We have just been informed of two fun music events in Los Angeles: 

The first is a free Mod club on Sunday nights called GoKlub. “…your fave Northern Soul, Motown, Ska, UK Power Pop and 60′s Garage sounds in true Go Klub style!” No doubt Eddie will be winsome when he sees all the vespas parked outside. We both miss the vespa which is in storage back in Sydney.

The second event is something I’m really looking forward to. At Club Microwave on Tuesday nights, we have “… micromusic / lo-fi, IDM, Elektro-Clash, 80s, Electronica, Breaks & more”. Thanks,Tony!

More stuff:

Above – an illustration by Shinya Chisato.(link from jeansnow.net)

Styleborg – A Weblog of wearable gadgets.

Next month, our friend Andrew Chan will be exhibiting his paintings in a show in Brooklyn, New York. Details HERE. Unfortunately we can’t make it as much as we’d love to be in NYC right now. Maybe in summer…?

Speaking of travelling - if we ever visit Berlin, I want to stay in, or at least visit, this hotel. The Propeller Island City Lodge has crazy rooms with circular beds, cages, upside-down furniture, padded/collaged walls and even a room with coffin beds… (link from boingboing)

What Mr. Postman brought us today:

“Hot Rod Juvenile Delinquents and Amazons From Outer Space Have Come to Memphis to Kill Hippies! They wanted meat so they ate the Flower Children!” 

Now how can anyone resist a premise like this? Thank you to Lisa for the Sore Losers DVD!!  

Our Chilled-Out Weekend… On Saturday – we spent the entire day within our neighborhood, walking around Los Feliz and pottering about at home. Did some reading while Eddie worked on some music with his new synthesizer-vocoder. 

Later, Keith and Nathan came over (now that we finally have a couch!) & we watched some Osaka-Pro wrestling & a three-volume DVD compilation of Toei’s Animated Opening/Closing Titles from the 60′s-70′s …. Makes you realize how many Speed Racer & Gatchman clones there were at the time with giant robots that all looked the same. There was even a blatant Astro Boy ripoff…

Today we checked out Munky King, a vinyl toys store in Chinatown. Very cool. So the prices are twice the amount one would pay in Hong Kong or Malaysia, but seeing that it’s even more expensive to order online and pay for shipping, we did not hesitate. What we picked up:

Evil Pinky  mushroomy figures by Steven House

Biddies hip hop kubrick-style figures (example left)

Super7 magazine

Another itRangers/Stereotype figure

A nice surprise was when the guy in the store said he liked my ‘ML crew’ T-shirt and said he would buy it.  I was overcome with shyness & couldn’t bring myself to say I designed it. Or maybe it was because he didn’t know what ML was, and I didn’t feel like explaining… 

Since we were in the Downtown area, we decided to head over to Olvera Street. It’s still the same bustling touristy place, and we noticed that they sell lucha masks now! They didn’t two years ago.

We also learnt that next week is Blessing Of the Animals day in Olvera Street. Everyone brings their pets. Now if only we had a dog or cat!

This new header will have to do for now…  Had to get rid of the old one because we were both so sick of it!

Plugin Hollywood Toycon! – Happening 9-11th April in HK.  This piece of news was found at Strangeco, a toy culture website which I am bookmarking right away.

Thanks to Tony for this –> Save The Piñata! (A 7MB mov file; right-click to download). This video clip is reminiscent of a cartoon idea Eddie once had about piñatas on the run, and taking revenge on humans.

*updated

ML Crew T-shirts!

A special order for the ¡Mucha Lucha! crew (that’s over 200 people including overseas studios, post-production etc.) Available in M, L, or XL in black, grey, dark green or navy. Thanks to Joel for coming up with the idea and organizing this!!

MUCHA LUCHA WORLD ORDER
Design of The Flea, Rikochet & Buena Girl by Lili

You won’t find THESE designs in any store!!

 Links

From Michael McDonough’s “Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School” -

95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
Only 5 percent is actually, in some simplistic way, fun. In school that is what you focus on; it is 100 percent fun. Tick-tock. In real life, most of the time there is paper work, drafting boring stuff, fact-checking, negotiating, selling, collecting money, paying taxes, and so forth. If you don’t learn to love the boring, aggravating, and stupid parts of your profession and perform them with diligence and care, you will never succeed.

It all comes down to output.
No matter how cool your computer rendering is, no matter how brilliant your essay is, no matter how fabulous your whatever is, if you can’t output it, distribute it, and make it known, it basically doesn’t exist. Orient yourself to output. Schedule output. Output, output, output. Show Me The Output.

