I normally can’t stand child actors, but the trio of kiwi kiddies assembled for this anti-drugs and driving PSA are comedic geniuses. They’re like Trailer Park Boys level funny… Perfect timing.

I guarantee these kids are going to get their own TV show.
 

 
h/t reddit

 
In 1964 Great Britain celebrated the 400th birthday of William Shakespeare. In 1964 one subject on everybody’s mind was The Beatles, who had become a nationwide sensation the previous year. It was obvious: Why not combine the two?

That’s exactly what happened on a show called Around The Beatles, which seems to have been a variety show with many musical segments. For the Shakespeare bit, the concept was to peform the rude mechanicals’ performance of the “play within a play” about Pyramus and Thisbe from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Paul plays Bottom/Pyramus, John plays Flute/Thisbe, George plays Starveling/Moonshine, and Ringo plays Snug/the Lion. The show was taped and aired the same week as Shakespeare’s birthday—and, as it happens, his death day (they’re the same: April 23).
 

Mad Magazine uses Shakespeare to twit the Beatles, 1965

The following comes from Way Beyond Compare: The Beatles’ Recorded Legacy, Volume One, 1957-1965, by John C. Winn:

April 28, 1964

Following days of rehearsal, Around the Beatles (at least, the portions requiring the Beatles’ presence) was apparently filmed in just over an hour this evening.

-snip-

[Then comes] the Beatles’ Shakespearean debut, performing the “play within a play” from act V, scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Paul and John take the roles of doomed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe, hamming up their parts enjoyably. Ringo plays the fierce lion, while George is Moonshine, complete with “lanthorn,” thorn-bush, and dog.

They stick to the general outline of the Bard’s text, altering the dialogue when necessary. ‘Then know that I, one Snug the joiner, am/A lion-fell, nor else no lion’s dam; For, if I should as lion come in strife/Into this place, ‘twere pity on my life” becomes “Then know that I, one Ringo the drummer, am; For, if I was really a lion, I wouldn’t be making all the money I am today, would I?” Members of [the backing band] Sounds Incorporated fill in for Theseus, Demetrius, and Hipployta, interrupting the “play” with heckling comments, such as “Roll over, Shakespeare!” and “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

Eventually, their constant interruptions ad the scereams of the audience become distracting, but seeing a golden-wigged and deep-voiced John tell Paul “My love thou art, I think” makes it all worhwhile. The “lovers” conclude with “Thus Thisbe ends: Adieu, adieu, adieu,” segueing into “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside.”

 
Paul does a very serviceable job as Pyramus; the same is true of George as “the Moon”—and the atmosphere in the room could hardly be better, with tons of playful, even collegiate call and response between the performers and the audience, who seem to be in a very intimate space. John, as Thisbe, wore a ridiculous blond wig and had blackened out one of his front teeth. Ringo as the lion is simply hilarious.

According to Barry Miles’ The Beatles Diary Volume 1: The Beatles Years, Paul later named his cat Thisbe. The Around The Beatles TV special also marked the first UK television appearance of P.J. Proby.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
William Burroughs shoots WIlliam Shakespeare
Incredible 1964 Beatles concert video, free on iTunes
The Complete Beatles Christmas Records

Pete Townshend
 
Did you know that the use, ownership, and sale of skateboards was banned in Norway from 1978 to 1989? With hooligans like these constituting the public face of skateboarding, it’s easy to see why.

I’m pretty sure Kate Hepburn is about to do a kickflip there. 
 

Brooke Shields
 

Katherine Hepburn
 

Chuck Norris
 
More photos after the jump…
 

 
Surfpunks, a 1981 Dutch made-for-TV documentary vacillates wildly from rapturous to heartbreaking. Aside from footage of well-known bands like (a very young) Suicidal Tendencies, there’s deeper cuts, like a bit on little-known experimental family band, Unit 3 with Venus (their shrieking eight-year-old daughter on vocals). It’s also a really personal look at the tragedy and destitution of the scene.

The main reason for watching, however, is a brutally naked interview with Casey “Cola” Hopkins, who offers extensive details of her suicide pact gone awry with Darby Crash. Hopkins, of course, survived, only to be maligned by her peers and bounced in and out of mental institutions over the next few years. Accounts of Hopkins vary, but it’s fairly agreed upon that the primarily female, fanatical Germs’ followers, known as “Circle One,” disliked and mistrusted her. It’s difficult to figure out who’s reliable in a cultish environment of young drug addicts, but from the footage, one thing seems certain: Casey’s a depressed, lonely young woman, and it’s hard not to have some sympathy for her.

On a lighter note, you can see footage of the self-described “all-American Jewish Lesbian folk singer,” Phranc, performing startlingly earnest protest songs. Taking (understandable) issue with the petulant punk trend of sporting (supposedly de-signified) swastikas, she manages to make her legitimate anger stand out from a scene hallmarked by chaos and screaming, with sincere, literal lyrics and an acoustic guitar. Phranc even plays us out, with a sly but optimistic anti-suicide song.

The whole thing is great, and aside from a few spots of Dutch narration, you get to hear the snotty California accents of the young early 1980s punks.
 

 
I have searched high and low for any more context on this photo, but the only thing I can glean from the Internets is that there were Woman of the Year Awards, and for one glorious moment, these ladies shared a room.

My only theory is that this is a magical dream I once had that I have somehow manifested into reality. I demand to see this reenacted by drag queens!

 
While I agree mostly with this list, I have to politely interject and say the Stars Wars’ “Imperial March” is a totally sexy time song (apparently!)

Just watch the hypnotic video, below.

 
Via Nerdcore

 
The harmless notion that good nutrition could aid the human body in fighting illnesses was so threatening in the late ‘60s that the FBI was willing to confiscate and burn books to suppress it.

Two major early champions of natural foods – and indomitable entrepreneurs—were two American brothers, Gregory and Craig Sams. Craig (who now owns Green & Black’s organic chocolate with his wife Josephine Fairley) was the cook who prepared food in his home for the short-lived UFO Club in London. He also imported books and pamphlets on the macrobiotic lifestyle from the Ohsawa Foundation in Los Angeles and sold them through the Indica Bookshop.

Craig was in New York the day the FBI raided a macrobiotic bookshop in the East Village. He wrote in 2005:

I visited [the macrobiotic restaurant Paradox] the same day I visited the macrobiotic bookshop – the day it was investigated by the FBI and told not to sell any books until they had reviewed their content (they contained illegal statements such as that poor diet could cause cancer and healthy diet could help cure cancer). Eventually all the books were taken away and burned.

The macrobiotic diet is not the countercultural revolution it once was, and some of its once radical tenets are now rather mainstream, such as sticking to unrefined, whole, natural food, grown locally and eaten in season. But in the late ‘60s, it was still underground.

The Sams brothers opened the first macrobiotic restaurant in London, Seed, in early 1968. The laid-back, Bedouin tent atmosphere of Seed was described by a visitor as feeling like somewhere he “might get stabbed or something.” Not at all what a typical vegan or raw food restaurant looks like today!

Craig recalled the layout of the restaurant and some of its more famous customers:

Seed had two rooms, in a big rambling basement of the [Gloucester] hotel. One had cushions on the floor set around tables made out of the 4-5 ft diameter reels that mains electrical cable was wound around, so customers met one another as there were no reservations and no exclusivity of tables in that room. In the other room there was a tent style hanging from the ceiling and normal square wooden tables with bentwood chairs.
—snip—
Marc Bolan of Tyrannosaurus Rex walked to Seed to get the free meal and it was at Seed that he met Mickey Finn, an event that rock historians cited when calling for a blue plaque for historical buildings to be put up on the site many years later. Regular visitors included John and Yoko, Terence Stamp, most of the Stones as well as vegetarian/macrobiotic activists and enthusiasts and most of the denizens of the Underground alternative culture that was springing up all over the country.

In his memoir, Jazz Christmas, Al Gromer Khan called Seed “restaurant, Zen monastery and doctor´s practice all in one, a subterranean place where guests sat cross-legged, setting standards for legions of psycho-analysts who came thirty or so years later, for us to get in touch with our inner selves.”

The Sams also started Ceres grain shops (that was how hard it was to find whole grains back then), the U.K.‘s first organic food shop, Ceres Bakery, the U.K.‘s first 100% wholemeal and sugar-free bakery, Ceres Bookshop, Green Genes Café (a “macrobiotic workingman’s café”), Harmony Foods (now Whole Earth Foods), and the original VegeBurger.

They also ambitiously catered the first Glastonbury and Isle of Wight festivals. Craig described the Glastonbury fare from 1970:

We were the only food suppliers at Glastonbury and all the festivalgoers either ate our food (muesli, brown rice, red bean stew, porridge, unleavened bread with tahini/miso spread) or brought their own. We also supplied some food to Sid Rawles, who led the Diggers, who gave out free food from the cowshed near the farmhouse up on the hill.

On the Sunday afternoon the local hot dog and ice cream vendors discovered there was a crowd at the farm and drove down to the site. They were met by the festivalgoers who blocked their route and rocked their vans, shouting ‘Out, Out Out’ until they turned around and disappeared.

