12, 2013.

We Own Drrrills… Easter Drrrills

Bonus cut: Home is A Rope

Bonus cut: BFF

Once upon a time there were these two amazing noise rock bands called Steel Pole Bathtub and Girls Against Boys. Each of their last records were among their best. Among the best records ever. After they were gone it was like rock and roll was fucking dead to me and it was time to move on. (OK GVSB are touring this year, even, but it’s been 11 years since the last record. Anyways, that’s not the point here.)

Many months ago I had put a ton of time in on creating the world’s most brilliant blog post about where the fuck SPBT had gotten to since they released the demos for their ‘Unlistenable‘ record. Then my daughter spilled water all over my computer. Here we are now an Easter weekend later.

Keeping it as simple as possible… Mike Morasky of Steel Pole went on to do all sorts of big Hollywood special effects work and then landed at Valve, where he had far greater musical success then SPBT ever dreamed of with the soundtrack for Portal 2, which has been in the top 20 soundtracks on Amazon for weeks now, many months after the game was released. This despite the fact that you can download all three disks of his material for free. You may enjoy this interview with Mike on GamesRadar. In the meanwhile, Dale Flattum – whose books with Chuck Sperry we regularly carried at Wow Cool back in the 90′s – released the definitive collection of his graphics with accompanying soundtrack: Tooth – co-published with Zak Sally’s La Mano 21. You can still get those right here.

As for GVSB? They are going to be on tour in Europe in May. Johnny Temple from the band is a main dude at our Brooklyn neighbors Akashic Books. Eli’s web page could probably use an update. Alexis and Scott are in Paramount Styles. Check them out. OK. Carry on. No more news here… noisy, rock or otherwise. Enjoy your weekend.

Ryan Gosling Drives to Schenectady – The Place Beyond The Pines

Ben Coccio, who was a major part of the cast and crew on Brown Cuts Neighbors second and third series of TV shows in the early 1990′s co-wrote the story and the screenplay for upcoming film The Place Beyond The Pines – which was shot in and around our hometown of Schenectady, New York. The film opens on March 29th. You can see Ben as the robe wearing man with a rope and many other roles – in front of and behind the camera – in the video below.

Keep Williamsburg Beautiful

Sam Henderson has joined the campaign to spread the message that “Only you can stop pollution”.

Dreams Don’t Die

Ike Eisenmann (Witch Mountain films, The Fantastic Journey and others) and Trini Alvarado (Times Square) star is this unusually arty and sympathetic early 80s TV movie on the New York Graf scene. Some more background on the film.

Two young kids in love, one young graffiti artist and the other a foster-child, find trouble on the mean streets on the other side of the river in New York City. Officer Charles Banks finds young Danny tagging subway cars and then catches Teiresa selling drugs for another mislead teen, Kirk. The officer, instead of turning both of them in, gives both teens a chance to make more of their lives together. Changing their ways turns out to be more challenging than first thought.

Bonus featurette: Stations of the Elevated

Happy Pi Day from Wow Cool

Four years ago I released this video for Pi Day from my band nickname: Rebel. I was going to try to get a remix together for this year’s non-event, but with 10 minutes to go by the time I could have gotten started, it seemed pointless. So, here it is again: Ouroboros. Filmed in Barcelona, Paris, Mexico and elsewhere. Enjoy.

Big Boys Always Jump The Fence

Once upon a time in the early 1980s in Austin, Texas, one of the best fucking bands in creation was born. They were called the Big Boys and they are still awesome. Apparently I’m not the only person who believes this, as their first record – Where’s My Towel/Industry Standard has just gotten the deluxe vinyl re-issue and NPR felt it worthy to write about.

There is also an audio commentary to the record by Tim Kerr (guitar) and Chris Gates (bass) that you can listen to.

Seven paragraphs down in the NPR article we come to an incident that has unfortunately loomed large in the lore of American punk culture. When I first heard about it, many years after the incident, it went something like “HR from Bad Brains beat the crap out of the Big Boys for being queer.” Getting past the improbability of that, given the relative size of the participants, I’d never bothered to dig up any kind of facts in the case, despite the availability of search engines, facebook friendships and the like. As mentioned in the NPR article and described by Tim Kerr in his blog (scroll down to the 12/March/2012 entry – I trust Tim Kerr in all things, a greater man has probably never lived) something did happen, involving most of the Bad Brains being homophobic assholes who treated their hosts in Austin like shit and made their beliefs well known. Ugly stuff. I hope this clears things up for other people as well.

In the meanwhile… I’ve always loved this live clip of the Big Boys.

Wow Cool

Help Complete Alan Moore’s Jimmy’s End Film Cycle

Steven Cerio in Beacon New York Friday

Our Summer Intern covers Scott Pilgrim’s Sex Bob-Omb

Guy Debord Was My Landlord

Gabrielle Drake in JG Ballard’s Crash 1971

Brown Cuts Neighbors at 2013 New York Electronic Art Festival June 28

John le Carré’s A Delicate Truth

Pat Povilaitis in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!

The Shape of Pop To Come

The Place Beyond The Pines Opens Nationwide

Jason Martin Warhol Museum Screen Test

R.I.P. Documentary Filmmaker Les Blank

Lady Starlight and The Easter Family Band – Death Birth Death Birth Etc

Jason Martin – Death Birth Death Birth Etc

We Own Drrrills… Easter Drrrills

Ryan Gosling Drives to Schenectady – The Place Beyond The Pines

Keep Williamsburg Beautiful

Dreams Don’t Die

Happy Pi Day from Wow Cool

Big Boys Always Jump The Fence

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