Betty Boop cartoon feat. Cab Calloway singing "Minnie the Moocher"

Classic, bizarre, and great. They snuck in the song "Mean to Me," which I will always love because of Annette Hanshaw. Listen to her singing it in 1929 here:



In the Betty Boop cartoon, I love that the call and answer and the jazz vocal improvisations were visualized as terrifying, soul-sucking groups of monster-ghost triplets. The walrus dancing like Cab Calloway is a nice touch.

Here's a cool compilation of Cab Calloway dance moves:

Artist Spotlight: Amy Rice

leaves are falling all around , originally uploaded by Amy Rice.

be proud of what you nurture and grow, originally uploaded by Amy Rice.

I came across this Minneapolis-based artist, Amy Rice, through a printmaking group on Flickr. Her work is an interesting combination of printmaking, stencils, and illustration, and I like that she works on old wood and other non-traditional materials to create beautiful objects.

Check out her Flickr photostream here, and her blog, Egg Basket Full of Hollyhock Dolls.

IKEA HEIGHTS!

IKEA Heights from DaveAOK on Vimeo.

A soap opera about Ikea, set in Ikea, with real customers poking around in the background? Oh, man, I want there to be so many more of these.

ABC3D Pop-up Alphabet Book

A really neat, well-designed pop-up book called ABC3D that I found on Tara Books' website.

100 Year Old Color Photographs of Russia

(click to view the full image)
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.
Peasant Girls, 1909.
Digital color rendering.
Prints and Photographs Division
(LC-DIG-ppmsc-03984) (4)

(click to view the full image)
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.
Mills in Ialutorovsk Uyezd of
Tobol´sk Province, 1912.
Digital color rendering.
Prints and Photographs Division
(LC-DIG-ppmsc-03965) (23)

My friend C. A. "Von" E. recently came across this Newsweek collection of early 20th century color photographs from Russia. They are really stunning.

Upon further research, it looks like this was a Library of Congress project-- they took photographer Prokudin-Gorskii's negatives (which he intended to be in color, because he took the photographs using red, green, and blue filters) and converted them digitally. The explaination of the process is really fascinating, and can be read about here. Prokudin-Gorskii's biography is here.

Oh, Library of Congress, how I adore thee.

Stop Smiling Interview with Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet)

I've been wanting to read The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet for some time now, and this Stop Smiling magazine Q&A with the author, Reif Larsen, makes me want to read it even more. Marginalia! And he loves Amy Hempel!