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Sixties psychedelic sexploitation: ‘The Touchables’
12.21.2010
01:48 am
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1968 film The Touchables is an explosion of mod and pop art imagery. It was the only film directed by Robert Freeman, whose iconic photos of The Beatles adorn the covers of “Rubber Soul,” “Help” and “A Hard Day’s Night.”

The Touchables was written by Donald Cammell, the director of the mindbending classic “Performance” and the underrated and rarely seen ‘Wild Side,” and stars the stunning Judy Huxtable, who later married comedian Peter Cook.

Four independently wealthy dolly birds kidnap pop star Christian (David Anthony) from a wrestling match, chloroforming him and smuggling him out of the arena dressed as a nun. They spirit him back to their communal home, an inflatable plastic dome, tie him to a circular bed and take turns having their way with him. Meanwhile, Christian’s manager and besotted gay wrestler try desperately to find the pop idol, who, truth be told, isn’t especially eager to be rescued. One of the most sought-after of psychedelic obscurities, this little-seen naughty comedy is a non-stop riot of Swinging London fashions and pop art accessories. The soundtrack features a score by Ken Thorne (“Help,”), short-lived flower-pop Brit band Nirvana and Wynder K. Frog.”

The Touchables captures a moment in time when London was swinging and LSD was melting on pop culture’s tongue. Grab a DVD of this hard to find gem here.

The music on the trailer soundtrack is Brit psych band Nirvana.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.21.2010
01:48 am
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Sweet short films of Brazilian star Seu Jorge contemplating Kraftwerk’s Model
12.21.2010
01:28 am
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New-generation samba-soulster and actor Jorge Mario da Silva a.k.a. Seu (“Mister”) Jorge has risen from drug addiction and homelessness in Rio’s Belford Roxo favelas to international renown. The world has seen the Brazilian go from playing the amazing villain Mané Galinha in City of God, to crooning Bowie tunes in Portugese as Pelé Dos Santos in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Now filmmaker Kahlil Joseph has captured some of the Jorge magic in conjunction with the singer’s eponymous album with the group Almaz, made up of folks from the Recife-based mangue bit band Nação Zumbi. In the two elliptical b&w vignettes below, Joseph finds Jorge wandering around a tasty Hollywood bungalow, musing on his mysterious muse, The Model, the undergoddess, the Oshun. His opaque handling of Kraftwerk’s tentative klassic is a sight to be heard…
 

 
After the jump: Check out the revelation of the Model…

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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12.21.2010
01:28 am
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Holiday madness from Marilyn Manson and StSanders
12.21.2010
12:14 am
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Marilyn Manson’s ‘The Beautiful People’ gets the StSanders treatment: a Christmas shred. Ridiculously sublime. Have a demented holiday.

Ho ho ho.
 

 
Via

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.21.2010
12:14 am
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O, You Pretty Thing: The Wonderful World of Andrew Logan
12.20.2010
09:44 pm
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I once met the artist, sculptor and jewelry-maker, Andrew Logan at a Divine concert in Edinburgh, circa 1984. He was charming and delightful and showed me a selection of his jewelry designs, including a ring with a tiny book attached. He told me there was nothing written in it yet, and full of youthful enthusiasm, I offered to write him something. I did, but never sent it. A pity, for opportunity only ever comes once.

Andrew’s work mixes Pop Art with Neo-Romanticism, and a pinch of English eccentricity. He is the only living artist with a museum in Europe, of which music maestro Brian Eno said:

‘Andrew’s work doesn’t offer that much to the would-be catalogue mystifier: if you start saying anything too pretentious about it, it sort of laughs in your face. It’s hard to place, because it doesn’t really quite belong anywhere, guilelessly straddling a number of heavily contested boundaries - such as those between art and craft, between art and decoration, between pop and fine, between the profane and sacred. But I don’t think this straddling is some sort of ideological position that Andrew has contrived - it’s just where he happens to find himself when he makes the work he wants to see.’

While the art critic and writer John Russell Taylor said:

‘Logan has achieved something beyond the reach of any other 20th Century British Sculptor, even Henry Moore: he has managed to open his own museum, dedicated entirely to his own work and carried it off with showbiz flair.’

Born in Oxfordshire in 1945, Andrew studied to become an architect at the Oxford School of Architecture, graduating in 1970, he then gave that all up to start a career as an artist, believing:

“Art can be discovered anywhere.”

He mixed with Duggie Fields, and Derek Jarman, and became an influence on Jarman’s early Super 8 films, which documented the social scene around Logan and Jarman’s studios at Butler’s Wharf.

In 1972, he started the now legendary the Alternative Miss World, a creative, free-reign competition, which was more about transformation than beauty. The event was filmed and made Logan rather famous.

But his work as an artist continued, and he was acclaimed for his beautiful and fun jewelry, used by such fashion designers as Zandra Rhodes; while his fabulous sculptures celebrated classic form with whimsy. 

Logan has generally found himself near the front of cultural developments. In 1976 his studios were the setting for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Valentine Ball, at which the Sex Pistols made their debut.

Since then, Logan has exhibited his sculptures and designs across the world - from London to St Petersburg, California to Baltimore.  His lifesize horse sculptures, Pegasus I and Pegasus II were displayed at Heathrow Airport, and his Icarus sculpture hangs in Guy’s Hospital. His jewelry was presented by Emmanuel Ungaro in Paris, and more recently it inspired designs for Commes Des Garcons.

This short documentary from Channel 4’s 1980s series Alter Image gives a delightful introduction to the wonderful world of Andrew Logan. Enjoy.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.20.2010
09:44 pm
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Meet The Humanimal Rudolph
12.20.2010
08:10 pm
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Okay, maybe he’s Vixen instead.

(via WOW Report)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.20.2010
08:10 pm
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When Duggie Fields, Divine and ‘J.R.’ Spent Christmas Together
12.20.2010
06:59 pm
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The brilliant artist Duggie Fields supplied Dangerous Minds with this fabulous Holiday snap of a Christmas party with Divine and Larry ‘J.R.’ Hagman in the 1980s. As Duggie explains:

The photo was Christmas day at Zandra Rhodes’ in London Maybe a year or two after ‘J.R.’ was shot in Dallas - Andrew Logan was also there, Joan and Jack Quinn and Janet Street-Porter too….Lunch and afternoon rather than evening…..Larry is giving out his Christmas gifts to everyone of mini portable fans with his photo on - his Patented Anti-Smoking Device...!

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Tea With Duggie Fields


 
Bonus snaps and clip, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.20.2010
06:59 pm
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Ultimate Christian Street Fighting: A glimpse of America’s future
12.20.2010
05:10 pm
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When pastors attack! Holy fuck!

Another winner today from Christian Nightmares

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.20.2010
05:10 pm
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Christian Pink Floyd ‘parody’: ‘Hey, Satan, leave our thoughts alone!’
12.20.2010
04:32 pm
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“Hey, Satan, leave our thoughts alone! All in all you’re just another snake on the crawl!”

A Christian take on Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” I love her “wind machine”!

Via Christian Nightmares

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.20.2010
04:32 pm
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Lester Bangs and Gary Lucas on Captain Beefheart
12.20.2010
03:20 pm
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Illustration by Ashley Holt

Two great pieces about the late Don Van Vliet AKA Captain Beefheart. First up the classic and epic Lester Bangs profile from the Village Voice circa 1980 (you might want to print this one out):

As reviews over the years have proved, it’s always difficult to write anything that really says something about Don Van Vliet.

Perhaps (though he may hate this comparison) this is because, like Brian Eno, he approaches music with the instincts of a painter, in Beefheart’s case those of a sculptor as well. (When I was trying to pin him down about something on his new album over the phone the other day, he said: “Have you seen Franz Kline lately? You should go over to the Guggenheim and see his Number Seven, they have it in such a good place. He’s probably closer to my music than any of the painters, because it’s just totally speed and emotion that comes out of what he does.”)

When he’s directing the musicians in his Magic Band he often draws the songs as diagrams and shapes. Before that he plays the compositions into a tape himself, “usually on a piano or a moog synthesizer. Then I can shape it to be exactly the way I want it, after I get it down there. It’s almost like sculpture; that’s actually what I’m doing, I think. ‘Cause I sure as hell can’t afford marble, as if there was any.”

Much of what results, by any “normal” laws of music, cannot be done. As for lyrics, again like Eno, he often works them up from a sort of childlike delight at the very nature of the sounds themselves, of certain words, so if, to pull an example out of the air; “anthrax,” or “love” for that matter appears in a line, it doesn’t necessarily mean what you’ll find in the dictionary if you look it up. Then again, it might.

Contrary to Rolling Stone, “Ashtray Heart” on the new album has nothing to do with Beefheart’s reaction to punk rockers beyond one repeated aside that might as well be a red herring. (“Lut’s open up another case of the punks” is the line reflecting his rather dim view of the New Wavers who are proud to admit to being influenced by him. “I don’t ever listen to ‘em, you see, which is not very nice of me but… then again, why should I look through my own vomit? I think they’re overlooking the fact - they’re putting it back into rock and roll: bomp, bomp, bomp, that’s what I was tryin’ to get away from, that mama heartbeat stuff. I guess they have to make a living, though.”)

And then there is the heartfelt appreciation of Beefheart that appeared in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, from onetime Magic Band member, guitar genius Gary Lucas:

I never met anyone remotely like him in my 30 years in “this business of music.”  He made up his own rules, was sui generis and sounded like no one else.  Steeped in gutbucket blues and free jazz, Van Vliet operated on the highest of artistic and poetic levels that left most people bewildered and scratching their heads.  But if you were willing to put in the work to really LISTEN – his music was not a background experience – you would be rewarded with a searingly honest beauty and a breathtaking complexity that made most other efforts in the pop arena seem cheap and disposable.

Besides music, he transformed and made art of everything he touched including poetry and painting and sculpture.  I was honored to have worked with him for five years as both his guitarist and manager. A total rebel artist and contrarian, he had the guts to go on David Letterman and announce “I don’t want my MTV!” after they rejected our video for “Ice Cream for Crow” as being “too weird.”  He could be a terror and a tyrant to his musicians, but most of them were fiercely devoted to him and put up with his extreme mood swings for the privilege of being part of the experience of working with him. We all knew we were involved in a world historical project.

His music was notoriously and fiendishly difficult to play – and the first piece he gave me to record, a guitar solo piece entitled “Flavor Bud Living,” which is featured on the “Doc at the Radar Station” album, absolutely put me on the map musically, the reviewer for Esquire Magazine writing that I must have grown extra fingers to negotiate my way through the piece.  Even the great Lester Bangs who had famously good ears (and was an early critical Don Van Vliet partisan, praising Beefheart’s most advanced albums “Trout Mask Replica” and “Lick My Decals Off, Baby” in Rolling Stone) was fooled by my performance of “Flavor Bud”, which involved months of rehearsal and shooting pains in my arm from the physical exertion learning to master the piece correctly, inquiring “Which part are you playing there Gary, the top or the bottom?” when he first heard the playback of “Flavor Bud Living” at a listening party.  “Lester, that’s all me, performing live in real time” was my reply.  That was really maybe the highest compliment I have ever been paid re. my guitar playing.

Via Michael Simmons/Steve Silberman

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.20.2010
03:20 pm
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Pupil dilation gif’d
12.20.2010
02:01 pm
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Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.20.2010
02:01 pm
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