Filmmaker and visual artist Nick Abrahams will be presenting “Lions and Tigers and Bears,” an exhibition of photographs, installations and artworks inspired by the lush magic of the British countryside. The show which opens at The Horse Hospital in London on Friday examines our changing relationship with nature by inviting the spectator “to use their own imagination to bear on sounds and images which are both extraordinary and overlooked.”
 

 
Last year Nick made “Ekki Mukk,” a short film collaboration with Sigur Rós that won the British Council Best UK short film award for 2013. That short (see below) forms part of the “Lions and Tigers and Bears” project and also inspired Abrahams’ 7-inch single of the same name:

The single and exhibition include 3 key audio recordings – that of a snail eating, a fox sleeping, and sounds recorded around a tree. The sounds evoke mysterious worlds – the tree is the Martyrs tree in Tolpuddle, under whose branches the first trade union in England met in 1834, to fight for better pay and working conditions… the snail is heard eating, amplified to a level which we can hear and sounding something like a chainsaw – what else would we hear if we could listen closely enough ? And a sleeping fox…. what does a fox dream about ?

A fourth recording features the voice of Shirley Collins, a living national treasure and seminal folk singer, who reads a prose poem by Nick Abrahams, leaving us in the world of fairytales.

A feature film of the “Lions and Tigers and Bears’ project is currently in development. Nick says there will be a live snail race at the opening (6pm to 9pm) and to “please come, bring friends (although not more snails, they can be rather ‘me me me’).”
 

 
The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD
 

 
Below, Abrahams’ stunning music video for “Ekki Mukk” by Sigur Rós:
 

 
For shits and giggles an American exchange student thought it would be hilarious to pose in a giant marble vulva at the University Institute of Microbiology in Germany and act like he was stuck. His friend gladly shot the photos. Problem was the young man actually did get stuck and had to be rescued by 22 firefighters.

The 13-year-old $173,000 statue, designed by Peruvian artist Fernando de la Jara, was said to be recovering well. The name, “Pi-Chacan,” means “making love” in a Peruvian Indian dialect.

According to reports from The Herald Sun, the vulva is doing just fine and there was no damage to it.

As a side note: I know many dudes who wouldn’t mind being stuck in a giant vulva. Stone or not.

 

 
via Herald Sun and h/t Jezebel

 
Red Emma’s mugshot

When state senator Wendy Davis held her 11-hour filibuster in Texas last year to block Senate Bill 5 and its restrictions on abortion, it was hard not to think how much better (and entertaining) anarchist firebrand “Red Emma” Goldman would have been if she’d have been the one speaking for so many hours. Davis incited a loud but well-behaved demonstration outside the capitol building in Austin. If Emma had been the orator, there would have been an actual riot. And fires.

Journalist Nelly Bly did a series of profiles of well-known anarchists for The New York World in 1893. She visited 25-year-old Emma in the notorious Tombs jail in New York City shortly after her arrest for inciting a riot at the Carpenters Hall in Philadelphia. Emma was demurely waiting for her friends to bail her out prior to the trial, where she was found guilty and sentenced to a year at Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary. After the obligatory description of Emma’s appearance and clothes (“a little bit of a girl” with “pretty and girlish” hair and dressed in “modest blue serge Eton suit, with a blue muslin shirtwaist and scarf” ), Bly elicited a prescient quote about, among other topics (like free love and marriage), capitalists:

Everything wrong, crime and sickness and all that, is the result of the system under which we live, she continued earnestly. ‘Were there no money, and as a result, no capitalists, people would not be over-worked, starved and ill-housed, all of which makes them old before their time, diseases them and makes them criminals. To save a dollar the capitalists build their railroads poorly, and along comes a train, and loads of people are killed. What are their lives to him if by their sacrifice he has saved money? But those deaths mean misery, want and crime in many, many families. According to Anarchistic principles, we build the best of railroads, so there shall be no accidents… Instead of running a few cars at a frightful speed, in order to save a larger expense, we should run many cars at slow speed, and so have no accidents.’

