These are only very low resolution copies of the actual images, which are full size 10328 px x 7760 px = 80.1 megapixels. I promise you, if you look at this image in full resolution, you can see every detail, every tiny ink stroke on his tattoos, every hair, all the … Well, I’m glad I’m not shooting fashion or doing retouching, because the files coming out of the IQ180 are huge. Around 90 mb as raw files, and if you save them as 16 bit tiffs (you have to import them via the CaptureOne raw converter software for the best results), they turn out as 480 megabyte files… Heavy cameras demand heavy computers, and my iMac I5 with 8 gb ram came to its knees a few times.

“I’d always been into music—printing up fake press passes and sneaking my camera into concerts since the day I first picked up a camera,” the photographer Laura Levine told me. “Typical New York City kid. I worked for all of the usual suspects—Rolling Stone, Creem, Trouser Press, Spin, Sounds, the New York Times—and, later, the record labels. But the publication I ended up working most closely with in the early eighties, during its brief but crucial existence, was the New York Rocker.

Link: Very bad late ’90s hip-hop cover art – Boing Boing

Forty years ago, with his band Pentagram, Bobby Liebling invented a style of fiendishly heavy metal that hardly anyone heard. He spent the ensuing decades in a haze of hard drugs and big trouble. Now, with the genre he spawned on the rise and a young wife and baby boy in tow, Liebling is feeling the first rumblings of success. Here’s where things start to get weird.

Link: Meet Dr. Doom: Pentagram’s Bobby Liebling Returns | SPIN.com

via: HEAVY DISCUSSION

“I can’t believe I wasted half my life helping Tipper put warning labels on this stuff when I could have been seeing these guys do their thing live,” Gore said of W.A.S.P. “They used to whip raw meat at the audience. How bad-ass is that?”

“Cause I’m burning, burning, burning up with fi-ire! ” added Gore, screaming the lyrics to “Wild Child.”

Link: Recently Single Al Gore Finally Able To Listen To W.A.S.P. Albums – America’s Finest News Source

via: Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой – Boing Boing

“Shine” by Final Placement from sharity world on Vimeo.

via: Epically bad teen Christian rock band becomes internet phenom Boing Boing

Photographing U2 has become more difficult as they have become more well known. The Joshua Tree was taken over a period of three days travelling through the desert. It’s unthinkable for U2 to do that now. For their last album I had two hours in bad weather.

Even after 28 years I always try to take a different picture of U2. If I’m stuck, I’ll go to Holland, smoke a joint and come back with new ideas.

Link: The day we clicked: rock photography | The Guardian

Another holiday soundtrack to fill your home with warmth, a free downloadable playlist from the ficitonal fundamentalist polygamists of HBO’s Big Love.

Tracks include:

We Three Wives
Deck the Compound
and, Silent Wife

Listen and download your favorite compound classics

Link: HBO: Big Love – A Juniper Creek Christmas

Behold NYC Bloggers Do the Holidays, a tour of urban goodies in list and link form. The WFMU contribution, courtesy of Otis Fodder, is a playlist packed with 80 tracks that will either make you freak out or keep you from freaking out, depending on your metabolic set point.

Holiday Freak In (2002) and Holiday Freak Out (2006) are compilations Otis pulled together for his special people, and now you’re a special person, too. A guy who really likes Christmas music liked them a lot. You can read that guy’s interview with Otis and commentary while you download. Cuz that’s gonna take a while.

Link: Happy Freakin’ Holidays Playlist – WFMU’s Beware of the Blog

Kurt Cobain’s Guitar Hero appearance | Offworld

11 Unintentionally Hilarious Hip-Hop Videos | The Rap Up:

Silliness has always been a part of human nature, but it appears to be more fashionable now that we have an assortment of tools to document our goofiness. After all, YouTube and other video sites gave independent directors a chance to showcase their work, prepubescent rappers a chance to gain recognition, and hip-hoppers an outlet for round-the-clock unintentionally comedy. Here are th 11 Most Unintentionally Funny Hip-Hop Videos:

From Josh Spear, Trendspotting:

Do you find that tune from Tetris twisting and turning in your brain all day? Does the music of Metroid make you want to move your feet? Sure you’re probably a video game addict, but there’s nothing wrong with getting those sweet sounds of Super Street Fighter stuck in your head. The only issue you face is trying to find a place that will let you relive the soundtrack of your gaming life. Luckily, there’s now 8bitFM, an internet radio station dedicated to devotees of Double Dragon ditties and Super Mario melodies.

