This story is do distasteful, twisted and nasty, it’s hard to know where to begin…

There was a piece on Anderson Cooper 360º last night that was so shocking to me, I was simply dumbfounded by what I was seeing. It’s sad. Oh, is it sad. And infuriating. It’s that in spades.

Fundamentalist Christian leader, anti-gay activist and infamous hirer of male prostitutes, Dr. George Rekers, who foundered the Family Research Council (with Dr. James Dobson) was the lead in the grotesque mind-rape of an innocent child—not just one child, several—in a bizarre psychological experiment at UCLA in the 70s called the “Feminine Boy Project.” Boys as young as 4-years-old were trusted with this creep by parents who were worried that their sons would turn out to be “sissies,” looking for a “cure” for this behavior.

When you watch this, you’ll want to cry. It was child abuse, pure and simple, under cover of “science” and administered by a self-loathing gay man with severe psychological issues of his own. When Rekers was caught in his “rent boy” scandal, with male prostitute Jo-Vanni Roman in 2010, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote: “Thanks to Rekers’ clownish public exposure, we now know that his professional judgments are windows into his cracked psyche, not gay people’s. But…his excursions into public policy have had real and damaging consequences on a large swath of Americans.”

Like young Kirk Murphy, whose life was ruined by Rekers’ sick Pavlovian “therapy.” From CNN:

Kirk Andrew Murphy seemed to have everything to live for. He put himself through school. He had a successful 8-year career in the Air Force. After the service, he landed a high profile position with an American finance company in India.

But in 2003 at age 38, Kirk Murphy took his own life.

A co-worker found him hanging from the fan of his apartment in New Delhi. His family has struggled for years to understand what happened.

“I used to spend so much time thinking, why would he kill himself at the age of 38? It doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Kirk’s sister, Maris Murphy. “What I now think is I don’t know how he made it that long.”

After Kirk’s death, Maris started a search that would uncover a dark family secret. That secret revealed itself during a phone conversation with her older brother Mark, who mentioned his distrust of any kind of therapy.

“Don’t you remember all that crap we went through at UCLA?” he asked her. Maris was too young to remember the details, but Mark remembered it vividly as a low point in their lives.

It’s a pity Kirk didn’t live long enough to see Rekers’ disgrace, downfall and the complete discrediting of his life’s work by the scientific community. He is a pariah now, even in the Christian conservative community, something he so richly deserves, but. humiliation isn’t enough for a guy like George Rekers. Humiliation is too kind for a monster of his caliber.

Imagine what it’s like to Google your own name and see yourself compared to Josef Mengele THOUSANDS of times? I hope that more of his victims and their families come forward like the Murphy family has and publicly denounce this evil man. He should be investigated, his degrees should be stripped from him, and I sure hope that he’s wrapped up in expensive lawsuits from his victims that will ruin what is left of his time on this planet.

Perhaps it’s impolite to say this, but it’s too bad that Kirk didn’t take George Rekers with him when he killed himself, but I doubt that I was the only one thinking it, watching this.

Maris Murphy,  said it best:

“The research has a postscript that needs to be added,” she said. “That is that Kirk Andrew Murphy was Kraig and he was gay, and he committed suicide.”

“I want people to remember that this was a little boy who deserved protection, respect and unconditional love,” his sister said. “I don’t want him to be remembered as a science experiment. He was a person.”

This is some powerful reporting. Anderson Cooper and his team did a great job with this explosive story.
 

 
Therapy to change ‘feminine’ boy created a troubled man, family says (CNN)
 
Via Little Green Footballs

 
It would be the Sun that got hold of this CCTV footage of a man so impossibly wankered he appears almost indestructible.

A drunk thrown from an exclusive London celebrity event has been caught on CCTV performing a spectacular acrobatic fall down stairs.

The drunk tripped down the stairs after being turfed from a theatre awards night at The Savoy, hosted by Stephen Fry.

