Okay, I ain’t gonna lie…dummies scare the living shit out of me! Remember those commercials for Magic? (*shudders*) To add salt to my open wound, Public School blog posted a demented photo-essay titled Vaudeville Ventriloquists Dummy Portraits. Click if you dare.

Mike Saputo’s poster design for this year’s Fantastic Fest.
 
I’m convinced there’s no better city in the world to be a movie fan than Austin, Texas. Add this to our bragging rights:

Beverly Hills, CA – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library is partnering with the Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse theater chain to archive the company’s growing collection of original film posters designed by contemporary graphic artists. The first group of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Mondo posters arriving at the Herrick will include the latest print, a poster for the classic horror film “Frankenstein” (1931), created by Drew Struzan.

The Alamo Drafthouse began producing limited-edition silkscreen posters in 2003. Mondo, the company’s art boutique, now produces more than 120 posters annually, and through it prominent artists such as Martin Ansin, Shepard Fairey, Olly Moss, Tyler Stout and Ken Taylor are commissioned to create new art for classic films, as well as alternative posters for contemporary movies such as “Inglourious Basterds,” “True Grit” and “Thor.”

“We are always seeking out the unusual, and the Mondo collection certainly fits the bill,” said the Academy’s graphic arts librarian, Anne Coco. “We are looking forward to working with the Alamo Drafthouse to ensure that its contribution to the art of movie posters will be around for future generations to appreciate.”

This ongoing gift from the Alamo Drafthouse will be housed along with the Herrick’s existing collection of more than 38,000 movie posters. The posters in the library’s collection are stored in climate-controlled vaults, and are scanned and entered into the library’s online catalog, where they can be viewed by the public.

“We’re extremely grateful to the Academy for its interest in archiving Mondo’s poster collection,” said Mondo Creative Director Justin Ishmael. “We’re fans of movie art, first and foremost, and to have our artists’ work archived alongside some of the classics of movie poster art is an incredible honor.”

The Margaret Herrick Library poster collection includes a wide range of works created by noted graphic artists, such as the Stenberg brothers’ constructivist poster for “Man with a Movie Camera” and Wiktor Gorka’s arresting poster for the Polish release of “Cabaret.” The library also holds all of the film posters designed by Saul Bass, including his groundbreaking key art for “The Man with the Golden Arm.”

The Austin Film Festival and Fantastic Fest are coming up in the next few months and Dangerous Minds will be there.

Check out some of the stunning movie posters at Mondo’s website.

Here’s a taste:
 

Shepard Fairey
 

Jesse Philips

 
Urban Struggle tells the tale of notorious Southern California punk club the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the early 1980s, the Costa Mesa venue hosted seminal punk and hardcore bands from The Ramones and The New York Dolls to local heroes like TSOL, The Circle Jerks, Fear and Black Flag. The club was the first to have a slam pit and was a magnet for cops and punk haters. The fact that it shared a parking lot with a honky tonk didn’t help.

This 1981 video has long been out-of-print, but a new documentary, We Were Feared, which covers the same scene and bands is soon to be released by Endurance Pictures. Consider this a long teaser. Some great footage of legendary bands.
 

 
As you will detect from his charming accent, DMRH debutant Steven Daly isn’t from around these parts: He’s from Glasgow, although these days he lives in New York’s allegedly fashionable outer borough of Brooklyn and works as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine. Steven’s first tentative steps up the glass mountain we call show-business were as the drummer for Orange Juice, a band that is frequently accused of “inventing” indie-rock. Next week Orange Juice are nominated in the box-set category of the Mojo Awards in London, alongside the like of the Kinks, Eric Clapton and David Bowie. Good luck, Steve. Let us know how you get on against that competition!
 
