The Stuff is an eighties cult movie made by director Larry Cohen. It’s was a perennial grindhouse flick of the decade, although I personally saw it for the first time in the hallowed halls of Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, during a festival of Cohen’s films. The Stuff is the story of a tofutti-like substance that bubbles out from the ground, and tastes great. Everyone who tries The Stuff, can’t get enough… but are they eating The Stuff or is The Stuff eating them?
 

 
The Stuff was made on a low budget with several familiar faces like Garrett Morris (from the original cast of SNL), Paul Sorvino, Danny Aiello, Brooke Adams and Andrea Marcovicci. It has several fake commercials that looked quite real at the time cut in throughout the movie that up the camp value considerably.  The Stuff is as much an anti-consumerist rant as it is a horror film. That’s why it’s so much fun. Check it out, it’s one of the better, more entertaining cult movies out there.  It’s actually way smarter than the trailer below indicates.

Read more on The Stuff at the the House of Self-Indulgence blog. where The Stuff is described as: “A cautionary tale for all those who enjoy consuming dessert products on a regular basis, The Stuff is a hokey horror farce that manages to skewer everything from mindless consumerism to cold war paranoia, and yet, still be a movie about homicidal yogurt not from outer space.” Elsewhere on the web I saw the film describe as “yogurt product comes to life, causing devastation.”
 

Thanks to Soft Skull Press for sending me an advance paperback copy of Daniel Radosh’s “Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.” This book is righteously demented—true to the title, it’s a voyage through the bizarre world of Christian pop culture, in a time where it is essentially one more underground scene, a pocket pop universe just like juggalos or furries (though slightly bigger—as Radosh points out, this stuff totals up to a $7 billion a year industry). Radosh takes us on a voyage through the cult of Left Behind, Christian rock, and the rest of the American Christian scene. Along the way we get some serious gems like “BibleZine” (!!!), bumper stickers reading “Any Sex that can Put You in Hell ISN’T SAFE” and Jay Bakker (Jim and Tammy’s son), who runs his own punk rock church.

I mean, reading this, it’s like… this is the alternate universe version of Dangerous Minds’ readers, like we went into a wormhole and came out with goatees and freshly baptized.

There are some absolutely jaw-droppingly great snippets of “Christian” lore from the book. For instance, Radosh includes a depiction of the Rapture from one of the “Left Behind” books:

“[M]en and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin… Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.

Gloria in excelsis Deo, motherfucker.

Awesome. Or try this one, from a Christian joke book Radosh finds:

One women’s libber started out a speech: “Where would you men be without us women?” A guy in the back shouted, “In the Garden of Eden!”

I gotta remember that one to impress the ladies with.

Anyway, excellent, hilarious, disturbing, sobering book. I imagine it would make a great read alongside Jeff Sharlet’s “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power” for a look at where the Christian right is, both in politics and in culture at large, at this moment. (Interview with author below!)

(Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture)

(Via Digg)

 
Before finding fame as Clark Griswald, a 24 year-old Chevy Chase was living his rock n’ roll dream as the keyboardist/drummer for Boston psychedelic band Chamaeleon Church.  Their sole album appeared on the MGM label in 1968 and was marketed as part of the Bosstown Sound that included other lysergic warriors from the area Ultimate Spinach, Orpheus, Beacon Street Union, Phulph, Eden’s Children, and Puff. 

Although the marketing plan back-fired, as the press deemed the whole scene as nothing more than record label hype, the albums made by the Bosstown groups contain many gems including this harmony-laden winner Camillia is Changing.  Produced by the ultra-prolific Alan Lorber, who also master-minded the whole Bosstown gimmick, the song has the usual 1968 flourishes and some killer harmonies, which I am sure Chase’s perfect pitch lent to extensively.

Before playing with the Church, Chase jammed with school friends Walter Becker and Donald Fagan in The Leather Canaries, who of course would find fame sans Chevy as Steely Dan.  Although his music career didn’t quite pan out, Chase simultaneously worked with an underground comedian gang called Channel One that would lead to his eventual TV and comedy career.
 

 
There are American icons and then there are American icons. And Bruce Springsteen is surely one of them. The kind you don’t mess with if you know what’s good for you. He’s the Boss and… you’re not, OK? Get it? Got it? Good.

Apparently Glenn Beck never got that memo because on his radio show Thursday, the Joseph McCarthy-loving, blubbering Fox News personality decided to read the lyrics to “Born in the U.S.A.” in a monotone voice similar to how William Shatner infamously declaimed Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” This is a tune Ronald Reagan tried to commandeer for his 1984 reelection campaign, a move rebuffed by Springsteen, the son of a union member.

According to Beck, the song is un-American.

“Born down in a dead man’s town,” read Beck to the listeners of his March 11 radio program. “The first kick I took was when I hit the ground. You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much. ‘Til you spend half your life just covering up.”

Here’s what Beck had to say about the famous song afterward:

That’s what it’s all about.That’s what America’s all about, according to Springsteen…. It’s time for us to wake, wake up, out of our, um, dream state. Wake up out of the propaganda. The, you know, this is the thing that, people who come from the Soviet-bloc or Cuba, they’re all saying, “How do you guys not hear this? How do you not see this?” Well, that’s ‘cause we don’t ever expect it.

The Boss… un-American? Bruce Springsteen? Is that what Beck is trying to say? Now I could offer some snarky commentary—that’s my job, I’m a blogger after all—but it’s totally pointless when discussing Beck, someone I could call “nuts” and the copy desk at the Los Angeles Times will probably let it sail right past because it’s not like it’s an opinion!

