Categories
Bruuuuuuuuce!!

Can’t wait to check it out!!

Bruce Springsteen to receive his own online museum

An online museum of Bruce Springsteen memorabilia is set to launch in June to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the singer’s record ‘Born in the USA’.

BlindedByTheLight.com will feature over 300 objects, ranging from concert posters to handwritten lyrics – with more items to be added in the future. The online museum will offer contest prizes every six months, with website creator Michael Crane offering signed album artwork as the prize for the first contest, reports Rolling Stone.

Springsteen has recently been making headlines by playing a number of unexpected cover versions during his live shows, most recently playing Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ at the March Madness Music Festival in Dallas in April.

While touring Australia and New Zealand earlier this year, the singer covered songs such as AC/DC’s ‘Highway To Hell’, for which he brought on stage Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, ‘Stayin’ Alive’ by The Bee Gees, ‘Friday On My Mind’ by The Easybeats and INXS’ ‘Don’t Change’.

A show in Auckland, New Zealand also saw Springsteen cover Lorde’s ‘Royals’, a cover which she subsequently said made her “teary”.

Categories
The Simpsons

Could be cool!!

‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Family Guy’ are crossing over in September

Though it was first revealed in 2013, next to nothing has been said about the crossover event between “Family Guy” and “The Simpsons.” At FOX’s 2014 upfront presentation though, they spilled the beans.

“The Simpsons Guy” will air in September as an hour-long crossover event. A section of footage was shown to advertisers and press in attendance.

It’s unclear what the special’s story will be, but from two screengrabs of the footage it’s easy to see that Stewie and Bart may get along, but Homer and Peter certainly don’t.

Categories
People

He was a true visionary. May he rest in peace.

‘Alien’ Artist H.R. Giger Dies at 74

The Oscar-winning Swiss set and creature designer of Ridley Scott’s “Alien” died following a fall in his Zurich home.

BERLIN (AP) — Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who designed the creature in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic Alien, has died at age 74 from injuries suffered in a fall, his museum said Tuesday.

Sandra Mivelaz, administrator of the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyeres, western Switzerland, told the Associated Press that Giger died in a hospital on Monday.

Giger’s works, often showing macabre scenes of humans and machines fused into hellish hybrids, influenced a generation of movie directors and inspired an enduring fashion for “biomechanical” tattoos.

“My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy,” Giger said in a 1979 interview with Starlog magazine. “If they like my work they are creative…or they are crazy.”

Born Hans Ruedi Giger on Feb. 5, 1940, in the southeastern Swiss town of Chur, he trained as an industrial designer because his father insisted that he learn a proper trade.

His mother, Melli, to whom he showed a lifelong devotion, encouraged her son’s passion for art, despite his unconventional obsession with death and sex that found little appreciation in 1960s rural Switzerland. The host of one of his early exhibitions was reportedly forced to wipe the spit of disgusted neighbors off the gallery windows every morning.

A collection of his early work, “Ein Fressen fuer den Psychiater” (“A Feast for the Psychiatrist”), used mainly ink and oil, but Giger soon discovered the airbrush and pioneered his own freehand technique. He also created sculptures, preferably using metal, styrofoam and plastic.

Giger’s vision of a human skull encased in a machine appeared on the cover of Brain Salad Surgery, a 1973 album by the rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Along with his design for Debbie Harry’s solo album, Koo Koo (1981), it featured in a 1991 Rolling Stone magazine list of the top 100 album covers of all time.

Giger went on to work as a set designer in Hollywood, contributing to Species, Poltergeist II, Dune, and most famously Alien, for which he received a 1979 Academy Award for special effects. Frequently frustrated by the Hollywood production process, Giger eventually disowned much of the onscreen work that was attributed to him.

The image of a brooding, mysterious artist was nurtured by Giger working only at night, keeping his curtains permanently drawn and dressing mainly in black — a habit he acquired while working as a draftsman because it made Indian ink stains stand out less on his clothes.

While his work was commercially successful, critics derided it as morbid kitsch. His designs were exhibited more frequently in “Alien” theme bars, short-lived Giger museums and at tattoo conventions than in established art galleries. In 1998, he acquired the Chateau St. Germain in Gruyeres and established the H.R. Giger Museum.

Giger was pleased that his idea of machines with human skin became a popular motif in body art.

“The greatest compliment is when people get tattooed with my work, whether it’s done well or not,” he told Seconds magazine in 1994. “To wear something like that your whole life is the largest compliment someone can pay to you as an artist.”

Details on survivors and funeral plans were not immediately available.