My 1970s Tumblr supplies “inspiration drops from 1970s aesthetics and lifestyle.” A fine reminder to that decade’s rich diversity of music, film, politics, fashion, and some rather dodgy advertising.

See more here.
 
 
 

 

 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
More pix from the fab seventies, after the jump…
 

 
Ironic that a man not known much for speaking should have given one of the greatest speeches in history. Here’s Charlie Chaplin’s moving oration from The Great Dictator set to contemporary imagery.

I’m sorry but I don’t want to be an Emperor – that’s not my business – I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.

We all want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.

The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls – has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.

We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in: machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little: More than machinery we need humanity; More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me I say “Do not despair”.

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress: the hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people, will return to the people and so long as men die [now] liberty will never perish…

Soldiers – don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you – who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.

Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate – only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers – don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty.

In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written ” the kingdom of God is within man ” – not one man, nor a group of men – but in all men – in you, the people.

You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let’s use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfill their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfil that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

 
Via Nerdcore

 
Attention poetry fans: Over at the LA Times “Jacket Copy” blog, Carolyn Kellogg posts about an event this weekend at the Getty Museum here in Los Angeles that will see Marilyn Manson reading the work of the great English poet, artist and mystic, William Blake:

The goth rocker adds star power to an event that’s focused on poetry, which tends to be a little quieter than your basic stadium rock show. Six poets will be reading original works inspired by the current Getty exhibit “Luminous Paper: British Watercolors and Drawings.”

Poets on the bill include Patricia Smith, a 2008 National Book Award finalist; Whiting Award recipient Ilya Kaminsky; Jeffrey McDaniel, who has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; poetry slam champ Rachel McKibbens; and poets and educators Brendan Constantine and Suzanne Lummis.

The readings will be accompanied by live music from Timmy Straw, who combines classical string training with electronics, and Roberto Miranda, an improvisational bassist.

The event, called “Dark Blushing,” is organized by the Write Now Poetry Society, a nonprofit founded by actress and poet Amber Tamblyn and poet Mindy Nettifee.

“Dark Blushing,” 7:30 p.m., free; parking at the Getty is free after 5 p.m. Reservations are already full, but the Getty will give out standby tickets starting at 6 p.m.

 
In this spandexcellent video, Poison perform “Rock Like A Rocker” on L.A. cable TV.

If you’re gonna rock, you oughta rock like a rocker as opposed to rocking like…I don’t know… a tuna fish sandwich.

Filmed sometime around 1985 before the release of their debut album, these Jennifer Beals wannabes look like they’re auditioning for Flashdance, Smell The Glove or the “before” video for a penis enlargement product.

This sucks like a sucker. But it is funny.
 

 
I’ve been harping on this point for some time here on this blog, but what’s been long predicted about the demographic shift that would ultimately doom the Republican Party as the percentage of Latino-American voters rises, is already pretty much a done deal here in California. The Republican challenger to Obama will hardly campaign here, mark my words, it’s simply a waste of time and money. Even with as weak of a Democratic ticket topper as Obama, the GOP nominee would be waging a Quixotic battle in the most populous state.

Republican meanies, this is your future. From the Sacramento Bee:

A new analysis by the Field Poll shows that even as California’s total voter registration grew by more than 2 million voters over the past 20 years, Republican registration declined by 285,944 voters, to 5.3 million.

The party’s share of statewide registration declined eight percentage points, to 31 percent.

Meanwhile, the proportion of registered voters who are Latino grew by about 2.3 million, from 10 percent of the state’s registered voters in 1992 to 22 percent today, according to the poll. In the 2008 presidential election, those Latinos provided Democrats an advantage of more than nine percentage points.

“No one’s talking about the sleeping giant anymore,” said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. “The giant is here now, and Republicans aren’t recruiting it.”

California gains two million new voters over the past two decades, but the Republican Party loses over 250,000 registered voters? How I love California!

Still more bad news for the GOP:

The proportion of Republicans who are 50 or older has increased from 40 percent in 1992 to 54 percent today, according to the Field Poll.

The proportion of Republicans younger than 40 has dropped to 25 percent from 41 percent in 1992.

That’s right, they are quite literally dying off…

Not trying to be morbid, but this fact cannot be denied or refuted. The demographic shift in the Golden State is a taste of things to come for the Republican Party: permanent minority party status. How can they possibly fight the demographic changes of the next two decades?

Answer: They can’t.

 
Two days after winning the Mercury Music Prize for her album Let England Shake (a record-setting second win in 10 years, let’s not forget, the first being for Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea) PJ Harvey and her band arrived in Manchester to play a live show at the legendary and cavernous Apollo, a show I was lucky enough to see.

