The “Galaxy Song” first appeared in the 1983 film Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and it has been revived in later years — on Monty Python albums, and in Monty Python stage plays. Now the song originally written by Eric Idle has been re-recorded, this time with the lyrics sung by the world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking. The lyrics include a lot of astronomical facts, some now considered outdated by scholars. But that doesn’t take the fun out of the recording.
The song will be available for download on iTunes. (If you live in the UK, find it here.) And it will also be released as a 7″ single. But you can stream it online for free above. Enjoy.
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The entity to whom Dutch group, Lifehunters, attributes the museum quality artwork in the video prank above doesn’t exist. The “famous” Swedish artist’s handle –IKE Andrews –is but a puckish reference to IKEA, the purveyor of the 10€ print (oh snap, it’s not even an original!) various unnamed “art experts” are asked to evaluate, having been led to believe it’s something rare and wonderful. IKE Andrews’ fellow fictional entity, Borat, would be gratified by how readily these experts accept presenter Boris Lange’s suggestions as to the value of this work.
Only if you think IKEA achieved global dominance by choosing designs, patterns, and images in order for snotty hipsters to buy them ironically…
As several YouTube, Twitter, and blog commenters have mentioned, the print itself is pretty cool.
It’s a media frenzy, but interestingly, the artist is not coming forward to herald his or her role in the hoax.
Make that artists. Turns out IKE Andrews is a pair of Swiss street artists, Christian Rebecchi and Pablo Togni, who collaborate as NEVERCREW.
They have a fascination with cross sections. As their website somewhat murkily explains [all sic]:
These models, as such, from time to time actually contain more or less extensive realities, represented as autonomous systems of which the reality of the viewer becomes a part. This then the rapport becomes the very subject, mainly highlighted as the relationship between man and nature (between human being and its nature), but automatically extended to a vision of total and inevitable relationship between everything, between every part, where it is only the point of view, the position within a system, to define a selection.
We call the theme “living structures” and we like to see them as models of living systems. We would like our art to generate interest and curiosity, and the viewer to become a part of the mechanism with his or her thoughts, perspective and emotions.
Philosophy’s all well and good, but what’s it actually look like, this “Message in a Bottle”?
Well, it seems to me to be a bottle, implausibly halved lengthwise to reveal a bunch of steampunk stuff balanced atop robot spider legs, forming a cage around an ancient-looking whale. Also, a cloud raining yellow liquid, or possibly light. (Hopefully the latter). Oh! And it appears to have been painted on a brown paper bag.
I can think of plenty of people who’d not only like it, but find meaning in it, as the experts do. The only difference is the experts do so on camera, a fact not all of them are willing to laugh at, when host Lange informs them they’ve been punked.
The artists aren’t the only ones playing it cool. The internet may be exploding, but so far, neither IKEA, nor the Netherlands’ Arnhem Museum, where the prank was staged, have made mention of this business.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and mother of a teen filmmaker whose best known work was shot guerrilla style in a Red Hook, Brooklyn Ikea. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Meryl Streep, frequently hailed as one of our Greatest Living Actresses — she claims there’s no such thing — commands a near-encyclopedic mastery of accents.
Others may prepare for their roles by working with a dialect coach or listening to tapes of native speakers, but Streep pushes to the limit, as indicated in the conversation with author Andre Dubus III, below.
She not only learned Polish in order to play a troubled Holocaust survivor in Sophie’s Choice,she thought deeply about the way gender roles and period inform vocal presentation.
Her commitment to her craft is inadvertently to blame for popularizing the phrase “dingo’s got my baby.”
How refreshing that this versatile and accomplished actor is not precious about her skills. She gamely trotted them out for the comedian Ellen DeGeneres’ parlor game, above. Looks like fun, provided one’s not an introvert. Each player draws a card labelled with an accent, sticks it to the brim of a silly hat, then tried to guess the accent, based on her partner’s impromptu performance.
“Brooklyn?” Streep giggles when the Louisiana-born DeGeneres has a go at Boston.
Her stab at the Bronx shows off her improv chops far better than the most recent stunt DeGeneres roped her into.
Turns out you can burn some good calories when you’re Burning Down the House. Enjoy a fun clip from Funny or Die, and some other great Talking Heads material from our archive below.
I can well remember the first time I read Mad Magazine. I was probably around Bart Simpson’s age, but nowhere near his degree of wiseass-ness. I found the humor of the adult world mostly mystifying and also pretty tame, given my rather sheltered existence. It was my discovery of Mad—stacks and stacks of old Mads, to be precise, in the rec room of a family acquaintance—that cracked the shell, one of those formative loss-of-innocence moments that are ultimately edifying. At the time, I couldn’t tell sophisticated satire from puerile parody, and the average issue of Mad was no Gulliver’s Travels. Nonetheless, its gleeful skewering of the American civil religion of politics, celebrity, professional sports, commerce, and middle class comfort hooked me instantly, and taught me about the value of freethought before I’d ever heard the name Jonathan Swift.
Founded as a comic book by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines in 1952, Mad and its gap-toothed mascot Alfred E. Newman (still active today!) pioneered populist satire and inspired many lesser imitators. One distinctive feature of the magazine for almost its entire existence was its ability to run without advertising, allowing it to tear apart materialist culture without fear of biting the hands that fed it. Instead, for decades, the magazine ran fake spoof ads like those you see here. At the top, for example, see a 1963 ad for the “1963 ¾ Edsel,” an update of the “1963 ½ models—which made all ’63 models obsolete.” The text goes on to state frankly, “we’re taking the first steps toward “Planned Monthly Obsolescence—when every car owner will be shamed into trading in his old June ’64 car for a brand new shiny July ’64 model.” Apple, take note.
