With the east coast of America still recovering from the effects of Irene, it seems like today’s American release of Grace Jones’ album Hurricane could not have come at a more inopportune moment. But as the album was originally released in Europe in 2008 the question remains - why did it take three years for Hurricane to get an American release in the first place? Was it label hassles? Jones hassles? Or a renewed interest in the lady’s work post-Gaga?

Either way it’s still a good day for Jones fans, even the ones who already own Hurricane. The American release comes with a dub-remix album imaginatively titled Hurricane Dub, which is also being released in its own right in other territories. Hurricane Dub is highly recommended, not just for the Jones-heads out there, but for connoisseurs of dub in general. It’s excellent. In fact it’s maybe even better than the original album, and yes I know saying that is kind of sacrilegious.

It’s a dub remix album in the true sense of the term, using just the original tracks and a shit ton of spaced out fx, mixed and processed by producer Ivor Guest (is that his real name?!). Like the dub mixes of her work from the 80s, Hurricane Dub brings the classic rimshot-heavy sound of the Compass Point All Stars to the fore, and positively drips authentic stoner atmosphere. I was actually surprised at how good this album is, and I do count myself among the hardcore Grace Jones faithful. Strangely enough though, there’s very little of this album appearing online. I hope her label are ensuring this reaches as many ears as possible! So, while you will have already seen the fantastic and terrifying video for “Corporate Cannibal”, here’s the only readily available video clip from Hurricane Dub available online:

Grace Jones - “Well Well Well Dub”
 

 
Hurricane and Hurricane Dub are available to buy here.

 
Happy Birthday Freddie Mercury, who would have been 65 today.

Here is Queen’s legendary frontman, having a soapy moment at home with his “husband”, the lovely (and also sadly departed) Jim Hutton.
 

 
 
Dangerous Minds reader, Eric Kleptone kindly shared this early film Made, by the late and sadly missed director, John Mackenzie, best known for the exceptional The Long Good Friday and his work with brilliant playwright, Peter McDougall.  Made is adapted from a play by Howard Barker, one of the most prolific and original playwrights in modern English theater.

Barker is a writer of secrets, who sees theater as a place where secrets can be shared. What he is not interested in is enlightening the audience with “truths”::

“When I write, I am not giving a lecture, I am speculating on behavior. Sometimes this is dangerous, but it should be. As I say often, theatre is a dark place and we should keep the light out of it.”

This is true of Made (1972), in which Barker speculates on the behavior of single mother, Valerie Marshall (played by Carol White), and her relationships with a musician, Mike Preston (played by folk singer/songwriter Roy Harper, yes, The Roy Harper), and a priest, Father Dyson (John Castle), while dealing with her family and elderly mother (Margery Mason). It’s very much a film of its time - a mix of social observation and exploration of identity, sexuality and independence, which often promises more than it delivers. But MacKenzie draws good performances and keeps the film moving.

Roy Harper contributed to the soundtrack, which became his classic album Lifemask.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Frankie Miller in Peter McDougall’s ‘Just a Boys’ Game’

Cast and Crew: ‘The Making of ‘The Long Good Friday’

 
With thanks to Eric Kleptone
 

Sion Sono and the 400 page script for Love Exposure.
 
I’d like to add my voice to the chorus of praise for Sion Sono’s (Suicide Club, Cold Fish) epically weird and wonderful Love Exposure.

Three minutes short of four hours long, Sono’s metaphysical black comedy is never boring and completely unlike any film you’re likely to see now or in the near future. Imagine a diabolically funny mix of John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, John Hughes and David Lynch and you might get a sense of what Sono is up to in Love Exposure. Gory, romantic, spiritual and completely bonkers, this is a trip definitely worth taking. Somehow Sono (a poet turned film maker) performs the magic act of juggling what seems like a dozen film genres in the air with supernatural grace.

I dig film critic Simon Abrams’ take on the movie:

Love Exposure is, in a sense, Sono’s equivalent of the Great Russian novel. In it, his substantial disaffection for societal conventions is matched only by his monumental love for his spectacularly messed-up protagonists. These characters become deranged because they have to create their own belief system. There’s no God except for the ones that Yôko, Aya Koike (Sakura Andô), and Yû Honda (Takahiro Nishijima) make for themselves. God is represented by mundane authority figures, people who simultaneously project their own fear of loving someone else and lustful need to be loved. In other words, father/Father figures are all rotten to the core in Love Exposure, though they’re all rotten in unique ways.

Made in 2008, Love Exposure is finally receiving a limited American theatrical run two years after I first encountered it at Austin’s Fantastic Fest.
 

 
While folks on the East Coast are still reeling from the havoc unleashed by Hurricane Irene, Tropical Storm Lee is adding to their misery by dumping a couple of feet of rain on New Orleans as it trudges north.

How does FEMA measure the potential dangers of these massive storms? There are several methods….including the status of your local Waffle House.

When a hurricane makes landfall, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency relies on a couple of metrics to assess its destructive power.
First, there is the well-known Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. Then there is what he calls the “Waffle House Index.”

Waffle House, reliable beyond the ordinary.
 

 
Via WSJ

 
I’m just here to try and make you feel good, okay?

If you’re like me, you’re probably a sucker for this kind of stuff.

These pups are rushing into things.  I always recommend waiting to marry until you’ve lived a little…at least until the age of five in dog years.
 

 
A Fistful Of Dub number two. Spaghetti westerns meet the massive attack of dub and reggae.

