The Source Family was a radical, utopian social experiment that emerged from the Los Angeles freak scene in the 1970s. Operating out of a hip health food restaurant owned by judo master/bank robber/accused murderer Jim Baker, aka Father Yod, The Source Family was everything you could want in a post-hippie, West Coast outsider spiritual trip. And they had a rock band too! Thanks to our pal Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos's absolutely fantastic new documentary now in theaters about Father Yod and his "children," interest in The Source Family and their band, Ya Ho Wa 13, has never been greater. The film, titled The Source Family: A Documentary, was inspired by The Source: The Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family, written by family members Isis Aquarian and Electricity Aquarian, edited by Jodi, and published by our pals Process Media. To complete the full transmedia Source Family experience, Drag City is releasing The Source Family soundtrack, a collection of choice tunes from the nine albums that The Source Family recorded between 1973 and 1974. Boing Boing is pleased to premier this free stream of the entire album, The Source Family soundtrack, available next week on CD and, of course, vinyl. Far fucking out.
BB pals Death Cab For Cutie are celebrating the tenth anniversary of their stunning fourth studio album, Transatlanticism, by performing it live in its entirety at the Bumbershoot music and arts festival in Seattle, September 1. Above is a live version of the title track which has become the quintessential closer at DCfC live shows.
From the American Museum of Natural History's excellent photo archive. Seen above, a millipede installing a model of a man in "The Forest Floor" diorama, 1958. (Thanks, Stacey Ransom!)
The old Ripley's Believe it or Not newspaper comic had a huge and lasting impact on me as a youngster. Neal Thompson has just published his new biography of Ripley, titled "A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It Or Not!” Judging by Megan Abbot's lengthy review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, it sounds like terrific read!
An intrepid, curious traveler, Ripley roamed not just to see renowned wonders and not just to drink and tomcat (though he would do both, vigorously, through his entire life), but to unearth the unusual, the hidden, the specific. His travel dispatches, laden with stereotypes of the day, reflect Ripley’s private obsessions — in particular, “the inexplicable things people did for their gods,” particularly if they appeared, to American eyes, grotesque, such as the man Ripley dubs the “Hanging Hindu,” an adherent dangling from a tree via a hook stuck in his back.
Ripley’s complicated relation to “the Other” is one Thompson explores in depth. He locates in Ripley a genuine desire to burrow into the cultures he explores and share the glories and mysteries of other places. But, in large part, the comic’s success hinged on Ripley’s expert skill not at penetration but at sensationalization.
Japanese designer toy firm Medicom worked with Herman Makkink to recreate an edition of his iconic sculpture "The Rocking Machine," famously seen in the film A Clockwork Orange. It's almost three feet long and more than a foot wide. You can have one one of your very own for $1600 or so. "The Rocking Machine" (via Death Waltz Recording Company)
From the February 22, 1975 episode of Soul Train, the marvelous jam "Summer Madness" by Kool & The Gang, whose slick suits beat robot helmets any year.
The Wire posted a small photo gallery of electronic and avant-garde musicians and their studios, including Atom, Pierre Henry, and Terry Riley. Above, JG "Foetus" Thirlwell's Brooklyn studio photographed by Daniëlle van Ark. At right, Madlib at home in Los Angeles, shot byJeremy & Claire Weiss. "Studio Envy"
Over at the Bold Italic, my friend Debbie Hampton wrote a heartfelt, no-nonsense, funny, and informative essay titled "How To Survive A Divorce":
...California is a no-fault state, meaning the dissolution of our marriage didn’t require a showing of wrongdoing by either person. Thank. God. Because I did some serious wrongdoing. There were addiction issues (mine) and excessive career demands (his). I got lost for a while. There are an endless amount of bad choices to be made if one wants to focus their attention away from a divorce. I drank. I started smoking again. I became a crappy friend. These choices caused a shit-ton of wreckage that I now have to work through as well. So don’t do that. Look at the divorce as an opportunity to grow, not an excuse to go backwards.