Lucky in that I got to witness what was an excellent performance and a great reminder of just what a good songwriter Polly Harvey is. The huge Apollo stage was minimally decorated, and yet Harvey and her three backing musicians (John Parrish, Mick Harvey and Jean-Marc Butty) managed to dominate it. Harvey had her own solo set up away from the others on the left hand side of the stage, while the band and their kit were grouped together further back on the right. But this wasn’t a disjointed or egotistical affair; it worked perfectly, and each member got their own turn in the (literal) spotlight.

Stepping in and out of the light seemed to be a theme of the show, with a group of spotlights and a constantly working smoke machine at the back of the dark stage being the only concessions to design (apart from the church-pugh style bench Mick Harvey was sat on). Polly Harvey looked amazing in a black Victorian-gothic dress with matching head gear - an inverted version of what she wore at the Mercury’s - and at the moments when she was freed from playing her zither or guitar she slinked in and out of the heavy smoke and bare light like an undead spirit emerging from her tomb. Those moments stood to remind the audience just how magnetic a performer Harvey is, even when she’s doing hardly anything.

Harvey has seemingly abandoned the notion of guitar, bass and drums and a traditional rock-band set-up, and much like Bjork, focussed on creating a unique and unusual sound world of her own. So Mick Harvey plays a distorted electric piano, Parrish backs him up on guitar and/or a Nord synth, and Butty focuses his drums around floor toms played with maracas, and a military, marching-style snare. The three backing musicians swapped instruments and places regularly, and all got their turn on vocals. Having not had a chance to listen to Let England Shake yet I was very impressed with the songs, which were delicate, moving, and surprisingly very short. The atmosphere of loss and melancholy was at times very powerful, without descending into patronising hectoring that is the failure of most “protest” music. The show’s set list comprised of Let England Shake played through in it’s entirety, and a final section (including encore) of some older favourites including “Down By The Water” and “C’Mon Billy”. Harvey proved that she is a mistress of the “less is more” school of performance and the show was all the more engaging for it.

As I said before I was lucky to get in to the gig - lucky to see such a beautiful and moving show, but also lucky in that I managed to be in the right place at the right time to be offered a free guest list place. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone - the tickets for the show (including booking fee) were a frankly extortionate £40. As excellent a performer and writer as Harvey is, I just can’t see how the show justifies the cost of that ticket. Maybe this is what the promoters knew they could get away with charging, or maybe it’s just the way the live music industry in general is headed. But there were no support acts and Harvey’s set lasted only one hour and twenty minutes - a few people I spoke to after the show said they didn’t think it was worth the price. And those were fans that enjoyed it too.

Perhaps when PJ Harvey tours Let England Shake outside the UK the tickets will be cheaper. I certainly hope so, because as many people as possible deserve to see this show. Here are a couple of clips from YouTube uploader Pogonka - they are bit shaky but the audio quality isn’t bad:

PJ Harvey “Let England Shake” live Manchester Apollo 9/8/11
 

 
PJ Harvey “The Glorious Land” live Manchester Apollo 9/8/11
 

 
Thanks to Jayne Compton!

“Consciousness” by Harry Thomas
 
A very interesting talk here from two of the more credible voices to comment on the 2012 phenomena (who I think need no introduction). As you would expect though from Hancock and Pinchbeck (both names together have a nice ring, eh?) the conversation covers much more than that, and takes in crop circles, drug consumption, 2012, the future, and the “freedom of consciousness”. The talk is opened up to the floor for some very interesting questions two thirds of the way through. This was recorded Baltimore late last year, and is here presented for the first time in its entirety, lasting just over 70 minutes. Perfect background listening while you are doing some dishes and washing some clothes:
 

 
Reichwing radio gasbag Rush Limbaugh responds to Douglas Rushkoff’s fascinating essay “Are Jobs Obsolete” in his own inimitable style... Hilarity ensues!

I love how Limbaugh starts off his rant by making sure his listeners know that he’s never heard of Douglas Rushkoff. Since Rushkoff is one of America’s most prominent intellectuals, no surprises there, Rushbo…

RUSH: I was just handed here a CNN story. The headline here: “Are Jobs Obsolete?” Who wrote this? Douglas Rushkoff. I never heard of Douglas Rushkoff. It’s a column. I’m gonna have to read this. The point of this is the whole concept of jobs may be “obsolete” in America now, which is the most amazing attempt to excuse Obama I have net seen, but that’s just at cursory glance. Yeah, get this, folks: “America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.” This is an opinion piece called, “Are Jobs Obsolete?” that appears at CNN.com by some guy named Douglas Rushkoff, who I’ve never heard of and he’s not identified here.

