An oldie, but a goodie. Still hilarious.
As expected, folks are pissed by the new ads from Antonio Federici, the world’s most blasphemous ice cream. From Campaign Live:
One ad created in-house shows a pregnant nun eating from a pot of Antonio Federici Gelato Italiano under the strapline “Immaculately conceived”.
Another ad shows two male priests apparently about to kiss, with the strapline “We believe in salvation”.
The print ads appeared in women’s weeklies Grazia, Look and The Lady, but were investigated by the advertising watchdog after it received a number of complaints about them.
Antonio Federici said the idea of “conception” represented the development of their ice cream, and its decision to use religious imagery stemmed from its strong feelings towards their product – the text also read “Ice cream is our religion”.
The Lady later said it regretted the offence that had been caused to its readers and said it would not publish the ad or anything similar to it in future.
The ASA told Antonio Federici that is was not to repeat the ads in their current form, as it was likely to be seen as distortion and mockery of the beliefs of Roman Catholics.
I’m putting together my list list of the best videos of 2010 and this is a definite contender. “Together” by Hervé with a sample from Primal Scream’s “Come Together”. Directed by Starworks. Grooooovy.
Swedish singer and self-appointed guru (Thomas) Di Leva is one of the oddest pop phenomenons I’ve encountered in quite awhile. Apparently he’s been a big star in Sweden for the past 30 years and yet I’d never heard of him. I pride myself on knowing a shitload about rock and roll and spiritual materialism, but somehow Di Leva, who embodies some of the best of the worst in both music and new age mumbo jumbo, has flown below my cultural radar all these years.
A cross between David Bowie, Donovan, Meher Baba and Barbra Streisand, Di Leva has released 19 albums, has dozens of videos on Youtube and a trippy dippy website devoted to his mystical teachings. His spiritual organization is called Spaceflower, which he describes with typical new age vagueness:
We are all Spaceflowers with roots in Eternity. Striving to consciously and blissfully flow through the supreme infinite reality. We are all one with the eternal now forever.
And Di Leva humbly describes himself as…
One of the greatest spiritual teachers and music artists in his home country Sweden. With Spaceflowers he is now taking his vision, presence and action globally.
Whether or not he succeeds in his quest to raise the planet’s consciousness or not is yet to be seen, but for now we have glimmerings of something Divine (as in Pink Flamingos) in his music videos and live performances. As much as I’m tempted to write this guy off, I find him actually quite compelling. From his obvious David Bowie vocal influence, new wave synth beats and Summer Of Love lyrics , Di Leva is not particularly original and, yet, he is. He’s a cosmic rip-off artist that manages the trick of making you almost believe in something totally artificial. But, I like artifice and Di Leva is thoroughly entertaining in his own weird, spacey, Swamidelic way. He’s a flower child gone to seed, Jesus in day-glo Laura Ashley drag or Dreamgirl mu mu. An Aquarian Age Adam Ant. Meher Abba.
Visit Di Leva’s Spaceflowers website and for a mere $9.00 you can receive a cosmic transmission via telephone from the Guru himself. He accepts Paypal.
Update 9/16: since posting this last night, the spaceflower.net website has been taken down for ‘construction’. I wonder why? Was it something I said?
Di Leva does Bowie after the jump…
Xochimilco 1914 recreates the historic first meeting of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata in the Xochimilco district of Mexico City on the morning of December 4, 1914. It is based on the original stenographic record of their conversation and animates the words and impact of the historic meeting. Two days after the meeting Villa and Zapata would lead their troops into Mexico City and occupy it.
Today is the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence from Spain.
The video is the a collaborative effort on the part of Mexican arts collective Los Viumasters.
A post from Dan Amira on New York magazine’s blog about Delaware’s Republican Senatorial no-hoper, Christine O’Donnell, quotes from a transcript of a, uh, “debate” over evolution between the dotty, anti-masturbation church lady and an evolutionary biologist. The Tea party favorite, who has been accused of living off campaign donations by her former campaign manager, really tells him, doesn’t she?
CHRISTINE O’DONNELL: Well, creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the Earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that.
No evidnece at all, Christine. Those dinosaur fossils were put here by God just to fuck with people, right?
And here’s what she said about not lying to Nazis if they wanted to know where the Jews were hiding on a Politically Incorrect appearance in the late 90s:
CHRISTINE O’DONNELL: A lie, whether it be a lie or an exaggeration, is disrespect to whoever you’re exaggerating or lying to, because it’s not respecting reality.
BILL MAHER: Quite the opposite, it can be respect.
EDDIE IZZARD: What if someone comes to you in the middle of the Second World War and says, ‘do you have any Jewish people in your house?’ and you do have them. That would be a lie. That would be disrespectful to Hitler.
CHRISTINE O’DONNELL: I believe if I were in that situation, God would provide a way to do the right thing righteously. I believe that!
And for a little perspective, here’s Eddie Izzard, her fellow guest on Politically Incorrect, on Creationists, dinosaurs and Jesus:
O’Donnell So Fervently Pro-Truth That She Wouldn’t Lie To Nazis Asking If She Were Hiding Jews In Her Home (Think Progress)
I remember reading early 70’s interviews with Don Van Vliet wherein he bragged of starting a record label called God’s Golfball and his plans to sign a band from his home town of Lancaster,California called Rattlesnakes and Eggs. I’m sure you can forgive me for thinking for lo these many years that band name to be a standard issue Beefheart non-sequiter along the lines of “There are 40 people in the world and 5 of them are hamburgers”. But no, they existed. For real. A communal affair, natch. They got their name from a resident pot-smoking 5 year old boy and boasted the occasional membership of John “Drumbo” French and future Magic Band member John Thomas. The music as heard here is not as far out as I’d hoped, but is still a pretty great slice of horn driven eccentric Zappa/Beefheart-esque desert boogie. They never released anything, but thanks again to the miracle of the Youtube, somebody put up a recording. Dig it.
Sascha Ciezata’s When Herzog Rescued Phoenix is based on a true story told by Werner Herzog.
Ciezeta also made another film with a similar concept called When Lynch Met Lucas which ran into some problems.
My immensely popular animated short film When Lynch Met Lucas was pulled off Vimeo and several other sites by a certain “organization” (who claims to support the arts and artists) with a rather nebulous claim that they own the copyright to the audio portion of my film.
Here’s When Herzog Rescued Phoenix followed by Where’s When Lynch Met Lucas??, which Ciezata shot on his iphone.
Where’s When Lynch Met Lucas?? after the jump…
We’ve sorta banned the word “rare” here at Dangerous Minds, because, let’s face it, nothing’s really rare anymore in the digital age. Nothing. Something might be “seldom seen” (we’ll be using that one a lot at DM) but “rare”? Nah, not in this century, bubbee. If there was ever more than two copies of something made, trust me, it’s out there somewhere in cyberspace, and can be located and downloaded with a little effort. Some of the seriously specialist “art house” and “cult movie” torrent trackers have shit so obscure and previously hard to find, that the word “rare,” especially when it comes to digital media just ought to be retired.
How rare or scare can something you don’t even need to move your ass off the chair for (and is normally free, for that matter) be???
It used to be that certain things were difficult to see, but no more. What about, say, the X-rated Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues. Once one of the rarest of the rare (at least for a watchable copy) during the heyday of the 80s VHS tape trading underground, you can now probably find close to 10,000 torrent files out there in the hinterlands of the Internet. It used to be on YouTube, for fuck’s sake. And again, it’s gone from “rare” to… ahem… free.
Warhol films? That’s easy.
Whenever I’m trying to get across to someone new to the idea of what bit torrent has to offer and exactly what kind of cinematic rarities are out there, the example I usually whip out is Jack Smith’s campy, pervy underground classic from 1963, Flaming Creatures. How many celluloid copies of this film ever existed in the first place? We know that some prints were seized in police obscenity raids, but considering how few places there ever were, historically, to legally be able (and willing) to screen such a confrontational film—subterranean Times Square pre-Stonewall gay porno theaters is the answer—I’d wager fewer than five prints maybe? Flaming Creatures was the limit test case for a rare cult movie. Outside of some institution showing it, or snagging a personal screening as a film scholar at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan, you could pretty much forget about ever seeing Flaming Creatures.
Until fairly recently. It was even shown on French television.
When Flaming Creatures and another of Jack Smith’s films, Normal Love, were posted on Ubu website, I recall thinking that the paradigm of “rare” was well and truly dead. Another legendary movie that I’d always wanted to see was the At Folsom Prison with Dr, Timothy Leary film, and that I was able to embed in a blog post here last week. Like I was saying, nothing is rare anymore and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Which brings me to George Kuchar and Mike Kuchar, deviant twin filmmakers whose work also used to be difficult to view, but not anymore. The Kuchar Brothers were among the original indie mavericks of 60s cinema. But if you are thinking in terms of a young Martin Scorsese or Roger Corman, guess again. Troma before Troma, would be closer to the mark.
The Kuchar Brothers made silly, smutty, no budget, overblown melodramas and Sci-Fi epics that were part of the “Underground” film movement of the time. Their nearest contemporaries were Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage, but the space between a Douglas Sirk drama and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space would seem to nicely define the campy aesthetic continuum the Kuchar’s films exist in. John Waters claims the Kuchar Brothers were bigger influences on him than Warhol, Kenneth Anger or even The Wizard of Oz in his introduction to their (amazing) 1997 book Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool.
In a time long before YouTube, the Kuchar Brothers borrowed their aunt’s Super-8mm camera at the age of 12 and began making their films: poorly-acted, cheapo productions as much parodies as homages to the Technicolor movies they grew up watching in the 1950’s. The sweetly oddball Kuchar sensibility was also informed by the SF underground comix scene (via friends Art Spiegelman and Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith) when George ended up teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. George, the more prolific of the twins, has made over 200 films, mostly with the help of his SFAI students, with memorable titles such as I Was A Teenage Rumpot, Pussy On A Hot Tin Roof, Corruption Of The Damned, Hold Me While I’m Naked, Color Me Shameless and House Of The White People. His best known film is probably the short, Hold Me While I’m Naked.
Mike Kuchar, often in collaboration with his brother and his brother’s students, made films with tiles like Sins of the Fleshapoids, The Secret Of Wendel Samson and The Craven Sluck. He also made an amazing short with Dangerous Minds pal, Kembra Pfhaler called The Blue Banshee and collaborated with gay German underground auteur Rosa von Praunheim.
These days, rare no more, the films of the Kuchar Brothers can be purchased on DVD, downloaded for free from Ubu’s website and are posted on YouTube. There’s even a documentary, 2009’s It Came From Kuchar, which you can stream on Netflix’s VOD. Below, 1966’s Hold Me While I’m Naked:
Below, the trailer for Jennifer Kroot’s documentary, It Came From Kuchar:
The Day the Bronx Invaded Earth: The Life and Cinema of the Brothers Kuchar (Bright Lights Film Journal)
George & Mike Kutchar (Vice)
