Tara beat me to this one, but her post was a long time ago and you should see this if you haven’t. I saw the B-52s last night, first time for me, they were very wonderful, and they ended the show with “Rock Lobster” as of course they should, and the venue was smallish and the audience was throbbing and appreciative. And it reminded me of this loopy video I once saw of robots playing “Rock Lobster” and it suddenly became essential that I show it to you. For all I know it was Tara’s post that (originally, eventually) led to my hearing about it way back when.

The Bit-52s were the brainchild of a James Cochrane of Toronto, Canada, and hats off to him.

The concept of a mechanized B-52s cover band reminds me of something I was thinking during the show…. how can I say this…. are DEVO and the B-52s diametric opposites? The B-52s and DEVO started around the same time, achieved national success around the same time, they have in common an obsession with the conformist, gee-whiz 1950s and a bent for simple instrumentation—you can program random computer parts to play “Rock Lobster,” and I reckon the same is true of “Whip It.” But their world views ... have the B-52s ever commented negatively on the 1950s or conformist America in their music? They named themselves after a beehive hairdo and obviously they’re entirely camp, but their perspective is all “Let’s go to outer space and send the girl from Ipanema to Greenland! Roam if you want to!” It’s all danceable, lovable positivity. DEVO isn’t like that. They’re both great bands and they share some DNA but they’re just real different when you dig a little deeper.

Anyway, the Bit-52s are a-ight but the B-52s were better.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The B-52’s doing the ‘Rock Lobster’ in Atlanta, 1978
What’s that on your head? B-52s perform ‘Wig’ on British kids TV, 1987

 
If you’ve ever wanted to own a piece of Ian Curtis now is your chance! Apparently the Joy Divison frontman’s kitchen table is up for sale on eBay.

From the eBay listing:

May the 18th 1980 Ian Curtis the singer of Joy Division took his own life in the Kitchen of the house he lived in with his wife Debbie at 77 Barton Street.

~ Snip

Included with the Table are confirmation of authenticity from Natalie Curtis, Debbie Curtis, Marco from Joy Division Central and Vicky Morgan. Also there is a four page print from a web site with pics taken inside 77 Barton Street when it was a B and B and a picture of Dorothy Smith.

The bidding began with a reserve of £100. The current bid is at £6,900.00 and the bidding ends on November 13, 2013.

“Ian Curtis’ Kitchen Table” would make a good name for a band.

 
Dennis Wheatley probably did more to sell black magic and the occult to the masses than any other writer. During his lifetime, Wheatley wrote over 60 books, which sold more than 50 million copies. His best-sellers included such classics as The Devil Rides Out, To the Devil a Daughter, and The Haunting of Toby Jugg. Wheatley actually hoped these occult novels would alert readers to the growing “forces of darkness,” which he believed were destroying Britain and the world. He considered these dark forces to be communism, socialism, multiculturalism, and to an extent sexual liberation and personal freedom of expression. Actually, anyone whose politics he didn’t like, the old crumudgeon lumped in with “Satanism” and he once famously said:

“Is it possible that riots, wildcat strikes, anti-apartheid demonstrations and the appalling increase in crime have any connection with magic and Satanism?”

It was after the Second World War, that Wheatley first indulged his nutty belief that a war between what he described as “good” and “evil” was inevitable, and became firmly convinced people (i.e. those to the right) should be prepared to form private militias to fight against the rise of “Satanism.” Cue thunder and lightning flash.

So, that’s the background to this brief interview, which Wheatley gave to the BBC in 1970, where he discussed his views on “good” and “evil,” “light” and “dark,” and why he believed civilization was disintegrating.
 

 
Cracked Actor is a 1974 BBC television documentary film about David Bowie that first aired in January of 1975. It was kind of a “Holy Grail” for Bowie nuts and over the years I’ve owned a VHS bootleg that was barely watchable, a DVD that was a slight improvement over that, and then I taped it off the air when BBC America aired it about ten years ago. Earlier this year, what with all the Bowie hoopla going on in the UK, the film was re-transferred to HD and trotted out again by the BBC. Now it’s really easy to find. In fact, it’s just a few inches below this very sentence.

