The eternally uncool G.E. Smith is leading the house band at the Republican National Convention. I’ve never been able to stand this guy and his support of Trump has doubled his loathsome quotient. Kids, being in a band doesn’t automatically make you cool. G.E. Smith is to rock and roll what Pia Zadora is to acting.

No matter who Smith played with, whether it was Dylan or Bowie, he always tried to upstage the artist he was supposed to be supporting. With his rigor mortis grin and guitar-slinger grimaces, Smith is one of the most inauthentic musicians on the fucking planet. Nothing notable about his style at all. A hired gun who can play some fills and solos while the front man grabs a fresh beer or a bottle of water from the drum stand.

Remember Smith’s insufferable mugging on SNL? Buffoon rock.

 
In the video below, watch Trump’s house band desecrate David Bowie’s “Station To Station.” Smith’s prior work with Bowie notwithstanding, would Smith and his band of whores have dared to do this if Bowie were still alive? And what did all those old, white conventioneers think of lyrics like:

It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine
I’m thinking that it must be love
It’s too late to be grateful

I’ve always had big ideals regarding rock and roll. You know, that it stood for something. That it was music of rebellion and hope. That rock and roll could change the world. And for awhile it did. The Beatles being the main force of raising consciousness. But I’ve been consistently disappointed over the years by bands selling out and selling out to Trump is particularly egregious in my opinion. Things have gone from “I sold my soul for rock and roll” to “I sold my rock and roll and my soul.”
 

 
As David Bowie fans are all too well aware, there’s very little professionally shot footage—almost none—of his theatrical “Diamond Dogs” tour from 1974. The best filmed example we have of what that stage set looked like comes from Alan Yentob’s famous BBC documentary Cracked Actor. Yentob must’ve chosen his title before shooting Bowie’s performance at the Universal Amphitheater on September 5th, 1974 as he concentrated resources on shooting the number that provided his (rather apt) title. When Bowie performed “Cracked Actor” on that tour, he donned a cape and “celebrity” sunglasses, singing into a skull ala Hamlet. He even French-kissed the skull as makeup artists and photographers fussed around him, an irresistible visual showpiece for the documentarian trying to make sense of his glamorous but enigmatically alien subject.

But there were no complete songs in the film. That’s where Nacho Video comes in. He’s the YouTuber who created the amazing edit of “Station to Station” we recently featured here:

I have been asked many times to create some videos for Bowie’s ‘74 tour. There is very little material available, but I have gathered all the footage that’s out there, I think. Among the Super 8 stuff there are some possibilities, tho’ a lot of labor will be required.

In the meantime, I’ve taken the obvious easy road of first working on the footage from the wonderful 1974 Alan Yentob BBC documentary, Cracked Actor. The in concert materiel it contains is really well filmed, as one would expect from the BBC. Unfortunately, it contains no complete song.

Therefore some imagination and technology is required. Here, I am more or less retreading what others have tried before, but not at this quality.

Dig it.
 

Samantha Fox and Lemmy Kilmister.
 
Samantha Fox was technically still a very popular topless Page 3 girl in The Sun and not yet an 80s pop star when she was asked for her opinions on two new singles by The Smiths and The Fall for UK music magazine Smash Hits in July of 1986. Apparently she was not terribly impressed by either single and took them to task using insightful words like “crappy” to tear apart The Fall’s “Living Too Late.” When it came to Miss Fox’s thoughts on The Smiths the target of her disdain would of course be directed at moody vocalist Morrissey. Here’s Fox dissecting Moz as only a misguided 20-something could in 1986:

I’m sorry to say but I find them very depressing. The lead singer’s voice sounds like he’s in pain—is that Morrissey? He can’t sing and it gives me a headache. In all his interviews he’s “Mister Nasty” too and goes moan, moan, moan.

