Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, the Temple of Set’s high priest Michael Aquino and H.R. Giger figure into The Occult Experience, a well-made, intelligent mid-80s Australian TV documentary,  Of particular interest is the section, starting at 33 minutes in, focusing on “witchy” Australian painter Rosaleen Norton, where you can catch a glimpse of some of her fantastic—yet seldom seen—paintings.

Noted occult author Nevill Drury (who contributed two essays to my Book of Lies anthology) did the interviewing, research and co-wrote the narration script, so this one is a cut above the usual fare. Drury’s latest book, co-written with Lynne L. Hume is The Varieties of Magical Experience.
 

Thank you, Tim Bob!

 
This priceless clip of the Polish pop singer Patty on the Polish TV show Dzień dobry! (“Good morning!”) is pretty terrific. While Patty gamely delivers her heartfelt/derivative pop vocals on her hit song (?) “Krzyk” (“Cry”), her guitarist appears never to have used a guitar before. (Her keyboardist doesn’t seem all that much more experienced, but the video evidence is more ambiguous.)

The meme-sters are already on to you, pretty lady guitarist who can’t play guitar…..
 

 
Thanks to Wilder Selzer!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Jimmy Buffett Rule: Spread this meme, make it go viral
Instant Obama Osama meme

 
For five years the gracious Maxine Powell ran the only in-house finishing school at any American record label. Most people have probably never heard of Powell, who died this week, but music fans have unknowingly enjoyed her handiwork at Motown since the ‘60s.

As Mrs. Powell explained:

When I opened up, in 1964, the finishing school, the purpose was to help the artists become class, to know what to do on stage and off stage, because they did come from humble beginnings. Some of them from the projects and some of them were using street language. Some were rude and crude, you understand, but with me, it’s not where you come from, it’s where you’re going.

The petite former actress, model, manicurist, cosmetologist, and African-American finishing school-modeling agency founder was hired by Motown to help the label polish its artists’ public images. She met Berry Gordy through his sister, who was one of Powell’s models, and his mother, who took one of Powell’s self-development courses. Her official title was “artist development,” but her duties were broader than that.

It was Powell’s job to teach the likes of Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, Martha Reeves, Tammi Terrell, The Marvelettes, The Velvelettes, and Smokey Robinson how to present themselves charmingly during interviews, performances, and off-stage public appearances. When they were in Detroit, Motown singers were required to attend two-hour session with Powell, learning public speaking, posture, walking, stage presence, etiquette, and personal grooming. Powell had studied African-American cosmetology at the renowned Madam C.J. Walker training school in Indianapolis.

Powell toured with artists on occasion, acting as counselor and unofficial bartender after shows. One of her mottos was “I teach class, and class will turn the heads of kings and queens.” She meant that literally. She wanted Motown’s artists to be able to comport themselves appropriately if they were ever invited to the White House or Buckingham Palace.

Perhaps more immediately useful was the instruction on how to sit in a limousine or on a stool (in a bar or on a talk who) in a short dress. Trying to act in a “ladylike” fashion is, let’s face it, like aiming at a constantly moving target. Even Diana Ross rejected the idea that shorter false eyelashes were classier than long, spidery ones.

Unlike Sharon Osbourne’s, Mo’Nique’s, and Ricki Lake’s Charm School candidates on VH-1, Powell’s students avidly listened to her and didn’t argue.

Martha Reeves of Martha and the Vandellas, told The New York Times, “Mrs. Powell was always a lady of grace, elegance and style, and we did our best to emulate her. I don’t think I would have been successful at all without her training.”

Although Powell left Motown in 1969 she left a lasting impression on the artists she had helped. For example, prior to a national TV appearance she counseled The Supremes to dance with their knees, not their buttocks (“Do not protrude the buttocks” was one of her maxims). “You’re not out on the streets here,” she advised them.

Powell’s memorial service and funeral are taking place in Detroit today.
 

 
Below, Maxine Powell on her approach to teaching “class” and how she motivated her students:

 
Last week, when we spoke to David Yow about his forthcoming Jesus Lizard: Book, he completely neglected to mention to us that he had a second book in the works. A book of cat drawings, and just about all of them groaner puns. Through his publisher, Akashik Books, Yow said:

I love cats. Always have. The only time I didn’t have a cat was a brief hell in Chicago where I lived in an apartment whose landlord didn’t allow them. At that place, I had a life-sized cardboard cutout of a cat which I named Toody. I also love wordplay. I’m the only adult I hang out with who still gets a kick out of puns. I make up palindromes. I used to write songs and poems (these days, I leave that for the songwriters and poets); in this book of cat-pun drawings, I have made a concerted effort to come up with ideas that range from really funny to really amusing. The entire litter of animals in this book are line drawings that are ‘coloured in’ with photographic textures, and each cat is dropped into a photographic setting. Yep, that’s the truth.

