We here at Dangerous Minds generally steer clear of the “cute.” It’s not that we’re actively anti-cute or anything, it’s just that “cute” rarely intersects with our curation filter of “dangerous.” The kids in Lindsay Morris’ photography however, manage to be both dangerous and adorable. Morris documented children aged 5-12 attending a camp where children are free to express their gender. They call it Camp “You Are You” but that’s actually a pseudonym to protect the campers’ privacy and all children were photographed with parental permission.

From Morris:

For many of these children, their perceptions of their gender are misaligned with their bodies. They may later identify as gay, transgender, or somewhere in between. This is just one way of being that has always existed, but only now are we developing the ability to say it’s OK not to put everyone in a neat little box. It will require all of us to break the habit of assigning individuals a gender label and to start thinking of gender on a broader spectrum. I know how lonely, and at times traumatic, life for an LGBT child can be. Looking over your shoulder and navigating your way through curious classmates and the occasional bully can be exhausting. That need to explain one’s self does not exist at camp. Pure freedom of expression is a compelling and emotional thing to witness.

Lindsay Morris is publishing a book in October, a resource for adults working with queer youth and she’d like to eventually travel with a multimedia show of the project. Her biggest goal is to start a fund for the kids who can’t afford the camp so that every child can have access to a safe space of their peers.

Related: 12 Things Every Gender Nonconforming Child Wants You To Know
 

 

 

 

 
More of Lindsay Morris’ photo series after the jump…
 

 
If you haven’t noticed—and it would be easy not to, because they aren’t showing up in many retail outlets yet, mostly just Amazon—over the course of the past year UMe, the catalog division of Universal Music Group that puts out all of those “super deluxe” two and three CD sets of classic albums, has started releasing high definition Blu-ray “Pure Audio” discs.

The BD discs contain no video content, although they certainly could (hint, hint), but what they do offer should be considered as close to the master tape, as heard in the recording studio, as is possible to experience in your own home. In terms of their HD-DTS Master Audio or Dolby TrueHD tracks, it’s probably not possible to give any more definition to a digital audio signal and expect the human ear to even be able to detect it. If it’s feasible to add a 5.1 surround mix to the discs, they do so (although when they don’t, it becomes a bit problematic from a consumer standpoint, but more on this below.)

So far UMe’s roster of “High Fidelity Blu-ray Pure Audio” discs include stalwart titles like Nirvana’s Nevermind and In Utero, Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, Miles Davis’ soundtrack album for Louis Malle’s L’Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud, White Light/White Heat and The Velvet Underground & Nico, Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key of Life, Derek & The Dominos’ Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, the fifty song Rolling Stones GRRR! comp, Let It Bleed, and Exile On Main St., Ella & Louis, I Put A Spell On You by Nina Simone, Selling England By The Pound by Genesis, John Lennon’s Imagine, Queen’s A Night At The Opera, Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire De Melody Nelson and a handful of jazz and classical offerings, about fifty in all. 5.1 surround mixes of The Who’s Quadrophenia and an expanded version of the Legend collection of Bob Marley’s greatest hits are scheduled to come out this summer via UMe.

Backing up a bit, the majors began releasing 5.1 surround and high resolution audio in 1999 with the introduction of the Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) which allowed for the reproduction of DSD audio streams that had the same “warmth” as vinyl. The music industry did such a terrible job of marketing the SACD format that few people even knew it existed before they more or less pulled the plug on it. (Bob Dylan’s entire catalog and all of the Rolling Stones ABKCO albums were released as SACDs, but for whatever reason, this fact was downplayed to the extent that it is barely noticeable in the packaging, although they can be easily identified in used CD racks simply as the ones in the digipaks). Elton John’s classic albums came out remixed in 5.1 surround. Ziggy Stardust was remixed for 5.1 surround in a way that made the album sound totally fresh (and much more muscular). Peter Gabriel’s catalog came out on SACD. Once it went out of print, the SACD surround version of Roxy Music’s Avalon—an album audiophiles have always gravitated towards—started selling used for hundreds of dollars....

