I know little to nothing about Japanese manga comics and even less about Mexican/Spanish TV. That doesn’t keep me from enjoying this goofy scene from TV show ‘Los Cabelleros Del Sobaco’ based on a manga created by Masami Kurumada.
‘Twin Flames’ from Klaxon’s Surfing The Void album.
Director: Saam Farahmand
Klaxons push the edge with this sexually charged and disturbing visual trip that seems to reflect their interest in the surreal and fantastic works of Burroughs, Ballard and Crowley. I detect some of the body horror of Cronenberg.
This didn’t last too long on Youtube before it got yanked.
I’m starting to understand why people say the Internet is a drag on America’s productivity. I’m just gonna go ahead and blame Bread People... for EVERYTHING.
See more Bread People after the jump…
Get it while it’s hot: “Who’s Who” by Ian Leino. FOR SALE TODAY ONLY!
Via The Daily What.
Hello, it’s the ninth episode of the Dangerous Minds Radio Hour. Allow, if you will, host Brad Laner access to your head space and be rewarded with as many indelible melodies, rhythms and sounds as can be crammed into one Earth hour. Today’s episode features a mini-tribute to the powerful, emotional music of Judee Sill (picture above). Her music is so significant to me, I can hardly muster the verbiage to describe it. Staggering stuff, if you’ve not yet heard it you’re in for a treat.
Crispy Ambulance - Deaf
Theatre Of Hate - Rebel Without A Brain
Marvin Gaye - Troubleman
Lady June (with Kevin Ayers and Brian Eno) - The Letter
Judee Sill - Jesus Was A Cross Maker
Judee Sill - The Kiss
Neil Young - Don’t Cry
The Roches - Hammond Song
Wigwam - Fairyport
Frank Zappa - It Just Might Be A One Shot Deal
Things to Come - Come Alive
Prince - New Position
Prince - I Wonder U
The Fiery Furnaces - Mason City
Download this week’s episode
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O boy, this was the kind of thing I wanted to make when I was about nine or ten, after watching too many episodes of Dr Who and Lost in Space, but found my imagination hindered by a lack of Meccano, and an excess of cardboard boxes and sticky-back plastic. Now it seems my childhood dream has come true as one of the UK’s first ever humanoid robots has been revived after spending forty-five years gathering dust in a garage.
Robot George wasn’t made by some sci-fi obsessed kid, but by a former spy catcher and RAF officer Tony Sale, who built this baby for around $25, using scrap metal form a crashed Wellington Bomber plane, back in 1950.
Sale was a fresh-faced 19-year-old at the time and his incredible, radio-controlled, man-sized robot, which looks like something from Flash Gordon, or even Flesh Gordon, could walk, apparently talk and carry out simplistic chores, as the Daily Telegraph reports:
“I made him in my spare time. He was 6ft tall and I put light sensitive cells in his eyes which enabled him to home in on an illuminated beer bottle,” he said.
“He was brought out and demonstrated at all the open days at RAF Debden and featured on Pathe News.”
The robot, which is powered by two motorcycle batteries can be made to walk, turn his head, move an arm and sit down. He can operate up to 30 feet from his controls.
He caught the imagination of the press and was featured in numerous papers as one of the earliest humanoid robots built in the UK.
George was pictured carrying the shopping, hoovering and even mowing the lawn.
“I think he really impressed people because he looked so lifelike,” said Mr Sale.
“Unfortunately I wasn’t able to improve him any further as computers weren’t developed enough at the time.
“He has no memory and there were no computers small enough to enable him to become an intelligent robot, so he was put away.
“He was left to languish until I found him again in my garage, where he hadn’t been touched for 45 years.”
However Robot George wasn’t Mr. Sale’s first attempt at building a robot, as this interview with the BBC explains:
Remarkably, George was not the first robot that Mr Sale had built. In fact, he was the fifth incarnation of a mechanical man that the young electronics wizard had put together.
Creating any kind of working robot in the early 1950s was an incredible feat, especially as Mr Sale was under 20 at the time. The version he produced then has a claim to be among the earliest humanoid robots built in the UK.
Mr Sale’s prowess with a spanner and soldering iron remained undimmed.
He was the driving force behind the rebuild of the famous Colossus computer and one of the founders of The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, as well as being a British spy-catcher.