Cracked Actor is a fascinatingly odd film. It was directed by a then 27-year-old Alan Yentob, later the Director of Programmes for all of BBC Television, who was promised extraordinary access to the singer by his manager Tony Defries. We meet a sickly, obviously coked-out David Bowie, being shunted between performances, limousines and hotels. He’s pale, stick thin and clearly mentally fragile. The somewhat uncomfortable manner in which he comports himself in film apparently made a big impression on Nicolas Roeg, who promptly cast him as an alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

In 1987, Bowie said of watching the film again:

“I was so blocked ... so stoned ... It’s quite a casualty case, isn’t it? I’m amazed I came out of that period, honest. When I see that now I cannot believe I survived it. I was so close to really throwing myself away physically, completely.”

Cracked Actor was mostly shot in Los Angeles and the majority of the concert footage was taken from a show at the Universal Amphitheatre on September 2, 1974. It is one of the sole sources of footage from the Burroughsian dystopia via Busby Berkeley vision of the infamous Diamond Dogs tour. Some of the material comes from D.A. Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars film.

Among the numbers performed in the film are “Space Oddity,” “Cracked Actor,” “Sweet Thing/Candidate,” “Moonage Daydream,” “The Width of a Circle,” “Aladdin Sane,” “Time” and “Diamond Dogs.”
 

 
Florida woman calls 911 to report drunk people at bar - Death and Taxes

Albert Hammond Jr says ‘Courtney Love is full of shit’ - Noisey

Speaking more than one language may delay dementia - USA Today

Boy, 13, suspended for carrying Vera Bradley purse - KLTV

Henry Rollins to star in indie horror-thriller He Never Died - Variety

UK Gov’t losing the plot: Now claiming Snowden leaks could help pedophiles - TechDirt

The Lyme disease battle: True believers and researchers face off over ticks and symptoms - LA Times

Billy Bragg tells artists to blame major labels not Spotify for ‘paltry’ streaming payments - NME

The federal government paid $11.3 million in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies from 1995 to 2012 to 50 billionaires - New York Times

Kapow! Batman, Robin, the Hoff and a Smurf chase Tesco attacker - STV News

Hundreds of tortoises found in luggage at Thai airport - Phys.org

Glenn Beck urges NY state to secede from NYC before it becomes ‘the next Detroit’ - Gothamist

Arkansas cop tasers woman who refuses to show him her breasts: lawsuit - NY Daily News

‘Artificial egg’ made from PLANTS backed by Bill Gates set to revolutionize cooking goes on sale at Whole Foods - Vegetarian Friend

EU rules that gay Africans are entitled to asylum: A gay refugee from an African country where people are jailed for being a homosexual does qualify for asylum - Telegraph

Legalisation of cannabis motion defeated in Irish Parliament - RTE News

Parisian restaurant has a policy of seating “beautiful people” in view of passersby, while keeping less attractive diners hidden - TheLocal.fr

Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of strongest storms ever, hits central Philippines - CNN

Skull marked ‘death to paedophiles’ among bones found off French Riviera - The Guardian
 

Below, a horny parrot REALLY wants a kiss:

 
Henry Rollins ain’t no George Carlin or Lenny Bruce. He takes aim at sitting ducks like people who shop at Walmart and he isn’t particularly funny and his insights are hardly revelations. But for some reason people really dig him. I don’t get it. I personally don’t turn to rock singers for their analytical thinking or wisdom. Not even the smart ones like John Lennon or Frank Zappa. They may be remarkable musicians but their satirical writings tend to be obvious and sophomoric.

Listening today to my old Mothers Of Invention albums, the stuff that seemed so outrageous and cool to me when I was a teenager seems trite to me now. Zappa’s targets were sitting ducks, too, but at least the ducks were relatively fresh. On the other hand, Henry Rollins’ rants seem tired and cliche-ridden. It’s easy to make fun of the defenseless slobs who work at Walmart or hipster douche-baggery, the military and frat boys. We did that shit back in the Sixties. So when I hear Rollins going on about the culture of greed and the idiocy that surrounds us it all sounds tired and worn out. We know this stuff already. It ain’t funny. In fact, at times, I think it’s cruel and hipper-than-thou classism. Rollins may consider himself some kind of edgy philosopher but I find him to be a dim-witted meathead with a slightly better than average vocabulary and a bunch of half-baked ideas who takes on subjects that have already been beaten to a pulp by superior humorists like the genuinely funny Bill Hicks.