Gregory Sams self-published three issues the exhaustively informative newsletter, Harmony, with recipes, vegetarian resources, articles about health, eco-consciousness, and nutrition. It was an ongoing counterdebate to the kinds of alarmist anti-vegetarian articles being published at the time, most notably Harvard professor Frederick Stare’s infamous Reader’s Digest article “The Hippie Diet That’s Killing Our Kids” (which, incidentally, if anyone has a link to the text of that article, please pass it along). John Lennon, a regular at Seed, contributed a cartoon to Harmony extolling the macrobiotic diet and Gregory’s evangelizing. Later the Sams brothers and their father published Seed: The Journal of Organic Living, which ran from 1971 to 1977.

John and Yoko and Chuck Berry assist at a macrobiotic cooking demonstration on The Mike Douglas Show, below:

 
My teenage ambition was to have a novel published by Penguin Books, the company responsible for publishing my favorite authors. My bedroom shelves were lined with orange and blue and green and silver-spined Penguin books—the only books whose quality is guaranteed by their cover.

I was, therefore, delighted to find A Penguin a week, where Karyn Reeves has blogs about her collection of Penguin books. Ms Reeves is collecting all of the Penguin books published before 1970, the year when the company’s founder Allen Lane died. So, far, Ms. Reeves has amassed 2,000 of the approximately 3,000 titles—“they look great in the book shelves en masse,” she says.

Karyn also reads and reviews one Penguin book a week (hence the title), and is currently reading “Penguin no. 1736:” At the Villa Rose by A.E.W. Mason. Once the book is read, a review is posted, and there are plenty of wonderful titles to browse through—from “Penguin no. 1:” Ariel by Andre Maurois, to “Penguin no. 2999:” Bullitt (Mute Witness) by Robert L. Pike.

However, there are quite a few titles still missing, and this is where you the reader might be able to help.

If you love reading, and you love books (particularly Penguin Books), then you’ll find plenty to enjoy at Ms. Reeves fabulous site.
 

 

 
Uschi Obermaier, like fellow model and rock star girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, is famous for the men in her life. But she is also remembered for her radical political associations, particularly the left-wing student movement in West Berlin in the late ‘60s, the milieu that produced the Baader-Meinhof gang/Red Army Faction, the shooting of young college student Benno Ohnesorg by police during a demonstration, and attempted assassination of leftist student leader Rudi Dutschke.

Uschi was briefly a member of Amon Düül (she played maracas on their albums Collapsing and Disaster) and lived with them in their Munich commune before moving to Kommune 1 in West Berlin with her new boyfriend, shaggy leftist political activist and communard Rainer Langhans in September 1968. Ironically she had no real interest in politics at the time, despite becoming the poster girl for the Left, being seen at numerous political rallies and demonstrations, and only moved to Kommune 1, West Germany’s first political commune, with hardcore Marxist values, drugs, and free love, just to be with Langhans. The couple met at the International Song Days music festival in Essen.

The Independent described daily life at Kommune 1:

Free sex, agit-prop political stunts, drugs and endless political discussion dominated life in Commune 1, where the inmates slept on mattresses on the floor. To rid the commune of bourgeois tendencies, all available cash was shared, the doors were torn off the lavatories and phone calls were piped through a loud speaker. Even inmates’ letters home to their parents were read out in full to the assembled communards.

Uschi was outspoken about sex and drugs, and cavalier about posing node, appearing on the covers of Stern and Playboy, and also posing at age 60, wearing only a pirate hat, in 2007. She recalled her youth in an interview with Bijan Tehrani in 2008:

I just wanted to be free. I didn’t think I wanted to be a rebel; I just wanted to be free and do the things I wanted to do, without anyone hindering me. I wanted to live the experiences in my own skin, it wasn’t enough for me to be told what it was, I had to experience it down to my own bones, to make a judgment for what I liked and didn’t like.

Among her lovers were Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards (who wrote about their relationship affectionately in his 2010 autobiography, Life and is still on friendly terms with her), and Mick Jagger. She met Dieter Bockhorn, a Hamburg club owner and former pimp, in 1973. She and Bockhorn were together for ten years, eventually marrying in India and travelling all over the world in a customized bus. After Bockhorn’s sudden death Uschi moved to the U.S. A film based on her autobiography, Eight Miles High, was released in 2007.

Uschi now lives quietly in Topanga Canyon near Los Angeles, where she works as a jewelry designer.

Uschi in the film Red Sun (Rote Sonne), 1969, below:

George Balanchine mollifying a temperamental ballet dancer

If there’s one thing New York City lacks nowadays, it’s ballets by major composers with elephants in them….

