I don’t know the exact provenance of these positively gorgeous stock film clips of the nearly-mythical Sunset Strip area in our beloved city that have been popping up in the last day or two via the Vintage Los Angeles FB group and Youtuber dantanasgirl. What an incredible treat, though. The building on the right in the first clip that bears the words Come to the Party would shortly become the Whisky a Go Go and further down the road Largo would become The Roxy. Certainly two of the more significant and beloved locations for my musical up-bringing! My Grandparent’s house was mere blocks from here, so these images really tweak some early childhood memories as well. Oh, internet….
 

 
More clips after the jump…

 
A gentleman performing a karaoke version of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” gets really steamed when he thinks the wrong track is played. Things start to get interesting around the around the 1:00 mark. I suggest watching the whole video though, the guy’s got talent.

 
(via The High Definite)

 
A creepy John Wayne Gacy clown suit and painting are for sale on Craigslist for “$1,000 up to $10,000.” I’m not vouching for the authenticity here, just pointing it out. Clown suit, anyone?

j.w.gacy items for sale - $1000 (chicago)

Thanks (I think), James!

Above, Mister Merlin, in his youth, and Quentin Crisp… well past his.

Reacting to the Facebook “gay kiss” scandal, Dangerous Minds pal Jesse Merlin, currently appearing (headless!) as Dr. Carl Hill in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator: The Musical at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood, sent us this droll example of the Crisp wit.:

Right before I started hanging out with Quentin Crisp on a weekly basis, there was a gay scandal at the little greek-owned restaurant he frequented: The “Cooper Square Restaurant” on 2nd ave at 5th street.  He ate there every day and the owners were very kind and respectful.

Well, apparently a gay couple was kissing there (when quentin wasn’t around, presumably) and the owner snapped up their menus, said “No sex in this restaurant!” and threw them out.  It may or not have been a messy kiss depending on who you ask.

Well, they organized a huge kiss-in at the restaurant and embarrassed the hell out of the owner, who eventually apologized with seeming-sincerity.  But my favorite part of the whole episode was when one of the two kissing troublemakers (who happened to be the doorman at my drama school nearby) called Quentin to ask for his support on the subject.

“I only eat there.  I don’t know what you want from me.”

He was totally unimpressed with the protest idea and wanted nothing to do with it.  But he did laugh about the owners possibly throwing *him* out:

“They can hardly throw me out.  They’re Greeks.  They invented the beastly thing.”

 
Iggy, Scott Asheton, Mike Watt, James Williamson and a fucking orchestra play “I Wanna Be Your Dog” in tribute to Ron Asheton at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor on April 19.

The sound is shit but the camera is so thrust into the meat and bone of Iggy’s performance that the end result is exhilirating and the bad sound actually starts to sound perfect. Distortion transcended.
 

 
British photo journalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya today. He was 40 years old.

Tim Hetherington, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and photographer, and Chris Hondros, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated photographer, were killed in the city of Misrata after being hit by mortar fire during fighting between Muammar Gaddafi’s forces and Libyan rebels. Two other photographers, Guy Martin and Chris Brown, were also injured.

Hetherington was a contributing photographer for Vanity Fair, and co-directed the Afghan War film “Restrepo” with author Sebastian Junger. That film was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary in 2011.

In his last tweet, Hetherington writes, “In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO.”

As I write this, no one yet knows who killed Hetherington and Hondros but already there are accusatory fingers pointing in many different directions. Stateside, the deaths of these journalists will be used to further the agendas of the right and the left. In Libya, Gaddafi will blame the rebels and the rebels will blame Gaddafi. We will hear rumors that CIA operatives were behind this as part of an effort to ramp up USA involvement in the conflict, to escalate things to all-out war. That sound in the background is the dull fluttering of idiots flapping their lips in the chatrooms of the Huffington Post and the New York Times. Everybody will have their angle. And this is mine: both men deserve better than being reduced to fodder for propaganda. Hetherington and Hondos were just doing their jobs, which they did brilliantly, jobs that are becoming increasingly perilous.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists there have been more than 80 documented attacks on the press in Libya since February.

They include 4 fatalities, numerous injuries, 49 detentions, 11 assaults, two attacks on news facilities, the jamming of two international television transmissions, at least four instances of obstruction, the expulsion of two international journalists, and the interruption of Internet service. At least six local journalists are missing amid speculation they are in the custody of security forces. One international journalist and two media support workers are also unaccounted for.

It is important that we see the images and hear the voices coming out of these war zones. Only then can we understand the depth of the pain and the extent of the horror humanity is capable of inflicting upon itself.  It seems to me that without genuinely confronting this horror we are doomed to repeating it…just as we are now.

