If ‘Dirty Dancing’ were directed by David Lynch
This is an oldie but goody. A trailer for Dirty Dancing re-cut to replicate the look and feel of a David Lynch film. I think it succeeds magnificently.
Things do get weird up in the Catskills.
This is an oldie but goody. A trailer for Dirty Dancing re-cut to replicate the look and feel of a David Lynch film. I think it succeeds magnificently.
Things do get weird up in the Catskills.
Via Cracked:
“The birth of every single asshole in America in a single conversation.”
I thought this was funny—and pretty profound—but the woman playing Ayn Rand couldn’t be bothered to put on a Russian accent???
Like that would have been a bad idea or somehow diminished the laughs?
The predictably predictable idiocy of the Ayn Rand fanboys is already starting to heat up in the YouTube comments. I can’t imagine a more pathetic or pointless activity than furiously typing up pea-brained cliches defending Ayn Rand or Objectivism on fuckin’ YouTube, but it heartens me to see so many self-styled “Galts” wasting their tiny lives like that…
Bless their pointed little heads.
Redditor RegBarc posted a scan of the seriously misguided letter that his father sent him when he revealed that he was gay on reddit/r/atheism:
“5 years ago, I was disowned via letter when I came out to my father. This is how hate sounds.”
If you’re having trouble reading the letter, you can find a larger version here.
The most popular response came from the father of an adopted gay son, who goes by the handle, newvideoaz, apparently his first post on reddit. I think you’ll agree that it’s a pretty remarkable retort:
RegBarc,
I’m the adoptive dad of a kid who came out when he was about 15. Yeah it’s sometimes difficult when this happens because no parent wants to see a kid we love get hurt - and like it or not - being gay can mean some people will wish you ill simply for who you are.
And that’s hard for any parent. But it’s no excuse.As an adoptive parent, I’m not my kids “father.” That’s biological. But I am his Dad. Because “Dad” isn’t something that’s actually biological, it’s something you have to earn.
With my son , I started to earn it the day he was born, but it was pretty easy until his second year when he had an accident and got hurt. The doctor in the ER strapped him to the “papoose board” to immobilize him and was about to start stitching up his head when he told me it was time for me to let go of his little hand. He looked up at me and whatever he saw in my face, he instantly said “or you can stay I guess.” I have no clue what he saw, except the fact that getting me to let go of that tiny hand was about as possible one of us jumping up through the ceiling to the moon.
The lesson for me that day is that any idiot can be a father (and clearly many are) but you’ve got to EARN being a Dad.
When my son came out to us, same deal. I was concerned, because I never had to deal with it before in someone I love. But we simply hooked him up with 1 in 10 and went on with our lives.
So here’s the opinion of someone who’s been in your dad’s shoes, but didn’t have his sad mental baggage.
Your dad failed a really huge parenting test. Period.
So now he’s self selected to be your father, but not to be your Dad. That sucks. And the really sad thing is that he has absolutely no freaking clue about the real value of what he’s tossed away.
He’ll always be your father. That’s biology. But biology is fickle. We know this because while he has perhaps passed a lot to you via DNA, he did NOT pass along intolerance or stupidity. He can “disown” you in his brain all he likes, but that doesn’t mean much because he’s already proved that whatever his strengths might be, he’s allowed his thought processes and natural instincts to become seriously flawed. How you feel about him. Hurt, sad, angry, disappointed, that’s yours to shuffle as you see fit.
But trust me, this is about him, not you. I actually hope that someday he gets a change to look deeply in his heart and comes to understand how horribly, terribly he screwed this up. If so, he’ll maybe have a chance to start some personal redemption and healing. But he needs that. You don’t.
Cuz there’s nothing wrong with you. At all.
Stay strong. Take care. The world is changing fast. And for more people than ever, gay and straight, it’s changing more toward love and away from fear - at least in this particular area.
Take care.
As they say on the Internet: ONIONS!
Of course, reddit being reddit, a couple of quipsters threw in some zingers:
“You should to his funeral and read that letter as your speech.”
“This would be the greatest ‘fuck you’ ever. Oh my god I’m so giddy right now.”
“And have it buried with him.”
“Burn it. And while it’s on fire, throw it in his casket. That guy doesn’t deserve the casket he’s in.”
Can’t say I disagree. What a fucking small-minded dickhead. I sincerely hope that he is made aware of how he’s being ridiculed. He, at the very, very least deserves that knowledge.
Stunning new video directed by Matt Mahurin for Tom Waits’ “Hell Broke Luce” from the album Bad As Me.