The first time I heard an SACD of Blood on the Tracks, I was hooked because not only did it sound like Bob Dylan was actually singing in the room with me, such were the sonic details that you could literally hear the guitarist’s fingertips moving across the ridges of the strings. Back in the days of Napster and Limewire, it was said that SACDs were not only impossible to rip, but that the files were too big for easy transport across the Internet (yeah, they really thought that). SACDs can only be played in a special SACD player but since hardly anyone bought one in the first place, the format was basically DOA. I have a ton of them, they sound great, but… yeah, who cares about SACDs? Cut to a few years later and since everyone has a DVD player, now the new thing is DVD-A. Mute put out Nick Cave’s back catalog remixed to 5.1 surround, setting the bar high for archival releases. Rhino put out a box set of Björk’s albums called Surrounded and the entire Talking Heads discography came out on so-called “Dual Discs” (one side a 5.1 surround DVD, the other a “red book” CD layer). Porcupine Tree’s Steven Wilson became the undisputed go-to-guy for 5.1 and produced newly created surround mixes of several Jethro Tull and King Crimson albums.

Last year Blu-ray audio releases starting to edge out the DVD-A releases, notably the excellent 5.1 surround mix of Van Morrison’s Moondance album, Steven Wilson’s new mixes of Close to the Edge by Yes and XTC’s Nonsuch and the approximately fifty Blu-ray Pure Audio releases from UMe. After watching them fumble the ball so many times on the surround front for the past decade, I’m finally starting to think they might get it right this time (and I do hope that someone at UMe in the Blu-ray department is reading this.) The UMe BD releases, especially the ones with 5.1 surround mixes (which sadly ain’t all of ‘em) are nothing short of stunning. The two best that I’ve heard, in terms of their audiophile ability to knock your socks off are Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (you can actually hear the sound of his foot on the pedal of his grand piano, it’s sublime) and Beck’s Sea Change (I don’t give a shit about Beck, but this album is the first thing I grab to demonstrate the possibilities of high resolution surround sound.)

Until the newly remastered version of Grace Jones’ Nightclubbing came out a few weeks ago, I believe that UMe’s Blu-ray releases were only being test marketed in France (where they’re manufactured). Perhaps the “Pure Audio” discs were catching on as Nightclubbing is being released worldwide simultaneously on double LP, CD, as a deluxe two CD set, on digital download and as a Blu-ray Pure Audio disc. Apparently the Blu-ray disc is now being seen as another music format and for consumers, and for the record labels themselves, I think this is a good thing. I’ve been evangelical about surround sound—it’s simply the best way to listen to music outside of having the musicians show up at your front door—and high definition audio for years and at long last the industry seems to be sitting up and catering to the consumer wishes of the folks who still can be relied upon to buy music on discs.

Although I have noticed that the prices for the UMe BDs on Amazon tend to be in the $25 to $35 range prior to the street date for some of these discs, once they hit, the price drops to around $15 to $18 per. That’s not bad and considering that they are, in fact, noticeably better than regular CDs, I don’t feel like I am being ripped off for buying something that I have perhaps already owned multiple copies of—if I had to attempt to objectively quantify it in some way, I’d say that the stereo BDs are about 7-10% better than their regular CD equivalents and that the ones with 5.1 surround mixes, compared to CDs and even the best vinyl pressings, is like going from an old tube 20-inch TV set to a 50-inch HD flatscreen.

Consider the sort of leap in quality that gets made when a song like “Bohemian Rhapsody” is opened up from two speakers to six and the data used to reproduce the music employs six times (or better) the data found on a regular compact disc. Since so many homes are now set up with home theater systems, it makes sense that the surround thing finally seems to be catching on to a wider public. You watch movies in 5.1 surround, you can listen to music on that very same system.

