When director Heiner Mühlenbrock showed up with his cameras to document the tense April 1983 recording sessions for the final Birthday Party EP, Mutiny!, the group was well beyond the verge of dissolution and barely on speaking terms. Mutiny! was cut at Hansa Ton studios in Berlin and the viewer is shown the development of the haunting “Jennifer’s Veil,” one of The Birthday Party’s finest—and darkest—moments on record and Nick Cave adding his vocal to “Swampland” (some truly truly impressive scream-singing during that bit).
Although he seems pretty sharp here, initially at least, at a certain point, Cave just nods off in the studio… for several minutes (Maybe he was… tired?). Some stunning shots of Rowland S. Howard’s hands where you can really see how he wrung those bleak bluesy sounds out of his six strings. Blixa Bargeld, who played guitar on “Mutiny in Heaven” (oh how I wish Mühlenbrock’s cameras were there for that session) is seen in the control room.
When Mühlenbrock showed his film to the band, they were unimpressed. MUTINY! The Last Birthday Party was finally released in 2008, in a limited edition DVD only for sale only at The Birthday Party website.
Patti Smith’s recollections of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe are touching, beautiful and sad in this interview filmed during the 2012 literature festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
Photos and video from Brian Butler’s performance of Aleister Crowley’s “Bartzabel Working,” a ceremonial evocation of the spirit of Mars, first written and performed in London in 1910 by the Great Beast 666.
The ceremony was performed at the west coast branch of L&M Arts in Los Angeles on December 4.
The ritual was part of the gallery’s current “For the Martian Chronicles” exhibit and employed custom robes made in the original A∴A∴ (Crowley’s magical order) designs and a circle, altar and triangle fabricated in Thelemic colors.
Mark first met “The Rat” while he was working on one of his books:
‘While researching Six Degrees of Paris Hilton, from out of the blue I received an email from someone claiming that he knew more about one of the criminals I was writing about than anyone. Intrigued, I phoned him, and soon realized that it was HIS story I wanted to tell…
‘“The Rat” and I have remained friends through the years, and I trust him with my life. Once, when I had to confront a pair of Russian mobsters operating out of a pawn shop front, The Rat flew down from Seattle to simply stand behind me and look intimidating. Only a true friend would do something like that.’
Mark also tells Dangerous Minds that “The Rat” will be going public this Thursday, when he will reveal his true identity for the first time on camera.
Here is an extract from Mark’s article on “The Rat”:
The first sign that something was wrong was when a car followed him onto his street – a one-way cul-de-sac at the top of Nichols Canyon in the Hollywood Hills where the mansions start at a million dollars. He was driving back from Bad Boys Bail Bonds, where he’d just dropped three grand to spring one of his drivers who had gotten popped in Santa Monica on a routine haul. Earlier in the day, he had pulled off the kind of transaction that some dealers go their whole lives without seeing – 300 pounds of primo weed for $1 million, which had netted him a cool $90,000 for two hours work. His senses heightened, he could feel the vibe going sour as he steered his discreet rental car past his own driveway. Another 60 feet, and suddenly there were searchlights washing every street corner – at least 30 undercover police cars – with a helicopter swooping down on top of him in case he decided to make a run for it down the open cliff face.
“I hadn’t done a deal in six months,” says Oz (most names in this story have been changed), a 48-year-old ex-marijuana trafficker and big-time baller who once dominated the I-5 corridor from British Columbia to Tijuana, was responsible for 70 percent of the marijuana smoked in Los Angeles and saw $4 million move through his operation every two weeks. “They take me inside – they’re stripping the house, and here’s my $90,000 all out on the table. I said, ‘Dude, just shoot me now. I don’t blame you guys, but I’m not going to rat on any of my people, so I’d prefer to be dead.’ The Fed says, ‘No, man, I can’t do that. But we need to talk.’”
