Dangerous Minds pal Jesse Merlin (currently appearing in Stuart Gordon’s hit musical adaptation of Re-Animator at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood) sent me this wonderfully weird film trailer for Mad Doctor of Blood Island, a cheesy, low budget—and incredibly bloody—Filipino horror movie from the 1960s. What makes this particular trailer of interest is the hilariously over-the-top voice-over courtesy of my late friend, Theodore Gottlieb, better known as philosopher, metaphysician and podiatrist, Brother Theodore.
“A barbaric experience in the most grotesque sense!”
I’m 100% certain that Theodore wrote the copy for this, too.
Linkin Park: The successful marriage of rock and hip-hop came together dramatically in their debut album Hybrid Theory. Linkin Park has attracted a huge fan base worldwide not only by consistently delivering compelling songs but by musically adventuresome collaborations with Jay Z. The band is exciting live and continues to evolve their sound, allowing them to succeed where many of their rap-rock contemporaries have failed.
Pearl Jam: As a contemporary of Nirvana in the early days of the Seattle grunge scene, the band grew in the 90’s into one of the consistently top bands around the globe. Known from the beginning as a great live band, they have grown a passionate fan base by adhering to their own rules…unapologetic, touring the way they want, putting out albums without concerning themselves if they had a hit track for radio play. A real original.
Dave Matthews Band: This Virginia based band made it the hard way…endlessly playing all over the country to emerge as one of America’s top live bands. Their lengthy shows and amazing musicianship continue the legacy of the Grateful Dead, with the Dave Matthews Band inheriting the mantle of the best jam band around. Like the Dead, the band is more of a live experience, not needing hit songs (though they’ve have a few of those as well) to play stadiums. They rock!
Other bands on the list include Coldplay, Death Cab For Cutie, and (yes) Green Day. There are two main aspects of this article that beggar belief. One, that the author thinks that these are the most important and influential bands of the current era (the CURRENT era I must stress—check the present tense of the verb “to shape” in the title). You surely don’t need me to explain how wrong this is. The second most unbelievable aspect of this is that this guy is getting paid money to write about music. Actually, seeing as it was first published on Huffington Post, maybe he’s not. So who is this Jeff Pollack guy? Whoever he is, he’s a comedy genius!
Thank God for Satan, as more than 60 Catholic clergy (66 perhaps?) gather in Rome for a 6-day (another 6!) conference on “Exorcism”, this week, at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, Rome. The event will examine how the web has made it easier than before to access information on Devil-worship and the occult, reports the Daily Telegraph:
“The internet makes it much easier than in the past to find information about Satanism,” said Carlo Climati, a member of the university who specialises in the dangers posed to young people by Satanism.
“In just a few minutes you can contact Satanist groups and research occultism. The conference is not about how to become an exorcist. It’s to share information about exorcism, Satanism and sects. It’s to give help to families and priests. There is a particular risk for young people who are in difficulties or who are emotionally fragile,” said Mr Climati.
Organizers of the event say the rise of Satanism has been dangerously underestimated in recent years.
“There’s been a revival,” said Gabriele Nanni, a former exorcist and another speaker at the course.
Over the course of 6-days, the exorcists will scrutinise the phenomenon of Satanism with “seriousness and scientific rigour”, avoiding a “superficial or sensational approach.”
In theory, any priest can perform an exorcism – a rite involving prayers to drive the Devil out of the person said to be possessed.
But Vatican officials said three years ago that parish priests should call in professional exorcists if they suspect one of their parishioners needs purging of evil. An exorcist should be called when “the moral certainty has been reached that the person is possessed”, said Father Nanni, a member of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. That could be indicated by radical and disturbing changes in the person’s behaviour and voice, or an ability to garble in foreign languages or nonsensical gibberish.
While the number of genuine cases of possession by the Devil remained relatively small, “we must be on guard because occult and Satanist practices are spreading a great deal, in part with the help of the internet and new technologies that make it easier to access these rituals,” he said.
The Vatican’s chief exorcist claimed last year that the Devil lurked in the Vatican, the very heart of the Catholic Church.
Father Gabriele Amorth said people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron, scream, dribble and slobber, utter blasphemies and have to be physically restrained.
He claimed that the sex abuse scandals which have engulfed the Church in the US, Ireland, Germany and other countries, were proof that the anti-Christ was waging a war against the Holy See. He said Pope Benedict XVI believed “wholeheartedly” in the practice of exorcism.
The church’s International Association of Exorcists was set up in 1993, and meet in secret every 2 years, with the aim “of increasing the number of official exorcists worldwide.”
Since 2005, Catholic priests can sign up to learn how to cast away evil spirits from the possessed at the Vatican-backed college, the Athenaeum Pontificium Regina Apostolorum in Rome.