He apparently fell over in front of guests including Sir Ian McKellen and Liam Neeson, before being put out on the street about 2am.

But security footage of the inebriated man in a smart dinner suit shows him as he first trips down a set one flight of stairs, before tumbling, then sliding sideways down a banister and flipping onto his head.

Incredibly, the man is able to get up despite the nasty fall, and continues to stagger and fall onto street furniture for several minutes.

“It’s amazing he didn’t badly hurt himself, The Sun quoted one source as saying.

So far, his identity is unknown.

CCTV, eh? There to protect and entertain millions.
 

 
Dangerous Minds pal and “America’s Luscious Beacon of Truth” (that’s what his press kit says) Marty Beckerman has a new book out: The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within… Just Like Papa!, a satirical look at Ernest Hemingway’s life and many misguided ideas:

Fifty years have passed since the death of Ernest Hemingway, history’s ultimate man, and young males today—obsessed with Facebook, Twitter, and Nintendo—know nothing about his legendary brand of rugged, alcoholic masculinity. They cannot skin a fish, dominate a battlefield, or transform majestic creatures of the Southern Hemisphere into piano keyboards.

It was not always this way. We can undo this descent into vegan emasculation. All we need is a teacher, a savior. Not a messiah, but a mansiah. All we need is Papa.

With chapters such as “For Whom the Beer Flows,” “Death in the Afternoon… Lunch is Served,” “A Farewell to Smooth Arms, Backs, Faces, Taints, etc.,” and “The Old Man and the See You in Hell,” former Esquire editor Marty Beckerman demonstrates how modern eunuchs—brainwashed by PETA and Alcoholics Anonymous—can realize their full potential as drunken, unshaven, meat-devouring, wife-divorcing, gloriously self-destructive manimals.

The Heming Way is a difficult path, and not for the weak, but truth is manlier than fiction.

Read an excerpt from the book:
How to drink, the Hemingway way: The self-destructive drinker knew what he liked when it came to alcohol. Here are some of his hard-learned tips (Salon)

 
Sarah Palin would like to meet Margaret Thatcher when she’s in England next month. Palin told the Sunday Times:

“I am going to Sudan in July and hope to stop in England on the way. I am just hoping Mrs Thatcher is well enough to see me as I so admire her.”

Hey, not so fast there, snowbilly grifter! Palin’s plans for something to rub off on her (or at least a photo op that will drive Michele Bachmann green with envy) will be most likely be “thwarted” with the excuse that Baroness Thatcher is seldom seen in public anymore and in poor health, as Wintour and Watt report at The Guardian’s website:

It would appear that the reasons go deeper than Thatcher’s frail health. Her allies believe that Palin is a frivolous figure who is unworthy of an audience with the Iron Lady. This is what one ally tells me:

“Lady Thatcher will not be seeing Sarah Palin. That would be belittling for Margaret. Sarah Palin is nuts.”

 
This summer in downtown Los Angeles there’s a photography show at the drkrm/gallery that explores the history of the acid-gobbling, show-stopping star-children of the infamous Cockettes drag troupe. From Frontiers:

For those who neglected to Netfix their eponymous 2002 documentary, here’s the skinny on the Cockettes—they debuted on New Year’s Eve 1969, as part of a midnight showcase in San Fran’s Palace Theatre. Combining Broadway parody, cross-dressing and LSD-fueled choreography, their performances soon gained high profile media attention in Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. In the Chicago Tribune, critic Rex Reed described the show as “a nocturnal happening comprising equal parts of Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, Harold Prince’s Follies and movie musicals, the United Fruit Company, Kabuki and the Yale Variety Show, with a lot of angel dust thrown in to keep the audience good and stoned.” Kitsch aficionado John Waters recounted, “It was complete sexual anarchy. You couldn’t tell the men from the women. It was really new at the time, and it still would be new.” On the Tonight Show, novelist and professional dandy fop Truman Capote simply stated “The Cockettes are where it’s at.”

