First up, a “trash compactor” cut of the incredibly earnest Christian anti-porn film, Every Young Man’s Battle.

My favorite part comes when the fat kid invites the guilty ginger… er, wanker (not that he seems like a bad person, I’m just being descriptive here) over to his [most assuredly no girls allowed] porn-watching party and then excuses himself to pick up “some special buzz juice, if you catch my drift...”

Oh, but we do.
 

 
If that taster wasn’t enough for you, please feel free to watch the entire thing below. Dig the football coach guy explaining to the boys how to go on the defense against yanking their cranks. And that sublime Ted Bundy interview conducted by Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, on the very day before he was executed in 1989.

Porn leads straight to death row! Heavy-handed much? Nah!

Every Young Man’s Battle was produced in 2003, but it’s so dated that it seems like something made ten years earlier. It’s worth mentioning that many Bundy biographers cite multiple instances of him saying that he had almost no interest whatsoever in pornography. The Dobson interview is considered by many to be Bundy’s final chance to manipulate the public’s perception (and why Dobson, specifically, was granted the interview). Bundy also blamed alcohol and brainwashing by the TV as reasons why he became a serial killer, so take his confession here with a hefty dollop of salt.
 

 
Via Christian Nightmares

 
Much like the “Hitler Reacts” videos, I’m pretty certain this “Walt gives Hank the wrong CD” will surely become a thing (if it hasn’t already).

I wasn’t all that much of a Malcolm in the Middle fan, BUT… I do remember this epic and totally unforgettable scene with Bryan Cranston.

“Heisenberg” would shit himself if he knew he accidentally gave Hank this!

 
Via reddit

 
Buster Keaton said his first appearance on-stage was inspired by a desire to take part in the fun his parents seemed to be having. Keaton was just nine-months-old when he crawled on from the wings, and encouraged by the audience’s laughter, planted himself between his father’s legs, where he played peek-a-boo with the smiling faces.

His parents, Joe and Myra Keaton were part of traveling medicine show. For a time they were partners with a magician and escapologist called Harry Houdini. Joe told jokes, sang songs, Harry astonished the audience with his tricks, while Myra played the saxophone and acted out roles in the short plays they produced. Houdini was a witness to Buster’s first dramatic entrance.

Aged six-months, Buster fell head-over-heels down a steep flight of stairs in an hotel. Thinking the infant hurt (or worse dead), Houdini rushed to the child and was shocked to find the baby gurgling with laughter. Houdini told Joe and Myra, “That’s some buster your baby took!” Buster was the term for a theatrical prat-fall or stunt. Thereafter, the name “Buster” stuck with the young Joseph Frank Keaton.

Whether the story’s true or not it was repeated so often and printed in so many newspapers that it became “true.” When Buster was three, he was carried-off by a cyclone, which deposited him, unharmed, several blocks away.

Buster’s father was an able PR man, who recognized in his son the opportunity to create an act and garner considerable column inches. The stories about Buster and his misadventures appeared all over America. These were clipped and kept by his mother in the family scrapbook. Buster’s addition relaunched the family act as The Three Keatons.

“Keep your eye on the kid,” ran their tag-line. The act was a variation on the infant Buster’s desire to join his parents on stage, only this time Joe would throw the child across the stage, kick-him like a football into the audience, and swing him like a toy over his head—just like the cartoon antics of Homer and Bart Simpson. In front of the audience this may have all seemed like one happy act, but backstage Joe was equally abusive and violent, but this time for real, to his bread-winning son.

Because of his age, Buster was banned from performing certain States. This led to Joe duping the authorities by having Buster dressed as an adult, given a false beard, and described in the billing as “a midget.” It worked. This was Buster Keaton’s entry into his life of show business.

In 1965, Keaton made The Railrodder a two-reeler film in the style of his classic silent movies, for the National Film Board of Canada (in conjunction with Canadian National Railways). The making of this film was in turn documented in a short film called Buster Keaton Rides Again, in which Keaton gave incredible insight into filmmaking and comedy, and discussed his career as an actor, writer and director.
 

 
After the jump, Buster Keaton in ‘The Railrodder’...
 

 
Terry Meeuwsen, the former Miss America who is Robertson’s long-suffering 700 Club TV co-host, demonstrates in this segment why she’s probably paid top dollar as she valiantly tries to corral this demented old codger from making an ass of himself in public. Again.

Via Right Wing Watch:

Despite Meeuwsen’s best attempts to steer the conversation away from Robertson’s anti-gay paranoia, Robertson insisted that gay people use special rings to transmit the virus.

