The legendary Jad Fair blesses us with a new album in 2020. Here’s “Undisputed Champions,” a preview of the upcoming Half Japanese album Crazy Hearts, due out on December 4th.

The video was animated by Jad himself who says:

“Undefeated, undisputed, undeniable, unstoppable,
Untoppable, unflappable and unquestionably great.
Take a pen and underline the word great. To quote
The Beatles ‘All you need is love.’ To quote me
‘Damn straight.’ Celebrate the celebration. Bravo
The undisputed champions.”

The album will be available on see-through turquoise vinyl and CD. Preorder Crazy Hearts here.
 

 
If Scott Lavene‘s name isn’t familiar, you can click here for the complete rundown on this up and coming English singer-songwriter. If you’re not familiar with his music yet, you’re in a for a real treat. Lavene’s debut album, Broke was easily one of the best albums of 2019—in fact I wrote “Any ‘best albums of 2019’ lists that don’t have Scott Lavene’s ‘Broke’ near the top are bullshit,” as you can see I felt pretty strongly about it—and he’s already working on the follow-up. If you haven’t heard Scott’s music yet, lucky you. And if you have, lucky you, too, because today we’re premiering the animated video for a new song of his called “Lover.”

Scott writes:

“I had this song ‘Lover’ that didn’t make the album. A b-side. The final release from the last album before settling in to work on the next one.  I wanted a video for it and since we are on lockdown i was just going to make a green screen and perhaps make something odd at home. Then a guy started following me on Instagram called Ryan D. Anderson. 

His animations are amazing and his humour is brilliant and bizarre. I asked him if he had anything lying around that i could use for a video, something odd, didn’t have to be too polished. So, he’s a fan and said he’d be happy to make something specific for the song. A completely excellent human. A comedian and writer. A Canadian. Hopefully we’re going to collaborate again. Here’s his website.”

More Scott Lavene on Bandcamp.

The Beatles by Guy Peellaert

Animation director Chuck Braverman won an Oscar in 1974 for Braverman’s Condensed Cream of the Beatles, his 14-minute animated history of the Beatles and their preeminent place in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. It’s a celebration of Beatlemania that is moving, amazing and inspiring.

I saw this three times when I was a kid. It used to come around once a year in the mid-70s as part of a weekend matinee movie “roadshow” that was four hours of Beatles films for $4. Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles at Shea Stadium and Japan ‘66 were some of the other films I recall seeing, but the clear highlight of the show each time was Braverman’s Condensed Cream of the Beatles, which used footage of the group combined with flashy pop art photo-montage animation. Trust me, this was a pretty astonishing thing to see at the time. Produced by Apple (who else could have gotten all the rights to this material?) and Braverman Productions, it aired on TV one time on Geraldo Rivera’s late night ABC program Good Night America (also where the “Zapruder Film” was first seen on television in 1975).

It’s a seriously cool film, but for whatever reason, it’s practically disappeared off the face of the earth. One of the few places you can actually still rent a 16mm print is at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD. (They’ve got quite a few cool things in their collection.)

A minor footnote to this film’s history is that it was picked apart for clues to the whole dumb “Paul is Dead” theory at the time. Braverman also made the opening montage to the dystopian sci-fi cult favorite, Soylent Green.

It’s a pity that the only complete version I could find of this marvelous little Oscar-winning film is so washed-out and tatty looking, but it’s the best I could do, so be grateful for small miracles. You’ll have to mentally “restore” it in your mind as you watch. Do watch it full screen as well, there’s a lot going on.
 

 
New Year, new you? Maybe. You can change the way you live and what you want to do. You can change your looks, your attitude, your friends, your hair. But there are some things you can’t change and the state knows that.

When Robert De Niro was de-aged for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman he might have looked years younger but his bodily movements identified him as old. The idea that our body movements can identify our age, sex, and to an extent exactly who we are has led governments (like China) to use body motion technologies to keep tabs on its population.

Filmmaker John Butler has just released a short animation highlighting this new form of state surveillance. Called Gaitkeeper, a nice little play on words, Butler’s latest film aims to expose how governments are using body motion technology to control their citizens. I caught up with Butler this morning and asked about Gaitkeeper.

What inspired your new animation?

John Butler: Lots of artists have been doing things on facial recognition, and how to thwart/evade it, and it’s a well worn theme. My aim is to look at the new science of ‘gait recognition’, which is being tested as part of China’s social credit system. I’m sure you know about that, it’s the techtalitarian system of assigning each citizen a score for good behaviour, which relies heavily on digital surveillance tools such as facial recognition.