At this point, though, as someone on the picky audiophile side of things, I gotta say, there aren’t a lot of titles that I would buy on Blu-ray audio discs unless they’d been remixed to include a 5.1 surround option. It’s THE LEAST the labels can do when asking the public to re-purchase classic albums already in their collections. Want me to upgrade? Sure, I will, and trust me I want to, but only if you can give me a surround mix. If I don’t get that, you don’t get any money from me UMe, it’s that simple (Dear UMe executive who might be reading this, note that I purchased the DVD-A of Histoire de Melody Nelson in 2013 BUT that I would have bought it again (for the fourth or is it fifth time?) had UMe offered the 5.1 mix on the Blu-ray. But you didn’t, which makes no sense because it would have been so easy to do, so I will not be upgrading… and I would have!)

To address Nightclubbing as a product, or rather as a product line, I’d have to say that if you’ve got a Blu-ray player, unless you are a die-hard vinyl person, there is no reason whatsoever to buy either the 2XCD set (it’s more expensive) or to buy a digital download. The BD is a much higher quality piece of software than the CD, hands down, but you also get a free digital download with every UMe BD purchase anyway (there’s a coupon inside each one), so why would you want to go that route and miss out on the vastly superior Blu-ray? It’s easily the best value for the money.

Although there is no 5.1 mix included on the Nightclubbing Blu-ray—WHY NOT?—it’s still great and I wholeheartedly recommend it for all of the above reasons. Unlike with many of the UMe “Pure Audio” releases, Nightclubbing isn’t something I already owned, so I think I’m probably being forgiving on the “no surround mix” point simply because I’m listening to the album on repeat twenty times a day and can’t get enough of it. But I do hope that when UMe is considering the next batch of Blu-rays to release, that they’ll opt for giving the discerning consumer the extra added value of a 5.1 mix. For me, it’s practically a requirement, but give me that and I’d be willing to rebuy half my record collection.*

*If my wife would allow this, I mean…

Below, Grace Jones in her A One Man Show live video from 1982.
 

 
For the past few days I’ve been seeing this “Killer Clown” prank video making the rounds on blogs. I always hesitate to click play on prank videos because they’re usually not that inspired or have goofball “Yakety Sax” background music. For whatever reason I finally clicked on the damned thing today and was pleasantly surprised at how sadistic and downright mean this prank is. I don’t know what I’d do if someone did this to me? Shit my pants? Cry? Try to kill them before they killed me?

If you haven’t seen this one yet, it’s worth taking a gander. The video was by Italian-based YouTube channel DM Pranks Productions.
 

 
It’s common knowledge that Kraftwerk and Neu! were both products of the Düsseldorf musical scene, having been united in the early prog band Organisation; eventually Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger would split from Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider to create the two classic Krautrock bands we know today, but there is a fair amount of material featuring Rother, Dinger, and Schneider (no Hütter, who had returned to school to study architecture). A surprising amount of it was captured on German TV between 1970 and 1972.

Kraftwerk is one of those bands that has husbanded its exclusivity awfully well; just ask anyone (like me) who tried and failed to get tickets to their severely limited-attendance run of MoMA shows in 2012. The most design-savvy of Krautrockers, they are prime objects of collector fetishization. Collectors already know about the band’s precursor Organisation, whose 1971 album Tone Float routinely goes for more than $100 on Discogs.com (the CD is a lot more affordable). There’s no shortage of enthusiasts of Kraftwerk’s early, proggy phase, but the majesty of a big chunk of their early work recorded for video or TV should enhance just about anyone’s day.
 

 
Bootleg editions of Tone Float often tacked on an extra track that actually was among Kraftwerk’s first works—that’s why when you execute a Google Images search of the Organisation album cover, a good many of the results have both names on the cover. That track, misidentified as “Vor dem blauen Bock” (Before the Blue Goat), is in fact is a groovy instrumental number named “Rückstoss Gondoliere,” which comes from an appearance by Kraftwerk on the Bremen Beat-Club TV show on May 22, 1971. (I’m having a difficult time translating “Rückstoss Gondoliere,” the closest I can come is “recoil gondolier.” I think the word Rückstoss here signifies the backfire of a car—similar to a recoil—but this clip is often translated as “Truckstop Gondolero,” which I must concede is a great title.)

