The next chapter, in which President Reagan introduces “Chairman Moe” of Liberia.

7/2/82 Caught off guard at his 12th press conference by Sarah McClendon’s question about “sex harassment of women” working in government, President Reagan waggles his head and says, “Now, Sarah, just a minute here with the discussion or we’ll be getting an R rating.” Many reporters – Sarah not among them – find this inane quip amusing enough to actually laugh at.

8/2/82 Seeking to convey the Administration’s displeasure with Israel over its attacks on Beirut, the White House points out the difference between a February 1981 photo in which President Reagan is sitting next to Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir and laughing, and today’s photo, in which Reagan frowns at him from across a table.

8/11/82 President Reagan tells Time’s Hugh Sidey that he sometimes feels trapped in the White House. “You glance out the window and the people are walking around Pennsylvania Avenue and you say, ‘I could never say I am going to run down to the drugstore and get some magazines,’” he says. “I can’t do that any more.”

8/17/82 Introducing Liberian head of state Samuel Doe, President Reagan says, “Ladies and gentlemen, Chairman Moe of Liberia is our visitor here today, and we’re very proud to have him.”

9/6/82 The Washington Post reports that of President Reagan’s first 72 nominees to the judiciary, 68 are white males.

9/14/82 Defending his support of anti‑abortion legislation, President Reagan says, “I think the fact that children have been prematurely born even down to the three‑month stage and have lived to, the record shows, to grow up and be normal human beings, that ought to be enough for all of us.” Later, aide Peter Roussel acknowledges that the record shows nothing of the kind: the youngest surviving fetus was four‑and‑a‑half months old. (A three‑month‑old fetus is, at most, three‑and‑a‑half inches long.) Was Reagan aware of this? “He knew,” says Roussel, “but he said three instead of four and a half.”

9/30/82 Two days after President Reagan commits the Marines to an indefinite stay in Lebanon, David L. Reagan (no relation) becomes the first Marine to be killed in the conflict.

10/4/82 President Reagan suggests – and not, by any means, for the first time – that since he sees big help wanted sections in the Sunday papers, unemployment must be caused by a lot of lazy people who’d just rather not work.

10/4/82 Addressing an Ohio veteran’s group, President Reagan discusses plans to strengthen three military divisions in Western Europe, “two of which are in Geneva, and one, I believe, still in Switzerland.”

10/8/82 The unemployment rate hits 10.1%, the highest in 42 years. This does not overly concern President Reagan, who soon puts it in perspective. “Just remember,” he says, “for every person who is out of work, there are nine of us with jobs.”

All entries are excerpted from the “Reagan Centennial Edition” of my 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor, available here as an enhanced eBook. More to come.

 
“Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man…” BTW, sorry in advance.

Oh, and there’s an acapella version here.
 

 
(via Certified Bullshit Technician)

 
Folks might remember a post I did last year on Nujabes’ “Luv (Sic) Pt. 2” slow motion video shot in Japan and directed by Sou Otsukis. Well, Otsukis’ slowmo madness is back, and this time “Luv (Sic) Pt. 2” takes place in Cambodia. It’s really worth a watch. 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Goofy People Running in Slow Motion

(via Nerdcore)

Above, Pat Toomey says it’s not the size…
 
Senator Pat Toomey, that rotten shit who is the new Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, tells the CPAC attendees his political philosophy in a form that they can all understand, that of a simple children’s story. Amazing. How does a scoundrel like this get elected to the Senate in a state so full of poor and working class people??? The man clearly hates the poor, they’re just “useless eaters” to him and his GOP buddies. Toomey even puts Rick Santorum in perspective! The sight of Toomey turns my stomach. He’s anti-gay, anti-poor, anti-healthcare reform, pro-gun, says global warming is nonsense, was against the Bush expansion of Medicare prescription benefits when he was a congressman and thinks that the economic meltdown should have been allowed to continue to the bitter end! (Oddly, Toomey supported DADT repeal. Go figure).

If teabagger Toomey—who should immediately stop dying his hair—had his druthers he would deregulate Wall Street and put a doctor who performs a legal abortion in prison, but when it comes to politics, he’s all for baby-talking to his base of buffoons. CPAC is going to be quite a show this year. These fucks are just tuning up the orchestra before unleashing a full-on symphony of hate. Non-haters need not apply to speak at CPAC. Her reasons are her reasons, but I have to say that Sarah Palin looks especially canny by avoiding this cavalcade of asshats.