And that’s not all. In January, Beck “analyzed” the Utopian lyrics of the Beatles’ “Revolution” and concluded that the song illustrated Liberal plans to slowly bring Marxism to America.

Glenn, wouldn’t that have been, uh, Lennonism? And I hate to remind you that Charles Manson saw hidden messages in Beatle songs too.

Cross posting this from Brand X

Tim Weiner on the dark history of the CIA, including the recent revelation of CIA suicide agents.

(Via Fora.tv)

(Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion)

 
Who doesn’t want a fuck-shit-stack? I do! Obviously NSFW.
 
Thank you Taylor Jessen!

 
Edin Velez‘s “Butoh: Dance of Darkness” is a mind-altering must-see film about the modern Japanese dance form. I can’t in any way profess to understand
exactly what’s happening here, but I do know that it hits me on a visceral level like no other form of dance I’ve ever encountered. It certainly works as a wonderful antidote to the ennui caused by viewing the contrived, over-cooked bullshit spectacle of that new Lady Gaga vid (gee Brad, how do you really feel about that?). See the whole film here.
 

 
via Max Hattler

1925 (aka Hell) is one of two animation loops directed by Max Hattler, inspired by the work of French outsider artist Augustin Lesage. 1925 is based on Lesage’s painting ‘A symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World’ from 1925.
The second loop, 1923 (aka Heaven), is based on Lesage’s painting ‘A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World’ from 1923 and can be found here

This premiered just now. Please, Dangerous Minds readers, please—explain to me what I just saw!?!?!?

(Watch big here.)

(The Fame Monster [Deluxe Edition])

(Special Bonus: 4chan thread on video here, while it lasts!)

“Chess Set” by Jack Jake and Dinos Chapman
 
(via Design Boom)

 
James “Bucks” Burnett is a “collector.” He used to write the Mr. Ed Fan Club newsletter and he managed the one and only Tiny Tim. Now he wants to open an eight-track museum.

From the WSJ:

“There are only two choices. A world with an eight-track museum and a world without an eight-track museum,” he says. “I choose with.”

Shortly after the show, the planners of a music conference in Denton, a music-loving college town about 40 miles north of Dallas, made Mr. Burnett an offer. They would find him a vacant space and pay $4,000 to build a temporary museum for a one-month run beginning Friday.

Mr. Burnett accepted and is readying his collection for another display, this time in a former lingerie factory in Denton. He plans to showcase and play a few hundred tapes, including a baby-blue copy of The Who’s “Tommy,” a copy of the “Easy Rider” soundtrack with sun-bleached cover art signed by Peter Fonda and a rare copy of Lou Reed’s 1975 avant-garde homage to noise called “Metal Machine Music.”

Play It Again: Promoter Has One-Track Mind About Eight Tracks (WSJ)

[Pleased to say I own a copy of Metal Machine Music on 8-track. Displayed proudly on my book shelf. I think it might be the first or second oldest possession I have, dating to when I was probably ten years old. I think it cost a dollar, still sealed, at a white trash department store my mother shopped at in Wheeling, WV.]

 
This is the second major strike this week. All news broadcasts and public services—including schools and all public transportation—were canceled and even the police and fireman—who cannot strike—let it be known that their sympathies were with the people. Additionally there was a huge protest last Friday that involved tear gas and a lot of property destruction. Keep it up, Greece!

More on the riots in Greece from the Telegraph:

The strike grounded all flights and brought public transport to a halt. State hospitals were left with emergency staff only and all news broadcasts were suspended as workers walked off the job for 24 hours to protest spending cuts and tax hikes designed to tackle the country’s debt crisis.

Riot police fired tear gas to disperse rock-throwing protesters at one point of the demonstration as more than 10,000 strikers and protesters marched through central Athens, banging drums and chanting slogans such as “no sacrifice for plutocracy,” and “real jobs, higher pay.” People draped banners from apartment buildings reading: “No more sacrifices, war against war.”

The demonstrators included a group of about 100 youths wearing crash helmets and ski masks, some of whom smashed windows of a department store and bank, and sprayed riot police with brown paint. Shopkeepers along the demonstration route scrambled to roll down their shutters, while a few blocks away, people sat at outdoor restaurants, continuing their meals.

This semiotic overload brought to you by Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Robocop (20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition)

 
Why in the world would any respectable company want to associate their product with a sociopathic sack of shit like Glenn Beck? And what ad buyer at which advertising agency would be dumb enough in 2010 to tell their client they should be purchasing advertising on the Glenn Beck show?!?! Whoever sold TurboTax on the idea should be drummed out of the advertising business for good. What fucking idiocy.

Nice work over at the StopBeck blog. Note how fast it was for TurboTax to pull out:

On March 9th, TurboTax advertisements began running on Glenn Beck’s show on the Fox News Channel.  Participants in the StopBeck effort promptly sprang to action.  Less than 24 hours later, TurboTax announced that they would be pulling their advertisements from Glenn Beck’s show.

This brings the total number of advertisers to drop Glenn Beck to 120.  On a related note, the broadcast of Glenn Beck’s show in the U.K. has been running without any advertisers for over a month now.

TurboTax’s statement:

Thanks everyone for your feedback, & for reminding us of what we value. We’ve pulled advertising from the Glenn Beck show.