Nothing of any great consequence occurred during this 1988 interview with America’s then favorite surrogate TV husband and wife, Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford, but it’s fun to watch. The punk rock legends on their morning gabfest to promote Ramones Mania, their greatest hits album.

Regis and Kathie Lee ask them about working with Phil Spector, about whether their “cult” status has constricted them in any way, and about their Brooklyn/Queens background. Regis mocks the very idea of a song being called “I Wanna Be Sedated” or “Teenage Lobotomy” and even insists that Joey tell him the opening lines of the latter.

Eventually everyone ends up somehow agreeing that really Dee Dee ought to be the focus, and Kathie Lee asks him about navigating ten years of marriage when groupies are part of the equation. The Ramones seemed genuinely happy to be there, and Regis and Kathie Lee, pros both, seemed perfectly happy to have them there.

I gotta tell you—as a New Yorker, I could listen to those Ramones accents all day long.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Marvelous Mage of Manhattan TV: Joe Franklin R.I.P.
For your viewing pleasure: ‘End Of The Century - The Story Of The Ramones’

 
Activist and singer-songwriter Billy Bragg showed up at the University of Minnesota’s American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees union’s Rally for Affordable & Accessible Healthcare for All this week, spoke about his support for the workers, and played “There is Power in a Union” and “Keep the Faith.” The AFSCME is the union for the university’s clerical, technical and health care workers. The are fighting for a simple sliding-scale health care model, but the university’s administrators – at an institution that is supposedly so very progressive – won’t even discuss it. Bragg happened to be in Minneapolis to play a gig last night at the Cedar, but still took the time to get to the noon rally. 

He was interviewed by Margaret Cho on the Monsters of Talk podcast in May, when he talked about the need for universal health care in the U.S. and Breaking Bad. And some of Cho’s tattoos. Their point is similar to the recent Breaking Bad, Anywhere But America Edition comic strip.
 

 
Bragg tweeted this pointed comment at Senator Ted Cruz on Wednesday:
 

Did Ted Cruz not get this message re: universal health care? Who's he working for? pic.twitter.com/NdBavznQme

— Billy Bragg (@billybragg) September 25, 2013

.
 
Animated excerpt from Monsters of Talk podcast with Margaret Cho interviewing Billy Bragg:

 
My first thought was, “Surely sleeping with a plank of wood is mightily uncomfortable?” But apparently not, as the enthusiastic reviewers on Amazon tell me that the Nicolas Cage Pillowcase can give you the best sleep of your life.

One customer comments that her friend is so enamored with sharing his bed with Mr. Cage that:

..you can hear through the walls how much he loves it.

Thankfully, the Nicolas Cage Pillowcase is “stain resistant.”

But this is not just some bedtime fancy, as that:

Classic Nic Cage smile seems to light up the room even when the lights are out!

And his eyes apparently follow you around.

But for those who worry that sleeping with Nicolas Cage will keep them up all night, fear not, as one other satisfied customer attests:

...if you are afflicted with the unfortunate illness of insomnia, purchase this item, I promise you won’t regret it.

Fortunately, I doubt I’ll be requiring one, as just the thought of watching one of Mr. Cage’s movies is enough to send me off.

But if you do fancy a night of bliss, cheek-to-cheek with Mr. Cage, then place your order here.
 

 

 
More pillows to plump, after the jump…
 
H/T b3ta
 

 
If music is patterned sound, then it kind of makes sense that algorithms whose task is to relentlessly forge order out of chaos might generate interesting music.

This could be an alternate soundtrack to The Shining, it could be where dubstep hasn’t taken us yet. It could be Kraftwerk. For me, the black/white/red color scheme clinches it. In any case, it’s utterly mesmerizing.

More info on the video. Not surprisingly, there’s been a lot of work done on the “audibilization” of sorting algorithms. Here’s a different one.

Here’s a breakdown of the “movements,” for want of a better term:

Selection sort 0:00
Insertion sort 0:10
Quick sort 0:39
Merge sort 1:06
Heap sort 1:29
Radix sort (LSD) 1:55
Radix sort (MSD) 2:11
std::sort (intro sort) 2:33  
std::stable_sort (adaptive merge sort) 3:05
Shell sort 3:37
Bubble sort 4:00  
Cocktail shaker sort 4:18
Gnome sort 4:34
Bitonic sort 4:53
Bogo sort (first 30 seconds) 5:17

Ending with “Bogo sort” is a wonderful little joke, somewhat like the Beatles sticking “Revolution 9” at the end of side 4. A bogo sort is a phenomenally inefficient sort that amounts to not sorting at all. As Wikipedia explains,

In computer science, bogosort (also stupid sort or slowsort) is a particularly ineffective sorting algorithm based on the generate and test paradigm. It is not useful for sorting…. If bogosort were used to sort a deck of cards, it would consist of checking if the deck were in order, and if it were not, throwing the deck into the air, picking the cards up at random, and repeating the process until the deck is sorted. Its name comes from the word bogus.

