Does the GOP have any intention of becoming more than a party of older white people? They “say” they want to change and be “more inclusive” but do they really? Really? It doesn’t look that way based on pretty much all of the evidence. Off the top of my head I can’t think of even one minor area where any change has become evident in the Republican Party, but there are dozens upon dozens of examples every week of mentally-deficient, racist, authoritarian, blindly anti-science, voter suppressing Republican hi-jinks.

How many votes, really, can the so-called “Southern strategy” still squeeze like turds out of a bloated, hick white electorate, when younger and better-educated whites aren’t inclined to want to buy what the obviously IQ deficient Republicans want to sell them force on them in the first place? And the House seems ready to kill any sort of immigration reform, so they’ve written off Latinos. As in “fuck you, you’re never going to vote for us anyway” written off.

I don’t think Republicans realize how stupid they look to the rest of us. The “marketing message” they send. If they did, why would they continue to humiliatingly beclown themselves, often on a national stage? Did you watch the live webcast of the Texas Senate abortion filibuster? I was glued to it for hours and one thing that struck me was (literally, I’m not trying to be arch) how terribly DUMB the Republican pols looked. They appeared, as a group, to the naked eye, to be excessively thick.

When they’d switch the camera over to where the Democrats were, the ‘crats looked like normal people who were frankly astonished at the authoritarian idiocy of what the GOP pols were getting up to. It was some of the most riveting “reality TV” I’ve ever seen.

But talk about a reality check: Surely there must have been plenty of pro-life Americans who watched that webcast, too, and they saw the same thing everyone else saw, normal people on one side and the residents of Hooterville (with a supermajority in the Texas Senate!) on the other. At a certain point, issues like pro-choice and pro-life will become separated from matters like forcing corporations to pay “living wages” and more economic/survival matters. Will even pro-life Christians still side with a GOP that, for instance, doesn’t believe in the minimum wage?

What has traditionally worked for the GOP on a national level no longer works and they are wildly flailing, without a fucking clue about what to do about it. A coalition of idiocy can only really last so long…

Even if the GOP won every southern state and Indiana, that still relegates them to a regional party status and one that will become increasingly marginalized as red states like Texas flip blue in coming years and as more deeply red states turn more, shall we say, er, Confederate.

The writing is on the wall in Texas, with her Latino population (and newly energized Democratic women). Racist or anti-immigration politics were popular with California Republicans within recent memory, keep in mind. Look what it got them, a permanent Democratic super-majority in the state. The chances of the GOP having a resurgence in California are dead. The GOP is basically dead here. They can’t will elections and they don’t even try anymore.

In the clip below, Rachel Maddow brilliantly sets up the white Republican pins and then knocks them all down. First up the new revelations about Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s openly racist staffer.

Via Raw Story:

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, reported Tuesday that Rand Paul’s director of new media was an avid supporter of the Confederacy who celebrated John Wilkes Booth’s birthday. The aide, Jack Hunter, had served as a chairman for the League of the South and warned America would no longer be America if white people were not the racial majority.

The same aide was hired by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) to write a book. Maddow noted that DeMint was now head of the Heritage Institution, which faced criticism earlier this year after publishing a report on immigration that was co-authored by a man who believed Hispanic people were inherently less intelligent that white people.

“Should the Republican Party be just the party of aggrieved white people, even to the extent that it may stray occasionally into Confederate territory in order to do that?” Maddow wondered. “Do you want that in order to maximize every possible white vote you can get out of an electorate that is less and less white all the time?”

Apparently they do. What other options do they realistically have?
 

 
BrickShtick makes these handmade DEVO light switch plates from LEGO pieces and “elements that are either new or gently used.”

I could see this totally working in a child’s bedroom. A cool child.

It’s $36.00 + shipping here.

 
Shane Snider, offspring of Dee Snider, the lead singer of Long Island’s most notorious hair metal group, Twisted Sister wrote in to My Dad Was In A Band about his famous father:

I’ve been hearing my dad’s music my entire life. As far back as I can remember, on my family’s VCR sat 3 VHS’s, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the movie, ET and Twisted Sister’s music video compilation. I’d watch my father drag Mark Metcalf down the stairs and snarl at the camera without batting an eyelash over and over and over again. It’s weird to think of all the questions I didn’t ask.

I never wondered why he was dressed so funny or why he was beating up this father character. I didn’t even realize the band was wearing anything out of the ordinary. To me, bands were like super-heroes or cartoons, they had outfits they wore all the time, that’s how people knew they were one of the good guys… or bad guys… or group of screaming war-ready up-rising transvestites.

Fun fact: I once was wearing women’s clothing in middle school and when my friend said “Isn’t that a girls shirt?” I said “Maybe… why?” thinking that this was something perfectly normal to be doing. But I was born into my father’s dark years. Twisted Sister was long gone and so was all of his money. My mother did all the make-up, logo and costume design for the band so when it went under, she lost her job too.

