It’s been well over a month since I saw The Black Swan at The Austin Film Festival and the movie has been dancing in my brain ever since. In my review of the film for Dangerous Minds I praised its delirious fusion of the luridly psychedelic shocks of Dario Argento and the Technicolor spectacle of Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes. I could have and should have compared The Black Swan to the great Hammer Films and Corman’s A.I.P. Edgar Allen Poe flicks. The mere fact that I’m mentioning producers of classic horror films that haunted my youth, is testimony to the crafty genius of director Darren Aronofsky and his cinematographer Matthew Libatique. The Black Swan  earns its place alongside such venerable masterpieces of spooky atmospherics as Argento’s Suspiria, De Palma’s Sisters, Terence Fisher’s Dracula Prince Of Darkness and Roger Corman’s The Masque Of The Red Death. It’s that good.

Natalie Portman’s deeply nuanced, physically challenging performance is already the stuff of legend and she’ll undoubtedly receive all kinds of nominations and awards in the next few months.

From my review of 10/27/2010:

It’s rare for a film these days to actually be scary. Most contemporary horror flicks are repulsive rather than frightening, assaulting the viewer instead of seducing them. The Black Swan is jump-out-of-your-seat scary and it achieves its scares honestly, through evocative storytelling and crafty film making. In addition, it’s sexy as hell, full of gothic atmosphere and genuine eroticism - a fairytale for adults.”

The Black Swan opens nationwide tomorrow (Dec. 3). By all means see it.  It’s number 9 on my top ten films of 2010.

Previously on DM: Aronofsky channels Argento in gothic thriller ‘The Black Swan’

 
It’s so good to have friends with excellent and adventurous taste. My label mate Shannon Fields just introduced me to some of the most haunting and gorgeous sounds I’ve ever heard. Hamlet Gonashvili (1928 - 1985) was considered the voice of Georgia until he died at the height of his fame after falling from an apple tree. How’s that for a unique rock star death?  Accompanied here on Georgian TV by his ensemble of nattily dressed gents, Hamlet will break your heart with some of the most achingly lovely harmonies you’ll ever hear. i have no idea what they’re singing about but I assume it’s quite sad.
 

 
More Hamlet after the jump…

 
Gary Valentine (birth name Gary Lachman) was a founding member of Blondie, playing bass with the group from 1975 to ‘77. He wrote one of the band’s defining songs ‘X Offender’ and one of their biggest hits, ‘(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear’.  He went on to form his own band The Know in 1978 and briefly played guitar with Iggy Pop in 1981. 

Valentine became a dedicated writer in 1996 and published his first book ‘Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius’ in 2001. His memoir ‘New York Rocker: My Life in The Blank Generation’ is one of the few accounts of the NY punk scene that gets it right. Since then he’s published a series of books on the occult, philosophy, psychology, suicide and politics. In this interview with Cherry Red Records’ Iain McNay, Gary discusses his musical past and his life long interest in the inner workings of the human psyche.
 

Flying Lotus
 
To call any one event in Los Angeles “party of the year” might be stretching it a bit. But what certainly looks to be the party of the month, is coming up soon with Cornerstone Research Collective’s fundraiser for MAPS and psychedelic chemist Sasha Shulgin’s medical bills on December 11th at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

With a formidable line-up including Madlib, J-Rocc, Flying Lotus and (former Dangerous Minds contributor) Elvin Estela AKA DJ Nobody, this bash for a good cause featuring LA’s hottest underground musical talent simply can’t be beat. This party is going to be a monster.

Where: The Historic Masonic Lodge, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 600 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, CA 90038

When: Saturday Decemenber 11th, 9p.m. to 3a.m. Free parking on site. $25 in advance, $35 on the door. Get tickets here before they all sell out.
 

Above, Madlib, looking for his spliff.

 
This live action take on Wiley E. Coyote and The Roadrunner cartoons by Apache Pictures is fun. The actor playing the Roadrunner actually looks a bit like the original.

I don’t know if this is part of a showreel or the beginning of a viral campaign for an energy drink. Whatever it is, it works.

Shot on location in Moab, Utah
 

Photo by Gianfranco Mantegna
 
The fine folks at Arthur, who have valiantly kept alive such ultra rare counterculture gems as Ira Cohen’s amazing short, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, and visual documentation of the Living Theatre’s infamous “Paradise Now” happening, has this brief excerpt from Keith Richards’ new autobiography, Life, where the human riff mentions The Living Theatre. Page 221:

“Anita [Pallenberg] and I went to Rome that spring and summer [1967], between the bust and the trials, where Anita played in Barbarella, with Jane Fonda, directed by Jane’s husband Roger Vadim. Anita’s Roman world centered around The Living Theatre, the famous anarchist-pacifist troupe run by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, which had been around for years but was coming into its own in this period of activism and street demos. The Living Theatre was particularly insane, hard-core, its players often getting arrested on indecency charges—they had a play [“Paradise Now”] in which they recited lists of social taboos at the audience, for which they usually got a night in the slammer. Their main actor, a handsome black man named Rufus Collins, was a friend of Robert Fraser, and they were a part of the Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga connection. And so it all went round in a little avant-garde elite, as often as not drawn together by a taste for drugs, of which the LT was a center. And drugs were not copious in those days. The Living Theatre was intense, but it had glamour. There were all those beautiful people attached, like Donyale Luna, who was the first famous black model in America, and Nico and all those girls who were hovering around. Donyale Luna was with one of the guys from the theater. Talk about a tiger, a leopard, one of the most sinuous chicks I’ve ever seen. Not that I tried or anything. She obviously had her own agenda. And all backlit by the beauty of Rome, which gave it an added intensity…”

 
Buy the Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika DVD at the Arthur store.

This is kinda wow. Alex Heller‘s beautiful film of one lonely doll’s desperate attempt to be accepted by a group of Barbies, may not sound like a winner, but trust me it is.

It’s made from 1,554 images, shot on a Nikon D60, and bound together by the blissful sound of Belgium’s Scala & Kolacny Brothers - which, I might add, is an odd title for a choir of female singers, who are conducted and accompanied by two brothers, Stijn and Steven, and hence, no doubt, the name.

As for Ms. Heller, well her biog on Vimeo says:

Seventeen. Trapped in the suburbs. I root for the underdog.

Well, I root for you, Ms Heller. You’re talented and deserve all success.
 

 
With thanks to Seamus McGarvey
 

‘All I Want for Christmas’ Science Gallery Greeting Card. Design by Shaun O’Boyle and Luke McManus. Inside message: Season’s Greetings. Card size: 210cm x 148.5cm.

This ‘All I Want for Christmas’ greeting card from Science Gallery is guaranteed to totally baffle your relatives this holiday season. Try it out. The card sells for €2.50.

(via BB Submitterator)

 
The National dug themselves out of their downtown apartments and sauntered onto the streets of New York City and wandered across the midlands to Europe and beyond with 2010’s High Violet .

The claustrophobia and paranoia of previous National albums gives way to an expansive melancholia and world weary beauty in High Violet that recalls a woozy marriage between the romanticism of Leonard Cohen and the gloomy gorgeousness of Joy Division and The Stranglers circa ‘Golden Brown’ and ‘Always The Sun’. Lead singer/lyricist Matt Berninger constantly teeters on the edge of exhaustion and exhilaration, observing the world thru a mesh of dream and grim reality - love among the ruins. When the heaviness starts to get too heavy, The National lighten the load with melodies that can make even the dourest of drunks swoon.

As gothic and sumptous as a Patrick McGrath novel, High Violet is my choice for one of the best albums of 2010 at number 9.

You said it was night inside my heart, it was
You said it should tear a kid apart, it does

 
Suicide’s Alan Vega interviewed for Tony Oursler’s Synesthesia Project.

The Synesthesia Project was a series of filmed interviews shot between 1997 and 2001 by artist Tony Oursler. Among the musicians featured were John Cage, Thurston Moore, Lydia Lunch and David Byrne.
 

 
Through the cunning use of motion detectors and ye olde MAX/MSP software, composer Alexander Schubert and violinist Barbara Lüneburg create quite the arresting spectacle. Greatly expanding the vocabulary of the lone fiddler to nearly god-like proportions, every gesture of the performer is amplified and extended both visually and sonically. It works.
 

