It’s not like these are the most beautiful bongs my eyes have ever laid on, but I do however, find them dumbly hilarious in a nostalgic way. When I saw the MTV-themed Beavis and Butt-Head bongs I certainly did laugh out loud. They’re ridiculous. The bongs are by an artist named John de Fazio.

The Ren & Stimpy bongs are good, but I much prefer the craftsmanship of the Beavis and Butt-Head ones.

There are no prices for the bongs. I’m not even sure if they’re for sale.

 
More after the jump…

 
Louisville, Kentucky, circa 1982: my best friend and I spent a lot of time exploring the woods on our walks home after school. One fateful day we stumbled upon a not-so-hidden cache of adult magazines which blew our Catholic grade-school minds. I still remember the titles after all these years: Oui, Harvey, Gallery, and two Hustlers. One of the issues of Hustler had an article on Anton Lavey, which I’m sure had a profound impact on my juvenile mind. That same issue had a pictorial I’ll never forget: two female “space aliens” in silver outfits and rainbow-colored afros. It was the first time I ever realized that two women could or would ever kiss each other. My initial reaction was “ewww” right before my secondary reaction of “ohhhh.”

Up to that point I had snuck a few peeks at the old man’s Playboys, but I had never known that there was other stuff under those furry early ‘80s muffs. There were so many revelations in those treasures that at first sort of grossed me out, but then completely fascinated me to no end. It seems, arguably, in retrospect, that these magazines just karmically appeared out of nowhere at exactly the right time in my development. My friend and I split them up. He’d hold on to a few of them for a week, and I’d keep the others, and then we’d swap. To a pre-teen kid, prior to the Internet, finding and holding onto such riches was unparalleled.

It wasn’t until the Internet came along that I learned “woods porn” was a thing that was experienced by anyone other than me. I remember first hearing the term mentioned on a messageboard back in the late ‘90s. I was surprised, at the time, that someone else had had a similar experience to my discovery of forbidden sacred treasures in the woods. Others began to chime in with their experiences and I was shocked to find that it was such a common experience.

Over the years, I’ve seen discussions pop up from time to time where (mostly dudes) reminisce about the stacks of Penthouse and (always) Hustler (it seemed to be the woods porn title of choice) that were found in dry creek beds or under logs or in abandoned shacks or behind construction sites.

I’ve had to wonder if there was some sort of Johnny Appleseed of porn who traveled the country distributing perverse periodicals for the most inquisitive children to find on their explorations. Some have speculated about nasty gnomes or porn-faeries littering the woodlands with titillating treats.

Is it possible that stacks of pornography were left in remote areas as lures for pedophiles with nefarious agendas? In my hometown we had a registered sex offender albino shop-owner whose entire M.O. in procuring teenage boys involved offering them jobs “reviewing” porn tapes. Could woods porn have been bait in a trap that somehow hundreds of kids in the ‘70s and ‘80s managed to snag like mice catching cheese without getting caught? I mean, there’s no anecdotal evidence I’ve ever heard to indicate that this is the case, but then again, maybe the parties involved aren’t able to tell their tales?

The truth is probably more simple and innocent than that: the woods offered some sort of privacy that couldn’t be found in the home . They were the ultimate safe space for kids or homeless dudes or henpecked husbands or whomever might have needed a quiet place alone to reflect on god’s creations.
 

Recreation of a typical woods porn cache. Photo by Bickel.
 
I recently asked friends on social media if they had ever had an experience with finding porn in the woods and within a day I had over 70 people chime in indicating that they definitely had found porn in the woods as a child. The stories of “secret spank banks” of “rain-mangled” magazines seemed to anecdotally indicate that woods porn was ubiquitous and finding it was a widely-shared common experience.

The stories told were sometimes frightening: one describing a massive “trash bag full that we found in the woods and when we shook it out to sift through it, a huge shit and blood-encrusted dildo fell out too,” and another who had found porn in the woods, but then stopped looking when a dead body was found in the same spot.

More after the jump…

 
On election night my wife and I laid in bed with the TV on and our laptops open happily watching the results of the vote come in and eating junk food. When the stable odometer on the New York Times interactive widget went from pinning the left side with a 98% likelihood of Hillary Clinton winning to flipping abruptly to the extreme right (see what I did there?) for a 95% chance of a Trump win, we both figured something was wrong with the Times’ website. After reloading the page a few times, and seeing it remain in favor of Trump, it seemed that the television coverage was telling the same surreal story. We sat—like most Americans still possessing a majority of their teeth—silently numbed in a state of profoundly bewildered and demoralized shock. When it became obvious that fucking swine from all across the country had suddenly sprouted wings and taken flight—I got over 200 extremely nasty anti-Semitic tweets hurled at me immediately on Twitter (and I’m not even Jewish) from alt.right goofballs with Pepe the Frog avatars—my wife broke the silence saying simply:

“Dangerous Minds has to change. We need to be harder and tougher. Rougher-edged. We can’t blog about frivolous frou-frou things anymore. We have to switch up what we’re doing to reflect what just happened.”

