Here are a couple of fan recorded videos of murdered Narcocorrido star Valentin Elizalde ,“El Gallo de Oro” and band doing some radio promotion events. I think these clips show the raw power of this music far better than the studio recordings. To see this stuff live is an amazing experience. I absolutely love the wild drumming and the way it’s used to punctuate phrases.  And of course, in fine folk music tradition, the songs are almost entirely tales of drug dealing and murder. Indeed Elizalde was murdered gangland style in 2006 just after playing a show. It’s a heavy world these guys move in !
 

Novelist Will Self debates physicist David Eagleman on the nature of the afterlife, courtesy of New Scientist:

Will Self, the novelist, doesn’t buy Eagleman’s bright-eyed, confident manner. He wanted to find out where fear lay in the scientist’s jumping between imagined afterlives.

Concerned, he said, that the conversation might get boring, he began to cross-examine Eagleman. “Was your epiphany emotional or intellectual?” he asked.

Earlier, Self had described his own epiphany. The experience of nursing his sick mother until her early death had profoundly altered the way he thought about death, and he suggested that all writers were inspired by such epiphanies.

Eagleman answered that his epiphany had been intellectual: after spending several years as a proselytising atheist, he found it was more interesting to think about God in new and different ways than it was not to think about him at all.

Self pursued his comic role as prosecuting counsel. “How old are you?” he asked. Thirty-eight, Eagleman said. Young, Self noted, but Eagleman is precocious - was he in the throes of a precociously early mid-life crisis? One that involved his spending his nights in hotel rooms gripping his mattress in dread of death?

(New Scientist: Will Self vs. David Eagleman)

 
Coming soon?

Add this one to your list of must see vinyl inspired documentaries and movies. Director Jony Lyle gives a quick teaser of his upcoming film entitled To Have & To Hold, which Lyle describes as “a ‘musicmentory’ to celebrate the age of vinyl records.”

The film promises enough archive footage, records rooms, music collections, pressing plants, and rare vinyl to satisfy even the most die hard physical music addicts. In addition to its irresistible collectible eye candy, To Have & To Hold, which is scheduled for a 2010 release, features interviews with such notable vinyl aficionados as Questlove, Chuck D, Bobbito Garcia, DJ Amir, Bruce Lundvall, Christian Marclay, and Paul Mawhinney.

(via Nerdcore )

 

 
Here’s a delightful collection of ultra-70s fashion sketches by designer D. Jame. Visit 1970s Fashion Drawings to see more funky design concepts and 70s trends.

Thank you Andrew Vogel!

A little late night music for you courtesy of /x/. Brix were shat.

(Nora Keyes)

(Nora Keyes: Small Apart)

 
Above, the amazing opening credits for Dave Allen at Large, a show I absolutely loved when I was a kid. Almost unknown in this country, Dave Allen was an Irish raconteur, who did most of his extremely popular show each week sitting in a chair, smoking and drinking. He hated, I mean hated, religion and it gave his comedy a fantastic edge for the day. No popular American performer would have been able to get away with anything even remotely similar to what Dave Allen did. Allen was hardcore about his Atheism. Even George Carlin didn’t start taking on religion as hard as he did until late in his career. And Lenny Bruce never said religion was stupid, he just said it was corrupt.

Dave Allen said religion was stupid and he said it over and over again throughout the many years of his television career. For a while he was even banned from Irish TV. He was hardcore, Dave Allen.

But the song! What about that fucking groove? It’s a song called Blarney’s Stoned by Alan Hawkshaw, an appropriate title for a song for Dave Allen, to be sure.

A lot of Hankshaw’s best work ended up in commercial music libraries where it could be licensed for film, radio and television. The video below, which I saw on Lady Bunny’s blog today, is a clip of Paco Rabanne’s collection of 1969 from a German TV show.

According to the YouTube poster the music is from the library label KPM 1169 - ARP ODYSSEY and the title of the track is Transcendental Meditation:
 

 
An energetic song about… nothing.