Cashing in on this unexpected fame, the Cockettes moved their show to New York. Unfortunately, the troupe’s free-spirited hippie aesthetic was perceived by elite Manhattanites as unprofessional and sloppy. John Lennon, Liza Minelli and Angela Lansbury were some of the many celebrities to walk out on the opening night performance. Gore Vidal hammered the final nail in their patchouli-scented coffin when he infamously proclaimed, “Having no talent isn’t enough.” The group returned to the West Coast and disbanded in 1972.

The photographs in Children were shot before the East Coast snafu. Consisting solely of black and white portraiture by longtime Cockettes member Fayette Hauser, the exhibit depicts her various castmates flower-powering around ‘Frisco—bearded men in boas and evening gowns performing on ramshackle stages; women with theatrical beat smeared across their face lounging in antiquated Haight-Ashbury houses; fierce tranny geishas frolicking through Golden Gate Park. Each picture is a crystalized moment from an artistically and culturally groundbreaking epoch.

Children of Paradise: Life With The Cockettes. Photographs by Fayette Hauser, drkrm/gallery, 727 S. Spring St., Downtown L.A. June 4-July 2

Below, the trailer from the excellent 2002 documentary, The Cockettes,
 

 
Via World of Wonder

 
YouTuber KirkCliff2 says, “In Soviet Russia, toy throws YOU!”

 
Dangerous Minds pal Jason Silva—you may know him from Current TV—sent me this epic rant, caught on video recently. He writes, “I wanted to share this video not as an empirical scientific presentation, but rather an imaginative interpretation of an idea that captured my imagination. The goal was to share an enthusiastic reflection on a wild hypothesis. This is what I would call a moment of ‘ecstatic awe.’”

Terence McKenna wrote in Food Of The Gods that language is a synesthetic technology that allows us to encode information in sound patterns and transmit it wirelessly through time and space. It is, in essence, the first information technology. He believes the catalyst may have been the boundary-dissolving effects of psychedelic mushrooms ingested by early hominids. It’s a wild idea, but it inspired this expository discourse.

In Tron, the main character longs for a reality of his own construction:

“The Grid. A digital frontier: I tried to picture clusters of information as they flowed through the computer.. what did they look like? Chips, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see.. And then… One day… I got IN.”

Picture from Needles and Sins.
 
Well, it feels like quite a while since we’ve had a genuine “ban this filth” furore kicked up over a horror film in the UK. Moral panic over celluloid work is something the British do very well - and not just the infamous Video (Nasties) Recording Act of 1984, but also the public and private reactions to films such as Reservoir Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Child’s Play 3, The Exorcist, Visions of Ecstasy and more. Now there’s a new film to be added to that list, or if you will sown on to the end of the chain. The British Board of Film Classifications (the BBFC) has taken the decision to place an outright ban on director Tom Six’s soon-to-be-not-released Human Centipede II (Full Sequence).

According to the BBFC’s website, here are the reasons for the ban:

*Spoilers Alert!*

The principal focus of The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) is the sexual arousal of the central character at both the idea and the spectacle of the total degradation, humiliation, mutilation, torture, and murder of his naked victims. Examples of this include a scene early in the film in which he masturbates whilst he watches a DVD of the original Human Centipede film, with sandpaper wrapped around his penis, and a sequence later in the film in which he becomes aroused at the sight of the members of the ‘centipede’ being forced to defecate into one another’s mouths, culminating in sight of the man wrapping barbed wire around his penis and raping the woman at the rear of the ‘centipede’. There is little attempt to portray any of the victims in the film as anything other than objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience. There is a strong focus throughout on the link between sexual arousal and sexual violence and a clear association between pain, perversity and sexual pleasure. It is the Board’s conclusion that the explicit presentation of the central character’s obsessive sexually violent fantasies is in breach of its Classification Guidelines and poses a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers.