I’d been more or less thinking the same thing, but my thoughts were amorphous whereas hers were much more sharply defined. Looking at Twitter, it seemed evident to me that within a matter of minutes a new American counterculture was spontaneously forming. As much as America had just gone full bore Idiocracy, in other quarters things seemed to be quickly getting very Mr. Robot. I offered some weak gallows humor saying that Trump might even ironically be good for a business proposition like Dangerous Minds, but she just groaned. (You’ll forgive me, I hope, but this is where my thoughts naturally drifted. Of course, unlike a lot of people, I also had the luxury of not having to worry about my undocumented abuela when America flunked its fucking IQ test…)

The next day, waking up with what felt like I had a toxic hangover of international proportions—I don’t drink—my wife who very seldom drinks herself, decided that she needed to be around people and joined several of her friends to commiserate at a bar that opened up at 9am. There was no way I wanted to be around strangers. Especially drunk people. Even worse weepy drunk liberal people…

Had fucking bullyboy Biff Tannen really beaten Tracy Flick?

I hated everything and everyone. I was glad to be alone.

After rolling an epic joint, I cranked up Smash the System, the fantastic new Luke Haines album, LOUD and listened to it all the way through and then again, and then again and then again on repeat. I don’t mean to imply that I rocked out, but fuck it, I rocked out. I’m not ashamed to say that. Pretty soon I felt, to my surprise, pretty okay. Like Haines was a revolutionary sonic sorcerer who had blown all the bad shit out of my brain. Smash the System was the perfect soundtrack for the day after Donald Trump was elected leader of the free world. I highly recommend it, maybe it’ll work for you, too.

I messaged Luke Haines on Twitter requesting an email interview and he kindly obliged me.

Richard Metzger: The obvious first question has got to be “Any thoughts on what happened last night?”

Luke Haines: So, the American Election. I may not be the right person to ask (who is?) as I believe in personal anarchy and magick. But here’s a few observations anyway:

The Brexit comparison isn’t entirely relevant. Brexit was actually a subtle bit of class war hijinks played out by a few members of the Bullingdon Club who bore long term grudges against one another. No one holds grudges better than the English Upper class—the Queen mother was said to have smiled with satisfaction very, very briefly at Wallis Simpson’s funeral. So, one of our ruling overloads lost out at a game of milky biscuit one night in the dorms at Eton, and the country got the brunt of it. Brexit was sold to the British public under false pretences—no one wanted to leave Europe (only Farage) The British public were sold the dummy, and they bought it hook line and sinker.

Trump is a businessman (not my tribe, if I had a tribe). He is also a sociopath (more understandable). He’ll try to “run” America like a business. Buying up shit, running shit into the ground, exploiting people—if he’s allowed to do this then he won’t lose interest in being El Prez. The best hope I guess, is that, he won’t be allowed to do that and he’ll lose interest…

Democracy only works when there is equality. Without equality democracy seems pretty broken.
 

 
Apparently Nigel Farage is said to be hopping on a plane to come over here to advise Trump! You guys can keep that asshole, we’ve got enough already. Was Smash the System a reaction to Brexit? Or not? It seems like you’ve been up for smashing the system for your entire career.

No. Not a reaction to Brexit. Although the album cover and video with the marauding Morris men was. The logical conclusion to the populist idea of Brexit would mean that no one in the UK would be allowed to leave their home town, or possibly the house where they were born. It’s “Autumn Almanac” by the Kinks as Modern Folk Politics.

Are you going through a bit of an Aleister Crowley phase?

Crowley was a bad man. I wouldn’t mess with the dark stuff—I might end up making a bad Stranglers album.

The unicursal hexagram on the CD packaging isn’t a nod to Crowley?

No, it’s based on the Kibbo Kift!

[I email Haines this Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicursal_hexagram]

First rule of Thelema: Never talk about Thelema.

