Clark Little: Wave Photography

Clark Little, born in California and since many years residing in Hawaii, is a surfer and a professional photographer specialized in...waves. It all started in 2007 when Clark's wife wanted a nice piece of art to decorate a wall. Voluntarily, he grabbed a camera, jumped in the water, and started snapping away capturing the beauty and power of monstrous Hawaiian waves from the inside out. He is now considered the number one photographer of surf and his images have been run on several photo magazines in U.S. and overseas.
Visit Little's site for more amazing photos...

Best National Geographic 2009 Photo Collection

Some of the beautiful photos chosen among the best ones of 2009 by National Geographic (click on them to see larger format.) Visit the site to see more visual delights...
(thanks Raghu)

Hazmat Modine: "Yesterday Morning"

Hazmat Modine - here performing live at Berlin Jazz Festival in 2007 - is an outstanding band from New York. Their mix of roots blues, jazz, and ska/calypso sounds at the same time ageless, primeval and otherworldly. Don't miss their beautiful debut album Bahamut (Barbés Records - JARO in Europe) and their site.
(Thanks Maurizio!)

Orange Sunshine: the B.E.L. saga

Nick Schou's captivating book Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love and Acid to the World is the involving inside story of the legendary Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a wild bunch of freak people that back in the late '60s and early '70s - strongly believing in the liberating power and spiritual values of Lsd and other psychedelic drugs - made their best to spread the visionary gospel and distribute millions of hits of Orange Sunshine acid, kilos of black afghani hash and other assorted delights in America and abroad.

The story began in 1966, when Farmer John Griggs (later founder of the B.E.L.) and his cohort of outlaw bykers from Anaheim, California, stole a large supply of pure acid from a Hollywood producer at gunpoint and later had their first overwhelming, spiritual acid trip. After having returned what was left of the stolen acid, they threw away guns, became vegetarians and began to spread the message of universal peace founding the B.E.L.

If you are eager to follow that 'hippie smuggling cartel' up and down Laguna Beach, Maui and Afghanistan, don't hesitate to buy this book and suddenly you'll find yourself back in those adventurous, wild times...Recommended

( Photo above: Tim Leary and Farmer John Griggs)

Roy, Albert & Lonnie

Did you want some Blues? Well, get a tasty bite with true champions: Roy Buchanan (black cap), Albert Collins and Lonnie Mack (white cap)....Surely one of the best live blues performances...Enjoy!!

Crap Hound magazine (coming soon...)

Crap Hound is a beautiful vintage graphic-art magazine. Sporadically published, it’s literally packed with high-contrast line art, culled from vintage catalogs, advertising, obscure books, and found ephemera. The publishers - now working on the second expanded edition of issue number four, Clowns, Devils and Bait – are raising on-line funds to get it to press. Please visit Crap Hound to get further infos and if possible give a helping hand,

Playing for Change: Stand by Me

Another great song in the Playing for Change: Songs Around the World series on You Tube. See previous post for details and links....

Playing for Change: War/No More Trouble

A real exciting version of Bob Marley's immortal anthem War/No More Trouble made by (talented) musicians around the world. You can find other beautiful videos of Playing for Change: Songs Around the World series on You Tube and then order the CD/DVD here. The site of the project is here.
Enjoy this great musical moment and stay tuned for the next post about a soulful version of another classic...
(Thanks Raghu)

Birth of a Psychedelic Culture

Many people, even within the entheogenic community, have harshly criticized - often without exactly knowing the real facts - Tim Leary's radical approach to the psychedelic experience. Now, thanks to the other two original members of the Harvard psychedelic trimurti, Ralph Metzner and Ram Dass, we finally have access to the real story behind the origins of the modern psychedelic culture. In the new book The Birth of a Psychedelic Culture (264 pp., $ 29.95, Synergetic Press), Metzner and Ram Dass, during an interview with psychiatrist Gary Bravo, give intriguing anecdotes, comments and new perspectives on the first experiments at Harvard and later at the Millbrook community and help restore Leary's reputation.
All you interested in psychedelics and the sixties shouldn't miss this priceless historical document: and while you dress before running to the nearest bookshop or search for the book on the Web, you can find an interview with Metzner on the book here and the foreword by John Perry Barlow (writer, former Grateful Dead lyricist and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) here.

Amazing HDR Photos

Few months ago, thanks to my friend Dana's beautiful blog SheWalksSoftly, I stumbled upon the magnificent HDR photos of Trey Ratcliffe. As Ratcliffe says, "HDR (High Dynamic Range) it's a post processing task of taking either one image or a series of images, combining them and adjusting the contrast ratios to do things virtually impossible with a single aperture and shutter speed." Techical explanations aside, Ratcliffe's works are really astounding and if you're an 'images junky' like me, you can't miss Ratcliffe's site, packed with mouth-watering photos from all over the world, infos about HDR and much more. Strongly recommended.
(Photos shown: Borobudur, Indonesia. Bangkok, Kyoto, Agra, Paris. Click on photos to see in original format)

Extraordinary Paper Art

If you like the paper art shown below ( 1. Simon Schubert, 2. Peter Callesen, 3. and 4. Jen Stark), probably you'll also enjoy the other 95 Extraordinary Examples of Paper Art...