Morgue, man with floral tattoo, 1945
 
Back in 2001, photographer Merrick Morton—who also happens to be a reserve LAPD officer—came upon a massive archive of Los Angeles Police Department crime scene and evidence photos which had been hidden for decades in a huge storage facility in downtown LA. The photos were buried among 150 years of police records in cardboard boxes.

When it was discovered that some of the boxes contained decomposing cellulose nitrate negatives, a serious fire hazard, the Fire Department recommended that all the negatives be destroyed. The team lobbied for the archive to be only selectively destroyed and their efforts paid off; some boxes of images were determined to be unsalvageable and destroyed, while the remaining images were sent to a cold storage facility where they reside today.

Around one million photos have been unearthed so far and choice selections, presented by Fototeka, will be exhibited at Paramount Pictures Studios from April 25-27 in Los Angeles.

Detail of two bullet holes in car window, 1942
 

Shoes, arm, and knife, 1950
 

Victim’s feet hanging off bed, 1934
 

Detail of bullet holes in screen, 1930
 

Onion field reenactment, 1963
 

Bank robbery note, 1965
 
Via Feature Shoot

 
Even for a culture well-known for its sadistic game shows, Japan’s Susunu! Denpa Shōnen (進ぬ！電波少年) still stands out. The producers of this “torture”-themed reality series, which ran from 1998 to 2002, took things so far that the government actually stepped in and cancelled it. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the program remains an iconic part of Japanese television history.

“Denpa Shōnen teki Kenshō Seikatsu” (“a life out of prizes”) was the best known segment of the show. Think of it as the naked, solitary confinement version of Big Brother. In it, Nasubi, an aspiring Japanese comedian—who it should be noted, auditioned for and agreed to this—was forced to live in a studio apartment, unclothed, with no supplies for a year and a half. Nasubi’s genitals were covered with a digital eggplant, a reference to his nickname for his elongated face.

He was provided with a radio, phone, sink, shower, toilet, gas burner, a small table and one cushion. He was also given a rack of magazines and a stack of stamped postcards so that he could enter commercial sweepstakes to get things that he needed. Like food. And toilet paper, which he didn’t win until about ten months in! He had to win anything he used or ate (the crew probably provided him with food, but not much, apparently). Once he’d “won” ¥1 million (about $10,000) in prizes he’d be able to leave his imprisonment and they would edit together a segment about his experience and call it “Sweepstakes Life.”

All he was offered, in exchange, was a chance at fame.

What Nasubi didn’t realize is that segments were going out weekly to a large television audience. At some point, the producers set up a live video feed that meant fans could watch Nasubi 24 hours a day.

When interest in Nasubi became so great that his location was discovered by reporters, the producers more or less kidnapped him and took to him a second location in South Korea! This time he had to raise the money to get back home. While all of this was going on his diaries about his experience of being locked away from the outside world became a bestselling book. Footage of him eating a bowl of ramen noodles was turned into a popular soup commercial. Without knowing any of it, he’d become rich and famous.

Although Nasubi admitted that at certain points he wanted to escape and feared that he was going bonkers, he never really addressed WHY the hell he’d do something like this for so long. I mean, wouldn’t any sane person say “Fuck this” after a couple of weeks without toilet paper?

Ironically Nasubi’s national fame was short-lived, although his segment on the show is fondly recalled.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Torrential rain poured down Easter Sunday at St. Peter’s Church in Brighton during an open air Passion Play performed by Soul by the Sea. Jesus, his disciples and the rest of the cast were forced to wear raincoats.

According to reports, the performance otherwise “went off without a hitch”!
 
Via Arbroath

 
VHS Cover Junkie posts hi-res scans taken from his wide collection of gaudy, tacky, yet strangely alluring video covers. These are the kind of VHS tapes once found in the bargain bin of the local Blockbuster in the 1980s, where the lurid covers, slightly frayed or worn, and decorated with reduced-in-price tags, often had little to do with the films’ content.

In this small selection, you will find some curiosities like James Spader in the cheesy Tuff Turf—“where reputations are earned”; The Band’s Robbie Robertson alongside Jodie Foster and Gary Busey in Carny; Ethan Coen’s The Naked Man; Harry Dean Stanton and Sean Young in Young Doctors in Love, and Motel Hell where “it takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters.”

Immerse yourself in the gaudy world of VHS Cover Junkie.
 

