“Crybaby” oil on steel wah-wah pedal, 4"x10"x3”

Amusing John Boehner wah-wah pedal entitled “Crybaby” by San Francisco-based artist Jesse Wiedel.

Thanks, Kenneth Thomas!

 
A special guest Dangerous Minds Radio Hour from the San Francisco band Lumerians.

Most of this set are vinyl rips we tracked the other night in Marc’s living room. The whisky was flowing free and so were we. This is real shit. We wanted to showcase our top favorites that we’ve been digging the past couple years as opposed to songs that are obscure for obscure’s sake. If folks get turned on to new music that’s definitely and added bonus. There is heavy San Francisco representation of bands old and new: Chrome, Magnetic Stripper and Bronze as well as a whirlwind trip through Latin America and Africa before returning to the English speaking world with a brief detour in lesser Korea. At the end you can hear Tyler actually breaking Marc’s record needle. Reentry burns every time.

01: Dick Hyman - “Topless Dancers of Corfu”
02: Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou - “Noude Ma Gnin Tche De Me”
03: Chrome - “Eyes in the Center”
04: Magnetic Stripper - “Extended Play”
05: Fabulous Diamonds -“Track 3”
06: Os Bongos - “Kazukata”
07: The Psychedelic Aliens - “Gbe Keke Wo Taoo”
08: Hydra - “Homem Com “H”
09: Sabu - “Choferito”
10: The Doves - “Mercury”
11: The Clean - “Point That Thing Somewhere Else”
12: Wire - “On Returning”
13: Bronze - “Parallels”
14: Teeth Mountain - “Soft Beast”
15: Jorge Ben - “Errare Humanum Est”
16: Shin Jung Hyun and the Men - “Twilight”
17: Dick Hyman - “The Minotaur”
 

 
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There is still a bit of a question lingering in some minds as to whether or not this is real, but to my mind, it absolutely has the ring of truth. If that’s not Gov. Scott Walker, it’s an acting genius portraying him. Sadly, this seems too real. The implications of this are staggering if it’s true!

And if it is true, then where do you go after something like this? I can think of a couple of solutions. A statewide recall election, where Walker is crushed and left on the scrapheap of history, becoming in the process, the dictionary definition of “traitor to humanity” or “cunt” for a generation; or perhaps Scott Walker’s head on a fucking pole? (Would Fox News broadcast that or pretend it didn’t happen?) How can this man feel good about what he’s doing? Listen in, you’ll want to puke by the end of this.
 

 
Here’s a fantastic artifact of one of the best shows ever to grace broadcast TV that I remember seeing back in the day but for some reason never picked up. Being ostensibly the tapes we saw Agent Cooper constantly making for his unseen assistant, Diane, quite a bit of this seems to have been created just for this release while other sections could have been lifted straight from the show. In any case it’s a big bundle of vintage and lesser-known Lynch-ian goodness. Below is most of the cassette in Youtube form. Follow the link at the bottom to get the entire thing.
 

 
More audio excerpts after the jump…

 
Filmed on December 9, 1971 in Hong Kong after the release of his first movie, The Big Boss, Bruce Lee’s interview with Canadian journalist Pierre Berton was long thought to be lost. It was discovered in 1994 and aired as a TV special in Canada as Bruce Lee: The Lost Interview.

Berton is unimpressive as a talking head but Lee is both charming and wise beyond his years.

 
Part 2, Part 3
 
Via The Awesomer

 
Kenneth Williams was born today in Bingfield Street, London, just off the Caledonian Road, on the 22nd of February 1926. According to his mother, he was born at two-thirty in the afternoon. She later claimed she remembered this, because it was early closing day and her husband had the afternoon off.

Kenneth’s father, Charlie, owned a hairdresser’s and, Kenneth’s mother, Louisa, worked there part-time. Charlie was known for being bluntly outspoken and highly sarcastic to his customers. “Henna dye on your head?” he’d ask incredulously.  “Do you want to look like a tart?”  Or, “Stick to your own color. You can’t improve on nature. You ought to know that. You’re old enough, and ugly enough.”

If Kenneth owed his refined looks to his mother, then, it was from his father that he inherited his sharp and acerbic tongue.

With only an older sister, Pat, born in 1923, it rested with Kenneth to take over the family business. But Kenneth aspired to things other than a shampoo and set.  He had seized upon acting as a possible, future career. However, his father decried his son’s ambitions, acting, he said:  “The women are all trollops and the men are nancies.“

While his sister Pat showed prowess as a swimmer and as an athlete, the rather camp Kenneth stuck to books and art. 

“I settled for the books and gramophone and an awful lot of talking to myself.  My exhibitionism concealed a sense of inadequacy. The real self was a vulnerable quivering thing, which I did not want to reveal; showing-off, affectation and role-playing I used like a hedgehog uses his spines. The facade was not to be penetrated. My parents respected this privacy.  ‘He’s up in his room,’ they’d tell visitors. ‘He likes to be on his own,’ and I was undisturbed in my private world where artists were heroes and the imagination was king.”