 

 
Get a doll doppelganger for $180 over at Be A Doll.

Everyday Heroes deserve an Action Figure too.

Have you ever wanted to be an action figure?

How about immortalizing yourself in a doll? Or a loved one - your parent, your spouse?

Your doll will be one of a kind, just like you are!

Each doll head is hand sculpted from photos by Doll Artist, Cyndi Safstrom. The head is then sculpted onto a vinyl doll or action figure, and dressed in the clothing of your choice.

 
A Tribute to Gay and Lesbian Characters from Children’s TV Shows and Movies. The Academy Awards montage that will never be.

Via our friends at the wonderfully wonderful World of Wonder blog

 
It doesn’t matter so much that the prank and the reaction is obviously fake (maybe?), but that where it’s coming from is obviously not. And Rich Praytor is one of the best Christian celebrity names ever, like a prayer raptor !
 
via Milk & Cookies thx Chris Ward !

 
In the early 90s I wrote to every single one of the crazed loners and weirdo organizations listed in Rev. Ivan Stang’s wonderful book, High Weirdness by Mail. I mean to say that I wrote to every single address in that book. I wonder how many of his readers did that? I did, using a form letter. Some were returned as undeliverable, but most made their mark. I got some kind of goofy letter or package in the post nearly every single day for a year. The best were from these total hillbilly crackpot UFO freaks asking for donations to build out a “UFO watching porch” addition on to their mobile home They would also send me insane cassette tapes of channeling sessions where the aliens would speak through them and say racist and anti-Democrat shit!

I also got stuff from various televangelists, the best being a ‘prayer mat’ from Peter Popoff that instructed the user to kneel within the dotted circle, take out their wallet, place that in the circle, too and pray for money. The reader was told that Popoff and his father would also pray for monetary bounty to rain on their new friend. It was so fucking blatant—almost a joke—that only an absolute moron would believe it in. That was the point obviously. Someone with even a tiny portion of a brain would take one look at something like that and toss it, instantly. That person in the .00009 lowest percentile of idiots in this country WAS the target. I’m not so sure that the people sending in their donations got much out of Popoff’s and pere’s prayers for the gelt, but the reverse is certainly not true, I’d wager.

Some were more professional and upscale than most. Like an organization called Share International, started in the 1950s by a Scot named Benjamin Creme, now 87, a guest from time to time on the George Noory radio show. Share International’s mission is to herald the arrival of the world messiah Maitreya, variously described as a reincarnation of Christ, the Messiah, the fifth Buddha, Krishna, or the Imam Mahdi.
At one point Creme said that Maitreya was the representative of a group of beings from Venus called the Space Brothers.

Their letters and books were fairly well-designed and printed. They’d send me short books and newsletters about Maitreya’s imminent arrival on the world stage. From what I could tell, that seems to have been the message for nearly 30 years: HE is coming. Eventually, I guess Creme thought he had to shit or get off the pot, because in 1988 Maitreya was spotted and was supposed to be this guy, a supposed miracle worker seen in Kenya, (see picture above) but his arrival on the, um, world stage fizzled out apparently.
 

 
Here’s where it gets good: British Raj Patel, well-known economist and author of The Value of Nothing, was on The Colbert Report in January. Soon afterwards he began to receive emails from members of Share International, He was also paid a visit by two members of the group. Their mission? To meet the Maitreya… That’s right: Raj Patel.

Patel’s response: “I’m not the messiah… I’m just an economics expert!” The Sun got it right: This is The Life of Brian redux:

The confusion began after Raj, from Golders Green, North London, appeared on TV in January to plug his book on the global financial crisis, The Value Of Nothing. Two days later, Share International founder Benjamin Creme, 87, announced the chosen one his cult calls “Maitreya” had arrived, telling followers: “Maitreya recently gave his first interview in America. “The master of all the masters for the first time in human history himself came on a well-known television programme on a major network. But undeclared as Maitreya, just as one of us.”

Raj was mis-identified soon after as he shares many of the prophesied characteristics of Maitreya.

Both are dark-skinned, were born in 1972 and grew up in London;

Maitreya took a flight from India to the UK in 1977, which matches the date Raj flew back from a holiday there;

Maitreya would appear on TV and speak with a slight stutter - which Raj did on The Colbert Report show;

Frustratingly for Raj, it also states the Maitreya will immediately DENY his identity.

Raj, who was raised a Hindu, said: “I started getting emails saying ‘Are you the world teacher?’ Then it wasn’t just random internet folk, but also friends saying, ‘Have you seen this?’ It’s absurd to be put in this position when I’m just some bloke.”

Although Raj swiftly rejected his holy credentials, two devotees from Detroit flew 2,400 miles to meet him at a book signing in his current US home town, San Francisco.

Raj said: “They were really nice, straightforward people. They said they thought I was the Maitreya. They also said I had appeared in their dreams.

“I said, ‘I’m really flattered you came all the way here, but it breaks my heart you spent all this money to meet someone who isn’t who you think he is.’”

The cult was founded by Scotsman Creme in the 1950s. It believes that the 18 million-year-old Maitreya - who combines elements of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam - has been hiding in the Himalayas for 2,000 years. His arrival will unite humanity and improve life for everyone on Earth. Share International has its HQ in Amsterdam with offices in London, the US, Japan, France and Germany. Creme has refused to confirm or deny whether he believes Raj is his saviour.

Meanwhile Raj has had to remove contact details from his website and refuses to talk further about the Maitreya.

He said: “It frustrates me it might disappoint those looking for Maitreya that, in fact, I’m just an ordinary bloke.”

Patel reappeared on The Colbert Report, but refused to play along as if he really was the Maitreya.

But that’s what the real Maitreya would say, as Colbert adroitly pointed out.

Via Letters of Note, this letter from 1957 reveals that “Burroughs has gone insane!”

Early 1957, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg travelled to Tangier to join William Burroughs; their mission to assemble and edit Burroughs’ many fragments of work to form a ‘readable’ Naked Lunch manuscript. Kerouac arrived early and, during a break from socialising with Burroughs, the ‘old familiar lunatic’, wrote to Lucien Carr and his wife Francesca in order to update them on the project’s progress.

The letter reads:

Dear Lucien & Cessa — Writing to you by candlelight from the mysterious Casbah — have a magnificent room overlooking the beach & the bay & the sea & can see Gibraltar — patio to sun on, room maid, $20 a month — feel great but Burroughs has gone insane e as, — he keeps saying he’s going to erupt into some unspeakable atrocity such as waving his dingdong at an Embassy part & such or slaughtering an Arab boy to see what his beautiful insides look like — Naturally I feel lonesome with this old familiar lunatic but lonesomer than ever with him as he’ll also mumble, or splurt, most of his conversation, in some kind of endless new British lord imitation, it all keeps pouring out of him in an absolutely brilliant horde of words & in fact his new book is best thing of its kind in the world (Genet, Celine, Miller, etc.) & we might call it WORD HOARD…he, Burroughs, (not “Lee” any more) unleashes his word hoard, or horde, on the world which has been awaiting the Only Prophet, Burroughs — His message is all scatalogical homosexual super-violent madness, — his manuscript is all that has been saved from the original vast number of written pages of WORD HOARD which he’d left in all the boy’s privies of the world — and so on, — I sit with him in elegant French restaurant & he spits out his bones like My. Hyde and keeps yelling obscene words to be heard by the continental clienteles — (like he done in Rome, yelling FART at a big palazzio party) — I’ll be glad when Allen gets here. — Meanwhile I explores the Casbah, high on opium or hasheesh or any drink or drug I want, & dig the Arabs. — The Slovenija was a delightful ship, I ate every day at one long white tablecloth with that one Yugoslavian woman spy. — We hit a horrendous tempest 2 days out, nothing like I ever seen, — that big steel ship was lost in mountains of hissing water, awful. — I cuddled up with TWO TICKETS TO TANGIER and got my laughs, I read every word, Cess, really a riot. — Also read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling which you should read, it’s down on your corner. — Right now I’m high on 3 Sympatinas, Spanish bennies of a sort, mild. — Happy pills galore. — The gal situation here is worse than the boy situation, nothing but male whores all over, & their supplementary queens. — Met an actual contraband sailing ship adventurer with a mustache. Etc. More anon. Miss you & hope you’re well. Jack.