Cast your mind back more than seventy years ago. It’s Thursday, April 9, 1942. The country is at war. You’re in New York, and you have a free evening at your disposal. What to do?

Here are a few suggestions. If you’d like to see a movie, there’s a brand new comedy called My Favorite Blonde starring that wonderful young comedian Bob Hope. But perhaps you’re in the mood for live performance. Let’s see…. At the Imperial Theatre on West 45th Street you can catch the new Cole Porter musical Let’s Face It! starring Danny Kaye and Eve Arden, or over at the Majestic Theatre a block down on 44th, there’s always George Gershwin’s masterpiece Porgy and Bess.

Or wait—what am I thinking!? There’s no way you’re not going to want to attend the world premiere of the elephant polka choreographed by George Balanchine and composed by Igor Stravinsky, right? That happens tonight at Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th, let’s get a move on before it sells out! (Yes, that’s where MSG was located between 1925 and 1968.)

This actually happened. The “father of American ballet” and arguably the most innovative composer of the pre-WW2 period really did partner up to write a performance for fifty elephants (with fifty ballerinas on top of them) for the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus. The resultant work was called “Circus Polka: For a Young Elephant.” The elephants, all fifty of them, wore pink tutus.

Not too surprisingly, the crowd loved it.
 

Balanchine and Stravinsky in 1957, possibly discussing a tarantella arranged for panda bears.

According to Stephen Walsh’s entertaining account in Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971, here’s how it all went down:

[H]e was telephoned from New York by Balanchine, who had been approached by Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey’s Circus to choreograph a polka for the circus elephants, and wanted Stravinsky to compose the music. Stravinsky told him that he could not write even a short piece before March. . . . All the same he certainly tinkered with the idea long before that. He noticed that by an odd coincidence there were polka rhythms everywhere in the Danses concertantes, and at about Christmastime he started sketching ideas for the elephant piece while still working on the ending of the Danses. Then, as soon as that work was finished, he rapidly composed the Circus Polka as a piano solo and completed the draft score by the 5th of February. The point about this, for him, slightly unusual way of working was that Ringling would need a score for a circus band, and for the first time in his life Stravinsky did not feel equal to the task. So he approached the best-known Hollywood arranger of the day, Robert Russell Bennett, and Bennett recommended a young composer called David Raskin—a pupil of Schoenberg, as it turned out, and already an experienced filmwriter—who duly orchestrated the polka for the bizarre combination of wind and percussion instruments (including Hammond organ) that Ringling had assembled for their circus performances.

As a piece of barefaced opportunism, the Circus Polka was hard to beat. A few years later Stravinsky gratefully accepted a Canadian interviewer’s suggestion that the piece was a musical equivalent of the circus paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, but at the time he was mainly concerned to write it as quickly as possible for the biggest fee Balanchine could get him. Later still, he reconstructed the original phone conversation in terms of an imaginary aesthetic discrimination. “I wonder if you’d like to do a little ballet with me, a polka perhaps,” Balanchine is supposed to have said. “For whom?” “For some elephants.” “How old?” “Very young.” (After a pause) “All right. If they are very young elephants, I will do it.” As for the music, the piece galumphs amusingly enough through vestiges of rhythmic ideas from the Danses concertantes reimagined for pachyderms, with an unexpected nod at one point toward Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, and ending with a heavily underlined and quotation-marked parody of the same Schubert march that he had merely hinted at in the Janssen score.

In fact the ballet—which Stravinsky never saw—was danced, when the circus opened at New York’s Madison Square Garden on the 9th of April, by fifty elephants in pink tutus, all apparently of mature age, like the fifty girls who sat atop them. At their head, lovely Vera Zorina rode in on Old Modoc, the chief and oldest elephant.

As carefully as if La Zorina were spun glass—which she is!—
the giant deposited her in the center of the forest of elephants,
and when she had completed her exquisite pirouetting upon
the sawdust picked her up and carried her away. But not
before she had handed [Modoc] a huge bunch of American
Beauties, which he promptly coiled up in his trunk like
a commuter filing his copy of The New York Sun under
his arm to read after dinner.

 
-snip-

Fortunately there was no stampede except at the box office, and though the Ringlings never revived the piece after the first season, the publicity it attracted served them well until, after less than two months, the band was paid off because of a pay dispute, and the circus continued with gramophone recordings, which of course precluded the Stravinsky ballet.

Here’s some of the music:

 
And here’s a brief documentary clip about the elephant ballet, which is still pretty diverting even though it’s entirely in Russian:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
It’s Igor Stravinsky’s Birthday !
Musical universes collide: When Charlie Parker flipped Igor Stravinsky the (Fire)Bird