In this instrumental clip, through the use of video magic, “Kraftwerk”—here Rother, Dinger, and Schneider—are frequently framed as if sitting very tightly around a campfire or, if you prefer, a hookah. The music sounds very much of its time—Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” come to mind. In any case, much more that than, say, Gary Numan or somebody. Meanwhile, virtual stalactites and stalagmites swirl around them, and well, don’t bogart the reefer, man.
 

 
Here is Kraftwerk playing “Ruckzuck” live on the WDR television channel in 1970. Dig Florian’s righteous flute jam in this video. The song’s enduring popularity as an early Kraftwerk deep cut is richly justified. The bewildered expressions on the faces of the German Jugend only add to the overall effect.
 

 
Here’s another early version of “Ruckzuck,” only this time the band is Organisation. As a special bonus, Florian is wearing a shirt with his own face on it.
 

 
“Köln II” on the German TV show Okidoki in 1971.
 

 
“Kakteen, Wüste, Sonne,” 1971. Title translates as “Cactus, Desert, Sun.”
 

 
Meet your new favorite musical powerhouse group The Plastics! The Plastics are made up of 33-year-old Toby Sheldon (who spent over $100k in plastic surgery to look like Justin Beiber, but ended up looking more like Bruce Jenner), 30-year-old Kitty Jay (who spent over $25k in surgeries to look like Jennifer Lawrence) and former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Venus D’Lite (who spent thousands in surgeries to look like Madonna).

Their song is called “The Plastics,” natch, and it is perhaps the worst shitshow that I’ve ever seen. Certainly it wins the prize for 2014 so far. You know those knock-off perfumes they sell in TJ Maxx? (“If you like Calvin, you’ll love Kevin!”) These three are the human equivalent of that.

How much do you want to bet TLC gives them their own reality show after this mess? Perhaps that was the goal from the beginning? Be afraid, be very very afraid. You can contact their management GR Media to hire these plastic people for “events.” This video is filed under “Comedy,” but I am guessing that this is only because YouTube lacks an “Ostentatious Mental Illness” category.
 

 
Via Daily Dot

 
Derek Jarman was no slouch: he was a film-maker, writer, artist, set-designer, gardener, political campaigner and diarist. Jarman began his film career as a set designer working on Ken Russell’s The Devils and Savage Messiah. With the flamboyant Russell’s encouragement, Jarman picked up a Super 8 camera and started making his own personal short movies. These films enabled Jarman to “make rapprochement with [his] real world.”

“The world of painting was sterile empty… Although I didn’t believe it at the time because I didn’t have any confidence, I had been isolated by being gay in painting. Film restored that connection missing in my painting.”

Film also allowed Jarman to develop his “aesthetic explorations in a medium more amenable to [his] political concerns”. His early Super 8 films dealt with space, magic, light and sexuality.

Jarman’s 1976 film Sloane Square ironically subtitled “A Room of One’s Own” documented his eviction from a friend’s apartment, after the friend had died. Jarman lived a precarious existence during the early seventies, at times dependent on the kindness of his friends to keep a roof over his head. Jarman had been living in a vacant dockside warehouse, which had proved insufferable during the winter months. His friend and mentor, the writer Anthony Harwood, invited Jarman to live in his rent-controlled, two-bed apartment. Alas, Harwood was the kind of man who “sailed through life on unpaid bills,” as Jarman wrote in his memoir Dancing Ledge:

When [Harwood] received unpleasant-looking brown envelopes through the post he put them into the kitchen cupboard unopened. Every now and then he tripped up. This month [January 1976] has been overshadowed by the court case over a year’s unpaid rent at Sloane Square—which the landlords have refused to accept from me as they would be able to charge a fortune for this flat if they could get it back in their hands. It’s £15 a week and worth over a hundred.

