June 11, 2013: If you are driving to Yosemite Valley on Highway 41, you will come upon Discovery View (also called “Tunnel View”) just after you emerge from the Wawona Tunnel (carved through solid granite and completed in 1933, the Wawona tunnel was the longest* highway tunnel in California until the Devil’s Slide tunnel opened in 2013). Needless to say, it is one of the most popular (& photographed) vistas in the world.
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*4,149 feet in length
Robert Williams (born 1943) is an American Artist who paints insane, hallucinogenic art with a strong emphasis on American Pop Culture. (I give up, he is beyond description, ok?). He was part of the Zap Comix collective of artists which included R. Crumb, Rick Griffin, Gilbert Shelton & other notables.
(I noticed recently that his work fits neatly with my love of film posters which I collect.)
Oh yeah, dude’s really into Hot Rods also:
I was recently in Florida and drove from Fort Lauderdale to Naples via Interstate 75 aka “Alligator Alley”. This scene and more are available for FREE DOWNLOAD via Dave’s FREE time-lapse collection! on Vimeo.
Ray Harryhausen, the great stop-motion animator and inspiration for many of today’s Special Effects Gurus passed away today at the age of 92. I remember seeing The 7th Voyage of Sinbad at age 8 and it made quite an impression. He was the first special effects artist I could actually name (it helped that he had an unusual name), and (I later learned) many of his films were scripted around his astounding animated creatures and concepts. Unlike today’s Special Effects Extravaganzas, requiring armies of animators and effects technicians, Harryhausen supposedly did most of the animation himself.
I got to meet Mr. Harryhausen in 1982 when he took a tour of I.L.M. and I got to show him around the Optical Department. I managed to secure his autograph on a Lobby Card from It Came From Beneath the Sea (which has faded somewhat since I had it framed and displayed).
My Mom traveled to Los Angeles with her Mother & Father in the Summer of 1934. They visited the Universal Studio lot and my Mom carried her autograph book with her (I guess this was a common thing back then, to have an autograph book). She got 4 autographs while at Universal Studios: Edward McWade (actor), Neil Hamilton (actor, appeared in several Tarzan movies), Franklin Pangborn (comedic actor, appeared in many Preston Sturges movies) and lastly Boris Karloff.
Below is a picture of my Mother and my Grandmother in front of the Notre Dame set from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Somebody took a scene from an old Outer Limits episode (from 1963) about a lab assistant who evolves himself into some kind of big headed genius of the future using some kind of “evolution machine” and added music by the Zombies. You get the inherent weirdness of the Outer Limits and a cool song, what’s not to like?
Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was born this day 132 years ago. Give an ear to a performance of his Piano Sonata (published in 1926) performed by Hungarian pianist, conductor and composer Zoltán Kocsis.