Here’s Rollins in his perfect setting as a cartoon character…
 

Bernal sphere space colony
 
In the 1970s NASA pursued serious plans to create space colonies at a “far-out address”—L4 and L5, two of the five “libration points” between two large celestial bodies (in this case the Earth and the Moon) in which a floating object will remain in a stable point relative to those two bodies.

NASA hired Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill to develop the concept. O’Neill testified before Congress on the subject, and as a part of the work his team at the Ames Research Center, in collaboration with Stanford University, generated these wonderful images of human settlements in outer space. They come in three types—a cylindrical space colony; a “Bernal sphere” space colony, in which the people would live on the inside surface of a sphere; and a toroidal space colony (a toroid is essentially a donut shape).

Be sure to catch the 1970s-era educational video at the bottom of the page. There’s lots more information at the NASA website.

Bernal sphere space colony
 

Bernal sphere space colony
 
More after the jump…
 

 
The great Joni Mitchell turns 70 today.

As an avid and longtime collector of “bootlegs” (LPs, cassettes, CDs, VHS, DVD or now torrent files) I can tell you that the #1 major artist who it used to be difficult for me to find bootlegs of—especially video bootlegs, which is what I mainly look for—is Joni Mitchell. I used to religiously hit collectors fairs, record conventions, and the monthly “record collector” parking lot area at the Pasadena Flea Market (which used to be THE BEST) but I could never find any Joni Mitchell boots. As in nothing. Ever. I can’t help but to think that there was some level of sexism that saw the likes of Dylan, Zappa, Beatles, Dead, Stones, Zeppelin, Tull, etc, etc get bootlegged like crazy, when so little Joni Mitchell was making it into the video trading pipeline? Even on eBay there was next to nothing. What gives?

In any case, this imbalance eventually got redressed on YouTube and now there are many hundred delightful examples of Mitchell singing live for her fans to enjoy. What I find especially noteworthy about clips of Joni Mitchell in her 60s/70s prime is how she could absolutely command an audience with just her voice and an acoustic guitar or piano. For such a seemingly frail young woman—her between song patter was often so nervous that it seemed like she was about to cry—she was an exceptionally powerful performer.

One hallmark of any live Joni Mitchell live performance was the tuning up between songs. There was a reason for it. Again, I’m sorry to report that rock snobs and guitar aficionados of my gender—some, not all—have never fully appreciated what a brilliant, world-beating guitarist Joni Mitchell really is. The reason she was always tuning up for so long between songs is that she was often completely re-tuning the guitar to an alternate tuning. She is known to have created at least 50 harmonically innovative open tuning patterns. Apparently, she required them to be able to physically play the music she heard in her head. Due to a bout of childhood polio, her hand became slightly palsied and she basically had to come up with her own way of playing guitar. Her style is completely original, keep all of this in mind as you watch some of these clips. (In 2003 Rolling Stone ranked Mitchell as the 72nd on their list “greatest guitarist of all time.” She was the was the highest-ranking female and she wuz STILL robbed!).

Below, a selection of some of the finest Joni Mitchell performances that YouTube has on offer…

First up, this is the best Joni Mitchell thing, period, a September 1970 solo appearance on BBC In Concert:

 
A very young and VERY lovely Joni Mitchell sings “Urge for Going,” late 1966. The men seem absolutely stunned here. What man wouldn’t be?

 
More after the jump…

 
Legend has it that the initial creative spark for This is Spinal Tap was generated from a serendipitous moment at the Chateau Marmont in 1974, when Christopher Guest overheard the following “duncelike” dialogue between the bassist for a rock band and his manager:
 

Manager: All right, well, we’ll take our instruments up to the room.
Bassist: Don’t know where my bass is.
Manager: I beg your pardon.
Bassist: I don’t know where the bass is.
Manager: Where is it?
Bassist: I think it’s at the airport.
Manager: You have to get back there, don’t you?
Bassist: I don’t know, do I?
Manager: I think you better.
Bassist: Where’s my bass?
Manager: It’s at the airport.

 
Guest let that idea ping-pong around his head for a while, and in 1978 Spinal Tap made its first appearance on an ABC sketch program called The TV Show, which aired at 11:30 pm. The initial target of the sketch was an NBC music show called The Midnight Special. In the book Risky Business: Rock in Film, R. Serge Denisoff and William D. Romanowski explain that the three main characters of the band were developed during video shoot. According to Harry Shearer (bassist Derek Smalls), “We were shooting a takeoff on ‘Midnight Special,’ just lying on the ground waiting for the machine that was supposed to make the fog effect to stop dripping hot oil on us—and to relieve the tension of that moment, we started ad-libbing these characters.”

In the clip, Rob Reiner introduces the band not as “Marty DiBergi” but as Wolfman Jack. The video is a kind of repository of heavy metal video tropes—the endless over-emoting on stage, the quasi-choreographed physical interplay between the band’s members, a video montage including a trippy poker game and a death’s-head judge pronouncing the band to be “guilty,” complete with gavel. There’s also a sublime Busby Berkeley moment that no real heavy metal band would ever be caught dead executing—this is the reference to “lying on the ground” in Shearer’s comment above. And just to top it off, there’s a shot of a playing card—the ace of spades, natch—on fire.

You can’t tell from watching it—at least, I can’t—but the keyboardist in the video is none other than Loudon Wainwright III.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Spinal Tap’s IMDB rating goes to 11
LEGO ‘This Is Spinal Tap’: Nigel’s Guitar Room

Just look at these idiots

I will not oversell this with breathless Upworthy-esque superlatives. It might not be the funniest or the most brilliant thing you’re going to see online all day. But it is damned witty and amusing, and absolutely worth spending ten minutes with, should you happen to have a spare ten minutes to kill. Award-winning essayist and short story writer Steve Almond - known for Candyfreak, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life and God Bless America - in a speech given at Tin House Magazine’s 10th anniversary celebration in 2009, delivered a terrific takedown of that depressingly durable, dangerously soporific, and shamefully not entirely unenjoyable early ‘80s hit, “Africa,” by the indisputably crappy band/punchline Toto.

Though it’s maybe shooting fish in a barrel, this needed to be done. Toto were a canned band of six session musicians, previously footnote-worthy for their work on several best-selling light pop and vaguely fusiony rock albums, who united so as to grope for stardom in their own collective right. They were responsible for some of the most unlistenable radio dreck of their late ‘70s/early ‘80s heyday, but “Africa,” from their ha-ha-we-won-all-the-Grammys blockbuster 1982 album IV, is the massive and enduring überhit that’ll get played at all of their funerals. And it’s not hard to see why, as really, it’s an undeniably pretty song with a very well-crafted emotional arc. And it’s kinda soothing. And it grooves along well enough in the background, so you sorta don’t mind it, and then oh right on, here comes that big soaring chorus and JESUS BALLS CHRIST it’s so obviously a douchey black hole into which all that is not mightily vile gets sucked and yet this creepy, pandering, empirically wretched smooth-jazz/pop dross has been a mainstay for over 30 years and how how HOW THE FUCK DID YOU DO THAT, TOTO, YOU AWFUL, AWFUL MEN? I am persuaded that a horrible bargain was struck with the same pop Satan that handed “Orinoco Flow” to Enya.

Almond’s fine belittlement of the accursed thing begins with a funny line-by-line parsing of the lyrics - which make very nearly no sense. He goes on to quote at length from a truly stupid interview with Toto’s lyricist, revealing that the man, though gifted at extracting money from the pop charts, was kind of an embarrassingly clueless fuckstick. Almond concludes with some brutal truths about the narcissism of white, Western privilege that I would love to blockquote here, but to do so would be to rob the man of his well-earned money shot. I’ll let him do the rest of the talking.
 

 
Hat tip to Paul Scot August for bringing this little gem to my attention.