‘If you do away with money and employers, who will work upon your railroads?’ I asked.

‘Those that care for that kind of work. Then every one shall do that which he likes best, not merely a thing he is compelled to do to earn his daily bread.’

‘What will you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?’

‘No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and give up. Under our order of things, every man would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged.’

(I was going to include Emma’s famous blintz recipe, which she included in a letter to her long-time friend and lover Alexander Berkman, but to obtain a copy you have to donate $10 to the Emma Goldman Papers at the University of California at Berkeley. Other writings of hers can be found for free at the online Anarchist Library.)

Newsreel footage of Emma at a press conference upon her return to the U.S. in 1934:

Grayson Perry by Richard Kelly
 
“Art is colors and shapes and looking good, that’s what Art’s about,” says artist Grayson Perry in this interview with Laurie Taylor form the excellent Sky Arts series In Confidence.

Perry, who is best known for his beautifully crafted ceramics that are illustrated with images of “explicit scenes of sexual perversion—sadomasochism, bondage, transvestism” and his fabulous tapestries, goes on to explain how he thinks “Art kids itself it’s some dangerous teenager.”

Perry is certainly a true rebel, for rather than opting for the supposed controversies of conceptual art popularized during his years as a student, he chose pottery as his “prime medium” as he explained in the biography Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl:

I was attracted to pottery because it was naff; that was the subtext. I was aware of ceramics being the underdog and that was one of its saving graces. It’s very British; pottery will never become bad taste. It will always have that woody, nutty, wholesome, truth-to-material-ness around it. It was never going to be a flashy, gay, window-dressing art, it was always going to be humpy, heterosexual and earthy. However trite and dilettante the images I put on the clay, the material would bring it, literally, down to earth. One of the great things about ceramics is it is not shocking so I thought, ‘I can be as outrageous as I like here because the vice squad is never going to raid a pottery exhibition.’

 

 
Perhaps not, but Grayson often decorates his high quality pottery with imagery that is at odds with their attractive appearance. This technique was evident from his first work in 1983:

I had seen the ceramics at the V&A, returned to the evening classes and asked the teacher, ‘Have you got a plate mould? I’d like to make a plate.’ The very first one worked reasonably well—because I put a coin over Jesus’s cock it appeared as if he had had an enormous wet dream while being crucified. So I made my first ever plate, which was called, Kinky Sex.

 

 
Perry often includes autobiographical imagery on his ceramics, in particular the adventures of his transvestite alter ego “Claire.” Perry’s interest in dressing-up and fetishism started at the age of seven when he made a noose out of his pajamas, which he attached to the headboard in his bedroom and tied around his neck.

I don’t think I wanted to commit suicide—maybe I was suicidal—I don’t know. It was very dangerous. That was my first sexual experience.

The first fetish story I read was about a man who went, dressed as a woman, to visit a prostitute. The prostitute strapped him to a crucifix and he had a noose tied round his neck with a stool under his feet that he stepped on and off to be able to have the experience of hanging.

 

 
From fetish stories found in pornography left carelessly around his mother’s home,  Grayson moved onto his own “bondage games… set in a prisoner-of-war camp where [he] would be bound and humiliated by the prison guards.” Eventually, Grayson found an outlet for his feelings in transvestism, which he described in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl:

If the unconscious can’t get what it wants emotionally in a normal way, it will find an alternative pathway to get it. If you can’t express your feminine side as a man, something decides, ‘Well, you’d better dress as a woman.’ If you can’t get a hug from your dad, you wrap yourself up very tightly in the bedclothes instead, though you don’t equate the one with the other. It’s your subconscious’s cry. It’s a predisposition, sensitivity or an emotional vulnerability in a person and if that person is brought up in a harsh environment soon the fetish world comes along offering a solution. As a child, not for a moment did I think, ‘This is because of my parents.’ Until I was an adult it never occurred to me to equate my sex life with any lack in my childhood parental experiences. My body and mind only whispered, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, try that.’ It would be a turn-on and the reward was a bit of a stiffy and a bit of a feel.