Cruising through the Hills in a tricked-out Lincoln Navigator, on loan from a fellow drug runner who got out of the game when he found religion, Oz can’t help but point the sites of his former glory: The Russian tanning salon in Hollywood where you could order up Vicodin or steroids on demand; the Melrose Avenue tattoo shop that moves 50 to a hundred pounds of weed a week; the Mexican restaurant that serves up kilos of coke with its carne asada. But he is less expansive when describing his life since the 2004 bust that curtailed his hand-built empire – and his uneasy resurrection as an undercover informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency. In the world he lived in for over 20 years, the worst thing you could be was a rat – a turnabout of fate that obviously weighs heavy on him. In the past three years, Oz has survived three suicide attempts – not counting his choice of livelihood.
Still retaining the hard angles and displaced muscle mass from his early years as a bodybuilder and protracted steroid enthusiast, Oz today most resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger if you put him through a threshing machine and then tried to spot-weld the bigger pieces back together. He’s had his bicep torn off from trying to break a guy’s neck in a bar, all his teeth are capped from being broken off in fights and he’s literally got screws in his head to hold his skull in place. He earned the sometimes nickname “Shrek” from taking so many punches to the face that his eyebrows calcified into scar tissue, leaving a large protruding ridge in his forehead. And in the kind of colorful anecdote that no doubt made it easier for him to do his job, he once bit his best friend’s ear off in the back seat of a limo.
“I have a short man’s complex,” admits the 5’8, 220-pound brawler, still capable of flashes of intense anger and pervasive menace, as well as intense emotion over the secondary victims of his chosen lifestyle. “I realized at one point that most people were my friends because they were scared of me. I’ve never killed anybody, but I’ve hurt a lot of people – and every one of them deserved it.”
My DM colleague, Marc Campbell has passed on this episode of Media Mayhem, with Mark Ebner, which contains the first on-camera interview with ‘The Rat’.
On June 27, 1979, accompanied only by her harmonium, Nico performed a stunning “Genghis Khan,” a typically atmospheric number from her as then-unrecorded 1981 album, Drama of Exile, on French television.
I have come to lie with you
I have come to die with you
On your padded shoulder
And your golden chest
In a wilderness of glass we rest
And all the flowers they are our words
And my chances follow dances Into a storm afraid
A sweet and bitter rest he gets
A sweet and bitter rest he gets
I have come to lie with you
I have come to die with you.
They don’t write ‘em like that anymore, do they?
The golf claps from the audience speak volumes about how this must’ve gone down in 1979!
UPDATE: The winner is Richard Swanson! Congratulations!
Thanks to the kind folks at the Universal Music Group, Dangerous Minds will be giving away TWELVE, that’s right, TWELVE Frank Zappa CDs, personally selected by yours truly, the arch Zappa freak who is sitting beneath a painting of Frank and the Mothers of Invention above my desk as I type this.
Did I say twelve? I meant THIRTEEN Zappa albums (and some selections contain multiple discs)!
My selection concentrates on my favorite era of Zappa’s vast oeuvre, the early years when he worked with his best collaborators, in my opinion at least, the original Mothers.
“These Mothers is crazy. One guy wears beads & they all smell bad.”—Suzy Creamcheese
The lucky winner will receive:
Freak Out! Absolutely Free Lumpy Gravy We’re Only in It for the Money Uncle Meat Hot Rats Burnt Weeny Sandwich Weasels Ripped My Flesh Ahead of Their Time You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 5 The Lost Episodes Mystery Disc
Plus one glorious example of Zappa’s admittedly sketchier, mid-period: the sprawling 3-CD set, Läther, making this prize a BAKER’S DOZEN of Zappa goodies for one lucky reader!
To enter, it’s simple: First you must be signed up to receive the Dangerous Minds Daily Newsletter via email (look for the sign-up widget in the top toolbar of this page) and “like” the official Frank Zappa Facebook fanpage. Then you have to leave a comment below, telling us why you deserve to win.
One newsletter subscriber will be chosen by the editors of Dangerous Minds to receive this musical bounty. The winner will be picked later today, December 17th, 2012. Good luck!
Frank Zappa discusses the absurdity of sin, guilt and four-letter words on Canadian television in 1969:
Tuning In – A Film about Karlheinz Stockhausen was produced for the BBC in 1981. Directed by Robin Maconie, who authored The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, this documentary is a lively and informative introduction to the work and process of a man who shook music and consciousness up.
