The Monkees singing a beautiful a capella version of the traditional Spanish Christmas carol, “Ríu, Chíu,” from their TV Christmas special in 1967.

And no that’s not a joint that Peter Tork is holding, it’s a stick of incense.
 

 
One of the odder Pink Floyd oddities one can find out there, a Christmas song recorded in 1975.

That’s Nick Mason singing, btw. I think this comes from a BBC radio program.
 

 
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but he was the original Captain Kirk, so I’m going to go ahead and assume there’s some level of hidden wisdom that I lack the insight to perceive.

“Worship it, and cultivate it, and admire it.” Testify, Bill.
 

 
Indulge me a little romance for technology long past. I generally avoid waxing nostalgic over the time before people like me got to live on the Internet all day, but there’s something so compelling about the primordial technology that served only brief, esoteric purpose.

Long before computers were mass-produced, you had arcane wooden lovelies like this one, hand-made by Steve Wozniak himself. There’s undeniable warmth to the console, and not just because of the organic materials; the wood-shop quality reveals a creator, and the personal touches connect us to a craftsman, as well as a programmer.

A model like this one (only 200 were made) originally sold for $666.66, though collectors now pay up to $50,000.

 
Before bouncers or doormen became codified, legislated and organized into a multi-million-dollar security industry, anyone could turn-up on the door of a bar or a club, so long as they were willing to put the boot-in or take ‘a doing’ from some disgruntled patron. Back in the 1970s, everyone seemed to take turns at standing on door. My brother made a brief career of it, in velvet jacket and bow tie, before becoming an accountant.

Once, even I had my stint on the door of a club with a pal called Mike. While I was out of my depth, Mike had experience. He wore steel toe-caps, had a cycle belt wrapped around his waist, and carried a chib tucked-in his boots. I hoped my interest in modern literature and the films of Ken Russell would dissuade any would-be trouble-makers. Thankfully little happened other than escorting a few drunks off the premises. But it was an experience and I’d discovered it wasn’t my calling. Mike went on to join a chapter of the Hell’s Angels, while I went off to college.

I was reminded of my puny attempts at bouncing by this rather wonderful film report, from the late great Bernard Falk, on the training of Glasgow bouncers during the 1970s. Meet Cherokee, Dirty Harry, Big Billy, and Little Billy, who are trained to deal with troublesome customers in a gentle, polite and effective fashion, at a ‘rent-a-bouncer academy’ by black belt Judo champion, Brian Voss.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Frankie Vaughan: Glasgow Gang Culture in the 1960s

 
With thanks to NellyM
 

 
When President Kennedy was assassinated, “sick comedian” Lenny Bruce came onstage just hours later, took the mike and paused for a long time, looking at the audience and shaking his head before sighing: “Vaughn Meader is screwed.” (Meader was a popular and wealthy 60s nightclub entertainer whose act consisted solely of his uncanny JFK impersonation).

This morning I couldn’t help but think, “Daniel Pinchbeck is screwed……”

When I woke up today, feeling exactly the same as I had yesterday and pretty much all the days before that, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder if “the end of the world” (as we know it)—or if you prefer, a global spiritual awakening—had happened last night as the wife and I watched the final episode of The Crimson Petal and The White, because, well, I’d forgotten all about it.

When my eyes opened today, after I had taken a piss, walked the dogs, made some tea, and was looking at Huffington Post’s headlines, I remembered, oh shit, the 2012 “apocalypse” thing was supposed to have happened last night. I certainly didn’t feel anymore “enlightened” that’s for sure. If some sort of cosmic transformation of mankind was supposed to have taken place—as some New Agers were predicting—then I was a groggy Bodhisattva this morning…

I checked if there had been any mass suicides or any of that sort of activity. Nothing on HuffPo. Drudge came up snake eyes on that front as well. That’s good, since at least one mass suicide seemed virtually assured…

And then I wondered if Daniel Pinchbeck had published anything about this momentous event—or notable lack thereof—on his blog. He had in fact, in a piece titled “The End of the Beginning,” that, to my mind, rather comically hedges on what did or did not just happen…

It begins like so:

At last, we have reached the end of the classic Mayan Long Count calendar, the 5,125-year cycle that ends on December 21 of this year. The mainstream media has, predictably, used the occasion to ridicule the straw man they irresponsibly helped to set up: That this was a doomsday threshold, as silly as Y2K. At the same time, the worst and best predictions of alternative theorists ranging from Graham Hancock to Paul LaViolette to Jose Arguelles, Terence McKenna, John Major Jenkins, David Wilcock, and Carl Johan Calleman have failed to materialize.