More with Luke Haines after the jump…

 
On its beautiful 35mm Technicolor surface, Anna Biller’s The Love Witch appears to be a spot-on replication of horror and sexploitation movies of the 1960s and 70s. Imagine a Hammer film directed by Radley Metzger or Russ Meyer’s Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls featuring witches instead of an all-girl rock band. Biller’s film also recalls devilish delights like Juan López Moctezuma’s Alucarda, Jimmy Sangster’s Lust For A Vampire and just about anything directed by Jean Rollin. But Biller’s cinematographer M. David Mullen eschews shooting in the ocher and crimson hues of the Hammer films or soft focus of Rollin and goes for a luminescent style that evokes Frank Tashlin’s use of primary colors with their cartoon clarity, or one of Aleister Crowley’s paintings. Though Biller herself would tell you she wasn’t influenced by the movies that The Love Witch seems to be paying homage to there is an undeniable aesthetic connection between The Love Witch and dozens of Italian giallos as well as the films and directors I’ve already mentioned. If Biller hasn’t seen those films or is reluctant to spend time discussing her influences in interviews it’s because, in my opinion, she doesn’t want The Love Witch to be classified as some kind of camp artifact but seen as a very modern take on pussy power. In her movie, no one grabs these witches by the pussy and lives to joke about it.
 

 
The Love Witch is a perfect film for these times. As we’ve seen women rising to political power and female artists dominating the music charts and directing major films, we’ve also seen a sexist backlash that hasn’t been this virulent in decades. Our culture still demonizes women who are unafraid to assert themselves through their politics, art, bodies and minds. Strong women are called loud, shrill, bitches. The perception on the part of many men (and some women) is that these successful women got to where they are because they’re good at manipulation, skilled in using their female powers, their cunning. That their success isn’t earned. That they fucked their way to the top, using their feminine wiles to get what they wanted. The classic depictions of women in film noirs of the forties and fifties are back in the form of modern day femme fatales who scheme like Hillary Clinton and beguile like Beyoncé. [For some bone-chilling sexism and racism check out the ‘net response to Beyoncé‘s appearance on the Country Music Awards.]
 

 
The Love Witch is feminist fairy tale that uses the past to reflect on the moment. Within its B-movie trappings, it poetically probes the backlash that occurred when women broke free from sexual oppression during the go-go sixties and how that freedom resulted in a whole new set of problems. Every gesture of openness and sexuality could be misread as a come-on, a seduction, an unspoken “yes.” The Love Witch takes place in 1971 and I remember well when women started going bra-less and wore mini-skirts and let their hair grow long and free. Sexual liberation was fine in theory. But in practice women who expressed their new-found freedom by wearing what they wanted, walked and talked like they wanted, sent a message to men that was misread. Suddenly liberated women were perceived as easy targets. Outside of communities of young, intelligent and sensitive people, free sex wasn’t free. It often carried a high price. The Love Witch is not a horror movie in the conventional sense. But it is horrifying to be reminded of how women have been persecuted since Biblical days right up until now for enjoying their bodies and sexuality. They’re dangerous, they’re from Hell, they’re witches and must be burned on the stake of religion, fear and cultural oppression. A free woman is a threat to the fragile male sense of superiority. Men have done everything they can to keep women under control. Even demonizing them to the point that executing them was acceptable. Male strength is predicated on the subjugation of women. And when women rise up, men become desperate and in desperation they reveal their weakness. The woman who resists male dominance is evil, possessed, a witch.
 

 
Now I realize that I’m making The Love Witch sound like a diatribe against men. It isn’t. It’s a very sly comedy that uses the idea of witchery as a metaphor for pussy power unleashed. The whole movie is as nutty and fruity as a bag of Freudian trail mix. Interpretation is more than welcome, it’s almost obligatory.  Magic potions are created by combining female urine with used tampons—Trump’s worse menstruating Megyn Kelly nightmare. Smoking beakers filled with witches brews of day-glo chemicals could be the bubbling components for birth control concoctions, abortifacients and hallucinogenics. Keys to open the castle doors. After all, wasn’t it the pill and psychedelics that helped free our bodies and minds? Wouldn’t a love witch want to spread the good vibes? Oh, those devilish witches with their magic elixirs.

New age homilies and hippie dippy black magic circle jerks are wonderfully skewered on Biller’s sardonic pitchfork. Scenes have the drug panic of a Dragnet episode. And at times the movie’s like what you’d get if The Wicker Man was a Wicker Woman and lived in Topanga Canyon next door to the Mod Squad. But that’s just part of it. Imagine Hitchcock’s Marnie starring Anton LaVey and The Shangri-Las as Marnie’s multiple personalities. No, that’s not it either. Maybe if Hogtied magazine had sex with an Archie comic and gave birth to a slew of demonic Barbie Dolls dressed in leather and latex? Or maybe just a frugging Anaïs Nin bobblehead?
 

