Street Gangs: Challenge for Law Enforcement is one of the many films produced by Charles Cahill (and Associates) for educational use during the late 1950s and early 1970s. Usually Cahill’s films had such uninspiring titles as Safety Through Seat Belts (1959), Safety Belt for Susie (1962), Highball Highway (1963) and Safety Rules for Schools (1967) and presented similarly uninspiring content.

Street Gangs, however, has considerable cultural and social interest mainly down to the interviews with young East Los Angeles gang members from sometime in the 1970s, who talk about their involvement in gangs, their codes, tattoos, and use of weaponry.  This documentary was found by GuildfordGhost, who purchased a 16mm reel of the film and uploaded it to YouTube.
 

 
Via Voices of East Anglia

 
James Ellroy is not the real name of James Ellroy, did you know that? He was born Lee Earle Ellroy, after his father, whom he would come to despise. He changed his name to James Ellroy around the time he published his first novel.

In 1958, a few weeks after Lee’s tenth birthday, the body of Geneva “Jean” Hilliker Ellroy was found in the shrubs outside of Arroyo High School.
 

 
Those of you who have read Ellroy’s My Dark Places know this story. The never-solved killing of his mother has understandably haunted Ellroy his whole life. A year later, when he was eleven, his dad gave him a copy of Jack Webb’s book The Badge, which contained a synopsis of the gruesome 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, who would forever be known to history as “The Black Dahlia.” Ellroy’s breakthrough novel, as well as the first novel of his “L.A. Quartet,” was called The Black Dahlia. Unsurprisingly, the brutal death of a beautiful young woman in Los Angeles resonated with Ellroy. Ellroy spent most of his early years in erratic fashion, he briefly joined the American Nazi Party (mostly for shock effect), and he also became a petty criminal and burglar; he was arrested several times. After he became a successful writer of brutal noirs set in Los Angeles, he hired a private detective to investigate his mother’s murder, a process that led to the writing of My Dark Places.
 

 
If you think all of this is horrendously unpromising material for a dance piece, then you aren’t Hans Van den Broeck, of the Brussels-based dance group SOIT (Stay Only If Temporary). He has choreographed a dance piece called “The Lee Ellroy Show,” which premiered in Brussels last November and recently was staged for the ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna, Austria. (Van den Broeck appears to have some prior connection to Vienna; a 2010 piece of his is called Café Prückel, a magnificent old Kaffeehaus on Vienna’s Stubenring.)
 

The story is set in the 50’s. Divorced and lonely, James Ellroy’s mother moves to El Monte, part of the endless sprawl of greater Los Angeles. The new suburbia, isolated and eerie. A sordid boiling hot place risen from the dessert, a nowhere, where she was prone to meet other lost souls and eventually did. On a ‘cheap’ saturday night she met her killer, the ‘swarthy man’, a murderer who was never found. She had a night out on her own, a few drinks, a talk, a dance and was discovered in the early morning hours in the bushes of a small dirt-road. An existence halted in the grass, a life that never blossomed.

This sudden, traumatic disappearance condemns James Ellroy to a life-long search for the mother he never really knew, a loving mother. He embarks on a disturbing journey ; from a big mouthed young bully, to a shoplifting teenager, a voyeur and finally nearly losing his mind as a homeless young adolescent. About to tip over the cliff, he devotes himself to writing. It will be his salvation and a sublimation of the trauma, a life-long battle with the omen living inside him.

