Back then, Billy Connolly walked on water, and turned it into wine. Or, so it seemed. He was “The Big Yin,” Glasgow’s favorite son. Every household seemed to own a Connolly album, or had been to one of his sell-out concerts, where even grannies queued for tickets, and wee kids knew the patter for his routines “Jobby Weecher” and “The Crucifixion” off by heart. He was a phenomenon, and in 1975 Connolly was on the verge of national and international success.

This short film captures Connolly at home in Glasgow, where he performs to a sell-out audience, visits his school and the Clyde shipyards where he first worked, and talks about his life.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

H/T NellyM

 
How did people call their penises and vaginas eight centuries ago? - io9

Female frogs prefer males who can multitask - EurekAlert

Capital University in Bexley runs out of dorms; houses students at an indoor waterpark - Dispatch

Florida Keys considering drones to fight mosquitoes - Reuters

Macaque monkeys that have developed the ability to use stone tools to open shellfish are in danger of losing the skill because of human development - BBC News

Soda linked to behavioral problems in young children, study says - LA Times

Fox paid $70M for 5% stake in Vice Media - Deadline

Forever 21 Employees wake up to bad news UPDATE: Company Confirms - Daily Kos

This Brooklyn apartment has bed bugs, not that the landlord will tell you that - Gothamist

Dinosaur Jr. coffee table book on its way, aging hipsters relieved living room finally coming together… - Daily Swarm

UC San Francisco scientists working in the lab used a chemical found in an anti-wrinkle cream to prevent the death of nerve cells damaged by mutations that cause an inherited form of Parkinson’s disease - University Herald

27 breathtaking record stores you have to shop at before you die - BuzzFeed

Drugs in the movies - YouTube h/t WFMU

Wonderful pic of songwriter Leonard Cohen on Zen retreat in Mt. Baldy, NM. - Steve Silberman

Coffee and tea may contribute to a healthy liver - Science Daily

Ever wanted to know what’s really in hotdogs? - Discover Magazine

Thai university students forced to wear anti-cheating paper blinker hats during exams - Arbroath

Below, Dolly Parton’s original recording of “Jolene” slowed down by 25%:

A Collapse of World Lines

People of El Lay, if you happen to find yourself along Culver City’s “art walk” tonight, make sure to put Gail Potocki‘s “Fragmented Alice” show at Century Guild gallery on your list of “must see” exhibits.

“Fragmented Alice” is 21st century “Old Master” Potocki’s first public show in three years. The work utilizes the archetypes of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland mythology to explore the ways in which we experience the passing of time. 

“I have a large turn-of-the-century cabinet in my home devoted to Alice in Wonderland,” Potocki explains. “From the time I was a little girl, the story fascinated me, and as I got older I bought every Alice-related oddity I could find.  I have antique card games, old metal toys… I even found LSD paper from the 1960s with an Alice theme!”

The results of Potocki’s explorations are on display from August 17- September 21 at at the Century Guild gallery at 6150 Washington Blvd. Culver City, CA. The opening is tonight at 7pm and exhibition hours are Thursday through Sunday, noon-8pm.
 

I Wonder if I’ve Been Changed in the Night
 

It Doesn’t Matter Which Way You Go…

 
This is a guest editorial by Hunter Heaney, executive director of The Voice Project, a US-based NGO that has raised over $100,000 for support and safety monitoring efforts for the imprisoned members of Pussy Riot.

They were tired of their rights being stripped away. Tired of their government not representing them any more. Tired of ultra right-wing policies that seemed to be driven by oligarchs and secret concentrations of wealth divorced from the needs of everyday citizens and oppressive to those with less political power in the current plutocracy that seems and acts more and more intimidatingly, more authoritarian every day.

So they sing. In public. They raise their voices as a way to express the basic human right to be heard by those would purport to govern them. And for that they are arrested. Sounds familiar.

It’s not Pussy Riot.

It’s not Russia.

It’s America.

