Here we have Pee-wee Herman’s contribution to the War on Drugs, in the form of this doomy public service announcement. Tell it, Pee-wee:
 

This is crack. Rock cocaine. It isn’t glamorous or cool or kid stuff. It’s the most addictive kind of cocaine, and it can kill you. What’s really bad is nobody knows how much it takes. So every time you use it, you risk dying. It isn’t worth it. Look, everybody wants to be cool. But doing it with crack isn’t just wrong—it’s dead wrong.

 
It’s something of an Internet mystery when this was actually made. Many people seem to take it for granted that this was done as part of Paul Reubens’ plea bargain agreement after he was arrested for indecent exposure in Sarasota, Florida, in 1991. But I’ve seen 1980 and 1985 mentioned as well—1980 is clearly out, as The Pee Wee Herman Show first aired on HBO in 1981, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse didn’t get onto CBS until 1986.

However, the mid-1980s are a far more intriguing possibility, because if that’s true then it means it was a good-faith effort by ... somebody ... to use Pee-wee’s overwhelming moral authority to get 11-year-old TV viewers to stop using crack cocaine. Somehow I think other approaches would be more effective. Does anyone remember seeing this during the Reagan years?

To paraphrase the question asked by the top YouTube commenter: Did anyone else half-expect the trademark Pee-wee snicker at the very end?
 

 
(Thanks to Mark Davis!)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Pee-wee Herman, punk rocker
‘I know you are, but what am I?’: Pee-wee Herman’s infamous bicycle as a vintage magazine ad

 
Forget The Beatles. Forget The Mersey Sound. Liverpool’s biggest star during the 1960s was the comedian Ken Dodd. Oh, yes!. So great was Doddy’s fame that his only rival was The Beatles.

Dodd was a box-office smash at clubs and theaters across the country, had hit TV shows (including the brilliant kids series Ken Dodd and The Diddymen, and had a recording career that saw him out-selling most pop bands, achieving nineteen hit singles, with his hit track “Tears” becoming the biggest-selling single in the U.K. for 1965. Indeed, after The Beatles, Dodd is Britain’s biggest-selling pop star for the 1960s.

Ken Dodd was born in the Liverpool district of Knotty Ash in November 1927. He started his career (rather nervously) as a Music Hall comedian in 1954. By the early sixties, Dodd was the biggest comic in the country. With his electric-shock hairstyle, buck teeth and tickling sticks, having Doddy on any bill guaranteed a truly “tattifelarius” evening, which would leave the audience “absolutely discumknockerated.”

In 1964, Dodd had an unprecedented and record-breaking 42-week sell-out season at the London Palladium. It was also during the Swinging Sixties that Doddy earned his place in the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s longest ever joke-telling session, where he told 1,500 jokes in three-and-a-half hours (which works out at 7.14 jokes per minute), at a performance in Liverpool.

While The Beatles split, and the pop world went Punk, Disco, Acid and Grunge, Doddy continued his exuberant comic career, with sell-out tours, and long summer seasons at the seaside resort of Blackpool.

Now, incredibly, 86-years-of-age, Doddy still tours with his comedy shows (Happiness Shows), which can still last up to five hours.

In 1976, Ken Dodd gave presenter Michael Barratt a personal tour of his hometown Liverpool for the magazine programme Nationwide. It’s a delightful snapshot of one of the U.K. most loved comedians.
 

 
Bonus clip of Ken Dodd and The Beatles, plus a selection of his record covers, after the jump…
 

 
Who wouldn’t have wanted a postcard from Malcolm Lowry? The old sot who wrote the marvelous Under the Volcano and Lunar Caustic. And of course, apart from its literary worth, the receipt of said postcard from Malc, off boozing in some foreign clime, would reassure the recipient that there was no need to lock up the whisky, the after shave or the hair tonic.

Lowry, you see, drank anything—including all of the aforementioned. How he ever managed to get his books written, only gives evidence to his desire to write, and write well, everyday. Writing was the only thing more important than boozing.

