And now for something completely… wonderful?

After The Sun broke the story about 12 hours ago, it was confirmed by Terry Jones to the BBC that comedy group Monty Python’s Flying Circus are to officially reform in some capacity for a stage show and a rumored film/TV deal. There’s going to be a press conference on Thursday, according to Eric Idle’s Twitter feed.

Jones told the BBC:

“We’re getting together and putting on a show - it’s real. I’m quite excited about it. I hope it makes us a lot of money. I hope to be able to pay off my mortgage!”

Graham Chapman died in 1989. The last time that surviving members John Cleese, 74, Terry Gilliam, 72, Terry Jones, 71, Eric Idle, 70, and Michael Palin, 70, have all been seen in the same stage was an appearance in 1998 at The Aspen Comedy Festival.
 

Not at everything, you’re not…

You may have read my recent post on Muhammad Ali’s starring role in Buck White, the black radical Broadway musical. An intrepid commenter turned me on to Ali’s earlier… material, his 1963 album, I Am the Greatest!. It even had a bit of backing vocals by friend and fan, Sam Cook! While it was largely a novelty album, primarily consisting of Ali’s brilliant spoken word braggadocio, it also contains his early attempts at a singing career. Not yet heavy weight champion, and still “Cassius Clay”, no one can say Ali lacked confidence.

How he got cast for Buck White after this, I do not know.
 

 

The Gang’s All Here
 

Stand By Me
 

Ali and his close friend Sam Cooke harmonize on a BBC sports program.

 
When former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was running around before his trial appearing on The Daily Show assuring Jon Stewart that he never, ever did anything wrong, he should have considered adopting the post-arrest media strategy of James Brown, as seen in this incredible interview. Considering that both Blagojevich and Brown ended up going to prison, it couldn’t have hurt! And James Brown is a hell of a lot more popular than Rod Blagojevich.

This interview on CNN’s Sonya Live! in LA occurred in May 1988, after Brown was arrested in Aiken County, South Carolina, on charges of drug possession and fleeing from the police after his wife Adrienne called 911 because he was threatening her safety. Brown was released after paying $24,000 in bail and then went to Atlanta to do this interview.

In the interview, Brown seems only dimly aware of Sonya Friedman’s questions, preferring to shout the lyrics to his songs and talk about how he “smells good ... and makes love good.” (The juxtaposition of Sonya’s “How did all this trouble begin?” and Brown’s non-sequitur answer—“Livin’ in America!”—is resonant in ways that utterly outstrip the meanings Brown may have had in mind.) If you want to see someone on TV being interviewed while high, you can hardly do better than James Brown. As in so many other things. Rod Blagojevich just wouldn’t be in the same league.

Brown’s incredible vitality is such that you’ll be excused for wondering whether this isn’t a concert appearance in addition to an interview. YouTube commenters and the like are given to identifying cocaine as the source of this live-wire act, but it was almost certainly PCP. His arrest was for possession of PCP, a substance Brown was allegedly using a lot at the time.

Just four months later, Brown was arrested again, this time on Interstate 20 (near the Georgia-South Carolina border) for carrying an unlicensed pistol and assaulting a police officer. He was sentenced to six years in prison and ended up serving three years.

To judge by R.J. Smith’s The One, Brown’s erratic conduct in the 1980s was going to land him in prison one way or another. Between 1984 and his September 1988 arrest, Adrienne Brown had to call 911 to report domestic violence a whopping twelve times.

As the undisputed father of funk, James Brown was one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century, and nobody was more electrifying live. This interview manages to be both highly amusing and a harbinger of the troubles that were just around the corner.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
James Brown gets ultra-funky on Italian TV 1971
James Brown shilling Cup Noodles

 
On his fortieth birthday in 1993, Alan Moore openly declared himself to be a magician, something he discussed in an interview with The Guardian in 2002:

“One word balloon in From Hell completely hijacked my life… A character says something like, ‘The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind’. After I wrote that, I realized I’d accidentally made a true statement, and now I’d have to rearrange my entire life around it. The only thing that seemed to really be appropriate was to become a magician.”

For Moore, his writing is his magic and his magic is his artform. In The Mindscape of Alan Moore documentary, he states rather unequivocally:

“I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman.”

Consider the truth of that statement in terms of Moore’s very own work and say… the Occupy movement or Anonymous.

God, I love Alan Moore. May he have the best birthday ever this year (and every year).

Click here to read about “Who Strips the Strippers?” Excelsior Burlesque’s tribute to Alan Moore.