 
Much thanks to Gregory Ward

 
Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore: A Tribal History, has uploaded 911 hardcore tracks of his favorite bands for free.  Some of the artists include: Flipper, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Dicks, Butthole Surfers, Cro-Mags and more!

Travel on over to 24 Hours of Hardcore compiled by Steven Blush and download the goodness while it lasts. 

Side note from Steven: “COPYRIGHT HOLDERS: I will delete your tracks at your request.”

(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

 
“As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.”—Luke 17

We covered crazy old coot, Harold Camping last year around this time when Camping and his dim-witted followers/employees announced that the Rapture was coming on May 21, 2011. Of course, Mr. Camping has made incorrect predictions in the past about the end of the world, but this hasn’t stopped him from trying again (hey, a stopped clock is right twice a day, isn’t it?). This time Camping is SO SURE that he got the math right, that he and his followers/employees have announced an aggressive advertising campaign with tee-shirts, tracts, postcards, stickers, outdoor advertising and even e-Bibles that the younger set can use on their iThingees.

Family Radio Inc., Camping’s company has also set up WeCanKnow.com, where you can learn all about the various ways the great man figured out when the Rapture would take place. How convenient that this is all happening when Camping himself is only 88-years-young. If his batshit crazy wish fulfillment nonsense turns out to be correct, HE’LL NEVER HAVE TO DIE. (And what’s more, when the Rapture comes, he’ll be young again! All the people in Heaven are in their prime. We know this because a kid who had an NDE told Gretchen Carlson all about it on Fox News!).

It’s all just a matter of simple math! From The Tennessean:

According to Camping’s prediction, the Rapture will happen exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about the flood. He said the flood happened in 4990 B.C., on what would have been May 21 in the modern calendar. God gave Noah one week of warning.

Since one day equals 1,000 years for God, that means there was a 7,000-year interval between the flood and rapture.

Got it?

Billboards like the one above are about to start appearing in Louisville, St. Louis, Detroit, Little Rock, Omaha, Kansas City, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Bridgeport, Conn. There are already 40 such signs in the Nashville area alone. Family Radio Inc., will also be sending RVs around the country with witnesses for Camping’s Rapture date prediction.

I look at it this way: I’d love it if Camping were correct and all the Christians (including Sarah Palin, the Teabaggers, Bryan Fischer, etc) get whisked up to Heaven en masse with Baby Jesus and assigned their fucking harps. We’d all wake up in a much saner world on May 22, 2011, if you ask me. Good riddance.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
2012 is for Suckers, part 2: Old Coot says Rapture nigh

 
These clips of The Ramones and The Dead Boys at CBGB in 1977 capture the birth of punk in all of its raw glory. Taken from the film Punking Out directed by Maggi Carson and Ric Shore, this is the scene as I remember it: unpretentious, fun, full of energy and kind of goofy.

Punking Out is a terrific time capsule of a time and place and really should be more widely seen. You can order a DVD copy at the film’s website.  The site hasn’t been updated in a few years, but the ‘shopping cart’ appears to still be functioning.

Dee Dee’s glue rant is hilarious.
 

 
If you generally detest today’s pop music, you may be sick of hearing Janelle Monae’s name so much. And considering that she’s firmly inside the music industry machine, it’d be hard to blame you.

But unlike many women in the pop and R&B realm, the girl has pretty confidently determined and shaped her own music and visual style. Synthesizing new rock and traditional soul into the kind of futuristic brew her foreparents David Bowie and Grace Jones served up back in the day, Monae’s still got the aesthetic zeitgeist at her back.

Let’s hope she retains the integrity and panache shown below. This video is excerpted from an appearance she made in the summer of 2007, just as she released her first EP on her Wondaland Arts Society label. And even though she was already officially signed to the megalith Bad Boy label, she saw fit to play the independent Criminal Records store in the Little 5 Points district of her adopted Atlanta hometown with her guitarist Kellindo Parker. Aaaand she tore it up.

Whatever happens to Monae’s career going forward—sometimes it pays to brace for disappointment, sell-out fuckery, etc.—we’ll be able to recount a time when she seemed like the future of pop. Go girl.
 

 
More Janelle getting real after the jump…