A British councillor has stunned his colleagues by claiming his real mother is a 9 foot green alien with 8 fingers.

Simon Parkes, who was elected as a Labour Party councillor for the Stakesby district of the Whitby Town Council in February this year, has spoken at length on You Tube of his life among extra-terrestrials and his upbringing with an alien Mom, reports the Northern Echo.

Parkes said he first saw an alien at the age of eight months, when “a traditional kite-shaped face”, with huge eyes, tiny nostrils and a thin mouth appeared over his cot.

He said: “Two green stick things came in. I was aware of some movement over my head. I thought, ‘they’re not mummy’s hands, mummy’s hands are pink’.”
He added: “I was looking straight into its face. It enters my mind through my eyes and it sends a message down my optic nerve into my brain.

“It says ‘I am your real mother, I am your more important mother’.”

He said after contracting chicken pox at the age of three, his mother went to work and left him at home to fend for himself when an 8ft “doctor” dressed as a waiter appeared to offer help.

As an 11-year-old, he claims he was taken on a craft by his alien “mother”, and made a deal with the beings on board.

He said: “The reason extraterrestrials are interested in me is not because of my physical body, but because of what is inside me. My soul.”

Councillor Parkes said his extraterrestrial beliefs “did not come up on the doorstep” while he was campaigning recently.

He said: “For many people who don’t experience it, it’s very hard to accept. We are taught to only see and believe what we can touch, but it’s acceptable to believe in religion.

“It’s a personal matter and it doesn’t affect my work. I’m more interested in fixing someone’s leaking roof or potholes. People don’t want me to talk about aliens.

“I get more common sense out of the aliens than out of Scarborough Town Hall. The aliens are far more aware of stuff. People in the Town Hall seem not to be aware of the needs of Whitby.”

Fellow Stakesby ward member and former Mayor of Whitby, Councillor Terry Jennison, said the matter had not been discussed by councillors.

He said: “I am completely in the dark about this.”

In his long (winded) interview, which becomes increasingly bizarre as it goes on, Mr Parkes gives full details (with illustrations) of his upbringing and inter-action with extra-terrestrials and their plans for our future. And I thought Republicans were weird.
 

 
Via the Northern Echo
 

 
A new documentary on the ill-fated career of glam rocker Jobriath, Jobriath A.D., screened last night at the BFI London Lesbian and Gay film festival and has received a very warm critical reception. In a glowing review in The Guardian, critic Andrew Pulver writes…

[...] in this fantastically revelatory documentary by Kieran Turner, Jobriath has been thoroughly rehabilitated: as a charismatic performer in his own right, the unwitting victim of record-industry hubris, and an unlikely, reluctant martyr for gay rights.

Haven’t heard of Jobriath? In an article previously posted on Dangerous Minds, R. Metzger, a Jobriath fan, described him in succinct fashion:

If you’ve never heard of Jobriath Boone, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Obscure even by “rock snob” standards, Jobriath was the first really openly gay rock star. David Bowie and Lou Reed flirted with bisexuality, nail polish and make-up, of course, but Jobriath was in his own words, “a true fairy.” He wasn’t just “out of the closet” he was out like a police siren with the volume turned up to eleven!”

And in an article published yesterday in The Guardian, Marc Almond pays homage to his hero and explains why Jobriath may have been too much too soon:

Jobriath (born Bruce Wayne Campbell) was a readymade entity with no big backstory, yet to those in the know he was thrilling and seductive, a guilty secret. I remember, before hearing a note, taking a journey to the big city to buy his first album, the eponymous Jobriath, on import. Its striking cover showed him with porcelain skin and film-star ruby lips, a fallen, broken, beautiful statue. On a first listening, the music is a baffling mix of glam, musical theatre and 1970s rock. At a time when we craved simple guitar chords and a Starman chorus, Jobriath seemed just too musical, too clever – not pop enough. His voice had a touch of Mick Jagger at his most sluttish (like that other wonderful US glam import, David Johansen of the New York Dolls). He was a mix of wide-eyed innocent and world-weary punk. And though there was a nod to Ziggy in the vowels, Bowie he was not.

For me, above all else, he was a sexual hero: truly the first gay pop star. How extreme that was to the US at the time. His outrageous appearances on the hallowed US rock show The Midnight Special prompted shock, bewilderment and disgust. Everyone hated Jobriath – even, and especially, gay people. He was embarrassingly effeminate in an era of leather and handlebar moustaches.

Jobriath A.D. will have its US premiere on Apr 14 at the Florida Film Festival.

