“@mtvnews: Beyoncé, Rihanna & Katy Perry send prayers to #Oklahoma #PrayForOklahoma”I feel like an idiot now…I only sent money.
— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) May 21, 2013
Right on, Ricky!
This South African commercial from Allan Gray Investment, with creative by the King James agency, is really a showstopper.
In all my years of advertising, I have never seen a treatment that was so detailed, so carefully thought through, and so deeply researched, than the treatment Keith gave us when pitching to handle this commercial. From beginning to end, his commitment to the job bordered on obsession.” says Alistair King, Executive Creative Director at King James.
“This was an incredibly challenging board, says Rose. You just take it for granted that James Dean is so iconic, so to go and mess with him and replan his life, if it doesn’t work its like you’re desecrating his memory.”
This fire escape from the 19th century is such a simple design, I wonder why it never caught on? Perhaps, it was not possible to maintain the structural integrity in high temperatures, and people would be unable to slide down to safety without being cooked. Mind you, fire escapes aside, this would be a fun way to leave work on a Friday.
Via Paraphilia Magazine
Damn, just when you thought you’ve seen all of ‘em, here it comes, hands down the best marriage equality meme EVER.
Whoever came up with this wonderfully droll Bewitched meets the “Red Equal Sign” gag deserves… something. I don’t know what that “something” is, but give me time to think about it. Something really good.
It’s a pity that Samantha Stevens can’t just wiggle her magic nose and bestow full civil rights upon our gay brothers and sisters. Even a witch has to get out there and make some noise for marriage equality!
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Campy fun: Paul Lynde sings and dances to ‘Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown’
Via WOW Report
I was impressed as fuck by Noel Fielding’s clever “dog whistle” homage to Kenneth Anger (and Roy Wood) in the opening credits to his Luxury Comedy TV series (see below), but just imagine seeing someone walking down the street wearing one of these limited edition embroidered “Lucifer Rising” jackets from La Boca:
We’re very excited to have a very limited re-release of our ‘Lucifer’ jacket for Sixpack France. Designed as a tribute to the jacket worn in Kenneth Anger’s 1972 masterpiece Lucifer Rising, the original release sold out long ago, and has since become one or our most requested pieces. This new release is limited to less than 100 worldwide, and we have a few available in our shop now.
Also available in-store exclusively at Citadium Paris.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Lucifer Rising: Jimmy Page’s insane, amazing, unused soundtrack to the Kenneth Anger film
Consisting mostly of a live set shot just before they became worldwide sensations, Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams Video Album (aka “Live from Heaven”) captures Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart at their most experimental. Within a year, they’d go from being a struggling band lugging their own equipment around to grossing more than some small countries.
This endearing performance was shot at Heaven, London’s notorious gay “superclub” in 1983 (known at the time for its amazing lasers—among other things—which are used throughout). At this point, Annie Lennox was in her gender-bending “Grace Jones” mode, and sports a man’s suit, hat and bright red hair.
Plus claymation!
Sissy Spacek puffing on her smokey treat in-between shots on the set of Carrie in 1976.
Let’s assume this is a cigarette.
Talking Heads perform a previously unheard version of “Psycho Killer” featuring Arthur Russell on cello. Superb.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Pseeco Keeler: Awkward Talking Heads performance on French TV, 1978
H/T Dazed & Confused and Chris Frantz!
Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw called La Danza de la Realidad (“The Dance Of Reality”), Chilean cinematic trickster Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film in 23 years, “a triumphant return, which mixes autobiography, politics, torture and fantasy to exuberant, moving effect.”
La Danza de la Realidad was shot in Jodorowsky’s hometown of Tocopilla, deep in the Chilean desert. The film, which premiered at Cannes tells the story, sort of, of the his Communist father, Jaime Jodorowsky, with whom the director obviously had a very complex relationship:
Of course, the entire story is swathed in surreal mythology, dream logic and instant day-glo legend, resembling Fellini, Tod Browning, Emir Kusturica, and many more. You can’t be sure how to extract conventional autobiography from this. Despite the title, there is more “dance” than “reality” — and that is the point. Or part of the point. For the first time, Jodorowsky is coming close to telling us how personal evasiveness has governed his film-making style; his flights of fancy are flights of pain, flights from childhood and flights from reality. And now he is using his transformative style to come to terms with and change the past and to confer on his father some of the heroism that he never attained in real life.
As a child, young Alejandro is played by Jeremias Herskowits, and as an old man by the director himself, who cuts a distinguished, Haneke-like figure with his white hair and trimmed beard. His father Jaime is played by the director’s son Brontis Jodorowsky, which lends the project an intriguingly Freudian flavour. (Until this moment, I thought the scene in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom in which the director dropped creepy-crawlies on his son’s pillow was the roughest father-son moment in cinema. But here Jodorowsky films a scene in which Jaime is tortured by the state police, and a naked Brontis Jodorowsky has electrodes attached to his testicles in full camera view. Ouch.)