 
What happens when the power between yin and yang shifts and sugartits pulls a metaphoric gun on the guy with his hands on the steering wheel? Biller is both playful and deadly serious in scenes where burlesque dancers bring howling men helplessly to their knees with a mere thrust of the pelvis and witches with Bobby Gentry bouffants reduce men to sobbing little boys who quiver in the wake of the all powerful energy of the sorceress. In these moments of masculine meltdowns I can hear the pathetic voice of Frank Booth sobbing the word “mommy” between each inhalation of his witch’s brew. And off in the distance where the sun bleeds into the desert, Tura Satana is going Jackie Chan on a truck driver with a porn ‘stache.

The film is deep and deeply twisted. There’s a renaissance fair in The Love Witch that looks like the commune scene in Easy Rider directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky while tripping on Orange Sunshine. It’s fucking out of this world wacky. I think there’s even a Unicorn. Or was I hallucinating?
 

 
Continues after the jump…

Erotic-themed cigarette case from Sweden, 1910.
 
In order to protect the somewhat delicate hand-rolled cigarettes that were sold during the early part of the 20th century, fashionable cigarette cases crafted in gold, silver or other precious materials started popping up in the hands of elite members of society all around the world.

These cases became a venue for artists to use their handiwork to produce images that would appeal to all kinds of customers, including those who enjoyed gazing at erotic images while enjoying a relaxing smoke. Born out of function cigarette cases became decadent pieces of art. Even the posh egg-man Peter Carl Fabergé designed cigarette cases in the late 19th century that were ornately decorated with precious jewels such as diamonds, sapphires and emeralds. While Fabergé‘s fancy cigarette cases were fit for the gentry or royal crowds, the “erotic” themed cases in this post were probably not flashed around by members of the upper-class or aristocracy while in mixed company.

Due to their age they are quite hard to come by and the exquisite cases have been known to fetch anywhere from $3000 to $9000 when they come up for auction at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. Occasionally these authentic era-specific cases do pop up on sites like Etsy and eBay but even then they can run several hundred dollars a pop. I’ve got a number of beautiful erotic cigarette cases for you to look at below—that said, though they are incredible works of vintage art (some of which are over 100 years old), they are NSFW.
 

Germany, early 1900s.
 

Vienna, 1913.
 

 

Germany, 1910.
 
More after the jump…

Paradise Garage
 
When I got to New York in 1977 it was to play on a Monday night with my band at CBGB. At the time, CBGB was becoming a magnet for bands from all over the world. But despite its growing rep as a music mecca, CBGB’s early days had the feel of a clubhouse for a very specific type of rock fan: A hang for rebels who loved rock distilled to its essence, poets who found their muse in the mayhem of loud amps and the thunder of drums and a handful of rock critics who desperately needed something fresh to wrap their heads around. Playing to a nearly empty house, my band saw CBGB in a less romantic light. It was a dump. But on those nights when The Ramones, Patti Smith, The Damned, X-Ray Spex, The Dead Boys etc. played, CBGB was the center of the rock and roll universe.

Whether playing CBGB or not I probably spent most nights in 77/78 either there or at Max’s. It was the last great era of rock and roll as far as I’m concerned. We’ll be talking about The Ramones, Talking Heads and Patti Smith long after grunge bands like Alice In Chains and Soundgarden are long forgotten (if they’re not already). As far as music of this new century goes, I’m not sure much of it will be remembered 20 years from now. I’m not hearing anything that really blows me away. I wish I did. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just an old fuck living in the past. But that past, particularly the glorious whole of the New York Club scene of the 70s and early 80s, was pretty fucking wonderful. Seen from a passing satellite I can imagine Manhattan, Brooklyn and The Bronx looking like a giant throbbing meatpit glimmering with copious amounts of sweat and dripping with… (use your imagination).

Punk, rap, disco and Latin music were drifting in and out of each other and the barriers separating uptown from downtown were being shattered. Blondie, B-52s and DEVO were being played at Studio 54 and bands like Liquid Liquid, Bush Tetras and Konk were taking disco’s four-on-the-floor beat and putting some angsty urban edge into the mix. The bottom line is people were dancing everywhere, even in clubs where people had been too cool to get crazy. Leaning on the bar and striking hipster poses looked pretty square when hundreds of people were going mad on the dance floor to The Gun Club’s invocation to “explode to the call… move, move, sex beat, go…!”

My own circuit included Danceteria, Peppermint Lounge, Mudd Club, Club 57 and Hurrah’s where new wave, post-punk and ska bands played regularly and deejays like Mark Kamins, Anita Sarko and Dany Johnson kept the crowds in perpetual motion.The segue from live bands to vinyl was an art that was being mastered as the scene unfolded and the best deejays were being born on the spot.