(Letters of Note: Burroughs Has Gone Insane)

(William S. Burroughs: The Yage Letters)

Arundhati Roy talks with Democracy Now about spending time with Maoist rebels in India. As somebody who’s spent time getting chased and almost killed by Maoist rebels, I’m not exactly sure she’s on point here. While they are fighting for the rights of the poor, they are also, to a large extent, providing a back door for China—and now that they have essentially sold Nepal to China, the buffer zone between India and China—two gigantic nuclear powers—is getting erased. Not good for anybody. In the slightest.

Earlier this month, when Forbes published its annual list of the world’s billionaires, the Indian press reported with some delight that two of their countrymen had made it to the coveted list of the ten richest individuals in the world.

Meanwhile, thousands of Indian paramilitary troops and police are fighting a war against some of its poorest inhabitants living deep in the country’s so-called tribal belt. Indian officials say more than a third of the country, mostly mineral-rich forest land, is partially or completely under the control of Maoist rebels, also known as Naxalites. India’s prime minister has called the Maoists the country’s “gravest internal security threat.” According to official figures, nearly 6,000 people have died in the past seven years of fighting, more than half of them civilians. The government’s new paramilitary offensive against the Maoists has been dubbed Operation Green Hunt.

Well, earlier this month, the leader of the Maoist insurgency, Koteswar Rao, or Kishenji, invited the Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy to mediate in peace talks with the government. Soon after, India’s Home Secretary, G.K. Pillai, criticized Roy and others who have publicly called state violence against Maoists, quote, “genocidal.”

(AlterNet: Arundhati Roy on the Occupation of Kashmir)

(Arundhati Roy: Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers)

The Guardian reports on Colonel Gaddafi’s bizarre literary output. I think he should form a writer’s circle with Lynne Cheney and crank out the world’s best S&M authority porn. Then they can both be gainfully employed in the San Fernando Valley working for somebody’s porn distribution outlet when Internet Sleaze finally proves to be the predominant ideology of the 21st century, leaving all fascist systems in the gulch.

If it feels as though Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has been around a long time, that’s because he has. Born in 1942, Gaddafi led the coup against the Libyan monarchy in 1969 – the same year Sesame Street debuted on US television. He’s as old as ineffably boring Sir Paul McCartney, his regime as venerable as Big Bird. And, like many dictators, he fancies himself as a writer.

Gaddafi’s most famous literary work is The Green Book, published in 1975. This treatise on “Islamic socialism” defined the concept of Jamahiriya, a state without parties that would be governed directly by its people. Which, in practice, translates as a military dictatorship, headed by – you guessed it – Gaddafi! His subsequent volume, Escape to Hell, is less well known. Marketed in the UK as a single collection of short stories and essays, it is in fact an amalgamation of two books: Escape to Hell (1993) and Illegal Publications (1995). Of course, while it’s safe to say that all works of dictator literature are to some extent fictional, few tyrants have tackled the art of Chekhov and Maupassant. I was quite excited to see how the colonel fared.

One of the first things I learned is that Gaddafi has little grasp of literary classifications. The texts in Escape to Hell are, alas, not short stories but rambling prose feuilletons. There are no characters, no twists, no subtle illuminations; indeed, there is precious little narrative. Instead, you get surreal rants and bizarre streams of consciousness obviously unmolested by the hand of any editor.

(The Guardian: Gaddafi’s surreal gibberish)

(Escape to Hell and Other Stories)

 

 

 
See more craptacular stuffed animals over at Crappy Taxidermy.
 
(via Cakehead)