Grayson Perry was a deserved winner of the Turner Prize in 2003, and like his art he is an immensely likable, delightfully subversive and highly intelligent man.  Somewhat improbably, Perry has been taken to the British bosom as a “national treasure” and as an English eccentric (think Boy George meets a naughtier Damien Hirst). The artist was selected to deliver the BBC’s ultra prestigious Reith lectures in 2013 and was given a CBE (while in drag) in January by a “giggling” Prince Charles. Even better, according to Perry, was a casual reference made to him on the long-running BBC soap opera, Coronation Street.
 

“Democracy Has Bad Taste,” the first of Perry’s Reith lectures
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
If you’re fond of Howard Finster, Jules Verne, Grandma Moses, or the improbable discovery of Vivian Maier’s photographs, the story of Charles A. A. Dellschau is a wildly improbable and intoxicating combination of those elements. How so? Born in 1830, Dellschau was a Prussian butcher who emigrated to the U.S. around 1849—upon his retirement a full fifty years later in 1899, he took up an intriguing hobby, to act as draftsman for the “Sonora Aero Club” of Houston, Texas, a club interested in kooky aeronautical crafts about which it is unclear whether it even existed. What is clear is that between the ages of 69 and his death in 1923 at the age of 92, Dellschau filled at least 13 notebooks with approximately 2,500 utterly awesome large-format drawings and collages around the theme of steampunk-ish dirigibles and other flying machines. Rebecca J. Rosen elaborates:
 

Dealers and historians eventually tracked down some additional Dellschau works, including a series of three journals called Recolections [sic], that also tell the story of the Sonora Aero Club and its inventions, with “ink drawings of fanciful airships that ... look for all the world as if they had flown off the pages of a Jules Verne novel,” as flight historian Tom D. Crouch describes them.

All together, the shoestring-bound books contain some 2,000 pages, each a double-sided collage replete with calligraphy (often in a code that is still today only partially deciphered), drawings, and newspaper clippings. (Dellschau referred to the clippings as “press blooms,” as though they were preserved flowers.) Each page—or “plate,” as Dellschau called them—is dated and numbered, though the counting starts at number 1601. The estimated 10 volumes with the first 1,600 drawings are presumed lost or destroyed.

 
According to Dellschau’s writings, the club was a secret group of flight enthusiasts who met at Sonora, California in the mid-19th century; one of the members had discovered the formula for an anti-gravity fuel he called “NB Gas.” Anti-gravity fuel! Even if that development never worked out, the vitality and energy of drawings Dellschau made in his 80s would humble most of the twentysomething art school students you would encounter today.

Curiously, there are traces of the Aero Club in lots of places in California—just not in Sonora. According to historian Tracy Baker-White:

“I haven’t found them in Sonora in the 1850s, but I’ve found them in Napa Valley in 1900, or in San Francisco in 1872, or in Stockton in 1872. There are possible links, but there’s nothing that is in Sonora.”

We often use the words “rare,” “unseen,” “unknown” to describe seldom-seen videos or paintings, and often it isn’t quite right, it’s just that very few people have seen them. In the case of Dellschau, however, it really seems to be true that between the years of 1923 and sometime in the 1960s, his work was actually, literally unknown. His works ended up in a landfill, and if not for the eagle eye of used furniture dealer Fred Washington, they’d remain unknown today. Since then, Dellschau’s spectacular works have received their due attention, including exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the Whitechapel Gallery in London. For an overview of Dellschau’s work, see Charles Dellschau by Thomas McEvilley et al.
 

 

 

 

 

 
More incredible pics of Dellschau’s work, plus a UFO expert tries to bring Dellschau into the fold—all after the jump…..

