Mr. Laner’s Krautrock post from earlier this week put me in a Can kind of mood (although it takes very little).  What follows below is a kinda wonderful fan-made video for Future Days, the epically dreamy title track from the final Can album to feature the vocal stylings of former street busker, Damo Suzuki.  The vid’s creator cribbed its imagery from banned films from the 20’s and 30’s.  Trippy visuals aside, as we ease into what should be a sunny Memorial Day weekend here in LA, make Future Days part of your soundtrack!

Kids say the darndest things.  I’m probably going to hell for posting this one.

 
It felt like the 80’s died last year with the passing of both Michael Jackson and John Hughes.  Losing Gary Coleman pretty much seals the deal for me, as Diff’rent Strokes was THE show as a kid.  Check out this classic episode up above condensed down to five minutes courtesy of the Minisode Network.

 
Yep, starve…to death.  A 41-year-old taxi driver and his wife were sentenced to 2 years in prison for choosing to play 10 hours a day at internet cafes rather than bottle feed their newborn daughter more than once a day.  And, for tragic irony, the couple’s game of choice, Prius, was one where they “played” raising a virtual baby. 

Court affidavits also stated that the girl, who was born premature and weighed 5 pounds, was fed rotten formula and, when she cried out of hunger, was beaten by her parents.  What did the couple name their newborn?  The Korean equivalent of “love.”  Oh, and, FYI: the mother received a lesser sentence because she’s currently pregnant with baby number two.  Some pre-sentencing video follows below:

 
South Korean Couple Let Baby Starve To Death

 
The sex lives of Catholic priests takes another controversial turn today with this story from Rome.  39 women who have engaged in longtime romantic relationships with priests have just penned an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI:

denouncing compulsory celibacy as a “torn up shroud.”  In the letter, the women describe the closeted lives they lead as companions to priests and ask the pope to consider that, perhaps, their men can only fulfill their priestly duties with their lives fulfilled by marriage.  “In order to become effective witnesses to the need for love, they need to embody it and experience it fully, in the way their nature demands it,” the letter said.  “Is it a sick nature?  A transgressing one?”

While the Vatican has declined comment, one of the letter’s authors, Stefania Salomone (above), is hardly afraid to voice her opinions.  The 42-year old, who’s been romantically involved with a priest on at least two occasions, points out that reconciling faith with sexuality wasn’t always so difficult, “most of the Apostles were married, and so were the presbyteroi, the elders who exercised priestly authority in the first Christian communities, as described in the Act of the Apostles and St. Paul’s letters.” 

To better help others like her, Salomone has launched a site for women romantically involved with priests.  The group letter to Pope Benedict was recently translated into (often moving) English.  You can read it in its entirety here, but it ends, stingingly, with the following quote from church critic, Eugen Drewermann:

The God that Jesus spoke about wants precisely what the Catholic Church today fears more than anything: free, happy and mature human life, which is not born of anguish, but of obedient trust and which is free from the limitations of the tyranny of a traditional theology that prefers to seek the truth of God in sacred scripture rather than in the sanctity of human life.

My Father, My Lover: Priests Struggle With Celibacy

 
Dear Dangerous Mind reader,

Now that I have your attention, can we talk? You know us, but we really don’t know who you are. Yet.

Would you mind, please, taking a minute to fill out our short questionnaire? Our advertising sales agency, Largetail would like to get an idea of who Dangerous Minds readers are and, frankly, when they’re out there selling advertising for us, it’s handy for them to be armed with information like “76% of DM readers bought a DVD in the past year” or “38% of DM readers have a Blu-ray player” are NetFlix subscribers, have iPhones, are between the ages of etc, etc, etc. You get the idea.

We’re also interested in what kind of culture you are consuming. What movies you are seeing, books you are reading and what music you are listening to. Some of the questions are not of interest to potential advertisers, they are only really of interest to us. Like I was saying, we need this information to sell adverising, yes, but we also want to know who is out there reading this blog.

Won’t you take a minute and fill out the survey, please? Each person who completes the survey will be eligible to win a selection of books from our friends at Feral House and Process Media Inc. Click here to take survey. Thank you!

 
Wolfgang Riechmann‘s sole solo LP is a minor masterpiece of late 70’s German electronica, very much of a piece with Kraftwerk’s concurrent LPs but a bit more lush and psychedelic. In fact, Riechmann played with future Kraftwerk member Wolgang Flür and Neu’s Michael Rother in Spirits of Sound in the 1960s. What’s not so wunderbar is that Riechmann was stabbed to death in a bar brawl just three weeks before the release of this LP.

 
Head Heritage: WOLFGANG RIECHMANN—WUNDERBAR
KRAFTWERK AND THE ELECTRONIC REVOLUTION

 
(via Mister Honk)

 
Or something like that… Mind rot at its finest!

Thanks, Bill Meehan!