The Solidarity Singers and the Raging Grannies gather every weekday at the Wisconsin state house to sing. They are trying to express their feelings about Governor Scott Walker and the run amok right-wing policies their state seems to be implementing at ALEC’s behest. And the powers that be are having none of it. Not only are the singers being arrested, but so are the spectators, just for attending, just for watching, just for reporting on it. And remember this is all happening in the public space of the state capitol building, the people’s building, the people’s property.

Free speech? Free press? The right to peaceably assemble? Not so much in Russia, not so much in Wisconsin, not so much in a lot of places these days.

Welcome to the modern world, welcome to modern America. Bit by bit we’ve lost the things we held dear. We’ve slowly let the freedoms we were so proud of, that were associated with our dream of this country, be disappeared like an extraordinary rendition to Guantanamo.  No trial, no explanation, just a black bag over the head. Habeas corpus is just a thing we once had, or we thought we had. An effective free press, well, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert remind us every weeknight where that’s gone (and they help us laugh to keep us from sinking into a national depression).

We’re surveilled like something out of the pages of Orwell, propagandized like scenes from V for Vendetta with fear campaigns like The War on Terror, beaten and pepper sprayed for peaceful protests, resigned to our running jokes about how Congress seems to have now abandoned even the facade of representing the people in favor of the supranational corporations and the 1% who finance their campaigns and their lives.

And the poor, well, forget about them. At least that seems to be the hope anyway. How much have you personally heard about one in four kids in this country being on food stamps now? Pensions being stripped away from those who worked and saved for them, just like George Carlin predicted they would be? It happens now through “strategic municipal bankruptcies” and other financial and legal maneuvers. It starts with carefully planned campaigns hatched by conservative think-tanks that talk endlessly about “entitlements.” Isn’t that clever?

We are now a shadow of our former selves. The “Greatest Generation” are dying. My dad was one. There are a few left, but they must not be impressed by what they see, what we are doing with what they fought for. Some of them certainly know that in no universe of realistic thought does Scott Walker’s Wisconsin or our modern America respect the sentiments they held dear enough to defend. They’re codified in Wisconsin’s State Constitution as:

“Every person may freely speak, write and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right, and no laws shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech or of the press.”

and

“The right of the people peaceably to assemble, to consult for the common good, and to petition the government, or any department thereof, shall never be abridged.”

No wonder the dystopian-future fantasies are so popular at the box office, they must ring true, or maybe they let us think it’s not quite so bad right now in comparison. But make no mistake, we’re there, welcome to Dystopia. You’re soaking in it. Sometimes I think we’ll wake up from it all—take the red pill.  It does seem to be happening in other places around the world, like Gezi Park and the streets of São Paulo, even if the dissent suppression machines seem stronger than ever.
 

 
Here in America though, I often think we’re just like slow boiling frogs, nodding off to sleep while the heat is steadily turned up, too late realizing what happened as things fade to black. Hopeless and specious tropes about how protest songs don’t matter anymore appear to have even some musicians convinced, and seem to signal our giving up. And that’s when I give thanks for Pussy Riot, for the Solidarity Singers, for the Raging Grannies. Let the armchair quarterbacks debate their musical quality or performance characteristics or predict the demise of protest singing. While they’re at it perhaps spoken and written words, literature, ideas and the rest of the humanities should be thrown in there too.

Of course there are ideas and words and performances that matter, like “I Have a Dream” or “We Shall Overcome” or “Redemption Song” or yes, “Punk Prayer” that will speak truth to power, that will inspire, that provide aid and succor to those who will resist. The Solidarity Sing-Alongs are to me without a doubt among the most important performances taking place today. Same with the 40-second performance that landed Pussy Riot in labor camps for two years.

Content matters. Ideas matter. So Pussy Riot is my band. The Raging Grannies are my band and the Solidarity Singers, too. They’ve inspired me to write this, and I’m going to go check and see if some friends want to join me in supporting these singers and what’s going on in Wisconsin.

