Remember “Honey Boo Boo,” the hyperactive, over-caffeinated “go-go juice” chugging star of the child beauty pageant reality show Toddlers & Tiaras? How could you forget her, right? Well, Honey Boo Boo and her family, mother June, father “Sugar Bear” and sisters “Pumpkin,” “Chubbs” and “Chickadee” will soon be appearing in a new six-part series on TLC called Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

The network this will air on is TLC. That used to stand for “The Learning Channel.” I wonder what those initials stand for now?

I also wonder if “Mountain Dew” is going to sponsor this? If not Mountain Dew, who?

How many products would benefit from an association with a show like this??? Domino’s Pizza, Little Caesar’s, Doritos, I guess the list is depressingly endless, isn’t it?
 

 

Alan McGee has shared this gem with Dangerous Minds - Joe Strummer’s original lyrics for “London Calling.”

LONDON CALLING

THE NEWS OF CLOCK NINE
RETUNE YOUR RECEIVER FOR THE LONDON SIGN

LONDON CALLING TO THE FARAWAY TOWNS
NOW THAT WAR IS DECLARED AND BATTLE COME DOWN
LONDON CALLING TO THE UNDERWORLD
COME OUT OF THE CUPBOARD ALL YOU BOYS & GIRLS
LONDON CALLING NOW DON’T LOOK TO US
ALL THAT PHONY BEATLEMANIA HAS BITTEN THE DUST
LONDON CALLING SEE WE AINT GOT NO SWING
‘CEPT FOR THE RING OF THAT TRUNCHEON THING

THE ICE AGE IS COMING The Sun is zooming in
ENGINES STOP RUNNING & The WHEAT is Growing THIN
THINKING NUCLEAR ERROR, BUT I HAVE NO FEAR
LONDON IS DROWNING - AND I LIVE BY THE RIVER

LONDON CALLING TO THE IMITATION ZONE
FORGET IT BROTHER, AN GO IT ALONE
LONDON CALLING UPON THE ZOMBIES OF DEATH
QUIT HOLDING OUT - AND TAKE ANOTHER BREATH
LONDON CALLING - AND I DON’T WANNA SHOUT
BUT WHEN WE WERE TALKING - I SAW YOU NODDING OUT
LONDON CALLING - SEE WE AINT GOT NO HIGHS
EXCEPT FOR THAT ONE WITH THE YELLOWY EYES

The lyrics are still as potent as when they were first written. Alan was given this piece of rock history by the song’s co-writer Mick Jones, and says, ‘Some people have the Bible, we had The Clash.’

 
Promo for ‘London Calling’, after the jump…
 

 
Frank Bruni took a much-deserved swipe at Michele Bachmann in the New York Times op ed pages this morning.

From “The Divine Miss M”:

What I find most fascinating about Michele Bachmann — and there are many, many more where she came from — is that she presents herself as a godly woman, humbly devoted to her Christian faith. I’d like to meet that god, and I’d like to understand that Christianity.

Does it call for smearing people on the basis of flimsy conspiracy theories? That’s what Bachmann just did to Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by essentially suggesting she might be a mole for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Does it endorse scaring young women away from immunizations that could spare them serious illness? Bachmann did that during her memorable presidential campaign, when she blithely drew an unsubstantiated link between a vaccine for the human papillomavirus and mental retardation.

Does it encourage gratuitously divisive condemnations of Barack Obama as “anti-American,” one of many incendiary phrases in her attacks against him in 2008? And does it compel a war against homosexuality waged with the language and illogic she uses?

She has said that gay men and lesbians are dysfunctional products of abuse and agents of “sexual anarchy,” and when the singer and songwriter Melissa Etheridge was battling breast cancer years ago, Bachmann helpfully chimed in: “This may be an opportunity for her now to be open to some spiritual things, now that she is suffering with that physical disease. She is a lesbian.”

Bachmann’s concept of Christian love brims with hate, and she has a deep satchel of stones to throw. From what kind of messiah did she learn that?

OUCH! Nicely put, Frank Bruni!

Bruni concludes by wondering if we should “start noting the difference between Christians of real compassion and those of exclusionary spite.”

Again: OUCH! There needs to be more like this. A flood of them to drown the stupid out.

And have you heard about the goofball Teabagger in Arizona, promising to launch a recall effort against Sen. John McCain for daring to defend Huma Abedin on the floor of the Senate? Even principled chivalry from a war hero gets no respect from these people?

