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.

Below, the Decker “sizzle” reel:

 
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.

We are not born for you. . . .

 
Video after the jump…

 
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.

The performance, after the jump…

 
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.

Micky, Marc Bolan wants his pants back.
 

When I was a kid I was told that Ouija boards were portals to Hell. That used to really freak me out, until I realized that I don’t believe in Hell.

Now that I’m past all that superstitious mumbo-jumbo, I’m completely charmed by the jewelry of UK punk and Occult artist Bex Ling which features Ouija boards, crystal balls, seeing eyes, palmistry, and the hands of fortune tellers. Not one piece of it emits a whiff of bad juju to me.

Her jewelry, sold under her company Misfit Makes, is crafted out of the same material that Shrinky Dinks are made of, so I doubt that it’s opening any windows of evil.

I predict you’ll take a look at some of her pieces:

 
“Gypsy-inspired” fortune teller’s necklace

 
Ouija board necklace

 
Palmistry brooch

 
Pentagram earrings

 
If “Subtle” and/or “Danger” is your middle name, there’s a vehicle in South Los Angeles perfect for you. Described as an “awesome project that you can drive as you restore,” this 1969 Cadillac Fleetwood Series 75 limousine is priced to sell at $2999. 

Wait, did you see that custom paint job? Let’s stop to appreciate this badass Caddy. Not only is this limo’s tail fin spray-painted in red to read, “I’m gonna f*cking kill you” and the side, “Go to Hell,” its hood has been tastefully decorated with an (upside down) satanic pentagram. Additionally, its Craigslist ad explains that there is a working partition window which “makes drinking legal in the back.”

 
Want a really good story? Talk the owner down to $2666.

via Deke Dickerson

 
It’s dark, it’s smooth, it’s Metallica and Hall & Oates all in one.

This mashup of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Hall & Oates’ “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” is the handiwork of Neil Cicierga. He’s no stranger to mashups, In fact, he’s got an entire album of awesome mashups. It’s titled Mouth Sounds. 

Without further ado, take my hand, we’re off to Never Never land:

 
via Death and Taxes

With assholes like Rush Limbaugh, all you have to do is wait…

For days the rumor has circulated that WLS 890AM, the Chicago market Cumulus-owned talk radio station, is about to drop Rush Limbaugh from its 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday slot at the end of March, although the company has denied this.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility that this “leak” was a way to grind Limbaugh down in contract renegotiations, but then Limbaugh himself posted this curiously self-aware statement on his official Facebook page:
 

 
My oh my, that sounds to my ears like the “Mayor of Realsville” admitting defeat, don’t you think?

WHO is gonna miss Rush Limbaugh when he retires? The only person whose life would be changed for the worse is that of the woman who married this asshole. Now he’s got more time to spend with her…

Limbaugh has been with the Chicago station for 25 years, but recently his show has become, in the words of one WLS insider “impossible to sell.” Both TIME and The Wall Street Journal have cited Limbaugh’s “failure to generate ad revenue” and credit his fall principally on social media campaigns like StopRush, BoycottRush and FlushRush that put public pressure on his advertisers, shaming them on social media where any association with Limbaugh is obviously toxic. Another of Limbaugh’s corporate benefactors, IHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel) which carries The Rush Limbaugh Show on over 500 of their stations, reported a quarterly loss of $309 million and upwards of twenty billion dollars in debt. Rush needs to pick up the hint and get the hook before he burns their house down! (He’s allegedly got a $400 million contract with them. Regrets? They’ve had a few hundred million, I’d reckon…)

Who says that hate speech, racism, misogyny and homophobia aimed at an audience dying off faster and faster with each passing year doesn’t pay? Ask the fuckwits tanking their stock carrying Jabba the Rush’s relic of a radio program in 500 markets in 2015! (How incredibly innovative of you, IHeartMedia!)

It will be a good day for America when El Rushbo hangs up his headphones for good, but I for one wish him a long life. Not a happy life, mind you, but a damned long one. May his millions pay the finest physicians that money can buy to keep him alive forever, like the Face of Boe on Doctor Who, his big fat head preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, his mind driven to madness by the realization that his entire life’s work was, in the end, of little value to anyone and with the lasting resonance of a particularly sulphurous fart in the howling winds of history. May he live forever and a day.
 

 
Well shit, I don’t normally use emojis in my daily life, but I just might start because these fantastic Cindy Sherman-icons by New York-based artist Hyo Hong. “I found iconic connections between her self-portraits and emoticons in terms of various facial expressions from one face,” said Hong.

I have to agree, there’s a Cindy Sherman emoticon for every type of feels!

You can download the Cindy Sherman-icons for your phone on Hyo Hong’s Tumblr page.

 

 

 

 
via It’s That Nice