A British production house called Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories created this fantastic video of a scientific experiment in which disembodied heads are used as musical instruments. Incredible compositing work.

The Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories website has more info, including some production stills.

[via my colleague Chino, via my colleague Sam.]

In November, I roped my pal Clive Thompson into joining me for one of the two AC/DC shows at Madison Square Garden. Though I wasn’t a huge AC/DC fan back when I was a guitar-playing, classic-rocking adolescent, I’ve become sort of obsessed with them in the last few years. Their rhythm section is one of the tightest, most rocking ever—viva Malcolm Young!—and their devotion to pure rock form hasn’t wavered in 35 years. Their new album, Black Ice, is pretty fine, and the lead track, “Rock ’n’ Roll Train,” is one of their best since the early-’80s glory years with producer Mutt Lange, who focused the band’s raw power and shaped the rhythm section into an incredibly tight, earth-shaking combo.

Clive and I didn’t have tickets to the show, which was sold out, and neither of us wanted to pay face value, about $90 each. So we planned to try our luck with the scalpers outside. If we failed, we’d just go drink beer somewhere in the neighborhood. We showed up outside the arena an hour after the doors opened, figuring that scalpers would be eager to get rid of any unsold tickets by then. Our price goal: $60 each. We didn’t know if this was realistic, but we weren’t too worried about it, because drinking beer was a pretty good backup option.

And that’s how we came to buy two counterfeit tickets. First I’ll tell the story of how and why we bought them, and then I’ll show you the ticket.

Neither Clive nor I had been to an arena-rock show in years. We knew we’d have to be on the lookout for ripoffs and scams, but we weren’t sure we’d be able to detect a professionally forged ticket. For all we knew, recent advances in printing technologies had led to a mishmash of ticket styles, with different appearances generated by different printing systems: at the arena, at a record store, at Ticketmaster outlets, and so forth. Had increased computerization led to greater standardization of ticket appearance, or less? We didn’t know. We also wondered whether scalpers had enough design talent to forge tickets convincingly.

[Continue reading "The Unbearable Lightness of a Counterfeit AC/DC Ticket"...]

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:

[Continue reading "Alice in Wonderland: The 1976 Musical-Comedy Porn Spoof"...]

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.