“You know what they do in San Francisco, some in the gay community there they want to get people so if they got the stuff they’ll have a ring, you shake hands, and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger,” Robertson said. “Really. It’s that kind of vicious stuff, which would be the equivalent of murder.”

Robertson remarks were completely edited out of the version posted online by the Christian Broadcasting Network.
 

 
This is a guest editorial by Allan Sheahen, the author of the new book Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security (Palgrave/MacMillan, NYC). A previous essay from Mr. Sheahen, “Jobs are not the answer: The BIG idea that libertarians and socialists alike can agree on?” was published at Dangerous Minds last week and proved to be very popular.

America is awash with money.

Yet poverty continues to grow.

Does anybody care?

The latest government figures show that 46 million Americans live in poverty, more than at any other time in our nation’s history. That’s 15.1 percent of our population. One in five children live below the poverty line of $22,314 for a family of four, compared to one in twelve in France and one in 38 in Sweden.

Yet whenever elected officials ask their constituents what issues are most important to them, poverty isn’t even on the list. The economy, jobs, Afghanistan, the environment, health care, and education always show up. But not poverty.

Accordingly, Congress is now debating not whether to cut food stamps for the poorest Americans, but by how much.  The Senate is proposing $4 billion in cuts. The House wants to cut $20 billion. Many Democrats are supporting the Senate version.

More than a half-million people are homeless in America. Food banks and homeless shelters are serving more people now than a year ago.  Unemployment is at 7.6 percent.

The problem is that all the private charities in America can’t end hunger and poverty. Ending poverty demands government programs, such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, Medicare, welfare, food stamps, child care, and more.

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act was sold to us as a way to get people off welfare, and it did.  Welfare rolls in the United States are down more than 50 percent.  But it didn’t reduce poverty. That’s because welfare reform dumped many recipients into low-paying jobs—with no benefits or ability to move up.

Does anybody care?

Maybe we care, but we don’t know what to do about it. So we shrug, say the poor will always be with us, and forget about it.

In 1969, a Presidential Commission recommended we establish a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) at the poverty level for all Americans.

On that Commission, the chairmen of IBM, Westinghouse, and Rand, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown and 17 others unanimously agreed with economist Milton Friedman that: “We should replace the ragbag of welfare programs with a single, comprehensive program of income suplements in cash—a negative income tax.  It would provide an assured minimum to all persons in need, regardless of the reasons for their need.”

Fast-forward 44 years, and we find that welfare has failed because it has destroyed people’s ability to take control of their own lives and make their own decisions. We assume the poor are incapable of making sound decisions; that they can’t be trusted with cash and have to be protected from themselves. It’s as if your employer thought you so irresponsible that he sent part of your paycheck to your landlord, another part to your grocer, another to the bank that provided your car loan, another to your doctor.

There are more than 300 income-tested social programs costing more than $400 billion a year. Much of that money goes for administrative expenses, not to the needy.

Charles Murray, whose 1984 book Losing Ground claimed that welfare was doing more harm than good, now agrees with the BIG approach.

“America’s population is wealthier than any in history,” Murray writes in his new book, In Our Hands.  “Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for retirements, health care, and the alleviation of poverty. We still have millions of people without comfortable retirements, without adequate health care, and living in poverty. Only a government can spend so much money so ineffectually. The solution is to give the money to the people.”

Murray calls for giving an annual cash grant of $10,000—with no work requirements—to every adult over age 21.

Indeed, the U.S. is a wealthy nation. Our 2011 Gross Domestic Product was $14.4 trillion. That’s an average of $46,000 for each man, woman and child in the country. It’s an average of $61,000 per adult. It’s more than enough to end poverty.

Poverty is wrong. A Basic Income Guarantee would establish economic security as a universal right. It gives each of us the assurance that, no matter what happens, we won’t go hungry.

Allan Sheahen is the author of the new book: Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security (Palgrave/MacMillan, NYC).  For more information, go to www.basicincomeguarantee.com

Below, footage of FDR’s so-called “Second Bill of Rights” speech which was filmed right after he had finished his State of the Union Address on radio on January 11, 1944.
 

 
It’s normal for people to fantasize about having their own theme song. But thanks to the outlawed narcocorrido genre of Latin music, if you are a major drug smuggler or head of a Mexican drug cartel, you really do have your very own customized theme song.

It’s not enough to move millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs, intimidate rivals, scare journalists, accumulate a ton of flauntable personal wealth, and control large swaths of Mexico. One has to also be a modern-day folk hero and have ballads (corridos = traditional Mexican ballads) written about one’s criminal exploits.