From Huffington Post: “Wes Harris, Arizona Tea Party Leader, Seeks To Recall John McCain Over Huma Abedin Defense”:

Wes Harris, the founder and chairman of the Original North Phoenix Tea Party, now says McCain’s words have given him grounds to mount an effort to unseat the longtime senator.

In an interview with the Arizona Capitol Times, Harris called McCain an “embarrassment,” before laying out a variety of unapologetic anti-Islamic sentiments.

“Have you ever read the Quran? I suggest you do so, because anyone that is a Muslim is a threat to this country, and that’s a fact,” Harris told the Times. “There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim. If they are Muslim they have to follow the Quran. That’s their religion and that’s their doctrine.”

According to the Times, Harris believes Muslims are incapable of being loyal to the U.S., because he claims that their faith in Islam and the Quran trumps any other allegiance. He also apparently believes Muslims shouldn’t be able to serve in the State Department at all.

“Is [Abedin] a Muslim? Is she an active Muslim?” Harris asked the Times. “I rest my case. That’s all she needs to be.”

Did you feel your brain cells dying as you read that?

It smells like burning hair.

For good effect, Harris told Senator McCain:

“Go to hell, Senator, it’s time for you to take your final dirt nap.”

By now, even a life-long Republican like McCain is probably thinking “These people are fucking nuts” and his own sense of vanity (if nothing else) will probably see him distance himself more and more from his party’s most embarrassing and outspoken dimwits like Bachmann, Louie Gohmert and Steve King (King’s the asshole from Iowa gloating that he’s been able to monkey-wrench animal cruelty laws! HOORAY FOR ANIMAL CRUELTY. Wha???).

It’s obviously only a matter of time before McCain’s own daughter leaves the GOP.

And look at John Roberts. Does anyone really think he’s going to be more conservative after the insane hatred unleashed in his direction after the Obamacare ruling?

Forget Republican vs Democrat, or Liberal vs Conservative, what’s shaking out in America is more like Smart vs. Dumb.

This is what it’s coming down to, is it not?

The all-out total implosion of the Republican Party cult is something that is both nauseating on one level (it hurts to admit that we live in an Idiocracy cum oligarchy doesn’t it?) and hilariously funny on another. It’s getting really intense. The flailing form the right seems so much more frantic as the election year rolls on.

From where I’m sitting, in the liberal stronghold of Hollywood, California, I’m thinking, hey, it can’t happen to a nicer bunch of flaming fucking assholes. A Republican Civil War would make my day, every day. So far Bachmann has shown no signs that the numerous denunciations of her latest stunt from fellow Republicans have slowed her “crusade” down even a little bit. I hope she keeps it up, with her pedal to the metal.

As a non-believer, and an avowed Marxist, I believe that, in the scheme of things, Michele Bachmann has a VERY SPECIAL ROLE TO PLAY.

She’s the best!!!

 
Gallery 1988 posted a few new paintings by Bruce White for its “Velvet Paintings for Your Inner Nerd” show.

Opening Reception: Friday, July 27th from 7-10pm.

Showing: July 27 - August 15, 2012

Gallery 1988 Los Angeles:
7020 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
 

 
Via Super Punch

 
If you’re a charter member of the 1% (or just want to be cheeky) might I suggest the Louis Vuitton waffle maker by Andrew Lewicki?

Via Booooooom!

 
If you haven’t heard, there’s a new Julian Cope book coming out and even compared to his other incredibly worthwhile publications (The Modern Antiquarian and The Megalithic European, extensive studies of Britain’s and Europe’s ancient stone circles megalithic sites, the classics Japrocksampler and Krautrocksampler and his hilariously honest autobiographical accounts of the Liverpool punk scene and his own rock stardom in Head On and the follow-up, Repossessed) this one looks like a complete motherfucker.

It’s 768 pages to lose yourself in and discover new things. A signed, deluxe edition of 250 will come with three CDs. Here’s the description from the publisher, Faber & Faber’s website:

Julian Cope’s Copendium is his re-imagining of a useful canon of popular music, which is set to become required reading. It’s available initially in a limited and highly collectable edition (see below) - with a standard edition due in November 2012.

Copendium comprises a collection of album reviews and themed track samplers that lay out an alternative history of the last six decades of popular music, written by the visionary musician, antiquarian and musicologist. The result is a feast of obscure and neglected masterworks; Krautrock, motorik and post-punk, stoner and doom metal, occasionally even jazz, spoken word and hair metal.

Julian Cope is the perfect guide to this novel terrain: impeccably informed, passionate, insightful and deeply funny.

