A new play about Jack Parsons, titled appropriately enough Pasadena Babalon premieres this weekend at Cal Tech. Sounds interesting. How many stage plays can you name that feature L Ron Hubbard, Aleister Crowley and the Biblical Whore of Babalon? Doesn’t sound much like a Neill SImon comedy to me:

Pasadena Babalon is a new stage play dealing with the life of rocket pioneer Jack Parsons, co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet General Corporation..

Babalon takes the audience on a journey through mid-1930s Pasadena up until Jack’s untimely death in 1952. Surrounded by a gallery of characters from Aleister Crowley, L.Ron Hubbard, Theordore Von Karman, and many others, the play examines the nature of genius with its unintended consequences, black magic, military contracts, and the formation of JPL.

TACIT casts feature Caltech undergraduates, graduate students, staff members, and JPL engineers.

The play will also be presented on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, and the following weekend on Friday and Saturday.

More information here.

Here’s a link to my own essay, John Whitesides Parsons: Anti-Christ Superstar, originally written for 21.C magazine and later published in my Book of Lies anthology.

Thank you Xeni Jardin!

A huge collection of films by “other cinema” pioneer Lutz Mommartz is available at the Internet Archive. Music in the first clip is by a group called The Iceni about whom I can find no further info. Anybody ?

 
Maybe NSFW. Definitely uh, hot…

thx Tara !

 
Already sold unusual (to say the least!) Etsy item by Larriva:

Using the insides of a windup tin toy for the body, I sculpted the head to balance the weight. The head is sculpted in polymer clay and is painted in acrylic. The hair is wool.

Dude, make some more of these!

Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future weighs in on another middle-class myth: the idea that “free range” is somehow a perfect solution for being nice to animals. This is another of those Whole Foods-style hairshirts: buy something slightly more expensive, with fuzzier, nicer packaging, and your hands are clean. Not so.

Having been both vegetarian and vegan at times in my life, and often returning to eating meat, I don’t have a clear answer on this one (although I recently heard a great NPR interview with a woman who designs machines to help cow slaughtering be more humane, who made the salient point that had these animals not been bred for food, they never would have lived at all). I do know that factory farm conditions are appalling, and a great unspoken shame of our civilization. Sadly, though, it seems that “free range” is not the easy answer.

Meat and egg companies often try to sell their wares to unsuspecting SWPLs (”socially conscious” educated bourgeoisie Americans) by using the “free range” label. Unsurprisingly, this label is a lie. To quote the Wikipedia page on “free range”:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) requires that chickens raised for their meat have access to the outside in order to receive the free-range certification. There is no requirement for access to pasture, and there may be access to only dirt or gravel. Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States. Likewise, free-range egg producers have no common standard on what the term means. Many egg farmers sell their eggs as free range merely because their cages are two or three inches above average size, or because there is a window in the shed.

The USDA has no specific definition for “free-range” beef, pork, and other non-poultry products. All USDA definitions of “free-range” refer specifically to poultry. No other criteria-such as the size of the range or the amount of space given to each animal-are required before beef, lamb, and pork can be called “free-range”. Claims and labeling using “free range” are therefore unregulated. The USDA relies “upon producer testimonials to support the accuracy of these claims.”

Basically, the label is a farce. It conjures up images of old time family farms, when the reality is the exact opposite. Factory farmed chickens are routinely debeaked, and starved to cause forced molting, which shocks them into entering another egg-laying cycle. They live in filthy, shit-strewn cages and suffer from respiratory diseases due to inhaling large quantities of nitrogen released by their feces. “Free range” chickens spend most of their time in cages.

(Accelerating Future: Free Range is Bullshit)

 
“I’m perfect, but nobody in this shithole gets me, ‘cause I don’t put out!”  So snarls Diane Lane’s Corinne “Third Degree” Burns in that great undersung grrrl-group movie from 1980, Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.  And that’s just one of many memorable lines in a film that manages to stitch together an immensely satisfying, angsty whole from such disparate elements as the Tubes’ Fee Waybill, LA’s late great (and equally undersung) Black Randy, and, as a Sexy (but babyfaced) Beast in leather, British actor Ray Winstone.  Oh yeah, and it’s got Laura Dern, some Sex Pistols, and The Clash‘s Paul Simonon in there to boot.

The hero in all this—mine, anyway—is screenwriter Nancy Dowd, who, in a mere three year span, put her fingerprints on not only the Stains screenplay, but the ones for both Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and George Roy Hill’s Slapshot. 

But despite her Academy Award for Coming Home, Dowd fought sexual harassment on the set and later struck her name from the picture.  Fortunately, Dowd’s given her due in the wonderful find below.  Made to coincide with the film’s 2000 VHS release, it’s a two-part Split Screen documentary on the making of LAG, TFS.  Check it out, then, if you haven’t already, go check out the movie.