Corridos originally used the medieval European ballad form to chronicle stories about heroes, revolutionaries, soldiers in the Mexican War, and outlaws like Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata. Drug smugglers view themselves as part of this lineage. The long-standing tradition of the corrido is anti-authoritarianism, with or without a drug culture to go along with it.

Cartel leaders pay Mexican songwriters to write glowing tributes to them, their organization, and superior products. It’s a great gig if you can get it… and don’t mind pissing off the leaders of other cartels, who might well kill you and your family for promoting the wrong side. Vice reported: “Sometimes narcocorrido singers avoid getting offed by getting songs approved by various cartels. Movimiento Alterado [another name for the narcocorrido genre] has sent songs to the Sinaloa cartel for clearance before releasing them.”

A norteño singer-songwriter from Monterrey named Edgar told me about the dilemma facing young artists. He left Nuevo Leon to start a Regional Mexican band in the U.S., where some of his relatives had already immigrated, because he didn’t want to write about the drug culture and no longer felt safe being a songwriter in Mexico.

Narcocorridos are banned from the radio and public performance in the states of Sinaloa and Chihuahua. This level of censorship is ludicrous considering the number of Spanish language radio stations in the U.S. with signals reaching far into Mexico, not to mention satellite radio and the internet.

Officials recently fined concert promoters in Chihuahua $8000 for allowing El Komander (Alfredo Rios) – whose catalogue was described by Latin Times as “one full of tall tales of pistol-packing drug traffickers and cartel dons” – to perform his work.

The fine was so high because Los Tucanes de Tijuana – whose shows have turned into shootouts in the recent past – were hired to appear at a music festival in Chihuahua City this summer and blithely paid the 23,000 pesos (about $1700) fine so they could play. Then the city raised the fine to 100,000 pesos ($7500). The mayor, Marco Quezada, said that he won’t issue another concert permit to the promoter who brought the narco-balladeers to town.
 

 
The template for the criminal folk hero is Robin Hood-like “generous bandit” Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of the illegal drug trade (along with Santa Muerte), especially in Sinaloa. Unofficial saint, because Malverde is just one example of local Mexican Catholic folk customs enraging and embarrassing the Vatican. He is said to have only stolen from the rich and helped the poor until he was killed by police in 1909.

The regular level of violence in this musical subculture far exceeds rap’s bad reputation. Singer Valentín Elizdale was murdered in front of hundreds of people in 2006 after a concert during which he sang lyrics insulted the Zetas cartel. Sinaloa’s beloved Chalino Sánchez, who performed mainly in southern California, was one of the major musical casualties of the drug war. He began writing narcocorridos to order at the request of his fellow inmates while in jail, and despite his weak voice, the song commissions kept coming once he was released. In 1992 when an audience member shot him during a concert, Chalino pulled out a gun and shot back. Unfortunately someone finally succeeded in murdering Chalino execution-style a few months later.

Narcocorridos, for all their dark, boastful, nihilistic, violent lyrics, sound…well, like cheerful polkas and waltzes. Trust me, I lived next door to people who played this music at top volume 24/7 for three years straight. A quick browse of the CD’s at a bodega or mercado reveals that most of the artists look like clean-cut pick-up truck driving cowboys, wearing tight jeans with huge belt buckles and cowboy hats. They do not resemble East L.A. cholos or Latin rappers in any way. If the Marlboro Man had a tidier Latino counterpart who was holding an assault rifle while surrounded by scantily clad women, he would be a narcocorridos singer.

Juan Carlos Ramirez-Pimienta, a teacher and scholar at San Diego State University, told Vice:

The narcocorridos react to reality. The cartels are at war, so the narcocorridos adopt a wartime propaganda message. They are meant to create fear in the enemy.

Composer Enrique Franco Aguilar disapproves of the drug culture and its glorification but loves corridos. Franco told music journalist Elijah Wald:

Too many of these “artists,” in quotation marks, only want money. But when you have a good interpreter the corridos can still have a very strong effect. Because the people believe in these artists. If the artists wanted, they could make a revolution. A great artist is more powerful than a politician.

The muy macho El Komander, waving lots of guns around after possibly raiding Johnny Cash’s closet, in “Mafia Nueva,” below

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Valentin Elizalde: Raw Live Narcocorridos

‘El Narco’: An Epic and Bloody Mexican Gangster Film

 
As Music Director of original alternative radio station WFNX/Boston for much of the ‘80’s, I have a few Replacements stories. There was the time, due to record company politics, that my station wasn’t allowed the “co-promote” on their Tim tour stop at the now defunct nightclub, The Channel. As a consolation, the Warner Bros. local promo team put together what remains to this day my all-time fave radio station promotion: “Replace A Replacement!” Entries were collected at local chain Newbury Comics’ locations with one lucky listener winning the grand prize: sing a single song onstage live with The Replacements.