Below, a video of Alan Moore’s complete lecture at Northampton College on September 26, 2013. The mage of comics reads an extract from his book, The Mirror of Love and offers insights on being a writer.
 

 
As if all his other accomplishments were not impressive enough, it should be noted that according to his early biographers, Leonardo da Vinci was also a “brilliant musician,” who was a talented player of the lira da braccio.

According to award-winning biographer and author, Charles Nicholl, Leonardo must “have excelled” since the biographers “the Anonimo” and Vasari insisted Leonardo:

”...went to Milan, probably in early 1482, [where] he was presented to the Milanese court not as a painter or technologist, but as a musician.”

The lira da braccio was not the lyre of ancient antiquity, but rather a forerunner to the violin. Leonardo excelled at playing this instrument, and was, according to Vasari:

”...the most skilled improviser in verse of his time.”

Leonardo the first freestyle rapper? Wonderful.

But it doesn’t stop there, Leonardo wrote music, though only fragments remain of his compositions. In his biography on Leonardo, Nicholl identifies one of the artist’s short compositions:

”...the following romantic ditty: ‘Amore sola mi fa remirare, la sol mi fa sollecita’—‘Only love makes me remember, it alone fires me up.’ The two passages of musical notation can be picked out on a keyboard—DGAEFDE AGEFG. This is a melody by Leonardo da Vinci.”

Leonardo also devised and created plans for many strange and wonderful musical instruments, including the viola organista, which is an instrument that combines the sound of the piano and the cello.

Five-hundred after years dreaming-up the viola organista, Leonardo’s musical instrument has been painstakingly reproduced by Polish concert pianist, Slawomir Zubrzycki, who spent 5000 hours building the instrument as based on Leonardo’s original plans.

Zubrzycki debuted the instrument at a performance at the Academy of Music in Krakow, Poland, and this is what it sounds like.
 

 
H/T the Sydney Morning Herald
 

 
I’m one of those arch rock snobs who always feels superior to “NPR bands.” Not all—hey, I love me The Real Tuesday Weld, for instance, The Langley Schools Music Project and The Ghetto Brothers—but you know what I mean. There’s a certain “grad school” stigma that NPR’s musical gestalt has for me. It’s hard for me to put my finger on it, but hopefully I’m managing to get some kinda point across here…

Which brings me to Public Service Broadcasting, who, NPR-endorsed or not (their debut longplayer can currently be streamed from the NPR website) are worthy of your attention, but your audio and visual attention. These guys—well, really it’s one main guy, the bow-tied dandy J. Willgoose Esq. and his drummer sidekick Wrigglesworth—do something that’s actually pretty innovative. Although the music is good—very good indeed and very varied, too—and can be enjoyed on its lonesome, there’s a really amazing video mixing/collage thing they do in their live performance that’s really… distinctive.

Public Service Broadcasting doesn’t fit into any easy electronic dance music category (The Books and the similarly named Emergency Broadcast System are the sole comparisons that come readily to mind). They use clips from old British (and sometimes American) government propaganda films (I believe through some arrangement with the British Film Institute) and they construct this rubbery, bouncy, almost motorik-sounding beat-driven music. But it’s not some boring thing with a man and his laptop, J. Willgoose Esq. is as likely to be seen with a sampler onstage as he is to be seen plucking a banjo.

Public Service Broadcasting’s Inform Educate Entertain album drops on November 19th.
 

 
The Winchester House, a sprawling Queen Anne Style Victorian mansion in San Jose, CA with no apparent rhyme or reason is a bizarre architectural manifestation of the guilty conscience (if not acute schizophrenia) of Sarah Winchester, widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester and one of the richest women in American history.

After the death of her baby daughter, and later her husband, Sarah Winchester came to believe that her family were haunted by the ghosts of people who had died by Winchester rifles, and that only by continuously building the spirits a home could she appease the ghosts (Through a medium her husband was alleged to have told her that the house must never be finished.)

I could not help but to think of Sarah Winchester when I read an item this morning on Business Insider that tells of how a Cleveland, Ohio-based Wal-Mart store is holding a food drive — for the very people who work there…

A sign in the store reads: “Please donate food items so associates in need can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner.”

Breathtaking isn’t it? This is America’s largest employer. THIS is how low things have gotten.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted Norma Mills, a Wal-Mart customer complaining “That Wal-Mart would have the audacity to ask low-wage workers to donate food to other low-wage workers — to me, it is a moral outrage.”

Kory Lundberg, a Walmart spokesman, said the food drive is proof that employees care about each other.

“It is for associates who have had some hardships come up,” he said. “Maybe their spouse lost a job.

“This is part of the company’s culture to rally around associates and take care of them when they face extreme hardships,” he said.

Extreme hardships like working at fucking Wal-Mart!?!?

Wouldn’t it be awesome if when someone told a lie, they’d just spontaneously combust? I would love that…

But what does any of this have to do with Sarah Winchester’s guilty conscience, you ask? At least she had one. Sarah Winchester acutely felt the wages of death that made her so rich and it ruined her life.

As everyone should know by now, but it still bears repeating, the Walton family is the richest family in the world and they collectively own over 50% of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer and second largest corporation. The family is worth a combined total of $150 billion as of August 2013 and the six most prominent members of the family have approximately the same net worth as the bottom 30% of American families combined.

They didn’t do a goddamn thing to earn this money. Nothing. They inherited every cent of their billions.

Every item that is purchased at a Wal-Mart has a tax built in for the Walton family. The supply chain that reaches to factories in Chinese and Indian slums? There is a tariff at each stop along the way that goes, ultimately, into the Waltons’ bank accounts. Think about it for two seconds, that is what’s happening.

If it was a sea of faceless shareholders, well, that’s harder to personify, but this is ONE family.

Wal-Mart is America’s #1 private employer.

And they don’t pay a living wage.

The Waltons live like pharaohs and their workforce can’t afford the necessities of life. In a very real sense they and Wal-Mart are beginning to personify everything that’s wrong with capitalism. A single family owning the equivalent of the collective wealth of the poorest third of the country? Could even Karl Marx have predicted THAT? It’s preposterous and yet… it’s the way things are.

If the Waltons wanted to change the fundamental fabric of American life for the better, they could raise their associates up to $20 an hour and set a powerful example for other companies to treat the people who DO ALL THE WORK with actual human dignity. If they did that—and studies have shown it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line much at all, and even if it did, I think they can take the hit—well, it’s a whole new America. It really would be.

But to hold back on improving the lives of so many people, that is one of the single most obscene things I can contemplate.

Up to the Waltons, of course, for now at least, but when the revolution comes—and it will eventually—it’s their heads that are going to be on the ends of sharp sticks…
 

 

 
This intriguing declaration of a belief in extraterrestrial life is noteworthy for a number of reasons. The sheer volume of grammatical and orthographical difficulties is a wonder to behold, but the illustration is quite excellent, showing the influence of Raymond Pettibon, perhaps. I rather like the concept of the familiar alien character running. So it has hairy legs? Hmm.

We admire the author’s sagacity in opting for the “foods at school” over the dicey prospect of “going away” with the “aliun.” Furthermore, we applaud “my cat Miguel” for her vigilance in this matter.
 
via WXN&MLKN

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Bizarre memo said to ‘prove aliens landed at Roswell’
Portraits of Alien Abductees

 
Peter Sellers once received a letter from a fan requesting a “singed photograph of yourself.” Sellers obliged, delicately burning the edges of a B&W 8x10 with a cigarette, before sending the portrait off. A week or so later, the fan wrote back asking Sellers if he would be so kind to send another photograph, as the last one was “signed” all around the edges.

This tale of probable dyslexia captures something of the humor of The Goon Show, that classic radio comedy series, which launched the careers of Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan.

With its unique brand of surreal humor, The Goon Show started modern British comedy and inspired generations of comic performers. It is difficult to imagine how Peter Cook, Firesign Theatre, Monty Python, The Bonzo Dog Band,  Eddie Izzard, and The Mighty Boosh would have developed their own particular brands of comedy without The Goons.

In 1968, eight years after The Goon Show had finished, Sellers, Milligan and Secombe reunited for a specially televised recording of one of their classic scripts “Tales of Men’s Shirts.”  The trio were ably joined by a young John Cleese as the program’s announcer. Though not as brilliant as the original radio production (the visuals distract from imagining the comedy, and Milligan and co. appear to be enjoying themselves a tad too much), there is, however, more than plenty to enjoy.
 
More from The Goons (& Cleese), plus bonus documentary, after the jump…

 
Here’s a stunning—and major décor statement piece, IMO—500 lb. bronze octopus coffee table by Los Angeles-based sculptor, artist and designer Isaac Krauss.

It’s pretty incredible, eh? I can’t find the price for this, but I’d wager that this sucker ain’t cheap…
 
You can contact Krauss via his website if you’re interested.
 

 

 
h/t Everlasting Blort