Well, at least Samantha got one thing right here because of COURSE Morrissey is in pain. Anyone who writes songs about how getting mowed over a ten-ton truck being a “heavenly way to die” or wishes you an “Unhappy Birthday” then proceeds to note that he’s going to “kill his dog” is clearly in pain. But I digress. If you’d like to read Samantha Fox’s thoughts in full on The Smiths, The Fall as well as Prince, Julian Lennon and Bryan Adams, I’ve posted a few of her amusing reviews for you below. You can also read all of Fox’s deep thoughts during her brief stint with Smash Hits as a record reviewer over at the fantasitc online archive for the magazine, Like Punk Never Happened run by the excellent Brian McCloskey.
 

Samantha Fox on The Smiths and The Fall from Smash Hits magazine, July, 1986.
 

 
Keep reading after the jump…

 
Watching Joe Pyne is interesting because he almost seems ahead of his time. Pyne was a broadcaster who had a series of panel talk shows in Wilmington, Delaware, and Los Angeles in the 1960s. He died of lung cancer in 1970 at the age of 45.

Many have cited Joe Pyne as the spiritual predecessor to figures like Morton Downey Jr. and Bill O’Reilly but…. well, I think that sells him a little short. I can’t stand those two guys, but I like watching Pyne. Pyne was cutting and sarcastic but was seldom all that nasty about it. He was host to controversial figures who weren’t appearing in other parts of the TV spectrum…. for instance, he would have KKK members on, or members of the Nazi Party, or people who were followers of Charles Manson. A typical guest was Sam Sloan, at that time a promoter of the Sexual Freedom League. Sure, Pyne had them on to oppose them or ridicule them, and you can see the template there, especially for Downey’s show. O’Reilly has too much psychological baggage and rage to really do justice to the Pyne comp—O’Reilly’s also more of a charlatan than Pyne was. With Joe Pyne there was no pretense.

Pyne represented the Archie Bunker perspective fairly honestly, he was derisive and contemptuous of oddball or extreme things and he understood that he had the ability to turn a decent foil into excellent TV. And somehow the stakes were never that high, the idea wasn’t so much “this is a threat that must be stamped out,” it was more like self-expression. You couldn’t imagine Joe Pyne starting a war over Christmas—but if he stumbled onto one, you know what side he’d be on.

Anton LaVey started the Church of Satan in 1966. On February 1, 1967, he performed a much-publicized “first Satanic wedding ceremony” uniting journalist John Raymond and New York City socialite Judith Case. That was the event that made Pyne think that LaVey belonged on his show.

Keep reading after the jump…

 
The path to success is often circuitous, filled with detours, wrong turnings, dead ends and log-jammed highways. Perseverance and a great desire to succeed are requisite. Where one starts off is sometimes far removed from where one arrives.

Sophia Loren was a mere fifteen-year-old when she stood in line with the other young girls hoping to win the glittering prize of Miss Italy in Rome 1950. The Miss Italy beauty contest was devised as a “pick-me-up” for the defeated and beleaguered Italian nation after the Second World War in 1946.

Many of those early Miss Italia winners and contestants became well known in Italy and abroad. In 1947 alone there were four contestants who later went on to Italian entertainment fame: Lucia Bose (the winner that year), Gianna Maria Canale (second place), Gina Lollobrigida (third), and Eleonora Rossi Drago (fourth).

In 1950 the competition was broadcast live on radio. This was the year Miss Loren made her appearance under the name Sofia Scicolone.  However, the teenage beauty was considered “too provocative” to win the contest and the judging panel awarded Miss Loren the specially devised title of “Miss Eleganza 1950.”

Maria Bugliari won the title of Miss Italy but her success was small potatoes when compared to the long and brilliant career Sophia Loren achieved as an actress from then on.
 

 

 
More early photos of Sophia Loren, after the jump…

 
In 1975, the notable British buttrock band UFO released Force It, a barrage of boogie riffs and and double-entendre lyrics about fucking. As hesher-metal albums go, it was fairly interchangeable with a lot of the era’s hard rock, but its cover art has proven durable even as the band’s sound has aged. It’s a photograph depicting what could be read as a coercive sexual advance between a couple of indeterminate sex, one of whom is sans pants. Collaged into the photo are many, many faucets.

