Vintage look portrait of Vincent Vega from “Pulp Fiction”
 
Last year, a South African-based creative design studio called MUTI created a fantastic series of posters and portraits based on members of the cast of ne’er–do–well’s from Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 masterpiece, Pulp Fiction. Some of the images in MUTI’s minimalist homage to the film may remind you of the artwork of cartoonist Chester Gould - the illustrator and creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip that originated back in 1931.
 

Vintage look portrait of Jules Winnfield from “Pulp Fiction”
 

Butch Coolidge
 
MUTI’s Pulp Fiction series made its debut last year in honor of the 20th Anniversary of Pulp Fiction and the images have the distinct look of objects that have seen better days. According to MUTI, the concept for the posters was inspired by vintage cigarette cards. Can you imagine pulling a set of these babies out of a pack of Tarantino’s fictional Red Apple smokes? As my imagination is as vivid as it is demented, the answer is yes, yes I can. It’s unclear if MUTI is actually selling prints of the collection, but you could contact them here and ask.
 

 

 
Continues after the jump…

 
Who else fucks with this jam?
 

 
The most beautiful song to ever hawk white chocolate, “Sweet Dreams,” with its coldwave synths and unforgettably emotive vocals takes a supernatural hold of the listener and doesn’t let go—transporting him or her on a flight of fancy to a magical creamy, dreamy wonderland. The jingle is the epitome of a crisp winter’s day.

The infectious mid-80s earworm, written by award-winning commercial composer Lloyd Landesman, has a frosty, ethereal majesty, making it a perfect choice as a non-denominational Capitalist holiday-season anthem. Here it is, troops! More ammunition for the (absolutely totally real) war on Christmas! Like an Alpine White bar kept in your pocket, may your season be white, sticky, and gooey.
 

 
After the jump “New Romantic Guy” dancing to our new favorite carol, plus the Faith No More cover!

The incorrupt body of Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, wax portraiture over bone, San Crisogono, Rome.
 
For many in our empirical and rational age, the belief in miracles and saints that is an accepted part of Catholic doctrine might present something of a challenge. As a species we now understand enough of the natural world to be able to send men to the moon, while the shelves of any pharmacy seem to establish much the same premise, that secular science, let’s say, might prevail over prayer. Paradoxically, the apparent dominance of science in our lives has the effect of making belief in miracles and saints that much more powerfully a test of faith.

This brings us to Elizabeth Harper’s fascinating photographs of the bodies of “incorrupt” saints. There is a group of saints whose special status is emphasized by the fact that their bodies refuse to decompose. The allure of such an idea is easy enough to imagine—the purity of a person’s soul reflected in some magical ineffability of the body. Bad people ought to stink more after they die, right? It makes a weird kind of intuitive sense. Unfortunately, the facts of nature don’t play along.

The secular mind rejoices when Dostoevsky reveals in The Brothers Karamazov that the body of the pious and wise Father Zossima stinks just as bad as everyone else’s:
 

The fact is that a smell of decomposition began to come from the coffin, growing gradually more marked, and by three o’clock it was quite unmistakable. In all the past history of our monastery, no such scandal could be recalled, and in no other circumstances could such a scandal have been possible, as showed itself in unseemly disorder immediately after this discovery among the very monks themselves. Afterwards, even many years afterwards, some sensible monks were amazed and horrified, when they recalled that day, that the scandal could have reached such proportions. For in the past, monks of very holy life had died, God-fearing old men, whose saintliness was acknowledged by all, yet from their humble coffins, too, the breath of corruption had come, naturally, as from all dead bodies, but that had caused no scandal nor even the slightest excitement. Of course, there had been, in former times, saints in the monastery whose memory was carefully preserved and whose relics, according to tradition, showed no signs of corruption. This fact was regarded by the monks as touching and mysterious, and the tradition of it was cherished as something blessed and miraculous, and as a promise, by God’s grace, of still greater glory from their tombs in the future. (Translation by Constance Garnett)

 
Like the man says: “There had been, in former times, saints ... whose relics, according to tradition, showed no signs of corruption.”

If you go to Rome you can actually pay a visit to a bunch of these incorrupt saints, and recently photographer Harper did just that and came away with a lot of interesting new work. The difficulty of sustaining a belief in incorruptibility as the pitiless centuries grind onward and onward leads to the existence, around the displayed bodies of these saints, of what nonbelievers might term “shenanigans.” But maybe it isn’t so simple—maybe the people in charge of these bodies aren’t so simple, either.

For instance, sometimes the preservation of the incorrupt is (it is claimed) intended to be perceived. The sacristan who was overseeing the sacred relics of Anna Maria Taigi insists that the wax on her body is not there to trick the devout; the intent is to preserve an honest impression of her body in the moment she was discovered in her grave. Meanwhile, St. Paula Frassinetti was given a bath in carbolic acid to assist in the preservation of her body. Pope St. Pius V and St. Vincent Pallotti are encased in silver, while St. Catherine of Sienna and St. Cecelia are encased in white marble.

In reality, of course, the corpses generally do decompose, and squaring this with official doctrine (even if it isn’t considered a hard-and-fast rule in the first place) can be a bit tricky. After 133 years, the body of St. Paula Frassinetti at the Convent of St. Dorotea in Rome is shriveled and brown, and Francesca Romana is pretty much a skeleton. According to Heather Pringle, who has led a team of pathologists from the University of Pisa in researching the subject, opening a tomb sometimes disrupts the microclimates that leads to spontaneous preservation, which can affect even the body of a saint.

As Harper writes:

This is surprisingly unproblematic for believers. The Church doesn’t count incorruptibility as an official Vatican-approved miracle anymore. It’s more like a favorable, if fading, sign from God.

Incorruptibility also isn’t binary, something you either are or aren’t. It can affect just one body part, lending extra significance to a heart, a tongue or hand. There are shades and degrees within the ranks of the incorrupt that make their numbers impossible to tally.

 
The standard account of incorruptible saints is The Incorruptibles: A Study of the Incorruption of the Bodies of Various Catholic Saints and Beatified by Joan Carroll Cruz, a housewife who decided to research and count every incorrupt saint.
 

The tomb of St. Cecilia, the first incorrupt saint. This famous effigy depicts the position her body was found in. Note the wound in her neck from her martyrdom., Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome.
 

The wax effigy of St. Carlo da Sezze. His relics are enshrined under the altar behind his effigy, San Francesco d’Assisi a Ripa Grande, Rome.
 
More after the jump…

 
When the powerfully-voiced Susan Pesklevits met her future husband Terry Jacks in the mid-1960s, she was a pretty blonde 17-year-old regular on a national Canadian teen TV show called Music Hop. She asked the 22-year-old Jacks to accompany her on guitar for her live gigs and soon the two would form a trio called The Poppy Family with lead guitarist/sitar player Craig McCaw. McCaw in turn brought in Satwant Singh to play tablas and drums, completing their unique folky pop psych sound. But even with all the exotic instrumentation, the real draw of The Poppy Familywas the voice of Susan Jacks, who could absolutely sell a song.

They had one really big international hit, the weepy “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” (from the album of the same title) which made it to #2 on the US Billboard charts and to #1 in Canada. The single sold over 3 1/2 million records.
 

 
For Poppy Seeds, their second—and final—album, Singh and McCaw were sacked, replaced by studio musicians. Both of the Jacks recorded solo albums after dropping The Poppy Family name in 1972, while Terry Jacks went on to score his biggest hit, the maudlin and ultra sappy 70s AM radio staple “Seasons in the Sun.” But by that time they were already divorced.

Terry Jacks went on to become a dedicated and award-winning environmental activist and filmmaker, while his ex-wife is still active and performing. A CD compilation of The Poppy Family, A Good Thing Lost: 1968-73 was released in 1996.

In this first clip, the Poppy Family sings “Where Evil Grows” on Kenny Rogers’s 1970 TV series, Rollin’. I love his Waylon-esque guitar playing on this number.
 

 
More from The Poppy Family after the jump…

 
When TIME magazine writer Sam Allis visited Dr. Hunter S. Thompson at home in Colorado in January of 1990, during his visit the good doctor decided that he wanted to set his discarded Christmas tree ablaze. He told Deborah Fuller, his loyal secretary of two decades: “Let’s give the journalist a memorable experience to write about. He needs to learn how to burn the creosote out of a chimney. We can’t run the risk of a chimney fire during the year.”

Of course not!

Here’s Allis’ account of what happened:

“I gave up on the interview and started worrying about my life when Hunter Thompson squirted two cans of fire starter on the Christmas tree he was going to burn in his living-room fireplace, a few feet away from an unopened wooden crate of 9-mm bullets. That the tree was far too large to fit into the fireplace mattered not a whit to Hunter, who was sporting a dime-store wig at the time and resembled Tony Perkins in Psycho. Minutes earlier, he had smashed a Polaroid camera on the floor.”

Hunter had decided to videotape the Christmas tree burning, and we later heard on the replay the terrified voices of Deborah Fuller, his longtime secretary-baby sitter, and me off-camera pleading with him, “NO, HUNTER, NO! PLEASE, HUNTER, DON’T DO IT!” The original manuscript of Hell’s Angels was on the table, and there were the bullets. Nothing doing. Thompson was a man possessed by now, full of the Chivas Regal he had been slurping straight from the bottle and the gin he had been mixing with pink lemonade for hours.

Wayne Ewing, the director of Breakfast with Hunter wrote a delightful secondhand account of what had happened that evening on his Hunter Thompson Films blog:

Of course, there’s a fine line between burning the creosote out of a chimney and starting a creosote fire that burns at 2100 Degrees Fahrenheit and sounds like a jet airplane taking off just before it explodes through the sides of your chimney and burns down a log cabin style house like Owl Farm.

In preparation, Deborah gathered all the fire extinguishers in the living room, while Hunter set up a video camera since I wasn’t there to shoot it. (I was back East, finishing a TV special for NBC News with Tom Brokaw called The New Hollywood. Believe me, Hunter was a hell of a lot more interesting to hang out with than Tom Brokaw, but as they say in show business: “Theater is life. Film is art. TV is rent.”)

Visitors to Owl Farm usually came in search of an experience with Hunter that would make a good story whether they were journalists or fans, and Hunter always delivered. But, the story wasn’t necessarily what they expected. In this case, Hunter got more than he bargained for as well; you can see how desperately he pokes at the burning Christmas tree, trying to contain the raging fire. The heavy wooden mantle still has the burn marks to this day.

Before he put the tree in the fireplace, there was a small fire burning already. The mass of the tree almost snuffed out the first fire when he jammed it in, so Hunter threatened to splash lighter fluid on it. In the original video, you can barely hear Deborah and Allen [he means Sam Allis] screaming, “NO, HUNTER DON’T DO IT” above the Cowboy Junkies playing “Misguided Angel” at maximum volume over the array of living room speakers.

Hunter gets a bit of lighter fluid onto the tree, and then throws a match after it, creating the conflagration you see in the film and then in the aftermath below. The flames were coming out of the top of the chimney in a four foot cone of fire, like the exhaust of a jet engine. Hunter, Deborah and Allen retreated to the front porch where Hunter taped the inferno with pride. No one remembered to carry out the manuscript of the latest book in progress which was lying on the living room table.

Thompson’s Owl Creek home has hardly changed in the years since his death and his widow, Anita Thompson is planning to turn the property into a museum.

You’ve read the story, now watch the video…
 

 
Via Open Culture/Gothamist/Hunter Thompson Films

 
It isn’t necessarily your first thought that the Cocteau Twins have Christmas content lurking somewhere in their catalog, but it turns out they do!

If you were a music fan in the early 1990s, you probably dimly recall the Volume “magazine” of CD compilations that were released pretty regularly between 1991 and 1997. They came with a thick booklet and they would always have a groovy picture of a tropical fish on the cover, remember those?
 

 
So the December 1992 edition (volume 5) included a cover by the Cocteau Twins of the Christmas classic “Frosty the Snowman”—according to Ned Raggett at Allmusic.com, the Cocteaus did it in part as “an acknowledgement that the band was still around.” Raggett also asserts that Robin Guthrie didn’t want to get involved with a religious-themed Christmas song, so went for something secular, which seems plausible enough.

For the holiday season a year later, the Cocteau Twins took their cover of “Frosty the Snowman” and added “Winter Wonderland” to create an EP called Snow consisting of only those two songs.
 

 
Snow came out in CD and 7-inch versions. The 7-inch is red and says “For jukeboxes only” on it. 

Both tracks are a perfectly dreamy addition to your holiday repertoire.

“Frosty the Snowman”:

 
“Winter Wonderland”:

 
Thank you Joe Yachanin!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde interviewed this week on ‘The Pharmacy’
Bauhaus, Japan, Cocteau Twins and more on ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’

 
There’s a sweet new HD Beatles VEVO channel that I wanted to call your attention to, dear readers. Utilizing clips taken from the spiffy-looking new 1+ Blu-ray box set, the channel has been uploading these sharp HD music videos for a while now and they’re adding new ones all the time (there’s a lot to work from, the deluxe 1+ BD set has over 50 lovingly restored Beatles promo films).

Embedded below is the famous performance of “Hey Jude” that was broadcast on Frost, the talk/variety show hosted by David Frost in Great Britain on September 8, 1968, and on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the US a month later, on October 6. (Apparently there was also a version shot with Cliff Richard introducing them.)

TV’s Ready, Steady,Go! director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who would go on to direct Let It Be (and had already produced other film promos for the Fabs, such as the ones for “Rain” and “Paperback Writer”) helmed the production. Paul McCartney designed the set for the shoot, with a two-tiered riser for the orchestra, which took place at Twickenham Film Studios on September 4. It’s worth mentioning that Ringo Starr had actually announced that he’d quit the Beatles just two weeks earlier due to a dust-up with Macca, who’d criticized his drumming on “Back in the U.S.S.R.”

They shot twelve takes, but after that McCartney announced “I think that’s enough.”
 

This is how it looked for most people back in the day. Probably sounded B&W, too! We moderns can now watch The Beatles in HD on bigass flatscreens in 5.1 surround sound.

As you are watching, try to imagine what it was like to hear this for the first time, and also bear in mind that the Beatles had only just released the astonishing Yellow Submarine film a few months prior to this! “Hey Jude” topped the charts in Britain for two weeks and for nine in America, where it became The Beatles’ longest-running #1 single in the US. Without further ado, here it is, “Hey Jude” as it was more or less experienced in its premiere airing. Of course it can now seen in far, far better quality than you’d ever have been able to see it in during those original television broadcasts, back when most people in Britain and America would have been watching it on low resolution B&W TV sets. (The Beatles themselves wouldn’t have even been able to see it in this kind of quality back then either).
 

 
More Beatles in HD after the jump…

Actress Mary Pickford affixing a “Santa Claus Lane” sign on Hollywood Boulevard, 1928

The tradition of holding a Christmas parade on Hollywood Boulevard started 1928 as a way to encourage shoppers to spend money at the various businesses along the Boulevard of broken dreams. Known as the “Santa Claus Lane Parade,” the event also gave movie stars a vehicle to promote themselves and their latest pictures by featuring their glamorous head-shots in the middle of giant wreaths or riding in a car along the parade’s almost four-mile route.
 

The Marx Brothers in the Santa Claus Lane Parade,1938
 

Actress Claudette Colbert posing with her wreath along the Santa Claus Parade route, 1932
 
The parade took a break during WWII but then returned in 1945 and continued under its original name until 1978 when it was renamed the “Hollywood Christmas Parade” which is still happening every year. The massive metal trees lining the boulevard were over ten-feet tall, as were the equally huge Santas that dwarfed onlookers during the entire month of December. I’ve got a nice selection of captivating images from the early days of Santa Claus Lane that will hopefully give your spirits a much needed lift, as they did mine.
 

Santa Claus Lane Parade float, 1931
 

The first Santa Claus Lane parade, 1928
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Ray Bradbury needed somewhere quiet to write. His wife had given birth to a baby daughter and their neat home did not seem so large anymore. Bradbury couldn’t afford to rent an office, so he spent his writing time in the UCLA library. Then one day he heard the Morse code clatter of keys on rollers and discovered the library offered typewriters for hire in a basement typing room at ten cents per half hour. Loaded up with a bagful of dimes, Bradbury started work on his latest story Fahrenheit 451.

Bradbury never liked to know what he was doing or where he was going when he wrote—he just hammered out the words from “the secret motives within.” It took him ten days to write Fahrenheit 451. Ten days to run up-and-down stairs and pull books off shelves to find random quotes for his book. Ten days not knowing what he was writing just following the course of the words that tumbled out of his head to tell their tale.

Published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 is the story of a future America where books are banned and firemen are professional arsonists who patrol the cities burning every book they find. The title Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns. Books are banned because they contain ideas that make people unhappy. The firemen burn the books to keep the people happy in their safe little spaces. Bradbury’s story could be our America today, where “politically correct” college students shut down ideas they cannot handle, and where “debate” means only talking to those who agree with you.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fahrenheit 451 in 2003, renowned artist Ralph Steadman was commissioned to illustrate Bradbury’s classic tale with his signature manic scratch and splatter style. Steadman had famously collaborated with Hunter S. Thompson on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and over a long career has illustrated numerous books, articles, and films as well as producing a vast collection of personal work. Though Steadman was said to be “jaded” about illustrating any more books, he was thrilled to illustrate Bradbury’s classic as he considered it “as important as 1984 and Animal Farm as real powerful social comment, because it’s about a fire brigade burning books.”

As someone once said, I think it was me: There is nothing so dangerous as an idea. Particularly one whose time has come…

When Bradbury saw Steadman’s vibrant illustrations, the author paid the artist the highest compliment:

You’ve brought my book into the 21st Century. Thank you.

Steadman’s flamboyant penmanship suits Bradbury’s style of writing “at the top of [his] lungs”—as both work intuitively, allowing accident and inspiration to lead them towards unknown destinations.
 

 

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

It was a pleasure to burn.
More of Steadman’s fiery illustrations for Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ after the jump….

READ ON▸

 
Two years into Frankie and Annette’s Beach Party series, emboldened by the five installments behind them, American International Pictures tried a variation on the movies’ profitable formula: Ski Party.
 

 
Frankie is now in college, where he and his roommate (Dwayne Hickman, TV’s Dobie Gillis) are studying a book called Fun Without Sex in a class taught by Annette (in a cameo appearance). Desperate for the love of babes, the pair head to the slopes for vacation; there, they dress as women so they can take easier ski lessons and get closer to the bikini-clad coeds. Yes, bikini-clad.

There is also a James Joyce joke:

CRAIG: What do you think of Finnegans Wake?

BARB: I didn’t even know he was sick!

Okay, it’s barely enough to keep the mind alive, but the whole reason this movie exists is so James Brown and the Famous Flames can chew it up and spit it out in their three-and-a-half minutes on screen. I suspect this is the only time Brown sang “I Feel Good” in a Christmas sweater, and it’s certainly the only place you can see him, the Flames and three St. Bernards glide into a ski lodge. Pain addicts who enjoy the taste of tears can watch the full movie (minus the audio of Brown’s performance) here, but for everyone else, James Brown and the Famous Flames’ showstopping performance is isolated below.