Oh, and the YouTube comments are silly and nerdy, too.
 

 
via Dinosaur Party

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Douglas Rushkoff: Program or Be Programmed
Leonardo Da Vinci’s incredible mechanical lion and history’s first programmable computer

 
Episode 37 in the Monkees’ TV canon, “Art for Monkees’ Sake,” is a pretty routine episode as Monkees episodes go. The premise is that Peter gets interested in art, paints his version of Frans Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier at the local museum, which then gets switched for the real thing, it gets stolen, hijinks ensue. It doesn’t really matter. It’s a Monkees episode, with two wonderful songs (“Randy Scouse Git” and “Daydream Believer”) and as many dumb sight gags as they could cram in there.

Because it’s set in a museum, the writers took full advantage of the opportunity to make “modern art” the target of as many silly jokes as possible. There’s a brief scene where Mickey wanders into an artist’s studio and the artist says most of the things you’d expect a pretentious “actionist” painter to say in an absurdist sitcom. There’s a gag where three of the Monkees are surprised in the darkened museum by a security guard, but they just freeze in odd poses, and the guard doesn’t “see” them, thinking they’re just some dumb art installation. Get it? Modern art! Hah!

Right in the middle of the episode, Mike’s off looking for Peter and wanders into a chamber music concert. And then something remarkable happens.

The room is populated by snooty-snoots wearing tuxedos and fine gowns. Through a door enters Liberace, who wordlessly opens a large case, extracts a golden sledgehammer, and proceeds to lay waste to a blameless piano while Mike mugs and cringes. Then Liberace, clearly having enjoyed himself, is wordlessly congratulated by the snooty-snoots as the scene fades out.

But wait! Destroying a piano with a sledgehammer? That’s a Fluxus move, innit? Pretty sure…..
 

George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell, Benjamin Patterson, Emmett Williams performing Phillip Corner’s Piano Activities at Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik, Wiesbaden, 1962

By the autumn of 1967, when “Art for Monkees’ Sake” first aired, destroying musical instruments was a well-known Fluxus trope. As Hannah Higgins reports in her book Fluxus Experience, in Nam June Paik’s 1961 work One for Violin, “The performer raises a violin overhead at a nearly imperceptible rate until it is released full-force downward, smashing it to pieces.” Furthermore, Higgins continues,

In Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, performed in 1962 at the first Fluxus-titled festival in Wiesbaden, Germany, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, Alison Knowles, and Emmett Williams engaged in the apparent destruction of an old, unplayable piano belonging to the Kunstverein. They did destroy the instrument, but not haphazardly. … [the performance included] the careful rubbing of a brick over the strings, patient waiting for the right moment to use a hammer.”

As Richard Meltzer writes in The Aesthetics of Rock, “One of the farthest-reaching dissonant-worlds-of-quality moves that the Monkees (or their producers) have carried out has been their TV scene with Liberace destroying a piano with a sledge hammer before an appreciative chamber music audience.”

I have to agree. I don’t know if Liberace gave a hoot about Fluxus or not—probably he didn’t—but I have to applaud the discipline and sheer insouciant gumption it took to do that scene and that scene only and not demand even a line of dialogue for his trouble.
 

 
The complete episode, after the jump…

 
The well-known Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei has just released three gorgeous skateboard decks in association with the Dutch skateboard company The Sk8room. Each of the models is a limited edition of 150, is hand-numbered and signed, and costs 300 Euros (about $400). Proceeds from the sale of the decks will go to Skateistan, a nonprofit NGO that promotes skateboarding and educational activities.

The slogans directly reference Weiwei’s ongoing struggles against the Chinese government, which has repeatedly harassed the whimsical and outspoken artist and even arrested him for “economic crimes” in 2001. The three slogans are: “There Are No Outdoor Sports as Graceful as Throwing Stones at a Dictatorship in the World,” “Maybe Being Powerful Means to Be Fragile,” “The World Is Not Changing If You Don’t Shoulder the Burden of Responsibility.”