When members of Pussy Riot were here in New York this past spring, they stayed over and we had some long talks. “Shaiba” said, “It feels like we’re building this great mafia around the world, friends everywhere.” I hope so. I think this is the way it’s going to need to work if we’re ever going to stage a comeback here. We’re going to need to look out for each other, work with each other in the face of great concentrations of power. Some say the key will be localism, a renewed reliance on our geographically proximate communities, but I sometimes worry an overzealous application of these ideas as a solution may lead to isolationism. I believe we’ll need to help each other, even across great distances and divides.

“Helotism” is a word I learned from Pussy Riot. Worth checking out the etymology on that one. One of the many things I learned from the girls. These are the kinds of things I’m remembering today, that I’m thinking about on this anniversary. That we can learn from each other, help each other, that we can stick together, we can make songs matter and turn ideas into action, that we can inspire each other, and we can decide to lay down and take it… or not.

Hunter Heaney is executive director of The Voice Project, a US based NGO that has raised over $100,000 for support and safety monitoring efforts for the imprisoned members of Pussy Riot.
 

 

 
Cleveland Ohio’s rock and roll sandwich emporium, “Melt Bar and Grilled,” is known the world over for its gigantic, rock-themed, whole-meal-between-two-buns, culinary masterpieces of excess. The restaurant’s latest sandwich special, created as part of a dinner-and-a-movie promo with a local theater, is like, totally right there in your face for everybody to see.

The overstuffed grinder in question, aptly-named “The Goblin King’s Ultimate Package,” pays loving tribute to “that which lies beneath” David Bowie’s nut-hugging, grey riding pants snugly worn in Jim Henson’s 1986 fantasy dance vehicle, Labyrinth.  In it, Bowie plays a teased-hair wizard-type who reigns over a giant multi- square-mile stone maze holding children captive and casting creepy musical spells while dancing around with puppets.

Giving new meaning to the term “Manwich,” Melt’s newest zesty monstrosity features “Bowie’s Spicy Battered Cod-Piece” and “Sir Didymus’s Sweet n’ Spicy Jalapeno Hush Puppies” peaking out from behind a nest of “Hoggle’s Hot Pepper and Pickle Slaw.” Cover it up with “Ludo’s Lip-Smacking Pepper Jack,” pack it all between two pieces of bread, and you’ve got yourself a sandwich that leaves nothing to the imagination.

Past dinner-and-a movie specials from Melt’s repertoire have included the “Dazed and Very Confused Donut Bacon Burger Melt” (the movie tie-in should be obvious) and the “My Special Purpose Hot Tuna Melt,” referencing Steve Martin’s self-discovery in “The Jerk.”

If you’re in the Cleveland area and you want to get your hands on the “Ultimate Package,” it’s available at Melt through the weekend. 

Check out more provocative Melt sandwiches and their epic posters by Cleveland artist John G here.
 

 
Keeping it single-spaced, because the man had rather a lot of accomplishments before turning the ripe old age of thirty!

WOODY ALLEN BIO:
 
Born in Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A. 1935.
Attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn.
Attended New York University but thrown out for poor student.
Attended City College of New York but thrown out for poor student.
Began career as professional comedy writer at 17, writing for Radio.
First show was Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy Radio Show.
Wrote for TV for years for such shows as:
Herb Shriner.
Gary Moore Show.
Sid Caesar Show.
Art Carney Specials.
Tonight Show.
Max Liebman Shows.
Won Emmy nominations and Sylvania Award for best writing on Sid Caesar Show.
Wrote for many comedians who appeared on TV and in nightclubs.
Wrote sketches produced on Broadway in revues.
Turned comedian nearly three years ago on a wild hunch of my managers.
Tried to keep it limited but performing went very well and one club led to another and one TV show led to another.
Appeared in U.S. at The Blue Angel, in N.Y., the Hungry in San Francisco, Basin St. East in New York, Mister Kelly’s in Chicago, Crystal Palace in St. Louis, Bitter End in New York (the latter was a coffee house that I got my first real start at, playing there for several consecutive months where the press could come and see me for a showcase.) Crescendo in L.A., Shadows in Wash.
Have done many concerts for colleges, groups and recorded my first record album titled Woody Allen just a few months ago.
On TV have appeared on The Jack Paar Show, the Tonight Show (I took the latter over for one week when Johnny Carson went on vacation) The Hootenany Show, Candid Camera, Steve Allen.
Anxious to get back to the United States to fulfill several cabaret and hotel bookings and some TV shots.
Press has been extraordinary, having appeared extremely favorably in every major magazine (Life, Time, Newsweek New Yorker, Playboy, every major newspaper and trade paper, Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Revue, etc).
Wrote What’s New Pussycat?” when Charles Feldman and Shirley MacLaine happened to catch me at the Blue Angel and he felt I’d be right to do script of a wild conception he had. It is my first movie script and the first time - I’ve ever acted.
(more)
 