Apparently, a galactic superwave is not engulfing our planet, as LaViolette proposed. We are not confronting immediate cataclysmic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, as Hancock sensationally predicted in his bestselling Fingerprints of the Gods. We are, also, not suddenly attaining collective enlightenment as Calleman, Arguelles, and John Major Jenkins conceived. Our pineal glands are not being instantaneously flooded with DMT, as Wilcock concocted. We have not reached the Eschaton or Singularity, where time collapses as we construct the final technological object at the end of history and complete the Great Work of alchemy, as McKenna playfully projected.  We are not ascending out of our bodies into the astral plane. But does this mean that this threshold was meaningless? Not at all.

Oh, I think that’s still pretty debatable, but it’s not a topic that I, personally, would care to debate with anyone. That would just be a fool’s errand, for obvious reasons.

Back to Pinchbeck:

As a personal aside, I am delighted we are finally getting beyond this date with destiny. Over the last months, my work has been constantly ridiculed and put down by mainstream journalists who parrot preconceived ideas. Almost as a rule, these journalists avoided watching the film I made with director Joao Amorim, which is freely available on Netflix, or reading my book. Each article is a tiny piffle of stupidity and ignorance, adding to the great vapidity. Although I am used to it, it is still painful to be misunderstood.

I’m sure it is, but such is the lot of a pop-up prophet in the age of snarky Internet blogs, right? Comes with the territory.

Now I want to be clear that I don’t have anything against Daniel Pinchbeck. We’re acquainted, although I have not seen him for for several years. I happen to agree with much of what he espouses, at least his more earthbound ideas on a post-capitalism future. I think he does a good job getting younger people excited by Occupy, saving the environment and these kinds of important issues with his prose and I am a fan of his writing myself, having excerpted some of his Breaking Open the Head book—which I loved—in my own Book of Lies occult anthology.

But whether it’s coming from Daniel Pinchbeck, or another source, this 2012 jive was/is a bunch of soft-brained New Age hooey—it doesn’t deserve any respect—and the idea that he’s trying to forge ahead and act like he was somehow right about it the whole time—unlike the rest of ‘em(!)—and rhetorically pivot away from the “failed” 2012 prophets made me chuckle as I read it. Pinchbeck’s own name is at the very top of that list and he damned well knows it.

In a 2006 Rolling Stone profile, “Daniel Pinchbeck and the New Psychedelic Elite” by Vanessa Grigoriadis—the article that first brought him some mainstream exposure—there are so many goofy quotes from Daniel that I’m sure he’d like to live down, that I don’t know where to start:

“I’d like to move off the grid, to escape the chaos and hustle of city life.” When we talked about it earlier, he said, “But there is no escape,” his eyes burning into mine. “We have to fix this situation right fucking now, or there’s going to be nuclear wars and mass death, and it’s not going to be very interesting. There’s not going to be a United States in five years, OK?”

Got it!

His current book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, has been largely panned in the mainstream press. In fact, his original publisher dropped it, with Gerald Howard, a venerable editor of authors like Don DeLillo, offering the comment “Daniel, you’re not Nietzsche.” Says Pinchbeck, “It was hard for him to conceive that someone of my generation was doing something of primordial significance.”

Perhaps Mr. Howard, in retrospect, might be forgiven his trespasses against our self-ordained prophet, eh?

“I’m generally a humble person, but I do feel I’m surfing the edge of consciousness on this planet,” he says. “A shaman risks their ass to get knowledge that the tribe needs to continue. In this case, the tribe is potentially the whole fucking world.”

On a blog post on his Amazon author page, generally humble person Pinchbeck responded to Grigoriadis’s tart Rolling Stone article:

I find myself in a peculiarly bittersweet relationship to fame, worldly success, etc., as part of the concept I am promoting is of a shift in consciousness that will be so swift and so profound, when it arrives, that it will annul our current categories and conventional reward systems. As I noted in ‘2012,’ I sometimes feel like I am communicating ‘backwards’ from this future state of ‘time freedom,’ and it is a peculiarly uncanny sensation. From that impersonal perspective, I am simply watching a process unfold in linear time – the process of the accelerated evolution of consciousness. As a messenger or prophet (certainly not a guru), I am simply sending out a signal to be picked up by those who are ready to receive it.”

I’ll just let that one fall to the ground with a mighty thud.

