This doesn’t seem to be a joke. Businessman Paul Salo has started a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo.com seeking 1.5 million dollars to purchase a 767 and a building. He intends to fly the plane, loaded with jet fuel, into the building, purportedly to prove “once and for all” what “really” happened on 9-11.

The project, titled 911 REDUX, is planned to take place in Thailand where Salo claims to have talked to the Thai military about purchasing a “used airplane” and a “used building.”

Salo’s campaign statement:

Many people want to know more about 9-11. We are like a Mythbusters for September 11th. It’s an important project for many reasons. Many people doubt various details of 9-11. As the world has changed our trust in government and media has declined significantly. We want to see for ourselves. We don’t need people to guide our thinking. In this project we will recreate 9-11 to the best of our ability given the funds raised. Our ultimate goal is a fully loaded 767 and a similar structure to the WTC. We will crash the fully loaded (with fuel) plane (complete with black box) into the building using autopilot at 500 MPH.

You will be able to see for yourself what happens under these extreme circumstances. I’m not sure which country we will purchase the aircraft and building but it doesn’t really matter much. I’m a globe trotter and will go where we need to go to complete this important project.

You can be a part of this. How will it end up? Will the plane disintegrate? Will the black box disappear? Will the out of date passports we scatter in the plane survive?  You will see it all.  We aren’t trying to prove anything either way. We will recreate the event and let the chips fall where they may.

At the time of this writing the campaign has raised $105 out of the $1.5M goal.
 

 
Culture Club and their gender-bending lead singer, Boy George, were top hitmakers in the ‘80s, selling more than 50 million records. Ten of their singles reached the Top 40 in the United States, and they dominated the early days of MTV (back when MTV still aired music videos).

Despite the fact that by the turn of the 21st Century, the ten-hit-wonder group was already practically a footnote in music history, some marketing genius in 2003 came up with this fucking thing:
 

 
This is the “Karma Chameleon” telephone, which was sold via television marketing at the “low, low price” of $69.95 (marked down from $89.95).

It’s a cheap plastic telephone in the shape of a chameleon and ladybug. When the phone “rings,” it plays the Culture Club hit “Karma Chameleon.” The animatronic lizard “sings,” while the ladybug plays the harmonica. The tacky chameleon lights up in the “red, gold, and green” from the song’s lyrics.

Boy George himself actually shows up in the commercial to hawk this item. How badly did he need the money at that point? It looks like they shot him with a VHS camcorder.

When I first saw this, it seemed so over-the-top stupid that I assumed it had to be a put-on—it’s SO “Tim & Eric”—but, no, this was a real, actual thing. Here’s a 2003 Entertainment Weekly article on it, and you can still find the phones on eBay from time to time.

I have to admit, now I kind of want one.
 

 
What it looks like in real life, after the jump…

 
Last weekend in Cleveland was shit. Utter. Fucking. Shit. We had snow and 30-degree temperatures in mid-May—the weather here has always been deeply uncooperative, but even by Cleveland standards, that was bizarre. For some reason, a complete baseball game transpired in that freezy, wet weather that couldn’t settle on whether it wanted to rain or hail, and naturally, Cleveland lost that game. Whatever, we’re Cleveland, we’re used to it.

But amid all that, a singularly cool thing happened: on Saturday, Willem Dafoe—the outré-but-still-somehow-mainstream actor who rose to prominence as the murderous counterfeiter in the underrated ‘80s-noir crime drama To Live and Die in L.A., and is probably best known today for his turns as Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, a vigilante-chasing FBI agent in Boondock Saints, and for completely owning one of the only two Spider-Man movies worth discussing—delivered the commencement address to the graduating students of the Cleveland Institute of Art—my alma mater, as it happens.

How did this awesome thing happen?

Dafoe’s first credited film appearance was the lead role in 1981’s The Loveless, an outlaw biker film directed by a young Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, The Hurt Locker) in which Dafoe played the leader of a gang that causes trouble in a small town on its way to Daytona for a race. One of the co-producers of that film was one Grafton Nunes, who since 2010 has served as President of the Cleveland Institute of Art, so perhaps a favor was being returned here.

Dafoe addressed the students about what sustained and inspired him “through 40 years career both above and below ground” and the value of cross-pollination among different art forms, especially with regard to his younger days in avant-garde theater.

