In 2002, for reasons that may have been clear only to him, former Van Halen singer and professional outsized ham David Lee Roth spent a reported $600,000 making a disjointed longform music video featuring himself cavorting with a dwarf, chugging beers with pregnant women, playing with an Asian sword to the tune of “Baker Street,” doing a totally unnecessary cover of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” brandishing military weapons, cavorting with models, playing jazz guitar…

It’s a lot like what might happen if a 14-year-old boy with a brutal case of ADHD was given a generous supply of alcohol and money, a shitty ‘80s VHS camcorder, and the chance to make the music video of his dreams.
 

 
The video was manufactured as a 2xVHS package—one tape was the regular video, the other was the video with Roth’s stream-of-Ritalin commentary, which would have to be exponentially more bonkers than the video alone—and it may have been sent out to entertainment industry movers in a quixotic endeavor to score a reality show, but it’s only been available to civilians as a bootleg, or in bits and pieces on YouTube, until a couple of days ago when Roth uploaded the whole damn thing to his own video channel, so that it can at last be seen uninterrupted in all its awkward-segue glory.

If your tolerance levels for Roth and/or the puerile display of women’s bodies are low, don’t even bother, you’ll definitely hate this 100% as much as you’re imagining you will. If you’re a sufficiently advanced ironist or a big enough actual fan of the guy to handle an hour of his mugging, you’ll be treated to a deliriously spastic mashup of early MTV and low-rent Jodorowsky for connoisseurs of breast implants and mind-bogglingly inept cover songs.

Watch ‘David Lee Roth’s No Holds Bar-B-Que’ after the jump…

 
In recent years underground filmmaker, author and occultist Kenneth Anger has added fashion maven to his multi-hyphenate resume with his tee-shirts and clothing endeavors. Now he’s taking his designer apparel to another level: Witness Anger’s new lightweight “Resort Collection” Lucifer Rising jacket, “ideal” he claims

“...for a midsummer night’s sorceries. The deluxe “Golden Scarab Edition” jackets are made with large embroidery on a vibrant satin material, as if they’d gone through a time machine more than a few times—landing someone in the next century.”

The jackets are the latest release from Anger and LA-based artist Brian Butler’s Lucifer Brothers Workshop:

Although the satin ‘souvenir’ bomber has come into vogue recently with labels such as Louis Vuitton, Valentino and Saint Laurent, Kenneth Anger’s original design tops them all. Featuring a palette known locally as Hodos Chamelionis, or the Path of the Chameleon—the colors of the forces which lie beyond the physical universe, happens to be the Lucifer Brothers Workshop’s house mascot. Here, they are flitted over gold and black satin in a limited edition of 333 with labels signed by Kenneth Anger himself.

Re-imagined in black and gold satin this lightweight edition of the iconic Lucifer Rising jacket is now in Anger’s online store and available to order.
 

 
A few days ago, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver made headlines when he tweeted that Apple Music is “literally a horrid platform” that does little beyond promote “commercialization.” Really, who could disagree with that?

Today Vernon is making the rounds for a different reason. An old buddy of Vernon’s named Andy Schumann posted footage from 1998 when Vernon and his mates competed in a Battle of the Bands under the name Mount Vernon (LOL!).

Before achieving considerable success with the hipster breakthrough album For Emma, Forever Ago in 2008, Vernon worked in some other outfits including JD Vernon and DeYarmond Edison. After achieving indie superstardom, Vernon has been tireless in his collaborations, including work with the ensembles Gayngs, Megafaun, Volcano Choir, and the Shouting Matches. He also worked with Kanye West on his 2013 album Yeezus.

 

 
The video of Mount Vernon, which features Vernon with a handful of his future collaborators, such as Phil Cook (DeYarmond Edison, Megafaun, Gayngs), Brad Cook (DeYarmond Edison, Megafaun), and Joe Westerlund (Megafaun, Grandma Sparrow) after the jump…

 
Max’s Kansas City is famous for hosting acts like the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Television, Suicide, and the whole downtown punk scene of the mid-1970s, but it also was the venue for an early gig by Bad Brains, the legends of DC hardcore. The original location of Max’s Kansas City on Park Avenue South and 18th St. closed in 1981. It’s said that Bad Brains and the Beastie Boys played the final gig at that location, but the evidence is mixed: this exhaustive page on the venue states that that lineup was scheduled but cancelled.

Bad Brains were there two years earlier, however, and fortunately for us the gig was exhaustively documented. The date for the show is commonly listed as February 1979, but that’s not correct. The date of the show was Sunday, December 16, 1979, a fact that is corroborated by two pieces of information, the poster above and the comment by H.R. during the show that it was drummer Earl Hudson’s birthday that day. (Also H.R.‘s younger brother, Hudson turned 22 in 1979.)

Bad Brains opened for The Mad, an interesting band fronted by a native of Osaka, Japan, who used the name Screaming Mad George. The Mad only put out a couple of singles at the time, but there retrospective CDs were released later on. Screaming Mad George did the poster for the gig. He also transitioned out of punk music into special effects for Hollywood movies, working on such 1980s classics as Big Trouble in Little China, Predator, and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

More after the jump…

 
Here’s a neato cuckoo clock that reenacts the famous ax scene from The Shining on the hour. Apparently every hour Jack Torrance breaks through the door—something that seems pretty cuckoo, I think we can all agree—with his axe yelling “Here’s Johnny!” accompanied by the screams from Shelley Duvall’s character. The clock, made by Chris Dimino, is sadly just a one-off. Boo!

Perhaps if there’s some Internet interest, Chris Dimino will make more?