How far down do we go before coming up again? Is there a glimmering of light in the dark pulp of man’s inhumanity.  Yes, even in the awful carnage of war, there is poetry. Wherever there is life, there is poetry. Finding that poetry within the deafening clatter of broken bones and battered flesh is a rare gift. To extract a shred of humanity from the cruel charnel house of war gives us some hope of redemption. In the photos and films of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, we saw and felt the human heart that beats under the veils of hate and madness. They were blood poets - artists that went down into the pit so that we didn’t have to, went down to find that last shard of humanity in that dark hole. Do you understand? They did it to save ourselves from ourselves. Their mission was to find the humanity in our human-made hell - to return with something that recalls to us the glory of being alive.

Diary is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.” Tim Hetherington.

Diary.

 
Restrepo.

 
A guest editorial courtesy of our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith. This essay is cross-posted from his essential Of Two Minds blog. Buy his book, Survival+

The guilty are powerful and free, the innocent burdened and oppressed: that is injustice.

There is a fundamental injustice that is poisoning the soul of the nation, and if it is not openly addressed then the nation will face the explosive consequences of institutionalized injustice.

Simply put, it is this: those responsible for the nation’s financial crisis and its catastrophic after-effects are not paying for the consequences of their actions—it is the innocent, those who were not responsible, who are paying the price.

You can call it whatever you want: the Anarchy of the Super-Rich (as per Paul Farrell), the Financial Power Elite, the financial Oligarchy, Plutocracy or Corporatocracy, or the unprecedented concentration of financial wealth and political power in a financialized post-industrial economy. Whatever you call it, we all know this class of financiers and its minions got away with high financial crimes.

Do the crime, do the time—unless it’s “white-collar” financial crime on a vast scale. Then you might pay a wrist-slap fine (a few million dollars from your treasure of embezzled hundreds of millions) and then you’re free to go on your merry way.

The after-effects are not just the losses which can be totalled on a calculator: the really catastrophic losses are to the foundations of democracy and the economy. Democracy has been subverted—oh please, spare us the happy-story propaganda about “reform” and “the system worked”—and the economy has been incentivized to favor poisonously addictive financialization and the shadow institutions of corruption, fraud, embezzlement, favoritism, collusion and misrepresentation of risk. This might be summarized as the protection of vested interests, engineered and overseen by the partnership of the ever more intrusive Central State and the nation’s Financial Power Elite.

The Central State, designed to protect the citizenry from an oppressive monarchy or Elite, now protects this Elite from the citizenry. That is how thoroughly the injustice has been institutionalized.

There is a second part to this fundamental injustice: look who will pay for the bailouts, guarantees and the interest on the borrowed trillions. Not the banks and bankers, to be sure. Who will pay? Those who the Central State can easily tap: taxpayers who earn most of their income from wages, and those politically weak players dependent on government payments.

Now that the bills of the bailout are coming due, the State isn’t going after GE for more taxes. Heavens no—if you try that, the Panzer Division of GE’s tax avoidance army would overrun you. No, the politically easy thing to do is raise taxes on wage earners and trim entitlements, because all the government needs to do is send down the orders and it is done: the taxes are withheld and the bennies trimmed.

To go after the Power Elite is just too difficult. They have the tax attorneys, the lobbyists, the campaign fundraisers, and all the rest.

The U.S. is just a third world kleptocracy on an Imperial scale. I explored the parallels with the Roman Empire in Survival+: the Elites increasingly avoided military service and taxation, the bedrock of Roman power, while the taxes on the middle class rose to such heights that this productive class was basically driven into serfdom. The bottom layer of State dependents was placated and made complicit with bread and circuses—yes, Rome had a vast “welfare state” and much of Rome’s population received free bread to keep them quiet and pliant.

That is of course a road to ruin: let the Elite plunder at will, protected by the Imperial Central State, tax the productive class to fund the armed forces and free bread, and then buy off the lower class with bread and circuses.

The only successful model of reconciliation and justice we have is the “truth commissions” in other post-oppression autocratic kleptocracies. In countries that were deeply divided and poisoned by institutionalized injustice and exploitation, the healing process requires a public, transparent “truth commission” in which the guilty are brought forth to confess their sins against the innocent and face the consequences of their actions.

If a society cannot rouse itself to cleanse the fundamental injustice at the heart of its institutions, then it is effectively choosing self-destruction.

So far, the U.S. is pursuing the Roman Imperial model with an institutional zeal unmatched since Rome’s fall.

Embedded institutional injustice has a price, a price which rises with every passing day of propaganda and prevarication. Some day the bill will come due and a terrible price paid in full. For those in power, the only concern is that it not be today or tomorrow.

