Vader Abraham: The King of the Smurfs
I’m afraid this will haunt my dreams for weeks to come. Vader Abraham (!) makes me imagine a hippified Dr. Gene Scott. My deepest apologies to all who view this.
thx? Ned Raggett
I’m afraid this will haunt my dreams for weeks to come. Vader Abraham (!) makes me imagine a hippified Dr. Gene Scott. My deepest apologies to all who view this.
thx? Ned Raggett
Erykah Badu drops her latest future R&B opus New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh today. The above video is the original lead single Jump Up in the Air featuring Lil’ Wayne. After the song leaked early, Erykah decided to yank it off the album and kept it as a digital only bonus track. See what happens when you break the rules!
The video is a kaleidoscopic acid trip set to one of Erykah’s most psychedelic songs to date, featuring boomin’ hollow kicks and open claps laced with Funkadelic like harmonies and enough reverse reverb to make 1968-era George Clinton proud. Come to think of it, the video looks like Funkadelic’s first album come to life!
Check out Erykah Badu tonight at The El Rey Theatre if you’re in Los Angeles! She is hosting her own record release party with yours truly opening things up with a DJ set. My good friends Kutmah and J Rocc will be rocking it too, along with surprise guests!
Clips:
Planet Earth
PBS NOVA Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
Human Animal
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life
Life of Mammals
National Geographic - Ape Genius
Yann Arthus Bertrand - Home
TEDTalks: Susan Savage-Rumbaugh: Apes that write, start fires and play Pac-Man
What Darwin Didn’t Know
Quotes:
Mike Huckabee
Ken Ham
David Attenborough
Desmond Morris
Steven Pinker
Kenneth Miller
(via Arbroath)
From today’s Fishbowl LA newsletter comes this utterly stupefying clip of the “mad skillz” of right-wing Christian rapper, Polatik. Is this guy for (sur)real? Look at him! He must really think he’s helping the cause. What a tool! He makes even Michael Steele look like he’s got good instincts for expanding the Republican base! He raps about as well as Orrin Hatch! And man are his backing dancers FLY or what?!?! Look at the booty on those babes!
We were just watching the CSPAN feed from this weekend’s “Tea Party” hootinany in Nevada when we caught arguably the greatest (and by greatest we mean the absolute WORST) hip-hop performance of all time—from reactionary MC “Polatik.” Seriously, we can’t even figure out how to describe what we just saw. Like if someone shoved the love child of Chuck D and Mussolini onstage after it had spent the majority of its adult life sniffing glue…but funnier.
Can’t seem to find the Nevada clip anywhere online, but here’s an older performance from Waco, Texas. Almost as good.
Ya gotta love shit like this. Every single time these Tea baggers show up, they bring the stupid by the mega-tonnage. No younger voters are gonna look at something like this and be “inspired” to do anything… other than to register as Democrats! I say bring it on! Go Polatik go!
Nice. Is the audience silent throughout because they can’t believe what they’re seeing? Nary a titter until the very end. Seriously odd. The world is yours.
thx Ron Nachmann !
Update: This is indeed a hoax directed by Marc Klasfeld. Bravo !
Reality Sandwich excerpts “Autobiography of a Sadhu” by Rampuri. Balls-to-the-wall crazy like only India can offer.
As he repeated a mantra, Amar Puri Baba slipped the rudraksha bead on the janeu string, over my head.
“My brother, your guru, has given you the gift of rudraksha. This bead, which as you can see, is a seed from a tree, contains the power of discipleship. It is the manifestation of the covenant between humans and the Great God Shiva that the Path of Knowledge would be passed down through the tradition of discipleship. Shiva’s most uncompassionate manifestation, Rudra, shed a tear of compassion for mankind, and this became the Rudraksha tree. It pulls the pranas upward, and can be worn anywhere on the upper body to focus energy, but the one the guru gives you is worn over the heart, where your connection with the guru is established.”
Mangal Bharti concluded the giving of the five gifts by wrapping me in the ochre dhoti, creating little sleeves for my arms as he folded and tied the cloth in the traditional sannyasi way. “This final gift of the five is your protection and sheltering of Mother Earth. You see, it is the color of her soil, ochre, her life-blood. You see how long this fine cloth is when unfolded? It is a flag marking that you are in her hands, and that you are on the Path.”
Excellent, excellent article on Cary Grant’s love affair with acid. This is rather heart-warming… how come we never hear THIS side of history?
It was 1943. Cary Grant was starring in the motion picture Destination Tokyo; an action-filled wartime drama co-starring John Garfield and a deluge of racial slurs. While America was embroiled in the intense fighting of World War Two, Axis powers had surrounded the neutral country of Switzerland. Deep within Nazi surrounded boundaries, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman was busy toiling away in a dimly lit laboratory, about to study the properties of a synthesis he had abandoned five years earlier. Hoffman was trying to devise a chemical agent that could act as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant when he accidentally absorbed lysergic acid through his fingers. While Americans sat in darkened theaters enjoying Cary Grant’s portrayal of a submarine captain, Hoffman was experiencing accelerated thought patterns, polychromatic visions and an unbearable onslaught of intense emotion. This was the world’s first acid trip. The discovery was soon to transform the life of one of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars.
Cary Grant was the first mainstream celebrity to espouse the virtues of psychedelic drugs. Whereas novelist Aldous Huxley’s famous 1954 treatise The Doors of Perception recounted his remarkable experiences with mescaline, Huxley was hardly mainstream - a darling of intellectual circles to be sure, but a far cry from a matinee idol. Grant was one of the biggest stars Hollywood had to offer when he jumped headlong into Huxley’s Heaven and Hell. His endorsement of subconscious exploration, arguably, created more interest in LSD than Dr. Timothy Leary who was largely preaching to the converted.1 Grant on the other hand was the fantasy of countless Midwestern women. He convinced wholesome movie starlets like Esther Williams and Dyan Cannon to blow their minds. When Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping interviewed him, the topic of conversation wasn’t Cary’s favorite recipe or “the problem with youth today.” Instead, Cary Grant was telling happy homemakers that LSD was the greatest thing in the world.
This is kind of insane.
Civilization, a video mural created for the new Standard hotel in New York City, depicts a journey from hell to heaven interpreted through modern film language using computer-enhanced found footage. This epic video mural contains over 300 individual channels of looped video blended into a multi-layered seamless tableau of interconnecting images that illustrate a contemporary, satirical take on the concepts of Heaven and Hell.
Watch it in hi-res below (worth it).