In a ‘solid state’, purchasing nappies is good, and buying alcohol is bad. A cashless system makes every transaction visible, so nosey journalists can often find themselves unable to book flights or even access the web.

Gait Recognition works on the assumption that your walk is as individual as your face or fingerprint, and I would agree. It allows identification from a distance and in cases where the face is obscured.

And you’ve used motion capture for this film?

JB Since motion capture is central to my art, I thought it was an obvious thing to do, especially since getting my own smartsuit. It is also a blatant attempt to be first in the field!

I was interested in the spat between Scorsese and Marvel, which you’ll know all about. In particular, he has used all of Marvel’s pioneering ageing/de-ageing tech to make The Irishman. One review praised how well it was done, but mentions the fact that De Niro “walks like a 70 year old…”

I think this backs up the theory that we are not images, but a compendium of behaviors. In the first Ant Man, they de-aged Michael Douglas, but he still has his older voice.

Another example is from Final Fantasy in 2000. This was the first attempt at a mocap film, and was a box office bomb. What surprised me was how James Woods, one of the most distinctive actors around, sounded like anyone else, when put into a synthetic character. I conclude that James Woods cannot be split into components. You need the hyper kinetic body language, the shifty look, the narrow face etc….

Our movement, motion, is as distinctive as our faces, and this will soon be captured and interned. Gaitkeeper is a biometric control suite designed to counter the challenge of “Locomotive Camouflage.”

Is that how you think we can counter governments using motion capture against us?

JB: Yes, with Gaitkeeper I’m imagining a time when performance artists and dance specialists will be in demand to train civic insurgents in the art of Locomotive Camouflage. It’s also “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” for the age of surveillance.

Gaitkeeper depicts a training and deployment phase, and a carivalesque riot inspired by the umbrellas of Hong Kong.
 

 
So, this is Christmas and…no matter what you’ve done, may I wish you all the very best Compliments of the Season, Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas.

Ah, Christmas. This magical pagan-Christian festival which owes as much to the Victorians and Charles Dickens for the way it is celebrated as it does to good ole Jesus and a bunch of Druids. In many respects it’s fair to say, Dickens was the man who revitalized (or some might say reinvented) Christmas with his classic tale A Christmas Carol. Dickens became so associated with Christmas that when he died in 1870, there was a suggestion that if Dickens could die then so could Father Christmas. But his inspiration was not religious or even superstitious but rather his book was written as a response to the grim inequalities of Victorian England.

Originally, Dickens considered writing a political pamphlet to highlight the issue—An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child—but figured such a pamphlet would have only a very limited appeal to well-meaning academics, enthusiastic charity workers, liberal politicians and rich philanthropists.

It was after he addressed a political rally in Manchester, in October 1843, where he encouraged workers and employers to join together in order to bring about social change, that Dickens decided it would be far, far better to write a story that would carry his message to the greatest number of people.

He reworked a story he had previously written in The Pickwick Papers—”The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton” as the basis for A Christmas Carol. He wrote it in a furious burst of creative energy in between completing chapters for his serialized novel Martin Chuzzlewit. His story of an old miser called Ebenezer Scrooge being given a chance of redemption through the visits of three ghosts was his response to the horrific working conditions Dickens had seen in London and Manchester. During the writing of the A Christmas Carol, he would often wander out at night around the grim and impoverished London boroughs, sometimes making a loop of ten-fifteen miles in a night, witnessing firsthand the extreme poverty endured by working class families—in particular their children.

Published on December 17, 1843, A Christmas Carol sold 5,000 copies by Christmas Eve. Dickens believed this book was the greatest success he ever achieved, becoming his best-known book which has never been out-of-print since its first publication.

A Christmas Carol isn’t really a traditional ghost story of the kind later made famous by M. R. James or Algernon Blackwood. The real horror of the story is not the ghosts but rather the horrors of Ignorance and Want hiding in the cloak the Ghost of Christmas Present:

They are Man’s and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.

While the emotional (or rather sentimental) heart of the tale rests with Bob Cratchit and the fate of Tiny Tim. Moreover, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out though Dickens considered himself “to be a brisk man of the manufacturing age, almost a Utilitarian,” he defended the medieval feast of Christmas (food, alcohol, and dancing) “which was going out against the Utilitarianism which was coming in. He could see what was bad in medievalism. But he fought for all that was good in it.”

The story has inspired numerous movies (the one with Alastair Sim being a personal favorite), musicals (yep, I dig Leslie Bricusse score for Scrooge), comedies, and of course radio and TV versions—most recently a “woke” interpretation starring Guy Pearce as Ebenezer.