With Harwood absent in New York, a notice of eviction was served, and Jarman attended court proceedings instigated by the landlords, where he offered to pay the outstanding back rent.

I put on my grey suit and sat through the afternoon in the magistrates’ court. Capital and County mounted a really mean attack through Bob the porter, accusing Anthony of everything in the book short of sodomy, but that was hinted at as well. I thought there was no chance but we won. The judge asked how many bedrooms there were—‘Two’—‘Well if that’s the case I see no reason for Mr. Jarman not to live there and take care of the place.’ The landlords brought up the lack of furniture, which Bob himself had helped to remove in the last onslaught when he let the bailiffs in. The judge smiled when I said Mr. Harwood, a writer, lived a Japanese lifestyle—‘It’s better with no shoes,’ he wrote, ‘no shoes at all.’

Not long after, Harwood died, and the landlords refused to recognize Jarman as tenant or accept his payment for rent arrears. At the age of thirty-four, and in the process of directing his first feature, Sebastiane, Jarman found himself homeless once again.

The apartment at Sloane Square was where Jarman cast for Sebastiane, where he spray-painted the walls, anticipating the set designs of his second feature Jubilee. It was also where he filmed and documented his life and friends, before the apartment was vandalized and abandoned.

Sloane Square was co-directed by Jarman and Guy Ford, and has been described as “the most Situationist of [Jarman’s] early films, in terms of both content and structure.” It’s a piece of personal, political and artistic filmmaking, which as the film switches from opening time-lapse to color film, Jarman presents himself as a filmmaker on the verge of his cinematic career, before returning to the apartment documenting the final leave-taking of a place (a past) he had once called home.

Jarman died of an AIDs-related illness in February 1994, days after his 52 birthday.
 

From ‘Swarm,’ 2004
 
Like many English children, Tessa Farmer grew up with an elaborate mythology of fairies, but her own contemporary fairy art is far from the sweetness of girlhood tales. Her elaborate taxidermy displays depict fairies as brutal, savage little creatures, an evil species that seeks to dominate and/or destroy other wildlife. Her displays show violence, death and rot, but it’s the sculptures’ ability to tell wicked little stories that truly draws you in. The description of her 2007 work, “The Desecration of the Swallow:”

Flies were laying eggs on the swallow, and their maggots consuming it, until the fairies snatched it from them and made it fly again by harnessing winged insets to its body.Now it has become a ship in their fleet, as well as a meal.

Her work is dynamic, detailed and very busy, inspiring apt comparisons to Hieronymus Bosch. Her short animated piece below, “Nest of the Skeletons,” reminds me of Ladislas Starevich’s dead bug puppet cartoons—and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s difficult to up the creepy factor on insect taxidermy, but Farmer manages it by contaminating our very childhood dreams. This isn’t the Tinkerbell our parents told us about.
 

From ‘Swarm,’ 2004
 

From ‘Swarm,’ 2004
 

From ‘Parade of the Captive Hedgehog,’ 2006
 

From ‘The Desecration of the Swallow,” 2007
 

From ‘The Desecration of the Swallow,” 2007

From ‘Little Savages,” 2007
 

From ‘Little Savages,” 2007
 

From ‘Little Savages,” 2007
 

 
Sad news is spreading this morning: Swiss surrealist artist H.R Giger has died. Giger is famous as the designer of the eponymous creature and bizarre sets for the film Alien, and for a lifetime’s worth of beautiful and disturbing organic/machine hybrid body-horror paintings (he called them “biomechanoids”). He also became a part of the music world when his works were used as album covers for the likes Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Magma, Celtic Frost and Danzig, among many others. Notoriously his “Penis Landscape” was included as a poster in Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist LP, setting in motion an avalanche of censorship and legal difficulties which derailed the band.

