This is the first video by Fucked Up to be taken from their current album, the very highly acclaimed David Comes To Life. Sure, Fucked Up may have made some skits to accompany their music before (namely standing around in public places while their music plays in the background), but this is a real music video, with actors, a story, production values, the whole shebang. And as such it’s pretty damn unusual. To say the least. Presumably it ties in with the narrative of the album, which the band have described as being a rock opera. But don’t let that put you off. To quote Richard Metzger:

Two thumbs up. WAY UP.

A thing of intense beauty. And unexpected. Unexpected is hard to do these days!

 
Fucked Up - “Queen Of Hearts”
 

 
Previously on DM:
Listen to Fucked Up’s ‘David Comes To Life’ in full
Fucked Up: The best live band in the world deliver the single of the year?

 
As seen at last week’s Netroots Nation convention. You can find out more at Change To Win’s website.
 

 
Burma’s pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi addressed US Congress through a video link today, seeking to help force Burma’s military junta to abide by a UN Human Rights Council Resolution passed in March. The resolution deals with the issues of political prisoners, freedom of association and information, independence of the judiciary, and the right of the UN Human Rights Rapporteur to visit the country.

“I’‘ve never made a statement before a committee of the United States Congress, so I’‘m not quite sure how to go about it. I would simply like to use this occasion to request that you do whatever you can to help us implement the United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution, because that will open up the real road to democracy for all of us.”

Suu Kyi’s video message was played during a Congressional Committee hearing into present conditions in Burma, after the “sham elections”, which were held last November. These elections were boycotted by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party, as international journalists and observers were forbidden to enter Burma during the vote.

Suu Kyi, who was held under house-arrest for most of the past 2 decades, made her statement by videotape, a she is reluctant to leave the Burma for fear she would not be allowed to return. In her message to the committee, Suu Kyi asked for help to make Burma an open society:

“The requests, the urgings, the demands of this resolution are very much in line with what we in Burma think is needed to start Burma along the genuine process of democratization.”

Note: the sound quality on this clip isn’t that good, but we think it still important enough to share.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Family photographs of Aung San Suu Kyi

 
The 1965 promotional video Detroit: City On The Move captures the city before everything went to shit.

Since this film was made, Detroit’s population has dropped by more than 60% and the future couldn’t look bleaker. There are some glimmerings of hope though. Artists and entrepreneurs are heading to the city to take advantage of cheap real estate and an atmosphere that is conducive to new ideas and energies. When you’ve got nothing left to lose, people and places will embrace anything that offers even the slenderest thread of hope. Creative people thrive in such conditions. I’d thought about moving to Detroit and buying a house for $8,000. But, it’s just too damn cold.

The film is narrated by then-mayor Jerome P. Cavanaugh with the enthusiasm of a man who has been taking bong hits of carbon monoxide. Maybe he saw what was coming.
 

 
Art can save neighborhoods. The Heidelberg Project is an example of the restorative energy that artists and the creative spirit can bring to a community. Detroit is at the crossroads of an absolutely ugly death or a beautiful re-imagining. It’s time to take the money spent on wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, drugs) and use it to resurrect America’s dying cities. There are people ready and waiting with ideas and dreams to make things happen - people like Tyree Guyton.
 

 
Preparing my solo album, Tantric Machine, for its release in October (finally) and came across this tune which I had more or less forgotten about. It was recorded during the TM sessions late one night in a single take. I made up the lyrics as we went along. I think the song has a nice loose feel and is emotionally true to the moment it was created in - a night of wine, diddling the Muse and spewing the Devil’s music in a studio in Tribeca.

Hugh Pool twisted the knobs and played guitar and beer bottle. “GC” is an unmastered rough mix and will probably remain so.

Indulge me.

I was born in the darkness
I was born in God’s cunt
You can call it whatever you like
Whatever you want

I was born in the bathroom sink
I was 2 minutes old and I needed a drink

You make it your exit
Or is it your entrance?

I was born in the darkness
I was born in God’s ...

Kind of liked the starkness
But the entertainment sucked
Crepuscular walls surrounded my brain
The muffled silence of the Bardo Plains

Well, they turned on the lights and they lit up the flame
They painted my face and they changed my brain
Well, they turned on the lights and they lit up the flame
They painted my face and they gave me a name

The hideous night became my friend
I built the machines of Original Sin

Opened up my mouth and the moon fell out
It was silver, it was cold, it was perfectly round

I could feel the power in my body born
Like a cloud that contained an electrical storm

And in this place Shiva’s daughter
Washes her body in the bloody water

And in this place the Prodigal Son
Starts his engines and fires his guns

I was born in the darkness…

The bone, the muscle, the blood and the brain
Electrical sparks in the gene parade

I was born in the darkness…

Darling, make some room in your womb
I’m coming home”

Check out TantricMachine.com for more music and info.
 