Big fucking ditches in the middle of the road
You pay a hundred dollars just for fillin’ in the hole
Listen to the general every goddamn word
How many ways can you polish up a turd”
With Waits’ death-rattle vocals, Keith Richards’ snarling guitar and Mahurin’s post-apocalyptic visuals, this is one dark grungy slab of somethin’ or other. Magritte breaking real bad.
In 2008, a live recording of the Velvet Underground, made in 1967 (one of the earliest live recordings that exists of the group) at a NYC club called The Gymnasium, was bootlegged, and received joyously by fans. Notable tracks include the live debut of a full 19-minute long workout of “Sister Ray,” “Guess I’m Falling in Love” (which was on the Peel Slowly and See box set) and a song that’s never seen the light of day anywhere else, “I’m Not A Young Man Anymore” (Lou Reed would have been a 25-year-old in 1967, go figure). You can find the VU Gymnasium show bootleg on a number of audio blogs.
The venue was located in the East 70s, and was originally a Czechoslovakian health and social club. The gym equipment was actually left in the club. A teenaged Chris Stein, later of Blondie, played at the Gymnasium with his own band and remembers seeing The Velvet Underground there:
“It was pretty late at night by the time we got out of the subway in Manhattan and headed toward the Gymnasium. Walking down the block with our guitars we actually saw some people coming down the street and they said, ‘Oh, are you guys the band, because we’ve been waiting there all night and we couldn’t take it anymore, we left because they never showed up.’ So we said, ‘Yeah, we’re the band.’ We went inside and there was hardly anyone there. Somebody said Andy was supposed to be there, but he was off in the shadows with his entourage, we never saw him. We hung around for a little while and they played records, then we headed up for the stage. It was a big echoey place, we had absolutely no conception of playing a place like this whatsoever, but Maureen Tucker said we could use their equipment. So we plugged into their amps and the amps were all cranked up superloud… The only song I remember doing was “You Can’t Judge A Book By Its Cover.” We must have done a few more, but I remember sitting down after a while because the whole thing had gotten me pretty discouraged. Then somebody came over and said, ‘Oh Andy likes you, he thinks you’re great.’ We must have played five or six songs then we just gave up. By that time the rest of The Velvets had arrived. After a while they started to play and they were like awesomely powerful. I had never expected to experience anything like that before… I was really disappointed that they didn’t have Nico, because we thought she was the lead singer, but I distinctly remember the violin and their doing “Venus in Furs” because a couple of people in dark outfits got up and started doing a slow dance with a chain in between them… There were maybe thirty people there. It was very late, but it was a memorable experience…”
It seems likely that Stein might be describing this very show (no Nico here), The complete and utter lack of applause might also be because of the small number of people Stein recalls being there. It was 45 years ago, so who knows? (They only played there twice, anyway, April 6 & 7, 1967, the night Stein saw them and either the day before or the day after that)
Below, have a listen to “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore.” I’m totally in love with this song. It’s been criticized elsewhere for being “minor” and “unfinished,” but fuck that noise, this is the bloody Velvet Underground and this groove don’t quit. I wish there was a 19-minute long version of this one, too. Turn it up loud enough that it hits you like a freight train.
Portrait of Lord Russell by Norman Rockwell
“Suppose, Lord Russell, this film were to be looked at by our descendants, like a Dead Sea scroll in a thousand years’ time. What would you think is worth telling that generation about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned from it?”
A terrific older essay by Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce on how fucking insane Republican Party has become (it appeared in the magazine’s May 2012 issue) has been resurrected on reddit/r/politics. I must have missed this one when it went around the first time, but it has not dated in the least since then (if anything it’s more true with each passing day). A gem, courtesy of one of the very best political writers in America today:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Republican party, root and branch, from its deepest grass roots to its highest levels, has become completely demented. This does not mean that it is incapable of winning elections; on the contrary, the 2010 midterms, as well as the statewide elections around the country, ushered in a class of politicians so thoroughly dedicated to turning nonsense into public policy that future historians are going to marvel at our ability to survive what we wrought upon ourselves. It is now impossible to become an elected Republican politician in this country if, for example, you believe in the overwhelming scientific consensus that exists behind the concept of anthropogenic global warming. Just recently, birth control, an issue most people thought pretty well had been settled in the 1960s, became yet another litmus test for Republican candidates, as did the Keystone XL pipeline, to which every Republican presidential candidate pledged unyielding fealty despite the fact that several prairie Republicans and an army of conservative farmers and ranchers are scared to death of the thing.
In Washington, there is no leadership anymore, no “Republican establishment” to which anyone can appeal. The ferocious strength of faith-based know-nothingism in the party’s base has resulted in a stubborn refusal to adopt even those ideas — like an individual mandate for health care, or cap-and-trade as an energy policy — that began as Republican ideas.