…for the most part it was untrained people making homemade shows. It was a time where dancers were making films, actors were painting, visual artists were performing, and everybody was making music. There was an amateur do-it-yourself aesthetic that wasn’t pursuing recognition or acceptance outside of a certain social circle. Often, the works were sloppy, incomprehensible, lazy, obtuse, and truly just bad. These people weren’t careerists—there was no career to be had in these forms. The most they could hope for to parlay their success into was to sleep with more attractive people in the downtown scene. But, there was something there in some of the work that exhibited extraordinary personal commitment, emotion, and abandon I had not seen elsewhere. For me, these qualities trumped all training and technique.

Having been one of the kids in one of those seats years ago, I don’t know if that’s exactly what I would have wanted to hear after spending years of my life and tens of thousands of borrowed dollars learning training and technique, but you can’t deny that point! It’s a great and genuinely inspiring speech about the process of making, and you can watch it in its entirety, via cleveland.com after the jump…

 
Have you ever thought to yourself “Gee, I wonder if there are any Igg Pop travel bags out there?” Well, lo and behold there is. We live in a day and age where anything is possible. And that means an Iggy Pop travel bag can be yours. As inexplicable as that sounds, I must admit, I kinda dig this bag.

The bag comes in two sizes, small (18.5” x 8.26” x 9.84”) or large (20.87” x 12.01” x 9.84). Apparenlty it’s handmade and takes about 7 days to deliver. If you like it, the price for a small bag is $75.63 and the larger one is $87.21.

If Iggy Pop isn’t your… bag, then there are Prince and David Bowie travel bags, too!

 
Some wag in Illinois’ Champaign-Urbana area has put up an ad on Craigslist for a sweet “Vintage Air Guitar” that his uncle gave him after securing it at a Thin Lizzy concert in the 1970s. The instrument is described as a “chick magnet.” Because of the high value of this item, the seller requests “no lowball offers or scams please.”

Here’s the description, in full:
 

Reluctantly parting with this awesome vintage air guitar. My uncle saw some dude in the audience playing this at a Thin Lizzie concert back in the 70s. Long story short, my uncle ended up trading the dude a lid of Acapulco gold for it and then gave it to me about 20 years ago. I’ve taken it to more concerts than I can remember and always get great comments about it. It’s definitely a chick magnet, especially if you’re working the has-been tour circuit (Rick Springfield, Bon Jovi, Kansas, Cheap Trick, whatever). The only reason I’m selling is to fund my lifelong dream of an overseas snipe hunt. Otherwise I’d never let this one go. No lowball offers or scams please.

(BTW This has nothing to do with Dave Hickey’s classic book of art criticism Air Guitar, which is available used on Amazon for less than four bucks.)
 

 
If you buy this you can train for the annual Air Guitar World Championships. The current titleholder is Kereel “Your Daddy” Blumenkrants, watch his prize-winning performance here:

 
h/t: Ned Raggett

Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968).
 
In younger days I had a girlfriend who would often ask me to look into her eyes and see how much she cared. Perhaps lacking the imagination—or just that right amount of sensitivity—I only ever saw her eyes staring blankly back at me. Which may explain why we never lasted very long as a couple.

The eyes are said to be the windows of the soul. Or as the Roman philosopher Cicero wisely said:

The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.

The eyes reflect what we’re thinking or more poetically as Saint Jerome put it “confess the secrets of the heart.” How often has someone said “look me right in the eye and tell me the truth” as if the very truth were evident in those watery orbs for all to see? It is a common belief that our organs of sight do reveal everything—even as far as those detectives who believed photographing the pupils of Jack the Ripper’s victims would reveal the image of their killer. Those detectives were wrong, but in truth our eyes do reveal more than we know.

Last year in Sweden, scientists announced after a study of 428 individuals that every eye is unique—as unique as a fingerprint—and each iris can indicate different individual character traits. Apparently, the more pockets or “crypts” (threads which radiate from the pupil) in the iris, the more a person is supposed to be kind, sympathetic and warm-hearted. The more “furrows” (lines curving around the outer edge) the more neurotic and impulsive.

According to Matt Larsson, the behavioral scientist who led the study at Orebro University:

...people with different iris configurations tend to develop along different trajectories in regards to personality.  Differences in the iris can be used as a biomarker that reflects differences between people.

Then it’s true—our eyes do reveal secrets. But we must know how to read them first—and not just see them simply staring blankly back.

Advertisers have been canny to this idea for a long time. A big close-up of an eye on a movie poster tells the public exactly what to expect from a film—fear, terror, violence, alienation, or otherness. It is a well-used trope for horror movies—a vulnerable eye looking out in terror on which we can see the reflection of the killer getting ready to despatch another hapless victim.  As can be seen from this small selection of movie posters, this heavily-leaned on semiotic message can sometimes work exceedingly well (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), fail miserably (Blind Eye), explain the whole movie (The Day of the Jackal) or just be plain old weird (The Theatre Bizarre).
 

Fred Zimmerman’s ‘The Day of the Jackal’ (1971).
 

Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Straw Dogs’ (1971).
 

John Boorman’s ‘Deliverance’ (1972).
 

Don’t let the flowers and peace symbols fool you, De La Soul are not hippies.
 
It has been 27 years since hip-hop pioneers De La Soul released their groundbreaking album, 3 Feet High and Rising on Tommy Boy Records. I recently pulled my copy of the record out for a spin at the request of my twelve-year-old son, no less, who had just heard “Me Myself and I” on the radio in the car and wanted to know who was responsible for the infectious track. I don’t often brag about my parenting skills, but when I do, musicology is involved.
 

De La Soul on Dutch TV show, Fa. Onrust, 1989.
 
So let’s go back to the magical number year of 1989 and De La Soul’s trip to the Netherlands. The trio appeared on Dutch television show Fa. Onrust and performed three songs from 3 Feet High and Rising, “The Magic Number,” “Plug Tunin’” and “Me, Myself, And I.” To say that De La’s performance is anything less than completely stellar, would be a vast understatement as it could easily be considered a historic piece of hip-hop flavored performance art that beautifully expressed the band’s culturally rich message. A message that still strongly resonates today.

More after the jump…

 
If there can be said to be a “golden age of the zeppelin,” it would be the 1920s and 1930s—a more precise span would be 1910 to 1937, but World War I interrupted widespread adoption of the primarily German technology. The year 1910, according to Wikipedia, marked the first time that zeppelins were flown commercially, by a company called Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG (DELAG). Over the next four years, DELAG would transport more than 10,000 fare-paying passengers on over 1,500 flights.

The end date of the period is pretty obvious: May 6, 1937, when 97 individuals decided to collaborate on some extremely expensive album cover design when a zeppelin known as the Hindenburg caught on fire in Manchester Township, New Jersey:
 

 
If you want to know more about the history of the zeppelin, you could almost certainly do worse than Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900–1939 by Guillaume de Syon.

As with any other form of airborne transport, there had to be a way of storing the vehicles overnight in such a way that they were protected from the elements, so along came the advent of the zeppelin hangar. These enormous structures were created to house the enormous rigid airships (yes, “rigid airship” is the name of the class of vehicles to which zeppelins belong), and pretty much any photograph of a zeppelin in its hangar is extremely likely to make observers think of sex. 
 

 
More smutty pictures of zeppelins after the jump…

“I know what kind of welcome you’re gonna give to JEFF BECK!”

Although it’s widely known—or at least widely known among David Bowie fanatics, MOJO subscribers and guitar otakus—that Jeff Beck was the “special guest” at Ziggy and the Spiders’ send-off show at the Hammersmith Odeon on July 3rd, 1973, Beck’s cameo appearance was cut from D.A Pennebaker’s documentary film of the event, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Beck joined Bowie onstage for a blistering two song encore consisting of “The Jean Genie” and a cover of the Chuck Berry number “Around and Around.” There have been several home video releases of the film over the decades and yet none of them have ever restored the Beck footage or even had it as a DVD extra.

It’s not 100% clear why Beck insisted that his footage be edited out of the film, but it’s most likely to do with him not liking what he was wearing onstage that night. Apparently no one had informed the guitarist that the show was being filmed. Even Mick Ronson, no slouch at the time in the goofy clothes department said of Beck’s outfit:

“I was too busy looking at his flares. Even by our standards, those trousers were excessive!”

By the guitar god’s own admission, though, it might’ve been his shoes. In a 2009 interview with The Sunday Times, Beck revealed that it wasn’t his massive flares, but rather his footwear (“the most disgusting pair of dirty-white stack-heeled shoes you’ve ever seen”) that was the reason. He wouldn’t relent:

“Bowie rang me about 10 times and said, “Look, man, I understand about the shoes, ‘cos I didn’t like what I was wearing either.”

Keep reading after the jump…

 
I would personally look like a damned fool trying to pull off these plush slippers fashioned after “The Worm” from Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. But maybe you could, or you know someone who’s a diehard Labyrinth fan who could rock the shit out of these?

Even though it’s getting warmer outside, they’re still perfect for these cold Spring mornings.

You can get them here for $50.13 + shipping.

Below, a short scene from Labyrinth featuring the The Worm:

 
h/t Alice Lowe

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
David Bowie’s ‘hidden’ face in scenes from ‘Labyrinth’
Jennifer Connelly auditions for ‘Labyrinth’, 1986