At downtown clubs like The Paradise Garage and The Saint deejays Larry Levan and Alan Dodd spun dance floor filling beats for predominantly gay clienteles who embraced divas Loleatta Holloway, Donna Summer, Grace Jones and Sylvester as well as euro-disco and the very beginnings of house music. These were the test markets for new singles by new artists and the latest dance re-mixes. If a 12-inch extended dance mix worked at The Paradise Garage it would work anywhere. It wasn’t long before rock bands like The Clash and Blondie were hitting the studios to re-work their tracks into dance mixes. No one was listening to radio. We were all too busy nightclubbing.
 

 
Tim Lawrence’s epic new history of nightlife in the city that never sleeps, Life And Death On The New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983, captures everything I’ve been talking about and so much more. In its six hundred thrilling pages, Lawrence gives us a close-up view of a scene that lasted from 1980 to 1983 before AIDS blew out the lights on a party that felt like it would go on forever. San Francisco in the 1960s had hippies, free love and psychedelics. It was the place to go to shake off the straightjacket of religious repression and cultural oppression for a generation of young people. In the less sunny and distinctly more frightening New York of the seventies and eighties, young people also gathered but with fewer support systems in play and far more obstacles than the free-flowing Aquarian era. Still, we made our own new version of paradise. It was rough-edged and more cynical but it was alive with energy that made us all feel that the future was ours. If there’s anything that makes Lawrence’s book ultimately a sad one is how quickly it all ended and how random and bewildering that end was. The openness and freedom we were all feeling was suddenly thrown under the wheels of some demonic subway train that had come rumbling out of nowhere.

When AIDS descended on New York it was a quiet bomb that shattered our world. For me, it hit home when I got a call that a friend of mine was dying from this new mystifying disease. I put down the phone not knowing exactly what it all meant. What the fuck was going on? My friend who was dying was Klaus Nomi. I had known Klaus for several years and had encouraged him in the very early stages of his music career. I helped him pick out a guitar (blue Fender Jaguar) and taught him three chords, enough to get him started. Ironically, we ended up on the same record label. Klaus epitomized New York’s multi-faceted music scene by crossing every possible boundary and creating something modern and new. He was ahead of his time, both wonderful and tragic.

Life And Death On The New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 is a remarkable achievement as history and as entertainment. A sequel to his Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979, it’s a celebration and a eulogy of a New York that we may never see again. Dance floors and rock clubs have been replaced by chain stores and condos. The funky storefronts and theaters that housed music venues and discotheques are now homes to the rich and fabulous. No one dances anymore. Everyone is too busy making money to pay for their little bit of real estate that once was the breeding ground for artists, musicians and writers. Where bodegas, pizzerias, bakeries, dive bars and cheap ethnic restaurants once stood we now have Starbucks, The Gap and $100 sushi handrolls. Tim Lawrence’s book is a reminder that the heart and soul of any culture, any city, is in its art. From the great Times Square jazz clubs to the Boogie Down Bronx and CBGB on the Bowery, New York has always been one of the world’s great music centers. Once we lose touch with that magic we’re left with an island of commerce and concrete. We not only lose part of our soul we lose our collective identity. The value of cities are measured by their art. No one comes to New York because it has a better Starbucks or Chili’s. People flocked to Manhattan even in the worst of times because we had clubs, theaters and museums no one else had. People were willing to brave the Bowery because there was something magic going on in a dive bar that stank of beer and urine but seemed like heaven to fans of adventurous new music. CBGB’s heyday really only lasted a couple of years but those years were game changers for rock music and musicians. The good stuff is eternal.

In the past few days I’ve been in a state of shock and awe. Despondent to point of paralysis. This piece I’m writing now is helping me get a grip on myself. As I write it, I am remembering all the battles I’ve fought since I was 15 and marched on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. I am remembering Nixon and Reagan and I’m also remembering that during every dark era the arts have flourished. As war raged and friends were drafted and killed, we saw a golden age of rock and roll emerge in the sixties. The Beatles, Fugs, Sly Stone, Jefferson Airplane all sang songs of peace and insurrection based on liberating our bodies and minds. The art scene of the ‘60s was a massive detonation of mind-expanding paintings, films and literature. In the 1970s, when New York was dying and the government under Ford fucked us off, there seemed to be no light nowhere. But punk rock reared its beautiful spiky head like a pus-filled boil bursting and expelling the poisons that had been building in a city and citizenry under siege. We didn’t run, we didn’t hide. We partied! Dance floors exploded with free spirits moving, grinding, slithering to beats that were sexy, tantric, primal and emancipating. The songs were anthemic invocations to stand up against the machinations of death and doom. Gloria Gaynor led the charge with lyrics that were a call out to each and every one of us to not despair, to not lose hope and to survive!