Two years later The Replacements stumbled into the station’s Lynn, MA lobby at 11:00AM for their sole ‘FNX interview. They were completely shitfaced. As they amused themselves by carving up our “Couch of Shame” with the razor blades left lying around for editing audiotape, I couldn’t help but wonder, “These are the guys who threw Bob Stinson out for being a drunk?” (It was then and there they scrawled “This Station Bites” on the above Pleased To Meet Me album cover. Initially I was pissed. Then I thought, “I’ll just take this puppy home”).

Since The Replacements’ bitter splitter in 1991, the possibility of a bona fide reunion became a more unlikely prospect as each year passed. When guitarist Slim Dunlap suffered a massive stroke early last year, it seemed all such hopes were permanently dashed.

Enter Riot Fest founder Mike Petryshyn. Since Mike started the Fest in 2005, he had listed The Replacements as an “it-never-hurts-to-ask” act. Armed with the knowledge that last September Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson had reunited in the studio to record their installment in the “Songs For Slim” benefit series, Mike moved The ‘Mats to the top of this year’s wish list. Per The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, he said, “There was life to the idea pretty early on.”

The main question left was with Slim Dunlap’s inability to perform, founding member guitarist Bob Stinson’s death in 1995 and Chris Mars, depending on with whom you speak has either “retired” from the music biz or was not asked, who would replace The Replacements’ other half? Ubiquitous drummer Josh Freese was almost a given – given he’d recorded and toured with ex-Replacements’ singer/guitarist Paul Westerberg for a slew of his solo albums. Freese and Tommy Stinson shared five years of touring the globe as battery mates in Guns N’ Roses, too. To complete the circle, Freese and guitarist David Minehan, leader of legendary Boston group The Neighborhoods, had both backed Westerberg on several mid-‘90’s solo tours.

If you’re like me, you’re wondering exactly what the hell did Saturday night’s first Replacements’ show after a two decades-plus absence from the stage sounded like. Slicing Up Eyeballs has the goods.

Those interested in helping Slim Dunlap defray the cost of his medical bills & stroke rehab check out Songs For Slim. Also ex-Georgia Satellite Dan Baird set up a means by which fans can donate towards Slim’s cause via PayPal. Baird and Dunlap played together for a bit after the respective demise of both their bands.

Below, The Replacements do “Color Me Impressed’ live at Riot Fest, August 25 2013:
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Saint Jareth, Saint Elvira, Saint Morrissey, Saint Edgar Allan Poe and Saint Vampira are available for all your prayin’ needs for around $6.99 a pop by Etsy seller GreaserCreatures.
 

 

 

 

 
Via Neatorama

 
Most intense Björk fans will know all of this information, but it was new to me and I found it pretty interesting. In 1977, at the age of 11, Björk released a self-titled album in Iceland that achieved moderate success. For some reason Allmusic.com gave it a very dismissive review—“Novelty value can only carry an album so far ... [it] will probably not be enough to keep you laughing, or interested for the duration”—but to my ears it holds up quite well. It reminds a little bit of ABBA.

More interestingly, to a surprising degree it puts Bjork’s solo career starting in 1993 into perspective. The first song,“Arabadrengurinn (The Arab Boy),” prominently features the sitar, the four covers on the album are well chosen, and you can pretty much draw a straight line from the show-tunes-y “Himnaför” to, say, the bombast of “It’s Oh So Quiet” or the standards of Gling-Gló.

I’m not saying that Björk is a mature work or even that Björk herself had that much to do with what songs were chosen and how they were arranged. What I’m saying is that when you record a really eclectic pop album that ranges all over the map when you’re eleven, it might serve as a clue that your later eclectic pop albums that range all over the map didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. Björk has had a musical career all of her life—she never really stopped recording in her teen years—and the only point worth making here is that there is far more continuity from Björk to Debut than discontinuity.

Oh, and the songs are pretty well executed and fun to listen to. So there’s that.

Okay. Chronology. Björk got started as a musician when a teacher of hers submitted a recording in which she sang Tina Charles’s song “I Love to Love” to RÚV, the only radio station in Iceland at the time.

Here’s Björk’s version:
 

 
Tina Charles’ version, for comparison:
 

 
A few years ago someone named Thomas Rinnan decided to find out more about Björk. Here are his findings:
 

Björk Guðmundsdóttir (literally ‘Gudmund’s daughter’) was born on 21st October 1966, in Iceland’s capital city, Reykjavik. From the age of six until she was 14, she attended a local music school, where she studied the classics, and learned to play the flute and the piano. The family home was a hippy commune, with a steam of artists and musicians among the constant human traffic. Björk’s stepfather, Saevar Arnason, was himself a guitarist, and played in a band called Pops, recreating Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and “all that hippy music”. This bohemian atomsphere laid down a firm musical grounding for Björk’s future vocation, and provided a stepping stone to the first, and most remarkable, aspect of her recording career: an eponymously titled solo album, released in Iceland in 1977.

