Found myself watching last week Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. Without wanting to comment too much on it beyond saying it’s no Heavenly Creatures or LOTR, I can say its Brian Eno score was a definite highlight.
A soundtrack for Bones has never been released, a fact that drove me nuts because I’ve been playing non-stop the above, suspiciously Eno-esque track, “The Moon’s Lament,” attributed to the apparently Google-proof band “Cindy D’lequez-Sage.”
Buried no less in the closing credits, it’s a gorgeous, haunting piece of music with some seriously spooky lyrics. Is it Eno himself? Will the real Cindy D’lequez-Sage please stand up?!
Author Ted Cox’s last gig saw him going undercover at a “furry” camp. His next assignment brought him to Phoenix, Arizona, and “Journey into Manhood,” a Christian-backed weekend retreat designed to help gay men go straight.
In the guise of an SSA (same-sex attracted Christian man), Cox, who’s both straight and an atheist, experienced everything from the “Motorcycle” position, to having erections pressed into his back.
He also happened to witness a fellow retreater taking a baseball bat to a dummy of his own father and beating the shit out of it. Cox’s motivations for going incognito were, to say the least, complicated:
First, I was raised in the Mormon church, which has taken the lead against equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians. It’s been ten years since I left Mormonism, and I feel a particular need to stand up against the church’s well-funded opposition to marriage equality.
Second, while the ex-gay movement has publicly declared that they can bring “freedom from homosexuality,” there’s no evidence that someone can change his or her orientation through these religiously motivated programs. Rather than turning straight, the men and women that I met throughout this project dealt with a cycle of repression, backsliding into sin, then shame, guilt, and repentance.
Third, these programs are dangerous. Ex-gay watchdog groups document the stories of men who, after years of failed attempts to become straight, resort to suicide.
As reads go, it’s long, but definitely worthwhile. A short segment with Cox on Fox News follows below:
Indian patient Prahlad Jani claims he has survived without food and water for more than seven decades.
Currently being held in isolation by India’s Defense Research Development Organization, Prahlad Jani has now gone six days without food or water and has yet to demonstrate any signs of hunger or thirst (he hasn’t crapped or peed either). Doctors feel the long-practicing “breatharian” might possess some hidden “key” that will help save lives. And by “lives,” they mean, naturally, military lives:
Mr Jani is regarded as a breatharian who can live on a ‘spiritual life-force’ alone. He believes he is sustained by a goddess who pours an ‘elixir’ through a hole in his palate. His claims have been supported by an Indian doctor who specializes in studies of people who claim supernatural abilities, but he has also been dismissed by others as a “village fraud.”
India’s Defence Research Development Organisation, whose scientists develop drone aircraft, intercontinental ballistic missiles and new types of bombs believe Mr Prahlad could teach them to help soldiers survive longer without food, or disaster victims to hang on until help arrives. “If his claims are verified, it will be a breakthrough in medical science,” said Dr G Ilavazhagan, director of the Defence Institute of Physiology & Allied Sciences. “We will be able to help save human lives during natural disasters, high altitude, sea journeys and other natural and human extremities. We can educate people about the survival techniques in adverse conditions with little food and water or nothing at all.”
A short documentary on Prahlad Jani and breatharianism follows below:
A collection of twenty of the most-viewed YouTube reaction videos were downloaded and then edited to start at the same time. This was possible by listening for the start of the audio for the 2 Girls 1 Cup video. Each of these videos were then processed to collect data about optical flow and volume.
Dangerous Minds pal Rod Stanley sent me this item, from Dazed Digital, about photographer Ruth Bayer’s new self-published book of her pictures of people getting high on amyl nitrate, appropriately titled Poppers:
Dazed Digital: Why did you want to do this poppers project?
Ruth Bayer: I spent a couple years in San Francisco, and used to go to a lot of clubs. There was a fair amount of poppers use going on, and I became fascinated with the visual effect it had on the user. I decided to try to capture that. I started the project by photographing friends and acquaintances, but the majority of shots came from one Saturday night at a club called “Duckie”, at the Vauxhall Tavern in south London. The club organiser offered me a small room upstairs (the landlord’s bathroom, actually), which I turned into a studio. There was a constant stream of volunteers, and we could have carried on all night. Each shoot only lasted a minute or two.
DD: How did the room smell afterwards?
Ruth Bayer: Well it’s sold as ‘room odoriser’, and it certainly did that! It was a small bathroom. But I think I’d built-up a tolerance because people were coming in saying, “God, how can you breathe in here?” I’m glad no one lit a match, put it that way.
DD: What do you think is interesting about the visual effect of the drug?
Ruth Bayer: It makes people look very sexy – a lot of it is to do with the dilated eyes and increased sensual awareness the chemical causes.
Read the entire interview (includes gallery) at Dazed Digital
People sometimes ask, “Is the universe a black hole?” Or worse, they claim: “The universe is a black hole!” No, it’s not, and it’s worth getting this one straight.
If there’s any quantitative reasoning behind the question (or claim), it comes from comparing the amount of matter within the observable universe to the radius of the observable universe, and noticing that it looks a lot like the relationship between the mass of a black hole and its Schwarzschild radius. That is: if you imagine taking all the stuff in the universe and putting it into one place, it would make a black hole the size of the universe. Slightly more formally, it looks like the the universe satisfies the hoop conjecture, so shouldn’t it form a black hole?
But a black hole is not “a place where a lot of mass has been squeezed inside its own Schwarzschild radius.” It is, as Wikipedia is happy to tell you, “a region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape.” The implication being that there is a region outside the black hole from which things could at least imagine escaping to. For the universe, there is no such outside region. So at a pretty trivial level, the universe is not a black hole.