I tried to find some video footage of the clock in action, but unfortunately turned up empty handed.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
A scene from ‘The Shining’ with the ghostly caretaker digitally removed
Behind-the-scenes of ‘The Shining’
The bathroom from ‘Room 237’ in ‘The Shining’ becomes the creepiest shower curtain of all time
‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ from ‘The Shining’ in other languages

 
Local news stories about underground music can always be counted on to cluelessly pander to the paranoid grandparent demographic, which makes this 1978 Minneapolis public TV segment on the Ramones such a gem—it takes punk’s aesthetic merits seriously and keeps to a minimum the then-typical hysterics about audience violence. An announcer calls punk “the theory of minimal art applied to rock ‘n’ roll,” right there much more gravitas than the subject usually got from hinterlands journos.

The interview segment sees the band talking about the punk bands in England (the voice-over announcer misidentifies England as punk’s “ancestral homeland,” apparently not knowing the Ramones were Ur-punks who beat the Brits to the punch by a couple of years). Dee Dee dismisses them with a blanket “they stink,” and Tommy downplays that scene’s vaunted political engagement, singling out the Clash & Sex Pistols as exceptions, while heavily qualifying the latter group. Johnny handwaving the British punks’ political leanings as “a bore” and lumping them in with Joan Baez is funny in hindsight, as most of us know by now what an arch-conservative he turned out to be.

Watch this fun 11-minute feature after the jump…
 

 
One of the intriguing residues of the near-simultaneous release of Blackstar and the sad passing of its creator was the apparent wardrobe callback Bowie threw into the video to “Lazarus.” In the video, Bowie is wearing a dark bodysuit with diagonal silver stripes, definitely a reference to Steve Schapiro’s famous “Kabbalah” photographs taken prior to the release of Station to Station in 1976 (see above). In the pictures, Bowie is shown drawing a sketch of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life on the floor.

Bowie’s references to Kabbalah are not limited to promotional pictures, however. In the title track of that album, Bowie sings the following lines: 
 

Tall in this room overlooking the ocean
Here are we, one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth
There are you, you drive like a demon from station to station

 
“Kether” and “Malkuth” are two of the ten Sephirots in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Not long after Station to Station came out, Bowie recorded “Breaking Glass,” which would appear on Low, in which the following line appears: “Don’t look at the carpet, I drew something awful on it, see.” Some people have taken that as a reference to Bowie’s habit of drawing the Tree of Life on floors around that time.
 

 
For a group exhibition called “Constructing The Self: David Bowie” at Vivid Gallery in Birmingham, England, Ferric Lux (real name: John Bradburn) has created a compelling short video called “The Mountain of Dead Selves” The video, which plays on a loop at the show, is “based on the occult themes of David Bowie’s album Station to Station,” according to the artist.

The exhbition website has this to say about the video:
 

‘The Mountain of Dead Selves’ is a six panel video work exploring the psychic states at play in the construction of Bowie’s 1976 album, Station to Station. The work explores Bowie as mystery school as much as art school.

 
“Bowie as mystery school”! That’s pretty great. I’ve gotten mildly obsessed with the video, trying to tease out how its six panels relate to the album’s six songs, which are, let’s recall, “Station to Station,” “Golden Years,” “Word on a Wing,” “TVC 15,” “Stay,” and “Wild Is the Wind.” Who knows if they match up one for one, but the fact of there being six panels, however, does seem significant.

Watch the video after the jump…

 
Wow! I really like this giant raven costume by illustrator and video game artist, Rah-Bop. It’s incredibly well-made and the details are impeccable. The costume was designed after Rah-Bop’s D&D character, Rue.

There’s really no additional information about this costume to report that I was able to find. But it’s amazing isn’t it? I wonder how long it took to make?

Hollywood needs to hire this Rah-Bop stat!

 
via Nerdcore

 
Morgan Loebel is an artist and dental technician who makes creepy, monstrous and downright scary phone covers out of polymer clay.

Loebel calls his gruesome designs Morgan’s Mutations. Each hand-sculpted phone cover is features a twisted, tongue-lolling, toothsome, fleshy aberration. Mostly monophthalmic, these creatures look set to lick and bite the hapless phone user. 

The quality of the flesh-shredding teeth on display are evidence of Loebel’s twenty years’ work as a dental technician crafting realistic detailed crowns, bridges and other dental prosthesis. This experience was fundamental in Loebel creating his life-like mutated creatures.

I love creating beings that have realistic features, from the eyes, teeth and the wrinkles in its flesh.

If you want to scare the bejesus out of friends and colleagues then check out the full range of Morgan’s Mutations here or on Facebook.
 

 
More of Morgan’s Mutations, after the jump…

 
The Internet was built to make celebrities out of people like YouTube user Steve1989 MREinfo.

This YouTuber has developed a significant following for his video posts showcasing his collection of old military rations. What makes his videos remarkable is the fact that Steve1989 MREinfo EATS the contents of the rations once he opens them on camera. Though these MREs and rations were made to “keep” for years, they were not meant to “keep” for several decades. Most of the videos on Steve1989 MREinfo’s channel depict him eating food that is very obviously no longer edible to regular human beings.

In one recent video Steve1989 MREinfo eats a cracker dating back to 1863. That’s an goddamned old cracker.

You have to appreciate someone who is so into their extremely specialized interest and collection, who literally risks his life to consume food which, in most cases, is likely spoiled. When it comes to obsessing over the history of military food, this guy is the real deal.

Here he tastes some 65-year-old food, which he’s clearly disgusted by:
 

 
Much more after the jump…