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Happy Birthday Bob Dylan
05.24.2010
01:46 pm
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I love His Bobness as much as the next guy or gal but instead of picking one of his revered classics to share today I couldn’t resist putting up this hilarious and spot-on parody by National Lampoon from back in the early 70’s which without a doubt has pissed off many an earnest fan the world over ever since. Enjoy !

 
Bonus: One of the finest Dylan covers ever, The 13th Floor Elevators doing It’s All Over Now Baby Blue

 

Posted by Brad Laner
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05.24.2010
01:46 pm
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Kraftwerk and the electronic revolution
05.24.2010
12:59 pm
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Relatively new to Youtube is this 2008 documentary in its three hour (!) entirety. I’ll admit I haven’t watched the whole thing yet so can’t vouch for quality, though it evidently touches on the whole beloved Krautrock spectrum. Hell, I’d watch a documentary about plumbing if it had something about Can in it, so I’ll be diving right into this one shortly.

Posted by Brad Laner
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05.24.2010
12:59 pm
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Numbers and letters with The Pointer Sisters
05.24.2010
12:35 pm
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As a kid, Sesame Street ruled my universe and this song was one from the show I couldn’t get enough of.  Over the weekend I heard this song played at a party and lost it!  I never knew it was actually released on vinyl until now.  I think that the biggest shock was finding out that the song is by The Pointer Sisters!  The Sisters weren’t limited to numbers, as the video below shows, they were keen on letter songs as well.
 

 

Posted by Elvin Estela
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05.24.2010
12:35 pm
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Teen Werewolves of San Antonio, Texas
05.24.2010
12:27 pm
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Meet the wolf-pack! They’re not goth. They aren’t “Emo,” either. They’re something altogether goofier! Not so much mall-rats as mall-wolves, I suppose. And they will have you know that they are not posers!

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.24.2010
12:27 pm
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Bay City Rollers, Ann Margaret & the best audience you will ever see in your life
05.23.2010
11:38 pm
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This is hilarious. Dig the audience! What is this? Who are Why are they there? It’s incidental that the Bay City Rollers happen to be onstage with a tartan-wearing Ann Margaret, but the audience! I love the range of reaction, from uninhibited dancing to the one lady knitting.

This wonderfulness via Lady Bunny blog/Marc Campbell.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.23.2010
11:38 pm
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Dog ‘date rapes’ unsuspecting chicken
05.23.2010
11:32 pm
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No means no, goddammit! This dog is going to need a really good attorney.
 
Thanks, Marc Campbell!

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.23.2010
11:32 pm
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Mark Twain’s autobiography coming out after 100 years
05.23.2010
11:18 pm
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Mark Twain, the revered American author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer left over 5000 pages of unedited autobiographical writing when he died, with the instructions that it not be published until 100 years after his death. And that’s now. I can’t wait to get my hands on this!

Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.

One thing’s for sure: by delaying publication, the author, who was fond of his celebrity status, has ensured that he’ll be gossiped about during the 21st century. A section of the memoir will detail his little-known but scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after the death of his wife Olivia in 1904. Twain was so close to Lyon that she once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy. But she was abruptly sacked in 1909, after the author claimed she had “hypnotised” him into giving her power of attorney over his estate.

Their ill-fated relationship will be recounted in full in a 400-page addendum, which Twain wrote during the last year of his life. It provides a remarkable account of how the dying novelist’s final months were overshadowed by personal upheavals.

“Most people think Mark Twain was a sort of genteel Victorian. Well, in this document he calls her a slut and says she tried to seduce him. It’s completely at odds with the impression most people have of him,” says the historian Laura Trombley, who this year published a book about Lyon called Mark Twain’s Other Woman.

“There is a perception that Twain spent his final years basking in the adoration of fans. The autobiography will perhaps show that it wasn’t such a happy time. He spent six months of the last year of his life writing a manuscript full of vitriol, saying things that he’d never said about anyone in print before. It really is 400 pages of bile.”

After keeping us waiting for a century, Mark Twain will finally reveal all (The Independent)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.23.2010
11:18 pm
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The Media Attacks: Bring Me the Head of Rand Paul
05.23.2010
10:42 pm
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It’s been fascinating—and fun—watching Republican Tea party favorite, Rand Paul implode this past week. In my never so humble opinion he’s a straight up nut job—no wonder the teabaggers love him so much—who’s a card carrying member of the tin foil hat brigade. Did you see the stuff about him warning against the “NAFTA Superhighway” and the “Amero” on TPM? When someone starts talking about the fucking Amero, trust me, it’s time to get off the bus and wait for the next one! (He even warned of a Hitler-style dictatorship coming to America at a speech at a “machine gun shoot” last year)

But aside from the culturally unsophisticated Paul bringing the funny, which as I say, I enjoyed very much, one of the commenters about him on YouTube got me noticing how ready the media is to rip this guy apart. The poster wrote some typical “They’re just trying to tear a brave man down” BS. Well, brave or not—I think Rand Paul is an absolute moron—the guy did have a point: The media IS trying to tear Rand Paul down. This is not a conspiracy, it’s an easily observable fact. It’s not just about him saying some dumb shit and then it dies down, the members of the media actively want his blood. Look at the video below from Meet the Press. The sharks are circling Rand Paul.

I’d argue that this is an entirely appropriate reaction to a guy who espouses the brand of dangerous horseshit Paul does. This is a case, right before our very eyes, where the media—and I remind you that the media is made of human beings with opinions and feelings, I work at the LA Times myself—is acting like white blood cells trying to rid the body politic of a cancer.

A cancer named Rand Paul. Fuck this guy!
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.23.2010
10:42 pm
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The MONDO 2000 History Project: begins!
05.23.2010
09:42 pm
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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.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.23.2010
09:42 pm
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The entire series of Lost boiled down for you by some cats in a minute.
05.23.2010
04:54 pm
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I think they might have glossed over some of the subtleties—just slightly—but in the main, it’s right on!

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.23.2010
04:54 pm
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