Do you think I’d crumble
Did you think I’d lay down and die?

Oh no, not I, I will survive
Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive
I’ve got all my life to live
And I’ve got all my love to give and I’ll survive
I will survive

So as we face this very uncertain time it’s important to not crumble to not lose your anger. For me, my anger right now is what clarifies who I am and what I believe in. This is not a time to go soft and get warm and fuzzy and talk about healing. Keep your anger close. Consider it an ally. But be precise and informed when you use it. In the meantime, this is the perfect time to find avenues to articulate and express your feelings without risking your freedom and safety. Nixon once quoted the old proverb “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”  Fuck him. I have a different angle: “when the going gets tough, the tough get down.” Let’s dance this mess around!
 

Dany Johnson
 
Here’s a mix to get down to. It’s based on a set list from Dany Johnson who was the house DJ at Club 57 circa 1980. Get happy, get healthy and get ready. We have work to do.

Blondie – I KNOW BUT I DON’T KNOW
Joe Cuba Sextet – BANG BANG
Delta 5 – MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS
Bootsy’s Rubber Band – BOOTZILLA
Talking Heads – WARNING SIGN
Lynn Collins – ROCK ME AGAIN….
Pylon – GRAVITY
The Cramps – I’M CRAMPED
Spoonie Gee – MONSTER JAM
B52s – DANCE THIS MESS AROUND
Frankie Smith – DOUBLE DUTCH BUS
Marie and Les Garcons – RE-BOP
Fatback Band – KING TIM III
Lulu – THE BOAT I ROW
Bush Tetras – TOO MANY CREEPS

 
Update: New York City dance club visionary DJ David Mancuso who hosted groundbreaking Love Saves The Day dance parties and opened The Loft on Lower Broadway in 1970 died yesterday (Nov.14). He was 72. He created an inclusive club scene where everybody felt at home and set the tone for virtually every dance club that followed in his wake.

 
In 1961, a young photographer named Eikoh Hosoe was asked by writer Yukio Mishima to take his portrait picture. It was a humbling yet surprising commission. Mishima was then Japan’s greatest living novelist—the author tipped to one day win the Nobel Prize. Hosoe was relatively unknown. The commission made Hosoe deeply curious as to why the great Mishima had chosen him.

When they met in the small garden at Mishima’s house, the author anticipated Hosoe’s question:

“I loved your photographs of Tatsumi Hijikata. I want you to photograph me like that, so I asked my editor to call you.”

“Mr. Mishima, do you mean I can photograph you in my own way?” I asked.

“Yes, I am your subject matter. Photograph me however you please, Mr. Hosoe,” he replied.

All my questions and anxiety faded.

The photographs Mishima so greatly admired were the ones Hosoe had taken of the dancer Tatsumi Hijikata. 

Hijikata was an originator of Butoh—an apocalytpic dance form developed in Japan after the Second World War in opposition to western influence. Mishima had similarly broken away from the prevailing western influence that had altered Japan after the war and during the 1950s. Mishima wanted a return of the Emperor and the ancient samurai traditions.

Mishima had been a puny kid. As he matured he changed his body through rigorous exercise and weight-lifting to become toned and highly athletic. His books often deal with the theme of the split between intellectual ambitions and the man of action.

His first novel Confessions of a Mask examined the “reluctant masquerade” between the perceived and actual life. Mishima was bisexual. He was married with two children but had an intense and active gay life. He was a sadomasochist, who believed in the living of a life through force of will. A life that he claimed adhered to the strict codes of the samurai. His books were fixed in this tradition—though his subject matter was preoccupied with sex and death. This led many critics in the west to misunderstand Mishima. One of my collegues here label him as a cross between “Proust and Jeffrey Dahmer.”

That fine day in September 1961, Hosoe quickly realized Mishima did not want a banal author portrait:

In offering himself as the “subject matter” of my photographs, I thought he might have wanted to become a dancer himself. I was still in my twenties then, so I was naïve. I did not make the distinction between an international literary figure and a dancer.

Mishima’s father happened to be watering the garden, so I grabbed his hose, and I wrapped Mishima’s entire body in the hose and kept him standing in the center of the zodiac, where he was planning to erect a statue of Apollo.

I asked him to look up and concentrate on my camera, which I was holding from a ladder above. I shouted, “Keep looking at my lens very intensely, Mr. Mishima! Okay, that’s great, keep going . . .” He never blinked while I shot two rolls of 35mm film. “I am proud of my ability to keep my eyes open for minutes,” said Mishima.