While many critics have not been kind to True Legend, I love it and have included it on my list of best films of the year at #10. Reviewers have dissed the film for being poorly scripted and disjointed. To which I respond: since when does the success of a martial arts flick depend on a tight cohesive script? It’s in the nature of chop socky flicks to have a certain loosy goosy lunacy.This ain’t fucking David Mamet. It’s kung fu!
Yuen Woo Ping has been making cutting edge martial arts films since 1978 when his groundbreaking classic Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow starring Jackie Chan burst on the scene like a fist to the solar plexus. He is arguably the greatest director and choreographer of action scenes in the history of cinema. His credits include the fight sequences in The Matrix, Kill Bill, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Kung Fu Hustle. Ping’s latest wi-fu spectacle True Legend is among the finest martial arts films produced in the past two decades. While the film features a shitload of computer generated imagery, at heart it’s an old school kung fu movie. A morality play with grand emotions and epic action, True Legend engages the heart while being breathtakingly thrilling. Plus, it has a terrific cast: the awesome Vincent Zhao, Gordon Liu (as Old Sage), the late David Carradine in his last film appearance and Michelle Yeoh (as Physician Yu). Just when you thought Asian action flicks had lost their mojo, Yuen Woo Ping resurrects the genre once again.
True Legend has yet to receive a theatrical release in the States, but you can buy it on DVD here.
Previously on Dangerous Minds: Exclusive video of Yuen Woo Ping at Fantastic Fest.
I’m putting together my film and music ‘best of’ lists for 2010. Kicking it off with the number 10 best album of this year: Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s Before Today.
L.A. popster Ariel Pink does a masterful job of evoking West Coast sixties vibrations, Zappaesque jazz/ funk grooves, psychedelic soul and 80’s new wave, bringing to mind everything from Shuggie Otis to The Strawberry Alarm Clock and Quicksilver Messenger Service to The Cure and Prince. Pink is an overachiever who hits his mark far more than he misses it. In Before Today, Pink has created a mini-epic that glides thru pop music history like Rollergirl on ecstasy. Beneath the glittering surface, there’s a density and complexity that constantly surprises and never bores. Pink is building castles in Brian Wilson’s sandbox.
In this track from Before Today, Ariel covers the Rockin’ Ramrods’ 1966 song ‘Bright Lit Blue Skies’.
Before there was Alice Cooper, Rocky Horror, Dr. John the Nightripper, The Cramps or Sabbath, there was Screaming Lord Sutch.
On June 16, 1999, David Sutch was found hanged at his home in London. For his friends and fans the world over it was a terrible and unexpected blow. Sutch’s obsession with horror movies and the macabre was well known, an integral part of his image, but it was strictly for laughs. If he had a dark side he kept it well hidden. True, he had been suffering from depression in recent years, especially since the death of his mother, but no one expected this surprise ending: dead by his own hand at the age of 59. Sutch was well loved by his many friends. He was a household name in Britain—practically a national treasure. He was to make a highly anticipated headlining appearance in Las Vegas at Halloween, only a four months away. Surely he had everything to live for. Lord Sutch in 1969 But when clinical depression wraps its dark cloak around a man, he’s completely alone. Tragically now, he’s gone but not forgotten. David Sutch will be remembered for many things. His colourful, larger than life personality was a fixture of the British political landscape as well as the entertainment world. Certainly his amazing recorded legacy ensures his place in rock’n'roll history in perpetuity: the wild rock’n'roll and horror sides he cut with Joe Meek, the demented mid-‘60s gems like “Train Kept A-Rollin’” and “All Black and Hairy”, the proto-psychedelic “The Cheat”, the hard rockin’ Heavy Friends - for someone supposedly with no discernible musical talent he sure made some great records. And if you make great records you live forever.
Read a fascinating and funny interview with the Lord at Ugly Things.
Here’s a documentary from 1964 of which there is little information to be found on the Internet. It’s filled with wonderful footage of Sutch performing live and that’s enuff for me.
Parts 2 - 4 after the jump…
The new generation of public intellectuals and pundits owes a lot to guys like Chalmers Johnson, who died yesterday at 79. This guy was one of the foremost experts on both America’s ascension as an empire and its inevitable decline, and he wrote the now-classic books Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire
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Like Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal, Johnson’s formed his worldview during the Cold War; his friend the progressive realist Steve Clemons calls him “a one time hard-right national security hawk” in the great piece he wrote today about the man. Most of us discovered Johnson after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and he’d cultivated his views about American imperialism. The Left in this country loved the irony of this academic with the old-school-Establishment-wonk demeanor breathing fire against Yankee hegemony. He’ll be missed.