I wish I knew about this when it was still active: Scott Thompson, the member of the Kids in the Hall sketch comedy troupe who broke ground as an out-of-the-closet gay performer at a time when homosexuals were still punching bags for some of the world’s most popular comedians, used to maintain a blog about fruits. Ha ha.

Thompson announced the fruit blog’s existence with the following, in February of 2011:

In the beginning there was the apple and everything was quiet. Then Eve took a bite and that’s when the fun started. The apple is the most popular fruit in the Western Hemisphere and grows pretty much everywhere. There are thousands of types of apples. My favourite is the Macintosh or Macs. Maybe that’s why I love my computer so much. I used to love Delicious apples when you only had them rarely. Then one day they were there every day, their bumps no longer exotic, their almost cloying sweetness no longer exciting. And then they weren’t even called Delicious any more and we were all suppposed to pretend that it had always been that way. No thank you Big Brother. I’m fine with my Mac and a hunk of cheddar. And no thank you, you can keep your fancy handkerchief to yourself. I’ll just polish it on my jeans.

New postings ended in September of 2012, roughly coincident with the announcement that Thompson would play crime scene investigator Jimmy Price on NBC TV’s Hannibal. But in that year and a half or so, Thompson (and friends) blogged a ridiculous series of video fruit reviews. He bravely took on the pomegranate, confronted guava with steely resolve, and went toe-to-toe with tiny bananas and lived to tell the tale. It’s pretty obvious these were all made in a single session. Since I’m laughing, I don’t care.
 

Pomegranates, part I
 
More fruit reviews after the jump…

 
Grace Jones has a theory that “men need to be penetrated…at least once in their lifetime.” The singer, actress and muse thinks it would help men “understand what it is like to receive,” which could (perhaps) “...help take some of the aggression out of the world.”

It’s a theory Jones has perhaps held for a while, as during the making of the movie A View to a Kill, in which she played villain May Day against Roger Moore’s James Bond, she (jokingly) tried out her theory. In a seductive scene between May Day and Bond, Jones surprised Moore by disrobing to reveal a large rubber strap-on attached to her body. She then pounced on the unsuspecting 007. The prank left Bond shaken, but not apparently stirred.

Grace learned all about male aggression from an early age. She was brought up by her grandparents, who were devoutly Christian, tough, hard, and violent. She was frequently whipped by her grandfather over anything he considered to be a misdemeanor.

“Sometimes we’d have to climb a tree and pick our own whips to be disciplined with. When you had to pick your own whip, you knew you were in for it.”

Such aggressive behavior taught Grace to hide her emotions form her family, though later it did inspire her to create a fearsome alter ego.

“I think the scary character comes from male authority within my religious family. They had that first, and subliminally I took that on. I was shit scared of them.”

A few years later, Grace moved to America to be with her parents. Without the brutish discipline of her grandparents, Grace started to rebel, and gave up religion for the world of music, art and theater. She became a model, and started to hang-out with Andy Warhol and his Factory scene, and in the late 1970s, she began recording.

Her collaboration with artist and designer Jean-Paul Goude produced several decade-defining fashions, music promos, and ads. In 1982, this perfect balance of Grace and Goude produced a video of Jones’ concert A One Man Show, which along with Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense is one of the best concerts of the 1980s—a brilliant piece of theater and music, which is long overdue a full release on DVD. Track listing, “Warm Leatherette,” “Walking In The Rain,” “Feel Up,” “La Vie En Rose,” “Demolition Man,” “Pull Up To The Bumper,” “Private Life,” “My Jamaican Guy,” “Living My Life,” and “Libertango/Strange I’ve Seen That Face Before.”
 

 
Bonus compilation of Grace Jones’ rarities, after the jump…

 
Long before he was winning Pulitzer Prizes as America’s most critically adored comix practitioner, Art Spiegelman cut his teeth as something far closer to a R. Crumb-ian “freaky” underground cartoonist. Spiegelman would eventually blend highbrow and lowbrow more thoroughly than perhaps any other comix figure, bringing a whole generation of talented avant-garde European artists to contribute to his self-published zine RAW on the one hand while coming up with the idea behind the Garbage Pail Kids (with Mark Newgarden) on the other. Crumb, Spiegelman, and all the rest were heavily influenced by the “usual gang of idiots” at Mad Magazine, and that lineage shows very strongly in a 1971 edition of Topps cards Spiegelman spearheaded called “Nasty Valentine Notes.”

To be clear, Spiegelman didn’t execute the art on these cards, or at least not all of them. According to Jay Lynch:
 

Art Spiegelman did the art on the wrapper and box. He also did the finished art on some of the pieces themselves….and he wrote most of them and did roughs. So he is the main guy behind this series. Some of the final art on the pieces are by Ralph Reece. Jeff Zapata was only 5 years old then…Len Brown and Woody Gelman had the Jobs running the creative Dept. that Jeff Zapata and John Williams have today. So Jeff is of a whole other generation….He edits the Topps stuff that comes out now. Woody and Len edited it back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

 
Every card had an, ahem, “witty” quatrain with a rim-shot punchline that would have felt stodgy in the days of vaudeville. These “sick” and satirical anti-Valentine’s Day cards do much more than lampoon the sickly sweet sentiments that govern most of the holiday. 1971 was a prime moment to stick it to the hippies, and boy, does it do that with a vengeance. Woodstock, Easy Rider, yoga…. all of them take their turns as whipping boy. My favorite is the fourth one below, which not only makes fun of men with long hair but also assumes that the only sexual option is hetero. Well, they do say satire often has a conservative bent….

The cards are a little convoluted. They had to be sold in the same format as baseball cards, so every card necessitated being unfolded three times and had five images on two sides. If you’re trying to read along, suffice to say you should be reading from small type to large type. I’ve put the “front” image for each card on its side because trying to read upside-down text makes my brain bleed.

There were 30 cards in the entire set, and you can download almost all of them—in the correct size to be printed on both sides of a page, should you have a yen to do that—at this tribute site to the series.
 

 

 
You’re really into yoga
You’re really into zen
But why study Eastern mysteries?
You can’t even count to ten!
 

 

 
More ‘Nasty Valentine Notes’ after the jump…

 
These fascinating playing cards are the work of a Slovenian artist named Boris Kobe who was held by the Nazis as a political prisoner in Allach, which was a sub-camp of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. Kobe lived to see the end of the war, and was a very successful architect in his native Slovenia afterwards; he died well into his seventies in 1981. His most prominent project after the war was probably the restoration of the Ljubljana Castle with Jože Plečnik.

As I see it, it’s a little unclear when and where these cards were made. Sources uniformly describe them as having been made “at Allach”—yet at least one of them appears to have been made after the Allied liberation of the camp, and it’s difficult to imaging Kobe hanging around the camp for very long after that. Certainly there wasn’t weeks of clandestine card games going on after that crucial moment. It’s difficult to tell, but there might be a little rhetorical sleight of hand going on there.

Whatever the case, the cards are simply remarkable. First, they look pretty great; Kobe was a gifted caricaturist, and there’s a lot of pleasure to be gained simply from looking at them. But most importantly, they show a life at Dachau close-up in the frankest terms. The cards depict inmates and guards alike, although most of the figures depicted are inmates forced to do back-breaking work, crowded into bunk beds,  disrobing en masse, and, of course, as a pile of skeletons. The king of clubs is depicted as a skeleton.

As I mentioned, these cards were almost certainly created after the liberation of Allach on April 22, 1945 by the 42nd Rainbow Division of the U.S. Army. How do we know this? It’s apparently depicted in one of the cards: Card XXI seems to show liberation, the Slovenian flag, and a tombstone-like image marked “Allach” that is being consumed by flames.

The cards are intended for a game variously called Tarock/Tarot, but the word tarot here is likely to be misleading to English-speaking audiences. Tarock/Tarot is a trick-based game like spades or gin that was popular in the Habsburg Empire and Europe generally for centuries. So this is not a tarot deck in the occult sense as we would think of it; that should be obvious from a glance at the cards, which lack characters like The Fool, The Magician, The Hanged Man, The Sun, and so on. To their creator Kobe and whomever else originally used them, it was just a regular deck of playing cards. I have family in Austria and on my visits there we would sometimes play a related game called “Schnapsen” which didn’t require four players and used a restricted deck, I think the cards only went down as far as the eight card. Basically a game of Schnapsen there was equivalent to the way dominoes is played in a lot of places, you’d play it aimlessly and shoot the shit and gossip.

See the complete deck at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies website hosted by the University of Minnesota. The original deck is at the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
More of these amazing cards after the jump….
 

 
On the heels of Touch & Go’s announcement of an insanely comprehensive Slint box set comes the release of the trailer for Lance Bangs’ documentary on the band, Breadcrumb Trail. Bangs’ impressive resume includes music videos for Arcade Fire, Pavement, Kanye West, The Shins, The White Stripes, The Black Keys, and Belle & Sebastian. Slint, of course, were the band of Louisville kids who dropped a very quiet atom bomb called Spiderland in 1991. The album hugely influenced math rock, slo-core, and Post-Rock, and so had a massive impact on the independent music of the 1990s and beyond. I’ve drooled on at length about it before, so I’ll not rehash. I’ll just point you here.

One thing about the trailer that’s just killing me—I am about Slint’s members’ age, and so I was a 19-year-old kid in college when the album came out, and damn if they don’t look ridiculously young to me now. So, how’d YOU change the world before you finished school?

Per Vice, screenings of Breadcrumb Trail don’t begin until mid-March, but I’m crazy-excited to see it. I’m especially keen to see how well it complements the 33 1/3 book on the album, which is thus far the single best source of information I’ve found on the somewhat mercurial band.

Enjoy the trailer.
 

 
Is Brother Donny Reagan of the Happy Valley Church of Jesus Christ in Johnson City, Tennessee, the “most racist pastor in America”? This is what The American Jesus blog is wondering. Surely he’s one of the dumbest.

Brother Reagan begins his remarks in the video below by informing his congregation that he is probably “going to make some people mad.” He’s apparently not self-aware enough to realize that some other people are going to simply point and laugh at him, but I believe it’s safe to say that self-awareness is not a quality the good Lord bestowed upon Donny boy here in any appreciable amount.

“Today we have so much fussing and stewing about this segregation of white and colored and everything. Why don’t they leave it alone? Let it be the way God made it.”

Wait, what?

“There is a move in the message, of blacks marrying whites, whites marrying blacks. And folks think that is alright, but you know, my God still has nationalities outside the city.’

“Nationalities outside the city”! I LOL’d at that line. Brother Donny’s congregation, clearly consisting of low IQ buffoons like himself, shout “Amen!” as Reagan reads from his prepared remarks. I wonder how these intellectually challenged folks vote, don’t you? [Me, neither, that doesn’t even qualify as a rhetorical question does it?]

“Hybreeding, hybreeding, oh how terrible. They hybreed the people. You know it’s a big molding pot. I’ve got hundreds of precious colored friends that’s borned again Christians. But on this line of segregation, hybreeding the people. What, tell me what fine cultured, fine Christian colored woman would want her baby to be a mulatto by a white man? No sir, it’s not right.”

At 2:19, Brother Donny makes an honest admission:

“Now friends I’m not very smart.”

Um, that’s right you inbred cracker fuck calling for MORE INBREEDING!!!!

DNA doesn’t work that way, Bro.

Dumb Donny goes on to say:

“If God wanted a man brown, black, white, whatever color he wanted him, that God’s creation. That’s the way he wanted it.”

Uh, you heard the man… As the Firesign Theater once said “Good lord, a stiff idiot is the worst kind.”
 

 
Via Christian Nightmares

 
The break-up of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore in 2011 caused an amount of dismay and grief normally reserved for fictional characters or mentally deficient royals splitting. What was interesting and somewhat surprising was the music Kim turned to for comfort in the aftermath. She told Elle,  “Rap music is really good when you’re traumatized.”

