A Thousand Voices Talk

theatlanticvideo: This is Your Brain on ‘Call Me Maybe’: The Scientific Power of Music Like food, sex, and drugs, music boosts dopamine levels to create addictive feelings of pleasure. In this short, scrappy video, the web series ASAP Science illustrates how it works. Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown, who produce the videos, talk about the making of the series in an interview with the Atlantic Video channel here.

Francis Picabia, The Procession, Seville, 1912 From the National Gallery of Art: Before establishing himself as a pioneering member of the dada movement during and after World War I, Picabia experimented with various forms of modernist painting. Procession, Seville belongs to a group of works from 1912 in which the artist demonstrates a sophisticated and highly idiosyncratic assimilation of recent developments in cubism and futurism.1 Fragmented planes, shallow space, and an allover pattern of flickering lights and darks are all associated with the analytic cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque; the quasi-abstract evocation of bodies in motion is an interest Picabia shared with Italian futurist painters such as Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni, who were just beginning to exhibit in Paris. The paintings in this series, which includes several large-scale works, were produced between June and September. All of the pictures have descriptive titles that are often boldly inscribed on the painting itself; many of these, including Procession, Seville, relate to scenes of peasant and religious life that Picabia had witnessed on his honeymoon in Spain in 1909. Procession, Seville purports to represent a hillside religious procession, with nuns in black habits and white headgear. Figures coalesce into a mass in the center of the canvas, making their way up the rugged terrain, with blue sky showing in the upper-left and upper-right corners of the composition. The restricted palette, dominated by blacks, whites, and grays, derives in principle from analytic cubism, but the acidic passages of blue and orange (presumably the nuns’ faces) are peculiar to Picabia’s work. Picabia’s paintings from 1912 were often produced in formal and thematic sequences or groups, including several canvases devoted to images of the dance.

From DVDBeaver.com’s review of the new Blu Ray of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). I have to admit, I’m starting to become addicted to Gary Tooze’s screen captures from Blu Ray discs. He has a knack for grabbing well-composed shots from the films he reviews. Credit here goes to director Don Siegel and cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks. I’m posting a link to this shot because I recently watched the new Blu Ray, which has the finest picture quality for this movie that I’ve ever seen by a wide margin. Welcome to beautiful Santa Mira. You’re next.

Thank you, NBC. Thank you very, very much. ihadtochangemyurl: The Kinks | Waterloo Sunset

Screen shot from dvdbeaver.com’s review of Criterion’s Quadrophrenia blu-ray disc. (Review and screen shot by Gary Tooze; wonderful shot composition and photography by director Franc Roddam and cinematographer Brian Tufano)

Scrawl 11:59 (It’s January) (Album Version) 11:59 (It’s January) Scrawl (from Nature Film, 1998) It’s not January, but I’m feeling this. I’m feeling Scrawl-y right now. (Cross-posted on thisismyjam.com)

 “What characters? This is a bunch of little kids dressed up in animal costumes.”

    family is a many-splendored thing… well, it’s definitely *a* thing, anyhow.

    in honor of The Royal Tenenbaums’ impending blu-ray release, the folks over at Criterion assembled a gallery of the books and magazine covers that appear in the film.