Fans of Tim Burton’s circa 1988 horror-comedy, Beetlejuice, are sure to appreciate these striking black-on-white cameos of bio-exorcist Betelgeuse, the monstrous Maitlands, and the “strange and unusual” Lydia Deetz.
These intricate paper silhouettes are the work of The Shadow Studio’s Julia LaFosse who hand-cuts each portraiture in a style made popular in the 18th century.
She explains:
Sometimes silhouette artists would be invited to parties by wealthy patrons in order to entertain the guests by creating cut-paper portraits of them, but silhouettes were also an affordable way for lower-class families to have portraits of their loved ones made, as they were much less expensive than paintings and photographs were not yet available. Silhouettes became so popular that a parlor game called Shades was widespread in the years before the invention of the daguerreotype, where people would take turns tracing each others’ shadows, cast onto a piece of paper by a candle.
The year was 1970 and Dennis Hopper was still riding the wake of the internationally huge cultural phenomenon of Easy Rider. Clearly, the cat could get away with just about anything including appearing on Johnny Cash’s weekly TV show reading Rudyard Kipling’ poem “If.” Now most of us pop culture obsessives have seen this clip of Hopper on the Cash show. It’s pretty pervasive on the ‘net and you may have already stumbled across it. But some smart cookie by the name of “Gints Apsits” has played around with the Hopper footage and created something that might resemble where Hopper’s psychedelicized head could have been at this particular point in his life.
Not only do words infect, egotize, narcotize, and paralyze, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain. . . . Rudyard Kipling.
Perhaps we’re watching Hopper watching himself through the eyes of his gas-huffing character Frank Booth. Or is that too damned heavy meta?
British animator Neil Williams (aka Stelos485) has created two of the coolest punk-related cartoons ever. The animation for the Bad Brains’ “Pay To Cum” is very much like the song and band itself: stripped-down, kinetic and as frenetic as a frog on a hotplate.
Williams’ animation for The Ramones’ “Chainsaw” is an ingenious mix of Saturday morning cartoon visuals, Tobe Hooper’s slice and dice horror films and beach party fright flicks. It’s perfectly in the spirit of The Ramones’ own obsessions and I wish there was one of these cartoons for every Ramones’ song ever recorded.
More of Neil Williams’ work can be viewed on YouTube channel. It is definitely worth a visit. Check out his Beatles’ stuff and an animated version of the notorious Orson Welles’ frozen pea radio ad.
Here are some photographs of Victorian women of color that date from 1860 to 1901. Unfortunately, a lot of these photographs have no names attached to the women posed in the photographs.
I’d love to know the stories behind each photo. What each woman’s life was like. Sadly, we’ll probably never know.
According to the website Downtown LA Life:
Photos of Women of Color from this era are hard to come by, especially “family” photographs.
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A couple of these photos were taken when there was still slavery in the United States.
Most rock fans know which bands distinguished themselves at the Woodstock festival, properly styled the “Woodstock Music & Art Fair,” in August 1969—Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, CSNY—but less well known are the various fees that producers John Roberts and Joel Rosenman paid to each individual artist. By that reckoning, Santana was a bargain and Blood, Sweat & Tears might have been just a touch overpaid, no offense to that fine combo.
Here’s the full chart, with 2015 equivalents listed in parenthses. For reference, $1 in 1969 is worth the same as $6.37 in 2015 dollars. The entire collection of talent cost $140,700 in 1969, which comes to $895,982.97 today. Whoever decided to fork over $1,375 to compensate Joe Cocker for his time made a very, very good decision.
AdultSwim.com’s adventure series Decker, starring Tim Heidecker as Agent Jack Decker a “true American hero” who is “capable of getting the job done,” returns today for a new season with new three-minute webisodes dropping daily for “the foreseeable future” as the press release put it.
Decker battles terrorism and the worst president we’ve ever had so Americans can haz freedom, saving Hawaii from the Taliban with the help of his trusty sidekick, CIA code-breaker Kington (Heidecker’s co-host of On Cinema At The Cinema, Gregg Turkington AKA Neil Hamburger).
Dangerous Minds: How would you describe Decker?
