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Happy Mama’s Day!
05.09.2010
02:09 pm
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Posted by Elvin Estela
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05.09.2010
02:09 pm
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I don’t have alien eyes!
05.09.2010
01:45 am
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Maaan, why haters gon’ tell you you have googly alien hybrid eyes?

Posted by Jason Louv
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05.09.2010
01:45 am
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Incredibly lazy dog rides incredibly slow turtle
05.08.2010
10:48 pm
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“Our dog named Hope likes to ride this random turtle we found who we named Carl”
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Dalmation Needs A Bike

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.08.2010
10:48 pm
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Party Monster: New Michael Alig prison interview
05.08.2010
09:27 pm
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Interview magazine has a long and fascinating interview with so -called “Club Kid Murderer” Michael Alig, subject of the film Party Monster. I met Michael when he was a student at Fordham University. I actually met him on the day I moved to New York, in November 1984. That night, at the Area nightclub, Michael physically pushed me into Andy Warhol. Welcome to New York!

At that time Michael was a smart, sweet and very attention-starved kid from Chicago. He was extremely charismatic, if somewhat amoral and cruel Although I was never the object of Michael’s cruel streak, I did witness it on several occasions. He didn’t seem to have a self-censorship mechanism in this makeup. He once stole a Nina Hagen cassette from me. I knew he did it for the sole reason that he was the only person besides me and my roommate to be in the apartment—since I had lived there. He brought it back, but blamed his then boyfriend who had never been in the apartment.

I shrugged it off and continued to have a cordial relationship with Michael over the years, but had not spoken to him in several years when the murder happened. The interview shows him contrite and sad about what happened, if overly optimistic about when he’ll get out.

Here’s an excerpt where interviewer Christopher Bollen asks about the infamous outlaw parties:

BOLLEN: That’s when you started doing the Outlaw Parties as promotion?

ALIG: That was a gimmick to get people to come to the clubs. Vito Bruno had done it before us, and I started doing mine with him so it wouldn’t seem like I was stealing someone else’s idea. People weren’t coming for the free drinks anymore, so Outlaw Parties were a great draw, which we always held suspiciously close to the club. When the bust happened, there would be 2,000 great people two blocks away, and we would have a surprise open bar for them, and the club would get a rush of people. It was a marketing tool.

BOLLEN: Where are some of the Outlaw Party locations you remember being most successful?

ALIG: Dunkin’ Donuts, the train bridge that is now the High Line, one of the piers. When the World was paying, we did one party at the Pitt Street pool. When the Red Zone was paying, we did one in a building that had recently exploded. It had been cordoned off with yellow police tape, and we did a party right inside the building.

BOLLEN: Walt told me you had one party in a crack house called ID that was off the Hudson River.

ALIG: It wasn’t a crack house. It was an abandoned building where some homeless people were living. Like a squat. We paid them in crack.

BOLLEN: So you made them into crack addicts.

ALIG: No, they were crack addicts before that. At first we gave them $100 to have the party there, but we noticed they would run out and buy crack with the money, so we just made it easier for them and gave them the crack.

 
Below: Club kids (including DM pal, James St, James) on the Donahue show:
 

 
The infamous “outlaw party” held in the Times Square McDonald’s which was recreated in Party Monster. This footage was shot by the late Nelson Sullivan (I was at this party, but am not seen in the footage).
 

 
Michael Alig interviewed by Christopher Bollen (Interview)

The Prison Art of Michael Alig (Black Book)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.08.2010
09:27 pm
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The Crackdown
05.08.2010
05:26 pm
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The biggest stock market crash in history and Greece falls apart, shaking the core illusions that prop up the US and EU…. Sweet fuck what a week.

In the US we have the ultrablack humor of seeing how illusory our “system” really is; the Zeitgeisters of the world have been bonkering on for years about how the fact our system is based on greenbacks “magically” produced by the Fed makes our economy an illusion. Well, yes, but if anything, Wednesday showed how understated they were being: the entire global economy, apparently, can be brought down by somebody’s finger missing the “m” on their keyboard and hitting the “b” instead. Magic tricks indeed. Meanwhile, in the EU, the continued disintegration of Greece is calling the series of bluffs that underpin the stability of the European Union like it’s 1968 all over again but without the clothes.

It all feels like a big joke that people are tired of perpetuating. “Let’s play hypercapitalism” is getting a bit old from the looks of how people are reacting to it. It’s been old for generations but now the promised payouts seem to be hardly worth the pretense; why stay at the table when all you’re likely to win is the new Usher album and maybe, if you work really hard, a good three years at some point in your life where you can pretend you’re living the house-cars-kids American Dream before they fire you and take all their toys back and leave you with the bill?

Yes, I propose that what we’re seeing is people calling the bluff. It’s less a failure of a system that we all know was broken anyway and more a lurch towards something better, towards simpler living and a refocus on the really important parts of being alive – like building a soul instead of more mini-malls. (I may or may not have crunched the detailed astrological math on the stock market crashing in order to back up this statement. That shit’s for hippies anyway.)