 

 
As Van den Broeck has said of the piece, “It has such a tragic and obsessive undertone: that man has really been obsessed by that loss throughout his whole life. It led to him becoming a writer, of course, but also, among other things, to a love-hate relationship with women. I trained as a psychologist and that fixation with an unresolved trauma of that kind really fascinated me. But in terms of language and style, too, it is a hugely inspiring book: obsessional in tone, written in a staccato rhythm, and quite ‘in your face’.” Jake Ingram-Dodd and Anuschka Von Oppen are the two dancers who inhabit “The Lee Ellroy Show.” The piece will have performances in Belgium this coming October and next March.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
A furtive fecal felon, dubbed “The Poo Man” (“Bajsmannen”) has been breaking into people’s homes in the town of Mariestad, Sweden, and taking a dump in their toilets. Mariestad’s toilet invader made headlines in the Aftonbladet newspaper after the Poo Man’s foul deeds were reported on TV crime show Brottscentralen, where one of his victims was interviewed. According to The Local:

Hosts on the show said the incident had developed into “an unusual, uncomfortable, and utterly revolting pattern.”

“A man or woman has repeatedly made their way into people’s apartments and done their business in the toilet,” one of the programme hosts explained.

“Without flushing, we should add,” the co-host added.

Since last summer, the Poo Man has left a noxious call card at four different households, visiting one of the victims, Emmeli Johansson, on four separate occasions. Ms. Johansson said she rued the fact that neither her landlord nor the police took her complaint seriously, and explained how she was forced to change her locks. Though this trail of devastation (defecation?) has led to many puns, jokes and assorted banter, Brottscentralen‘s reporters reminded residents “that the crime was actually a serious one”:

“It’s easy to laugh about it, but it’s really uncomfortable when you realize that a pattern is developing,” they said.

An anonymous caller to The Local explained that the suspect could be “the legendary poop man” who hits music festivals around the country, covering himself in human excrement from the festivals’ portable toilets. The caller’s claims remain unconfirmed.

Meanwhile, it’s unknown whether the Poo Man is still on the run, or bunged-up somewhere… we can only hope this fecal terrorist washed his hands after using the facilities…

With National Toilet Paper Day coming up on August 26th, here are ten facts about you know what…
 

 
H/T Arbroath

 
News that Marianne Faithfull had copped to her ex-boyfriend Jean de Breteuil’s (alleged) involvement in Jim Morrison’s death sent me back to a poem I’d read in 2011. That poem, “The Final Times of Jim Morrison” by Ed Sanders of the Fugs, gives a concise account of how de Breteuil was (allegedly) connected to Morrison, Morrison’s longtime companion Pamela Courson, and Marianne Faithfull.

A very compressed summary of Sanders’ story follows. In the summer of 1970, Pamela was living with de Breteuil, a French count and heroin dealer, in Los Angeles. When Janis Joplin overdosed on de Breteuil’s uncut shit, he freaked out and fled with Courson to Paris; Pam left Jim a note, “which upon reading he burned.”

“Some time in the several months thereafter / de Breteuil hooked up with / Marianne Faithfull / meeting her in London / while he stayed at Keith Richards’ house.” Around Christmas, while the Doors were finishing L.A. Woman, Pam returned to L.A., telling Jim to quit the band and move to Paris with her. He agreed, and moved into a Right Bank apartment Pam (“now a stone junkie”) found for him “through connections of de Breteuil.”
 

Comte Jean de Breteuil
 
In June 1971, de Breteuil returned to Paris from London, bringing Faithfull with him and displacing Pam, who had been living in his Paris digs. Pam moved in with Jim. She scored pure Chinese H from the count. Jim and Pam spent the night of July 2 watching home movies and hoovering rails of scag. (“In between reels / they honked down strips of the powerful horse.”)

Jim gurgles. Pam slaps him awake. Jim gets in the tub. Jim pukes blood and pineapple. “After considerable vomiting / She later claimed Jim said to go back to bed / He felt better.”

Pam calls de Breteuil and tells him Jim is dead. De Breteuil rushes to the apartment and tells Pam to flush the drugs. Though he is in a big hurry, he can’t help beating up Marianne Faithfull before rushing her out the door and onto a plane to Tangier.
 

 
You’ll like the poem better. It’s got prosody, diction, rich detail—you know, a poem. Sanders’ most famous book is The Family, but did you know he was hired by Glenn Frey in the 70s to write a biography of the fucking Eagles? The 800-page manuscript, still unpublished, should be their Cocksucker Blues, but sadly there are no bootleg copies.
 