 
Everything the American Apparel clothing line advertises belies an odious fine print. For all the boasting of its success from founder and former CEO Dov Charney, the company always seems to teeter on bankruptcy. The promise of a perfectly comfy t-shirt come at hefty price-tag, and the quality and durability of the clothes frequently fall short. Claims of “sweatshop-free” and “made in the USA” are rendered moot by suspicious confidentiality agreements, union-busting and an absolute slew of sexual harassment lawsuits.

And now finally, finally, Charney has been dethroned as CEO by his own board, for rampant, and I mean rampant, business-related scumminess (allegedly!). It’s legitimately baffling that it took him this long to get fired. Then again, it appears that Charney has been getting away with being an asshole for a very, very long time.
 

 
Before he had more lawsuits than retail outlets, and yes, even before he went bankrupt the first time on his daddy’s start-up cash, Charney was quite the little hustler. Seen here at 12-years-old in the 1983 comedy documentary 20th-Century Chocolate Cake, little Dov bemoans the injustice of summer camp, where he doesn’t retain complete control of his finances. I’m not sure if this is the Israeli summer camp his father sent him to as a disciplinary measure, but if it was, it didn’t work—Charney senior said his son “kept escaping.” Morris Charney eventually ended up working from home to “keep an eye on” Dov, as he was “difficult to handle.” There are also rumors that the precocious little scamp was expelled from his posh Connecticut boarding school. Accounts vary, but they’re both pretty disgusting—think either ejaculate or feces.

Behold the sweet face of a future capitalist pig and absolute slimeball. He’s positively incensed that his summer camp won’t let him walk around with a wad of cash. He’s twelve. I tend to be fond of obnoxious children—everyone’s a beast at some point in childhood—but even I shuddered at the sound of this little black-market hustler when he spat with disgust:

“They just do it because they don’t want any poor kids to be jealous.”

Summer camp rules = Communism!
 

 
Marty Lott aka Jerry Lott aka “The Phantom” was born near Mobile, Alabama in 1938 and moved to Leakesville, Mississippi during infancy. He played country music on stage at school which progressed to playing country and western at Paynas Furniture Store in Lucedale, Mississippi. Jerry started entering and winning local performing contests which led him to start touring. It all changed in 1956 for Marty and so many others, when Elvis Presley came along, opened his eyes and charged his soul with rock and roll.

“Love Me” was written in ten minutes and recorded in Mobile at Gulf Coast Studio in the summer of 1958. It is one of those rare, lust-filled, psychotic explosions that, in one minute and twenty nine seconds, packs more punch than most punk records did and is considered by many to be the wildest rock and roll song ever recorded. It had to wait until the new decade to see a release.

Lott told Derek Glenister:

“I’d worked three months on the other side of the record. Somebody said, ‘what you gonna put on the flip-side’ I hadn’t even thought about it. Someone suggested I wrote something like Elvis ‘cause he was just a little on the wane and everybody was beginning to turn against rock ‘n’ roll. They said, ‘See if you spark rock ‘n’ roll a little bit’... so that’s when I put all the fire and fury I could utter into it. I was satisfied with the first take, but everybody said, ‘let’s try it one more time’. I didn’t yell on the first take, but I yelled on the second, and blew one of the controls off the wall.”

“I’m telling ya, “it was wild. The drummer lost one of his sticks, the piano player screamed and knocked his stool over, the guitar player’s glasses were hanging sideways over his eyes.

 

 
Lott, known at this time as The Gulf Coast Fireball left Mobile for Los Angeles to shop his master tape around. On a truly bizarre impulse he followed Pat Boone to church one Sunday morning and convinced him to give the tape a listen. It was Boone’s idea to rename Lott The Phantom, even agreeing to issue the record on his own Cooga Mooga label. Eventually Lott signed a contract with Boone’s management but the single of “Love Me” b/w “Whisper Your Love” was released on the label Boone recorded for—Dot Records in 1960, packaged in a nifty picture sleeve, normally reserved only for the really big stars here in the States.
 