Ian Dury and the Blockheads - There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards
The Boys - The First Time
Subway Sect - Nobody’s Scared
Nosmo King and the Javells - Goodbye Nothing to Say
Dexy’s Midnight Runners - I Love You
Holland-Dozier-Holland - Don’t Leave Me Starving for Your Love
Lauryn Hill and Refugee Camp All Stars - The Sweetest Thing
Syreeta - I Love Every Little Thing About You
George Faith - To Be a Lover
I-Roy - Don’t Get Weary Joe Frazier
Morrissey - The Last of the Famous International Playboys
Sugababes - Push the Button
The Faces - You Can Make Me Dance, Sing Or Anything (Even Take The Dog For A Walk, Mend A Fuse, Fold Away The Ironing Board, Or Any Other Domestic Short Comings)
Juggy - Soul at Sunrise
 

 
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Subscribe to the Dangerous Minds Radio Hour podcast at iTunes
 

Bonus video : 50,000 supporters of my beloved Celtic Football Club, of Glasgow, singing an early Depeche Mode classic in a stoutly heterosexual fashion!
 

 
In case you missed it, some fantastic reporting from The Rachel Maddow Show (by way of Right Wing Watch) on Rick Perry’s wingnut Woodstock, “The Response.”

What will future people think of this era? (Provided of course, these crazy assholes don’t kill us all first)
 

 
“Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us….”

That’s right you groovy little fuckers, Dangerous Minds launched two years ago today, on Bastille Day of 2009 (considering our political views, we thought that was appropriate).

Since that day, the traffic has grown so rapidly that we’ve over-taxed every server we’ve been on, before moving over to our new home on Monday (That’s why there were, and may continue to be, some outages as we work out the kinks. Big shout out to awesome Alan Stuart and Brian Morales from One Long House, who designed and developed the blog. They’ve been with us since the beginning. Thanks guys!).

So what we have decided to do is to celebrate this milestone is repost some of our favorite pieces from the past few years—giving ourselves a semi-day off in the process(!)—and some stuff from the earliest days of the blog that some of you might have missed.

PS We’d also like to say a HUGE THANK YOU to all of you who repost our stuff on FB, Twitter, Reddit, and now Google + (we’re adding those buttons soon, next on the bottomless “to do” list). 

We couldn’t do it without you. Truly.

 
There has been a lot of dropping of the H-Bomb here lately, whether it be in relation to riots at SXSW, or criticism of The Stone Roses. The word “hipster” has gone from vaguely meaning “poseur” to being a catch all term to describe anyone with different tastes to ourselves. I think it was time I addressed the matter head on. I’m not going to try and define what a “hipster” is here - if you need a crash course, I’ll point you in the direction of the Wikipedia “Hipster (contemporary subculture)” page, which is surprisingly on-point. I don’t even need to prove to you that the term is media fabrication used to hate on the young - though I probably will. No. I just want to say “Enough! If you going to call someone a hipster as an insult, then you should know that makes you a square.”

The first article I ever read on the subject of “hipsters” was Douglas Haddow Adbusters’ piece “Hipster - The Dead End Of Western Civilsation” from 2008. The article’s shrieking headline and hyperbolic tone should be a giveaway to the author’s intentions, but the fourth and fifth parts of the essay really show the hypocrisy involved. Haddow is at a party taking photos, yet manages to complain about both the other photographers at the same party AND the kids who want their photos taken. It’s genius! And herein lies the rub - the people doing the complaining themselves fit into the neat little bracket they have described. We have cultural commentators and arbiters of previously obscure tastes moaning about the now more widespread acceptance of those tastes. We have opinionistas offering up opinions on why we should hate other opinionistas. Photobloggers bitching about other photobloggers. Fixed gear cyclists who tell us only THEY can ride bikes properly.