The fact is, for many people—and I am very definitely in this camp, myself—a musical recommendation from Julian Cope is practically a decree to get your hands on something, the same way it was when Lester Bangs wrote about The Stooges, Lou Reed or The Clash. Cope’s wild-eyed passion for convincing you, his reader, that you need, nay MUST have this deep rock and roll epiphany that he has had and that some obscure or overlooked album is a very real and necessary shamanic rite of passage, is, for me, frankly irresistible. The quality of his prose is second to none (I detect the influence of Bangs, yes, but also John Sinclair or Mick Farren in his more polemic essays) and he’s just got fucking phenomenal taste.

Truly, there is no better guide, none, to the hidden history of the last six decades of music, both popular and otherwise, than Julian Cope. Over the years, I have been turned on to so much amazing, life-enhancing, life-changing music that I feel like I owe him a heartfelt public thank you. Has anyone written as passionately about music since the death of Lester Bangs, than Julian Cope? Not one writer comes to mind.

It was via Cope’s Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker compilation that I first heard of Scott Walker, for instance, inspiring at least a ten-year long Scott Walker obsession for me. And it was Cope’s brilliantly written assessment of Miles Davis’s “difficult” electric phase of the early to mid-70s that saw me dive deeply into those funky waters (and a year-long period where I listened to practically nothing else—my neighbors must have hated my fucking guts!).

Hell, I first picked up on Faust due to Julian Cope (this alone calls for more than a public thank you—perhaps naming a child after him?). The Taj Mahal Travellers? Never heard of ‘em before Japrocksampler, now I am obsessed with their music. I could go on and on.

In fact, here’s something that I was turned onto just this very morning via Cope’s writing on his Head Heritage website. My introduction to Ash Ra Tempel came via their Seven Up collaboration with Timothy Leary. It’s not an easy thing to listen to (the band and Leary were tripping on LSD when they recorded it) and is something that I filed away with my collection of Timothy Leary memorabilia (not my CDs), probably never to listen to again, frankly. I was not interested in hearing more. However, this morning I came across this essay, from 2000:

Ash Ra Tempel’s first two LPs had taken the metal of Detroit to heights not even considered by the MC5 or the Stooges or even Funkadelic. Sure those groups had got close on stage. But Ash Ra Tempel got it on record. While the collective Detroit obsession with the Outer-spacings of Sun Ra and the free-jazz innervisions of John Coltrane had been tamed beyond recognition by the American record industry, Ash Ra Tempel suffered no such disappointment. And those searching for the fulfilment of the Detroit promise need have looked no further than Ash Ra Tempel in 1971. There’s a part of Iggy Pop’s autobiographical I Need More in which he writes (p.17) about the early Stooges sound thus:

“...I’d play this sort of wild Hawaiian guitar with a pick-up that I invented, which meant that I made two sounds at one time, like an airplane…using 55-gallon oil cans which I got from a junkyard and rigged up as bass drums, I home-made a drumset. For drumsticks I designed these semi-plastic moulded hammers. Scotty beat the shit out of these cans; it sounded like an earthquake – thunderous… It was entirely instrumental at this time, like jazz gone wild. It was very North African, a very tribal sound: very electronic. We would play like that for about 10 minutes. Then everybody would have to get really stoned again…But what we had put into 10 minutes was so total and so very savage – the earth shook, then cracked, and SWALLOWED ALL MISERY WHOLE.” (my capitals)

Music that Swallowed All Misery Whole…

In the first two Ash Ra Tempel LPs, Ash Ra Tempel and Schwingungen, they had captured on record All that Iggy Pop had promised Could Be but, because of Record Industry Hang-ups, had been unable to deliver. And this music which could Swallow All Misery Whole reached into the core of each musician who played in Ash Ra Tempel and pulled out, still wriggling, the cosmic conger eel of white light which so few artists ever capture in the Moment of Recording.

For years, I had drooled over that description in I Need More. I’d shown many friends that passage – I had bored them with it. And all the time Ash Ra Tempel had already done it in 1971… But it was not without a price. The first LP was by a Kosmische power-rock trio of gargantuan size. The 20-minute opening track “Amboss (Anvil)” was all of Iggy Pop’s above description and more. Sure it was a fucking cosmic freakout. But it was played by Renaissance Man and Cosmic Man at the same time.

Fuck Jim Morrison’s ridiculous “Renaissance Man of the Mind” description.
That was just an excuse to be a fat slob.
That was just an existentialist knee-jerk.
No. No. No.

These freaks were fit. Superhuman. Superman.

