Warning: You may actually crap yourself while watching this video.

As a YouTube commenter so eloquently puts it, “Dear mother of god! Watching that made me shit myself.. Balls - they have huge ones!”

(via langweiledich.net)

 
During the 1980s, Andy Warhol occasionally walked the fashion runways and did product endorsements, represented by the Ford Modeling Agency. This print ad for his friend Vidal Sassoon hair products was a frequent sight in trendy magazines circa 1985.

 
Surfer and filmmaker Mickey Smith made this breathtaking video that summons up the most sublime sense of being alive and in touch with the world we inhabit.

Smith worked with Allan Wilson from the Astray Collective, who acted as Director of Photography on the project. Together they logged hours of footage across the Atlantic coastline, traveling around Ireland, Cornwall and Manchester. Shot in Super 16mm film, as well as groundbreaking work with Canon 5D mk11 Digital SLR, Smith also projected images of the huge walls of water within which he works, on to monster urban landscapes such as sky rises and castles in Manchester, as well as the cliff lines at his home of Ireland.

Dark Side Of The Lens
 

 
There’s more right about this record than I could ever elucidate in a couple of pithy sentences. Best to simply bathe in its glory. You’ll be non-stop dancing in no time.

The Dead Weather’s latest single, “Blue Blood Blues”, will have a limited edition component in the form of an all new Triple Decker Record. Designed by Jack White and assembled by United Record Pressing, the Triple Decker contains a 7” record embedded inside a 12” record. The Triple Decker is limited to 300 copies and are available at Third Man Records in Nashville on Friday Sept. 17, and at finer brick and mortar independent record stores worldwide. 50 copies will also be inserted in random mail order for Blue Blood Blues.

 
A new website called Price of Weed.com asks the question: What is Marijuana really worth?

From their mission statement:

We want to crowdsource the street value of marijuana from the most accurate source possible: you, the consumer. Help by annonymously submitting data on the latest transaction you’ve made.

It’s simple: you, the public, go on the site, select the area you live in and report the amount you paid for your herb and rate its quality.

The site says that it costs roughly $420 an ounce for top shelf herb in Los Angeles. I think that seems about right, although it reports the same for New York City where truly high quality cannabis—the kind more common than not on the west coast I might add—costs closer to $600 an ounce. Our friends in the Pacific Northwest get the best deals. In Portland and Seattle, high quality pot sells for just $250 an ounce.

It may be rainy up there, but at least you can be unemployed and still afford good weed. That’s important these days.
 

 
Noted scholar of Beat Generation authors, Professor John Tytell writes at the Chronicle of Higher Eduction on the flurry of activity revolving around the Beats and Allen Ginsberg this season, including the James Franco-starring Ginsburg biopic Howl (released September 23), the publication of several new books on the Beats and the photography show at the National Gallery of Art, “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg.”

From the article:

Ginsberg’s ride on that wave has perhaps ebbed and flowed since his death 13 years ago, but it is cresting once more, with the recent publication of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (Viking) and The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation (Free Press), by Ginsberg’s archivist and biographer, Bill Morgan; an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” (with an accompanying catalog, published by Prestel); and the movie Howl, starring indie heartthrob James Franco, about Ginsberg’s most famous poem and the 1957 obscenity trial challenging its publication in the United States. That trial, along with the simultaneous publication of Kerouac’s On the Road, catapulted the Beats into literary and cultural history.

The intense, candid letters that Ginsberg and Kerouac wrote to each other capture the emergence of that literary and cultural moment when America, and American literature, would change irrevocably. The letters are often elated with aspiration, extravagant—even hyperbolic—with language sometimes soaring for its own sake; at other times, they plunge into despair: “God knows what oblivion we’ll wind up in like unpopular Melvilles,” Ginsberg ponders.

The correspondence begins in 1944, when the two young men met in New York City, where Ginsberg was an undergraduate at Columbia University and Kerouac a dropout living nearby, and continues until 1963, six years before Kerouac’s death, in 1969. Although they were greeted by American media as barbarous buffoons at the cultural gates—“I go rewrite Whitman for the entire universe,” Ginsberg boasted—the letters demonstrate a committed literary perspective. Allusions to Melville, Balzac, and Dostoevsky, Pound and Eliot, Joyce and Henry Miller establish the tradition they were committed to continue.

Some of the letters describe the daring literary ambitions they had for their friends, especially Ginsberg’s for William S. Burroughs, whom he regarded as a genius. Others, written from Mexico in the early 1950s, reveal how their views were deepened by living in a country “beyond Darwin’s chain,” as Kerouac put it. Fortified with tequila and peyote, Kerouac praised pastoral Mexico, and both men saw it as a foil to an American obsession with acquisition and consumption. Occasionally the letters crawl with dense Buddhist philosophy; inevitably they race again with reports of the latest recklessness of friends like Neal Cassady and Gregory Corso. Later letters, more ominously, are full of the hysteria that overwhelmed Kerouac after the notoriety of On the Road. As he reported to Ginsberg, with some of the cascading presumption that galvanized his prose—repeating what he had announced in a television interview—“I am waiting for God to show his face.”

Read more: Howl’s Echo (Chronicle of Higher Eduction)

Fascinating stuff from New York-based filmmaker, Kirby Ferguson:

Remixing is a folk art but the techniques involved — collecting material, combining it, transforming it — are the same ones used at any level of creation. You could even say that everything is a remix.

The blog about the web video series, “Everything is a Remix”

(via Nerdcore)

 
Did Johnny Carson know what he was getting into when his producers asked Jim Henson to perform without Muppets on his show in February 1974?

By the time of the clip below, Henson and his Muppets Inc. crew were five years into what was becoming a hugely successful partnership with the Children’s Television Workshop on the show that would raise Generation X, Sesame Street.

What better time to do something like, say, adapt electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott’s highly trippy piece, “The Organized Mind” as a short live multimedia stage performance? (By the way, the film playing in the background is apparently Henson’s film adaptation of the same piece of music.)
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Cookie Monster helps train IBM sales staff (1967)
Jim Henson’s “Time Piece”
 
Bonus clip after the jump: “The Paperwork Explosion” another 1967 Henson/Scott collaborative film for IBM…
 

 
Dangerous Minds pal, Chris Campion, author of the scathing Police biography,Walking on the Moon: The Untold Story of the Police and the Rise of New Wave Rock sent me this hilarious item about Sting today:

A Russian communist organization urged on Tuesday the arrest of British singer Sting over his “public promotion of drugs.”

Sting, 58, played St. Petersburg on September 13 and is due to perform in Moscow on Wednesday.

“In April 2010, Mister Sting publically called for “the worldwide legalization of marijuana,” the Communists of Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, a separate organization from the much larger Communist Party, said in a statement.

“Not only communists, but everyone in favor of a healthy way of life, the strengthening of our nation’s culture and tradition must understand that such a figure , however talented screaming teens may consider him, can not appear on stage in the Russian Federation,” the group said.

It also claimed the failure of the police to detain Sting as a “leading” proponent of drug use in St. Petersburg was an example of “double standards, negligence and rotten liberalism.”

The statement went on to call for the dismissal of St. Petersburg’s cultural authorities, and accused them of “pushing our children toward the hell of degeneration,” by allowing Sting to perform.

Sting has yet to comment.

Russian communists call for arrest of ‘drug pusher’ Sting (RIA Novosti)