 
I saw Human Centipede (First Sequence) at the cinema, and enjoyed it a lot (it was in fact a first date, and we are still very much together). While I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was a classic, it was well made, delivered some good scares (mostly centred around the excellent, unhinged performance by Dieter Laser as herr doktor, above) and it wasn’t as gory as I was expecting. The horror did indeed come from the central idea, a rare feat in today’s saturated, torture-porn market. While last year’s A Serbian Film featured some very heavy sexual violence, and was heavily cut by the BBFC, it still played in cinemas and on DVD systems across the land. It seems that mere graphic sexual violence is not enough to get a film banned, it is indeed about the film maker’s intent. And herein lies the problem.

Personally I do not believe in the power of prohibition, and feel particularly irked by the thought that there are a group of people somewhere making decisions on what I can and cannot watch without knowing a single thing about me (and yet assuming the worst about my character). What is the point in this day and age when uncut versions of pretty much anything can be obtained at the click of a mouse? However, I also know how the horror industry works, and absolutely any whiff of scandal that can be created must be exploited for maximum exposure. Human Centipede II (Final Sequence) was shot in England, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that director Tom Six knew the BBFC guidelines and decided to deliberately flout them. The UK has a relatively small market but a powerful media presence, and let’s face it, the film will get a hell of a lot more column inches now than it would have otherwise. For a series of horror films based on a truly disturbing central idea, getting one banned is a masterstroke. Because no amount of onscreen depravity will ever match up to the dark fantasies we create in our heads when imaging how bad a banned film might be.

Writing this post (which I wouldn’t have done were it not for the ban) I decided to look up the trailer for HC2FS, and was rather dismayed at the result. It’s all going a bit Von Trier for my liking - that is when a director’s ego and persona becomes much larger, and more of a focal point, than the actual work they are creating and promoting. Thus bad film making can be excused through a cult of personality. And before any fan people jump on me for that statement, it’s acknowledged that Von Trier has used his own persona, and people’s perception of it, to break his films out of the Danish art market and on to the international stage. It’s not a crime per se, but it still pisses me off, especially if the directors are just not as interesting as they think they are, as is the case here. So, principle photography and at least the first edit of HS2:FS must be ready for the BBFC to pass a judgement, but when it comes to trailers all the public can we see is this rather self-indulgent and poorly executed “personality director” clip. Is this supposed to brew disturbing images in my mind and make me want to see the new film? Sorry Tom Six, but it doesn’t. It bores me and makes me want to see it less: 
 

 
Thanks to Keith Jukes for the headline!

 
A structure, said to be neither “rock nor mountain” nor “fabricated structure”, has been discovered on Mars by “armchair astronomer” David Martines, [who] discovered “a mysterious structure on the surface of the red planet - by looking on Google earth,” reports the Daily Mail:

David Martines, whose YouTube video of the ‘station’ has racked up over 200,000 hits so far, claims to have randomly uncovered the picture while scanning the surface of the planet one day.

Describing the ‘structure’ as a living quarters with red and blue stripes on it, to the untrained eye it looks nothing more than a white splodge on an otherwise unblemished red landscape.

He even lists the co-ordinates 49’19.73"N 29 33’06.53"W so others can go see the anomaly for themselves.

In a pre recorded ‘fly by’ video of the object, Mr Martines describes what he thinks the station might be. He said: ‘This is a video of something I discovered on Google Mars quite by accident.

‘I call it Bio-station Alpha, because I’m just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it.

It’s very unusual in that it’s quite large, it’s over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide, it looks like it’s a cylinder or made up of cylinders.

‘It could be a power station or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage - hope it’s not a weapon.

‘Whoever put it up there had a purpose I’m sure. I couldn’t imagine what the purpose was. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to live on Mars.

‘It could be a way station for weary space travellers. It could also belong to NASA, I don’t know that they would admit that.

‘I don’t know if they could pull off such a project without all the people seeing all the material going up there. I sort of doubt NASA has anything to do with this.

‘I don’t know if NASA even knows about this.’

