Westboro Baptist Church, eat your heart out.
A scene from the half-hour Comedy Central special “This Show Will Get You High,” created by Matt Besser, one of the founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.
(via The High Definite)
As seen on Christian Nightmares. Is this not the most succinct sentence you’ve read all year?
“A man wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘Jesus Christ Saved Me From 27 Years of Homosexuality’ shares his story.”
Today is the 53rd birthday of the great Mister Julian Cope! As regular readers of this blog know, I think Cope is one of the coolest motherfuckers alive. Here’s an excerpt from an earlier Dangerous Minds post I wrote about him:
My friend Wm. Ferguson and I met the Arch Drude at the Island Records offices near Tower Records in lower Manhattan. During the interview Cope told us about the mystical experience he had that led to his vision of the earth dying that inspired Peggy Suicide’s somewhat bleak environmentalist message. I recall that we discussed a certain book about Helena Blavatsky which he and I had both read and he compared the physical sensation of his mystic moment to the first time a pubescent boy masturbates, not quite pleasurable and very confusing, a sort of mental orgasm felt in the brain. I asked him if he felt conflicted about bringing a child into a world—his wife Dorian was then pregnant with their first daughter—that he so obviously thought was terminal. He paused and said, “Well, yeah the world is fucked, but it’s not THAT fucked that it can’t be saved, certainly. We’ve got to try.” I then voiced my own skepticism about bring new life into the world—I was 25 at the time—and he said something that I will never forget and have repeated to friends expecting children several times: “If people like you and I stop having children, we’ve ceded our world to the idiots. All intelligent people should have as many babies as possible to prevent all the thick, ungroovy Christians from taking over.”
When we were leaving, I mentioned in passing that I’d seen the infamous Hammersmith Palais show of his first UK solo tour in 1984, a concert that saw Cope performing a bloody act of self-mutilation. During the encore of “Reynard the Fox,” Cope snapped his mike-stand in half and proceeded to rake the jagged edge across his chest, back and stomach drawing lots of blood and generally freaking out the entire audience! Up until the very end it had been a slick, professional rock show. A girl standing near me puked when she saw what he had done. It cemented Cope’s reputation as a Syd Barrett-like acid casualty.
Cope laughed sheepishly and pulled out his wallet. “Well, you’ll appreciate this: Whenever I’m feeling like I am fucked in the head, I pull out this picture—” it was of a bloodied Cope from the concert I’d seen “—and I remind myself that however fucked up I think I am I am still not THAT fucked!”
Read more: Julian Cope: Someone spiked his acid
A great vintage Teardrop Explodes clip after the jump…
Finally! Actually, this condom bagpipe doesn’t sound bad at all. It’s ‘safe’ music I suppose.
Two condoms are used (one inside the other) to create the bag for this bagpipe. The chanter and drone are aluminium tubes with a membrane reed at the top of each.
(via HYST)
Me and Guccione had the same dentist in Manhattan. I’d see him gliding thru the waiting room glittering with bling bling like King Tut. Bob’s testosterone fogged my Italian wraparounds. The cat had presence.
Bob Guccione, who founded Penthouse magazine in the 1960s and built a pornographic media empire that broke taboos, outraged the guardians of taste and made billions before drowning in a slough of bad investments and Internet competition, died Wednesday in Plano, Tex., The Associated Press reported. He was 79.
NY Times obit here.
Penthouse was to Playboy what The Rolling Stones were to The Beatles. I came down on the side of The Stones.
Guccione produced the big-budget soft-core epic Caligula. Here he is commenting on the censoring of the film:
I’ve been feeling particularly vulnerable lately and I find it therapeutic to make fun of other people. My sense of self-esteem is so low that I’m actually reduced to dissing people who don’t deserve it. These folks are just doing their best to share a beautiful moment with us. It’s indicative of how callous I’ve become (though I claim vulnerability) that this heartfelt performance makes me nauseous. I hate what I’ve become. I’m a product of the new digital disconnect. I need to start doing drugs again.
Via Village Voice
Martin Sorrondeguy (ex-member of Los Crudos) directed Mas Alla de Los Gritos (Beyond The Screams), a 1999 documentary on the Hispanic punk rock scene. Illuminating and inspiring.
What occurs with the Latino/Chicano punks is also what occurs to the
communities they come from. So if they are living in corrupt countries or
communities where poverty, drugs, gangs, etc. are part of the every
day, this adds to their struggle for change. Punks may be seen as
outsiders from a voyeur’s perspective but these same punks may go home with
their families and deal with life as it affects them all. Also a lot of
the Latino/Chicano punks living in the US still have ties to family and
friends in Latin America and those ties are strong, so when things get
desperate or intense in Latin America it is a concern for many living
here as well.” Martin Sorrendeguy
I test drove the new Grinderman album over the weekend on a roundtrip roadtrip between Austin and Houston. Listening to a CD while driving down long stretches of highway is my favorite way to get to know a fresh chunk of music. Grinderman 2 is epic and intimate, a roiling, raging, rock and roll masterpiece. Nick Cave’s lyrics twined with Warren Ellis’s feral guitar is a rope of flame dangling over a pit of white hot Devil cum. This is some fucking seriously beautiful torment.
Listening to Cave’s romantic wail at dusk, the Texas sky black and blue, striated with the blood orange of a sinking sun, life seems like some sweet agony, every breath a birth, every breath a death. I ride through the hill country toward some unknown thing…and not knowing is the mystery that sparkplugs the engine that rules these infinite rolling hills. Between two places is where I’ve always been. I’m learning to be content in being nowhere.
When music makes me think musically, when it inspires me to create something approximating art, it’s done its job. Art is a contagion.
‘Palaces Of Montezuma’, a song I particularly admire from Grinderman 2, contains the following lines:
“The spinal cord of JFK
Wrapped in Marilyn Monroe’s negligee
I give to you
I want nothing in return
Just the softest little breathless word”
Many songwriters claim Rimbaud’s mantle, Cave nails it.
More Grinderman after the jump…
Sad news via John Lydon.com:
John and Nora have asked us to let everyone know that Nora’s daughter Arianna (aka Ari-Up) died today (Wednesday, October 20th) after a serious illness. She will be sadly missed.
Everyone at JohnLydon.com and PiLofficial.Com would like to pass on their heartfelt condolences to John , Nora and family.
Rest in Peace.
Thanks Jimi Hey
Mesh was a digital animation scheme that brought together a diverse range of talented, young animators, who created twenty-seven award-winning works between 2000-07. Produced by Nicola Black, in conjunction with Channel 4 and Nesta, Mesh was a neat idea, one that is typical of Black’s imaginative and uniquely original approach to program-making.
It was also the kind of series that benefited TV, as it allowed anyone to submit an idea, script and storyboard for consideration, out of this a short list was drawn-up, from which 4 animators were chosen to develop and make their films. The scheme also involved seminars and courses, where the animators worked with established film-makers and script-writers to develop their projects.
Amongst the animators were Grant Orchard, whose Welcome to Glaringly was voiced by Little Britain’s Matt Lucas; James Merry who went onto work on Monkey Dust; Darren Price, who animated the true story of a bear who loved vodka; Yasmeen Ismail who made a simple animation about size and shape before going on to form Sweetworld and Rhumbaba: John Butler who created his clever, idiosyncratic consumerist fable; Stephen Cavalier who crafted a homage to 1950s sci-fi; and Neil Coslett, whose Killing Time at Home was used by Placebo as a back projection on their recent tour. All of have gone on to bigger and better things, but Mesh was where it all started. Here is a small selection of some of these animations.
Five bonus ‘Mesh’ animations after the jump…