One of his school reports ended with the word, “Quick to grasp the bones of a subject, slow to develop them.” The young, master Williams ‘”affected indifference” when his father read the report to him.  “It sounded like a reluctant vulture on someone else’s prey.” It was at school that Williams developed a talent for mimicking his teachers, something that landed him in trouble more than once. It was the first inkling of Williams’s desperate desire to be liked, and of the possible outcome such mimicry would incur.

The headmaster warned Williams that such “mocking” may win him popularity but that it would also succeed in undermining his own authority. “A facetious front may win you popularity but you won’t be taken seriously when you want to be sincere.  People won’t believe you and that will hurt you.” A surprisingly apt prediction.

Kenneth’s need for human companionship saw him attempt to steal away many of his sister’s schoolboy boyfriends. Infuriated by the number of youthful suitors that called for the blossoming Pat, Kenneth merrily told them that his sister was “meeting another bloke” and then, nobly, offered his own services as a date. Such brass-neck inevitably ended in tears.
 

 
Previously on DM

Tears of a clown: The Wit and Wisdom of Kenneth Williams

 
More sex and death from Kenneth Williams, plus bonus clips, after the jump…
 

 
Looks like Wisconsin’s increasingly unpopular governor Scott Walker is developing a bit of a “Google problem”!!

He’s no Rick Santorum (yet) in that department, but if just a few of you reading this click over to Google and search for something like, say, “Is Scott Walker a pedophile?” we might be able to help to at least keep Walker competitive!

Do it, you know you want to…

Via Wonkette

 
Honey Badger don’t give a shit, it just takes what it wants. Honey Badger doesn’t care. 

(via Cynical-C)

 
Last year, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim co-hosted a special screening of director James “The Master of the Romantic Thriller”™ Nguyen’s “so bad it’s good” feature film, Birdemic: Shock and Terror at Los Angeles’s beloved art house, Cinefamily. After a positively mind-melting 90-minutes had elapsed, Heidecker stood before the audience, microphone in hand, silently surveying the psychic damage the film had caused before asking: “Don’t you all just feel like total assholes for sitting through that?”

Cue 200 people laughing and nodding in vigorous agreement.

But, hey, you can’t exactly get this kind of entertainment just anywhere, all right? How many Plan Nine from Outer Space-type winners should the human race be allowed?

Birdemic: Shock and Terror “tackles topical issues of global warming, avian flu, world peace, organic living, sexual promiscuity and lavatory access.” You, know, all the big issues. Director James Nguyen, a 42-year-old Vietnamese refugee, wrote, cast and shot the film over four years, diverting money saved from his career as a software salesperson in Silicon Valley toward making his Hollywood dream come true. Nguyen’s dream might be Roger Ebert’s worst nightmare, of course, but I don’t think that the director was really thinking much about how the critics would react to his film (It’s hard to tell what he was really thinking).

In a recent interview about the film, co-star Whitney Moore had this to say when asked about people who assume Birdemic was “faked”:

I have spoken with people who believe that Birdemic was faked, and I always ask those people if they have met James Nguyen. If they have, and they still believe that he is some mastermind of irony and comic timing who can make a movie like Birdemic intentionally, then there is nothing I can say to change their mind. Nor would I.

In any case, it’s out today on DVD and Blu-ray from our friends at Severin Films and now you can see for yourself the film that’s seen “midnight movie” fans across the county get very… well, very perplexed, let’s just say… WARNING: Do not try to watch Birdemic: Shock and Terror alone. Not because it’s too scary or anything, but because it must be seen with others, others who, like you, yourself, should be stoned into complete oblivion for this dubious cinematic treat.  I think anyone who watches Birdemic: Shock and Terror by their lonesome would just be too pathetic. So don’t do it.

UPDATE: There will be a special midnight screening of Birdemic: Shock And Terror at Cinefamily, here in Los Angeles this Friday (1st anniv. screening, director & cast in person!)

Here’s one of my, er, um, “favorite” scenes from Birdemic: Shock and Terror... “Where’s Becky?”
 

 
We’ve posted before about both South African artist Spoek Mathambo and amazing photographer Pieter Hugo (his book Nollywood is sitting on a coffeetable 10 feet away from me as I type this) and wow, their new collobaoration on this video for Spoek’s fucking brilliant cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” is nothing short of simply astonishing.

You think there’s nothing new under the sun, jaded reader? That every good idea has already been used up by music video directors? Guess again because this will knock your socks off!

Via Dazed Digital:

‘Control’, the fourth single from Spoek Mathambo‘s debut album Mshini Wam, is a ‘darkwave township house’ cover of the Joy Division classic ‘She’s Lost Control’. In collaboration with one of South Africa’s most influential photographers Pieter Hugo, and cinematographer Michael Cleary, the new video explores township cults and teen gangs. Shot on location in a squatted train boarding house in Langa, Cape Town, the video features a cast mostly made up of local neighborhood kids who run their own dance troop, Happy Feet. Spoek Mathambo has been pioneering a progressive take on African music for the last few years via his DJing (as HIVIP), solo and live band projects, having featured on Boysnoize Records and Top Billin.

Directed and shot by Pieter Hugo & Michael Cleary. Edited by Richard Starkey

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Voodoo Dubstep: Cape Town, South Africa’s rising star, Spoek Mathambo