 

 
ksby.com reports:

Martines calls the apparent structure, Biostation Alpha but planetary geologist Alfred McEwen from the University of Arizona says not so fast. McEwen thinks Biostation Alpha is simply a glitch in the image caused by cosmic energy interfering with the camera.
McEwen says, “with space images that are taken outside our magnetosphere, such as those taken by orbiting telescopes, it’s very common to see these cosmic ray hits.”

Martines says he’s not an astronomy expert and doesn’t know what the image is but isn’t sold on McEwen’s explanation.

“He says that it’s a glitch caused by the reflection of the sun, but even he doesn’t know what camera took the picture and even he doesn’t know where the raw data exists” says Martines.

While Reno Berkeley at technology.gather suggests more possible answers:

A man who believes he’s discovered proof of life on Mars has named the cylindrical structure he claims to have found on the planet as Bio Station Alpha. The video of his discovery, found via Google Mars, has received nearly a million views. But, is it really an artificial structure? Scientists say, ‘no.’

Martines, who uploaded his video to YouTube on May 28, pondered the supposed structure’s purpose. “It could be a power station,” he said in his video, “or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage—hope it’s not a weapon.” Oh, dear, please spare the world from idiotic alien invasion conspiracy theories!

Anyway, Alfred McEwen claims that the “bio station” is actually nothing more than a “linear streak artifact created by a cosmic ray.” McEwan is the lead scientist in the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), which is a powerful telescope orbiting Mars. The rays are energetic particles emanated by the sun and other stars. When orbiting telescopes take photos of Mars or other things in space, the images go through a compressing process in the camera, making the rays look as if they’re cylindrical. McEwan couldn’t tell which orbiting telescope took the photo, so he wasn’t sure what the raw data showed.

Clearly miffed at this, he said, “The people at Google need to document what the heck they’re doing. They should be able to identify what the source of their information is, and let people know so they can go back and look at the raw data.”

Another critic of Martines’ Bio Station Alpha theory is another YouTube user who goes by the name of buzzology1990. Buzzology1990 posted his own video of screen caps, showing how the image Martines claims is a structure is actually just a mineral or salt deposit. Others think it is a dry ice deposit, as this image is near one of the poles on Mars.

Whatever it is, David Martines and his YouTube video have generated a lot of interest and speculation about life on Mars and on other worlds.

On YouTube Martines writes:

This could be the most important discovery on Mars yet! This structure is 700’ x 150’, and is colored white with blue and red stripes against the red Martian soil.

This is not a rock or mountain. It is a manufactured structure. This is not something that I created, this is something that is currently on Google Mars. NASA wont talk to me about it. I’ve sent them a few emails, and no reply.

Go see for yourself.

The coordinates are: 71 49’19.73"N 29 33’06.53"W

 
At the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas, when they say “no talking” or “stop texting” during a movie, they really mean it. This is hilarious:

As many of you know, I really can’t abide people who talk during a movie. A couple of years ago I was accosted in the Village parking lot by a patron who was warned for talking in a movie. I’ve nearly come to blows more than a few times over the years with rude customers over the same issue. When we adopted our strict no talking policy back in 1997 we knew we were going to alienate some of our patrons. That was the plan. If you can’t change your behavior and be quiet (or unilluminated) during a movie, then we don’t want you at our venue. Follow our rules, or get the hell out and don’t come back until you can.

Recently, we had a situation where a customer persisted in texting in the theater despite two warnings to stop. Our policy at that point is to eject the customer without a refund, which is exactly what went down that night.  Luckily, this former patron was so incensed at being kicked out, she quickly called the office and left us the raw ingredients for our latest “Don’t Talk or Text” PSA. You can check it out below, or come to the Alamo this weekend where the video will be playing before all of our R-rated movies.

Ma’am, you may be free to text in all the other theaters in the Magnited States of America, but here at our “little crappy ass theater,” you are not. Why you may ask? Well, we actually do give a f*$k.

Sincerely,

Tim League
Founder/CEO
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

 
Thank you Adam Parfrey!