My father road his mountain bike to his job working as my uncle’s secretary making just over minimum wage while my mother took care of me and my 2 brothers. Apparently, “rock star” isn’t enough experience to have on a resume to get a decent job. Sometimes my father would would perform with a group called the SMF’s at small bars with maybe 20 people in attendance. Many of which were not there for the show.

I’d watch these shows and wonder what happened. Why wasn’t he dressed like a silly monster anymore? Why isn’t it like the way it used to be? I wonder if my and my brothers’ obsession with the music videos hurt him. A lot of the footage in the videos would be of Twisted Sister performing in packed out houses and coliseums, jamming out on beautiful cars and being rock stars. But under a leaky roof, with a lawn made of dirt and nothing but a station wagon to wash, it was clear there was a large part of my father’s life I just wasn’t around for…. and whatever part that was, it was important.

Part of me wishes I could have seen him in his heyday mostly because I know in that small time span where he was at his peak was always what he had been striving for. Of course he’s better now. He’s making more money, more steadily and he knows how to handle himself in the industry. But I’ll still always wonder what it would have been like to be his son, way back when.

 
There’s alien gas flowing through New York City’s subways - PopSci

Neanderthals shared speech and language with modern humans, study suggests - Science Daily

‘Mythical’ corpse-eating fly rediscovered in Europe - News.com.au

Maternal antibodies linked to Autism - The Scientist

Caroline Burns woke up in a hospital as doctors were about to remove her organs and donate them to patients on the transplant waiting list - ABC News

The Science of Muzak - Skeptoid

Life on the set of The Wire: How Bunk, Kima, Freamon, and McNulty blew off steam in Baltimore - Slate

Liz Taylor giving the one finger salute… Retrogasm

Pictures inside the NYC subway: 1983-1984 - BuzzFeed

The new generation of Twitter bots are disturbingly human - The Daily Dot

Yes, there’s a giant Colin Firth floating in the Serpentine - Now.Here.This.

Legoland dream dies for man, 63, over rule that adults must be accompanied by kids - CTV News

Photo collection of vintage Summers - Superbomba!

Robots inspired by water creatures - Discovery

Kenya seizes three tons of ivory - VOA News

China’s coal burning cutting lives short by years: Historical study links higher levels of pollution to higher mortality - Nature

The generation we love to dump on - CNN

The head of Australia’s leading alcohol research body has called for marijuana to be legalized to reduce the harm of drinking - Herald Sun

Ball State University’s hiring of a high-profile supporter of intelligent design just weeks after it launched an investigation into another professor accused of teaching creationism has left - Inside Higher ED

Suspicions growing over death of journalist (Michael Hastings) probing NSA and CIA abuses - The New American

Gay tourists could face jail following new anti-gay law in Russia - Planet Ivy

30,000 California prisoners refuse meals in apparent hunger strike - LA Times

5D optical memory in glass could record the last evidence of civilization - Phys.org

Below, “Dungeons and Dragons, Satan’s Game…”:

Video via Christian Nightmares

 
Dissidence is frequently intimidated into propriety. Folks come ready to protest their government, full of piss and vinegar, prepared to hand lawmakers their collective ass, but they freeze up amidst the pomp and circumstance of politics (and lots of cops).

It’s especially hard when the politicians you’re addressing are mired in right-wing reactionary culture—coming from a red state that I maintain a love/hate relationship with, I saw this one all the time. So I nearly got choked up when I watched this woman (identified only by her Twitter handle, @VictorianPrude) 28-year-old activist Sarah Slamen say everything she really wanted to say to the Texas Senate, even when they tried to shut her down.

Because you shouldn’t be polite to fascists. You should scare the living shit out of them.
 

 
Managing to sound simultaneously authentically retro and yet still very cutting edge at the same time is a neat trick and youthful Aussie psychsters Tame Impala balance it wonderfully, surfing the fine line between something obviously influenced by early Pink Floyd and Marc Bolan and something totally new and unexpected. (I saw Tame Impala in concert recently in Pomana, CA and they were impressive indeed, zigging where lesser bands would have zagged. It sounded very familiar and yet was never derivative.)

The same can be said of love him or hate him, you just can’t ignore him, Kanye West. He brings back a lot of the spirit of spontaneity and innovation not heard in hip-hop for some time, and yet still West is pushing sonic boundaries beyond what some of his fans are ready or willing to process.

Normally I’m not one for “mash-ups” unless they’re done really, really well but this clever remix that pits of Tame Impala’s “Elephant” hit against “Black Skinhead,” the first single from Yeezus hits the spot. It’s the work of Washington, D.C.-based producer Nate Belasco.
 