Not country revenge songs about cheating in which someone gets shot? Not Nick Cave’s “Your Funeral and My Trial,” Leonard Cohen, Morrissey, or a single song from Frank Sinatra’s Only The Lonely album?

For others, the only things that helped them through the first stages of a broken heart are copious amounts of alcohol, gallons of ice cream, Patsy Cline, early Kiss albums, Dio, or The MBD Band’s Hot ‘N Sticky. For Kim, it was old school and new rap.

Having her share her break-up playlist is like having Brian Greene explain the Higgs boson, Richard Stallman expound on software liberty, or Henry Rollins talk about self-reliance (or list his twenty favorite punk albums). It’s time to pull up a chair.

 
Kim and Thurston’s wedding day, 1984. Do you feel doomed yet?

Kim Gordon’s “Traumatized Good Time Tunes,” as told to Refinery 29 after the jump…

 
On February 14, 1994, London’s Bark Psychosis released their moody and idiosyncratic debut album Hex, a landmark record noteworthy for its use of rock instrumentation and process in a lot of decidedly not-so-rock ways. In fact, it was so difficult to shoehorn into any one genre that Mojo critic Simon Reynolds is said to have invented the term “Post-Rock” to describe it. (Acknowledging that there are those who disagree with that account, it remains widely accepted lore.) A few months later, Tortoise would release their moody and idiosyncratic debut, and very soon Post-Rock would become a go-to catchall for pretty much any “alternative” music—pardon the scare quotes, but it still irks me how that wretched term stuck—wherein the investigation of timbre and creation of atmospherics were favored over riffage, but that was clearly neither shoegaze, which term had already found backlash and disfavor anyway, nor the also newly-emergent trip-hop, which, though it sometimes toyed with similar textures, moods, and grandiosity, wasn’t rock-derived.

It swiftly became a problematic term. A genre defined so broadly as to encompass the left-field but still fairly straightforwardly rock likes of Trans Am or Don Caballero, droning mood-merchants like Labradford or Bowery Electric, heavy metal bands like Isis, and pensive sophisto-pop like Aloha can’t really usefully be considered a genre at all. But for better or worse, it’s the descriptor we have. Something was happening, and it needed a name.
 

 
So, onward—Hex was and is a fucking fantastic atmospheric record, and it’s a shame that it remains such a cult item even among fans of the genre. Arriving two years after the band’s groundbreaking (and still breathtaking) 21-minute single “Scum,” its most obvious antecedents are Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock (and Talk Talk’s drummer would go on to play on Bark Psychosis’ second album), but it also contains strong echoes of minimalism, Kosmische, industrial, prog, and even the occasional African rhythm. Check out the opening track, “The Loom.”
 

 
Now check out “A Street Scene” and ponder this trivia tidbit: Bark Psychosis originally formed as a Napalm Death cover band.
 

 
You never would have guessed, right? Skipping ahead a bit, “Big Shot” includes two of the tropes that would come to characterize a lot of stereotypical Post-Rock—an ostinato bass groove and a vibraphone. Interesting how Bark Psychosis and Tortoise both hit upon this at the same time, but an ocean apart.
 

 
The album’s icily beautiful closer “Pendulum Man” is said to be named after band leader Graham Sutton’s mood swings during the recording, though it seems they could have applied the name to a mood-swingier song.
 

 
After Hex, the band went pretty much silent for ten years, save for a 1997 comp, until he resurrected the name for 2004’s Codename: Dustsucker, a noisier effort that equals its predecessor. One 2005 remix EP later, and that was the end of Bark Psychosis. Sutton has had an amazing career as a producer, helming albums for superb artists like These New Puritans, British Sea Power and Jarvis Cocker, and doing remixes for Goldie, and even Metallica. In an interview published last summer, Sutton stated that he was contemplating making new music again. Let’s hope so.

Live footage has been frustratingly difficult to find, but I did turn up this incomplete version of “Big Shot,” from a 1994 performance in Moscow.
 

 
Question: What creates a ghost town? Answer: Rapid population, rapid depopulation. Ghost towns are the residue of booms and busts, expectations of substantial monetary gain that for whatever reason failed to materialize. Wherever resources can be exploited and depleted, there you will find, at some point, ghost towns. In the United States we have ghost towns where the Gold Rush happened, where railroads or interstate highways suddenly diverted opportunities elsewhere.