So welcome again to 2010, the year of vomiting up as much as we can of the last 2000 years of this utter bullshit patriarchal woman-hating child-hating life-hating nature-hating nonsense. You’ll want an empty stomach when you’re coming up at the party anyway, so have a few glasses of water and here’s hoping you have somebody to hold your forehead while you yak.

In the meantime, watch this small masterpiece from German death diva Billie Ray Martin (via Loki23). It’ll make you feel much better.

Posted by Jason Louv
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05.08.2010
05:26 pm
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Teenage girls ‘speaking in tongues’
05.08.2010
05:04 pm
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No, this is not the aftermath of a Justin Bieber concert, these girls are giddy for Jesus. This YouTube clip of Pentecostal teenage girls seen “speaking in tongues” after a church service is a depressing thing to watch. These girls are the victims of peer pressure and slow, steady intellectual child abuse. Compare and contrast their brainwashed hysteria to that of the religious/sexual hysteria of the nuns in Ken Russell’s classic—but seldom seen—film, The Devils.
 

 
Via Christian Nightmares.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.08.2010
05:04 pm
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How do astronauts sh*t in space?
05.08.2010
05:01 pm
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You know you’re curious.  From NASAtelevision:

Mike Massimino helps answer the one question he and other astronauts get asked most often: “How do you ‘go’ in space?” Mike catches up with STS-132 Mission Specialists Steve Bowen and Piers Sellers as they get some “refreshers” on the use of shuttle Atlantis’ “Space Potty.” (Training includes an “alignment camera.”) Bowen, Sellers and their four crewmates are scheduled to launch aboard Atlantis for the International Space Station on May 14. The workings of a space toilet, on “STS-132: Behind the Scenes, Vol. 1

Update: Lenny Smith says:
 

 
(via Nerdcore )

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.08.2010
05:01 pm
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The Stones in exile
05.08.2010
04:28 pm
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How did I manage to post this before Novicoff or Metzger ? Bet your ass I’ll be viewing this doc as soon as I’m able.

 
Bonus: My fave one-two punch from Exile

Posted by Brad Laner
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05.08.2010
04:28 pm
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Coachella 2011 line-up
05.08.2010
03:42 pm
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You read it here first.
 
(via Mister Honk)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.08.2010
03:42 pm
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Blondie’s Autoamerican: A lost classic
05.07.2010
10:50 pm
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Debbie Harry by Andy Warhol
 
How can it be that we haven’t yet covered Blondie on this blog? What a tragic oversight! One that I must redress immediately…

I absolutely loved Blondie when I was a kid, after discovering them on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert when I would have been about ten. I recall being transfixed by how beautiful Debbie Harry was and thinking how cool she dressed. I had never seen a girl who looked like this before… and I was quite impressed. Debbie Harry made a strong impression on my young mind that a keen and idiosyncratic fashion sense most probably signaled a female creature of high intelligence (nearly, but not always, true). I was a fan from that moment on, believe me when I tell you…

The first Blondie song I heard on that day was In The Sun. I danced and pogoed around my grandparent’s living room in my socks, sliding on the floor as I did so. Watch the clip below. It was an exhilarating thing to see something like this back then. I was a kid very attuned to rock music—the way most ten-year-olds today are into SpongeBob SquarePants—and Blondie was a real sit up and pay attention change of pace from Foghat, Uriah Heap and REO Speedwagon, the groups normally seen on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.
 

 
Completely aside from the insanely sassy gorgeousness of Debbie Harry, Blondie really stood apart musically from everything else that was going on at the time. Their songs were catchy, upbeat and fun. Despite their CBGBs pedigree, they really were never punks. There was a knowing calculation behind their persona, a campy, cabaret vision of ‘60s girl groups and Farfisa-infused garage pop.

For my money, the greatest artistic statement made by the band is 1980’s Autoamerican, an album reviewed poorly when it came out and that has never really been properly re-evaluated by either critics or audiences.

Autoamerican has aged very, very well. It doesn’t sound like anything else other than Blondie and so is a bit timeless in that sense. The opening track, Europa, a brooding modernist instrumental that dissolves into a spoken word rant from Harry extolling the virtues of cars. It’s an amazing song and a cool way to open the collection. The album contains both The Tide is High (originally a late ‘60s rocksteady hit in Jamaica for the Paragons and U-Roy—I bow to their genetic coolness for knowing about this song then) and Rapture, the song that, more than any other piece of music introduced the world to the concept of what rap music was. It’s a masterpiece of pop. I listened to it three times today—quite loud—and the skill, charm and verbal dexterity with which Debbie Harry casually rattles off her dada-hipster rhymes still astonishes 30 years later. It’s got a groove as funky as one written by James Brown, Prince or George Clinton, a feat almost no other white group can lay claim to.
 

 
My favorite moment on Autoamerican is T-Birds, a soaring piece of road music featuring angelic backing vocals courtesy of Flo and Eddie. If you’ve never heard Autoamerican before—and you call yourself a music fan—get your hands on it and give it a chance. Truly Autoamerican is one of the great lost albums of the New Wave era.
 
Bonus clip: Blondie do a cover of Goldfinger on German television’s Musikladen show: in 1977:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.07.2010
10:50 pm
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