A 1968 episode of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, featuring a drunken Jack Kerouac, The Fugs’ Ed Sanders and confused academic Lewis Yablonsky discussing the “Hippie” movement.

 
Although Charles Manson didn’t actually write “Never Learn Not To Love” for the Beach Boys, he did in fact, write a number titled “Cease to Exist” that drummer Dennis Wilson—a friend of Manson’s in the late 1960s—convinced his cleancut brethren to record for their 20/20 album

Dennis even arranged for Manson to get some studio time in Brian Wilson’s home studio and let him and his entourage crash in his mansion for a while.

Manson’s original “Cease to Exist” lyrics go like this

Pretty girl, pretty, pretty girl
Cease to Exist
Just come and say you love me
Give up your world
C’mon you can see
I’m your kind, I’m your kind
You can see
Walk on, walk on
I love you pretty girl
My life is yours and
You can have my world
Never had a lesson
I ever learned
But I know we all get our turn
I love you
Submission is a gift
Go on, give it to your brother
Love and understanding is for one another
I’m your kind, I’m your kind
I’m your mind
I’m your brother
I never had a lesson I ever learned
But I know we all get our turn
And I love you
Never learned not to love you
I never learned

“I’m your mind”>? “Submission is a gift”? Well, isn’t that special?

Freeway Jam writes at Lost in the Grooves:

The Beach Boys’ version changed the key phrase to “cease to resist,” but otherwise left the lyrics and melody essentially unchanged. Dennis Wilson sings lead vocal, a rarity, and the Beach Boys supply their famous group harmonies and dense production. There’s an ominous intensity to the recording; even divorced from Manson, it conveys a vaguely sinister edge, with its tribal rhythm and hypnotic chants.

“Never Learn Not To Love” was originally released as the B-side to the “Bluebirds Over The Mountain” single in November of 1968, but was credited solely to Dennis Wilson who Manson owed money to. The story goes that when Manson heard the song, with the lyrics altered, he threw a fit and went to Wilson’s house with a loaded gun. When he found out the Wilson wasn’t there, he took a bullet from the gun and told his housekeeper to give it to Dennis with a cryptic message.

Dennis WIlson wasn’t the only one impressed with Manson. None other than Neil Young said of him:

“He had this kind of music that nobody else was doing. He would sit down with a guitar and start playing and making up stuff, different every time. It just kept comin’ out, comin’ out. Then he would stop and you would never hear that one again. Musically, I thought he was very unique. I thought he had something crazy, something great. He was like a living poet.”

Young even gave Manson a motorcycle!

Here are the Beach Boys performing the song on The Mike Douglas Show:
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Nothing represents the Sex Pistols’ ability to push buttons as well as the choice of the word “Bollocks” to appear in the title of their first record in 1977. Unquestionably vulgar in an in-your-face way, the word was nevertheless not obviously obscene, or “indecent,” to employ the legal terminology used at the time. It was offensive enough that Her Majesty’s Government sought to suppress the display of the word in public—but not offensive enough for that position to carry the day in court. “Bollocks” clearly has some relationship to the word “Balls,” but it’s not a 1:1 relationship—it’s a little like the word “freaking” to substitute for “fucking,” but better and more vivid. Bollocks to that! “Bullshit” would be an a close synonym for American English. It’s the perfectly rude Sex Pistols word.

On Saturday, November 5, 1977, a policewoman named Julie Dawn Storey spotted the Never Mind The Bollocks display in the window of the Virgin Records store in Nottingham. She went inside, confiscated a couple of albums, and informed shop manager Christopher Seale that the appearance of the word “Bollocks” in the display violated the 1899 Indecent Advertising Act. Then she arrested him. For the couple of weeks before the trial, nobody could risk the legality of the album’s name—shop owners were forced to sell the album under the table, and a Pistols’ expensive ad campaign appeared to go to waste because no publications would dare to run it. Naturally all of this had the effect of adding to the Pistols’ reputation as the most controversial band in Britain.
 