“I have never been photographed like this,” he said. “Why did you do it in this way?”

“This is the destruction of a myth,” I replied.

“You should wrap the hose around Haruo Sato,” he laughed. Haruo Sato was considered to be a literary giant at that time. But what I really meant was that I wanted to destroy the preconceived ideas about Mishima’s image in order to create a new Mishima.

After the shoot, Hosoe thought he may have gone too far. Two days later, Mishima phoned him to say he loved the photographs and wanted to collaborate with Hosoe on some more.

Over a period of six months Hosoe worked with Mishima on a series photographs which he hoped would capture the writer’s soul. These were eventually published as a book—with text by Mishima—called Ba-ra-kei or Ordeal by Roses.

In November 1970, Mishima together with four members of his secret army attempted a military coup. They broke into the eastern headquarters of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces taking the commanding officer prisoner. Mishima demanded 800 soldiers gather outside the offices to hear a speech and a list of demands he had written. Mishima hoped this speech would inspire the troops to rebel against the corruption of western influence and join his rebellion. Mishima wanted an end of democracy and a return of the Emperor. His rebellion was a literal union of the artist and man of action changing history.

The troops laughed and jeered as the author spoke. The coup failed. Mishima returned inside where he committed seppuku (self-disembowelment) before one of his soldiers attempted to decapitate him. After several blows failed to remove his head, another of his soldiers eventually managed to decapitate Mishima.

Mishima’s biographer John Nathan suggested this military coup was only a pretext for Mishima’s ritual suicide—something he had long dreamed about. In his short story “Patriotism” Mishima described an idealized seppuku where the central character pulls a blade across his abdomen cutting himself open:

The vomiting made the fierce pain fiercer still, and the stomach, which had thus far remained firm and compact, now abruptly heaved, opening wide its wound, and the entrails burst through, as if the wound too were vomiting. . . . The entrails gave an impression of robust health and almost disagreeable vitality as they slipped smoothly out and spilled over into the crotch. . . . A raw smell filled the room.

Hosoe’s photographs of Mishima taken in 1961 and 1962 capture the author’s terrible beauty, eroticism and conflicted sadomasochistic nature.
 

 

 
More of Hosoe’s photographs of Mishima, after the jump….

 
Today is a day I’m not looking at anything political on the Internet. I just can’t. I won’t. I mustn’t! I’m not even clicking on any of my favorite news sites today as I just know I’ll read or see something shitty that will bring me down in the dumps.

So what am I left with? Cat memes and clickbait photo-themed websites. Yep. I wasted my time. I’m not proud of myself. But I didn’t get depressed or mad. In fact, I even chuckled silently to myself once or twice. Small victories. They mean so much.

So I’m going to do something similar here today as I simply don’t know what else to do. Some of these images you’ve probably seen before because a few of ‘em come from those slow-moving clickbait-y sites. I apologize in advance.

They are funny, though! Go on, take this slight distraction from reality with me, won’t you?

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Who knew the power of the boogeyman better than the Rastas? Despised pariahs, the “blackheart man” your mother warned you would steal and eat you if you were naughty, Rastas knew the score on being a scapegoat. They were “the stone that the builder refused.”

That must be why, as I read in S. Baker’s notes for the Soul Jazz comp Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955-83, which largely focuses on the contributions of Count Ossie and nyabinghi drumming to Jamaican music, the Rastas took the name “nyabinghi” straight from the racist tall tales of Italian fascists:

Propagandists of the Italian government, in the middle of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, invented a story that a secret society of black warriors known as the Nya-Binghi (meaning ‘Death to the oppressors of the black races’) had been formed under the leadership of Haile Selassie I of Abyssinia (also known as Ethiopia). A threat to civilised society, the group had (potentially) 190 million members throughout the world. The Ku Klux Klan in the United States was the first to become aware of the power of the Nya-Binghi. Apparently Klan members in numerous American cities had recently been smitten with a strange and mysterious lethal disease. With publicity like this who wouldn’t want to join the Nya-Binghis!

 

 
Count Ossie (né Oswald Williams), who is widely credited as a, if not the, inventor of nyabinghi drumming, founded a Rastafarian community near east Kingston’s Wareika Hill during the 50s. He and his band only recorded sporadically over the following decade, Baker writes, because their “community-based” music was essentially devotional and not made for material reward.