Cannes 2013: La Danza de la Realidad (The Dance Of Reality) - first look review (The Guardian)
The Burning Ghat is a strange, yet revealing short film that reveals something of the relationship between original Beat, Herbert Huncke, and his long-time companion and room-mate, Louis Cartwright.
Huncke was a petty crook and junkie, who hustled around Times Square in the 1940s, where he met William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. It was Huncke who originally introduced these 3 young writers to the “Beat Life,” and became a major inspiration on their writing.
Louis Cartwright was a photographer (he took the portrait of Huncke above), drug addict and alleged pimp. According to Huncke, he was also someone not to be trusted. In 1994, Cartwright was stabbed to death, and his murder still remains unsolved.
The Burning Ghat was directed by James Rasin (Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar) and Jerome Poynton, and was filmed in Huncke’s apartment on Henry Street, New York.
Allen Ginsberg wrote of the film, “O Rare Herbert Huncke, live on film! The Burning Ghat features late-in-lifetime old partners Huncke & Louis playing characters beyond themselves with restrained solid self-awareness, their brief masquerade of soul climaxing in an inspired moment’s paradox bittersweet as an O’Henry’s tale’s last twist”.
Harry Smith said of the film, “It should have been longer”.
The Burning Ghat was featured at the 53rd Venice Biennial, and included in the Whitney Museum’s “Beat Culture and the New America” show of 1996. It won the Gold Plaque Award for Best Short Film at the 1990 Chicago International Film Festival.
Made the same year Huncke published his autobiography Guilty of Everything, this was to be his only on-screen, acting performance.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
‘Original Beats’: A film on Herbert Hunke and Gregory Corso
Out-takes from ‘Original Beats’ featuring Herbert Huncke, after the jump…
Wild. Singer/songwriter Joe Henry has co-written (along with his brother David) a biography of Richard Pryor entitled, Serious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World that Made Him, due out in November. If you’re familiar with Joe Henry’s work, then you already know why this is so cool and appropriate, but if not, then I’ll tell you…
If you don’t know who Richard Pryor was, well then, no wonder you think the universe is kind of boring and tedious. Richard Pryor was Chris Rock before Chris Rock was even born, unleashing his ferocious comedy to both white and black audiences in the 60s and 70s, way before it was “OK” to joke seriously about racial issues and about the experience of being an African American in a nation still trying to suppress the inevitable realization that its cultural roots were about as black as they were white.
Here’s Richard Pryor as the first black president of the US. Like a lot of Pryor’s comedy, you can’t quite see where it’s going until it gets there and, prior to arrival it veers into the surreal.
Wild, no? That’s from the 1970s and I’m thinking popular culture was actually somewhat less brittle back then. The ghost of left-wing culture hadn’t quite faded away yet, though of course in just a few years Reagan’s jackboots would stomp even that poor pitiful thing into the ground. Even in the early 1980s, after Pryor recovered from a disfiguring freebasing accident that left him badly burned and near death, the nation laughed when Pryor explained: “When I dunked the cookie in the milk, it exploded!”
Joe Henry, meanwhile, dedicated one of his better albums (Scar) to Pryor, and wrote one of the songs (”Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation”) in his voice. Here’s “Stop,” from that same album (If you are a Madonna fan, you may have noticed that this song has the same lyrics as “Don’t Tell Me” from her Music album, and indeed Henry wrote those lyrics. Joe Henry is, bizarrely enough, Madonna’s brother-in-law (married to her sister Melanie) and also wrote the Baywatch theme, but don’t hold that against him.)
Henry operates in a nominally popular idiom by placing scraps of jazz, rock, R&B and even country into the athanor of his songwriting craft and then melting them all down and shaping the resultant amalgam into the odd and sometimes frightening little homonculi that are his songs.
When Henry (or his “people”) made the announcement about Serious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World that Made Him on Facebook and his blog a couple of days ago, it came as both a surprise as well one of those things that seems obvious in retrospect. I’m stoked for the publication of this book and will almost certainly celebrate this news later with a bottle of Monday-night plonk and the very loud cranking of Joe Henry’s Blood From Stars album.
Here’s a rarity of sorts, of Henry singing (or pretending to be singing) the title track from hisTiny Voices album:
Waylon Jennings on The Johnny Cash Show in 1969. The country great was still clean-shaven here, but already moving in the direction of his “outlaw” country sound even then.
Here’s another shit hot live version of “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,” from what appears to be Hee Haw. I am currently monumentally obsessed by this song. I could play it on a loop for 24 hours. That fuckin’ guitar solo is sublime city, baby!
Here’s a link to Linda Ronstadt’s more Flying Burrito Brothers-ish sounding version of the song, rechristened “Only Mama That’ll Walk the Line,” a staple of her live show in the late 60’s.
In case you were wondering (and I know you were) the mega-hottie on keyboards is Jennings’ then newly-wed wife, Jessi Colter. Below, Jessi Colter performs her 1975 pop-country crossover hit, “I’m Not Lisa”:
Sad to hear this.