Tim Heidecker: Decker is a web series which follows lone wolf CIA agent Jack Decker as he fights terrorism and battles with the bureaucracy of Washington… the character is my character from On Cinema’s version of the ultimate action star. It’s his attempt at doing, Steven Seagal, Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro all at once, but it comes out closer to Donald Trump. The editing is either done by him or someone with very little experience in the entertainment arts.
It’s important to take note that Decker is a spin off of a web series based on a podcast.
So the Decker character is pretty closely based on the real you?
Not really in any way, except that if I really did try to make an action show I would fail as well.
What are the advantages of the three-minute drama over say, a five-minute episodic?
Well we are trying to capture the short attention spans of this terrible generation, I guess! One of the macro jokes we play with is the lack of story movement and the fun we have with padding things—stretching story and jokes until they feel like they may break. Cutting these up into a a TON of episodes helps. We’re going to release one a day, five days a week for… a while.
You and Eric are incredibly prolific. You just had the Bedtime Stories series, there’s your cooking show, and now hot on the heels of your recent three-hour Oscar telecast, there’s a brand new series of Decker. Only David Lynch seems to be able to churn out material at the rate you guys can. He launched his own line of David Lynch signature coffee beans, so I’m wondering if we can expect a Tim and Eric edible product line in the future?
We flirted with opening a small restaurant called “Hamburgers and Hot Dogs” for a while in LA, but everyone we knew said we were crazy to get into the food business. The odds are just so high that you’ll fail! There’s a really, really perfect product out there that we might try to dip into soon—more on that later.
I’m happy to hear that you have that perception. I often feel unproductive but when you list it out it sounds mighty nice!
New episodes of Decker will premiere every day, Monday to Friday, from now to whenever on AdultSwim.com.
My first memory of a record album being a media event was Pink Floyd’s The Wall in 1980, when I was 10 years old. I had some KISS albums by that time and the soundtrack to Grease and a couple other things, but The Wall was the first current album that penetrated my consciousness as a Big Fucking Deal. The album was released in late 1979 but I didn’t register that information, for me the phenomenon happened purely in 1980. For you 1980 might be the year of London Calling or Los Angeles; I wouldn’t hear about those albums until a few years later. For me it was the year of The Wall.
It must have been a big deal in Germany as well, judging from this excellent footage of a duo going by the name “Vierzehn” (which means “fourteen”) performing a German version of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part I)” on two different talk shows. Their rendition is dramatically shorter than the original, consisting of a single verse and chorus performed by the duo and then repeated by a chorus of German schoolchildren who march out at the appropriate moment. Then comes the righteous solo.
There’s very little information about Vierzehn out there, but one of the guys was named Joachim Heider, who sometimes went by “Alfie Khan” and who led a band called the Alfie Khan Sound Orchestra.
The German title is “Stein Um Stein,” which means “brick by brick.” Stein actually means stone; the proper word for “brick is Ziegel or Ziegelstein, but it obviously works well enough.
Here are the German lyrics followed by a translation—you’ll see it doesn’t really match up with the lyrics of Roger Waters (no reference to “dunklen Sarkasmus im Klassenzimmer”):
Wir sind nicht für euch geboren.
Wie Computer programmiert
In uns’re Köpfe schaut uns keiner
Nein, wir schwimmen nicht mit dem Strom
Hey, Lehrer, laßt uns doch in Ruh’!
Stein um Stein mauert ihr uns langsam ein.
Stein um Stein mauert ihr uns langsam ein.
Wir sind nicht für euch geboren. . . .
We are not born for you
Programmed like computers
In our heads nobody is looking
No, we do not swim with the stream
Hey, teacher, leave us alone!
Brick by brick you are walling us slowly in.
I’ve already written an item for DM on Secret Weapons, David Cronenberg’s near-incomprehensible TV short from 1972 about a dystopian state that uses mind control drugs and a rebel biker gang that opposes it—in that movie, however, despite the stated existence of a biker gang, there were scarcely any motorcycles to be seen in it. That problem, at least, does not arise in Cronenberg’s 1976 short The Italian Machine.