 
Via Consequence of Sound

 
Yours truly made a recent appearance on How Sex Changed The World, a colorful, fast-paced new History Channel series. The topic was Aleister Crowley and basically how his outsized sex drive and compulsion to do whatever his dick desired that ultimately had a great effect on society in the 1960s.

In other words, Crowley was a free-living, free-loving hippie during the Victorian era, lighting the long fuse of a bomb with his “Do what thou wilt” philosophy that would go off with the sexual revolution.

I had fun doing this show and I got to explain a general concept of what sex magic is to middle America! Good times!

The Crowley segment starts at about the 5:50 mark.
 

 

 
Perhaps 33-year-old Ollie McAnich from Bath in Somerset will choose his friends (and bride!) more carefully next time! I have no idea what these nutters were thinking when they kidnapped the groom-to-be, set off smoke grenades, and threw him in the back of a van where he was bound, gagged and dressed in a Guantánamo Bay-style jumpsuit.

McAnich’s loving fiancée, Clair Hart, was in on the prank where they drove him over 100 miles where McAnich “was then made to strip, given a mankini and bicycle and told to cycle to his stag party in Exeter, Devon, more than 10 miles away.”

Apparently poor McAninch was so frightened by the whole ordeal he came down with a serious case of shingles and had to postpone the wedding.

For whatever dumbass reason, McAnich forgave his “friends” and fiancée and the wedding took place last Saturday.

Video of this mess is below:

 
Via Arbroath

 
In yesterday’s mail I got a copy of Universal’s newly-released Scott Walker box set, which includes Scott(s) I-IV, ‘til The Band Comes In and a few singles. It’s a classy box and it sounds great, but that’s not exactly what this post is about (I’ll get to it in greater depth in the coming days).

On ‘til The Band Comes In, the least well-known of of Walker’s “classic” albums, there’s one song, “Long About Now,” that Walker could just not sing, since the lyrics were from the perspective of a wife waiting for her husband to return from his daily grind:

Long about now
He’s heading home
Back from the rain
Burned to the ground
His ashes will rise black butterflies
Tapping at my window pane
He’ll want to rest within my design
All the way to the end
Lighting my skies all up inside again
Dimming Summer
Long about now
He’s headin’ home
Drowning the games
That steel a man
Long about now
He’ll shrug and sigh and need me again

As poetry on the page—or screen—I think you’ll agree it’s a great lyric, but combined with the big ballady arrangement of Wally Stott, it really comes alive as a song. But who could sing it credibly and hold her own with Scott?

Walker’s then manager (and songwriting collaborator) Ady Semel was Israeli and also managed the beautiful Israeli pop singer Esther Ofarim, who had a worldwide 1968 hit with her then husband, Abi, called “Cinderella Rockefella” and she was brought in to sing “Long About Now.” My god did she kill it.

Yesterday, I plunked ‘til The Band Comes In on the stereo, not intending to really “listen” to it, but just to see how it compared to the CDs I already owned. I was doing the thing that audiophile nutjobs do, A-B’ing the old and new CDs. Anyway, I ended up doing the dishes and kept listening and when it got to “Long About Now,” my ears perked up and I was completely transfixed and moved by what I was hearing (I know the song well, but haven’t put this album on in well over a decade). On the last line, I found her performance to be so overwhelming emotionally that I got a lump caught in my throat and burst into tears. I probably listened to it five or six times on repeat.

It’s an incredible performance and frankly, one that I didn’t expect to find a video of, but wouldn’t you know it, in 1970 Esther Ofarim appeared on The Rolf Harris Show and did that very number.

Prepare to be astonished:
 

 
Thank you kindly, Adam Starr!

 
Marc Almond is one of the truly great interpreters of song of our age. His distinctive voice, like Frank Sinatra’s, is instantly recognizable from the very first note. Almond’s subject matter often chooses to examine a seamier side of life than most people would be inclined to want to experience firsthand. In this way he is like Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of “Saint” Jean Genet, a darkly sensual queer roué reporting back, musically in Almond’s case, from the sexual fringes, while alchemically transmuting squalor and sleaze into great and moving art.

I am a huge, huge fan. Marc occupies a special place in my (gutter) heart and in my record collection. His harrowing Torment & Toreros album would totally be in my top five of all time (I’ve written about it extensively here), while his Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters collection would hover just beyond the top ten, garning at least getting an “honorable mention” in this household.

And don’t even get me started about my love of Soft Cell…

Marc Almond turns 56 today.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Soundtrack for a Suicide: Marc Almond’s musical masterpiece, ‘Torment and Toreros’

‘A Lover Spurned’: French photographers Pierre et Gilles direct Marc Almond

Here’s a real Marc Almond gem, a powerful live rendition of Charles Aznavour’s deeply moving ballad about the life of a drag performer, “What Makes A Man A Man?” It’s one of Almond’s finest vocal performances, if you ask me. Taped at the Royal Festival Hall in 1992. Simply stunning: