FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Dangerous Minds welcomes Ron Nachmann
06.06.2010
05:33 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
I’m very pleased to announce the newest member of the Dangerous Minds “group”, my great old friend and colleague going back to grade school, Ron Nachmann. Ron brings many years of immersion in music, art, politics and culture with him to our blog and I’m certain our readers will appreciate his passionate, intelligent writing and analysis as well as his excellent taste in music and great sense of humor. Welcome, Ron !

Posted by Brad Laner
|
06.06.2010
05:33 pm
|
Christianity is Stupid
06.06.2010
01:11 am
Topics:
Tags:

 
“The Mashin’ of the Christ,” an amazing short film set to Negativland’s “Christianity is Stupid.” Made by Negativland, i.d. and Heath Hanlin. From the Our Favorite Things DVD. (I just bought it today, it’s awesome.)

Want to know more about the preacher on the song? Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Christploitation Cinema: If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

Negativland’s Mark Hosler discusses the making of Christianity is Stupid (YouTube)

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
06.06.2010
01:11 am
|
Want to prevent another oil spill? Here’s how!
06.05.2010
10:50 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
The answer to the Louisiana Oil Disaster. Graphic by Jason Louv. Art Direction by Howard Bloom. Text by Jason Louv, Howard Bloom, and Buzz Aldrin. Go ahead, make this viral!

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
06.05.2010
10:50 pm
|
Why Paul McCartney Still Matters
06.05.2010
04:09 pm
Topics:
Tags:
Posted by Brad Laner
|
06.05.2010
04:09 pm
|
Pure: Movie clichés with music by The Jesus Lizard
06.05.2010
11:04 am
Topics:
Tags:

(via Nerdcore)

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
06.05.2010
11:04 am
|
Steve Martin’s funny response to fan mail
06.05.2010
12:15 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Read the full story behind Steve Martin’s letter over at Chattering Teeth.
 
(via Mister Honk)

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
06.05.2010
12:15 am
|
Arizona is in a hell of a mess
06.04.2010
09:21 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
The following was posted on Wonkette and I am reposting it here in full because I don’t think they’d mind and I sure couldn’t say it any better. As an American I am horrified by this. Please post this story on your Facebook and Twitter and get it out there:

Hard to find even the Gallows Humor in this story, so maybe we won’t even try. Maybe it’s time to admit that large chunks of America are in the hands of unreconstructed racists and vulgar idiots, and that the popular election of a black man as president just might’ve pushed these furious, economically doomed old white people into a final rage that is going to end very, very badly. Ready? Here you go: An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face from the mural, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students pictured on the school wall to be repainted as light-skinned children.

This is America, in 2010, and there’s a dozen more states and endless white-trash municipalities ready to Officially Adopt this same Official Racist Insanity.

From the Arizona Republic:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school. The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity….

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town’s most prominent intersections.

“We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars,” Wall said. “We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics).”

The children depicted on the mural, as we mentioned before but feel compelled to repeat, are little kids who go to the school — “a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project.”

And these children, for the past several months as this happy mural encouraging “green transportation” was being painted by local artists, have been treated to the city of Prescott’s finest citizens driving by and yelling “Nigger” and “Spic” at this school wall painted with pictures of the children who attend the school. And this has been encouraged by a city councilman, Steve Blair, who uses his local radio talk show to rile up these people and demand the mural be destroyed.

And now the faces are being painted white, “because of the controversy.”

Remember where you were, when you could still laugh about teabaggers and racists and Arizonans, because funny time is almost over. If the unemployment keeps up — one in five adult white males has no job and will never have a job again — and people keep walking away from their stucco heaps they can’t afford and the states and cities and counties and towns keep passing their aggressive racist laws to rile up the trash even more, shit’s going to very soon become very bad, and whether it’s the National Guard having wars in the Sunbelt Exurbs against armies of crazy old white people who are finally using their hundreds of millions of guns, or whole Latino neighborhoods burned to the ground the way the Klan used to burn down black neighborhoods a century ago, we are in for a long dark night and no light-colored paint is going to fix that.

Postscript: So that asswipe Steve Blair got fired from the radio station. Blair emphasized in his statement that “I’m not a racist by any stretch of the imagination, but whenever people start talking about diversity, it’s a word I can’t stand.” What a fucking idiot.

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
06.04.2010
09:21 pm
|
Pep Pep passes: Richard Dunn from ‘Tim and Eric Awesome Show,’ RIP
06.04.2010
02:52 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Sad to hear that Richard Dunn, the befuddled senior citizen from the cast of Tim and Eric Awesome Show—great job! passed away at 7:14 a.m. on June 4, 2010.

It’s nearly impossible to pick a favorite Pep Pep moment, but this clip, of Dunn and Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro is mine:
 


Via Xeni Jardin/Eric Wareheim on Twitter.

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
06.04.2010
02:52 pm
|
Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan…
06.04.2010
02:19 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Last month, Britain’s new Defense Minister, Liam Fox, described Afghanistan as a “broken 13th-century country” and indeed this is what we are told frequently, that Afghanistan is scarcely more advanced than a medieval society and its barren, rocky terrain indistinguishable from the lunar surface. But it wasn’t always that way. Not at all. And things were much different for women, too…. not long ago, in fact.

Mohammad Qayoumi, president of California State University, East Bay, writes in Foreign Policy:

But that is not the Afghanistan I remember. I grew up in Kabul in the 1950s and ‘60s. When I was in middle school, I remember that on one visit to a city market, I bought a photobook about the country published by Afghanistan’s planning ministry. Most of the images dated from the 1950s. I had largely forgotten about that book until recently; I left Afghanistan in 1968 on a U.S.-funded scholarship to study at the American University of Beirut, and subsequently worked in the Middle East and now the United States. But recently, I decided to seek out another copy. Stirred by the fact that news portrayals of the country’s history didn’t mesh with my own memories, I wanted to discover the truth. Through a colleague, I received a copy of the book and recognized it as a time capsule of the Afghanistan I had once known—perhaps a little airbrushed by government officials, but a far more realistic picture of my homeland than one often sees today.

A half-century ago, Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled casually at movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories in the suburbs churned out textiles and other goods. There was a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower stations and roads, albeit with outside help. Ordinary people had a sense of hope, a belief that education could open opportunities for all, a conviction that a bright future lay ahead. All that has been destroyed by three decades of war, but it was real.

I have since had the images in that book digitized. Remembering Afghanistan’s hopeful past only makes its present misery seem more tragic.

I highly recommend clicking through all 24 pages of this photo essay, Once Upon a TIme in Afghanistan. It’s a fascinating look at a society that was so vibrant and thriving in the 1950s and 1960s, but is now in a hell of a mess. Some of these photographs are likely to stop you in your tracks when you consider the implications of what happened to this culture. HOW could things have gotten this much worse in 40 years?!?! It’s just incredible to contemplate. A cautionary tale of the very worst, most depressing kind.
 
Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan (Foreign Policy)

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
06.04.2010
02:19 pm
|
Let’s dance for the great guy Bruce Lee
06.04.2010
01:16 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
My wonderful old friend that I miss terribly, the late, great Jac Zinder was a true visionary pioneer in his pursuit of the artifacts of non-western cultures existing within our diverse city long before the notion of “world music” ever became commonplace. Much like his close friend Jonathan Gold‘s endless uncovering of the huge spectrum of the foods of these cultures hiding in plain sight all around us, Jac was constantly finding amazing musical gems to stun his friends with, buying endless cassettes of Bollywood soundtracks at the many local Indian movie theaters long before it was even remotely hip to do so and then playing them in DJ sets all over town. This one tune in particular, by Indian film score master Bappi Lahiri, will always remind me of him, perhaps more than any other. Like Jac himself, this song is sublimely ridiculous. It’s such a strange approximation of disco that it could almost pass for a track by Flying Lizards. It features some of the most brutal Synare playing ever recorded !

 
Bonus: A brief clip of the actual number and another lovely tune from the film Morchha

 

Posted by Brad Laner
|
06.04.2010
01:16 pm
|
Betty White Mashups
06.03.2010
11:24 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
image

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
06.03.2010
11:24 pm
|
Brion Gysin: Dream Machine at the New Museum
06.03.2010
05:46 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Some artists, like Picasso and Dali, were discovered when they were young and their talents grew to maturity before the public eye. Sometimes, however it takes,,, well, dying before the art world sits up and takes notice of you, This has certainly been the case with Brion Gysin, the Canadian/British painter and author who has long stood in the shadows, figuratively speaking, of William S. Burroughs, his lifelong friend and collaborator. Burroughs once said that Brion Gysin, the inventor of the Cut-Ups literary technique was the only man he ever truly respected.

Gysin is an artist whose work must be seen in person to be truly appreciated. This is said about every artist’s work, but it’s particularly true with Brion Gysin. What might appear to be random chicken scratch calligraphy when reproduced in a book, becomes ALIVE when seen in person. Seemingly careless hash marks become scenes of hundreds of people around a bonfire or a crowded Arab marketplace when you’re staring right at it.

The man was a master. And he left an awful lot of work behind. Although there were various Gysin gallery exhibits in New York while he was still alive—I recall being astonished by some large works on paper in a great 1985 show at the Tower Gallery—there has never been a museum level retrospective of Gysin’s work in the United States until now:

Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” will be the first US survey of the work of Brion Gysin (b. 1916, Taplow, UK; d. 1986, Paris), an irrepressible innovator, serial collaborator, and subversive spirit who continues to inspire artists today. The exhibition will include over 250 drawings, books, paintings, photo-collages, films, slide projections, and sound works, as well as the Dreamachine—a kinetic light sculpture that utilizes the flicker effect to induce visions.

In 1959, Gysin created the Cut-Up Method, wherein words and phrases were randomly collaged to unlock unknown meanings, culminating in The Third Mind, a book-length collage created with his lifelong collaborator William S. Burroughs. Transferring the idea of the Cut-Up to magnetic tape, Gysin became the father of sound poetry. Throughout his life, Gysin was a collaborator and an inspiration to artists, poets, and musicians, such as John Giorno, Brian Jones, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis-P-Orridge, and Keith Haring.

More than two decades after his death, his work continues to attract the interest of a new generation of artists drawn to Gysin’s radical inderdisciplinarity, including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cerith Wyn Evans, Trisha Donnelly, and Scott Treleaven. The exhibition is curated by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator, and will be on view in the New Museum’s second-floor gallery. It will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published with Hugh Merrell, Ltd. which will include scholarly essays and appreciations by contemporary artists, musicians, and poets.

Video below, a trailer for FLicKer a Canadian documentary about Gysin directed by Nik Sheehan, in which I make a brief appearance.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
06.03.2010
05:46 pm
|
What Twitter is for…
06.03.2010
05:06 pm
Topics:
Tags:

 
@SomeGreyBloke has figured it out!

Via Fishbowl LA/TIna Dupuy

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
06.03.2010
05:06 pm
|
Hey Baby: the creep-killing game for women
06.03.2010
04:05 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
“It’s payback time, boys.”  So says the site for Hey Baby, a first-person woman shooter released by, LadyKillas, Inc. (!), that lets ladies (or men, too, I suppose) extract a fair amount of vengeance in response to the leering eyes and catcalls (everything from “I like your bounce” to “I wanna rape you, bitch”) of various creeps and cretins.

Broadsheet’s Tracy Clark-Flory, picked up Hey Baby‘s weapon of choice, a locked and loaded, .80 caliber machine gun (hey, you can, too, right here).  Here’s what she thought of the experience:

Clearly, the game isn’t afraid to stir up some controversy.  We’re used to heroines with big boobs and naughty little getups, but here we’re placed in the shoes of a virtual protagonist whom we never actually see.  Instead of a far-fetched scenario, we’re placed in an infuriating and frightening everyday reality for many women.  Show me a woman who doesn’t have at least one story of being aggressively pursued—verbally or otherwise—by a stranger on the street.

The rage behind the game might be a little too real for some tastes, but there’s no question many women will find it thrilling, maybe even therapeutic.  Personally, I can’t say I’m particularly fond of the “all men as potential attackers” mentality that the game engenders, even if it does make for interesting commentary about the ways street harassment warps women’s views of men.  Ultimately, though, considering the existence of first-person sexual assault games like RapeLay, it’s about damn time someone introduced a street harasser shoot’em-up game.

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
|
06.03.2010
04:05 pm
|
The Work: I Hate America (1981)
06.03.2010
03:34 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Quite a polarizing and still edgy sounding 1981 single by The Work. The Work being Henry Cow founder Tim Hodgkinson’s early 80’s post-punk combo. Sounding every bit like their studio mates This Heat having a battle royale with Captain Beefheart‘s Magic Band, this violently convulsive tune is the very definition of apoplectic rage. And this was only 1981 ! Imagine how angry this would have been had it been recorded in the Bushco era ! Fortunately there’s enough bile in this track to apply to any other past or future outrage you’d care to. Art rock sticking it to the man !
 
image
 

 
LA FOLIE DU JOUR: THE WORK ” I Hate America” (UK,1981)

Posted by Brad Laner
|
06.03.2010
03:34 pm
|
Page 1369 of 1503 ‹ First  < 1367 1368 1369 1370 1371 >  Last ›