I am currently finishing off a play entitled tentatively Don’t Drink the Water, to be produced by Max Gordon on Broadway upon my return to the U.S.
Since my week on the Johnny Carson Show I have had many offers for my own TV series, to act on TV and Broadway both in comedies and musicals (I don’t sing or dance) have been offered parts in motion pictures and opportunities to do screenplays of major films.
I am not interested in writing any movies that I would not be in heavily (star or co-star in is what I mean) and would not do adaptations for anyone in any medium because I am only interested in writing originals under any conditions. I would accept funny roles if offered me and I liked them.
I have been offered opportunities to direct both films and play for Broadway, both of which I would like to do someday but not right now.
I have been offered many advances for written material from all the top publishing houses for books but I haven’t the time.
My hobbies are not drinking and avoiding sex.
I play several musical instruments, all horribly. I love music.
I have been married (when I was 19) for six years. I discuss my marriage and subsequent divorce in my act in detail.
Everything I say in my act is either true or based closely on my experiences either real or fantasy.
I have no children.
I go out with girls if they are pretty, funny, bright, neurotic, and like Hershey Bars. (addict)
My family is alive (or think they are) - my sister is twenty-one, married recently and a teacher.
My father is now in the jewelry business but has been many things (but not a father) including a waiter for many years.
My mother has always been a bookkeeper in a flower shop.
When I was a child they’d give me a quarter and I’d let them alone. Now I give them money and they let me alone.
I live (contrary to the incessant myth about me living in Greenwich Village, which I never did or claimed to, I just dress in expensive but ill fitting clothes so I guess it looks sort of that way) on the chic upper east side on Manhattan and have for the past eight years or nine years. I love it there, adore Fifth Avenue, and wouldn’t want to live anyplace else.
I do not own a car or dog.
I enjoy working both writing and any form of performing.
I hated performing at first but now I like it. It was hard to make the adjustment from the closed room to facing people but my managers forced me.
Whereas I was friendless and alone three years ago, I now have a girl friend, managers, a press agent, a lawyer, and an accountant.
I like Sugar Ray Robinson, little blonde girls and William Butler Yeats.
I hate rising early, being beaten up and when I don’t get my way.
If I could have been anyone else I would have liked to have been Louis Armstrong.
 

 

 
(via Showbiz Imagery and Chicanery)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Woody Allen boxes a kangaroo, 1966
Woody Allen: Fascinating documentary made for French TV in 1979
Orson Welles hated Woody Allen

 
By now you’ve all heard of Elon Musk’s idea to build a gigantic pneumatic tube system to move people, cargo, and even cars between San Francisco and LA in like half an hour.

On Bloomberg the other day there was a fascinating article pointing out that, not only was the idea of moving people via pneumatic tubes previously conceived of in the 19th century, one guy in New York actually built a working prototype of such a system in 1867 that moved thousands of people between Murray and Warren streets downtown, during the Boss Tweed era!

That’s right, Alfred Ely Beach proposed an entire system for urban mass transit based on pneumatic tubes, and he built a prototype to show that it could be done. If you read his entire proposal here (and you should definitely take a look—the other drawings are fascinating), you can see that he planned to even have subway-like cars pushed throughout the city using pneumatic power. As proof of concept, however, folks could walk into the basement of a building on Murray Street and get whisked over to Warren Street. Thousands of people apparently did it, and the larger proposal looked like it was going to go through, except that Boss Tweed’s apparent enthusiasm for the scheme ended up killing it when Tweed was finally nailed for corruption.