It’s almost jaw-dropping how much progress Cronenberg had made between these two movies. The Italian Machine relinquishes all aspirations toward big-dick sci-fi in favor of a far more nuanced, engrossing, unfussy meditation on technology, art, decadence, and, shall we say, the pet obsessions of warring subcultures. The idea of the movie, which lasts only 23 minutes, is that a bunch of motorcycle buffs, having learned that an incredibly rare and high-quality Italian motorcycle, specifically a 1976 Ducati 900 Desmo Super Sport, has come into the possession of a local art enthusiast who intends to keep it in his living room as a sculpture, take on the moral imperative of liberating the machine from its outré confines and restoring it to its rightful purpose of kicking ass on the open road.
What The Italian Machine, which first appared on the CBC television program Teleplay, most resembles is a really good short story; more specifically it reminds me a great deal of J. G. Ballard, which isn’t very strange considering that Cronenberg adapted Ballard’s Crash a couple of decades later. In The Italian Machine, Lionel, Fred, and Bug are three motorcycle nuts who enjoy the kind of nerdy oneupmanship that probably features on every episode of The Big Bang Theory. Upon finding out the identity of the Ducati’s purchaser, one Edgar Mouette, they concoct a plan to pose as a magazine crew of photographers doing a spread on Mouette’s interiors. That Ballardian angle resides mainly in Mouette and his cohorts, philosophical aesthetes to the max (when they’re not taking cocaine). Once Lionel and his buddies gain entry, it is the viewer’s task to decide which side is the nuttier of the two. Eventually they do get ahold of the bike, at which point their own ability to fetishize the machine unexpectedly manifests itself.
Truly, a top-notch piece of work, very in line with the many dark masterpieces Cronenberg would make in the years to come.
It doesn’t matter where you start—it’s where you’re going that counts.
Kate Bush made her television debut in a disused train depot in West Germany, when she guested on the light entertainment show Bios Bahnhof (Bio’s Station) for WDR-TV, February 9th, 1978. In front of a well-heeled, middle-aged audience, Kate sang two songs: one with her backing band (“Kite”); and one to a backing track (“Wuthering Heights”)—the B and A-side of her debut single.
“Wuthering Heights” was a revolutionary debut and still sounds as radical today as it did when first released. But its success may never have happened had her record label E.M.I. stuck with their plan to release “James and the Cold Gun” as her first single from Kate’s album The Kick Inside.
“James and the Cold Gun” was one of the songs Kate performed when she was learning her craft as lead singer with her brother’s group the K.T. Bush Band during the summer of 1977. The K.T. Bush Band gigged around London, traveling in a small Hillman Imp, performing covers of the Beatles and the Stones and Marvin Gaye’s “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” They also tried out a few of Kate’s original compositions like “James and the Cold Gun” where she would mime a shoot-out with the audience.
Kate Bush fronts the K.T. Bush Band circa 1977.
The K.T. Bush Band perform a Beatles classic, 1977.
Kate was determined her first release should be “Wuthering Heights” and pushed the label until they conceded.
“Wuthering Heights” had been scheduled for release in November 1977, but E.M.I. held the single back until January 1978 fearing it would be lost in the festive froth of Christmas records—Paul McCartney made the top of the hit parade that year with “Mull of Kintyre,” which went on to become the biggest selling UK single at that time. Fortunately, a few promo discs of the single fell into the hands of some radio DJs, who were mesmerized by the song and played it prior to its official January release. It caught the public’s attention and “Wuthering Heights” rapidly moved to the UK #1 on 5th March 1978, the first number #1 to be written by a woman.
And what about Bio who spotted this exquisite talent before anyone else? Well, he is Alfred Biolek an entertainer and TV producer, who had previously produced two special German-language editions of Monty Python for German TV—for which John Cleese, Eric Idle and co. had to learn German phonetically as none of the Pythons spoke the language fluently. Bio certainly had an uncanny knack for picking up on original talent before anyone else.
It’s Monkee member (yes, that sounds funny) Micky Dolenz’s birthday today so I have a good enough reason to bring back one of my favorite posts from the Dangerous Minds’ archives for your viewing and listening pleasure.
In this video, Micky Dolenz of The Monkees goes glam on The Greatest Golden Hits of The Monkees TV special from 1977.
I’m guessing this was intended as a joke. On the other hand, Dolenz directed the show and maybe just maybe this was his idea of a hip career move or he was tired of The Beatles comparisons and wanted to move on to other things.