Faucet. Force it. You get it, ha ha, let’s move on.

The cover was designed by one of the era’s most distinctive and forward-thinking design studios, Hipgnosis. The firm consisted of designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, and were responsible for singularly surreal album art for Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, and Led Zeppelin, among many, many other clients. Force It was hardly their only controversial work, but it ranked high on that score. The US version of the cover was censored, by making the aggressively embracing couple half transparent. The irony here is that the models for that cover were already known for works that made the Force It cover look kid-friendly. From Neil Daniels’ High Stakes & Dangerous Men: The UFO Story,:

The artwork was risky for the time and because of the amount of flesh on display was almost banned—well, it was the 1970s, a non-PC age, but also surprisingly prudish too. It was toned down for the USA release, where they were even more prudish. One point of interest, is that the gender of the couple remained a cause of debate amongst UFO fans, but the couple turned out to be Genesis P. Orridge [sic] and his then girlfriend Cosey Fanni Tutti.

 

Kissing and buttocks mercifully ghosted for delicate American sensibilities.

Many of this blog’s regular readers know that Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti were, at the time, the principals behind COUM Transmissions, an art group known for incredibly transgressive performances that included heavy doses of kink, up to and including unsimulated bleeding and vomiting, violence, and even live sex—so this “controversial” photo was actually one of the tamest things they’d ever done. The year after Force It, COUM would evolve into the pioneering industrial band Throbbing Gristle, and Throbbing Gristle included in its membership one Peter Christopherson, who in the mid ‘70s was an assistant at…Hipgnosis.

More after the jump…

 
Okay, sure, so this is probably just totally gross and unnecessary, but hey, in my defense, my job here at Dangerous Minds is—often, not always, but often—to expose you, our dear readers, to the bowels of Internet hell. And this, unfortunately, includes posting about cupcakes that look like giant cystic pimples that you can actually squeeze! Blessed By Baking, in California came up with this idea because of the Internets’ obsession with pimple-popping videos on YouTube by Dr. Pimple Popper. Apparently people are strangely satisfied by watching videos of pimples and blackheads being extracted.

So naturally the next step with this obsession is to make squeezable pimple cupcakes, right? Ew.

According to Blessed By Baking, the cupcakes taste awesome. The yellow pus-like substance is actually custard or lemon curd. To be honest, I wouldn’t touch this shit. No way!

 
via Daily Mail

 
Whereas I am certainly no admirer of GG Allin—he brought nothing to rock and roll and may his soul rot in Hell—I admittedly LOL’d at this vintage local news clip about one of his shows in Orlando, FL in the early 1990s reported on by none other than future Fox News anchor Shepard Smith!

During this WCPX-News 6 evening news broadcast Smith told viewers about how clubgoers at the Space Fish Cafe had

“... paid $7 to watch a man defecate into his own hand while he was nude. And that is just the beginning.”

Smith is almost comically unflappable at the notion of an asshole throwing his own shit around a nightclub. No wonder Fox News hired him.

But the real star of the show is the guy who was merely an innocent bystander when the feces-covered Allin ran out of the club. The one who makes the LOL comment about “well-to-do white kids.” I’d quote it here but I’d rather force you to watch it.

Near the end of the report, the club’s owner oddly muses that this is “the first bit of the big city that’s come to Orlando.” What does that even mean in this context? Which big city is he referring to?
 

 
When the fashion designer Alexander McQueen sewed locks of his hair into his 1992 show “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims,” it probably never crossed his mind that he was giving some scientifically oriented person in the future a way to generate human tissue with his own genetic material.

But the year is now 2016, and that’s exactly what student Tina Gorjanc is doing—and she’s doing it, remarkably, as a way of emulating McQueen himself, by making clothes out of skin grown from McQueen’s DNA.