Lowry wrote everything down in small pocket books, which provided much of the content for his novels and stories. Alas, only two of novels were published during his lifetime the semi-autobiographical Ultramarine, and the excellent Under the Volcano. The rest appeared after his untimely death by suicide, or possible murder, in 1957. Lowry ingested a large quantity of alcohol and barbiturates, the latter had been prescribed to his wife Margerie. Gordon Bowker suggests in his excellent biography Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry (1993), that an exasperated Margerie may have fed Lowry handfuls of the pills in his alcoholic stupor. It sounds possible, for who could live with such a relentless drunk? Also, Lowry would not have gone gently into that good night, without filling a notebook or two with his thoughts and feelings, and last farewells.

Since we never received that decorative missive from Mr. Lowry (“Wish you were here!” lost in the post), here is the next best thing a Tumblr site dedicated to imaginary Postcards from Malc, in which vintage postcards are tied together by Lowry’s life, letters and books.
 

 

Bowen Island, Canada December 1953

You’ve me caught me at a bad time to write a letter like because I have to catch a boat to an island whence the posts are few and far between. In fact a December Ferry to Bowen Island.

          - Letter to Albert Erskine 27/12/1953

Milan 1954

In Milan I met the translator of the Volcano and worked on it with him for a couple of weeks. It is scheduled for March publication and I understand they are going to launch it with much fanfare and publicity.

          - Letter to Harold Matson 20/11/1954

 
More postcards from Malc, after the jump…
 
Via Postcards from Malc
 

 
You have to see only a single one of Guillermo del Toro’s lush, vivid movies to realize that the Mexican director, most recently of the Godzilla-style throwback Pacific Rim, is some kind of creative Tasmanian devil—another Tim Burton. It’s no surprise to learn that del Toro is a first-rate draftsman and has been obsessively marking up art notebooks for years. Fans have been wanting to a look at those notebooks for years, and finally, the day is nigh: Timed perfectly for Halloween gift season (is that even a thing?), Harper Design on October 29 is releasing a gorgeous edition of Guillermo del Toro Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions. It may not be quite as spectacularly weird as Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, it’s pretty damn weird and spectacular in its own right.
 

 

 
You can pre-order the book from Amazon for $36 (down from $60). If that seems pricy to you, then you probably aren’t super interested in the “Limited Edition,” which comes “encased in a cabinet with partitions and a secret compartment that holds the book”—that baby will run you $633.82. Marc Zicree is credited as a coauthor, and —as befits the A-lister del Toro has become—a foreword by James Cameron and an afterword by Tom Cruise.
 

 
Here’s a charming video trailer for the book, with plenty of mouth-watering closeups of various oddities in what I presume is del Toro’s own home:

 
In related news, Guillermo del Toro’s reference-tastic opening to the Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” was released yesterday, and it’s fantastic. It’s meticulously detailed (like the Cabinet of Curiosities) and jammed with classic horror movie references. I spotted The Birds, The Phantom of the Paradise, The Shining, and del Toro’s own Pan’s Labyrinth are gimmes; I leave the rest for you to spot.
 

 
via Collider

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Codex Seraphinianus: A new edition of the strangest book in the world

 
The Voice Project has filed an urgent appeal with the UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment to intervene on behalf of imprisoned Pussy Riot member Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova - TVP

Study finds that reading Tolstoy & other great novelists can increase your emotional intelligence - Open Culture

Some online journals will publish fake science, for a fee - NPR

Buenos Aires artist Leandro Granato paints by snorting watercolours up his nose, and then squirting it out of his eye - BuzzFeed

New York latest state to take on revenge porn - The Daily Dot

Ministry’s Al Jourgensen creating comic book series - Rolling Stone

Charity makes little girl’s dream come true as she meets a mermaid on the banks of Loch Lomond - Daily Record