 

 

 

 
More trashy video covers, after the jump…
 

 
An advertisement for a Swiss shopping mall has been condemned by an animal rights’ group for promoting bestiality. The Easter poster campaign for the St. Jakob Park shopping mall has a red g-string superimposed on a rabbit. Critics claim the poster sexualizes the animal, which links to bestiality and animal abuse.

Daniel Bader from the Swiss animal protection group told Tages Anzeiger:

“From our point of view, the respect of the rabbit has been badly damaged.

“This is a clear sexualisation of an animal. As far as I’m concerned, it heads in the direction of bestiality and it stinks of promoting animal sex and the sexual abuse of animals.”

I wonder what Herr Bader would make of Brian Griffin, Disneyland, Jessica Rabbit, or those annoying dogs that always hump your leg? Clearly, Fritz the Cat would give him a heart attack,

The manager of the shopping mall told Central European News that the images of attractive women “in bunny ears and fluffy tails were clichéd,” and he wanted to create something more humorous with a real rabbit.

However, according to The Independent, Swiss PR guru Klaus J. Stoehlker said the image was far more damaging to the lingerie company.

“If I was the boss of that Italian lingerie company I would take action over this advertising,” he said.

“I mean, who wants to see their sexy underwear stuck on such a fat rabbit backside?”

No comment…
 
Via The Independent

 
This year marks the centenary of the birth of pioneering filmmaker Norman McLaren, whose multi-award-winning animations inspired generations of filmmakers including Francois Truffaut, George Lucas and Michel Gondry. 

McLaren’s best-known for his work with the National Film Board of Canada, for whom he made his Oscar-winning 1952 short Neighbours, which mixed pixilation, stop-frame animation and live action to create a powerful anti-war message. The film reflected McLaren’s mixed feelings about the Korean War as he had just returned from China where he had been greatly impressed by the way the Communist country was progressing. He found his own experience of Chairman Mao’s China at odds with its representation in the West during the war.

McLaren was born on April 11th, 1914 in Stirling, Scotland. He attended the Glasgow School of Art, where he decided filmmaking rather than painting was the future of art. He started making short animations by painting and scratching directly onto the film. His first experiment proved so successful that the film was worn-out through continual screenings. His next film Seven Till Five (1933) told the story of a day-in-the-life of the art school. The film used various techniques such as montage and editing-in-camera lifted from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. McLaren followed this with Camera Makes Whoopee (1935), which covered the celebration of a student party. Again, the film is now best-known for McLaren’s innovative use of camera effects.

In 1936, McLaren collaborated with fellow student, sculptor Helen Biggar on a far more ambitious and political project, an anti-war film called Hell Unltd.. McLaren was a pacifist and, at this time, also a Communist, who believed he could change people’s attitudes through his films. Together with Biggar he created a highly imaginative (if politically simplistic) anti-capitalist take on the cause and effect of war and profiteering from it. The film mixes stop-frame animation with filmed and archival footage, captions and rostrum camera work. It’s a powerful little film and one that showcases many of the talents that made Norman McLaren a dynamic, imaginative and brilliant film-maker.
 

 
More after the jump…

“Untitled,” 1985
 
Anyone with any familiarity with Kurt Vonnegut’s literary output probably knows that the man liked to doodle. His whimsical self-portrait, the one that emphasized his mustache, is very familiar, making an appearance in his 1973 masterpiece Breakfast of Champions and many other places. Breakfast of Champions, of course, featured all manner of little drawings as a non-textual means of furthering the story.

Next month a handsome coffee table book, Kurt Vonnegut Drawings, from the Monacelli Press, featuring hitherto unavailable artworks, will go on sale (the list price is $40, but you can pre-order it for $25.40). The book will feature 145 selections of his work.
 

 
Vonnegut was a fervent believer in the importance of art as a means of enhancing everyday life, and these interesting drawings are the proof. He used pen and (quite clearly) magic marker for these artworks. They remind me most of all of Joan Miró (esp. the Janus-like piece from 1987) and Saul Steinberg (esp. the one with the wavy hair from the same year).
 

“Untitled,” no date
 

“Untitled,” no date
 

“Untitled,” 1980
 

“Self-Portrait,” 1985
 
More of Vonnegut’s amusing art after the jump…..

 
Confusingly, Roxy Music have used “The High Road” as the title of two different live releases with the exact same cover art.