 
I was thrilled to read Vaughan Bell’s short essay at Slate about Milton Rokeach’s rarely encountered 1964 book, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. It’s one of my all time favorite books, but alas, one that no one else I’ve ever met has heard of or read. It’s nearly impossible to find for a reasonable price. The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is a psychiatric case study by Rokeach, a detailing of his experiment with a trio of schizophrenic patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The three men—who each harbored the delusional belief that he was Jesus Christ returned—were forced to live with each other in a mental hospital to see if their beliefs could be challenged enough to effect a break-through in at least one of them.

But it wasn’t that simple, as Rokeach found out. Bell writes:

But the book makes for starkly uncomfortable reading as it recounts how the researchers blithely and unethically manipulated the lives of Leon, Joseph, and Clyde in the service of academic curiosity. In one of the most bizarre sections, the researchers begin colluding with the men’s delusions in a deceptive attempt to change their beliefs from within their own frame of reference. The youngest patient, Leon, starts receiving letters from the character he believes to be his wife, “Madame Yeti Woman,” in which she professes her love and suggests minor changes to his routine. Then Joseph, a French Canadian native, starts receiving faked letters from the hospital boss advising certain changes in routine that might benefit his recovery. Despite an initially engaging correspondence, both the delusional spouse and the illusory boss begin to challenge the Christs’ beliefs more than is comfortable, and contact is quickly broken off.

In fact, very little seems to shift the identities of the self-appointed Messiahs. They debate, argue, at one point come to blows, but show few signs that their beliefs have become any less intense. Only Leon seems to waver, eventually asking to be addressed as “Dr Righteous Idealed Dung” instead of his previous moniker of “Dr Domino dominorum et Rex rexarum, Simplis Christianus Puer Mentalis Doctor, reincarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.” Rokeach interprets this more as an attempt to avoid conflict than a reflection of any genuine identity change. The Christs explain one another’s claims to divinity in predictably idiosyncratic ways: Clyde, an elderly gentleman, declares that his companions are, in fact, dead, and that it is the “machines” inside them that produce their false claims, while the other two explain the contradiction by noting that their companions are “crazy” or “duped” or that they don’t really mean what they say.

In hindsight, the Three Christs study looks less like a promising experiment than the absurd plan of a psychologist who suffered the triumph of passion over good sense. The men’s delusions barely shifted over the two years, and from an academic perspective, Rokeach did not make any grand discoveries concerning the psychology of identity and belief. Instead, his conclusions revolve around the personal lives of three particular (and particularly unfortunate) men. He falls back—rather meekly, perhaps—on the Freudian suggestion that their delusions were sparked by confusion over sexual identity, and attempts to end on a flourish by noting that we all “seek ways to live with one another in peace,” even in the face of the most fundamental disagreements. As for the ethics of the study, Rokeach eventually realized its manipulative nature and apologized in an afterword to the 1984 edition: “I really had no right, even in the name of science, to play God and interfere round the clock with their daily lives.”

There’s another piece I found mentioning the book that’s worth bringing in here, too, because it uses the Three Christs of Ypsilanti as a microcosm of how the world’s major religions all believe they have the one truth and worship the one true god. A guy named Steve Bhaerman who writes a humor column under the pen name “Swami Beyondananda” at a New Age website called InnerSelf had a profound insight about the book, seeing the three messianically-challenged protagonists as stand-ins for the world’s big three religions, each under the delusion that their “truth” is the true truth and it’s the other guy’s religion that is superstitious bullshit:

I hadn’t thought about that book for years, until I was reminded of it by two seemingly unrelated news items. The first involved the Middle East peace process, which recently has been neither peaceful nor much of a process. A huge seemingly unresolvable dispute involves Jerusalem, which houses the sacred sites of three major religions. Someone had the enlightening suggestion that Jerusalem be ruled by God. Of course, the next question was, whose God?

The other news item was about the Catholic church declaring that for all intents and purposes, IT alone is the one sure way to heaven—and perhaps more important, the only certain way to avoid hell. A friend of mine who owns a marketing business (and incidentally grew up Catholic) says, “I can only dream of having such an unbeatable marketing premise. Buy my product, go to heaven. Buy the other guy’s, go to hell.” Not to single out the Catholics, though. Fundamentalists of every stripe play out a dyslexic version of that childhood taunt, “My dog’s better than your dog.” Except that “my God’s better than your God” has caused millions of deaths and oceans of tears.

And that’s when it occurred to me that the three major religious systems are like the Three Christs of Ypsilanti. Each lives in a delusional system that it alone is the One True Path. And now, God has placed them all in a therapy group to see if they can accommodate one another.

Brilliant. If you are interested, some parts of The Three Christ of Ypsilanti can be read online here.

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (InnerSelf)

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus: In the late 1950s, three men who identified as the Son of God were forced to live together in a mental hospital. What happened? (Slate)