And when they encounter works of art which show that using new media can lead to new experiences and to new consciousness, and expand our senses, our perception, our intelligence, our sensibility, then they will become interested in this music.” Karlheinz Stockhausen
Stockhausen once said he was using music as a “flying device.” I like that.
Not that anyone had any high hopes that South Carolina’s Tea party favorite, Governor Nikki Haley, would appoint anyone but a fucking buffoon to replace departing conservative dickhead Jim DeMint—who left to head the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation and make a lot more money than being a mere US Senator pays—but she really plumbed the absolute bottom of the barrel by selecting Republican Congressman Tim Scott.
In his 2010 campaign for the House, Scott described himself as a lost youth who had his life turned around when a Chick-fil-A franchise owner took him under his wing and taught him conservative principles.
Think Progress summed up Scott’s deplorably moronic record:
Floated impeaching Obama over the debt ceiling. As the debt ceiling debate raged in the summer of 2011 because of the intransigence of Tea Party freshmen like Scott, the nation inched perilously close to defaulting on its obligations. One option discussed by some officials to avoid that scenario was for the president to assert that the debt ceiling itself was an unconstitutional infringement on the 14th Amendment. However, Tim Scott tolda South Carolina Tea Party group that if Obama were to go this route, it would be an “impeachable act.”
Proposed a bill to cut off food stamps for entire families if one member went on strike. One of the most anti-union members of Congress, Scott proposed a bill two months after entering Congress in 2011 to kick families off food stamps if one adult were participating in a strike. Scott’s legislation made no exception for children or other dependents.
Wanted to spend an unlimited amount of money to display Ten Commandments outside county building. When Scott was on the Charleston County Council, one of his primary issues was displaying the Ten Commandments outside the Council building. According to the Augusta Chronicle, Scott said the display “would remind council members and speakers the moral absolutes they should follow.” When he was sued for violating the Constitution and a Circuit Judge’s orders, Scott was nonplussed: “Whatever it costs in the pursuit of this goal (of displaying the Commandments) is worth it.”
Defended fairness of giving billions in subsidies to Big Oil. Scott and his Republican allies in Congress voted repeatedly last year to protect more than $50 billion in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil corporations. When ThinkProgress asked Scott whether it was fair to do that, especially at a time when oil companies are earning tens of billions in profit every quarter, the Tea Party freshman defended the industry: “fair is a relative word,” said Scott.
Helped slash South Carolina’s HIV/AIDS budget. As a state representative, Scott backed a proposal to cut the state’s entire HIV/AIDS budget, despite the fact that South Carolina ranks in the top-third of reported AIDS cases. The cuts were ultimately included in the state’s budget, impacting more than 2,000 HIV-positive South Carolinians who needed help paying for their medication.
Had enough?
Departing dipshit Jim DeMint is an asshole with big clown shoes to fill and it looks like Tim Scott is the asshole who’s going to fill them. DeMint is stupid, but he’s not stupid stupid, he’s stupid smart (“stupid like a fox” to coin a phrase). Scott, I fear, is just a real fuckin’ numbnuts. Exactly what the US Senate needs right about now…
That thing about cutting food stamps off for the children of striking union workers is one of the lowest of the low things I’ve ever heard of a Republican suggesting. That’ll break the unions:STARVE THEIR CHILDREN. Scott deserves spit in his face, gallons of it, not an unearned Senate appointment!
The reichwing blogosphere is already starting to bleat about South Carolina’s “first black senator” but… THIS KNOB??? Give me a fucking break…
For shame, South Carolina. If you can’t do better than Nikki Haley, Jim DeMint or a silly lightweight jackass like Tim Scott, that says truly pathetic things about your state.
My first initial response to this Pentax K1000 SLR tattoo by artist Helma van der Weide was “Oh, wow! That’s kinda clever.”
Then after a few seconds, I realized it’s permanent and the “owner” is always going to have to hold her arm in front of her face like that for the rest of her life so that people get the joke…