In 1973, Count Ossie and his group joined forces with the Mystics, a jazz-influenced band led by saxophonist Cedric Im Brooks, and the resulting combo was known as the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari. After several years playing cover tunes in clubs, Brooks had left Jamaica in ‘68 to study music in Philadelphia, where, it’s said, Sun Ra and the Arkestra made a strong impression on him. (I haven’t yet found a source on their relationship that isn’t exasperatingly vague; Baker writes only that, while in Philadelphia, Brooks “established an association with Sun Ra’s artistic Arkestra commune.”)

Back in Jamaica, Brooks played on a number of Studio One sessions and formed the Mystics with trumpeter David Madden. Their debut with Count Ossie and group as the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari was the triple LP Grounation, recently rereleased by the Dub Store label. If a reasoning session with jazz horns sounds like a novelty item, far from it—in fact, The Rough Guide to Reggae says this is the nyabinghi album to get:

Though serious musicologists had made occasional field recordings of nyahbingi sessions, the first album to give the music the studio time it deserved, while remaining as true to its original forms as possible, was the triple LP set Grounation, from Count Ossie & the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari. The MRR was an aggregation of accomplished musicians which brought together both Count Ossie’s African-style hand drummers and the horns and bass of tenor-sax man Cedric Brooks’s Mystics band. This historic set has never been superseded, but the establishment of Rastafari as the dominant reggae ideology in the mid-1970s, plus the emergence of an audience for reggae albums that were more than collections of singles, created a climate in which more sets of nyahbingi-based music could be produced.

Hear ‘Grounation’ by Count Ossie & the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, after the jump…

 
Excluding Blondie’s 1981 foray into the genre with “Rapture,” when it comes to listing “white rappers of the ‘80s,” most people would start and end their list with the Beastie Boys. 3rd Base came along in 1989, really ushering in the heyday decade of white boy rappers in the 1990s with acts like Vanilla Ice, House of Pain, Insane Clown Posse, Snow, Kid Rock, etc.

Most people forget the almost-was of caucasoid rap, The White Boys, who existed at the same time as the Beastie Boys’ rise to fame with their world-wide smash album Licensed to Ill.

While the Beasties and their label-mates LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and EPMD on Def Jam rose to world-wide acclaim, rival label Tin Pan Apple with signees The Fat Boys, the Latin Rascals, and The White Boys folded after only five years when the Fat Boys were dropped from PolyGram’s US artist roster. The White Boys may have been primed by the label to help rap crossover to a new demographic, but the public wasn’t buying. The Beastie Boys were more talented, more stylish, with more overconfident reckless bravado and better production… and perhaps the public just wasn’t ready for TWO white rap groups.

Or perhaps the public wasn’t ready for white rappers who looked like heshers. It would take Kid Rock another decade to make that a thing.

The White Boys weren’t groundbreaking, but their origins are interesting. They came out of a small Southern town, Lancaster, South Carolina in the mid 80s. One of the members, T-Ray, went on to be an acclaimed music producer, working with The Beastie Boys, Nas, Mick Jagger, and Santana (on the Grammy-winning “Supernatural”), who won two Grammys for his work with the Latin group Ozomatli.

After hearing a friend’s copy of Soul Sonic Force’s ‘Planet Rock’ in the early ‘80s, T-Ray (Todd Ray) purchased a pair of turntables and began DJing locally, performing with his friends. Their group didn’t have a name and they were often referred to and listed on local flyers as “those white boys.” Winning a regional talent contest, the group was sponsored by Swatch Watch, who flew them to Breckenridge, Colorado for a snowboarding event. It was there that Converse Sneakers provided them with an additional sponsorship.They seemed to be on their way to the bigtime.

A Charlotte, North Carolina club sponsored a talent contest which T-Ray won several weeks in a row, qualifying him for the finals. The finals were judged by reps from both Def Jam and PolyGram. T-Ray didn’t win that competition, but he was approached by a PolyGram representative (Tin Pan Apple’s parent company) with the offer of a record contract.

The White Boys then moved from South Carolina to Rosedale, Queens, where they recorded for Tin Pan Apple Records and appeared on the Fresh Fest Tour. By 1987 fame had not found them and the group broke up.
 

This is hardcore, is it not? Well, actually…
 
The song that was to be their break-out single, “This is Hardcore, Is It Not?,” is sort of a Run-D.M.C. “Rockbox” rip, but with mediocre production and mullets. The video for the song is interesting in that it features Steve Caballero, Christian Hosoi, Tommy Guerrero, Lance Mountain, Rodney Mullen, Mike Domínguez, Ron Wilkerson and Bryan Blyter and is one of the earliest music videos to feature both skaters and BMX professional riders.

Ultimately, it was not in the cards for the OTHER ‘80s white rap group, but T-Ray’s real success came later as a producer. He now runs a freak show in Venice, California.
 
More after the jump…