In 1971, the brilliant, nay genius animator Richard Williams made his version of A Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge, Michael Hordern as Marley, Melvyn Hayes as Bob Cratchit, Joan Sims as Mrs Cratchit and Michael Redgrave as the narrator.

Williams, who died earlier this year, was one of the most innovative and original animators of the past sixty years. His work ranged from his award-winning debut animation The Little Island to the titles for What’s New Pussycat? and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and his great magnum opus which was wrestled from his hands by philistine producers The Thief and the Cobbler.

A Christmas Carol was first broadcast on U.S. television by ABC on December 21, 1971, and released in cinemas the following year. The film deservedly won Williams an Academy Award for Best Short Animation. It’s magical, beautiful film, which is suitable for getting in the mood for today.
 

 
Warmest wishes to { feuilleton }.
 

“That basketball was like…a basketball to me”
—Basketball Jones

“Basketball Jones” was a song/routine/character from Cheech & Chong’s 1973 Los Cochinos (“The Pigs”) record. The original album cover had a secret compartment where you could see how they smuggled pot, sandwiched in their car door. I bought this LP at a garage sale when I was a child just starting to get into comedy albums. I only half understood the idea of what “drugs” were at the time, I’m pretty sure, so I can’t imagine that a Cheech & Chong album made much sense to me at such a tender age. But I loved the routine “Basketball Jones” by Tyrone (as in “tie your own”) Shoelaces & Rap Brown Jr. H.S. and would go around singing the musical part of it like ten-year-olds do.

The song is about teenage Tyrone and his love of basketball sung in a falsetto voice by Cheech Marin. It’s catchy as hell, but small wonder, dig the backing band: George Harrison, Klaus Voormann, Carole King, Nicky Hopkins, Tom Scott and Billy Preston. Ronnie Spector, Michelle Phillips and The Blossoms with Darlene Love were the backing cheerleaders’ voices.

Cheech Marin:

“George Harrison and those guys were in the next studio recording, and so Lou (Adler) just ran over there and played (it for him). They made up the track right on the spot.”

Producer Lou Adler:

“That was a wild session. I probably called Carole (King) and told her to come down, but with Harrison and (Klaus) Voormann—I didn’t call and say come in and play. Everyone happened to be in the A&M studios at that particular time, doing different projects. It was spilling out of the studio into the corridors.”

The song itself was a parody of “Love Jones” by the Brighter Side of Darkness. Having a “jones” btw, is a slang for having an addiction to something.

The “Basketball Jones” animation is by Paul Gruwell and was made in 1974. This cartoon has also made some impressive Hollywood cameos over the years, in Robert Altman’s California Split (which was never released on VHS due to Columbia Pictures refusing to pay royalties on the song, Altman had to cut the music—but not the animation—for the DVD); Hal Ashby’s Being There (it’s what Chauncey Gardiner is watching in the limo); and in the 70s underground comedy Tunnel Vision. It was even parodied in a 2011 episode of The Simpsons (”A Midsummer’s Nice Dream”) guest-starring Cheech & Chong.
 

“Basketball Jones”
 
More after the jump…

The 1979 collection ‘Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts’
 
William S. Burroughs envisaged Ah Pook Is Here, an extension of the comix serial The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, as “a picture book modelled on the surviving Mayan codices.” However, after nearly a decade collaborating with artist Malcolm McNeill on an illustrated version of the tale, Burroughs was unable to find a publisher for his graphic novel avant la lettre. Instead, it appeared without images in Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts, a 1979 collection of Burroughs’ researches into Mayan, Egyptian, and space age magical techniques. (McNeill has since published his artwork for Ah Pook Is Here in a separate volume.)

Burroughs’ novella concerns an American plutocrat named John Stanley Hart, whose fear of his own mortality leads him to disturb the gods of the Mayan pantheon. Hart is a junkie with a jones for the suffering of others, especially poor people and ethnic minorities. Narcotized by the “blue note” of their pain, congenitally selfish and incurious, he can’t imagine that calling down awful deities from another dimension might have unwanted consequences: “Mr. Hart has a burning down habit and he will burn down the planet.” Before you know it, blood is spurting from delegates’ every orifice at the “American First” rally, and the Acid Leprosy has eaten a hole in time.
 

‘The Unspeakable Mr. Hart’ from Cyclops magazine (via Virtual Library)
 
Philip Hunt made this stop-motion film of Ah Pook Is Here as a student at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in 1994, taking the sound from Burroughs’ collaborations with John Cale on the Dead City Radio album. At six minutes, it is a distillation of the story, but a good one: death gods disturbed by a grotesque people-thing.

