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Devo: Something For Everybody!
05.14.2010
04:33 pm
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Calling it “flawless,” and “rife with sci-fi paranoia and doomed futures,” Popmatters today celebrates the reissuing of Devo‘s Duty Now for the Future.  I love that ‘79 album dearly, but looking back at that era now, I can still remember the absolute, utter contempt some of my fellow Angelenos reigned down upon Akron’s spud boys.

Being a time when authenticity seemed prized beyond all other attributes, it’s not hard to see why.  Devo had uniforms, a mythology, tightly orchestrated playing.  But Gabba Gabba Hey, so did these guys.  And whatever doubts I had about the band were quickly and forever banished by this

So, here we are today.  With authenticity no longer a concern, like, at all, are we not better poised, err, evolved, for Devo’s return?  And, more importantly, will the world switch with them from Whip It red to Winter Olympic blue
 
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Devo’s upcoming album, its first in 20 years, comes out June 15th.  And perhaps mocking, perhaps embracing, this focus-grouped-to-death time of ours, the band’s calling it, Something For Everybody:

Though the 12 songs on Something for Everybody are built on Devo’s signature mechanized swing, the recording and presentation of the album saw the band experimenting with an entirely new approach.  Greg Scholl was brought in to serve as COO for Devo, Inc., and—working with the advertising agency Mother LA—conducted a series of studies through the Club Devo site to help the band with its creative decisions, from color selection to song mixes.

“We decided to actively seek comment and criticism from outside people and use that as a tool, rather than shunning or ignoring it,” says Gerald Casale.  “Our experiences participating in secondary creativity—things like corporate consensus building, focus groups—make you appreciate the connection that an artist has to society.”

An amusing “touch test” for Something For Everybody follows below:

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds: Devolympics, Jerkin’ backwards and forwards with Devo

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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05.14.2010
04:33 pm
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LAFMS videos by Jonathon Rosen
05.14.2010
04:22 pm
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Excellent videos for LAFMS stalwarts The Doo-Dooettes, Tom Recchion and David Toop by NYC artist Jonathon Rosen.

These videos evolved out of the copious material that was generated for live performances with the great musician/composer Tom Recchion. Working as a live mix video-instrumentalist with music as evocatively visual as this, was (and is) for me, a matter of letting the video elements self-assemble themselves. In other words, rather than force a narrative, as much as possible I strive to be a conduit - using the sound as my guide, and let the visuals tell me what they want to be.

 
Doo-Dooettes, Loop Rendered (excerpt).
Music by the Doo-Dooettes from the CD Think Space on Organ of Corti.
Remixed and reconfigured by Tom Recchion.
Video animation & editing: Jonathon Rosen.
 

Apartment Thunder.
Music from David Toop’s CD Black Chamber (Sub Rosa).
Musicians: David Toop, Tom Recchion.
Animation / Editing / Direction: Jonathon Rosen

 

Posted by Brad Laner
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05.14.2010
04:22 pm
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Striking a pose for “American Able”
05.14.2010
01:44 pm
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From the site of Canadian photographer, Holly Norris:

‘American Able’ intends to, through spoof, reveal the ways in which women with disabilities are invisibilized in advertising and mass media.  I chose American Apparel not just for their notable style, but also for their claims that many of their models are just ‘every day’ women who are employees, friends and fans of the company.  However, these women fit particular body types.  Their campaigns are highly sexualized and feature women who are generally thin, and who appear to be able-bodied.  Women with disabilities go unrepresented, not only in American Apparel advertising, but also in most of popular culture.  Rarely, if ever, are women with disabilities portrayed in anything other than an asexual manner, for ‘disabled’ bodies are largely perceived as ‘undesirable.’  In a society where sexuality is created and performed over and over within popular culture, the invisibility of women with disabilities in many ways denies them the right to sexuality, particularly within a public context.

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Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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05.14.2010
01:44 pm
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RIP Craig Kauffman
05.14.2010
11:54 am
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Craig Kauffman, maker of sublime ultra-minimal vacuum molded acrylic wall hangings and original member of the famed Ferus gallery gang in the mid-60’s (along with the likes of Eds Ruscha and Kienholz, Wallace Berman, Warhol, etc) has died. I’ve always loved his somewhat erotically-shaped and candy-like art-for-art’s-sake and what I’ve heard described as a “finish fetish”. Oh, so smooth and shiny !
 
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Los Angeles Times: Craig Kauffman dies at 78; artist captured the ethos of Los Angeles
 
thx Patrick Scott !

 

Posted by Brad Laner
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05.14.2010
11:54 am
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The King of Woolworths
05.14.2010
12:59 am
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The King of Woolworths is the musical alterego of Mancunian Jon Brooks, who makes reprocessed tributes to 1960s BBC soundtracks. This is good shit. Here’s a BBC interview with him:

The King Of Woolworths is Jon Brooks, a man inspired by the soundtracks of 60s and 70s film and television like Get Carter, The Sweeney and the music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. “It was always my dream to work for them,” he says. “Just that kind of experimentation. I like that attitude where anything went. You could use guitar or trumpet but the way you treated it was something else, and they created some really amazing sounds.”

L’Illustration Musicale is his second album, the follow up to 2001’s sampledelic soundtrack Ming Star. “Ming Star was me and a load of samples, whereas there are no samples on this album, it’s just a load of loops and stuff.” The new LP also features Jon’s first work with vocalists, including tracks with Dot Allison who has previously added vocal flushes to Death In Vegas and Emma Pollack from indie rockers The Delgados. She features on Nuada, 60s sugary pop soul inspired by the film The Wicker Man. “It was a very different thing to do for Emma, but I kind of had an idea it might work.”

