It is raining in Seattle. Why not head to a beach circa summer of 1997? Poolside.fm’s webpage takes you to a 90’s Macintosh Desktop with curated music and videos. They have apps. Go to Poolside.
Category: Video
Death: Graveyard speaks
In this short French video adaptation of a story by Maupassant, entitled “Dans la nuit”, the dead return to tell their truth. Brief and haunting.
Road Trip: Alice meets Dorothy
Netflix has ignited a project to unite these two spacey girls who live in the public domain. The Alice and Dorothy crossover is reportedly a “fantasy adventure epic”
The original script found Dorothy Gale haunted by nightmares of Oz’s impending destruction. Sent to a home for others like her who experience troubling, vivid dreams, she soon befriends Alice, a mysterious girl who involves her in a perilous quest to not only save the worlds of imagination, but the world as we know it.
More details here.
Abstraction: Colors and Shapes
Just a two hour video of a kaleidoscope, visualizing the synapses in you mind. Play in the background while you are doing origami with you eyes closed.
Watch: A documentary about real-life mermaids
Wetlands is a short experimental documentary about a community of mermaids/merman in Virginia, with a mystical metaphysical poetic narration backdrop by one of the mermaids. Directed by Iranian-New Zealand filmmaker Persia Beheshti. It is three minutes long and worth it. via BoingBoing
Watch: Sedation in action
The YouTube description bills this animation as “The Trippiest Video Ever”. The song is synthy-bass heavy and the video takes you places.
Hypnotized: Cactus flower timelapse
Cactus flowers blooming contrast with the spiky cactus textures. Vibrant otherworldly colors palettes embody impermanence. These cactuses are known as “Echinopsis”, their flowers bloom overnight and last one day. The time for each timelapses captured in this montage average 8 hours/bloom.
Here is the photographer’s website, chock full of more more timelapses and stills. The video’s background music is “Chin Swee Sunset” by O$P$.
Flicks: Canon of film psychedelia
The Taste of Cinema blog describes 25 psychedelic films “worth your time”, with classics like Zabriskie Point, Altered States and Easy Rider, and more obscure or unexpected films like the Czech New Wave movie Daisies, feature length trippy porn Behind the Green Door and genre-defying British film The Wicker Man.
Whether the film is depicting drug-induced madness or creating an atmosphere of existential confusion, these films somehow experiment with the audience’s sensory perceptions in order to uproot the viewer from reality. These films welcome (or in some cases, force) the audience to interact with a plethora of psychedelic imagery, sounds, and/or narration.
Esther Zeilig, taste of cinema blog
TV: Woody becomes Leary
Reportedly, Woody Harrelson has signed on to play Timothy Leary in an adaptation of The Most Dangerous Man in America. No network is attached yet, but with the well-known source material and a big star, it seems likely to happen. Vice tells more.
For those who don’t know Leary, here is the quick: he was a Harvard psychology professor who co-led the ethically problematic Harvard Psilocybin Project with Richard Albert (who later became self-help guru Ram Dass). Both Leary and Alpert were fired from Harvard and Leary went on to live an orgiastic debaucherous lifestyle in a Massachusetts mansion, in Mexico, the Bay Area and jail. He was famously sexist and homophobic, he coined the phrases “set and setting” and “tune in and drop out”, he was a psychedelic evangelist to the 10th degree and his ego-fueled cultural stardom is retrospectively considered a significant factor in the federal scheduling of LSD and henceforth a roadblock in the legal approval road of contemporary psychedelic research.
Costumes: A Love Story
Via BoingBoing, Verasphere is a vibrant and adorable 20 minute documentary about costuming, romance and community.
“We had a terrible burrito, but it was great.”
“It’s always Ms. It’s Mrs. Vera. She’s had a history.”
“The only thing that’s required is the interest to do it… it’s not normal to want to look that strange… but it’s really fun.”
“Our collaboration saved his life.”
[It] follows two San Francisco artists, David Faulk and Michael Johnstone, who fall in love at the height of the AIDS epidemic. While most of their community is overcome with grief and rage, David and Michael discover an unlikely joy through the creation of Mrs. Vera, an outrageous costumed character made from found materials. What began as an intimate art project and a way to pass the time while they faced an inevitable death, soon took on a life of its own. Now 25 years later, a large and diverse community has evolved around Mrs. Vera, all centered around one day of costumed celebration in the San Francisco Pride Parade.