Eagle eyed Dangerous Minds contributor Tara McGinley caught a brief glimpse of our pal Kembra Pfahler of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black (that’s her in the picture frame) on last week’s Gossip Girl (Okay, I admit it, we’re total Gossip Girl addicts and nothing you can do or say will change that).

We think Gossip Girl’s team should give Kembra a real cameo on the show. Witness her performance here at the Villa della Petraia in Florence during the Proenza Schouler event, June 18, 2009. Now that’s production value!

 
In a move reminiscent of the Thin White Duke‘s mid-‘90s issuing of Bowie bonds:

Hip hop pioneers Public Enemy will partner with fan-funding site Sellaband to finance their next album.  Public Enemy is one of the first established acts to sign up to Sellaband?

I wonder what this movie is all about…

 
Just in time for pandemic season: starting Thursday, the Haruyama Trading Co. will begin offering suits designed to protect the wearer from the deadly H1N1 strain of influenza:

The suit is coated with the chemical titanium dioxide, which reacts to light to break down and kill the virus when it comes into contact with it, according to Junko Hirohata.  The chemical is a common ingredient in toothpaste and cosmetics.

The suit—which is indistinguishable from any other worn by Japan’s legion of “salarymen”—comes in four colors and styles, which are medium grey, charcoal, navy and a grey pinstripe.

Note: for illustration purposes only, the above suit reflects the Haruyama Trading Co.‘s water-repellent suit, and not the one designed to shield its wearer from swine flu.

In the Telegraph: Japanese Suit That Fights Flu

Cilice sells gear for modern-day Medieval penitents. Their site reports:

A cilice was originally a garment or undergarment made of coarse cloth or animal hair (a hairshirt). In more recent times the word has come to refer not to a hairshirt, but to a spiked metal belt or chain worn strapped tight around the upper thigh. Many religious orders within the Roman Catholic Church have used the cilice as a form of “corporal mortification,” but in recent years it has become known as a practice of numeraries (celibate lay people) of Opus Dei, a personal prelature of the Roman Catholic Church.

Hand-crafted using traditional materials, our hairshirts, metal chains and goat skin cilice belts, used in some form throughout history as an aid to worship, are available to buy and can be shipped worldwide (Prices shown are inclusive of shipping). Practiced for centuries, use of the cilice has been commonplace in the lives of the saints, for example: St Francis of Assisi, St Thomas More, St Therese of Lisieux, Pope Paul VI, St Padre Pio and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The motivation behind these voluntary mortifications is to imitate Christ and to join him in his redemptive sacrifice (cf. Matthew 16:24), and they can also be a way to suffer in solidarity with the many poor and deprived people in the world.

The use of the cilice belt or hairshirt must not be undertaken lightly, it is essential that people seek spiritual guidance and instruction before using one.

I think that’s my Christmas shopping list sorted!

(Cilice official website)

(Thanks, Jon Graham!)

 
From Times Online:
 

A baby woolly mammoth that died after being sucked into a muddy river bed 40,000 years ago has revealed more prehistoric secrets of how the species survived in its icy habitat.

The mammoth, known as Lyuba, was about a month old when she died in the Siberian tundra, where she remained until she was discovered by reindeer herders three years ago. Her body was so well preserved in the permafrost that her stomach retained traces of her mother?

 
Radley Metzger (no relation, although I wish he was!) made super slick “European art house” softcore erotica in the Sixties and early Seventies. His high class skin flicks, he said, were philosophically inspired by Orson Welles and Jorge Luis Borges. Decadent feasts for the eyes, visually they seemed influenced by the camera of Michelangelo Antonioni and featured sumptuous soundtracks by composers like Piero Piccioni, Georges Auric and Oscar-winner Georges Delerue. Never before or since has softcore porn been given such a glossy, lustrous, quality art-directed look and feel.
 

 
The Lickerish Quartet (“an erotic duet in four players”) from 1970 is one of Metzger’s best. Visually dazzling and sophisticated, it looks like something straight out of a Vogue layout. No less of an expert than Andy Warhol called it “an outrageously kinky masterpiece.”
 

 
Beautiful people and beautiful surroundings were key elements in Metzger’s films. The Lickerish Quartet mostly takes place in a lush castle owned by a rich, bored couple. The watch a stag film. Later they go to a carnival and one of the drivers (Silvana Venturelli) in a speed race turns out to be the woman in the movie. They decide to invite her back to their Baroque castle for a party, then humiliate her with the film, except that when they watch it again, she’s not in it. One by one she seduces the father, mother and son. Things are not what they seem.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

The Tenth Victim: Kitsch Klassic

Vampire Lesbians of Hammer

For centuries, various controversies (carbon dating, image creation) have dogged the Shroud of Turin.  But Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, chimed in today with what he thinks is the final word.

An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ’s burial cloth is a medieval fake.

The shroud, measuring 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man some believers say is Christ.

Carbon dating tests by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona in 1988 caused a sensation by dating it from between 1260 and 1390.  Skeptics said it was a hoax, possibly made to attract the profitable medieval pilgrimage business.  But scientists have thus far been at a loss to explain how the image was left on the cloth.

Garlaschelli reproduced the full-sized shroud using materials and techniques that were available in the middle ages.  They placed a linen sheet flat over a volunteer and then rubbed it with a pigment containing traces of acid.  A mask was used for the face.

The pigment was then artificially aged by heating the cloth in an oven and washing it, a process which removed it from the surface but left a fuzzy, half-tone image similar to that on the Shroud. He believes the pigment on the original Shroud faded naturally over the centuries.  They then added blood stains, burn holes, scorches and water stains to achieve the final effect.

Images (above and below) from Garlaschelli’s recreated shroud are on the right.

 
In Reuters: Italian Scientist Reproduces The Shroud Of Turin

 
As the school’s website touts, it’s not for the fainthearted, but sex-club bouncers might find the admissions process particularly breezy!

The Rogue Film School will be in the form of weekend seminars held by Werner Herzog in person at varying locations and at infrequent intervals.

The number of participants will be limited.

Locations and dates will be announced on this website and Werner Herzog’s website: www.wernerherzog.com approximately 12 weeks in advance.

The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making.  For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.

The Rogue Film School is about a way of life.  It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible.  It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature.

The focus of the seminars will be a dialogue with Werner Herzog, in which the participants will have their voice with their projects, their questions, their aspirations.

Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; they may be shown and discussed as well.  Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film?  How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays).  How do you sensitize an audience?  How is space created and understood by an audience?  How do you produce and edit a film?  How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?

Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking.  Traveling on foot.  The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully.  The athletic side of filmmaking.  The creation of your own shooting permits.  The neutralization of bureaucracy.  Guerrilla tactics.  Self-reliance.

Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list: if possible, read Virgil’s “Georgics,” read “Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber,” The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular the Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo “True History of the Conquest of New Spain”.

Follow your vision.  Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere.  At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.

For more information on becoming a student, see: Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School