Okay, now, I found out who this Douglas Rushkoff guy is. He’s a “media theorist,” a media theorist, “the author of Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, and also Life, Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back.” That’s who has written the piece at CNN.com, “Are Jobs Obsolete?” He’s a “media theorist.” What the hell is a “media theorist”? Now, he’s got a Wikipedia entry, but everybody has a Wikipedia entry, just like everybody has a radio show. It says he was born in 1961, so he’s 50. He’s “an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.”

So he’s a “media theorist” who writes comic books. So it’s quite understandable here that CNN would give him a soapbox. Anyway, “Are Jobs Obsolete?” On the day Obama’s going to give his big speech on jobs! “The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology’s slow but steady replacement of working humans. Unless an external source of funding comes in, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That’s 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms. We can blame a right wing attempting to undermine labor, or a left wing trying to preserve unions in the face of government and corporate cutbacks.

“But the real culprit—at least in this case—is e-mail. People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment and other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps. New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures—from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs,” and it doesn’t ask for a day off to take care of the cat.

“We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace. And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs—as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there’s something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned. I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand…”

(laughing) “I understand we all want paychecks—or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs? We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.” (sniffs) No, my nose started running. This is Douglas Rushkoff, “media theorist” at CNN.com.

“America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that’s even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books. Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff—it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.”

Wait a minute. “[W]e don’t have enough ways for people to work,” but yet he just said we don’t need people working. I shall nevertheless continue here: “Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept.” Did you know that, folks? Jobs are a new concept, “relatively” so. “People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement. The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked.

“And so they invented the chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a ‘job.’ ... While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people.” See, workers in unions are not people. “Isn’t this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment?

“Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with ‘career’ be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful? Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff. The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised.

“The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can’t capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.” Is that what we’re doing? That’s what we’re doing now, we’re just cutting loose people and letting them suffer out there? We’re cutting social services along with their jobs? I’ll tell you what, I think Obama is putting this crackpot theory to the test. Having a small number of people working to support the rest of the country is exactly what Obama’s doing. This crackpot’s theory is in process here of being implemented!

We’re all a bunch of guinea pigs here; we didn’t know it. Mr. Rushkoff here sounds like he’s sitting in some frat house after a night of too many hits on the bong, folks. He says here, “We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do—the value we create—is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful. This sort of work isn’t so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations.

“We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another—all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.” Yeah, that’s what we should do: Make games for each other, write books for each other, solve problems for each other, educate and inspire one another instead of doing stuff—and we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff, but… Well, nobody’s gonna have any money if they don’t have any. I don’t know. Again, Douglas Rushkoff. I’m sort of embarrassed this guy shares letters of my name.

You know, this Rushkoff guy needs to hear the story of the first Thanksgiving. He needs to hear how his way failed. He needs to actually… Anyway, it’s at CNN.com, and just came in over the transom. (interruption) Funemployment? Look, I’m not gonna make the claim that this guy is out there trying to help Obama (laughing), but on the day Obama’s giving his big job speech, this guy’s got a piece out there, “America’s productive enough they could probably shelter, feed, educate, even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working,” and we’re putting that theory to test here, folks. We are in the process of doing exactly that.

Thank you kindly, Jeff Newelt of New York City!

 
Another killer mash-up from Wax Audio.

Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” melds beautifully with Metallica’s “Sad But True.”

This originally appeared on Wax Audio’s Mashopolos 2 released in 2008 in audio form only. The new video is smashingly good!
 

 
Via Wax Audio

 
Simple but highly effective graduation film made by Jurjen Versteeg, who explains the idea behind his project:

Designed as a possible title sequence for a fictitious documentary, this film shows a history of the title sequence in a nutshell. The sequence includes all the names of title designers who had a revolutionary impact on the history and evolution of the title sequence. The names of the title designers all refer to specific characteristics of the revolutionary titles that they designed.

This film refers to elements such as the cut and shifted characters of Saul Bass’ Psycho title, the colored circles of Maurice Binder’s design for Dr. No and the contemporary designs of Kyle Cooper and Danny Yount.

This title sequence refers to the following designers and their titles:
Georges Méliès - Un Voyage Dans La Lune, Saul Bass - Psycho, Maurice Binder - Dr. No, Stephen Frankfurt - To Kill A Mockingbird, Pablo Ferro - Dr. Strangelove, Richard Greenberg - Alien, Kyle Cooper - Seven, Danny Yount - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang / Sherlock Holmes.