Christopher Seale and the Sex Pistols’ immortal album art
 
On November 24, 1977, the court convened to rule on the fate of the shop owner, Christopher Seale, and Virgin Records. Defending the Sex Pistols was a fusty-looking chap who didn’t look like he belonged on the same continent as the Sex Pistols, much less the same courtroom. His name was John Mortimer, and by the time of his death at the age of 85 in 2009, his status as one of the most beloved attorneys and novelists in British history would be rock-solid.

Before the “Bollocks” trial, Mortimer’s primary claim to fame as a lawyer was his work on obscenity cases. He successfully defended the publication in Britain of Hubert Selby Jr.‘s Last Exit in Brooklyn in 1968, and three years later lost a similar case involving the scandalous Danish book The Little Red Schoolbook. In 1976, he defended Gay News editor Denis Lemon for the crime of publishing James Kirkup’s poem “The Love that Dares to Speak its Name” against charges of blasphemous libel; Lemon lost the case but it was overturned on appeal.

Although he would achieve much greater fame later, Mortimer had already been a writer of fiction for some years, which may partially explain his interest in obscenity cases. In the 1960s he had written A Voyage Round My Father, an autobiographical play about his relationship with his blind father (also a barrister)—it was later made into a TV movie with Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates. With his wife, Mortimer also wrote the script for Otto Preminger’s 1965 movie Bunny Lake Is Missing. In 1975 Mortimer began his lengthy series of bestselling comic novels revolving around Horace Rumpole.

In 1978, just a year after the Pistols trial, Thames Television launched Rumpole of the Bailey, its immensely popular series about a rumpled—if you will—and principled barrister who defends his clients against the weight of the Crown with everything he’s got. Rumpole was portrayed by Leo McKern, who became synonymous with the role—although DM readers might know him better as the heavy in the Beatles movie Help!.
 

Mortimer and McKern, in costume as Rumpole
 
As odd a fit as it may seem, Mortimer obviously had impeccable bona fides on free speech cases, which in fact made him a perfect choice to defend the Sex Pistols in court. The website 20thcpunkarchives describes Mortimer’s strategy:
 

John Mortimer raised the question of why Seale was prosecuted for displaying the sleeve while the newspapers that used the same image as an illustration were not. Mortimer continued to outline the history of the term “Bollocks” tracing it back to roots in the Middle Ages. Mortimer continued by bringing in a Professor Kingsley, head of English Studies at local Nottingham University. Kingsley told the court that the term had been used from the year 1,000 to describe a small ball (or things of a similar shape) and that it has appeared in Medieval Bibles, veterinary books and literature through the ages. He also revealed (not surprisingly) that it also served as part of place names throughout the UK. Eyebrows were raised when Kingsley said that the term had been used to describe the clergy of the previous century. In that connotation it was used in a similar fashion as the word rubbish and used to describe a clergyman that spoke nonsense. The defense continued to intimate that perhaps the prosecution was not interested in decency of the word in question but instead were waging war against the band themselves. After making the case clear, the judiciary deliberated for twenty minutes and felt compelled to dismiss all charges against Seale. The Sex Pistols’ cover was ruled as “decent” and set a precedent that would protect other shop owners who displayed the cover.

 
Johnny Rotten had attended the trial wearing a safari hat. As he exited the courtroom, a reporter solicited his comment—I remember hearing about this line when I was in high school, and it tickles me now just as much as it did then. Rotten was quoted as saying:

“Great! Bollocks is legal. Bollocks! Bollocks! Bollocks!”

 
There’s a possible game show here: call it something like What’s Up My Ass? in which contestants have to smuggle a selection of goods past a panel of celebrity prison officers. It’s like What’s My Line? except with discretely hidden contraband.