They were here to go. But all in good time. And they had staying power over 20-minute tracks. On “Amboss”, Klaus Schultze plays drums like a hundred drummers. He’s not twice as powerful, he’s a hundred times as powerful. Hartmut Enke, the spiritual leader of the band, hits his Gibson bass the way only a giant could: the huge extra-longnecked she-bass was courted, cajoled and ultimately goosed into action by this huge handsome freak they all called The Hawk. And Manuel Gottsching plays blues like Clapton, but right alongside pre-emptive Keith Levene white noise and egoless as Lou Reed’s Live 1969 rhythm guitar freakouts. The interplay is so intuitive that frequently it’s impossible to hear the instruments — you just hear the Music. And the LP was housed in yet another of Ohr Records’ extravagant packages — a centrally opening gatefold with an Ancient Egyptian exterior, a freaky occult gematriac interior, and a tragically beautiful Head poem that began: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness staring hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”

After the jump, hear “Amboss” by Ash Ra Tempel…

 
Well, it’s actually a recycled photo that’s been making rounds on the Internet for a while. Apparently no one will ever be able to escape this image…

“In his new ad for PETA, Morrissey continues his crusade for animals and asks you to help eradicate the animal overpopulation crisis by spaying and neutering your companion animals,” PETA said on their website.

Below, an outtake I found from the cat-on-the-head photo shoot.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Heaven Knows He Was Miserable Then: Morrissey’s first postcard to a pen-pal from 1980

Via BuzzFeed

 
The Composites is an ongoing project by Brian Joseph Davis where images are “created using a commercially available law enforcement composite sketch software and descriptions of literary characters.” 

Above is the composite sketch of Dracula, from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula.

The description from the book:

A tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache…His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead…His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking…For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin…The blue eyes transformed with fury. (Multiple suggestions)

The Composites
 
 
Via Nerdcore

 
After several 911 calls from alarmed motorists who saw him doing 112 mph on the Maine Turnpike in a Ford Mustang with the hazard lights flashing, Timothy Courtois, 49, was arrested Sunday night by state police in Biddeford, Maine with an unusual arsenal in his car. Police found an AK-47 assault rifle, four handguns and several boxes of ammunition.

From the Bangor Daily News:

Also in Courtois’ car, police found newspaper clippings about the mass shooting Friday during a showing of the same Batman movie at a Colorado movie theater, according to McCausland.

Courtois told police he had attended the Batman movie at the Cinemagic Theater in Saco on Saturday night with a loaded gun in his backpack and that he was on his way Sunday to Derry, N.H., where he planned to shoot a former employer, McCausland said.

“He didn’t speak to any intent to harm people [at the theater], but I’m sure a lot of this is going to continue to come out” as agencies including the state police, FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives continue their investigations, Maine State Police Lt. Kevin Donovan said Monday.

“We don’t know what his true intentions were” when he brought the gun to the theater, and investigators are trying to determine his reasons for doing so and for having a large collection of firearms, McCausland said.

Disturbing enough, of course, but there’s more:

A search of Courtois’ home at 344 Elm St. in Biddeford after his arrest uncovered more guns, including a machine gun, rifles, handguns and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Courtois made his initial court appearance in Springvale District Court on charges of having a concealed weapon and criminal speeding at 1 p.m. Monday by video from York County Jail, according to a court clerk.

His bail is set at $50,000 cash or $150,000 real estate, with provisions that he not use or possess alcohol, drugs or dangerous weapons. He also must submit to random searches and testing under the bail conditions.

Wait a minute, under THESE circumstances, the guy with a massive cache of weapons, who spoke to police of the intent to kill someone when the police picked him up for doing double the speed limit with an assault rifle in his car, plus with what happened in Colorado and the whole Batman connection here, if this guy makes bail, THIS GUY, they’re just going to let him go?

Apparently so. Courtois is scheduled to appear in York District Court at 8:30 a.m. Aug. 23.

How would you like to be this dude’s neighbor? And I wonder if the cops bothered to call his former boss to suggest the immediate purchase of a flack jacket? WTF?

Via Joe.My.God.

 
The first pro-shot footage of The Stone Roses performing together in 16 years has appeared on You Tube. Taken from their concert at Benicàssim International Festival, Spain, on July 14th, 2012, when the Roses give a rousing version of “I Wanna Be Adored”. And while Brown, Squire and Mani may have aged well, the drummer Reni looks like he is auditioning for Rab C Nesbitt.
 

 
With thanks to Stevie McGuire