Weird Nature

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I had no idea this could happen:

weird (link)

Like Mantis'? Check this out.

xenmate_weirded_out

Post Secret

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More entries from the excellent post secret.

I want one of these!!!

I saw this picture today and almost went bezerk. This has to be the coolest bot in existence. If only it played music... that would make it perfect!

Seeing this reminded me of some pictures of a kid I saw a few days ago that almost made me cry out in laughter. I had to look around for a while to find them, but I finally clocked them:

I just love the expressions...

There are a few more here.

Xenmate_20_years_younger

The weekend is here!!

Hell yes, Mr Scruff will be playing some of his crazy music here tonight!

Looking forward to that.

And now, a completely off-topic picture for your delectation:

Mr_Xenmate

OpticaSens

Try this out.

Xen_illusion

Vomito Art

I don't know much about who is behind this appart from the fact that he/she/they is/are from Buenos Aires. I've come across their stuff on Wooster Collective and it's fantastic. Shocking, provocative and straight to the point political commentary. They do have a website but it's under construction. It's looking promising though.

I leave you with a sample of their stuff:








Xenpuaaaaagggghhhhh!!!!!

Vintage Circus Posters

This is outstanding. Chico Bangs, of no fame whatsoever, is compiling a nifty little Flickr set of vintage circus posters.


You can see the rest of his collection here.

Xenmate_Cadabra

Cut & Paste lesson from Professor Dj Food

This is insane. The might Strictly Kev of Dj Food and Ninja Tune fame brings us "Raiding the 20th Century": a history of cheeky bootlegs, made famous by the likes of 2 Many Dj's.

For those of you who do not know what the hell I'm on about, bootlegs are illegal mixes of well known tunes. As in, one tune on top of the other type thing.

If still in doubt, download "Raiding the 20th century", for free, from over here.

Xenmate_Remixed

I'm getting old...

Remember cassettes? Boy, what nostalgia! My first ever album was Mano Negra's Casa Babylon on tape. Times have changed...




For an amazing trip down memory lane, click here.

Xen_Cassette

San Francisco model in Gelatine

Following our series on people with way too much time in their hands (see the card stacker and Jenga man) Spy's Spice brings to you the artist who constructed a model of San Francisco out of Jelly!

Hmmm... I wonder what an earthquake would be like here...

Xenmate_dazzled

Cyanide and Happiness take two!

Click on the comic strip for original size.

Xenmate_size_matters

No Comment

School band play 'Dj Shadow's Endtroducing' with real instruments

Why didn't I do things like this in school?

A bunch of kids at Minnetonka High School have been learning to play tracks from Dj Shadow's Seminal LP Endtroducing with real instruments.



You can watch the rascals playing here. It's not perfect, but it's a damn good effort! Pricless!

Xenmate_Organ_Donor

Cyanide and happiness

This made me laugh out loud...








Xenmate_and_happiness

Spot the 7 differences!

Pictures by isolano and adampsyche.

Xenmate_waaaaaahhhhh

Castells offers a good description of the malaise of democracy

I read this in the conclusion of Castells' "The Internet Galaxy" and I'd thought I'd share. I think it's an excellent way to describe the malaise of modern politics in western democracies.

How can we trust with the lives of our children governments controlled by parties that usually operate in systemic corruption (illegal financing), entirely dependent on image politics, led by politicians only accountable at election times, managing insulated bureaucracies, technologically outdated, and generally out of touch with the real life of their citizens? And yet, what is the alternative?

Bloody good question.

Xenmate_democrazy

James needs Stupid games.

This is what you do: type in Google your name followed by the word needs, then post what comes up.

These were mine:

1.- James Needs posters.

2.- James Needs Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. --- I knew it!

3.- James Needs A Hat Petition.

4.- James Needs to Be Protected from Development by Sam Sieber, BrandySieber, and Todd Fredricks.

5.- James needs to tell Dave that if he continues to discriminate unfairly, he will be obligated to contact Dave’s manager. --- yeah!

6.- James needs to get off his fat ass and fix it. --- no!

7.- James needs to marry nobility to gain a special license for his successful business.

8.- James needs more money. James will never wank to gay porn? --- I beg your pardon?

9.- James needs a home that is carpeted or has lots of rugs.

10.- James needs a special room for his mistress--the wardrobe mistress, that is. --- That's much much better, although I'm not sure what a wardrobe mistress is...

Xenmate_needs_therapy

P.S.: off course this wasn't my idea. Stole it from someone who stole it from someone, ad infinitum.

Film: The Whale Rider by Niki Caro

Yesterday I sat down to watch this film for the second time and can honestly say that I liked it even more than the first time. And that's saying quite a lot. Based on a book by Maori writer Witi Ihimaera the film tells the story of a young Maori girl's attempts to fulfill her destiny against the wishes of the chief of her village: her grandfather.

Sounds soppy doesn't it? Well, it is, a little. But above all it's a beautiful film. It's funny, sad, emotive... Quite amazing what they have achieved with such a small budget.

I can't reccommend this enough.

The Whale Rider

Xenmate_grey_back

Spy's Spice News Alert: Cow of the Week!

Oh yes! It's that time again!

It's the blessed COW OF THE WEEK!!!

Why? you may ask...

Only God knows.

Enjoyeth!

Xenmate_moooo

No Comment

No Comment

Xenmate_says_no_more

Stress relief

God told me to post this link here.

Xenmate_clickin'_n'_draggin'

Album of the week

Perennial Favourites is a great little album by the septet Squirrel Nut Zippers combining old swing, jump blues and folk music from the cradle of America with a more updated sound.

This is one hell of an album folks.

Xenmate_feelin'_musical

Spy's Spice News Alert: Cow of the week!

Yes ladies and gentlepeople! A new section in Spy's Spice: THE COW OF THE WEEK!!!