Cyclic Defrost - Australian Independent Music Zine

Creativity/Machine – interesting reading re: Cultural Studies. Also where I discovered Stumble, a nifty websurfing tool.

Last but not least, we just saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. We highly recommend it! It’s a great film.

Links

Village Voice – Essay: Blogging Off  How blogging can ruin a person’s life.

Kempa.com – Vinyl Data  Eddie: There’s a Thompson Twins game?

Animateonline.org… But we’re not based in the UK.

Eric So’s Hellboy is very cool.

Momus: photos of Russia

Big vague idea…

More sketches here

So we’ve had a big idea (amongst several others!) brewing in our heads for the past year. It’s still somewhat intangible in terms of Story. But we’ve been doodling and thinking and compiling reference material.  In a nutshell it will be a music-driven/musical show, with different music subcultures  … a stylistic and animated composite of all the stuff* we’ve both been interested in for many years, from even before we met each other. The current challenge is to come up with a unique, distinct Look, which Eddie is pretty good at.

More Toys! In this month’s Action Figure magazine, there is a full page of ¡Mucha Lucha! toys that we haven’t seen, presumably due out in Fall 2004. There’s Minotoro, El Loco Mosquito, Cindy Slam, Tic Tac Toe, a school playset, schoolbus and Masked Toilet!  The Ring of Collectors website also has some close-ups of these new unreleased figures. P.S. ML toys are available from Toys R Us, Walmart, Amazon.com and the Cartoon Network online store.

Our mission yesterday was really to buy another ‘console table’ from Target, seeing that we’ve run out of space for Eddie’s growing collection of music equipment. Instead, we ended up windowshopping in Little Tokyo…

The Kage Star

Akumaizer 3

At Anime Jungle, we were both so mesmerized by what we were seeing on the shop’s TV monitor that we had to buy the DVD - which is a compilation of opening and closing titles from several Japanese live action-hero TV series c. 1975-1983.  It was pretty pricey but how could we resist watching crazy masked and costumed characters kicking-ass to catchy music? (eg, to give you an idea of how awesome this stuff is — one villain’s outfit was made up of smoke-emitting cigarette butts; another is a grey skeleton wearing a giant sombrero. Yes, in Japan!)

We’d tell you more but we’ll have to watch the DVD first (and the cover is entirely in Japanese).

P.S. Just found this listed on the Anime Jungle website…Ours is “Toei TV Hero Tokusatsu Theme Song Collection Volume 2.”

Eddie also picked up an old issue of Tokion Magazine devoted to Jamaican Dancehall Music from the 50′s – 60′s (pre-Reggae). Lots of interviews with DJs and Studio One producers; and a Japanese Custom Lowriding magazine which funnily enough, consists of 90% fashion & accessories (for gangsta-wannabes), and 10% cars.

There’s a Moog documentary in the works and on April 1st – a Moog Fest in San Francisco.

A big thank you to Lisa for sending us that bag of goodies! Amongst the batch of groovy CD comps in the parcel was a videotape with clips from James Brown’s Future Shock .  

This is a show from the early to mid ’70s produced and hosted by James Brown himself. The Future Shock show featured, dance contests and cuts from Brown’s album, “Body Heat” as well as songs from other soul artists of that era. Afro’s and bell-bottoms reign supreme in this rare compilation of clips from this dance show.

If you’re like me and love Soul Train for the funky dancing, you’d love Future Shock. Eddie was saying that you can see the beginnings of the ‘breakdancing’ style here (in the late 70′s) with guys diving onto the floor and doing spins.

New Mix

By Eddie: Endsville – It’s a Mix!

Geeky stuff: I just found this free online wysiwyg HTML editor. And Stylemaster is a CSS Editor which I think I might download to teach myself CSS…

© Andrew Chan – Open 24 Hours

Last Wednesday night we met up with Shirley and Andrew, visiting LA from NYC. (Well, Andrew is really from Australia, and Shirley’s from Canada). Check out Andrew’s paintings - We think they are gorgeous. The one above is from his ‘Hong Kong’ series.

Currently - researching/compiling a list of  Dance references. In the process, we came across Kollaboration.org. We recommend downloading the videoclip of Dave Elsewhere (kid in the red sweater on the left). Watch him dance! He is amazing.

Tomorrow night - Petty Booka  is playing at the Silverlake Lounge as part of the Japanese Girls US Tour. We’re going!

For the Australians…

Pat has posted on the Ozanimation forum  seeking a programmer for the “Australian Animation Source” (working title) website. A year ago, a few of us got together to discuss producing a web portal for Australian animators. ie, the Australian animation industry’s equivalent of a awn.com -style website. Volunteers welcome! 

Sydney Food Diary - A blog about where to eat in Sydney.