 

Catatonic
 

Cat Burglar
 

Cat Nip
 

Cat-O-Nine Tails
 
Et cetera. There are many more of these to be seen at Yow’s web site. And that’s the only place you’ll be able to see them for awhile. The book won’t actually be out until next summer.

It’s charming that he thinks people will like pictures of cats, but frankly, I’m skeptical. Who the hell buys cat stuff?

Below, fan-made video for Scratch Acid’s “Cannibal” (NSFW)

 
Previous, More Previous

 
On December 26th, 1958, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were interviewed at home, in their Greenwich Village duplex apartment. The couple had just moved from California the week prior, and their new dwelling was still filled with unpacked belongings when veteran TV broadcaster Edward R. Murrow came visiting via a video-link-up.

Woodward and Newman were nearly a year married, and Joanne was pregnant with the couple’s first child, Nell. Newman joked that an original painting of George Bernard Shaw will hang over the baby’s crib “as we believe in osmosis.”

Joanne had recently won an Oscar for her performance in The Three Faces of Eve, while Newman had picked up the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival and was in the running for an Oscar for his performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (The award went to David Niven for Separate Tables.) Woodward describes her Academy Award as “her favorite child, until I have this one.” Her next favorite child is Newman’s “Noscar”, which was presented to the actor upon not being nominated for an Oscar in 1957. Newman would be nominated five times as Best Actor before eventually winning his Oscar for The Color of Money in 1986.

When asked about his “rebel” status, Newman put his head in his hands, then remarked it was “A sore point”:

“We live, in what I call, an age of conformity, where you have to travel with the herd, and if you don’t travel with the herd, and you don’t say ‘Yes’ to that little man that’s leading the pack, why you are branded as a ‘rebel.’ I am trying desperately, I hope, to be an individual. I think there’s quite a bit of difference.”

It’s all harmless and innocent enough, but in the great scheme of things, this kind of TV access, eventually (and dishearteningly) led to Keeping Up With the Kardashians—o, how far we’ve fallen.
 

 
Before his death of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2007 at the age of 69, Robert Craig “Evel” Knievel apparently endorsed this Legend 2000 model motor scooter (PDF) from Pride Mobility Products Corp.

Obviously there’s something kind of funny about Evel Knievel, of all people, endorsing a vehicle that can’t even jump.

Here’s the famous Wembley jump from 1975 in which he attempted to vault over thirteen London buses. The clip is long, but the buildup is worth it.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Everything is Terrible: Stunt School
Dangerous Train Stunt

 
Decades of experimentation (and fun, by the way) were necessary before even the most rudimentary cinema equipment could be made in the 1890s. The great Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic experiments with the physical motion of humans and horses happened in the 1870s, but even when little Eadweard was a tot, in the 1830s, there were plenty of amusing gadgets around that depended on the persistence of vision. They went by a bunch of different names, including the zoetrope, the phantasmascope, the fantascope, the stroboscope, and the phenakistoscope.

“Phenakistoscope” was the term favored by a Belgian inventor named Joseph Plateau. (The term “phenakistoscope” comes from the Greek phenakizein, meaning “to deceive.”) Plateau’s idea was to put 10 images or so around a circular plate, each image being slightly different to its neighbor and the entire set of images being cyclical in nature, such that when the image was spun rapidly and the viewer’s gaze was interrupted by as many equally spaced radial slits on the disc as there were separate images, a cyclical set of moving images would emerge. You would have needed a mirror to use the phenakistoscope; other devices used a second disc to supply the visual interruptions.

I find all of the phenakistoscope images below utterly delightful and charming. They’re all wonderfully imaginative (some are even a little disturbing), and they were all painstakingly executed without any kind of mechanical reproduction, of course—no computers to duplicate the images or to help indicate exactly where the neighboring image should occur. (Actually, I’m not 100% sure that all of these images date from the 1830s, but at least a couple of them definitely do.)

Anyone interested in these devices is urged to visit Richard Balzer’s website or his Tumblr—you’ll find an endless array of delightful 19th-century visual trickery there.
 

