Behind-the-scenes footage of Queen filming their second last video for “I’m Going Slightly Mad.” This footage has been posted along with a mixed selection’s of Freddie Mercury’s home video footage, which includes a brief tour of Freddie’s home Garden Lodge, a group of his friends chatting in the kitchen (including his personal assistant Peter Freestone, the singer and actor Peter Straeker, and cook Joe Fanelli), some of Freddie’s cats playing, and the morning after Christmas.

However, it is the footage for “I’m Going Slightly Mad” which has more pop cultural importance as we see (after some filming with penguins) how much effort Freddie puts into shooting just one scene from the video, even though he was very ill.

As for the home video footage, well, over a decade ago, I met and interviewed Freddie’s partner Jim Hutton for a documentary I was then producing. Jim had written a personal memoir about his relationship with Freddie called Mercury and Me, and I wanted to talk to him about that and his relationship with Freddie. I traveled to Ireland, where Jim was living. His home had a few possessions from his time with Freddie at Garden Lodge: a dining table and chairs, a glass cabinet, photographs, assorted mementoes. Jim was a handsome man, with a soft Irish lilt. He was charming, unassuming, direct and genuinely kind-hearted. We spent the afternoon talking and looking through his photographic albums, which were piled in a corner, still in a remover’s box. Inside were hundreds of large glossy color photographs of Jim and Freddie in Japan, at home, at Christmas, at a garden party together. The pictures revealed glimpses of their shared private world. Jim then opened another box filled with Hi-8 video cassettes, which contained various home movies, clips of which have made their way onto YouTube since Jim’s death in 2010. The quality is not great, but for the time (late eighties-early nineties), that’s to be expected.
 

 
More of Freddie’s home videos, after the jump…
 

 
There’s less than a week left before Christmas. You’ve got someone on your list who is really difficult to buy for? A sophisticate?

We’ve got you covered.

Yesterday I remarked to my wife that if I stacked up all of the amazing stuff I’ve been sent in just the past two months alone from publishers, publicists, and record labels, it would far surpass my best Christmas haul… ever. Some of it I asked for, but most of it came unbidden. Every day’s post saw a crazy new treat arrive.

Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult Dayal Patterson (Feral House). I found this book as fascinating as I found a new issue of RE/Search or Mondo 2000 when I was younger. I’m putting this book at #1 on my list because, believe it or not, I think it would appeal to the largest cross section of people. Me, I didn’t give a shit about Black Metal, but when I opened the package and pulled this book out, I sat right down and read the majority of it in one sitting. If you want the satisfaction of seeing your rock snob friend, lover or relative sit down on Christmas day and bury their nose in YOUR gift, go with Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult. You’ll find a more in-depth review here.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman: The Complete Series (Shout Factory) I received this a few weeks ago and we’re already, as of last night, 81 episodes into it. If I only got the MH, MH box set (38 DVDs, 325 episodes, plus ten episodes of Fernwood 2Night with Martin Mull and Fred Willard) this year, it would still be my best Christmas ever. It is astonishing how well this show has aged, and just how far ahead of its time the humor was, too. In a longer post about Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, I said that this long lost, fondly-recalled series was arriving just in time for the binge watching generation and owing from the way Tara and I have been ravenously devouring it, I’d have think that there’s going to be a full-on MH, MH cult revival coming soon. By the time it gets onto Netflix streaming, well, forget about it. (I also predict “Mary Hartman” will be a popular Halloween costume next year for hipsters—male and female alike—mark my words…)

White Light/White Heat 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition The Velvet Underground (UMe) The second installment of Universal’s “Super Deluxe” VU reissues, White Light/White Heat has surely never sounded better, but it’s the inclusion of the stunning 1967 live show from The Gymnasium that’s the crown jewel of this set. Read more here and listen to “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore,” one of the most amazing VU performances you’re ever going to hear.

Fanfare Jonathan Wilson (Downtown) I’m already on record as calling Fanfare the best and most important album of 2013 and I will stand by those words (and direct you to my original review here). I do want to mention here, though, that Wilson is a total analog freak in the studio and his vinyl releases are done to a very exacting standard (and weigh a lot). Vinyl head on your shopping list this year? Go for the two-record set of Fanfare.

Instant Replay Deluxe Edition The Monkees (Rhino Handmade) I played this so many times in the weeks after I got it that I thought my wife might break it if I didn’t let up. Instant Replay came out after the Monkees TV series was cancelled—and Peter Tork was gone by then, too—although many of the numbers were recorded prior. The album, as originally released in 1969, was somewhat uneven, but with the inclusion of several great extras, I’d give this an A-. It’s not the best Monkees album, no, but it certainly still deserves to stand alongside their earlier albums that everyone knows. “Someday Man,” “You and I” (a Davy penned song with backing from Neil Young on guitar) and the inclusion of nearly all of Mike Nesmith’s “Nashville Sessions” made this, for me, a must have.

Moondance Deluxe Edition Van Morrison (Warner Bros.) I posted about this the other day, so I’ll keep it brief. Classic album, one of the all time greats of the rock era, but you already knew that. Four CDs of a nicely remastered stereo Moondance, alternate mixes, discarded takes and mono versions. For me, though, the glorious 5.1 surround mix by one of the recordings’ original engineers, Elliot Scheiner, is the main event (on a Blu-ray in high quality HD DTS so you can really hear the difference, too).

Comme à la Radio Brigitte Fontaine (Superior Viaduct) This album is one of the most far out things I’ve ever heard. The (to say the least) eccentric Fontaine teams up with The Art Ensemble of Chicago, employing their unique talents to realize her bohemian Beatnik musical vision—a kind of wild, arrhythmic, Arabic free jazz—that brings to mind PiL, Serge Gainsbourg and The Master Musicians of Joujouka in various measures. If you want the satisfaction of seeing your giftee forcing this album on all their musically inclined mates, go with Comme à la radio, on CD or deluxe vinyl from Superior Viaduct.

Theres a Riot Going On: Gold Edition Sly and The Family Stone (Get On Down/EPIC) Well-known for their super creative packaging, the folks at Get On Down did not disappoint with this deluxe gold disc release of this mind-crushing classic. There’s a Riot Goin’ On is never going to sound truly “great” from an audiophile point of view—the tracks of the master tapes were recorded and re-recorded on too many time for that—this is probably the best sounding version there is. With a nice full color hardback book essay on the album and an embroidered cloth patch of the cover’s black, white and red flag, this is a sweet collector’s trophy piece.

Recollection “Le Ducks Box Set” Neil Innes (Neil Innes.org) One of the things I listened to the most in 2013 was this absolutely stellar three disc, one DVD collection of material from the Innes Book of Records TV series. I did a long interview with Neil Innes over email about this release—only available at his website—so I will direct you to that post, which has plenty of fantastic video clips. If there is a Monty Python fan on your shopping list, this one is, for sure, a knockout of a gift.

Cal Schenkel’s amazingly cheap art sale: Long associated with Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, American artist Cal Schenkel has created some of the most striking, freaky and enduringly classic images ever seen on album covers. I’m a big admirer of his work and I was floored to find out how inexpensive his prints—and even his paitings—are going for on his site. Any Zappa or Beefheart nuts in your life? They will love you long time for a piece of art from the great Cal Schenkel!

The Rock Snob’s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge David Kamp and Steven Daly (Three Rivers Press) Evocative title, eh? An amusing A-Z of exactly what you think it’s about. Co-author Daly (who did a guest turn on the Dangerous Minds Radio Hour and was the original drummer for Orange Juice) is an old pal of mine. He told me when the book was published that it was 1/3 based on my record collection, so with that in mind—and since they coined the phrase—I can recommend this one unreservedly as a sweet stocking stuffer.

SONOS speakers. Like I was saying earlier, this has been a wonderfully bountiful holiday season pour moi, and (by far) the biggest reason for that is the two rooms worth of wireless audio gear that SONOS’ ace marketeer Austin Brown sent my way. I’ve got a SONOS surround system in the bedroom (it would have been very awkward to use wired speakers in that particular room, so these were quite welcome, I can assure you) and two SONOS Play:5 speakers that are flanking me on either side as I type this. The first thing I played when I hooked these babies up was “The Suit” by Public Image Ltd., a song that’s practically a part of my DNA I’ve listened to it so many times, and sure enough, I heard things I have never heard before with the Play:5s, which are just incredible. The SONOS subwoofer weighs about 40 lbs! They have SONOS listening stations at Target, so you can check them out there. I reckon they’re some of the best sounding speakers I’ve ever heard, engineered from the ground up by some very smart people. (A big thank you here for Mr. Chris Holmes.)

Speaking of speakers and smart people, Alexander Rosson is the CEO and chief scientist/inventor behind the high end Audeze headphone line. While Audeze headphones are pretty pricey—the top model, the LCD-3 sells for $1945.00—they are actually worth it. A bit like having tiny Magneplanars strapped to your head, it could be argued that for someone who aspired to own a $20,000 dollar stereo, but will never be able to afford it, that these puppies are actually a bargain. The Audeze cans are featherlight and covered in supersoft leather. If Audeze are the Bentley of headphones, then Beats would be like the Pinto.

 
Adam Ant was featured as a hero in a comic book series published in a short-lived British magazine called TV Tops. Tops normally featured articles and comic strips based on popular TV shows of that era like Buck Rogers, Fame, Hart to Hart, The Metal Mickey TV Show etc. And for whatever inexplicable reason Adam Ant had his own comic series. I guess Tops was trying to capitalize off his fame? I don’t know. “The Fantastic Adventures of Adam Ant” issue was published April 17, 1982, when Antmania was at its absolute height.

It’s amusing to see Adam Ant fighting against evil, depicted as a Native American, a Lawrence of Arabia-type, highwayman robber and a cowboy. What can’t our hero do?!

I’ve compiled a few scans from the magazine. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find them in their entirety (except for “Stand And Deliver - Adam Ant’s Story” which is at the bottom), but I think you can get the drift of what’s going on by the ones posted below. Good stuff!
 

Click here for larger image.
 

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More after the jump…
 

 
I wish there were more photos of this chihuahua skeleton sculpture made entirely from typewriter parts by artist Jeremy Mayer. I wonder how big it is? Is it life-size? It must be.

According to Mayer’s Tumblr, he’ll be posting more photos of this piece in the next few days. Hold tight.

Via Boing Boing

 
Harlan Ellison describes himself as “a child of the Disney era,” whose first taste of the magic of cinema was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. But Disney’s latest movie (made in collaboration with BBC Films) Saving Mr. Banks has so pissed off the already notably cantankerous Mr. Ellison that he has felt it necessary to post a rather disconnected (one might say rambling) video on YouTube calling out the film as “bullshit.”

Saving Mr. Banks stars Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as P. L. Travers, the author of the book Mary Poppins, which was first published in 1934. The film concerns Disney’s attempts to convince Travers to allow him to film her famous novel. It took Disney over 20 years to achieve this, and eventually his company filmed Mary Poppins, with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, in 1964.

Ellison has great praise for Hanks and Thompson in the film, but his main beef with Saving Mr. Banks is not the acting but a pivotal scene at the end of the movie, which he claims is bogus and bullshit. One can surmise what this scene may entail, as Ellison declares how Travers hated the movie, and went to her grave regretting her decision to ever allow Disney near her work.

Ellison gets all fired up about this, which (I suppose) is understandable as Ellison is a writer who is deeply proud of his own work, and sees anything he writes as sacrosanct. However, I (like no doubt millions of others) have known for decades that P.L. Travers hated Disney’s Mary Poppins. It’s not new news.

When musical impresario, Cameron Mackintosh asked Travers, who was then in her nineties, if he could produce a musical version of Mary Poppins, Travers stipulated (confirmed in her will) that this musical must be adapted by English writers and no Americans, or anyone involved with the film or the Disney empire were to be directly involved with the creative process of the musical. Mackintosh adhered to Travers’ wishes, and the musical opened in London’s West End in 2004, where it ran for four years.

Okay, so it’s not news, but what Ellison is really getting at is his disdain for the…

“...refurbishing of Disney’s god-like image, which he spent his entire life creating, and it is so fucking manipulative…”

Particularly when this involves the misuse of a writer’s work, especially when that work is exploited and bastardized for commercial reward, and in this case, to create propaganda to “burnish” the image of Walt Disney.  Which probably is something to be pissed-off about.
 

1940
 
Let’s face it—if you want to see a top-notch Christmas card in action, it probably helps if you’re buddies with an old Disney hand or Chuck Jones or Tex Avery or somebody groovy like that. Ward Kimball was precisely that, one of Disney’s “Nine Old Men”, creator of Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio and the Mad Hatter and Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland as well as, surely, countless others.

Every year from the 1930s through 1966, Kimball would employ his unbeatable cartoonist’s arts to crank out a witty Christmas card. His cards were immensely popular, and his list of recipients ballooned to over 1,000 by the time he was done with it.
 

Ward Kimball
 
Imagine if you personally knew a top Disney animator, and imagine how awesome his Christmas cards would be—that’s exactly how great Kimball’s cards are. Frequent motifs include cute choo-choo trains, urchins, and trombones—in point of fact, Kimball himself played the trombone, as the Christmas video below vividly demonstrates. Most of the cards feature Kimball and his wife and children (where applicable—this changed throughout the years, of course) and starting in the 1950s the cards were more likely to include photographic montage instead of his ass-kicking draftsmanship skills. Either way his instincts for caricature and the sight gag were in fine form throughout the entire period under investigation.

Apparently (judging from the 1950 card), the Kimballs owned a cat named “Feets,” and we can only hope that they had a lion named Stanley, too, but I’m somehow less sure of that part.
 

1936
 
More after the jump…
 

 
The forlorn feelings elicited by unloved, unattached furniture just sitting around in some public place make them a fit canvas for the lyrics of a sublimely lofty balladeer like Lionel Richie, once of the Commodores. And it took probably the world’s biggest Lionel Richie fan—possibly ironically, although she isn’t giving the game away just yet—named Molly Evans to make the requisite connection.

This past summer, in part to amuse/annoy a Milwaukee neighbor, she started pillaging Lionel Richie classics like “Dancing on the Ceiling,” “Easy,” “All Night Long (All Night),” and “Hello” for pithy phraseology that she then embroidered on various sofas, mattresses, even a bumper pool table. Somewhat like the work of Barbara Kruger or Banksy, the massive yellow script writing—seemingly direct from the mind of Richie himself—makes for an arresting spectacle on an otherwise ordinary boulevard.

You can see more of Evans’ “Lionel Stitchie” artworks or follow her blog.
 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
Not much to say about these but DAMN. Award-winning London illustrator Daniel Mackie has created a gorgeous series of animal images, all hand-rendered in pencil and watercolor on paper, an increasing rarity in this age of digital art. From a Tangled Fingers interview:

I abandoned Photoshop in 2010 having used it as my main illustration tool for over ten years. Photoshop was making me cut corners and it was driving me crazy with its flat colours. Once I started using watercolour it became instantly clear to me that one of the reasons I was becoming so frustrated with my work was that I never had to make a solid decision. I could always undo something. When you’re using watercolour, you can’t undo it. You have to be brave, and as a result your decision-making gets better.

His blog features copious work-in-progress photos that give evidence of his considerable skill, and prints are of course available.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via I Am The Trend

Photo by Glen E. Friedman.
 
Check out legendary ripper Tony Alva doing what he does best in a pool at an abandoned Hollywood Boulevard apartment building in this gorgeously sinister testament to the beauty of skateboarding as an art form.
 
L.A. production company, Six Stair, perhaps best known for their righteous 2002 documentary, Fruit of the Vine, about the search for skateable empty pools around the U.S., shot the footage below for Gus Van Sant’s 2007 film, Paranoid Park, but it was never used.

According to Buddy Nichols, who also appears in the segment along with Rick Charnoski and Ivory Serra (Buddy and Rick are the brains behind Six Stair, and Ivory is sculptor Richard Serra’s nephew), the deserted apartments were once home to drag queen actor, Divine, and are rumored to have hosted a few Marilyn Monroe/JFK liaisons.

The spastic, sludgy free-jam supplied by former Don Cabellero bassist, George Draguns, is the perfect accompaniment for this nightmarish (in a good way) clip shot at 54 frames per second on super 8.

You can hear more from George Draguns at his Soundcloud page.  Paranoid Park is streaming on Netflix.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Fully Flared’ remastered: Stunning skateboard footage directed by Spike Jonze

 
My original plan for this post was a silly little holiday essay, something to give us a laugh, something flip.

I love flip. I excel at flip. But these pictures elicit such a deep discomfort. LIFE never published them, and there’s no date or context for the party. The mood seems, er, cheerful and the colors are seasonally bright; I’m just not sure I’ve ever seen something so apparently mundane manifest with such implied menace.

Don’t worry. I’ll write you something flip tomorrow.
 

 

 

 

 

 
Via The Wall Breakers