The modern story of Africa is largely one of exploitation at the hands of the European powers, so it’s probably not surprising that they have ghost towns there, too. One of the most remarkable exists in Namibia. It’s called Kolmanskop; the Germans who created settlements to mine the diamonds there called it “Kolmanskuppe.”
 

 
The 1910s were a big decade for Kolmanskop: the Germans created a veritable German Gesellschaft there, complete with a hospital, a ballroom, a power station, a school, a theater, even an ice factory, no small luxury in balmy Namibia. World War I put an end to all that; the town crept along until 1954 before becoming abandoned for good.

At that point, the sands started to take over the town and those sands are transforming Kolmanskop into a haunting, beautiful artifact.

French photographer Romain Veillon has a jaw-dropping series of photographs of Kolmanskop called “Les Sables Du Temps”—“The Sands of Time.” The title is a cliché, of course, but something about the material demands a cliché of that sort. In addition to whatever fleeting political point they evoke, the images are really about man’s transience in the face of implacable nature. 

Veillon is hardly the first artist to discover the aesthetic possibilities of Kolmanskop. Richard Stanley’s 1993 horror movie Dust Devil was partially filmed there, as well as parts of Ron Fricke’s non-narrative 2011 movie Samsara.

You can see more of these images at Veillon’s website.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via The Fox Is Black

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Breathtakingly beautiful Central African pygmy yodelling
Insane dust storm caught on film in Mali, West Africa

 
Gregg Foreman’s radio program, The Pharmacy, is a music / talk show playing heavy soul, raw funk, 60′s psych, girl groups, Krautrock. French yé-yé, Hammond organ rituals, post-punk transmissions and “ghost on the highway” testimonials and interviews with the most interesting artists and music makers of our times.

This week’s guest is James Williamson of The Stooges. Topics include:

—Iggy nearly choosing to a see movie over meeting David Bowie.

—The final Stooges show that saw a rain of bottles, cans, glass—even cameras—hurled by angry bikers at the band.

—How Raw Power got made while management was preoccupied trying to break David Bowie in the USA.

—Elektra records dropping the band due to drug use and Ron Ashton’s Nazi paraphernalia-filled room.

—When James got fired from the band temporarily and found himself working as a projectionist at a porn theater.

—How The Stooges had no idea what effect their sound would have on future bands.

 
Mr. Pharmacy is a musician and DJ who has played for the likes of Pink Mountaintops, The Delta 72, The Black Ryder, The Meek and more. Since 2012 Gregg Foreman has been the musical director of Cat Power’s band. He started dj’ing 60s Soul and Mod 45’s in 1995 and has spun around the world. Gregg currently lives in Los Angeles, CA and divides his time between playing live music, producing records and dj’ing various clubs and parties from LA to Australia.
 
Setlist

Mr.Pharmacist - The Fall
Ramblin Rose - The MC5
Shake Appeal - The Stooges
Intro 1 / Honky Tonk Popcorn - Rx / Bill Doggett
James Williamson Interview Part One 
I Gotta Move - The Kinks
I Just Wanna Make Love to You - The Rolling Stones
Sonic Reducer - The Dead Boys
Sunshine of Your Love - Spanky Wilson
Intro 2 / Do Your Thang - Rx / Dennis Coffey
James Williamson Interview Part Two
Know Your Product - The Saints
I’m Bored - Iggy Pop
Try It ! - The Standells
Intro 3 / Guess I’m Falling in Love (Rx on Organ) - Rx / Velvet Underground
James Williamson Interview Part Three
Let a Woman Be a Woman , Let a Man Be a Man - Dyke and the Blazers
Gone and Passes By - the Chocolate Watchband
Intro 4 / Twin Stars Of Thence Ra - Rx / Sun Ra
James Williamson Interview Part Four
Gimme Danger - The Stooges
Mr.Pharmacist (Outro) - The Fall
 

 
You can download the entire show here.