Bonus: If you really want to make yourself retch, check out the video of Newt Gingrich’s CPAC entrance to the sounds of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” What a tacky little man. You have to appreciate the brain-dead embrace of this guy by Christian conservatives. Newt Gingrich, a man who left his wife while she was battling cancer for a much hotter, younger woman, treated like a rock star by these people and not a moral pariah, which would be appropriate (the way John Edwards was shunned by Democrats). Extraordinary stuff.
 

 
There’s currently a lot of buzz around the electronic artist James Blake in the UK. In January he came runner up in the BBC’s Sound of 2011 poll, and last week he released his self-titled debut album on Atlas records. Having made a name for himself with his forward-thinking dubstep productions on the labels Hessle Audio and R&S, he has gone in a very different direction on James Blake.

Though some of the dub-style production tropes remain, the sound is much more folk influenced, with some of the tracks featuring just Blake on vocals with spare piano accompaniment. This is most definitely not a dancefloor record, it’s much more of a post-club album, with shades of Anthony Hegarty, John Martyn and even Laurie Anderson. It’s a definite shoe-in for a Mercury Music Prize nomination, and it’s the kind of worthy project the judges love to reward. But is it any good?
 

 
Some of the production on James Blake is stunning, but unfortunately this over shadows the actual songs, that to these ears could have done with a lot of refining and a lot less meandering. For a dubstep producer to make a move away from instrumental bin-shakers it would be useful to have a few more songs of the standard of “Limit To Your Love” or “The Wilhelm Scream” - I find what I am drawn to more is the intricate production of “I Never Learned To Share” or “To Care (Like You)”, which are hugely impressive without being particularly engaging. There is a sense that this is mood music rather than pop, and as such it easily begins to fade into the background.

A lot of the press buzz around Blake’s album is about dubstep “growing up”, which is misleading. Dubstep may be a cornerstone of his career, but on this album it sounds more like a footnote, or a production flavor used to shade a very different palate. Where this record seems more aimed at is the gap left in the market by Radiohead being on hiatus or, dare I say it, the coffee table. The album is definitely interesting, but it’s something I want to like more than I actually like. One day when I am in a particular mood I am sure it will hit the perfect spot, but til then, I will continue to listen to “CMYK” instead.

You can hear James Blake in full here, streaming on the Dutch website 3VOOR12.

James Blake is currently available on import in the States via Amazon.

Thanks to Kelvin Brown for the link.

 
To celebrate Bertolt Brecht’s birthday, here is David Bowie in the BBC production of Brecht’s play Baal, from 1982. It was directed by Alan Clarke, the talent behind such controversial TV dramas as Scum with a young Ray Winstone, Made in Britain, with Tim Roth, and Elephant.

Baal was Brecht’s first full-length play, written in 1918, and it tells the story of a traveling musician / poet, who seduces and destroys with callous indifference.

Bowie is excellent as Baal and the five songs he sings in this production were co-produced with Tony Visconti, and later released as the EP David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht’s Baal.
 

 
More of ‘Baal’ starring David Bowie, after the jump…
 

 
The first exploitation flick to get an X rating for violence, I Drink Your Blood is a low budget gore classic that blows chunks and your mind at the same time. It hit the drive-ins in 1970, one year after the Manson family murders, and was clearly concocted to cash in on the anti-hippie hysteria of the time. But how do you come up with something more shocking than the Manson massacre? Well, I Drink Your Blood answers that question.

A cult of LSD eating, Satan worshiping hippies, led by Horace Bones, looking and sounding alot like Tommy Wiseau, wreak havoc on a small town and end up getting a dose of their own medicine when after eating meat pies infected with the blood of a rabid dog are transformed into flesh-crazed cannibals.

Like a sheet of high-grade blotter, I Drink Your Blood packs enough bizarre entertainment value to last for hours and hours. We can only repeat the demonic invocation of Horace Bones (Bhaskar), who tells his followers in the movie’s opening scene: “Satan was an acid-head. Drink from his cup. Pledge yourselves, and together we’ll all freak out!”

Released by Box Office Spectaculars, co-owned by Blood Feast auteur Herschell Gordon Lewis, I Drink Your Blood was directed by David Durston who also helmed the first 35mm gay porno film Manhole.