The legality of splitting up is absolutely overwhelming. California is a community property state, meaning all the crap you acquire during your marriage is equally owned. So there’s the potentially nail-biting adventure of dividing up furniture, plates, art, and everything else. We didn’t have this problem. Neither of us cared much for stuff.
Could the flickering and winking of some stars be a kind of Morse Code that extraterrestrials are using to communicate across space? Princeton University astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz and her colleagues are exploring that very question. Her team is using algorithms to sift data from the space observatory Kepler for flickering patterns that don't appear to be the result of passing planets, sunspots, eclipses, or other known reasons. “What would lead us to say it really is an alien signal?” she asks. “I don’t know, but in my book, finding things you can’t explain is interesting no matter what it is."
Here are the first 20 years of Wired covers in less than 30 seconds. I met Mark in 1993 around Wired's birth when we both worked at the magazine. I was Mark's intern! My first day on the job, Mark brought me downstairs to meet his wife Carla Sinclair who was editor of bOING bOING the print 'zine that I had been reading since 1990. Mark and Carla assigned me an article on the spot, handed me a half-empty bottle of Vasopressin, and we quickly became best pals. Ah, the good ol' daze.
Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky makes compelling cut-up movies from "found" 16mm and 35mm footage and samples from other movies. All of the frames and clips are treated in the darkroom, without digital tools. For Outer Space (1999), seen above,
Tscherkassky chopped up and decolorized bits from The Entity, a 1982 horror film starring Barbara Hershey.
Carlo Zapponi created Bolides, a fantastic animated visualization of meteorites that have been seen hitting the Earth. The data source is the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society's Meteorite Bulletin. "The word bolide comes from Greek βολίς bolis, which means missile. Astronomers tend to use bolide to identify an exceptionally bright fireball, particularly one that explodes." Bolides
Over at Apple, Jony Ive is reportedly pulling back on the skeuomorphism for iOS 7. I'm glad. I don't care for skeuomorphism except in a very few instances, like the 1982 Chrysler Town & Country seen above with Ricardo Montalbán.
The Source Family was a radical, utopian social experiment that emerged from the Los Angeles freak scene in the 1970s. Operating out of a hip health food restaurant owned by judo master/bank robber/accused murderer Jim Baker, aka Father Yod, The Source Family was everything you could want in a post-hippie, West Coast outsider spiritual trip. And they had a rock band too! Thanks to our pal Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos's absolutely fantastic new documentary now in theaters about Father Yod and his "children," interest in The Source Family and their band, Ya Ho Wa 13, has never been greater. The film, titled The Source Family: A Documentary, was inspired by The Source: The Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family, written by family members Isis Aquarian and Electricity Aquarian, edited by Jodi, and published by our pals Process Media. To complete the full transmedia Source Family experience, Drag City is releasing The Source Family soundtrack, a collection of choice tunes from the nine albums that The Source Family recorded between 1973 and 1974. Boing Boing is pleased to premier this free stream of the entire album, The Source Family soundtrack, available next week on CD and, of course, vinyl. Far fucking out.
An intrepid, curious traveler, Ripley roamed not just to see renowned wonders and not just to drink and tomcat (though he would do both, vigorously, through his entire life), but to unearth the unusual, the hidden, the specific. His travel dispatches, laden with stereotypes of the day, reflect Ripley’s private obsessions — in particular, “the inexplicable things people did for their gods,” particularly if they appeared, to American eyes, grotesque, such as the man Ripley dubs the “Hanging Hindu,” an adherent dangling from a tree via a hook stuck in his back.
...California is a no-fault state, meaning the dissolution of our marriage didn’t require a showing of wrongdoing by either person. Thank. God. Because I did some serious wrongdoing. There were addiction issues (mine) and excessive career demands (his). I got lost for a while. There are an endless amount of bad choices to be made if one wants to focus their attention away from a divorce. I drank. I started smoking again. I became a crappy friend. These choices caused a shit-ton of wreckage that I now have to work through as well. So don’t do that. Look at the divorce as an opportunity to grow, not an excuse to go backwards.