Here’s a 1981 British television interview with Giger and Blondie singer Debbie Harry. The occasion for the seemingly odd pairing is Giger’s portrait of Harry for her debut solo LP, KooKoo. Giger also made videos for the album’s songs “Backfired” and “Now I Know You Know.”
 

 
The music videos are seriously dated by a quaint, acutely ‘80s video cheapness, but they’re still pretty damn cool. They’re by Giger, after all.

 
Many thanks to the ever-resourceful Beth Piwkowski for this find.

 
“Les Sucettes” (“The Lollipops”) was written for the virginal blonde 18-year-old France Gall by that arch-lecher himself, Serge Gainsbourg, who wanted to market her as the ultimate French “Lolita” pop star. The song’s lyrics depict a young girl, Annie, who likes aniseed-flavored lollipops. Here’s a translation of a verse so you get the gist:

When the barley sugar
Flavored with anise
Sinks in Annie’s throat,
She is in heaven.

Annie’s aniseed. Think about that for a minute…

Christ, he’s good…

But here’s the thing: France Gall apparently had no idea that she was singing a song about oral sex and swallowing… seed.

When she performed the number on the television program seen in the clip below, she did so oblivious to what every other person present was thinking! It wasn’t until she was on tour in Tokyo that someone let the cat out of the bag. Gall was infuriated and greatly embarrassed by what she’d unwittingly taken part in. She felt betrayed by the adults around her and mocked like a naïve fool. She refused to leave her home for weeks afterwards and ultimately entirely stopped singing Gainsbourg’s songs that had made her so famous. For years afterwards her career suffered from her association with this scandal, even if “Les Sucettes” had been a big hit.
 

 
It’s interesting to note that Walt Disney himself wanted France Gall for a musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, but the project was shelved with Uncle Walt’s death in 1966. Bernardo Bertolucci reportedly wanted her for the leading female role in his X-rated Last Tango in Paris opposite Marlon Brando. Can you imagine? No offense to the late Maria Schneider, but it’s too damned bad that didn’t happen!
 

Regarding “Les Sucettes” with a rare public comment from France Gall about the scandal it caused.
 

“Teenie Weenie Boppie,” about LSD and Mick Jagger on Dim Dam Dom.

More France Gall on Mod Cinema’s two DVD France Gall collection

 
Recently Google launched an absolutely amazing Street View tour of all 286 miles of the Grand Canyon, captured from the very waters of the Colorado River. My knee-jerk assumption was that this was simply another victory in Google’s ultimate goal of mapping every inch of the world (in order to more easily conquer it, obviously), but the Grand Canyon was actually chosen for its ecological significance. Working in conjunction with environmental non-profit American Rivers, Google released this statement:

For over 6 million years, the Colorado River has carved out its place on Earth. It spans over 1,450 miles, beginning in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and ending the Gulf of California in Mexico. The Colorado River serves as a lifeline in the arid Western United States. It graces 7 states, 2 countries, and 9 national parks, nourishing the lives of 36 million people and endangered wildlife. Millions depend on the river for irrigation, water supply, and hydroelectric power. However, excessive water consumption and outdated management have endangered the Colorado River.

Over at Harper’s, writer and former Grand Canyon cartographer Jeremy Miller notes the extraordinary technology and scope of the project, and though he admits it can’t compare with a visit to the actual Grand Canyon, it’s baffling that such an impressive and advanced resource could be completed in just eight days. Silicon Valley has a notable habit of eschewing paying their taxes (or even more basic philanthropy) in favor of very conspicuous, tech-oriented social experiments—I’m unsure of how much Grand Canyon Street View will support conservation efforts, and I’m not convinced that a fat check wouldn’t do more to save the Colorado (it’s unclear if Google has donated). Regardless, the map is cool as hell, a worthy project in its own right, and I highly suggest you check it out.
 

 
Via Harper’s