Throughout the album, the Roy Budd-influenced instrumentals are cut up with Scott Walker-tinged pop. “I love pop music as well, especially 60s and 70s pop, and I wanted to get an essence of that,” he says. “I didn’t want to do the same thing again. I didn’t want the album to sound like the last one.”

(The King of Woolworths)

(Kings of Woolworths: Ming Star)

(You may recognize the song below as the source for Coil’s “Wraiths and Strays.”)

Posted by Jason Louv
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05.14.2010
12:59 am
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Tommy 35th Anniversary Screening in Los Angeles with Ken Russell
05.14.2010
12:06 am
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On May 21 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts is presenting a 35th anniversary screening of Tommy, the 1975 rock opera directed by Ken Russell, based on the album by The Who. There will be an all new digital cinema presentation with the original quintaphonic soundtrack. Best of all, the legendary Ken Russell will be there for a panel discussion about the film with Who documentarian Murrary Lerner and the film’s editor Stuart Baird.

Tommy earned an Oscar nomination for Pete Townshend. The cast includes Roger Daltry as Tommy, Oscar-nominated Ann-Margret (she’s fantastic in Tommy!), Keith Moon. Elton John, Eric Clapton, Jack Nicholson, Tina Turner (as the Acid Queen) and Oliver Reed. I hope this means they’ll be putting out a Blu-ray of Tommy soon.

Samuel Goldwyn Theater at 8949 Wilshire Blvd. Friday, May 21, at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
 

 
Thank you Rupert Russell!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.14.2010
12:06 am
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An Open-Source History of Mondo 2000
05.13.2010
09:58 pm
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Ken Goffman, R.U. Sirius, also know as Ken Goffman was the editor/co-founder of Mondo 2000, one of the most visionary and influential publications of late 1980s and ’90s. He’s looking to use Kickstarter to finance a “collective memory project” about the magazine and its history, for posterity. It’s certainly a worthy subject to my mind. Goffman’s project would take the form of a physical book and possibly become a documentary, too. Kickstarter has a podcast interview about the project and the history of Mondo 2000.

This project stemmed from your original desire to do a memoir, but seems to have become something much more.

Originally, I had the idea that I could work with the idea of memory and perception in the context of writing a memoir. I probably didn’t remember my life that accurately, and perhaps not that interestingly, but if I made my memoir open-source and brought people who had their own memories of interacting with me in their own lives — during the late ’60s/’70s and the period when I was doing Mondo 2000 and earlier magazines — then something really interesting would come of that. It’d be a literary experiment and an exploration of memory and psychology.  That’s where it started.

On one level it seemed really self-indulgent; in another way, it seemed like a fairly original project.  There’ve been a lot of books where it’s “as told to,” starting with a book called Edie by George Plympton, where they go around and talk to a whole lot of different people and quote them verbatim about some person’s life and what they witnessed.

My feeling was this would dig a little bit deeper, more interactive and more probing. Eventually, largely as a result of thinking about raising capital to get started on Kickstarter, trying to get the equivalent of the small amount book companies give for an advance, I decided I needed to narrow my focus.  People would be interested in doing this just with Mondo 2000 and the magazines that preceded it.  So it was narrowed down to a period from 1984-1997, starting with a magazine called High Frontiers that mutated into Reality Hackers and then Mondo 2000.

Mondo 1995: Up and Down With the Next Millennium’s First Magazine by Jack Boulware (SF Weekly)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.13.2010
09:58 pm
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BBC childrens’ show character says ‘Fuck your mother’ in Mandarin
05.13.2010
09:43 pm
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I love it when this sort of thing happens:

A telly viewer in China rang the BBC claiming he heard a character in hit kids’ show In The Night Garden say: “F*** your mother”, we can reveal.
The gibberish talk of one of the tumbly, pepper-pot Tombliboos - Unn, Ooo and Eee - made it sound like the toy had sworn in Mandarin.

A spokesman for BBC Worldwide, who sold the show to China, last night pledged to investigate.

A source said: “Someone was watching the show in Beijing and was convinced they heard a Tombliboo say ‘f*** your mother’ which, as you can imagine, is not on in any language.”

“Mandarin is all about tonality so you can end up saying something quite different to what you actually mean if you get it wrong.”

The series is produced by Ragdoll, which makes the Teletubbies.

It features several odd-looking characters and is set in a magic kingdom “that exists between waking and sleeping in a child’s imagination”.

BBC childrens’ show character says ‘Fuck your mother’ in Mandarin (The Sun)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.13.2010
09:43 pm
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Danger: Diabolik: two sides of Deep Deep Down
05.13.2010
05:10 pm
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(John Phillip Law and Marisa Mell in Danger: Diabolik)
 
There’s no question that one of the more beloved movies here at Dangerous Minds is that deliriously kitschy caper film, Danger: Diabolik, Mario Bava‘s ‘68 ode to love, leather, Marisa Mell and…Marisa Mell.  The same could be said for its somewhat hard-to-find Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

While uniformly great from start to finish, and full of quotable dialogue, it’s perhaps best remembered for its insanely catchy main title song, Deep Deep Down.  You can hear Christy‘s renditions of the song below (in both English and Italian), but below that is one from Mike Patton.

Say what you will about Patton’s various bands (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle), because I can say very little.  He does, though, do a fully committed Deep Deep Down!

 

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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05.13.2010
05:10 pm
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Another one of the Hoopster’s gimmicks…
05.13.2010
05:08 pm
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Yep, look out, the Hoopster’s comin’. Better watch out! He’ll like “hoop” you or something…

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.13.2010
05:08 pm
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