Now this isn’t as crazy or unprecedented as you might think. During the 19th century and into the 20th, many European cities had pneumatic tube systems used for moving around messages and small items. In fact, here’s a photo of a sort of connection room in London that apparently made it into the 20th century:
 

 
Interestingly, a pneumatic tube system in London ended up playing a crucial role during the telegraphy era: Undersea signals originating from the US and making it into the UK didn’t have enough oomph left to make it into noisy London, so the telegraphs were printed out on paper and sent into London via the pneumatic tube system. In addition, like with Paris’ extensive system, there were local tube stations in many neighborhoods into which you placed your cylinder. That cylinder could carry messages of course, but it could also carry small physical items as well, including food and even, according to some recorded cases, proposals plus engagement rings. Kind of like a primitive Amazon Prime operating atop of a steampunk Internet system that could deliver physical items!

Amazingly, New York itself built a pneumatic tube system in the 1890s, the map for which you can see here. Apparently, the tubes could move at 25 to 35mph, and carried not just letters but even, it is rumored, sandwiches from a particularly popular shop.
 

 
Another bizarre fact is that municipal buildings on Roosevelt Island (that big island under the 59th Street Bridge in the East River) have a pneumatic waste disposal system that is still in operation to the present day! It still puts out several tons of garbage every single day.

In other words, Alfred Ely Beach’s idea to move people and even larger things via a gigantic pneumatic tube system wasn’t as crazy as it sounded, and really just represented a vast upscaling of the pneumatic tube systems already prevalent in Europe, and it predated Elon Musk’s idea by over a century! One wonders, however, if it weren’t for Boss Tweed, might history have proceeded differently so that we’d have a vast metropolitan pneumatic people-moving system in New York City? Perhaps it would have delayed the building of the New York City subways by a few decades. Like the short-lived Blimp mast that was the original intent for the top of the Empire State Building, had Beach’s tube system somehow made it, New York could have been very different, a sort of Steampunk paradise.

Imagine disembarking from a blimp at the top of the Empire State Building and then proceeding down into the basement were you took a pneumatic tube home to your neighborhood!

 
Golfers are invited to get a ‘Heil’ in one when a controversial crazy golf exhibition opens in Derby, England later this month.

Doug Fishbone and Friends: Adventureland Golf presents artworks by the likes of Jake and Dinos Chapman, David Shrigley, Brian Griffiths, Jonathan Allen, Zatorski + Zatorski, and Doug Fishbone displayed over a golf course.

The course begins with Jonathan Allen’s boarded up library before heading over to Brian Griffiths’ desert island. Elsewhere David Shrigley offers advice and guidance on the participant’s way round the course such as “Respect Your Opponent”. In the context of holiday fun Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Doug Fishbone have created replicas of two dictators for the course which concludes with Zatorski + Zatorski’s black mausoleum-like slabs. After this hole the ball is irretrievable. The game is over!

The most controversial exhibits are a statue of Saddam Hussein by Fishbone, and a statue of Adolf Hitler, designed by the Chapman brothers.
 

 
When a player hits a ball through the Hitler hole, the fiberglass Führer raises his arm in a Nazi salute and says “Nein, nein, nein.”

London-based, American-artist Doug Fishbone claimed the intention was not to ridicule or minimize the suffering caused by these dictators.

However, when the exhibition first opened last year in the popular seaside resort of Blackpool, Michael Samuels, of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, described the Hitler statue as having “absolutely no artistic value whatsoever.”

The exhibition has inspired considerable debate on local newspaper the Derby Telegraph‘s website.

“Bagheera” criticised the exhibition and said: “As someone who lost family members in both conflicts, I consider this grossly offensive. If this is art then, quite frankly, we would be better off without it.”

Manasas called the exhibition a “total waste of public money”, said it was “insulting to the people who died under both monsters” and called for it to be cancelled.

Fellow reader Ianrad51 said: “I think the crazy golf course with Hitler and Saddam on it is sick.”

Other readers praised Quad for bringing the exhibition – called Doug Fishbone and Friends: Adventureland Golf – to Derby.