Check it out here.

Ellei Johndro .

From LA Weekly:

Her Web site and moniker have become synonymous with the sloshed and sweaty shenanigans of L.A.’s cool kids and the underground ragers they frequent, but Shadowscene’s Ellei Johndro is far from just another “club photographer.” Unlike some novice shutterbugs who hopped the snapwagon when lens-toting characters such as the Cobrasnake started getting attention for their Web sites, Johndro’s had a passion for photography, editing and storytelling of all forms (creative writing was her major in college) since she was a teen growing up in Boston.

She started Shadowscene.com while still in Boston back in 2002, its original incarnation more of a personal showcase for her stark and, yes, “shadowy” cityscapes (lots of “streets and alleys,” she recalls). It wasn’t until she moved to Los Angeles seven years ago that the subject matter turned to after-dark hell-raising and earned serious hipster approval.

Jerry Stahl .

From LA Weekly:

Armed with his fourth novel since his breakthrough book, the memoir Permanent Midnight, Jerry Stahl has, in his own inimitable fashion, done a drive-by.

Pain Killers continues the adventures of Manny Rupert, the hapless, hopelessly romantic (in his own damaged way) cop-cum-detective we got to know and love in Plain Clothes Naked. This time a septuagenarian, Jewish millionaire named Harry Zell, who wields his walker like a shillelagh, enlists Manny to go undercover as a drug counselor at San Quentin. Rupert’s mission it to determine if a certain peroxide-blond, 97-year-old inmate is in fact none other than the Nazi Angel of Death, Dr. Joseph Mengele. As if that isn’t nettlesome enough for the illicit substance–susceptible sleuth, his first night on campus reveals his ex-wife and love of his life (who offed her first husband in Plain Clothes Naked by serving him a bowl of Drano-and-glass-laced Lucky Charms) has taken up with the leader of the prison’s Aryan gang … who happens to be Jewish.

Jesse Thorn .

From LA Weekly:

It’s odd, Jesse Thorn knows, for small children to adore public radio. “But it’s what my parents always had on in the car,” Thorn says. “I’ve been hearing Terry Gross my whole life.” All that listening time has given Thorn an uncanny ability to parse, in detail, the style and quirks of every interviewer to have appeared on NPR, nationally and locally, over, say, the past two decades. So it’s perhaps not surprising to learn that at 27, Thorn has already spent eight years with his own show, called the Sound of Young America, which he describes on his Web site — maximumfun.org — as something like Conan O’Brien on public radio, or Fresh Air, but more fun.”

Gary Leonard .

From LA Weekly:

On a gray March morning, photographer Gary Leonard stands in the center of his gallery, a small room dimmed by overcast skies, sunlight feathering through the gaps between high-rises on Broadway Avenue. Leonard has a cold, but he’s agreed to meet with us, anyway, at his new gallery, Take My Picture, named after his recently retired CityBeat column. Later on, Leonard will sit behind a table laid with a collection of his black-and-white photographs, smiling only when asked, while the L.A. Weekly takes his portrait.

Lucian Piane .

From LA Weekly:

When audio of Christian Bale’s tirade on the Terminator Salvation set surfaced, the actor unwittingly joined a select fraternity with Barbra Streisand and Bill O’Reilly: celebrities whose rants have been transformed into viral-dance remixes by RevoLucian. Almost as soon as Bale’s hissy fit went public, the Web picked up on RevoLucian deft a mash-up of Bale’s best quotes set to a synth-heavy beat. “Bale Out” turned “What don’t you fuckin’ understand?” into one of the year’s most addictive choruses and spun a little art out of the debacle. Considering how widely the song was heard, it’s almost surprising that nobody at the Newsroom Café recognizes songwriter and producer Lucian Piane, 28. RevoLucian is a pseudonym for what he calls “my remixes, my crazy things.”

Check out the entire list here.