Slumber Party Massacre II, written and directed by Deborah Brock, is a horror comedy musical cult film that you need to see. Pay no attention to the haters at Rotten Tomatoes who called it a “a horrible movie, not a horror movie”—so the killer in Slumber Party Massacre II breaks into song. Like that’s a bad thing? How often do you see something like that outside of Sweeney Todd? Released in 1987, Slumber Party Massacre II was the sequel to (how’d you guess?) Slumber Party Massacre and there were others in the Slumber Party Massacre franchise, but sequels, prequels people, who cares about those other films…? This is the one you need to watch.

The story is all about girl rocker Courtney and her badass band of preppies going on a weekend getaway to a parent-free condo to have a girly slumber party. OF COURSE, their very 80s boyfriends show up and so does the driller killer. Before I even discuss that guy, Courtney’s awesome band of stone foxes “plays” (mines along to) music courtesy of LA-based group Wednesday Week.

The first number they “perform” called “If Only” takes place during a scene at their garage practice spot before they leave town.

Keep reading after the jump…

A metal bra and chastity belt by Yva Richard (modeled by Nativia Richard), 1920s.
 
My DM colleague Tara McGinley recently posted some fantastic vintage images of kinky boots—and as I share her admiration for rule-breaking women and fashion I thought many of you would enjoy seeing some more provocative images from the 1920s and very early 1930s taken in Paris of models donning the latest in French fetish wear.
 

Animal print panties with a tail by Diana Slip, 1920s.
 
At the time there were only a small number of companies that were actually making the clothing that catered to the robust bondage loving, whip and chains-wearing fans that enjoying living out their fantasies in the clubs of Paris and in the privacy of their own home. If people were getting their freak on in an iron bra and matching chastity belt (pictured at the top of this post) it probably came from France. Two of the pioneering companies that were feeding the fetish community with their playthings were Yva Richard and Diana Slip.

Yva Richard was the husband and wife duo of L. Richard and Nativa Richard. Getting their start sometime in the early 1920s, Nativia was not only the talented seamstress making Yva Richard’s signature risque lingerie, but she also modeled much of the companies cheeky creations and would routinely appeared in Yva Richard’s popular mail-order catalog from which the kinky couple sold everything from masks to iron restraints. The Richards’ biggest competition back in the 20s was Diana Slip—a fetish wear company run by Léon Vidal. Vidal’s collection while very much marketed to purveyors of kink had a slightly more sophisticated air and was not as overtly deviant as Yva Richard’s designs.

The arrival of WWII and the subsequent occupation of France in the early 40s pretty much put the kibosh on the booming fetish business and both companies as well as others closed up shop. I’ve included some incredible examples of what both Yva Richard and Diana Slip were designing for their fetish loving French fans that I’m sure will get your blood pumping. If they don’t, you might want to get that checked out.

If this kind of thing is your thing (I don’t judge and neither should you) the French book Yva Richard: L’âge d’or du fétichisme features a large collection of photographs that chronicle the history of the French fetish wear pioneers. That said, some of the images that follow are NSFW.
 

Diana Slip, 1920s.
 
More after the jump…

 
Here we have sculptor Patricia Piccinini’s ugly baby, Graham, a high-concept mutant designed to withstand car crashes. Graham’s unsettling physiology was created in collaboration with trauma surgeon Christian Kenfield and road safety engineer David Logan in order to emphasize how incredibly fragile our (comparatively attractive) human bodies are, and as far as public safety service announcements go, he really gets the point across. Our mushy little brains are so vulnerable in our (more or less) normal-sized heads!

I’m willing to bet Piccinini added the the row of rippling puppy nipples for shock value, but the construction of Graham’s skull in particular is very medically informed. Our brains are not capable of withstanding the impact of a high speed crash, and we’d need massively reinforced gourds to do so—so wear your damn seatbelt and don’t speed!

If you’re considering bodymodding yourself for optimum safety, you can look at Graham’s physiological “specs,” so to speak, in a 360 degree rendering online!
 

 
More after the jump…

 
To the extent that writer/musician Adam Gnade is known at all, it’s for a sparse and desolate talking-song folk music that sits on the raw edge of the New Weird America trip, often recorded very primitively and directly, a la John Lomax’s field recordings, or early Mountain Goats. His musical and literary output together comprise a singular and ambitious body of work—the same characters and plotlines continue through both forms, telling stories set in his hometown of San Diego.