Ben-Spiller wrote: “Ridiculing tyranny through interactive art that provokes debate about the legacy of mass-murdering bigots can only be a good thing.

“Would Hitler and Hussein have wanted their legacy to include being figures of fun on a crazy-golf course for people from all cultures to enjoy together? Most probably not. This is a good reason to do just that.

“Let’s knock Hitler and Hussein off their self-made pedestals and have fun doing so but let’s also think about the terrible impact of their cruel regimes.”

Doug Fishbone and Friends: Adventureland Golf opens at the Quod in Derby on August 31st, details here.
 

 
H/T Derby Telegraph
 
A tour of the golf course plus an interview with Doug Fishbone, after the jump…

 
If TMZ (and the Internet) had been around in the 1960s, you can bet that D.A. Pennebaker’s infamous film of John Lennon and Bob Dylan “both on fucking junk” (Lennon’s words) in the back of Dylan’s limo would have made it to their blog, Gawker and Huffington Post within a New York minute. But it wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when the VHS tape trading underground really took off, that copies of this insane, historically important for all the wrong reasons meeting started making their way into collectors eager hands (I had a copy). Now it’s easy to see, of course, on YouTube.

I’d always just assumed that Dylan and Lennon were both just extremely hungover, but maybe they were on something stronger. Lennon himself would know, right? It would certainly explain Dylan’s odd behavior and all that vomit talk, wouldn’t it?

This momentous event occurred on May 27, 1966 at the time of Dylan’s first “electric” tour of Great Britain, during a year that he admittedly had a $25 a day heroin addiction. The encounter was captured by filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker—it’s an outtake from Eat The Document—and shows how nervous these two rock gods were around each other. In his famous 1971 interview with Rolling Stone, Lennon remarked about the awkward limo ride:

“I just remember we were both in shades and both on fucking junk. ... I was nervous as shit. I was on his territory, that’s why I was so nervous.”

Whatever surreal flights of rock god verbal fantasy they had planned for this filming, the results were something rather less than coherent after Dylan shared his stash! Lennon told Jann Wenner that he was “frightened as hell” and “paranoid” that Dylan had just invited him to be in the film to put him down.

Without stating the obvious, (or perhaps he didn’t know) D.A. Pennebaker told Gadfly magazine:

It was not exactly a conversation by any means. Dylan was so beside himself and in such a terrible state that after a while I don’t think he knew what he was saying. He hauled him up the stairs of the hotel, and when he got to his room he was really sick.

Dylan is clearly out of his flipping mind on something and makes little, if any sense. From the way that he starts off fairly jovial in the first part to the slurred-voiced, nodding-off, face-scratching torpor and talk of vomiting that begins part three, Dylan’s behavior is consistent with a junk user and the viewer practically gets to witness the drug’s effect on him IN REAL TIME! The transformation is something to see. Lennon seems a little embarrassed, and yes, fucked up, but is still willing to play along until their failed attempts at witty wordplay dissolve into nonsense and Dylan seeming to wonder if they’ll make it all the way back to the hotel in time before he pukes his guts out. If John Lennon’s own word is to be trusted, they were both on junk in this footage. This is two of the world’s most famous people, ever, in the entire history of the world, and this is (most probably) them fucked up on heroin together!

How crazy, right?

This is history, baby. Not like great history or anything, but history nonetheless. It’s assumed by most people that they only spent a few minutes in the limo together because that’s what you see in the film and that’s normally what gets posted on YouTube, but they spent more than 20 minutes being shot in that limo. Although it’s fairly excruciating to watch, it is worth it to sit through all of it, once.
 

 
Dylan’s slow descent, after the jump…

 
Happy birthday Bukowski. You are seriously missed.

“Something for The Touts, The Nuns, The Grocery Clerks And You” is Charles Bukowski at his absolute best—angry, bitter, sad, beautiful and funny. From the 1974 collection Burning In Water, Drowning In Flame.

The video is composed of found footage and excerpts from the works of Arthur Lipsett and Gregory Markopoulos.