Using WIki as a guide, it is possible to trace how this meme caught on in the media, and came to be some sort of established fact . It was not the first time the term was used this way, and “hipster” was not completely pejorative when it re-emerged in the last decade, but articles like Tim Walker’s “Meet The Global Scenester” re-inforce the idea that “hipster” was a stick used by cultural commentators to beat a perceived threat to their roles. There was no talk of the positive elements of the emerging youth culture, a culture these articles sought to define. It felt like it was a backlash waiting for an actual scene to happen. For a time in the early ‘90s, the UK music press lumped shoegaze bands together as “The Scene That Celebrates Itself” - anti-hipster chroniclers could now just as easily be labelled “The Scene That Berates Itself”. 

Originally posted on 04/08/11.

After the jump, the relation of irony and authenticity to fashion and music, new media and new cultural norms versus old school cool, and John Peel as the ultimate hipster.

 
Along with Dangerous Minds, it’s Harry Dean Stanton’s birthday. Hard to believe that he’s 85 years old.

Here’s an amusing and rare clip of Harry in A Fistful Of Dollars.

When A Fistful Of Dollars was aired on the ABC Sunday Night Movie in 1977 network execs felt a prologue needed to be shot to give Clint Eastwood’s character less of an amoral edge. They wanted there to be some clearly defined motivation for the carnage that followed in Sergio Leone’s existential western. Thus, they hired director Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop) to create this intro with Stanton (who appears nowhere else in the movie) and a stand-in for Eastwood.

Neither Leone or Eastwood had anything to do with this scene. The reaction shots of Eastwood were inserted using footage from other scenes in the film. This results in some unintended humor.
 

 
The “Bop Gun” was an imaginary weapon, theorized by George Clinton, leader of Parliment, on their 1977 album, Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome”. The “Bop Gun” would fill the being of the soulless automatons moving robotically through modern life with FUNK and dancing would be inevitable.

You’ll note that I wrote that it “was” an imaginary weapon. Now someone’s gone and built a real “Bop Gun”—it can yours for a mere $1200:

Finally the conundrum of the universes’ missing funk has an answer: BOP GUN.

5 mixed squarewave oscillators allow for rapid phase matching and total funky collapse of even the most complex wave functions!

LFO modulates filter! All oscillators, LFO and filter are controlled by global attack/decay functions at the pull of a trigger! INVERT function allows for continuous function for those situations requiring fancy long-term funkic interventions. Funkify traffic! Passers-by! Bar Mitzvahs! The sky!

LED feedback ring at the business end reacts to funk levels, providing photonic enhancement in attractive aqua green tones. Extra-sweet readout panel provides incomprehensible feedback from selected functions. Audio output jack included, and batteries fit in the handle.

 
Below, Glen Goins, the Parliament singer famous for “calling in the Mothership” during their elaborate concerts, explains the “Bop Gun” concept to this Houston crowd during a 1977 performance:
 

 
Via Nerdcore

 
There seems to be some confusion: This October will see the release of The Thing, which is, apparently, a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing. If that’s the case, then I’ll save my dollars as I know the ending - everyone is killed except an Alaskan Malamute that escapes (after a disastrous helicopter chase) and infects Kurt Russell’s science station with an alien life form.

If it’s a remake, well - why bother?

John Carpenter’s The Thing was a remake of Howard Hawks’ classic 1951 film The Thing From Another World.

Hawks’s original was an unforgettable classic, an adaption of John Wood Campbell, Jr.‘s fanastic short story, “Who Goes There?” - and is one of the greatest science fiction movies of the 1950s (along with Them!, Inavders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

As for Carpenter’s remake, I thought it one of the best films of 1982 - it reinvented the original, gave it a dark, terrifying twist, and had incredible special effects by Rob Bottin (and Stan Winston).

So now, here’s a new version, which leaves me thinking “O, FFS,” as it again confirms Hollywood’s bankruptcy of ideas , and the unwillingness or inability to invest in new talent, new ideas, and new scripts. But make your own mind up - here’s the trailer and the official synopsis:

Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty.  It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists.  The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being.  It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman.  In the thriller The Thing, paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet.
Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime.  Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago.  But it is about to wake up.

When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time.  And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish.