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Cleese Crossing
08.19.2010
12:57 pm
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(via Cakehead)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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08.19.2010
12:57 pm
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Mister Softee 2010:  Robot Sells Ice Cream In Japan
08.19.2010
05:23 am
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Yaskawa-kun, the lovechild of the Pillsbury Dough Boy and Mister Softee, dispenses soft-serve ice cream at Tokyo’s Summerland Waterpark. 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.19.2010
05:23 am
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London in the sixties: 2 groovy short films on fashion and cafe culture
08.19.2010
03:20 am
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Look At Life were a series of short documentary films produced in the 1960s by the Rank Organization. They were shown in British movie theaters before the main attraction. Shot in vibrant color, Look At Life often focused on ‘Swinging London’.

In these two clips we get a peek into the King’s Road fashion scene and hip London coffeehouses. Groovy.

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.19.2010
03:20 am
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Birds for Justice: DC Central Kitchen replies to Rush’s remarks about non-profits
08.19.2010
12:24 am
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On Inauguration Day 1989, Washington DC-based club manager and booker Robert Egger opened the DC Central Kitchen in order to use job training, meal distribution, and supporting local food systems to help fight poverty, hunger and homelessness in the nation’s capital.

It was about five months after a certain repugnant blowhard named Rush Limbaugh took his show into national syndication. Last week, that blowhard had this to say about non-profit organizations:
 

 
Egger’s thoughtful response—after the jump—should encourage all you Dangerous Minds readers to donate to the DC Central Kitchen today…watch till the end…
 

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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08.19.2010
12:24 am
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Awesome old school NYC subway photos
08.18.2010
11:16 pm
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Photograph by Bruce Davidson
 
Photos of old school New York before they switched over to the subway trains that couldn’t be graffitied on. New York has sadly lost a lot of its character since then (as well as many of its characters, too!)
 
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Photograph by John F. Conn
 
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Photograph by Bruce Davidson
 
See more photos after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Tara McGinley
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08.18.2010
11:16 pm
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The American: New Norman Mailer documentary
08.18.2010
10:05 pm
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Dangerous Minds pal Paul Gallagher write at his Planet Paul website about a new documentary called Norman Mailer: The American:

Norman Mailer claimed he was “imprisoned with a vision” which would “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”  Unfortunately for Mailer, he was far too good a writer to ever do that.

The writers who have achieved such a “revolution” have always produced poorly written and unrelentingly dull books.  Marx and Hitler may have changed history, but ‘Das Kapital’ and ‘Mein Kampf’ will never be page turners, let alone literature.

As for Mailer, he wrote over 40 books, a dozen of which are important works of literature.  No small feat when considering how often Mailer was reckless with his talents. Now Joseph Mantegna has directed a documentary film, called ‘Norman Mailer: The American‘, which examines the life of the great novelist, journalist, film director, and actor and promises to reveal the man behind these multiple lives, with unseen footage, and interviews from his wives, his children, his lovers, his enemies.

When Martin Amis unflatteringly compared Mailer and his legacy to the ruins of Ozymandias‘ two vast and trunkless legs of stone, languishing in the desert, Amis failed to appreciate how Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s poem had made the great King immortal.  Mailer’s life and books don’t need a Shelley, but it’s certainly about time someone assessed the great man’s life and work, and thankfully it looks like Joseph Mantegna has stepped up to the plate.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.18.2010
10:05 pm
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A tribute to Rammellzee
08.18.2010
04:15 pm
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“A tribute to Rammellzee by collaborator and artist Part2ism.”

Previously on Dangerous Minds: “There’s no story to hip-hop—just culture”: R.I.P. renaissance man Rammellzee

(via Wooster Collective)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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08.18.2010
04:15 pm
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Slim Gaillard: La Vout-Oreenie Mac Rootie O’ Scoodilly Bounce O’Vouty
08.18.2010
03:16 pm
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Slim Gaillard was a wonderful jazz performer and inventor of his own groovy dialect he called Vout. He was notably immortalized in the following passage from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road:

‘... one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who’s always saying ‘Right-orooni’ and ‘How ‘bout a little bourbon-arooni.’ In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He’ll sing ‘Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti’ and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he’ll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can’t hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, ‘Great-orooni ... fine-ovauti ... hello-orooni ... bourbon-orooni ... all-orooni ... how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni ... orooni ... vauti ... oroonirooni ...” He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can’t hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience.

Dean stands in the back, saying, ‘God! Yes!’—and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. ‘Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.’ Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two C’s, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverie and realizes Slim is playing ‘C-Jam Blues’ and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages. Finally the set is over; each set takes two hours. Slim Gaillard goes and stands against a post, looking sadly over everybody’s head as people come to talk to him. A bourbon is slipped into his hand. ‘Bourbon-orooni—thank-you-ovauti ...’ Nobody knows where Slim Gaillard is. Dean once had a dream that he was having a baby and his belly was all bloated up blue as he lay on the grass of a California hospital. Under a tree, with a group of colored men, sat Slim Gaillard. Dean turned despairing eyes of a mother to him. Slim said, ‘There you go-orooni.’ Now Dean approached him, he approached his God; he thought Slim was God; he shuffled and bowed in front of him and asked him to join us. ‘Right-orooni,’ says Slim; he’ll join anybody but won’t guarantee to be there with you in spirit. Dean got a table, bought drinks, and sat stiffly in front of Slim. Slim dreamed over his head. Every time Slim said, ‘Orooni,’ Dean said ‘Yes!’ I sat there with these two madmen. Nothing happened. To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni.’

 
So with that in mind here are a handful of clips. He has so many great songs, it was hard to narrow them down !
First a few live clips from his mid-40’s heyday. A young Scatman Crothers on drums:

 
More Slim after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Brad Laner
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08.18.2010
03:16 pm
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Bigotry gets no sanction from the Founding Fathers: What George Washington said on this day in 1790

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Like many of you, I am sick to death of watching ill-educated and misinformed Tea party-types attempting to hijack the notion of “what our Founding Fathers would have wanted” in favor of what they and their ignorant brethren actually want. Whenever someone pulls out the “Founding Fathers” card these days, I recoil immediately because I know I am dealing with an intellectually dishonest scoundrel from the get-go, as this is usually an admission that what they have to say is totally bogus and very often has next to nothing to do with actual history. Referring to what the Founding Fathers would have wanted has become a fall-back straw-man argument of the historically-challenged Glen Beck set and it’s being rendered meaningless the more and more often it gets repeated by ignorant people wanting to shoot their mouths off on TV and at Tea party rallies regarding issues they know nothing about.

While we can’t know exactly what the Founding Fathers would say about the racists on the radical right who are protesting the plans for the Cordoba House in downtown Manhattan, we can read what George Washington himself said about religious freedom on this very in history, August 18th, 1790, in his letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island:

The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet, from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security. If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and a happy people.

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Not very ambiguous is it? Even something like the above would probably still fail to faze the Facts? Who Cares About Facts? brigade of the Republican party. If you are going to invoke the matter of what the Founding Fathers would have wanted, you simply can’t pick and choose from history willy-nilly to suit your argument and be considered credible. But whether they are misinformed or simply lying, however you slice it, when these folks start to evoke what they Founding Fathers would have wanted, they are almost always just plain wrong.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.18.2010
02:21 pm
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Worst rap lyric ever?
08.18.2010
02:00 pm
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Hmmmm. Really, Diddy???

Update: Aaron AuBuchon says, “He’s like a horrible ATM.”
 
(via BuzzFeed)

 

Posted by Tara McGinley
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08.18.2010
02:00 pm
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