‘Like nothing we had seen before’: New species of owl discovered - The Independent

Prince to play gig at his house this weekend: The pop icon will host a party at his Paisley Park Studios complex - NME

David Tennant joins U.S. adaptation of hit British drama Broadchurch - TV Guide

Making the movie trilogy The Hobbit has cost more than half a billion dollars so far, double the amount spent on the three movies in the The Lord of the Rings series - AP

Rob Zombie saves puppies - BlabberMouth

Russia halts adoptions to Sweden over gay nuptials - The Local

A Spanish judge has risked the ire of women everywhere after ruling that a driving school was within its rights to charge female learners more because it was proven that “men were better drivers” - Telegraph

Neil Young will perform at a benefit for the Silverlake Conservatory of Music that Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea and Anthony Kiedis will host - Billboard

The Nebraska Supreme Court rejected a 16-year-old ward of the state’s request to waive parental consent to get an abortion, saying the girl had not shown she is sufficiently mature and well-informed enough to decide on her own whether to have an abortion - Chron

Sifting through the many solo albums (and names) of Frank Black/Black Francis - AV Club

Photos of the original walls from the CBGB music club - Laughing Squid

Below, Psychedelic Furs lip-sync “We Love You,” in front of an audience of American children:

 
In the late 1970s, so many awesome punk bands looked to rockabilly for inspiration—think of the Cramps, X, the Gun Club. Not as renowned as those bands but possibly more authentically rockabilly than any of them were Tav Falco’s Panther Burns.

Early on, Gustavo Antonio Falco caught the attention of fellow Memphisian Alex Chilton, who saw him end a perfomance at the Orpheus in Memphis by cutting a guitar in half with a chainsaw. Chilton worked with the Cramps around the same time, and saw in Tav Falco someone who he could help take blues and rockabilly to new places. Falco did the titleing for Chilton’s notorious first solo album, Like Flies on Sherbert.

Around the time all of this was happening, Falco booked a gig on a Memphis-area talk show hosted by the matronly and marvelously named Marge Thrasher. In Amy Wallace and Handsome Dick Manitoba’s Official Punk Rock Book of Lists, Eric Friedl ranks this TV appearance #2 in his list of “Things That Made Memphis Punk.” With Chilton shyly sporting a pair of Cons and slotted in as guitarist (Falco cheekily introduces him as “Axel Chitlin”), the Panther Burns did a rendition of the Burnette Brothers’ “Train Kept a Rollin’” before segueing into … well, it took quite while before they could get to that second song—over the apparent objections of La Thrasher.

Fascinating here is the yawning chasm between the song they actually play, which seems understated, spare, groovy, and otherwise unexceptional, and the well-nigh horrified reaction it gets from Thrasher. While it was not a performance designed to blow the roof off the joint, Falco must have been positively bumfuzzled to hear the middle-aged Thrasher deem the song possibly “the worst sound I’ve ever heard come out on television” and block Falco’s efforts to play a second song by engaging in a lengthy and hostile interrogation as to the inherently “anti-music” nature of Falco’s style, which frankly seems hardly to exist—there’s nothing particularly alienating about the music! Not unduly discomfited, Falco gamely offers up a bunch of philosophical mumbo-jumbo in defense.

Thrasher doesn’t even seem all that angry, she’s genuinely curious why anybody would choose to play music like that on live TV at 9 o’clock in the morning: “This is anti-music, is that right? ... Are you all all part of the federal grant, of money?” (You can almost hear the Tea Party in that question….) We encountered a similar theme in a recent post about the Jackson 5—our increasing inability to hear just how profound punk’s attack on the status quo was. I don’t know if Thrasher was expecting the Electric Light Orchestra or the Carpenters or Lawrence Welk, but she sure as hell wasn’t expecting the thrum and purr of a low-budget rockabilly machine such as Tav Falco’s Panther Burns. I don’t know; it’s a wonderfully resonant bit of television. (In the video, the interesting freeze effects and inserts are the work of Randall Lyon, who partnered with Falco to run a video company named TeleVista Projects, Inc.)
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Alex Chilton Honored In Congress By Representative Steve Cohen
Alex Chilton and The Box Tops live at The Bitter End in 1967

 
For the unfortunate guardians of these children, there must’ve been a tense, slack-jawed “What the hell are we gonna do we do now?” moment resulting from the sight of this zany, barely-clad New York City street performer. Then the reality of “Nothing to see here, kiddies. Let’s move along” probably sank in pretty quickly.