Weiwei paid homage to his own artworks for the decks. One of them uses an image from his installation Sunflower Seeds, which was shown at London’s Tate Modern in 2010, and another borrows from his work He Xie, which featured a group of ceramic crabs and was displayed at Washington D.C.‘s Hirshhorn Museum.
 
After the jump, some close-up views of the three Ai Weiwei decks….

 
In 1967 Mike Wallace hosted a controversial CBS TV documentary titled The Homosexuals. Part of CBS Reports, a precursor to 60 Minutes, the program marked the very first time the topic of homosexuality had been broached on a national television news show (there was an earlier local San Francisco PBS program called The Rejected from 1961, which featured anthropologist Margaret Mead ). It went through two producers and several iterations over the course of three years before it finally aired on March 7.

At the time the show was made, nine of every ten Americans saw homosexuality as an illness or a disease and as a social problem worse than prostitution, abortion and adultery. A majority of the country believed homosexual acts done in private between two consenting adults should be illegal and punishable by law.

As you might expect, there are several cringe-worthy elements in the film, although the intentions on the part of the original producer seemed good-ish, or at least educational. The inclusion of Dr. Charles Socarides, the psychoanalyst who is widely regarded as the father of “conversion therapy” is one of the first red flags of “balance,” but Socarides was a man taken very seriously at the time. (Worth noting that his openly gay son, Richard Socarides, was a top adviser to Bill Clinton.) Dr. Irving Bieber, another prominent “expert” of the day who viewed homosexuality as a pathology brought on by over-protective mothers (and absent or competitive fathers) is also given screen time. Socarides and Bieber both come off very poorly in hindsight, like fatuous “experts” who don’t know what they’re talking about. At all. History will not be kind to either of their reputations.

One of the interviewees, a 27-year-old gay man who has his face obscured by a plant, is described as someone facing LIFE IN PRISON should he be arrested again for attempting sexual gratification. He seems himself to believe that he is sick.

Mike Wallace’s disapproving commentary is indicative of what attitudes towards homosexuality were like at the time:

The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his love life, consists of a series of one–chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits. And even on the streets of the city — the pick-up, the one night stand, these are characteristics of the homosexual relationship.

The legendary CBS newsman Fred Friendly (who famously worked with Edward R. Murrow to cut Joseph McCarthy down to size) was the exec in charge of the special and asked the producer William Peters to add in something explaining to the viewers what it was that homosexuals actually did. When the mechanics of gay sex was explained to Friendly, the veteran journalist quickly changed his tune.

Jack Nichols, the prominent early gay rights activist and co-founder of the Washington DC-based branch of the Mattachine Society appeared in the program under the pseudonym “Warren Adkins” due to the fact that his father was an FBI agent and would have lost his security clearance. When he’s asked about his sense of self, he answers eloquently:

I have thought about it, but it really doesn’t concern me very much. I never would imagine if I had blond hair that I would worry about what genes and what chromosomes caused my blond hair, or if I had brown eyes… My homosexuality to me is very much in the same category. I feel no more guilt about my homosexuality or about my sexual orientation than a person with blond hair or with dark skin or with light skin would feel about what they had.”

Friendly left CBS News over an argument about the Vietnam War and the film looked like it wouldn’t air, except that there was already some news reports about the hot potato film that had been in baking since 1964. Friendly’s successor there, Richard Salant, thought that the doc was too pro-homosexual and hired another producer, Harry Morgan, to redo it, practically from scratch. All but ten minutes of the original edit were dropped. Interviews where the subjects were previously portrayed as happy about themselves were re-edited to mislead the audience into coming to the exact opposite conclusion.

Some of the participants were furious when the show was aired. Jack Nichols was fired from his job the very next day. He later had this to say about his encounter with Mike Wallace:

[A]fter we finished and the camera was turned off, Mike Wallace sat down with me and talked for about half an hour. He said, “You know, you answered all of my questions capably, but I have a feeling that you don’t really believe that homosexuality is as acceptable as you make it sound.” I asked him why he would say that. “Because,” he said, “in your heart I think you know it’s wrong.” It was infuriating. I told him I thought being gay was just fine, but that in his heart he thought it was wrong.

Wallace, as late as 1995, was publicly saying that he thought people could chose not to be gay.