McQueen, one of the most arresting and experimental fashion designers of our time, committed suicide in 2010; the next year, Savage Beauty, a retrospective of his creations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art curated by Andrew Bolton, was by far the most talked about show of 2011, causing patrons to wait for hours in lengthy lines stretching around the block.

As part of her “Pure Human” project, Gorjanc, a student at London’s Central Saint Martins art school, is sourcing the iconic designer’s DNA from the locks of his own hair that were incorporated into his first collection inspired by Jack the Ripper. She has already filed a patent on it after convincing the owner of the collection to give her some of McQueen’s genetic material.

We’re still a ways away from actual objects made out of skin with McQueen’s DNA. Gorjanc’s designs at Central Saint Martins’ end-of-year show were speculative designs using pig skin offcuts, chosen for their resemblance to human skin, and with layers of colour and silicon applied to the surface of the leather to enhance the similarity.

However, the plan is for Gorjanc harvesting McQueen’s DNA into skin tissue, which will then be tanned and turned into human leather.

Gorjanc gave the following comment to Dezeen Magazine:
 

The Pure Human project was designed as a critical design project that aims to address shortcomings concerning the protection of biological information and move the debate forward using current legal structures. ... If a student like me was able to patent a material extracted from Alexander McQueen’s biological information as there was no legislation to stop me, we can only imagine what big corporations with bigger funding are going to be capable of doing in the future.

 
Hey, it might be creepy, but at least she didn’t resort to the collection methods used by fashion desinger Jame Gumb in Thomas Harris’ novel The Silence of the Lambs......
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…....

 
There’s a trend that’s only been getting bigger recently in the tattoo community…. stick ‘n’ pokes. What started out as a jail tattoo (or a kitchen hobby) needing only a pen, needle, ink, bottle cap and a steady hand has turned into something tattoo parlors now offer. And it can be pretty expensive. They charge hourly, of course, and really intricate stick ‘n’ poke work can take a very long time. Or you can get your drunkass friend to do it one convivial late night and end up with something that could be…. well… less than impressive.

Stick ‘n’ pokes seem to be tied up with the more DIY elements of the punk rock community. There is a scene in Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization where X and friends are seen hanging out in their living room and John Doe is giving a friend, Top Jimmy, a stick ‘n’ poke. In fact, the whole scene is a late night post X show stick n’ poke party.
 

 
Intrigued by this tie in of stick ‘n’ pokes and punk music, I reached out to Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females, someone who has a reputation for stick ‘n’ poking:

Marissa says:

“Stick ‘n’ pokes often come along with a fun story. Tattoos done in a proper studio can come along with a good story as well, but from what I’ve experienced, a DIY tattoo is often born from chaos. I love that sort of abandon, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize that drunkenly marking someone’s flesh isn’t something I’m so keen on doing.”

As far as learning how to tattoo, she says:

“An artist and musician who goes by the name Ben Snakepit taught me how to give myself a tattoo while Screaming Females was on tour in Austin in 2008. I must have been twenty years old at the time. Ben is well known for an autobiographical comic he makes called Snakepit.”

 

Marissa tattooing her bassist, King Mike’s leg while their drummer sleeps on a couch.
 
Now stick ‘n’ poke parties are becoming trendy. Here’s a flyer for an event that included free stick ‘n’ poke tattoos, music, live painting and drinks. Mainstream culture seems to be celebrating the idea of these simple little lowly tattoos. Get your 10-year-old sister to draw you something, it will be the perfect kitchen tattoo.
 

 
And yet stick ‘n’ pokes can truly be art. Certain tattoo artists have mastered stick ‘n’ pokes as simply another option at the local tat shop. Jenna Bouma aka Slowerblack is one such artist who does amazing work. You would never know her tattoos are hand-poked.
 

 
More stick’n’ poke tattoos after the jump…