A potential contestant for such a show would certainly be 35-year-old André Silva de Jesus, who was arrested after attempting to smuggle a surprising number of items into a prison in Ribeirao das Neves, Greater Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

André Silva managed to secrete two mobile phones, two batteries, pliers, two drills, eight pieces of a hacksaw, five nails and three Sim cards up his anus. On arrival at the prison, the man presented guards with a medical certificate which claimed he had a pacemaker and was therefore exempt from passing through the facility’s x-ray machine. However, the guards became suspicious of André Silva’s “nervousness” and searched him. Military police were called in to “record the occurrence” but it is not known which inmate was to receive the smuggled contraband.

In an innuendo-laden statement, the Secretariat for Prison Administration said authorities had “opened an internal procedure to determine what happened.” Sounds painful.

As there is no news footage for this story (quelle surprise!), so here’s one that was put together earlier…
 

 
Via Arbroath

 
Oh, lawyers. You gotta love ‘em.

In 2002, Jeffrey Baldwin of Toronto died of starvation at the age of five after severe abuse at the hands of his grandparents, Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman. The grandparents were convicted child abusers but Jeffrey and several siblings were still handed into their care by a children’s aid organization after concerns arose that the parents were abusing their children. Jeffrey and a sister were locked in a bathroom for days on end, where they were forced to live in their own filth. Court testimony revealed that Bottineay and Kidman were interested in custody of the two children for the government checks they would collect. Jeffrey died of starvation on November 30, 2002. Kidman and Bottineau, were convicted of second-degree murder in 2006.

According to Wikipedia, Jeffrey’s case led to significant changes in policy by children’s aid societies in the granting of custody of children to relatives.

In happier days, the boy was a Superman fan who was even photographed wearing the classic uniform. According to his father, Richard Baldwin, “He wanted to fly. ... He tried jumping off the chair. We had to make him stop. He dressed up [as Superman] for Halloween one year. … He was so excited. I have that picture at home hanging on my wall. He was our little man of steel.”
 

 
A Toronto resident named Todd Boyce was so moved by this story—revealed in a long delayed inquest into the death earlier this year—that he started an indiegogo crowdfunding project to create a statue for the poor boy. The project had an initial goal of $25,000 (Canadian dollars), but raised in excess of $36,000. Noted Ontario sculptor Ruth Abernethy has completed the sculpture but it is now at a foundry waiting to be cast into bronze. The sculpture features Baldwin wearing his favorite garment—a shirt with the famous Superman logo.

The City of Toronto sought assurances that the monument would not violate any copyright laws before granting Boyce’s request to have the monument placed in Greenwood Park, near where Jeffrey grew up.

According to the Toronto Star, DC has denied the request.
 

DC’s senior vice-president of business and legal affairs, Amy Genkins, told Boyce in an email that “for a variety of legal reasons, we are not able to accede to the request, nor many other incredibly worthy projects that come to our attention.”

DC declined to comment.

 
Boyce feels that the Superman aspect was a crucial part of the bronze monument, which will include a bench: “I’m sort of empathetic to (DC’s) point of view on this, but I feel very strongly that the image of Jeffrey is so powerful. It’s the image of a vulnerable boy dressed up as the most invulnerable character in the universe. So I just feel like there’s something lost if we change it.”

Reluctantly, Boyce is going to have the “S” on the statue changed to a “J” for Jeffrey.
 

 
Via The Beat

 
What do you do if you’re living in the USSR in, say, 1957, and you’d like to press an illegal record of some banned rock and roll or jazz? Consumer tape recorders don’t exist, and in the USSR, vinyl is difficult to come by. How do you proceed?

One thing you might do is press your contraband beats into discarded X-rays. A police state does wonders for the sheer inventiveness of its citizens, does it not? Clever Russians eager to hear some liberating rock and roll would salvage exposed X-rays from hospital waste bins and archives and use them to make records.