Even if Daniel is from the future, he’s not allowed to change the past: A writer named Tom Swiss penned a short take-down of Pinchbeck’s seeming belief that he was a cosmic messenger of the gods in an online essay, “Why Daniel Pinchbeck needs a smack upside his head” that highlights the most… well, the funniest aspect of Pinchbeck’s whole idiosyncratic 2012 trip: If Aleister Crowley could declare himself the prophet of the new aeon, then by gum, Daniel could do it, too.

Generously “borrowing” from The Great Beast 666, with a hefty dollop of Terence McKenna’ trippy apocalyptism thrown into the mix, the whole “channeled message” nature of Pinchbeck’s psychedelic holy man shtick is—how do I put this kindly—FUCKING RIDICULOUS:

Daniel Pinchbeck is the guy probably most responsible for kicking off the idea that some great transformation is going to occur in 2012. In his book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, he claims to have received “transmissions” from the Mayan deity Quetzalcoatl telling him about this momentous event. An excerpt from these transmissions:

The writer of this work [i.e., Pinchbeck] is the vehicle of my arrival—my return—to this realm. He certainly did not expect this to be the case. What began as a quest to understand prophecy has become the fulfillment of prophecy. The vehicle of my arrival has been brought to an awareness of his situation in sometimes painful increments and stages of resistance—and this books follows the evolution of his learning process, as an aid to the reader’s understanding.

The vehicle of my arrival had to learn to follow synchonicities, embrace paradoxes, and solve puzzles. He had to enter into a new way of thinking about time and space and consciousness.

Almost apologetically, the vehicle notes that his birthday fell in June 1966—6/66—“count the number of the Beast: for it is the number of the man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”

The Beast prophesied is the “feathered serpent,” Quetzalcoatl. [Pinchbeck, 2012 p. 370]

LOL.

That’s one hell of a zany, paranoiac, monumentally self-important megalomaniacal feedback loop, ain’t it?

As I type this today, one aspect of the 2012 trip is certain, and this is that all of those fucking full-of-shit blow-hard New Ager/“Burner” types who made cocksure bets about SOMETHING (anything!) happening (solar flares, earthquakes, killer asteroids suddenly coming out of nowhere, or even the more mundane predictions of a great spiritual awakening and turning point for all mankind) on December 21, 2012 are going to have to pay up... as well they should.

New Age-types: STOP BEING SO GULLIBLE. You’re no better than Fox News viewers if you bought into this bullshit!

I mean, seriously, people, anyone who promoted or defended any manifestation of the 2012 hoax without tongue placed firmly-in-cheek, needs to have their noses rubbed in it bigtime. Learn a lil’ lesson, brah. No, really, take a serious bloody hint about how you evaluate your information sources and maybe. just maybe seek out some different intellectual inputs before somebody gets… embarrassed.

Or hoist with his own petard.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Timewave Zero: Did Terence McKenna *really* believe in all that 2012 prophecy stuff?

Below, the grand finale of Beyond The Fringe, the hysterically funny “End of the World” sketch, restaged for The Secret Policeman’s Ball in 1979 with Peter Cook, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Eleanor Bron and others. A young Rowan Atkinson fills in for Dudley Moore. This sketch will never get old… for obvious reasons!
 

 
The three kings bring gifts to the baby Jesus. Sock monkeys enact the nativity scene in Austin, Texas.

In its own way, it’s quite beautiful.

 
Feverishly prolific New York graf-based expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat would have turned 52 today. That fact jars us because of the inevitable Peter Pan myth that accompanies the premature death of any young artist in any discipline.

Though I hate to pursue it, does it depress us to imagine a middle-aged JMB? Would he be still cocooned and slickly dressed, and now entrenched and heavily sponsored downtown, or maybe bugged-out HR-from-Bad-Brains style, redolent in gray dreads, pursued often and obtained for the occasional commission in order to keep up his paranoid existence in who-knows-where?

Of course, Basquiat’s influence dwarfs the downtown New York art scene in the way that he embodied the New York mix of hip-hop, post-punk, and fashion. But our culture also tends to rely on him in an unspoken way as a kind of purified representation of redundant cliches like doomed youth, avant-garde blackness, and the price of fame. We do best to remember each of those features as part of him—and separately, we do best to remember Basquiat as Basquiat.

In that spirit, we draw your attention to Tamra Davis’s excellent documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child, kindly uploaded to YouTube for the budget-minded…
 

 
Thanks to the excellent musician Aybee Deepblak...