 

More after the jump…

Please, Jimi, don’t sabotage my TV show…

In 1969 the producers of pop singer Lulu’s BBC variety show thought it was a great idea to book The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Lulu was typecast as a squeaky clean, non-threatening, sweet entertainer who had multi-generational appeal. Despite her disapproval of marijuana, which prompted her then-husband Bee Gee Maurice Gibb to fling the windows of their home open for several minutes in all weather prior to her arrival, she was cooler than she was given credit for, even before her cameo appearances on Absolutely Fabulous. This is a woman who, in addition to a brief fling with David Bowie in the ‘70s, had the guts to scream at John Lennon for ignoring his first wife at a party to flirt with other women.

Hendrix had enjoyed recent success in the U.K. with “Hey Joe,” and the idea was for Lulu to sing the last few bars with him as a duet on her January 4, 1969 show before transitioning to her usual closing song. The producers had even suggested the unthinkable possibility of Jimi and Lulu singing a duet on “To Sir With Love,” her biggest hit.

Things didn’t quite work out that way.

Hendrix and the band were horrified at the idea of a duet with Lulu. The unflappable bassist Noel Redding wrote in his autobiography Are You Experienced? The Inside Story of The Jimi Hendrix Experience that the band tried to relax by smoking a lump of hash in the dressing room, which they accidentally dropped down the sink. Redding said:

I found a maintenance man and begged tools from him with the story of a lost ring. He was too helpful, offering to dismantle the drain for us. It took ages to dissuade him, but we succeeded in our task and had a great smoke.

After playing “Voodoo Child” as planned, Jimi allowed a blast of feedback to “accidentally” interrupt Lulu’s introduction of “Hey Joe.” The by now baked band played a few minutes of song before Jimi stopped abruptly. “We’d like to stop playing this rubbish,” he told the straight, ordinary, respectable, and totally bewildered audience. He then announced an impromptu tribute to Cream, who had just disbanded, and flew into an instrumental version of “Sunshine of Your Love.”

Lulu’s show producer Stanley Dorfman paused his nervous breakdown long enough to repeatedly point to his watch as they played out the show. Redding said:

Short of running onto the set to stop us or pulling the plug, there was nothing he could do. We played past the point where Lulu might have joined us, played through the time for talking at the end, played through Stanley tearing his hair, pointing to his watch and silently screaming at us.

As a result of this prank Hendrix was banned from appearing on the BBC. Eight years later when Elvis Costello was similarly banned from Saturday Night Live for stopping in the middle of “Less Than Zero” and playing “Radio Radio” instead, he admitted that he was copping Jimi’s move.

 
My first encounter with Irish punkers The Undertones was seeing them open (with Sam and Dave) for The Clash in September of 1979 and they were shockingly good. Subsequent gigs seen later in ‘79 and early 1980 at Irving Plaza, Trax and Hurrah’s were all stunners. The band was one of the best live acts I’ve seen - tight, intense and loud. Their songs have indelible hooks.  On every level The Undertones are right up there with The Ramones, The Heartbreakers and Suicide Commandos. They were one of John Peel’s favorite bands and had a huge following in the United Kingdom but were mostly ignored in the USA. Too bad.

The band split in 1983. Lead singer Feargal Sharkey (that’s him as a kid on the “Jimmy Jimmy” picture sleeve) released some solo material and went on to a long career in the music industry, while the rest of the band formed That Petrol Emotion in 1985.

The Undertones, Irving Plaza 1980.

I went looking for some live concert footage of this under-appreciated group to share with DM readers and and came upon this stellar video from 1981. It’s from a show in Munich, Germany. If you know the band, you’ll know what you’re in for. If, not this is a great place to start.
 

 
Here’s a terrific documentary on The Undertones.

 
One of the worst things about living in New York is the inflated prices of nearly everything you could get in middle America for damn near nothing; used clothing, bicycles, furniture- everything is marked way up. It’s such a treat when you can find a deal, and ever better when you can find a freebie, like this human-sized hamster wheel, available in Brooklyn!

FREE HUMAN SIZED HAMSTER WHEEL AVAILABLE FOR IMMEDIATE PICK UP. CAN ACCOMODATE UP TO 200 LBS. FULLY FUNCTIONAL. NOT RECOMMENDED FOR HOUSES WITH SMALL CHILDREN OR ANIMALS. 50 LBS OF SHREDDED NEWSPAPER ALSO AVAILABLE.

I WILL NOT HAVE THIS IN MY HOUSE ANY LONGER.

TAKING APPOINTMENTS TO VIEW THE WHEEL THIS WEEK.

SANDRA Z. ZZZ

I want to help you Sandra! I know you’re at your wit’s end, but I must know more!!! How? And why? And will WD-40 keep it in shape? And is it good for cardio?

UPDATE: This is a prank. You can watch how CNN was duped by the story on YouTube. You can also read about it on Pitchfork.
 
Via Brokelyn