In the 1946-1961 era, some ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X-ray film. The thick radiographs would be cut into discs of 23 to 25 centimeters in diameter; sometimes the records weren’t circular. But the exact shape didn’t matter so much, as long as the thing played.

“Usually it was the Western music they wanted to copy,” says Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev. “Before the tape recorders they used the X-ray film of bones and recorded music on the bones, bone music.” As author Anya von Bremzen elaborates: “They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole. ... You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan—forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”

I can’t wait until Record Store Day 2015, when limited edition X-ray releases will surely be some of the most sought-after purchases!
 

 

 

 

 
Previously on DM:
Vintage X-ray ‘vinyl’ from Russia
 
via Vinyl of the Day
 

 
One of the most notorious, brilliant, and amusing copyright news stories surrounds Negativland’s appropriation of Casey Kasem and U2, when they provocatively released a single with “U2” emblazoned in huge letters on the cover with the silhouette of a Lockheed U-2 spy plane (cover image is below). The song featured a hilarious recording of Casey Kasem getting frustrated over the pointlessness of enthusiastically introducing U2 to an American audience, eventually to a tinny backbeat of U2’s 1987 track “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”—indeed, the track is listed simply as a cover of that song.

Island Records didn’t find the jape very funny. With Achtung Baby due to hit stores—readers will find this hard to remember, but U2’s status as a worldwide force was far more questionable before that album came out—Island sued Negativland with great alacrity and proved remarkably effective at gathering up as many of the extant copies as it could. Negativland soon countered with a book, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2, that included a CD as well as documentation from all the legal wrangling. The whole thing was a masterful bit of culture-jamming, and for fans of out-there assholery before the widespread existence of the Internet, Negativland’s “U2” became a much-sought-after cultural artifact that proved devilishly difficult to find.
 

 
Now, with the Internet and everything, it’s not hard to find at all, and since nether Island Records nor U2 probably cares much whether iTunes sales of Achtung Baby are affected anymore, Negativland has chosen this, the week of Casey Kasem’s death, to release the masters for today’s generation of culture jammers to fuck with. On Negativland’s website, “Hal Stakke, legal counsel of Seeland Records” has issued a press release after the demise of Kasem under the following title: “In Memoriam, Kemal Amin “Casey” Kasem (27 April 1932 – 15 June 2014): Negativland releases ‘U2’ tracks for remixing and reuse.” Here’s the content of the release:
 

One of the most beloved voices in music radio, Kemal Amin “Casey” Kasem, died on Father’s Day 2014 after a long illness, and also a very public family squabble over his continuing care. Negativland pays tribute to this broadcasting legend by reaching into its vaults and presenting what is perhaps Kasem’s best-known work, on Negativland’s long-unavailable U2 maxi- single, offering up for public consumption (and now, for creative reuse) what has been hidden from view for 23 years.

In 1991, Negativland’s “U2” single had one of the shortest releases in music history, squashed like a bug after less than ten days on store shelves, under legal fire from the Irish rock band U2′s music publisher (Warner/Chappell) and then-record label (Island). The history of this fracas was detailed in their 1995 book and CD release, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (Seeland 013).

Now, instead of merely reissuing the U2 record itself, Negativland presents, for free digital download, the original un-mixed studio multi-track tape for re-mixing, re-purposing and re-inventing in whichever way the listener may choose. Negativland encourages the re-contextualization of this seminal work for whatever reason, whatsoever. In keeping with the working methods and philosophy of Negativland, and the Fair Use provision in U.S. Copyright Law (Section 107, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html), the group offers up this raw material in the hopes that entirely new versions of the work are created and disseminated. Listeners/remixers are encouraged to post their creations in these locations: www.negativland.com and https://www.facebook.com/pages/Negativland/131759750185111.

 
If you want the masters, all you have to do is download them here. It’s all pretty exciting, although of course, it’s always possible that, to paraphrase Kasem himself, “Nobody gives a shit.”
 

 
via Slicing Up Eyeballs