 
Matt Taibbi takes on goofball far-right Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann in the pages of the new Rolling Stone. It’s everything you want it to be, trust me:

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don’t laugh.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children’s show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing “launch” instead of “lunch” inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. “It’s your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!” she gushed. “You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard.”

I said lunch, not launch! But don’t laugh. Don’t do it. And don’t look her in the eyes; don’t let her smile at you. Michele Bachmann, when she turns her head toward the cameras and brandishes her pearls and her ageless, unblemished neckline and her perfect suburban orthodontics in an attempt to reassure the unbeliever of her non-threateningness, is one of the scariest sights in the entire American cultural tableau. She’s trying to look like June Cleaver, but she actually looks like the T2 skeleton posing for a passport photo. You will want to laugh, but don’t, because the secret of Bachmann’s success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger.

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you’ve always got a puncher’s chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

Bachmann’s story, to hear her tell it, is about a suburban homemaker who is chosen by God to become a politician who will restore faith and family values to public life and do battle with secular humanism. But by the time you’ve finished reviewing her record of lies and embellishments and contradictions, you’ll have no idea if she actually believes in her own divine inspiration, or whether it’s a big con job. Or maybe both are true — in which case this hard-charging challenger for the GOP nomination is a rare breed of political psychopath, equal parts crazed Divine Wind kamikaze-for-Jesus and calculating, six-faced Machiavellian prevaricator. Whatever she is, she’s no joke.

Michele Bachmann’s Holy War (Rolling Stone)

 
It needs more energy. Music and video by Luke Million.

 
(via Beautiful/Decay )

Above, from their idiotic press release

They protest at the funerals of gays, dead American servicemen and now the sociopaths of the Westboro Baptist Church are threatening to protest the funeral of comedic dare-devil Ryan Dunn of the “Jackass” gang. They called Dunn a “drab pervert [who] hawked porn-level filth (e.g. toy car up his rectum for entertainment.” Gimme a break:

The notorious Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. announced Tuesday that its members will protest any public service held for ‘Jackass’ star Ryan Dunn, who died on Monday in a high speed car accident, according to Daily Local of West Chester in Pennsylvania.

The church has a history of protesting high-profile burials, often calling deaths a punishment from God. The group has been denounced as radical by many Christian organizations.

“WBC will picket any public memorial/funeral held for Dunn, warning all not to make a mock of sin, and to fear and obey God,” the group said in a news release. It’s headline states: “Ryan Dunn is in hell!”

DellaVechia, Reilly, Smith & Boyd Funeral Home, Inc said services and interment for Dunn will be private. A public memorial service will be announced at a later date.

What a bunch of flaming assholes. I hope Dunn’s friends and family take them on “Jackass”-style if they go through with this. That could be fun to watch!

Ryan Dunn Death: Westboro Baptist Church Threatens Service Protest (IB Times)

 
There’s a super bleak story in The Independent about a home-made heroin substitute that’s becoming popular in Russia. The problem is that “Krokodil” is so detrimental to the human body that it practically eats right through it. There are up to two million junkies in Russia, the most in the world and around 100,000 of them are addicted to Krokodil which can be easily produced for a fraction of the price of smack. 

Even hardcore methfreaks are better off than Krokodil addicts. Withdrawal from the drug can take an agonizing MONTH (Heroin detox lasts a week to ten days, a relative walk in the park).

The home-made drug that Oleg and Sasha inject is known as krokodil, or “crocodile”. It is desomorphine, a synthetic opiate many times more powerful than heroin that is created from a complex chain of mixing and chemical reactions, which the addicts perform from memory several times a day. While heroin costs from £20 to £60 per dose, desomorphine can be “cooked” from codeine-based headache pills that cost £2 per pack, and other household ingredients available cheaply from the markets.

It is a drug for the poor, and its effects are horrific. It was given its reptilian name because its poisonous ingredients quickly turn the skin scaly. Worse follows. Oleg and Sasha have not been using for long, but Oleg has rotting sores on the back of his neck.

“If you miss the vein, that’s an abscess straight away,” says Sasha. Essentially, they are injecting poison directly into their flesh. One of their friends, in a neighbouring apartment block, is further down the line.

“She won’t go to hospital, she just keeps injecting. Her flesh is falling off and she can hardly move anymore,” says Sasha. Photographs of late-stage krokodil addicts are disturbing in the extreme. Flesh goes grey and peels away to leave bones exposed. People literally rot to death.

This is like something straight out of Burroughs or Cronenberg, but as I was reading the article, I was thinking more about what a modern day Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky would make of a plague like this.

Read the entire horrific story: Krokodil: The drug that eats junkies (The Independent)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Scarface: Attack of the Flesh-Eating Cocaine

 
I thought this was clever. It deserves to go viral.

I’d certainly rather see more work from Charlotte Young than I would Tracey Emin…

 
Thanks, Brian Braun!