Here’s the trailer:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds: Jobriath, Rock’s Fairy Godmother

 
“Bubbles” (or rather Mike Smith, the actor who plays him) from the greatest Canadian television show of all time, Trailer Park Boys, wants to go to outer space. The Metro News in Toronto is holding a contest to put one of their readers into space and Smith wants to win.

Vote for him here. Let’s shoot this cocksucker into space! Bubbles has to win!
 

 
And now you know why your cat’s tongue feels like sandpaper when it licks you. 
 

 
Via reddit

 
“Somebody told me you people are crazy! But I’m not so sure about that; you seem to be all right to me.”—Lux Interior

On June 13, 1978 The Cramps gave a free concert at the California State Mental Hospital in Napa. It is, simply put, one of the single greatest rock and roll moments ever captured on videotape (in this case, on a half-inch open reel Sony Portapak by Joe Rees and his Target Video outfit). Also on the bill were The Mutants from San Francisco.

One hundred years from now this video will be as iconic as The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. But enough description, HIT PLAY AND WATCH IT, ALREADY!

Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard meticulously recreated this event (and the video itself) as an elaborate art project at the ICA in London in 2003. Forsyth and Pollard’s “Cramps” also performed in front of an audience comprised of psychiatric patients in their “File under Sacred Music” re-staging of the infamous 1978 gig.
 

 
Look at my fucking red trousers! is a “collection of photographs in celebration of the vibrant and burgeoning red-trousered communities of London and elsewhere.”
 

 

 
Via Everlasting Blort

 
A blood poet of the highest order, Harry Crews has died of neuropathy at the age of 76.

Crews wrote in a style that was at once brutal and beautiful, baroque and as ordinary as dirt. Within a single sentence he could be both tender and terrifying. His novels were populated by freaks, outlaws, burn-outs and lost souls who wandered through trailer parks, bayous, dive bars, sideshows and the long lonely highways of the deep south. Possessed of a gothic sensibility, dark humor and hard-edged grittiness that put him in the company of Cormac McCarthy, Charles Bukowski and Flannery O’Connor as well as hardboiled writers like Jim Thompson, Crews was capable of transforming the rot of reality into something so rich with life that even death had to laugh.

Punk rockers gravitated to Crews because he was a badass who managed to find a medium through which to articulate his anger, despair and lust. Lydia Lunch and Kim Gordon created a band called Harry Crews as an homage to the writer. They harnessed the energy of his books and transformed it into the only kind of music that could handle it - blistering hard rock.

Crews was one of the major influences on my writing, right up there with Bukowski and Raymond Chandler. I f you haven’t read him, I recommend starting with The Knockout Artist, All We Need Of Hell or Scar Lover. Once you’ve started up with Harry you won’t stop until you’ve read him all.
 

 
More Crews after the jump…

 
Bilingual? No problems if you’re not, the important sections here are Kenneth Anger’s, where the Magus of American Cinema tells his story from Fireworks to Lucifer Rising, via Bobby Beausoleil, Mick Jagger and Aleister Crowley, in this rare interview with French television from 2003.
 

Illustration by Kristian Hoffman

Club 82, at 82 East 4th Street in New York’s East Village, was a well-known “high class” drag club of the 50s and 60s where the likes of Walter Winchell, Elizabeth Taylor and Errol Flynn could be seen. Down on its luck in the 70s, the space was transformed into a glam-rock club and later a disco.

In this clip, the New York Dolls, in drag (save for Johnny Thunders), perform “Pills” at Club 82 on April 17, 1974. I’m presuming this was shot by Bob Gruen, but I’m not sure.
 

 
Augustin Rebetez gives answers to questions that are as quirky and idiosyncratic as his films.

The Swiss conceptual photographic artist and film-maker describes himself as “a sad child full energy.” I don’t know whether he is sad or not, but his work is certainly full of energy and boundless imagination. I was particularly impressed with his stop animation film The Dinner of the Lonely Man, which he tells me was made “With my hands” over “Some nights.”

It is a beautifully eerie, funny, Lynchean dream, that tells the story of “The painting of Ulf, the old owner of a house in Norway who was living there alone.” Now you know.

This isn’t his only film, “The others who exist already are more epileptic that this one,” and his work has been exhibited and screened across the world.

Augustin’s only aim when making art or films is: “I try to be honest and to present good stuff.” He certainly does that, and in an amusing and highly original way.

He is currently working on “Some stuff, one new film which is called maison.” Check out more from the highly talented Mr. Rebetez here.