Via The Doors’ Facebook page:
Ray Manzarek, keyboardist and founding member of The Doors, passed away today at 12:31PM PT at the RoMed Clinic in Rosenheim, Germany after a lengthy battle with bile duct cancer. He was 74. At the time of his passing, he was surrounded by his wife Dorothy Manzarek, and his brothers Rick and James Manczarek.
Manzarek is best known for his work with The Doors who formed in 1965 when Manzarek had a chance encounter on Venice Beach with poet Jim Morrison. The Doors went on to become one of the most controversial rock acts of the 1960s, selling more than 100-million albums worldwide, and receiving 19 Gold, 14 Platinum and five multi-Platinum albums in the U.S. alone. “L.A.Woman,” “Break On Through to the Other Side,” “The End,” “Hello, I Love You,” and “Light My Fire” were just some of the band’s iconic and ground-breaking songs. After Morrison’s death in 1971, Manzarek went on to become a best-selling author, and a Grammy-nominated recording artist in his own right. In 2002, he revitalized his touring career with Doors’ guitarist and long-time collaborator, Robby Krieger.
“I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of my friend and bandmate Ray Manzarek today,” said Krieger. “I’m just glad to have been able to have played Doors songs with him for the last decade. Ray was a huge part of my life and I will always miss him.”
Manzarek is survived by his wife Dorothy, brothers Rick and James Manczarek, son Pablo Manzarek, Pablo’s wife Sharmin and their three children Noah, Apollo and Camille. Funeral arrangements are pending. The family asks that their privacy be respected at this difficult time. In lieu of flowers, please make a memoriam donation in Ray Manzarek’s name at www.standup2cancer.org
Below, a post-Jim Morrison Doors do “Love Me Two Times” on Germany’s Beat Club TV show, with Manzarek taking over the vocal duties:
Stick it up, mister!
Can you hear what I’m saying now, yeah?
Over the weekend, Toots and The Maytals were doing their version of John Denver’s “(Take Me Home) Country Roads” at the Dominion Riverrock festival—a song you’d think would go down a treat in Virginia—but an intoxicated moron identified by Richmond police as William Lewis, 19, had to go and ruin everyone’s good time by hurling a glass bottle at Toots Hibbert, hitting him right in the head. Hibbert was able to walk off the stage without help, but was rushed to the hospital where he was given seven stitches.
From Jamaican’s Music:
Speaking with The Gleaner, Andrea Davis, a member of Toots and the Maytals’ management team, noted that this was a first for the artiste but he remains in high spirit continuing the tour.
“This is the first ever. We have never had an incident like this. We have been travelling around the world for over 40 years and this has never happened,” she said. “It is a most unfortunate and unprecedented incident for an artiste of this stature.”
Lisa Sims, with Venture Richmond, the group that helps run Riverrock, explains that it’s mysterious as to how Lewis smuggled the bottle in the venue but measures have been taken to tighten loose ends.
“There are bag checks regularly,” Sims said. “You can’t just bring a big backpack in here full of stuff, and people aren’t looking at it. If there is any sort of incident or anything that gives us pause at any time, we obviously look at ways we might tighten things up,” she continued adding that the venue is reviewing its security procedures.
Police have arrested William Lewis, 19, and charged him with public intoxication and a felony count of aggravated assault.
A felony conviction for a class 6 assault in Virginia can mean one year in jail and a fine of $2500, on up to five years in a state prison. That this act of senseless violence was perpetrated in public, with literally dozens of witnesses able to finger him, and plenty of video, leaves William Lewis, 19, the “alleged” bottle-throwing tosser (see what I did there?) with quite a future ahead of him.
I hope it was worth it? Of all the people in the world worth having a bottle hit them over head, this dummy thought attacking the great Toots Hibbert, the hardest working man in reggae—now 67—was a good idea?
Here’s a link to the regrettable incident, caught on a cell phone. Hibbert went on to perform the next night in New York. Anyone with who witnessed the bottle throwing, or who has video of the event, is urged to contact Hibbert’s management at his Facebook page.
Below, Hibbert and his Maytals sing the classic, “54-46 That’s My Number” about his own time spent in prison for cannabis possession in 1966. Young Mr. Lewis needs this tune on his fucking iPod:
Henri le Chat Noir wishes he could get this kind of artistic cred
This beautiful 1944 silent film from husband-and-wife team Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid is quite possibly the only evidence we need that cats are the ultimate well-spring of creativity.
Deren and Hammid were both staples of the 1940s Greenwich Village avant-garde art scene. Deren, in particular, is considered a pioneer of film (and about 1,000 other artistic pursuits). Using their own cats in their own apartment, they chronicle the interior world of a cat “family,” and it’s just insanely compelling, even outside of the cat-lady milieu! A few short title cards loosely structure the trials and challenges of (and for) the new kittens. The tightness of the shots and attention to movement creates an intimacy with the viewer and the “performers.” While Deren and Hammid are most known for their first avant-garde film, Meshes in the Afternoon (which David Lynch cited as a major influence for Lost Highway), this lovely and weird little short is not to be overlooked.
Although credited solely to Hammid, it’s thought that Deren was more the director of the film, while Hammid did the shooting and the editing.
Via The Atlantic