Below, Charles Hugh Smith discusses his book Survival +
 

 
I just thought I’d put up a few under-viewed clips of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark performing on Top Of The Pops in the early 80s—why the hell not? I know we have a few fans lurking out there amongst the readers (and writers) and these could do with a few more views. I have a confession to make though—OMD pretty much passed me by until very recently. I dunno why that is to be honest. Maybe it’s the glut of other early synth bands from the same period whose back catalogs I was more urgent to check out. Maybe it’s my vague hazy childhood memories of the band being that they were not particularly cool. Maybe it’s the connections I can see now between OMD and the haunted Ariel Pink/John Maus sound casting the band in a new light. Whatever. I don’t wanna question it too much. I just wanna enjoy:
 
OMD - “Souvenir” (live on TOTP)
 

 
OMD - “Messages” (live on TOTP)
 

 
After the jump “Genetic Engineering”, “Joan Of Arc” and “Maid Of Orleans”

Contact High liner notes.
 
The Godz first album, Contact High, rearranged the furniture in my head when I first heard it back in 1966. I was 15 years old and had never heard anything so fucking weird in my life. The Godz’ hypnotic, electronic, cowboy ragas and high lonesome mantric wails sounded like Hank Williams, Sun Ra and The Fugs being wok-fried in the Mongolian barbecue of absolute reality. Their subversive drone was immortalized on vinyl a year before The Velvet Underground’s debut, which leads one to wonder if VU picked up on The Godz twisted vibrations.

The liner notes for Contact High are worth reading in their entirety. They capture a very specific place and time in rock and roll’s ascension:

“THIS IS THE GODZ’ TRUTH: two sides of eight original tunes by four New Yorkers who don’t give a good God-damn whether you dig it or not. They are human, alive, and hot in the blood, creating their own song, forging their own sound with a beat like an elephant’s heart. They are that way because they hold honesty dear, and have no need for arrogance.

By name the GODZ are blond Jay Dillon, 24, a psaltery player by choice and a graphic designer by trade; Larry Kessler, 25, a sometimes craps dealer, dishwasher and itinerant record salesman. Record salesmen also are Jim McCarthy, 22, guitarist, harmonica and plastic flute player, and drummer Paul Thornton, 26, who never played that instrument before this date. To all of them, musical instruments are but so many vehicles by which they express all they cannot consciously define in any other way. Now if all this stops you, don’t read further and for GODZ’ sake don’t buy this record album.

But if you want to hear about love and the lack of it by victims unashamed, about hate and too much of it in the world, or the passion of these realistic young men who know dream can be another name for nightmare, then you can say these are your kind of people and make it stick. For it is a new, honest, emotion laddened telling-it-like-I-feel-it kind of music, which is, really, the only kind of music this country has produced, and is, therefore, very American, Lyndon Johnson and the critics notwithstanding.

The GODZ in short are hip and wise to the ways of the world, its put-ons and all of that. They don’t dig Mom’s apple pie and I’ve never seen them in church on Sunday. They stand in the margin of life and that is where their music is, and this is what they offer you in this, their first recorded album.”  Marc Crawford.

Contact High was followed by Godz 2 in 1967 and The Third Testament in 1968. All three albums blend a proto-punk rawness with alt-jazz and deranged country weirdness into something that still sounds as adventurous and irreverent as it did back in the sixties.

The Godz opened up the field of possibilities for rock and rollers, expanding our notion of what rock is. But I’m sure they’d never claim that. It doesn’t sound fun enough.

In this rarely seen (until now) video, legendary experimental film maker Jud Yulket shoots The Godz in their Manhattan apartment in 1966. The silent 8mm footage was overdubbed with the band playing an extended medley of two of their songs, “Lay In The Sun” and “Come On Girl Turn On,” and some improvised jamming. The music track has never been released on vinyl or CD. Sloppy but evocative, this is not The Godz at their musical best but it does take you back to a time when space was the place and rock and roll was vital mojo in a shaman’s trick bag.
 

 
“Radar Eyes” from Godz 2 is edgy psychedelia with some seriously sinister overtones. Cooler than punk and twice as deadly.
 

 
Dangerous Minds pal Chris Musgrave shot and directed this extraordinarily intimate music video for a song called “Paper Wings” by newcomer Hannah Moriah. This is my first exposure to Hannah and her music and I’m duly impressed!

Here’s what Shannon Corr wrote about her:

Listening to Hannah Moriah sing is both mesmerizing and disconcerting. Hannah’s voice is haunting and carries a delicate tone with note subtleties that at times are but a whisper.  Her high register is captivating. Hearing its fragile inflection will have you expecting a break in tone, but it stays true throughout.  Angelic and elegant, her vocals seem aged beyond her years. She drops to a smokey resonance while ending a word, setting a mood for what could be the end of the world or the soundtrack to a dreamscape. The perfect companion to a David Lynch film.

I’ll buy that. Chris promises another video is on the way soon. Not to sound like Ed McMahon or anything, but I think we’ll be hearing a lot from this talented young lady in the future! (That did sound just like Ed McMahon, didn’t it?)