In the 1960 spoof ad above, military culture gets a send-up with “Aspire Boot-Lick Polish,” made for “The Man in Command: Pompous… Pig-headed… Pathological.” The flavored boot polish—“licorice, caviar, chocolate, caramel, molasses, borscht, halavah, and Moxie in a base of chicken fat”—is said to make “boot-licking a little more tasty when you gotta do it.” A clever inset links the U.S. chain of command with previous empires, showing a cartoon European naval officer of centuries past getting his boots licked by a subordinate sailor.
Just above, the disturbing 1969 fake ad for “Cemetery Filler Cigarettes” predates the tobacco trials of the 1990s by decades. Long promoted for their health benefits, calming effects, sophistication, and taste—as in that memorable first episode of Mad Men—cigarettes are exposed for the mass killers they are by none other than “Adolph Hitler”. (Another 1970 fake ad for “Winsom Cigarettes” uses an actual cemetery to similar effect.)
While cigarette companies were a frequent target of Mad’s fake ads, just as often they took on the inanity of the entire ad industry itself, as in the above 1965 meta-ad for “Let’s Kill Off Ridiculous Ad Campaigns.” The text reads, “If you advertisers have to blow your own horns, why tie your products to unrelated activities? Mainly, what’s eating a Breakfast Cereal got to do with playing a musical instrument? Boy… we just can’t swallow that!” Another regular feature was “Mad’s Great Moments in Advertising,” a kind of highlight blooper reel of ads gone wrong. The example below, also from 1965, spoofs the promises of cleaning product ads to make the lives of housewives easier with a product that works just a little too well.
I am applying for the position of Assistant Professor in Philosophy. I am an advanced doctoral candidate in Philosophy (with minors in Urban Studies and English), and expect to defend my dissertation in May, 2015.
My dissertation, Both Sides Now applies a bilateral, hylomorphic analysis to the phenomenon that is described by the signifier “clouds.” Having been constituted in Western discourse both positively as “rows and flows of angel hair,” “ice cream castles in the air,” “feather canyons everywhere,” and negatively as objects that exist solely to obscure the sun, express rain and snow, and hinder the achievement of various goals, we can conclude that after the application of this bilateral, hylomorphic analysis that due to these contradictory “up” and “down” epistemologies of cloud tropes, the reality of clouds is somehow still understudied, having been ignored in favor of their Platonic form/sign, and that we really don’t “know” clouds at all.
You can read the rest of her “application” here and then spend the evening dreaming about taking Joni’s classes on Plato, Existentialism, and Urban Development. I know I will.
You can find more great Joni Mitchell material below.
If you warbled “02134” without hesitation, you probably grew up watching a beloved children’s television show of the 70s.
It turns out Zoom wasn’t the only cool program WGBH hatched in 1972. On March 13, just a couple of months after Zoom’s debut, the station aired Between Time and Timbuktu, a 90-minute special inspired by the work of Kurt Vonnegut.
Vonnegut also wrote the introduction to the published script, a paperback quickie enhanced by production stills and photos taken by Vonnegut’s wife, Jill Krementz. It was as good a forum as any for him to announce his retirement from film, which he cited as a medium “too clanking and real” for his comfort.
The show itself is likely to cause nostalgia for television’s freewheeling, Monty Python era.
Though 1972 wasn’t an entirely silly period, if you’ll recall. The Vietnam War was raging, with Walter Cronkite holding down the CBS Evening News desk.
Between Time and Timbuktu capitalizes on the veteran broadcaster’s ubiquity by casting comedian Ray Goulding of Bob and Ray fame, as an appropriately grave Walter Gesundheit. Bob joined him at the news desk as a fictitious former astronaut. Vonnegut was appreciative of their efforts, stating that American comedians had probably done more to shape his thinking than any other writer.
Also look for William Hickey, who played Prizzi’s Honor’s genial, aged mafia don, in the lead role of Stony Stevenson—now there’s a period character name! If you’ll remember, Stony is also the first civilian in space, at least according to the Sirens of Titan.
Attention sulky art school students! Next time you’re stocking up on pre-smashed TVs, baby doll parts, riot cop stencils and mannequins, be sure to say hello to Shepard Fairey.
Fairey’s real, but the store, a brightly lit emporium catering to those seeking to make subversive statements with their art, is the invention of Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s Portlandia. (The full episode aired last week on IFC.)
Meanwhile, Fairey wins laughs by leaving the comedy to the comedians. Though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Shocking Art Supply employee Shepard F is an admirer of Henry Rollins. You can read all sorts of things into a performance that deadpan.
The segment was filmed in a Portland store where Fairey remembered purchasing art supplies a few years back. As he notes on his website:
I’m no actor, but this part, along with maybe “jaded art student” or “jaded skate shop employee,” are the closest I’ll ever get to method acting.
- Ayun Halliday is an author whose last sting in Portland involved making final edits to the Zinester’s Guide to NYC in a broken down vintage camper infested with flying ants. Follow her @AyunHalliday
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