In the states, we have seen a staggering overreach on the part of Republican governors in the Midwest regarding labor rights, wildly restrictive voter-ID laws aimed at solving a problem that doesn’t exist, immigration statutes that are leaving lettuce to rot in the fields because nobody’s left to pick it, and a welter of preposterous antiabortion statutes. And behind all of that, a party base that has constructed its own private history, its own private language, its own private logic, and its own wholly rounded private universe.
That’s how Sarah Palin can tell people that Barack Obama wants to bring us “back to days before the Civil War” because Obama once hugged Derrick Bell, a law professor at Harvard. That’s how an insurance-friendly health-care bill can be declared to be socialism when it’s not being called the first step toward fascism. That’s how Mitt Romney came to tie himself in a bowline trying to run for president, even though he was the only real candidate in a field of crackpot poseurs, and even though he was running the only real campaign as opposed to tent revivals, exercises in brand maintenance, and extended book tours. Too late did Romney realize that the path to the nomination led through an alternate reality.
This was a development long in the making, and one of which we may well never see the end. It began with the vicious, truthless campaigns run by the National Conservative Political Action Committee in the late 1970s. This initiated the creation of a conservative network that was outside the formal party structure. To this was added independently financed think tanks, Christian colleges and (later) Christian academies and organized home schooling, and conservative boot camps that produced young people, and young candidates, whose primary allegiance was to conservative ideology and not to the Republican party. Eventually, as was proven by the failed candidacies of Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle, which helped lose the Republicans a golden chance at controlling the Senate as well in 2010, these people cared less about whether the party succeeded than they did that their ideology was kept pure and their private universe invulnerable. In trying to control the uncontrollable and to appease the insatiable, forcibly locked in with itself, like the Beales in Grey Gardens, the party gradually lost its mind.
That last sentence is quite simply… prose perfection. Pierce deserves a Pulitzer prize based on that line alone*.
He concludes:
The Democratic party has an obligation to beat the Republican party so badly, over and over again, that rationality once again becomes a quality to be desired. It must be done by persuading the country of this simple fact. It cannot be done by reasoning with the Republicans, because the next two generations of them are too far gone.
The whole thing is most definitely worth your time. While you are there, you should bookmark the Esquire Politics blog, it’s an essential daily read for political junkies.
His post this morning about Harry Reid and why he’s letting it rip so hard on Mitt Romney is also a must read.
Let’s Stop Being Upset with Harry Reid Already (Esquire Politics)
(*If it were up to me, I’d award a Pulitzer to Charles P. Pierce, if for no other reason, his snarling use of an all-purpose, southern-fried epithet my grandmother used to employ with great disdain: “dipshit doodlebug.”)
This is a great mash-up because it works on several levels:
It’s seamlessly edited. The two songs meld and build on each other. It has an organic dynamic.
A mash-up can editorialize and this one does so with style and intelligence. In juxtaposing very different musicians from distinctly different cultures, but who draw from similar wells of inspiration (politics and social commentary), it celebrates the unifying power of music and it specifically reminds us of the vital link between punk and reggae. It makes a statement beyond the statements the songs already make or re-enforces the statements made… or both. In this case, the songs share a deeply cynical view of any kind of quick spiritual fix, religious or otherwise.
It takes two really good songs and combines them to create another really good song.
It fucking rocks and it brings a smile to my face.
“Get Up Hitch A Ride” - Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” vs Green Day’s “Hitchin’ A Ride” mixed by G3RSt.
Via Audioporn Central.
British film maker and writer Horace Ove’s Reggae was the first documentary to capture the early days of reggae’s UK invasion and its growing popularity outside of Jamaica. In this mix of performances filmed at Wembley Arena in 1970 combined with footage shot in the West Indies and interviews and commentaries providing social and political context, we are introduced to reggae as an art form that transcends music and becomes an articulation of a complex culture and a powerful medium for change.
The Heptones - Message From A Black Man
The Pyramids - (Pop Hi!) The Revenge Of Clint Eastwood
Noel And The Fireballs - Can’t Turn You Loose
The Pioneers - Easy Come Easy Go
Laurel Aitken - Deliverance will come
Black Faith - Everyday people
The Beatles - Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da/Get Back
John Holt - I Want A Love I Can Feel
Dave Barker (Tommy and The Upsetters) - Lockjaw
Count Prince Miller - Mule Train
Millie Small and The Pyramids - Enoch Power
Mr Symarip - Skinheads Moonstomp
The Maytals - Monkey Man
Desmond Dekker - Israelites
Bob & Marcia - Young, Gifted & Black
Reggae has not been released on VHS or DVD. Finding it on Youtube made my day. These are the groups and artists that revived my passion for pop music before punk came along.
Photo: Horace Ove.