Gnade has been prolifically releasing music and books for about eleven years, and his newest novella, Locust House, is being published by Pioneers Press in collaboration with Three One G, a record label run by Justin Pearson of the brutally spastic hardcore band The Locust (the band is referred-to in the book, the title isn’t a coincidence). Locust House is ostensibly a night-in-the-life story of a concert at a punk flophouse getting broken up by the police (and if it was based on a real-life show, it would have been a pretty fucking epic night), but the plot is only an excuse to take us deep into the inner lives of the characters, something at which Gnade excels. Among other themes, he explores scene members’ changing relationships to music and community as life advances, viscerally nailing that discrete, unrepeatable, life-altering thrill one gets when the right music hits the right young brain at the right time. It’s a feeling I’d love to have again, and reading Gnade’s words persuasively re-immersed me in that experience. (It also made me wonder if he’s read Ageing and Youth Cultures.)
 
More after the jump…

via Facebook
 
We are all big fans of Sinead O’Connor here at Dangerous Minds. Her voice is gorgeous. Her songs cut through lies. She is hilarious. She’s defied the music industry’s sexist, grab-ass bullshit. She confronted the Catholic Church about child abuse two decades before it was front-page news and paid the price for her courage. She is a real, actual artist.

On Monday, O’Connor announced on Facebook that she’s selling handmade, decorated illustrations. They are available in two flavors: sacred (without swears) and profane (with), though there appears to be some overlap (see “The Books of the Fucking Prophets” below). The sacred works draw on Sinead’s heterodox Catholicism, while the profane celebrate “Reasons To Fucking Thrive.” 

Sinead writes:

I make these as a hobby. But am now going to make a living. If you want to order and buy one for yourself with words of your own choosing or mine, please contact. Backstagebetty@icloud.com
Themes are only two… Scripture (no bad words) or Reasons To Fucking Thrive .
Send yours and get it made pretty..

I’m mystified by one or two of Sinead’s selections in the latter category (for instance, she big ups “Don Fucking Lemon,” not one of my personal heroes), so I would probably choose my own words. How about Sinead Fucking O’Connor?

Here are a few samples from Sinead’s Facebook page:
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Yesterday Jack White’s Third Man Records dropped a cryptic video on its Facebook presence, in which it promised to make “vinyl history again” on “July 30th.”

In 2014 White set a kind of land speed record on Record Store Day when he recorded, pressed and distributed the title track of his second album Lazaretto in under four hours.

The Vinyl Factory believes that the project could be the realization of White’s long-standing goal to be the first to play a vinyl record in outer space.

In the video, a Star Wars-like caption states “On 30th July Third Man Records is going to make vinyl history again,” after which followed by a gold record bearing a label of Carl Sagan’s “A Glorious Dawn,” released as a seven-inch by Third Man in 2009, zips towards the viewer.

As The Vinyl Factory pointed out, in 2012 White spoke to astronaut Buzz Aldrin for Interview Magazine. During the chat, White discussed the breakup of the White Stripes and also divulged that he was working on a “secret project” to get one of the songs on Third Man Records to be the “first vinyl record played in outer space”.

White’s concept at that time was “to launch a balloon that carries a vinyl record player. And figure out a way to drop the needle with all that turbulence up there and ensure that it will still play.”

Keep reading after the jump…

 
Someone’s dead relatives just got a makeover. Artist Alex Gross takes discarded vintage photographs, paints on them and turns them into portraits of pop culture icons like Batman, Superman, Electra, Wonder Woman, Super Mario and Marge Simpson. These mixed media paintings raise questions about the relevance of history, family and memory in our neo-liberal consumerist world—where fictional characters have far more currency and longevity than familial ties or dead relatives.

Gross is best known for his beautiful, disturbing and surreal paintings that explore modern life.

The world that I live in is both spiritually profound and culturally vapid. It is extremely violent but can also be extremely beautiful. Globalization and technology are responsible for wonderfully positive changes in the world as well as terrible tragedy and homogeneity. This dichotomy fascinates me, and naturally influences much of my work.

I like Alex Gross’s paintings. I like his ideas. He is painting a narrative to our lives—and like all good art he is questioning our role within this story and the values we consider important in its telling. More of Alex Gross’ work can be seen here.
 