 
“I only have questions,” Sam Peckinpah tells Barry Norman in this seldom seen interview from December 1976.

“As a film maker I must look at both sides of the coin, and do my best as a story-teller. I have no absolutes. I have no value judgments,” Peckinpah goes on to say, before asking, “Why does violence have such a point of intoxication with people? Why do people structure their day on killing?”

This is an incredibly honest and brilliant interview with Peckinpah, who doesn’t flinch form any of Norman’s questions—discussing his ignorance, his mistakes—explaining why he was wrong in thinking it could work as catharsis in The Wild Bunch, and why he was “a good whore.”
 

Pakistan got the right idea…
 
That guy from the NRA, he really spoke a lot of sense (“guns don’t kill people – movies do”), but I think I’ve spotted a small flaw in his plan to have armed adults in every school. Granted that the only thing that can “stop a bad guy with a gun” is a “good guy with a gun,” what if the school accidentally hires a bad guy to be their armed school attendant? I mean, that would completely defeat the purpose of the idea, wouldn’t it, and surely sooner or later some school’s “bad guy” checker will come up short, and there’ll be lots more infanticide, and the guy from the NRA would have to do another big talk and think of another solution entirely?

Well, over here in the UK, watching events unfold with an open mouth, I think I’ve come up with the solution…

Arm all American schoolchildren.

Now, given that I myself live in the almost-gunless nation, and I’ve never even seen a gun outside the hands of specialist armed police, I suppose I don’t really know what I’m talking about, and guess it could be somewhat dangerous, maybe, perhaps, letting a few million kids go around armed.

A little bit of online research, however, reassured me. I quickly came upon a video (see below) made by an American called Casey Lavere, all about how to ensure kids handle guns safely.

The film, called Kids With Guns, begins with Casey addressing his camera, alongside his thrilled looking son and daughter (who are, I think, about five and seven respectively):

“The kids have been dying to shoot their guns, so we’re gonna do a really quick video on how to show your kids how to shoot guns safely and properly, and steps that I take with my kids so that they understand gun safety and the importance of it. Gun safety is very, very important, there’s a lot of people who are killed every year by kids playing with guns without their parents around.”

Casey then turns to his son. Now I could be hearing things, but I’m pretty sure that he addresses the boy as “Gauge.”

“Gauge, what’s the very first thing I ever taught you about guns?”

“Don’t point them at pee-pull,” obliges young Gauge.

“Very good,” proclaims Papa, before turning to the camera and delivering the fully-grown version of this motto. “You don’t ever want to point a gun at anything that you don’t want to shoot.

Turning to his daughter (who I think is called Brailey, not Hollowheadettea or anything), he invites her to recite his Second Golden Rule.

“Never touch a gun without parent supervision.”

“That’s right, you never want to be around a gun without an adult around… I feel very strongly about this! But I also feel very strongly about teaching kids to shoot a gun and to enjoy it.”

Surely. What responsible parent wouldn’t want to see their child enjoying messing about with a lethal weapon?

The safety shtick over and done with, we’re then treated to a couple of minutes of kids firing guns to a ropey rock guitar soundtrack. Casey’s kids look like pretty good shots! After a couple of minutes, it’s time to introduce the guns themselves, which Casey does stood in front of his pick-up truck.

Behind him, Brailey and Gauge sit clutching their huge weapons like miniature henchmen, their little legs dangling from the back of the vehicle.

“This is a little .22 we bought Brailey when she was five years old.”

“Four!” Brailey brusquely corrects him, from behind a fetching pink rifle.

“Four” concedes Casey, fondly, “I got a little excited and bought her a .22 when she was four.”

Cultural relativity’s a funny thing ain’t it! Here in the UK, getting “a little excited” and buying a four year old a gun would make you an extremely dangerous psychopath: In Utah, Casey Lavere’s making home movies about it. And showing them in public.

“And this,” he goes on, indicating the larger rifle resting in young Gauge’s even smaller lap, “this is gonna be a Gauge’s gun, this is a .22 magnum I bought…”

Wrapping things up, Lavere explains that he just wanted to “show you guys a safe way to get the kids out” [sic] and implores any watching shooters (as opposed to flabbergasted Englishmen) to make sure they pick up the detritus following target practice, and to “keep firearms locked away from kids,” a truly worthwhile message unfortunately undermined by Casey’s own two heavily armed children sat at either side of him.

Young Gauge helpfully illustrates Dad’s solemn admonition by wagging his finger at the camera and then turning it into a trigger finger, which he pulls, five times.