A sad footnote: Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury who plays Horace Bones was a professional dancer who seven years after starring in I Drink Your Blood was crippled in a stage fall during a rehearsal and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He died in an old folks home in 2003.

Here’s I Drink Your Blood in all its uncut glory.
 

Thanks See Of Sound

 
Six years after he graduated high school, and four years after the LSD experiences that he’s called “one of the two or three most important things I’ve done in my life,” and less than two years after he co-founded a company named after a fruit, the biological son of graduate students Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Simpson prepped nervously for his first TV interview.

Ya gotta figure most game-changers have found themselves “deathly ill and ready to throw up at any moment,” right?
 

 
Thanks, Cameron Macdonald!

 
More stories about ignorance and food stamps.

2/27/82 The Congressional Budget Office finds that taxpayers earning under $10,000 lost an average $240 from last year’s tax cuts, while those earning over $80,000 gained an average of $15,130.

3/1/82 Sen. Bob Packwood (R‑OR) reveals that President Reagan frequently offers up transparently fictional anecdotes as if they were real. “We’ve got a $120 billion deficit coming,” says Packwood, “and the President says, ‘You know, a young man, went into a grocery store and he had an orange in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other, and he paid for the orange with food stamps and he took the change and paid for the vodka. That’s what’s wrong.’ And we just shake our heads.”

3/1/82  In a speech to the Civil Defense Association, Ed Meese describes nuclear war as “something that may not be desirable.”

3/24/82 Agriculture official Mary C. Jarratt tells Congress her department has been unable to document President Reagan’s horror stories of food stamp abuse, pointing out that the change from a food stamp purchase is limited to 99 cents. “It’s not possible to buy a bottle of vodka with 99 cents,” she says. Deputy White House press secretary Peter Roussel says Reagan wouldn’t tell these stories “unless he thought they were accurate.”

4/15/82 Citing a favorite example of British jurisprudence, President Reagan says, “England was always very proud of the fact that the English police did not have to carry guns ... In England, if a criminal carried a gun, even though he didn’t use it, he was not tried for burglary or theft or whatever he was doing. He was tried for first‑degree murder and hung if he was found guilty.” White House spokesman Larry Speakes, on being informed that this fable is totally untrue, responds, “Well, it’s a good story, though. It made the point, didn’t it?”

4/30/82 President Reagan describes the Falkland Islands war as a “dispute over the sovereignty of that little ice‑cold bunch of land down there.”

5/10/82 Taking questions from students at a Chicago high school, President Reagan explains why his revised tax exemption policy could not possibly have been intended to benefit segregated schools. “I didn’t know there were any,” he says. “Maybe I should have, but I didn’t.”

5/21/82 Discussing Soviet weaponry at a National Security Council meeting, President Reagan asks CIA deputy director Bobby Inman, “Isn’t the SS‑19 their biggest missile?”  No, Inman replies, “that’s the SS‑18.” “So,” says the President, “they’ve even switched the numbers on their missiles in order to confuse us!” Inman explains that the numbers are assigned by US intelligence.

6/17/82 Interior Secretary James Watt – one of whose semantic rules is, “I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It’s liberals and Americans” – warns the Israeli ambassador that if “liberals of the Jewish community” oppose his plans for off‑shore drilling, “they will weaken our ability to be a good friend of Israel.”

6/20/82 Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger explains the Pentagon’s position on a “protracted” nuclear war: “We don’t believe a nuclear war can be won,” but “we are planning to prevail if we are attacked.” The difference between winning and prevailing is not explored.

All entries are excerpted from the “Reagan Centennial Edition” of my 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor, available here as an enhanced eBook. Much more to come.

 
I can never get enough of the obscure, psychedelic sounds of Rubble, the twenty-volume Nuggets-inspired “freakbeat” and “pop sike” compilations from Bam Caruso Records and Phil Lloyd-Smee. If you like Nuggets or the British Nuggets II, there’s not a lot of overlap. I love all the Nuggets comps, too, but I’d give the Rubble collections the edge just because they required even more dedicated crate-digging. I think the effort was worth it.

One group I discovered on a Rubble comp is The Mirror, a British beat group who apparently reached the lower rungs of the German pop market as they made the scene on The Beat Club TV show with their song, “Gingerbread Man.”
 

 
Via Flower Bomb Song/Anorak Thing