In 1982, the group was on a major world tour in support of their Avalon album. The show taped for the four song EP titled The High Road was a performance at The Apollo, Glasgow August 30, 1982, whereas the one on the home video release also titled The High Road was shot in the Côte d’Azur in Fréjus, France, three days earlier on August 27th.  I always wondered why the version of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” was different on the VHS. Now I know.

To make matters even more confusing, just the soundtrack from the video was released as Heart Still Beating on CD in 1990. The High Road DVD, which you could think of as Heart Still Beating with newly added picture if you didn’t know any better, I suppose, was re-released in 2004.

Set list:
1. The Main Thing
2. Out Of The Blue
3. Both Ends Burning
4. A Song For Europe
5. Can’t Let Go
6. While My Heart Is Still Beating
7. Avalon
8. My Only Love
9. Dance Away
10. Love Is The Drug
11. Like A Hurricane
12. Editions Of You
13. Do The Stand
14. Jealous Guy

Bryan Ferry on vocals; Phil Manzanera on guitar; Andy Mackay - saxophone and oboe; Neil Hubbard - guitar; Andy Newmark on drums; Alan Spenner - bass; Jimmy Maelen - percussion; Guy Fletcher on keyboards and Fonzi Thornton, Michelle Cobbs and Tawatha Agee on backing vocals.

The Avalon tour would be the last time Roxy would perform together for eighteen years.
 

 
In 2011, photographer Marc Mol captured these intense aerial shots of hippos and crocodiles battling it out over Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park. Large herds of two different species going at it, is a pretty incredible thing to witness, IMO.

I’m not entirely sure if the crocs took down a single hippo—hippos are known as one of the most aggressive and vicious animals on the planet—or if the crocs were feeding on a dead one and then other hippos came in to protect their territory? Either way, it’s like a The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers epic battle scene, but in nature.

If you are going to be lucky enough to be around at exactly the right moment to photograph such a thing, hope that your luck holds out and that you’re airborne when it happens, like Marc Mol was!

 

 
Via reddit

 
File this under “If You Like Jobriath”:

One day I found myself looking for obscure glam rock compilations on Amazon and the “customers who bought this” recommendation led me to an album called Breathlessly Brett, an LP originally recorded in the mid-1970s—but not released until 2003—by a then-teenaged performer named Brett Smiley. It seldom left my CD player for the next month.

I’d never heard of Brett Smiley before that, but when I did a search on him, an interesting story emerged. A child star who who went to junior high school with Michael Jackson (the shared a woodworking class), Smiley once played the title role in the musical Oliver!. He was just a sixteen-year-old when he was discovered by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, then keen to take his career down a Phil Spector-type producer/Svengali path. and feeling competitive with Jobriath’s manager, Jerry Brandt.
 

 
Smiley was given a $200,000 advance and recorded an album produced by Oldham with Steve Marriott from the Small Faces and Humble Pie on guitar. An amazingly raucous single “Va Va Va Voom” was released and heavily hyped with Smiley’s blonde pretty-boy face appearing in ads all over London, and in an extremely over the top performance and interview on the popular Russell Harty Plus TV program. Disc magazine proclaimed Brett to be “The Most Beautiful Boy In The World.”
 

“It wasn’t a slipper he slipped to Cinderella…” Brett Smiley as “The Prince” in the 3-D erotic musical version of Cinderella.
 

The insanely catchy single “Va Va Va Voom”
 
Hard to see how a tune that catchy failed to storm the charts, but the single bombed and the album was shelved. Although Smiley auditioned to replace David Cassidy in The Partridge Family and made a film appearances (like 1977’s erotic Cinderella and American Gigolo), he must’ve fallen into some sort of “velvet goldmine” and wasn’t really heard from again until 2003 when RPM Records acquired the master tapes. The sad truth was that Brett Smiley wallowed in serious skid-row drug addiction for years. His legend proved mysterious and intriguing for glam rock fans and Johnny Thunders’ biographer Nina Antonina wrote a book, The Prettiest Star: Whatever Happened to Brett Smiley? about how Smiley’s super brief pop supernova moment—just the idea of him—so strongly influenced her teenage years.

Now recovered from the drug excesses of his past, Smiley continues to record and perform, mostly around New York City.

This Russell Harty clip features a young Brett Smiley performing his Ziggy-influenced “Space Ace” (the “Va Va Va Voom” B-side) and it’s pretty incredible if you like this sort of thing (Turn the sound up really loud as the audio here sounds pretty weak here.)
 

 
From the Dangerous Minds archives