“Aahh, uhh, let’s go! Uhh
Press your lips to mine
And whisper I love you
Gotta have chance that lasts
To do the things we wanna do
Don’t hesitate, I can’t wait,
Love me
You set my soul on fire
Every muscle in my body’s burning with desire
Baby kiss me do
Make me know you’re mine
Love me with desire
Oh honey, this is fine
Don’t hesitate, I can’t wait,
Love me
Aahh!
I want you to be my bride
My heart’s a runnin’ wild
Got to make you mine
If just for a little while
Don’t hesitate, I can’t wait,
Love me, love me, love me, love me…”

 

 
Sadly in 1965, Jerry’s wife took her own life, and shortly thereafter, in 1966, while still attempting to tour, The Phantom was involved in a near fatal auto accident in York, South Carolina. After his car tumbled 600 feet down a mountainside he was left paralyzed below the neck. Lott continued to write songs, but never recorded again. He passed away on September 4th,1983 at the age of 45.
 

 
Ever the rock ‘n’ roll purists The Cramps chose the song to be one of the first ones they learned, going so far as to make a flyer that they put up around New York City before they ever even played their first gig proclaiming “LOVE ME” featuring the baleful gaze of Cramps guitarist Bryan Gregory.
 

 

The Cramps play “Love Me” at the Napa State Mental Hospital in 1978

A new generation was introduced to the likes of The Phantom in the late 70’s/early 80’s through this and many European (i.e. bootleg) rockabilly compilation LPs. Fanzines like Kicks, which later morphed into Norton Records and Kicks Books were the first in America to dig deep and write about The Phantom.

As usual, rock ‘n’ roll in its purest form is always discovered 50 years too late by those who wish to use the music to sell stuff. I got an email requesting the cover of the “Love Me” single last week from a music supervisor working for an advertising agency. He couldn’t tell me who, but “Love Me” by The Phantom was going to be used in a huge ad campaign and they needed the artwork for the iTunes download that they will be making available in conjunction with the ad. It was just announced that the song would be used in the latest Southern Comfort campaign. More money will be earned, hopefully by a family member of Lott’s (though I highly doubt it), by the use of this song in this ad than Jerry Lott probably made in his entire music career. It just seems odd the way they used it, like I’m watching TV with the sound down and listening to a record.

I think I need a drink.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Who was that masked man? ORION: The Man Who Would Be King

 
For those of you who haven’t been keeping tabs on the massive, slow-moving trainwreck that is the Atlas Shrugged trilogy, the first movie cost $20 million and made $4,627,375 at the box office, while the second cost $10 million and made $3,336,053. The third had to be partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign that yielded a cool $446,907—we have to wait for the September release before formally declaring it a failure, but I think it’s safe to say we’re not looking at a blockbuster here. It gives one the warm fuzzies to realize that a movie based on Ayn Rand’s epic paean to capitalism is a failure by her own measure, since the free market has stubbornly refused to acknowledge the Atlas Shrugged cinematic “franchise.”

But wait—the final installment will be pulling out all the stops!

After toying with the idea that the third installment could be made into a musical (not kidding, look it up), the Randroids are bringing out the biggest guns: Ron Paul, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Grover Norquist. Hannity was apparently already in the second one, but conservative weirdos really work best in an ensemble, don’t you think? Apparently the pundit guest-stars weren’t even given scripts but were instructed instead to just “riff” off protagonist John Galt’s ten hour monologue. This should give you an idea of the professionalism of the movie.

They say politics is just show business for ugly people, but when show business gets political, some of that ugly is gonna get on the silver screen. For a preview, check out Ron Paul’s feverish endorsement of Ayn Rand below. Watch the crazy old man give his book report. Do it.
 