When I was a kid, I was amongst the group of school children who were taken to the controversial Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit in Cincinnati, but that was… art.

 
via reddit

 
My old Emdashes colleague Benjamin Chambers spotted this gem buried deep in the archives of The New Yorker.

In the July 1, 1972, issue there’s an ad for Canadian Club in which some upper-class twit is quoted as saying, “Mountain hopping, it’s sort of the jet age answer to mountain climbing.”

The twit continues, “All you need is a rocket pack, a pretty assistant—and you’re ready to hop your first mountain…. 3 … 2 … 1. Varooom!”

Varooom, indeed.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Jet Propulsion Labs Brings AI to Space

 
Stephen Malkmus has loved Can’s 1972 album Ege Bamyasi for a long, long time.  In 1992, before hardly anyone knew who Malkmus was, he told Simon Reynolds in Melody Maker, “All that German music is really important to us. . . . I played Can’s Ege Bamyasi album every night before I went to sleep for about three years.”

Last year was the 40th anniversary of the album’s release, so late last year Malkmus visited Week-End Fest in Can’s home town, Cologne, Germany, and covered the full album, backed by Cologne band Von Spar.

The album was relesed in a vinyl limited edition for Record Store Day. The charming cover was designed by David Shrigley.

About halfway through this video, Malkmus tackles a couple of questions about covering the album before being adorably attacked by his own daughter.

 
Here’s Malkmus doing Can’s “One More Night”:

 
Here’s his “Pinch” and “Soup”:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Choose your own adventure as Can’s Damo Suzuki

 
My wife, knowing how deep my League of Gentlemen fandom goes sent me an email just now (subject line: “Holy shit!”) with the news that the great comedic geniuses would be reforming. Anyone who knows me well, knows just how high my regard is for the League.

Sadly, though, it’ll only be a one-off “local” affair, seeing the Gents reuniting for a London charity fundraiser. Via Chortle:

Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith are to perform together at a star-studded benefit for the Royal Free Hospital at the Adelphi Theatre on December 1.

The Rocks With Laughter event also features a rare live appearance from Rowan Atkinson, as well as Matt Lucas Harry Enfield, Harry Hill and Mitchell and Webb.

Shearsmith prompted intense speculation about the reunion yesterday when he tweeted a picture of the three of them, with the message: ‘There might be some news about these people - coming soon. Keep em peeled.’

I follow Reece Shearsmith on Twitter and I saw that and my hopes were high for another series or perhaps a second LOG movie. As I’m quite sure video from the Rocks With Laughter fundraiser will reach YouTube, I’m just happy to take what I can get.
 

 
BUT THEN I noticed something in that article that had managed to escape my attention: Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith had already reunited on television, shooting a number of sketches for a BBC kids show called Horrible Histories, in 2012. How did I not hear about this? (I don’t watch kid’s shows?)

In the series of ten sketches (not written by the trio or their off-screen writer-partner, Jeremy Dyson) Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith play American movie execs shooting down one historically accurate film idea after another. It’s disconcerting to hear them all do American accents, but also really fun, too.

They do manage to slip in a fair amount of history into the really clever dialogue. A US version of this show would do gangbusters.

Dick Whittington pitches his life story to three American movie executives. Maybe Eddie Murphy can do the voice of the cartoon cat?

“The King Canute Project”

Eight more great sketches from ‘Horrible Histories’ after the jump…