 
Making Of LAG, TFS Part II

 
Today’s Texas Tribune published a University of Texas survey of that state’s inhabitants which reveals that nearly a third of them believe humans and dinosaurs “roamed the earth at the same time,” and that more than half of them dismiss the notion that mankind evolved from an earlier, ape-like species:

The differences in beliefs about evolution and the length of time that living things have existed on earth are reflected in the political and religious preference of our respondents, who were asked four questions about biological history and God:

• 38 percent said human beings developed over millions of years with God guiding the process and another 12 percent said that development happened without God having any part of the process.  Another 38 percent agreed with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago.”

• Asked about the origin and development of life on earth without injecting humans into the discussion, and 53 percent said it evolved over time, “with a guiding hand from God.”  They were joined by 15 percent who agreed on the evolution part, but “with no guidance from God.”  About a fifth—22 percent—said life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.

• Most of the Texans in the survey—51 percent—disagree with the statement, “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.”  Thirty-five percent agreed with that statement, and 15 percent said they don’t know.

• Did humans live at the same time as the dinosaurs?  Three in ten Texas voters agree with that statement; 41 percent disagree, and 30 percent don’t know.

As a chaser of sorts to the Texas survey, you might want to read about Vice’s amusing, albeit ultimately unsatisfying, visit to Kentucky’s Creation Museum (top photo).  A commercial for the museum follows below:

 
(via RawStory)

 
First Lennon’s jewelry, now Abbey Road, the iconic studio whose consoles mixed not only 90% of the Beatles catalog, but WWII British propaganda recordings as well.  Purchased by EMI back in 1929 (!) for £100,000, the studio is expected to raise tens of millions of pounds.

 
I’m in utter shock! WTF are they talking about?
 
(via Nerdcore)

Via Arthur, here’s a great piece on London author Iain Sinclair, whose works I have admired for over ten years now, including ‘White Chappell Scarlet Tracings” and the excellent “London Orbital,” a psychogeographic drift through London.

In London, from the first, I walked. As a film student, newly arrived in the early Sixties, I copied the poet John Clare on his feverish escape from Matthew Allen’s asylum in Epping Forest, when he navigated by lying down to sleep with his head to the north. Skull as compass: all the secret fluids and internal memory-oceans aligned by force of desire. Clare returned, as he thought, to Mary, his first love, his muse; to his heart-place, Helpston, beyond Peterborough, on the edge of the dark fens. My drag was cinema, Bergman seasons in Hampstead, Howard Hawks in Stockwell. Or art: the astonishing Francis Bacon gathering at the old Tate, at Millbank, former prison and panopticon. Bacon’s melting apes were robed like cardinals. Naked men, stitched from photographs, wrestled in glass cages.

Motiveless walking processed the unanchored images that infiltrated dreams of the shadow-belt on either side of the Northern Line. I lodged in West Norwood, a house on a hill, like the one I had left behind in Wales. I wandered through mysterious suburbs to the rooms above the butcher’s shop in Electric Avenue, Brixton, where the school was based. Street markets, I discovered, were a significant part of the substance of this place. Walking was a means of editing a city of free-floating fragments. I composed, privately, epic poems conflating the gilded Byzantium of W.B. Yeats with the slap and strut of Mickey Spillane’s California. London was an impossible relativity of historical periods and superimposed topographies.

(Arthur: Iain Sinclair, Psychogeographer)

(Iain Sinclair: London Orbital)

Isn’t that cover great? Check out psychedelic-Lovecraftian artist John Coulthart’s blog on this lost gem of early gay lib fic:

We had Shock Headed Peters walking through Sodom yesterday so this novel from 1971 seems like a fitting follow-up. The eye-catching title is no doubt an allusion to Byron’s description of Turkish baths as “marble palaces of sherbet and sodomy”, an epithet which one imagines sent generations of sweet-toothed Uranians trekking to Constantinople throughout the 19th century. I’d seen the cover of this book before on sites which collect the gay fiction of the late Sixties and early Seventies—that doubly-phallic tower makes a good match for the cover of Bugger Boy—but I don’t recall reading a description of the contents before. Homobilia has an extract from the opening page:

My name is Jud. I am eighteen and a half. I was born from the felicitous conjunction of an anthropologist and an ethnologist under the sign of Capricorn. I have been called cute, handsome, pretty, and good-looking; actually, I am beautiful… my nose is classically English, along the line of Reynolds, maybe with a little Caravaggio thrown in around the nostrils. My athletic adolescence on the swimming team at Sterling High has given me a slender muscular body… my eyes are South Pacific blue. I have read Hesiod. I masturbate regularly. I have no concept of money or its value. I try to keep my farts silent. I have juvenile down on my ass. I have read the minor Elizabethan poets and I have looked at my anal sphincter in the mirror. Until last week I considered myself heterosexual…

(John Coulthart: Sherbet and Sodomy)

(Songs of the Black Wurm Gism: The Starry Wisdom Part 2)