Wayne Cochran was the baddest motherfucker to sport a platinum blond pompadour in the history of rock and roll. He was the honky doppelganger to the hardest working Black man in show business. But, the booze, the pills, the nightsweats, the trembling heebeegeebees and soul twisting demonic machinations of the Devil’s music drove him into the cold stiff arms of suicidal despair. Some men cannot handle the Hermetic heaviness bestowed upon them, the alchemical fire scorches and blinds them.

Like so many tales of rock and roll redemption, Jesus appeared to Wayne and laid his hands upon that sinner’s radiant wighat and the Satanic sunglasses of sin fell from Wayne’s eyes and the light of salvation penetrated his supplicating optic nerve sending a bolt of Christ-like illumination into the pulsating pink folds of his frontal lobes. Wayne was a changed man and Jesus had a new brother in arms, but rock and roll had lost a sharkskin suited shaman who had sent the serpent power of sexual bliss up the spinal column of sweet soul music.

And the black angels wept.

As one who had seen Cochran perform in the early 70s, I can testify to the man’s powerful transformative mojo. I was struck down and raised up.

45 years after appearing on Jackie Gleason’s Miami-based TV show, Wayne is running a Christian ministry in the same city where he once dazzled an audience with his lime green threads and his Mephistophelian moves.

In many cases, the transformation from rock star to Christian minister is lateral and redundant. But, sometimes the lord moves in mysterious ways and He does the watusi. Wayne Cochran was a cosmic force before he found religion. Religion found him - a primal, wild, uncontrolled religion. Sometimes that’s more than a man can handle. So, he turns to the script, scripture, where the rules are neatly laid down - ‘Jesus For Dummies.’ Every man or woman needs to do what they have to do, but it saddens me to see great artists retreat from their work because they can’t mentally process it. Art is supposed to be scary, it takes you places where you’ve never been and that is knowledge.

Wayne Cochran’s pompadour was a crown, not of thorns, but that of the Magi.
 

 
It’s not so much wedding bells as ‘execution yells’ as a killer of 12 marries his ‘fried to be’ on the electric chair.  Barbara Wintergreen reports for CBN News.

 
Yes, talk on the white Right about “camps” and “guns” should send a shiver up my spine as a Jew (whose father spent time in an immigration camp in post-WWII Palestine). But I hope I’m not the only one who thinks that this type of thing represents the fascinating last gasp of mainstream hegemonic white-identity politics. I have trust in the rest of this country’s people. Maybe I’m hopelessly naive.

As seen in the video below, here’s Marg Baker, Tea Party Republican candidate for Florida House of Representatives, District 48, on immigration:

We can follow what happened back in the ‘40s and 50s. I was just a little girl in Miami, and they filled camps with the people that snuck into the country because they were illegal. They put them in the camps and shipped them back. We can do that.

Of course, those camps held Cuban refugees who fled the repressive Machado and Batista regimes, which leased virtually all of the country’s resources, land, financial system, electric power production, and industry to US monopolies. But, history shmistory.

On the Second Amendment:

We’ve gotta have guns!

 
Good news for National Lampoon fans: Artist Rick Meyerowitz, a longtime contributor to the humor magazine during its golden years (and a little beyond) has put together a 320 page volume of the best of the Lampoon, along with remembrances from the various storied collaborators, who were/are as the title would have it Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great (Abrams):

From its first issue in April, 1970, the National Lampoon blazed like a comet, defining comedy as we know it today. To create Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, former Lampoon illustrator Rick Meyerowitz selected the funniest material from the magazine and sought out the survivors of its first electrifying decade to gather their most revealing and outrageous stories. The result is a mind-boggling tour through the early days of an institution whose alumni left their fingerprints all over popular culture: Animal House, Caddyshack, Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, SCTV, Spinal Tap, In Living Color, Ren & Stimpy, The Simpsons—even Sesame Street counts a few Lampooners among its ranks. Long before there was The Onion and Comedy Central news shows, there was the National Lampoon, setting the bar in comedy impossibly high!

 
Thanks, Mike Backes!

 
John Lennon reading about Brian Jones death. 1969.

 
In 1967 Philco introduced a 3 7/8 inches in diameter vinyl disc they called ‘Hip Pocket Records.’ They had a ‘hit’ song on each side and sold for 69 cents. Is this not groovy?

How did I miss this back in the sixties? As a kid, I would have loved this. In fact, I want some now.
 

 
More photos after the jump…

 
Although it screams of rip-off in flashing letters each the size of a New York brownstone, James Cameron’s Avatar is being re-released with eight additional minutes. Eight measly minutes? Shouldn’t there be some kind of ten year rule before “Director’s Cuts” get to pick our pockets again? And then I saw these two words “Na’vi Sex.” From MTV:

“You mean the alien kink scene?” [Cameron] joked. “It’s been restored, every last frame of it. Seriously,” he said, adding that the scene in question won’t break any records — it lasts all of about 20 seconds. “I would say, just so that we correctly manage people’s expectations,” he explained carefully, “it does not change our rating at all. I would call it more of an alien foreplay scene. It’s not like they’re ripping their clothes off and going at it.”

 
Fan-f*cking-tastic!
 
There’s a bonus shot of a nude Matt Berry at the end. Blink and you’ll miss it!
 
(via Nerdcore)

 
In my opinion Negativland’s 1983 LP, A Big 10-8 Place is their masterpiece. Edited by hand with razor and tape, it’s a superb pre-digital sound collage homage to the weirdness of suburban living filtered through a love of C.B. radios and terminology. Have a listen to the entire first section below in excellent sound quality, though never mind the fan made visuals. This is truly a movie for your ears.

 
This glacial speed Reading Rainbow intro scares the living shit out of me. Quaalude, anyone?
 

 
(via HYST)