 
Via The Hollywood Reporter

 
Francis Ford Coppola was not the first choice to direct The Godfather, Paramount Studios wanted Sergio Leone, but he turned it down to concentrate on his own gangster movie Once Upon A Time in America. Next up was Peter Bogdanovich but he also knocked it back as he was working on What’s Up, Doc?. Coppola was eventually approached by producer Robert Evans, who wanted an Italian-American to direct the film.

As Coppola later recalled in an interview:

The Godfather was a very unappreciated movie when we were making it. They were very unhappy with it. They didn’t like the cast. They didn’t like the way I was shooting it. I was always on the verge of getting fired. So it was an extremely nightmarish experience. I had two little kids, and the third one was born during that. We lived in a little apartment, and I was basically frightened that they didn’t like it. They had as much as said that, so when it was all over I wasn’t at all confident that it was going to be successful, and that I’d ever get another job.

 

 
Coppola was considered a risk. He had made five movies, only one of which was a hit. He was also in debt to Warner Brothers from an overspend while producing THX 1138.

Paramount were still skeptical about Coppola’s ability and kept a standby director ready to replace him. The first argument between director and studio came over casting. Coppola had drawn up his own list of possible contenders, which the studio was also set against, in particular they did not like Coppola’s suggestion of Marlon Brando or Laurence Olivier for Vito Corleone.
 

 
Coppola wanted the world’s greatest actors for the main role, but the studio didn’t want Brando because he had a bad reputation for delaying film productions; while Olivier was supposedly too ill to film and turned the offer down.

Who the studio wanted was Ernest Borgnine, as he had the mix of rough-and-ready, and seemed like the kind of “family man” an audience would identify with.
 

 
For Michael Corleone, Coppola wanted (then mainly unknown) Al Pacino, but the studio wanted a name, a hit name like Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal.

Michael was a good, strong role, and it attracted Martin Sheen, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman and James Caan to audition for the role, but Coppola threatened to quit unless Pacino was given it. The studio eventually conceded on the agreement that James Caan was cast as Sonny Corleone.

Again the lure of box office names led to considering Paul Newman and Steve McQueen for the role of lawyer Tom Hagen, but that eventually went to Robert Duvall.
 

 
Other stars who went up for roles include Anthony Perkins who auditioned for Sonny, while Mia Farrow auditioned for Kay. Meanwhile, Robert De Niro tried out for Michael, Sonny, Carlo, and Paulie. He eventually played the young Vito in The Godfather Part II.

This is Coppola’s original cast list, which contains many of the names who eventually appeared in the film.
 

 
Via Retronaut, FuckyeahDonCorleone and Julia Segal

 
A stenciled Crass drumhead is going up for auction as part of Sotheby’s rock and roll memorabilia event. The estimate is that it’ll go for between $15,000 and $20,000. The “Presley to Punk” auction will occur on June 24. When I saw this, I have to admit, the collector in me swooned.

It’s a pity that this will probably just end up in some rich asshole’s house instead of in an anarchist museum or some place like that. At least I hope that it’s Penny Rimbaud himself who’ll be getting the money for this (it appears that he signed it recently). If anyone deserves to cash in on their past in this way—I really mean this—God bless them, it’s Crass. No one’s selling out here, they’re just clearing out the garage!

The auction also has some amazing signed items from The Beatles, one of Sly Stone’s vests, a jacket worn by Jimmy Page, several drawings and paintings by Joni Mitchell, as well as guitar straps worn by Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia. A naughty comic strip from a young Jim Morrison and a semi-pornograpic collage made by John and Yoko for Elton John’s birthday in 1975. Several gold records belonging to Mick Jagger, even the Grammy presented to Johnny Cash and June Carter for “Jackson.” There are 145 items in all being auctioned off.
 

Sly Stone’s beaded vest, as seen during his infamous stint as co-host of The Mike Douglas Show.
 

Crosby, Stills & Nash by Joni Mitchell
 

Gary Panter’s original rendition of The Screamers logo

Thank you Luhuna Carvalho!