It runs a two-month course to teach the “spiritual, liturgical and pastoral work involved in being an exorcist.”
According to Father Giulio Savoldi, Milan’s official exorcist, requirements include “the supernatural force – the presence of God – and then suggest that the man picked to do this kind of work be wise and that he should know how to gather strength not just from within himself but from God.” The Roman Catholic’s new Exorcism RiteThe Roman Catholic’s new Exorcism Rite, which was updated in 1999 for the first time since 1614, stresses the importance of distinguishing who is really in need of an exorcism.
Father Savoldi said: “Those studying to become exorcists should also study psychology and know how to distinguish between a mental illness and a possession. And, finally, they need to be very patient.” He said the priest who undertakes the office should be himself a holy man, of a blameless life, intelligent, courageous, humble. He should avoid in the course of the rite anything resembling superstition and he should leave the medical aspects of the case to qualified physicians.
If that doesn’t turn your head, then you may enjoy Mark Kermode’s fascinating BBC documentary, Fear of God: The Making of ‘The Exorcist’, which examines the story of classic 1973 horror movie, with cast and crew, and discusses the true events inspired William Peter Blatty’s original novel.
This is odd. Seldom-seen footage of America’s pimp laureate Iceberg Slim, promoting his book Trick Baby and talking about “White Folk,” taken from a 1968 episode of The Joe Pyne Show.
Joe Klein writing on the 2012 crop of potential Republican presidential nominees on his TIME magazine blog:
This is my 10th presidential campaign, Lord help me. I have never before seen such a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers coagulated under a single party’s banner. They are the most compelling argument I’ve seen against American exceptionalism. Even Tim Pawlenty, a decent governor, can’t let a day go by without some bilious nonsense escaping his lizard brain. And, as Greg Sargent makes clear, Mitt Romney has wandered a long way from courage. There are those who say, cynically, if this is the dim-witted freak show the Republicans want to present in 2012, so be it. I disagree. One of them could get elected. You never know. Mick Huckabee, the front-runner if you can believe it, might have to negotiate a trade agreement, or a defense treaty, with the Indonesian President some day. Newt might have to discuss very delicate matters of national security with the President of Pakistan. And so I plead, as an unflinching American patriot—please Mitch Daniels, please Jeb Bush, please run. I may not agree with you on most things, but I respect you. And you seem to respect yourselves enough not to behave like public clowns.
Ha! These are great! New York-based artist Jonathan Viner paints “computer geeks” from our 70s mainframe past. His solo exhibition, “COMPUTER SCIENCE” is currently being shown March 31 to April 30, 2011 at Sloan Fine Art.
Shortly after his first son was born, artist Jonathan Viner naturally had fatherhood and his own childhood on his mind. As children, Viner and his twin brother spent hours visiting the robotics lab at the New York Institute of Technology, where their father taught and worked. Faded memories of “computer nerds” playing Dungeons and Dragons, sharing ideas, and celebrating on New Year’s Eve came back to him as the artist shuttled between infant care, painting and conversations with artists, critics and enthusiasts over Facebook.
Inspired by the stunning impact these unlikely heroes from his childhood have had on the world, Viner began hunting online for class photos of computer science majors from the 1970’s. Those old photos, mined through Google on an iPad, became the starting point for “COMPUTER SCIENCE.”
You gotta hand it to him, Rick Santorum, that wacky wingnut Republican no-hoper presidential candidate, a man with even less of a chance of gaining the GOP nomination than, say, Newt Gingrich (or any of the rest of them for that matter), just won’t give up. Despite the fact that NO ONE, I mean NO ONE thinks he’s got a snowball’s chance in hot hot Hades of gaining traction with, you know, actual voters, Rick’s out there, fighting the good fight… or something. It’s hard to say what he’s really doing or what he thinks he’s accomplishing.
Could there be a less-inspiring, less-intelligent, less-attractive candidate than Rick Santorum? Of course there could be, never count out the GOP when it comes to scraping the bottom of the loony bin, but the odds are against a lesser contender turning up in this election cycle. Even Ron or Rand Paul have better chances of moving into the White House than Santorum—effectively none, of course—and yet like a buffoonish Energerizer Bunny, he just keeps on going. BUT WHY? WHO is urging him to run? What kind of people shows up at his campaign events? What’s his motivation to run for President in spite of overwhelming indifference?
Who the fuck knows? Michele Bachmann probably even thinks Santorum is a pinhead. What alternate conclusion could anyone, even a Republican, come to when faced with a statement like this one:
“The social security system in my opinion is a flawed design, period. But, having said that, the design would work a lot better if we had stable demographic trends. … The reason social security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.”