Given the vintage of Ah Pook Is Here, I can only interpret the suicide-by-shotgun at the end as a reference to the death of Burroughs’ former collaborator, Kurt Cobain—an unlikely candidate for Mr. Hart.

 
Pete Shelley died late last week, a very sad day for all of us at Dangerous Minds. He will be missed.

Everyone reading this knows that Shelley played an important role in the UK punk scene as the lead vocalist and songwriter for Buzzcocks and was an important new wave innovator as a solo artist. Over the weekend John Coulthart called attention to an aspect of Shelley’s career I hadn’t known about, his innovative use of computer technology to create alternative means of enjoying music in the televisual age.

On the cover of Shelley’s first proper solo album, 1981’s Homosapien, a dandified version of the artist perches awkwardly in an extremely 1980s sort of “office” that featured (among other objects) a pyramid, a phrenologist’s skull, and, significantly, a Commodore Pet, which was one of the first personal computers sold directly to consumers, in the late 1970s. Wittingly or no, that Pet would signal a bold direction Shelley would take on his 1983 follow-up, XL•1, which featured a suite of “videos” to accompany each of the album’s songs that consisted entirely of computer graphics. The program was programmed by Joey Headen for the ZX Spectrum, a home computer of that moment that served as the approximate British equivalent to the Commodore 64 in the United States. (Remember: If you’re not pronouncing it “Zeddex Spectrum,” you’re not saying it right.)

According to Headen, Shelley, an early adopter of the ZX Spectrum, wrote a simple program in BASIC that would display the words to one of his songs in response to a series of key presses. Eventually, with the help of some computer-savvy friends, Shelley put together a test of a program that would run without requiring human intervention—using Wire’s “A Question of Degree” as the guinea pig. Shelley liked the results so much that for a time he would enthusiastically show the program off to houseguests.
 

 
Shelley’s producer Martin Rushent was (like Shelley) quite technophilic and thus instrumental in making the ZX Spectrum version of XL•1 come into being. Rushent’s home studio was technologically forward-looking enough that in 1983 the magazine MicroComputer Printout would quip that his mixing desk “looks like something out of Star Wars.” Rushent invited Headen and another programmer named Francis Cookson up to his home studio to work on the program while Shelley cut the tracks for the album. Headen later reminisced:
 

We decided the program was going to be divided into 10 different sections, one for each song. Each song was going to have a different graphical look.

The lower third of the screen, 8 lines of text, would contain the lyrics. I had devised different methods for the text appearing: instantly, slowly, from the side and from the top. These could be used depending on the song. The top part of the screen would be used for graphics. The graphics were kept simple—pixels, lines, circles, color blocks, scrolling horizontally and vertically.

With three weeks until the album was to be finished, I moved down to the hotel to work on the program full time. This was crunch time, and Francis and I spent most of the time working in the hotel room. In fact it took us three days before we realized that there was only one bed in the room and we had to change rooms.

 
Here’s one of the pages Headen saved from that month of work—a lyrics sheet in Shelley’s handwriting for XL•1‘s first track “Telephone Operator.” I’m not sure but the numbers on the right might have been some kind of notation for Headen to keep track of the program’s cues.
 

 
The program was crude but anyone who remembers 1983 at all will testify that such oddities didn’t seem crude whatsoever at the time.
 
After the jump, experience the full multimedia experience of XL•1….......
 

 
You don’t have to be a child to appreciate the genius of Stephen Hillenburg. I think that’s why his passing especially hurts. I still watch Spongebob and Rocko’s Modern Life regularly. And I’m pretty sure both are even better as an adult.
 
Before he was an animator, Stephen Hillenburg taught marine biology. As a visual aid to his course curriculum, Hillenburg wrote and designed an informative comic book titled The Intertidal Zone. It was about anthropomorphic tide-pool animals and featured a particular sea sponge - one who would go on to warm the hearts of millions. As the story goes, the educational comic eventually developed into the fifth longest-running animated series in American history - Spongebob Squarepants.
 

 
Hillenburg always had a passion for the arts. When he was in third grade, in 1970 and during the Vietnam War, his teacher commended him for an illustration that he did featuring “a bunch of army men… kissing and hugging instead of fighting.” It was at that moment that Stephen’s creative talent (and potential) was first recognized. After getting the nautical comic book idea turned down by publishers (it still is unpublished), Hillenburg followed his artistic ambitions and enrolled in animation school at CalArts.
 