This is a mixed bag to be sure, but it’s a FASCINATING mixed bag from start to finish. The bathroom sting footage, the undercover cinéma vérité camerawork. The wonderfully open-minded Rev. Robert Bruce Pierce (at about 24:30 minutes in) who says that he knows that it is wrong when he feels uncomfortable around gays and tries to CHANGE HIMSELF. Don’t miss the amazing segment that begins at 32:00 with biographer Albert Goldman and Gore Vidal debating the notion of a “gay mafia” in the arts. Goldman sees homosexuality as one of several factors that would bring about “the final erosion, of our cultural values.” Vidal, on the other hand, says “The United States is living out some mad Protestant nineteenth-century dream of human behavior….I think the so-called breaking of the moral fiber of this country is one of the healthiest things that’s begun to happen.”

You’ll notice that there are no lesbians represented in the program. It was thought that including ladies who love ladies would have only served to confuse Mr. and Mrs. America

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Ask a Homosexual: Historically important call-in TV show from 1972
 

 
In early 1968, Hollywood producer Si Litvinoff was trying to find a director for Terry Southern’s screenplay adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novella, A Clockwork Orange. He sent the script around to the likes of John Boorman, Roman Polanski, Tinto Brass, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg and John Schlesinger with cover letters suggesting that The Beatles were interested in doing the soundtrack and that Mick Jagger or David Hemmings would be good for the lead Droog “Alex,” the role that went to Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick’s film.

At one point Jagger actually owned the rights to the Burgess novella—he bought them for about $500 at time when Anthony Burgess was apparently flat broke—and then later sold them at a nice profit to Litvinoff.

When the news reached the Stones camp that Hemmings was the favorite for the role, not Mick, Marianne Faithfull, all of The Beatles, Candy director Christian Marquand, artist Peter Blake and several others sent a note to Terry Southern:

DEAR MR SOUTHERN, WE, THE UNDERSIGNED, DO HEREBY PROTEST WITH EXTREME VEHEMENCE AS WELL AS SHATTERED ILLUSIONS (IN YOU) THE PREFERENCE OF DAVID HEMMINGS ABOVE ****** MICK JAGGER ****** IN THE ROLE OF ALEX IN ‘THE CLOCKWORK ORANGE’...

Read the entire story at Letters of Note.
 

 

 
An amusing audio montage of squeaky-clean “American Top 40” radio host Casey Kasem losing his shit. This is behind-the-scenes, obviously. But still a hilarious swear-filled treat nonetheless.

As Death and Taxes writer Alex Moore points out:

I really wish the Cohen brothers had heard this before making The Big Lebowski so that “fucking ponderous, man” could have become one of The Dude’s signature lines. It’s just too perfect.

Listen, below: 

 
When I worked in a daycare, one of our “special guests” for the preschool-age children was a volunteer clown who often visited children’s hospitals to cheer up sick kids. I have no idea why there’s this whole sick kids and clowns thing. The majority of children are scared shitless of clowns, because children have a natural and understandable aversion to the grotesque. This woman’s/clown’s act had a very clever component, though. She actually arrived with no make-up, and talked to the children as she applied it, explaining that clowns are actual people underneath the wigs, and face paint, and rubber noses. Clowns are human, too!

All well and good, but I feel like we could have cut out that step entirely by banning clowns outright. Most adults are creeped out by clowns, so why should we attempt to eradicate the healthy fear of them residing in childish minds?

To some, however, clowns are symbols of joy and levity, which is why Grampa Jerry’s Clown Museum is such a labor of love for its curator. The roadside attraction, located in small-town Arriba, Colorado off the side of a desolate highway, is literally a pink shack filled with an estimated 5,000 pieces of clown iconography, and you couldn’t pay me enough to go in there alone. But while the idea of a damn clown mausoleum chills me to my bones, the story behind it warms my heart.

“Grampa” Jerry began started his collection in 1978, and just kept on going, right up until his death in 2010. His wife, Dale Ann, now runs the museum and continues adding to their collection, cheerfully archiving clown after clown. You can hear the genuine love in her voice as she reflects on her husband’s eccentric opus below. While she’s gone on record saying she understands the uncanny nature of clowns leave some folks a little shaken, for her the museum is a connection to a man she clearly loved very deeply.
 

 
Still though. Neither bribes nor threats nor liquid courage could get me into that accursed building. One of the clowns is made from a cow’s hairball! You cannot convince that doesn’t have some kind of dark voodoo power. Nope. No damn way. Not enough tequila in the world.