People likey the porn spoofs, so here’s footage from an incredibly odd artifact I discovered during my search for Kubrick porn: an adult version of Alice in Wonderland from 1976. This ain’t no filmed-in-one-afternoon quickie—it’s a musical comedy that combines elaborate song-and-dance numbers with hardcore sex. Billed as “An X-Rated Musical Fantasy” and produced by the same man who brought the world Flesh Gordon, it’s one of the more artistically ambitious porn spoofs you’ll ever see. Judging from my quick scroll through the video—it’s all too weird for me to spend much time actually watching it—the singing and dancing is much more prominent than the hardcore sex. But there’s a fair amount of that, too. In the clip below, Alice, a once-virginal librarian whose libido has just been awakened, gives some help to an impotent Humpty-Dumpty, who closely resembles Stanford from Sex and the City. This footage is pretty tame, because I edited out a few minutes of lesbian action between the two nurses. But it still isn’t safe for work, so be careful.

Kristine De Bell, who played Alice, was a former Playboy playmate who went on to appear in Meatballs (with Chris Makepeace!) and various other mainstream films and TV shows. A restored version of Alice in Wonderland was released on DVD in December, and it’s available on Amazon. It apparently includes both an X-rated version and an XXX-rated version.

Alice in Wonderland apparently got a lot of attention upon its release. Roger Ebert even reviewed it. Here’s an excerpt from Ebert’s review:

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This awesome clip shows a barely pubescent Jimmy Page playing skiffle on a British TV show in the late ’50s. Text in the clip says “1957,” which would mean Page is 13 years old here, but Wikipedia asserts that Page didn’t start playing guitar until he was 14. So let’s guess that this is from 1958, and Page is 14. Whatever his age, this is a fantastic artifact. But where’s his violin bow?

The host is a guy named Huw Weldon.

Related entry: Jimmy Page Was My Co-Pilot.

Well, it’s not that new: Lay It Down was released in late May. But it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard all year. (My pal Joe Keyes is the person who tipped me off to how excellent this disc is.) If I told you it was recorded in 1976, you would believe me. Everything has a real analog feel, thanks to the spare production by James Poyser and Questlove of the Roots. Questlove also played most or all of the drums on the record.

Al Green is singing about as well as I’ve ever heard him. Here’s the second track, “Just for Me.” You can buy Lay It Down here.

This fantastic slo-mo video sequence, in which top skateboarders ride through a postindustrial landscape rigged with explosives, is the intro to a skateboarding DVD called Fully Flared, which Ty Evans, Spike Jonze, and Cory Weincheque directed for the footwear company Lakai.

These people are reckless and crazy, and we get to watch!

Make sure you stick around until the end, because you’ll get to see an entire staircase get blown up with napalm.

The music is M83’s “Lower Your Eyelids to Die With the Sun.”

[via my pal Jonathan Hayes, again!]

For the upcoming update to its popular Melodyne audio-processing plugin, the German company Celemony has done the impossible: It has developed technology that can analyze polyphonic audio and break it up into individual notes, which can then be pitch-shifted, time-shifted, and otherwise mucked with. What this means is that the audio of anything from a guitar chord to a full symphony orchestra can be twisted into an entirely new piece of music. It’s long been possible to pitch-shift monophonic audio, such as a singer’s voice, or to pitch-shift an entire music track. What has never been possible before—and this is truly revolutionary, in a way that will eventually have a major impact on the music you listen to, whether you ultimately know it or not—is the ability to break apart complex, polyphonic audio into its constituent parts and rebuild it into something else.

To name just one application of this technology (and I’m sure someone will do exactly this): You could take the vocals-only version of the Beatles’ “Because” from Anthology 3 and completely reharmonize it into a new piece of music (even on the fly, with a MIDI keyboard), and it would still sound very much like John Lennon and the Beatles.

Celemony’s (slightly cheesy) promotional video explains everything:

Late last year a Finnish media artist named Santeri Ojala got a lot of attention for a series of hilarious YouTube videos in which he lifted concert footage of various guitar heroes and overdubbed his own intentionally awful playing. The bad musicianship was funny enough, but the verisimilitude made it even funnier: Ojala was great at matching each player’s hand movements and timing, and he sprinkled lukewarm applause and other sound effects throughout. The videos were like alternate-universe versions of rock-god cliches.

A month or two ago, YouTube yanked the videos and suspended Ojala’s YouTube account, apparently due to copyright complaints from several of the guitarists. Many of the videos have now resurfaced on YouTube, and because I never got around to posting them the first time, here’s one of the best. Eric Clapton does jazz:

More: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Vai, Slash, Eddie Van Halen, Metallica, Jake E. Lee with Ozzy Osbourne. Also, Yngwie Malmsteen, complete with symphony orchestra!

Inspired by Ojala, someone else contributed this Oscar Peterson-Joe Pass train wreck:

After living with thwarted technolust since last June, I finally got myself an iPhone on Monday. Verdict: amazing, beautiful, world-historical. I quickly got tired of the generic wallpaper, so I poked around in my files and found a scan of a gorgeous music score by the avant garde American composer George Crumb, whom I posted about two years ago. I spent a few minutes turning the score into a 320x480 graphic, and now it greets me each time I pick up my phone. Even though it’s too small for the details to be visible, it still looks super-cool on the high-res iPhone screen. (I’ve uploaded a much bigger copy of this score so you can see it in all its glory; you can view it here.)

You can download this and use it on your own phone:

The gang at Collected Ventures has some excellent fun with “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger. Whee!

[via Coudal Partners.]

This has gotten passed around a bit over the last few months, so forgive me if you’ve seen it already. It’s the incredible animated video for “Remind Me,” a 2002 track by Röyksopp, the brilliant electronic duo from Norway. In the past year I’ve listened to Röyksopp’s The Understanding more than any other album. They’re kind of like Air except more electronic and dancey—and not quite so French. They’re also a bit Boards of Canada-ish at times.

The guest singer on this track is Erlend Øye, one half of another great Norwegian group, the folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience. Do you like good music? Of course you do! So go buy the 2001 debut album by Kings of Convenience, Quiet Is the New Loud. It’s perfect.