Why?

God knows.

But anyways... here is: THE FIRST COW OF THE WEEK!!!!!!

Enjoy.

Xenmate.

Quote of the... er... week, maybe?

From an all-time favourite comic strip:

Calvin: "When I grow up, I'm not going to read the newspaper and I'm not going to follow complex issues and I'm not going to vote. That way I can complain when the government doesn't represent me. Then, when everything goes down the tubes, I can say the system doesn't work and justify my further lack of participation."

Hobbes: "An ingeniously self-fulfilling plan."

Calvin: "It's a lot more fun to blame things than to fix them."

Street Art

As advertising grows bigger and brighter, those using our streets as platforms to make their statements have had to adapt, inventing newer, bolder ways to make a point and make us mortals stop and think for a little while.

banksy is a case in point.

You can also take a look at some more of his creations here.

Xenmate

Lazarus Sixto

Imagine you are a budding artist and you record a couple of albums and... well, nothing happens. So you get on with things only to discover thirty years on that you were a superstar in South Africa!. Well, that's exactly what happened to Sixto Rodriguez.

This from today's Guardian.

Oh and by the way, his music is damn good.

Friday October 7, 2005The Guardian

Ten years ago, most people thought Sixto Rodriguez was dead. In fact, that was one of less lurid rumours about him. A letter to Q Magazine in 1996 appealed for "any information about US singer Rodriguez, who wrote all his work in prison and shot himself onstage after quoting from his song Thanks For Your Time". No one replied, possibly because no one in Britain had heard of Rodriguez in the first place, onstage suicide or not.

It has that combination of obscurity of quality," says DJ and Ocean's Eleven soundtrack composer David Holmes, who found a copy of Rodriguez's remarkable 1970 psychedelic folk album Cold Fact in a New York second-hand shop in the late 1990s, and went on to include its standout track Sugarman on his mix album Come Get It I Got It. "I'd never heard anything quite like it. It was quite surprising to me to see how many people don't know it."Crackling down a telephone line from Cape Town, Sixto Rodriguez chuckles at the myths surrounding him. "When I started out, a real heavy cat in the music business told me it was going to take me 10 years to get there. In this job, you think it's going to take two weeks, but it takes a long drive, it just takes time." He sounds very much alive, if a little confused. His answers are a bit vague on details, and tend to the cryptic. Then again, you might be a little confused too, given the turns that his life has taken in the past few years. "It was a pretty surreal experience being with him," says Holmes, who met the singer in New York, "but he's had the most surreal journey."

Now 63, Rodriguez was working on a Detroit building site when he discovered he was a star in, of all places, South Africa: a fact that, understandably, "blew my mind". Despite its undoubted qualities - its stream-of-consciousness protest songs, heavy with drug references, are pitched somewhere between Bob Dylan and Love, tricked out with bursts of sinister electronics and luscious string arrangements - Cold Fact had vanished without a trace in the US: a state of affairs not helped when Rodriguez's record label Sussex, also home to Bill Withers, went bust. Bizarrely, however, Cold Fact not only secured a release in South Africa but became a platinum-selling hit. The effect of the album on national service conscripts under the apartheid regime is frequently compared to that of Jimi Hendrix or the Doors on US servicemen in Vietnam.
"South Africa in the early 1970s was a very restrictive society," says Stephen Seger-man, a former Johannesburg jeweller who made it his mission to track down Rodriguez. "Cold Fact was never banned, but it never received any radio play, except on pirate stations like Swazi Radio, which weren't under the censor board. The song I Wonder had this line, 'I wonder how many times you had sex', which for South Africa in those days was about as controversial as it could get. For kids, it was like a joke song, they were like 'listen to this!'. Then they heard the album, and realised there was a lot more in it, it was trippy, it was beautiful, it had a lot of social content. It affected a lot of people in a lot of different ways. The commercial success was unbelievable. If you took a family from South Africa, a normal, middle-class family, and looked through their record collection, you'd find Abbey Road, Neil Young's Harvest and Cold Fact. It was a word-of-mouth success."

The word of mouth did not reach Detroit, where Rodriguez had given up his recording career after a second album, 1972's Coming From Reality, vanished in much the same fashion as his debut. He tried an unsuccessful career in politics, studied for a BA in philosophy, worked in a petrol station and apparently "took part in Indian pow-wows throughout Michigan", before becoming a self-employed labourer. In South Africa, meanwhile, his record company seemed to have no idea of his whereabouts. In place of any concrete information, rumours spread. It was variously assumed he was dead from a heroin overdose, had been burned to death onstage, had been committed to a mental hospital, or was serving a prison sentence for murdering his lover: "Who or what Rodriguez is remains a mystery," claimed the sleeve notes to a reissued CD.
Segerman and journalist Craig Bartholomew began their search after the former discovered to his amazement that Rodriguez was unknown in his home country. After several months chasing false leads, they received a startled email from his daughter: "Do you really want to know about my father?" A series of rapturously received South African tours, two documentaries and a platinum disc followed, a fairly remarkable turn of events for an artist who had never played live in America. "Oh gee, it blew me away when I found out, it was so good," says Rodriguez. "All these youngbloods came rushing towards the stage. It was crazy. In South Africa, people talked to me about how they ran into the album. It happens all over the place, people coming up to me, into the material."

His reputation restored and burgeoning - he's about to play his first UK shows - Rodriguez sounds understandably contented. Only one mystery remains: what happened to the money he should have earned from his 1970s success in South Africa? "We still haven't got to the bottom of that, I'm still sorting it out," he says, darkly. "I don't really know what's going on there." Then his mood brightens. "But we're putting things together, man. I'm long-term, you know what I mean?"

· Rodriguez plays the London Forum Oct 7 and Oct 8