01. “Cocaine” - Sly and The Revolutionaries
02. “Blood Dunza” - King Tubby and The Aggrovators
03. “Man A Warrior” - Tapper Zukie
04. “Out Of Order” - Prince Jammy
05. “Youth Man” - King Tubby
06. “Coming Home” - Dennis Brown
07. “Washroom Skank” - The Upsetters
08. “Nothing Is Impossible” - Techniques All Stars
09. “Buckshot Dub” - Rupie Edwards
10. “Freak Out Skank” - The Upsetters
11. “Please Officer” - Talent Crew
12. “The Big Rip Off” - Augustus Pablo, King Tubby
13. “New Style” - Niney The Observer
14. “Herb” - Sly and The Revolutionaries
 

 
Does the name Matthew Vadum ring a bell? If it doesn’t, then consider yourself, uh, lucky, but unfortunately, dear reader, your luck has just run out…

Vadum is the portly, Truman Capote-esque conservative blogger you see/hear from time to time spinning over-wrought conspiracy theories about the former community organizer ACORN on cable news programs and talk radio. The Exiled calls Vadum “a fat little waffentwerp,” a “national laughingstock” and “the male equivalent of the squatty little nerdette who carved a “B” in her face and blamed it on evil Negroes.”

In 2008, Vadum infamously told The Daily Show that community organizers barter votes for Democrats in poor neighborhoods with crack. He’s written a book about ACORN called Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers that’s been published by the brain(dead) trust at World Net Daily (who else would touch it?). Endorsed by the likes of David Horowitz, Rep. Michele Bachmann and G. Gordon Liddy, Subversion, Inc. is paired on Amazon with Jerome Corsi’s Where’s The Birth Certificate?, also published by World Net Daily. Vadum is a columnist at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government blog and a Senior Editor at the Capital Research Center in Washington, DC.

Recently Vadum published a controversial essay titled “Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American” at a curiously named blog called American Thinker (curious because of the notable lack of critical thinking going on there and quotation marks around “Thinker”). If you read his essay cold, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was an Onion writer attempting a bit of Swiftian satire at the expensive of far-right autocrats. Nope, this dickhead actually means it!

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians.  Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.  It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

So according to this repulsive hobbit, poor people voting in their own self-interest is somehow wrong? Democracy itself is somehow “un-American”?

If you even think something like this, well, that’s very unfortunate for you, but to say it out loud and in public, you are, in effect, asking for people to agree with you (or at least open the Overton Window a little more). No surprise then to see all the ridicule and abuse hurled at Vadum—who calls himself a “Libertarian Conservative,” btw—in the blogsphere.

No surprise either, that he’s rather thin-skinned. Here’s his Twitter feed in case you feel like sending him some fan mail.

May I suggest the Twitter hashtag #MatthewVadumFuckFace?

Below, a photo-montage video of this ludicrous berk.
 

 
Let’s Make Matthew Vadum Bad-Famous (Videogum)
 
Registering the Wealthy to Vote is Un-American (Technorati)

 
Before America’s Got Talent, there was Stairway to Stardom, a public access talent show, broadcast in New York during the late 1970s and 1980s. Shot in what looks like someone’s basement, or the rehearsal room for a David Lynch film, Stairway to Stardom offered the young, the old, and even the deluded a chance to achieve the success their ambition suggested was theirs. Clips of this wonderfully bizarre series have popped up on YouTube over the years, and reveal what fans of Stairway to Stardom have known for years - that this camp, fun and rather charming show is still well ahead of Simon Cowell’s smug, corporate juggernaut.
 

Horowitz and Spector sing “Something’s Rotten in Translyvania”, 1988
 

Stairway to Stardom - Opening Titles 1984
 
More joys from ‘Stairway to Stardom’, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Fernando Caetano
 

Jersey punk receives the 2011 Polar Music Prize from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf.
 
Patti Smith was awarded Sweden’s highest musical honor this past week.

Billboard reports:

The Polar Music Prize was first presented in 1992 and has gone to pop artists such as Sir Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. King, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and classical names such as Isaac Stern, Renée Fleming, José Antonio Abreu and Ennio Morricone.

Smith’s award was presented by one of her favorite authors, Sweden’s Henning Mankell. Speaking without notes, he credited Smith for inspiring women all over the world to write poetry and create music. He then read the citation, which lauded Smith for “devoting her life to art in all its forms” and for demonstrating “how much rock ‘n’ roll there is in poetry and how much poetry there is in rock ‘n’ roll.” Calling Smith “a Rimbaud with Marshall amps,” the citation said that she “has transformed the way an entire generation looks, thinks and dreams.”

In her acceptance, a visibly moved Smith had to stop for a moment to collect herself as she thanked her daughter Jesse Paris and son Jackson, as well as the musicians she has worked with for years, including “Lenny Kaye, who has played guitar by my side for over 40 years.” Smith also acknowledged the late Stig Anderson and “my late husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith,” guitarist for the rock band MC5.

“Receiving the prestigious Polar Music Prize is both humbling and inspiring, for it fills me with pride,” Smith told the audience at the Stockholm Concert Hall. “It also fills me with the desire to continue to prove my worth. I am reminded always how collaborative the music experience is and so I would like to thank the people, for it is the people for whom we create and it is the people who have given me their energy and encouragement for four decades.

No longer outside of society, punk’s elder stateswoman discusses her past, the present and the creative process with Stockholm journalist Jan Gradvall.