Documentation about this record is scant. Although Björk often alludes to it, precise details are hard to come by. And with the singer on a promotionaly tour of Japan and Australia at the time of writing, I turned to one of the few people with first-hand knowledge of this early release: Hildur Hauksdóttir—Björk’s mum.

“The record came about when Björk was at school,” revealed Hildur, on the phone from Reykjavik. “They used to have an open house every week where the kids had to entertain, read aloud and things like that. Björk sang a song called ‘I Love To Love’. She was born musical. She started to sing very early. She started singing melodies around seven months old.” Björk’s teachers were sufficiently impressed with her redition of Tina Charles’ U.K. No.1 from February 1976, to take the budding starlet along to Iceland’s Radio 1, then the contry’s only national broadcasting organisation, who in turn seemed only too pleased to play the song on air.

“After that she was offered a record deal by a label called Fálkkin,” continues Hildur. “I knew two musicians here, Palmi Gunnarsson, a bass player and singer, and Sigurdur Karlsson a drummer, and they had already recorded some songs with Björk. We worked on the recordat the Hljdrijinn Studios in Reykjavik. Palmi and Siggi brought in some of the best players in Iceland. After that first record with all thouse grown-ups, she only ever worked with oeioke her own age.” Among the other musicians on “Björk” was stepfather Sævar Arnason, and Björgvin Gíslason, one of Iceland’s most acclaimed guitarists. Björk would return the favour several years later when she sang on the track “Afi” on Gíslason’s 1983 LP, “Örugglega”.

The “Björk” album was released in time for Christmas 1977, with a cover designed by Hildur, and photographed at a local Reykjavik studio. In contrast to precocious recordings by singing kids like Lena Zavaroni, the tone of “Björk” mercifully falls short of the little-madam-wearing-mummy’s-make-up image(although who knows what she’s singing about!). Producers Gunnarsson and Karlsson constructed a perfect listenable, mid-70s pop album (albeit one sung by an 11-year old), which mixed a handful of standard Icelandic pop tunes, and a Björk orginal - the instrumental “Jóhannes Kjaval” (a tribute to a celebrated Icelandic painter)—with covers of Melanie’s “Christopher Robin” (with a decent approximation of Mel’s vocal growl), Stevie Wonder’s “Your Kiss Is Sweet”, Edgar Winter’s “Alta Mira” and the Beatles’ “Fool On The Hill” ( translated as “Álfur Út Úr Hól”!). Despite her tender age, Björk managed to press her personality into the grooves, and this, her real debut, is as much her own record as it is her producer’s.

Perhaps succumbing toa little of the mythmaking which is an inevitable side- effect of stardom, Björk has recently maintained that the album went platinum in Iceland, indicating that she became an instant celebrity. Her mum is not so sure. “I have no idea!” replied Hildur, when asked how many copies “Björk” sold. “It’s sold out today, I know that. And they are playing it on the radio now in Iceland! But at the time, she was not exactly what you’d call famous. In Iceland it’s different from elsewhere. It’s such a small place, everybody knows each other already. But the record didn’t separate her from school or anything.” And what became of the Fálkinn label? “They have stopped making their own records. They only sell others’ records now, and bicycles”.

 
After the jump, the ten songs off of Björk’s 1977 album and the originals of the four songs she covered…

After Bators injured his back, Lords of The New Church guitarist Brian James secretly put out an ad for a new singer. When Stiv found the ad, conflicting sources say that either Stiv or James wrote it verbatim on a t-shirt and wore it onstage for a gig. For the encore, Stiv fired the entire band.
 
Stiv talking about when he actually died for a minute after a routine performative self-strangulation went awry (don’t you hate it when that happens?). If he hadn’t pissed himself, alerting bandmates and crew members that something had gone wrong, he might not have lived.

As Bators (who will be portrayed in the CBGB movie by this guy) is carried into the backstage area after a Lords of The New Church show, he is a complete physical wreck, barely able to stand. He’s revived by a security guard and his girlfriend, who he openly adores. An incredibly sweet guy by most accounts (as you can see in this interview with Brooke Shields, or this heart-wrenching eulogy from Iggy Pop), Bators was also clearly a romantic, professing his love in the most naked and emphatic way.