 

 

 
More photographs reborn after the jump…

 
Yesterday I blogged about gnarly pimple-popping cupcakes and today I’m blogging about shark-shaped tea bags that slowly release blood red tea. I’m not trying to gross you folks out, I swear! These tea bags are a bit more subtle in the “gross out” department, anyway.

The shark tea bags are designed and made by Japanese manufacturer DaiSho Fisheries. I don’t know that much about the company and Google translate isn’t helping that much. I believe—but don’t quote me—that their sole purpose is making novelty tea bags. Either way, I dig this design. I can’t vouch for the flavor of the tea, though. Hopefully it’s good.

 
via Laughing Squid

November 1970 poster for a series of Suicide shows at “A Project of Living Artists” on 729 Broadway

The news of the death of Alan Vega of Suicide came down over the weekend. As all such deaths do, it has given rise to an outpouring of heartfelt reminiscences, providing an occasion to reflect on what a blazing, contradictory, committed, special band Suicide was. Famously early in defining the possibilities of the term “punk music” (via 1970 gig ads, one example of which is above), Suicide became one of those rare bands you absolutely had to have a reaction to, as they perhaps learned to their chagrin when they accepted an offer by the Clash to open for the London-based punk band in Britain in 1978. Many of the punks in the audience despised Suicide, leading to an incident in Glasgow in which an audience member threw an axe at Vega’s head.

Living up to its name, “A Short Film About Suicide” (2007) lasts roughly 15 minutes. It mostly consists of Vega talking, which is an unimpeachable strategy. The movie opens with Vega recalling the September 3, 1969, gig at the Pavilion on 42nd St. when the Stooges opened for the MC5 and Iggy (and, improbably, Johann Sebastian Bach) changed Vega’s life forever. The movie features Vega and Martin Rev, of course, plus Chris Stein of Blondie, Mick Jones of the Clash, and others. Howard Thompson tells of hearing Suicide’s incredible first album for the first time (mistakenly playing side B first) and then realizing that he absolutely had to put it out in the U.K.

If “A Short Film About Suicide” lasted 5 hours, no part of it would be boring.

More after the jump…

 
Adrien Barrère was a prolific poster artist in late Belle Époque Paris, noted for having illustrated over 200 cinema posters for Pathé in the earliest decades of the 20th Century. His style was a bit more cartoonish than his more famous contemporaries like Toulouse-Lautrec and Chéret, due to his training as a caricaturist.

And that respected artist made some marvelously ghastly posters for that notoriously gory and debauched theatre, the Grand Guignol.

A huge influence on horror cinema, the Grand Guignol (roughly “large puppet show”) specialized in garish melodramas that typically climaxed in graphic violence. In his introduction to Theatre of Fear and Horror, U.C. Berkeley Drama professor and author Mel Gordon writes:

There is something embarrassing about the Grand Guignol. Like a renegade sect or invented religion from another century, it still touches upon our secret longings and fears. A product of fin-de-siecle France, the Grand Guignol managed to transgress theatrical conventions and outrage its public as it explored the back alleys of unfettered desire, aesthetic impropriety, and nascent psychological trends in criminology and the study of abnormal behavior. Its supporters called the Grand Guignol play the most Aristotelian of twentieth-century dramatic forms since it was passionately devoted to the purgation of fear and pity.

Audiences came to the Theatre of the Grand Guignol to be frightened, to be shocked, while simultaneously delighting in their fears (or in those of the people around them). The more terrifying a performance was—that is, the more it tapped into its spectators’ collective phobias—the greater its success.

Gordon’s book was originally published by Amok Press in 1988, but an expanded edition is being released in a few weeks by Feral House, and will feature a section of color plates, play scripts, and the autobiography of one of the theatre’s company players, actress Paula Maxa, who may be the single most murdered performer in the history of theatre (“I had been shot, burned, poisoned, flogged in the nude, bitten by snakes, dismembered on a butcher’s table, strangled, left bleeding to death—all at the whim of the playwrights”).

The gallery of Barrère prints below was graciously provided by the publisher. Clicking spawns an enlargement.
 

The Puppets of Vice, 1929
 

Harakiri, 1919
 
More macabre mayhem from the Grand Guignol after the jump…