‘The Green Beret’
 
Stephen Hillenburg created two animated shorts while at CalArts, both in 1992. The first was The Green Beret. It was about a Girl Scout with enormous fists who toppled homes while trying to sell cookies. Rife with political satire (George Washington in the war trenches) and a hint of farce directed at American excess and television culture, the short contained the same tongue-in-cheek humor that made Hillenburg’s later works so satisfying. The Green Beret kind of reminds me of Meet the Fat Heads, the absurd in-universe cartoon program that had several cameos in Rocko’s Modern Life.
 

The only online evidence of ‘Wormholes’
 
Hillenburg’s thesis film was a seven-minute animation titled Wormholes. It was based on the theory of relativity and while the short does not exist anywhere on the web, Hillenburg has been quoted as describing it as “a poetic animated film based on relativistic phenomena.” The film was shown at several international film festivals, including the 1992 Ottawa Film Festival, where Hillenburg met Joe Murray, creator of Rocko’s Modern Life. After seeing Wormholes, Murray offered Stephen the directorial role on his new cartoon for Nickelodeon. And the rest was history.
 
It is without a doubt that Stephen Hillenburg has inspired something special within us all. May he rest in peace.
 
Watch Hillenburg’s first animated short film ‘The Green Beret,’ after the jump…

 
Artist James Kerr was looking for something new to do, so he decided he’d start making GIFs ‘cause he thought that’d be fun. “Somehow,” he tells me, “I figured the best way to learn was to try and make one per day for an entire year, and see where it all went from there. This was back in 2012.”

Kerr shares his work under the name Scorpion Dagger. Over the past six years, he has produced hundreds of GIFs featuring artwork from northern and early Renaissance paintings. He has also produced a book which features some of his best and most popular work. But Kerr didn’t start out as an artist, he was a Political Science graduate who spent his time at university hanging “with lots of art school kids who really inspired me to make art.” I like Kerr’s work—they’re funny and clever and remind me of those brilliant animations Terry Gilliam made for Monty Python. I contacted Kerr to find out more about his work as Scorpion Dagger.

What’s with the name Scorpion Dagger? Where did it come from?

James Kerr: Essentially, it’s all to annoy my friends. It comes from working construction with these guys a long time ago, and us joking around about needing some tough sounding nicknames. I came up with Scorpion Dagger, and they all hated it. Them hating on it made me want to try and make it stick even more, so when it came time to name the GIF project, the choice was obvious.

How do you make your GIFs?

JK: At first, it was all made in Photoshop. I’d hunt around for interesting images, cut them up, and animate all in PS. I’ve slowly started using After Effects more-and-more, but there’s some quality issues that I don’t like with it—it’s too clean! I like a slightly messier aesthetic. But, it does save me tons of time, so now somewhere around I’m 50/50.

What brought you to these specific sets of paintings?

JK: It goes back to making GIFs every day for an entire year - it was a real struggle finding inspiration for what to animate, so I would do these totally random google image searches where I would pull out whatever struck a chord. At some point I noticed that I kept going back to these specific paintings, and noticed that the inspiration got easier. I find the paintings from that era to be quite comical on their own, especially those of the Northern Renaissance, and that they were a perfect muse in helping me say what I wanted to say.

What has the response been?

JK: Pretty amazing. During that first year I figured that I may be able to find a gallery show where I would project them all once it was all done, and that would be that. But, as time went on, I couldn’t see myself ending it. I was having way too much fun. Now, this whole silly project has turned in to a career. Definitely lucked out.

You produced a book out—can you tell me something about it?

JK: Do You Like Relaxing? came out a few years ago, and it is (we think) the first ever (and perhaps only) physical book of animated GIFs. It presents itself much like any old art book, with still images and such, but you can animate a good chunk of them on your device using an augmented reality app. It all came about when I was looking around for someone to help me out with an AR project I was trying to pitch, and a friend introduced me the Antesim (the publisher), who were looking for someone to do an AR book with.

What motivates you?

JK: Not entirely sure. Not to sound too clichéd, but at times art feels as if it’s something I need to do. If I haven’t made something in a while, I tend to get this uneasy feeling. In a sense, I just really love making stuff, and don’t feel whole unless I’m working on something.

What’s next?

JK: No idea. I’m sitting on a couple projects that will slowly roll out over the next year that I’m really excited about. One of which is another book, but this time it’s in collaboration with some writers who wrote this fun story. One thing that’s been on my mind is that I would love to experiment a little more, and get back in to posting on my socials a little more regularly, which, for me, I think go hand-in-hand.

You can buy the book Do You Like Relaxing? or follow Scorpion Dagger on Instagram or Facebook or see more of Kerr’s work here.
 

 
See more from Scorpion Dagger plus and interview, after the jump…