Lennon and McCartney are the most covered songwriters of all time (Yesterday is supposed to be the #1 most covered song in history). I used to make a sport of finding great Beatle covers to make mixed tapes with, and let me tell you, there are some really grood ones and then again there are some really crappy ones, too.

Frank Sinatra and Shirley Bassey both do boffo version of George Harrison’s Something, but Desmond Dekker’s take on Come Together is the best one of all. There’s also the Tokyo Beatles, but more on them at a later date…

When it comes to the bad Beatle covers, none are so awful as the absolutely shit Beatle Barkers novelty album, where the songs of the Beatles are… uh, barked (and it doesn’t even include Hey Bulldog! What gives?).

Eagle-eared Dangerous Minds readers who used to watch my Infinity Factory talkshow back in the day, might recall that the show’s producer, Vanessa Weinberg, used what (kinda) sounds like dogs singing/barking (croaking?) a version of We Can Work It Out during the breaks and at the end of the show. This is where that came from.

It’s painful to listen to, as you might imagine, but there is a level of “so wrong it’s right” to the proceedings as well. It’s not even real fucking dogs, it’s human beings doing the barking! You can listen to the entire thing at the WFMU blog... if you, uh, really want to…
 

 
For most of us, our jobs are shitty only in the figurative, but not literal sense. That’s not true for Julio Cou Cámara, who literally spends his workday swimming in excrement, urine and other waste products in the sewers of Mexico City. Because of a odd way the city’s sewage system was constructed, if a blockage occurs, it can cause flooding immediately—or worse—so the government employs two full time divers who jump into the stinky muck and then grope—blindly, of course—to find the obstuctions and remove them before any damage is done. Yucky, yes, but fascinating!

From a long and interesting article on Edible Geography:

People often ask me what I see down there. Do I find money or jewellery?  No, you can’t really see any of those things. Montezuma’s treasure may be down there, but I will most likely never find it, because you can’t see anything—all you can do is feel blockages.

In terms of things we come across: we find lots of cigarette butts. I’ve had blockages caused by pieces of carpets, pieces of cars, or even body parts. Removing these kinds of things from the sewage is part of our work. People who work nearby or are walking past think, “Look at that crazy guy, he’s getting into the sewage.” But yeah, of course—that’s just what we do.

A normal day for me… well, what can I tell you? I go into the office, and if there are no emergencies then we work on maintaining the equipment. This equipment has to be in one hundred percent perfect condition—it mustn’t fail. My other colleague and I have our gear ready at all times. We work during the night as well as during the day. It’s not as though day or night makes a difference for us, because we can’t see anything down there anyway.

Julio the Sewer Diver (Edible Geography)

Deep-Slime Divers Keep Vast and Smelly Sewers Flowing (Washington Post)

Thank you Paul Gallagher!

 
My esteemed associate Mike Paradinas (a.k.a. µ-Ziq) brings us this very interesting mix of what he tags as Juke/Ghettotech /Footwork /Ghetto House /Chicago House. Basically what the kids are dancing to in Chicago and other points in the midwest. Sez the man himself:

Here’s what I’m excited about right now. A mix of Footworking tracks from Chicago. Footwork has hyper syncopated rhythms, sub-bass, offbeat tom fills, triplets and pitch manipulated pop samples; it takes a while to reprogram your brain, but it’s worth it. This sound has evolved over the decades from Chicago House, Ghetto House, and is part of Juke.

Leave it to a Brit to pluck the best of an American phenom (again) ! I often think that rock music has utterly failed for at least the last 20 years to be any kind of irritant for the older folks, but here... well that’s a different story all together. I’d like to believe that this music would likely drive most people over 30 completely batshit. And that’s an excellent thing !
 

 
Richard sez : “That music is the precise intersection between Steve Reich and Larry’s Theme by Grandmaster Flash!” Sounds about right to me…

 
Today marks the half-century anniversary of the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which—along with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita opening earlier the same year—used the artform of cinema to hold up the cracked mirror of compulsive desire to Western civilization.

Movies, of course, would never be the same. Who better to drive the point home than our friendly neighborhood Lacanian critical theorist from Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek, from his excellent 2006 documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema?

 
Get: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema Pt. 1-3 [DVD]

 
You could call Charles Fort (1874 – 1932) the “first Ufologist”—and many do—but that’s already, um, damning the quirky author of The Book of the Damned with feint praise. Fort was more of a scientist (or scientific researcher), but not in any sort of traditional sense most people would recognize as science. A better description of his interests would be to say that what fascinated Fort were the things which were intellectually excluded by science. Rains of frogs, alien spacecraft, meat falling from the sky and spontaneous human combustion were the grist for his mill and this is what he spent his life meticulously cataloging.

Fort was also a bit of a comedian, a Swiftian satirist of science. He hated the idea of experts and thumbed his nose at scientific authority. Fort was a sworn enemy of orthodox rationality. His prose is a delight and is a part of his strong attraction for many readers. His style is “circular,” I guess you might say. Repetitive, but this is kind of the point, to be bludgeoned by the sheer force of the number of examples he’d throw at readers, into accepting the simple fact that something awfully strange is going on here.

Fort, who invented words like “teleporter” kept his notes, his Forteana, if you will, on notecards. Although from time to time, the eccentric author would burn his research, tens of thousands of his cards survive and can be viewed at the New York Library’s Rare Book Room (I’ve looked at some of them myself). In his day, Fort had his share of detracters (his friend H.L. Mencken said his head was filled with “Bohemian mush”!) but also many prominent admirers such as Ben Hecht, Theodore Drieser and Oliver Wendell Homes.

The influence of Charles Fort’s work is subtle but pervasive throughout popular culture. No Fort, no X-Files, for instance. No Art Bell or George Noory, either. Although Fort was in life and after his death, a relatively obscure writer, his work still holds a strong fascination for many people who consider him an intellectual giant. And of course there is a magazine, The Fortean Times, which keeps the flame alive as well as regional organizations of Fortean enthusiasts and a yearly convention.

Dangerous Minds pal Skylaire Alfvegren organizes The League of Western Fortean Intermediatists (or L.O.W.F.I) and she’s got a great short biographical essay of Charles Fort at the Fortean West website:

There is a man, largely undiscovered by the modern world, whom I, and many others, believe made one of the most significant contributions to the world of science. Had it not been that he vehemently opposed modern scientists and their methods, his work might be enjoying a greater popularity than it does. Had this man decided to write about completely different topics, he would be hailed as a fabulous literary character. Here was a peculiar fellow. Charles Fort devoted 26 years of his life to compiling documented reports of scientific anomalies from journals and newspapers from all around the world. He lived in dire poverty so that truth could prevail. His life’s work may one day be of great scientific worth, should the established scientific community ever muster the courage to approach it.

Anomalies. This is what Fort trafficked in. Reports of prehistoric beasts frolicking in the world’s oceans. (Loch Ness, Champ, Storsjon Animal). Ancient artifacts found in improbable places (Roman coins in the deserts of Arizona, Chinese seals found buried deep in the forests of Ireland, small statues of horses discovered in pre-Columbian Venezuela). Falls of things other than rain from the sky (red rains in 1571 England, 1744 Genoa; a rain of “73 organic formations, particular to South America” in France in 1846). Unidentified aerial phenomena (excluding Ezekiel’s Biblical description. Fort’s list contains the first known report of a so-called “UFO”, dating from 1779). These are but a few of the subjects Fort spent his lifetime collecting reports of. This anomalous data are roped together under the banner of “Forteana”, a term which probably does not exist in any dictionary, because that which it pertains to isn’t supposed to exist at all.

He who championed underdogs, has been and will likely continue to be, one of the greatest underdogs of all time. For he has not a baseball team or brooding thespians to compete with, but the entire history of the scientific world. His work spat in the face of conventional scientists. There is much going on around us that defies explanation. Fort amassed reports of events seen by humans around the world countless times, which, none the less, have been dismissed. The data he collected were excommunicated by science, which acts like a religion. “The monks of science” he wrote, “dwell on smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles- Science has done its utmost to prevent whatever science has done” (the Book of the Damned, p. 245). His legacy, his collection of data lies before us. It is indisputable, and yet still ignored. The reports he gathered could make any enemy of science acquire a renewed enthusiasm for the subject. In his four published works, the Book of the Damned (1919). New Lands (1923) Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932) we find over 1,200 documented reports of occurrences which orthodox science refuses to attempt to explain. Explanation was not Fort’s purpose. He merely presented the data, sometimes with his own speculations, sometimes with tongue in cheek. While anomalies can be entertaining, they can also be deeply disturbing, for they undermine the foundations of science, the idea that every thing in this world is rational and under control. Articles like those collected in Fortean Times and the INFO Journal (International Fortean Organization), two publications which continue Fort’s work, prove that things are not under our control, nor will they ever be. Many people, including scientists, find this discomforting and so ignore that which they cannot explain.

The Life, Work and Influence of Charles Fort (Fortean West)

Photo from Dr. Sketchy’s
 
How could you blame him? From Times Live:

An 18-year-old man on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali claimed he was seduced by a cow after being caught having sex with the animal.

A neighbour caught Gusti Ngurah Alit in the act on Sunday and immediately reported him to local authorities, village chief Embang Ida Bagus Legawa said.

“He was caught by one of the residents standing naked while holding the back of the cow,” Legawa said.

On Friday, Alit underwent a cleansing ritual in which he was bathed and the cow was drowned in the sea to rid the village of bad luck.

Alit said he did not see a cow but a beautiful young woman. “She called my name and seduced me, so I had sex with her,” he said.

He had to pay 2,000 old coins as a traditional punishment while the village chief paid the owner of the cow 5 million rupiah (545 dollars) in compensation.

The village idiot rapes a cow and they kill the cow? How is that fair!?

Via Paul Gallagher

Following up on Brad’s post on butoh, my gifted illustrator friend Michael Wertz notes that Antony Hegarty (of the Johnsons) has written the obituary for Kazuo Ohno—one of the stark dance/performance form’s originators—who died on June 1 at the age of 103.

Ohno and fellow choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata created butoh in the ‘50s as Japan roiled in young, tortured energy, and the proliferation of butoh groups throughout America and Europe since the late ‘70s speaks to their legacy. Check out Edin Velez‘s excellent film Butoh: Dance of Darkness here.

You can see butoh’s influence on Western avant-garde pop on both the Virgin Prunes live clip and the excerpt from ½ Mensch, Ishii Sogo’s 1986 film of Einsturzende Neubauten, below.

(above: Heita, daughter, aokubi daikon)
 
Surely the key to ultimate happiness must be in the creating of wind instruments out of a variety of vegetables, because this gentlemen, known simply as Heita, is just preternaturally happy. Just look at his magical wares ! It’s nice that he’s not trying too hard to present it as “serious” music so much, more that it’s just so delightful that musical sound is coming out of this produce ! Can you believe it ?
 

 
Many more homemade vegetable instruments : Heita 3’s Youtube channel
 
Allee Willis’ Blog – Plastic Fruit & Vegetable People and The Most Talented Man You’ve Ever Seen Playing Music On Vegetables
 
thx Richard !

 
So begins R.U. Sirius’s history of Mondo 2000 magazine and its circle of fellow travelers. I approve of how it starts with this wonderful personal anecdote about his first exposure to the underground press as a teen, in the form of the San Francisco Oracle. Many people will tell you of an “Oh wow! This exists! And there must be more of it!” epiphany like this—I had a similar experience discovering David Bowie and reading Lester Bangs in Creem magazine eight years later—and it’s a highly enjoyable essay. Worth pointing out that kids today and forevermore will be unable to have an experience like this due to the always on mediascape we inhabit today. Discovering something rare used to require luck, a knack for ferreting out weird stuff or a hip relative. Not saying it would be preferable to go back to this earlier era, of course, I’m just saying that back then it took work:

Let the story beginning in the Spring of 1967. I am 14 years old and in 9th grade. It’s early evening and the doorbell rings at the suburban house in Binghamton, New York where I live with my mom and dad. It’s a group of my friends and they’re each carrying a plastic bag and looking mighty pleased. They come in, we shuffle into the guest room (where the record player is kept) and they show off their gatherings — buttons (“Frodo Lives!” “Mary Poppins is a Junkie” “Flower Power”), beads, posters (hallucinatory), incense with a Buddha incense burner, and kazoos. A lonely looking newspaper lays at the bottom of the pile, as though shameful, the only item unremarked.

Without realizing the implications, I happen to throw side one of Between The Buttons on the player. Eventually, the song “Cool Calm and Collected” plays and a kazoo sounds through the speakers. In an instant, newly purchased kazoos are wielded and The Rolling Stones only-ever kazoo solo is joined by three wailing teenagers, bringing sudden shouts of objection from my famously liberal and tolerant Dad in the living room. It’s quickly determined that it’s late, Dad’s tired, and it’s time to send all kazoo-wielding teens packing. As each of the friends moves to retrieve his items, I grab the newspaper to see what it is. There are, I now see, two of them — two editions of something called “The Oracle.” It has hallucinatory visuals on the cover and boasts an interview with a member of The Byrds (David Crosby). Vinnie, who had bought it — but who, despite writing poetry — avoids any signifiers of intellectual curiosity as the teen status crushers that they are, feigns disinterest and gives the copies to me.

And that’s where it begins, this strange love affair with the periodical, particularly the periodical that has flair and style… where you can almost feel the energy and fun emanating off the pages.

I remember only one thing from the content inside those two Oracles and that’s David Crosby denying that he was “some kind of weird freak who fucks ten chicks a day.” That stuck in my mind. I didn’t know it was possible even to think that, much less print it, much less be in a position to find it necessary to deny being it!

How great is that last sentence?

Read the entire essay—and support the project—here.

 
Holy, WTF!  I’m not sure what’s more disturbing about the above clip: the 23-year-old woman’s screams, or the tattoo artist’s lack of any response whatsoever?  Oh, and the saga continues: here’s the Part II of sorts.