She’s baaaaaaack. Yes, one of the world’s greatest living artists (and I say that without hyperbole), Julie Heffernan, has a sumptuous new show opening called “Boy, O Boy.” It consists of her signature, fecund self-portraits, only this time she reimagines herself as a male youth. As someone who is guilty of gravitating toward female-focused works myself, I must say it is refreshing to see the idea of gender and art played with - and in such a splendidly beautiful way. The show is up at PPOW Gallery from April 29th to June 5th, and is absolutely not to be missed.
Arthur mag’s Jay Babcock takes on Julian Cope, the Archlord of All Pagan Psychedelia and a Dangerous Minds patron saint. (This is a reprint of an LAWeekly article from 2000.)
Because we have our own aural tradition and need for congregation with like minds . . . because we can’t, not all of us, get our knickers in a twist about the muffler-rock of Testosterostock 2000 (Metallica, Korn and Kid Rock at the Coliseum, July 15, mark your calendars!) . . . because the airwaves are clean and there‘s nobody singing to me . . . Because of all that, I find myself here in London, jet-lagged and double-lagered, listening to Julian Cope.
Yes, that Julian Cope. Ex-leader of the Teardrop Explodes, the early-’80s Liverpudlian post-punk group with a sizable cult following. Solo artist with a minor pre-alternative hit (the anthemic “World Shut Your Mouth”). A petulant, paranoid near-rock star freakoid who in true “VH1 Behind the Music” fashion succeeded in alienating his band, his fans, his record label and, finally, himself before a series of revelations in 1989 shifted him in a newly “aware” direction.
Cope went hypernova and deep-historical—from town frier to town crier, from “Saint Julian” to “The Arch-Drood,” from Syd Barrett-esque acid-gobbler to full-throttle goddess-worshippin‘ Mystic Brother No. 1, becoming a self-conscious subscriber to Dadaist artist Hugo Ball’s dictum that “Artists are Gnostics, and practice what the priests think is long forgotten.” Now confident in his role as “Shamanic Rock & Rolling Inner-Space Cadet,” Cope released an extraordinary series of artistically ambitious albums on Island (and, later, American) that, in the music-industry scheme of things, were underperforming commercial failures, and he ended up without a major-label recording contract.
Back in 2001, filmmaker Liz Canner (Deadly Embrace: Nicaragua, The World Bank and International Monetary Fund) took a job editing erotic videos for a pharmaceutical company. Like most jobs probably involving pornography and drugs, it wasn’t at all what she thought it’d be cracked up to be:
Her employer is developing what they hope will be the first Viagra drug for women that wins FDA approval to treat a new disease: Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD). Liz gains permission to film the company for her own documentary. Initially, she plans to create a movie about science and pleasure but she soon begins to suspect that her employer, along with a cadre of other medical companies, might be trying to take advantage of women (and potentially endanger their health) in pursuit of billion dollar profits. ORGASM INC. is a powerful look inside the medical industry and the marketing campaigns that are literally and figuratively reshaping our everyday lives around health, illness, desire — and that ultimate moment: orgasm.
Welles says he was ashamed of it and called it, “a rather tawdry device…a dollar-book Freudian gag.” The complete Paris interview runs about an hour. 10 minutes of it follows below:
“If you’re going to show it, make sure it’s worth seeing.” Thank you, internet, you’ve once again answered my prayers! On my “Penis Pants Fridays,” no longer will I bend over, ashamed, for a can of baked beans at TJ’s!
The Backtacular Gluteal Cleft Shield, created by designer Kimberly Brewer, is a stylish cover that prevents any unfortunate butt-crack revelations. Made of hypo-allergenic denim, and decorated with studs and rhinestones for added bling, the Backtacular Gluteal Cleft Shield is applied directly to the skin, and sits above the waistband protecting the wearer’s modesty and morals like a tiny, fashionable nun.
Slightly late notice, but there’s still time to make it, British author-comedian, co-creator and co-star of the brilliant Look Around You (and now a visiting South Park writer) Robert Popper will be playing and discussing some of his favorite prank phone calls. I’m assuming he’ll be giving special attention to the classic “enraged Gordon Brown throws a tangerine” call, but I hope he’ll also play the tape of the time he pretended to be Baroness Margaret Thatcher calling the House of Lords to find her missing apples. It’s my favorite. I laughed until I cried when I first heard this. From the man himself:
If you’re in Los Angeles tonight, I’m going to be playing a few of my phone calls at the Cinefamily Cinema, 611 N Fairfax Ave, West Hollywood, at 10:30pm. It’s an event open to members, but if you’re not a member, just turn up and use the password – which is/are ‘Lithium based batteries’. And it’s free.
It seems that someone’s had a lil’ change of heart where it comes to social media. Known for his radio and television speeches which can go on and on and on and on, Venezuelan el Presidente Hugo Chavez will be forced to learn a little brevity when he starts Twittering. Can Twitter’s 140 character limit accommodate the loquacious leader?
In January Mr Chavez said that using Twitter, the internet and text messaging to criticism his regime was “terrorism.”
He has now decided to use the social networking tool for his own purposes.
“Comandante Chavez is going to open his Twitter account soon to wage the battle online,” Diosdado Cabello, director of Venezuela’s state-run telecommunications agency, said on Venezuelan television, according to Bloomberg News.
“I’m sure he’ll break records for numbers of followers.”
And he’ll probably prove to be much more interesting than Ashton Kutcher or John Mayer!
