These fascinating energetic photographs of crashing porcelain figurines are by German photographer Martin Klimas. What I love about these is Klimas is able to capture the exact moment when something that was once inanimate is given life, action and violence. You can actually “see” the force and impact of the kick or the punch. Very clever.

From a height of three meters, porcelain figurines are dropped on the ground, and the sound they make when they hit trips the shutter release. The result: razor-sharp images of disturbing beauty—temporary sculptures made visible to the human eye by high-speed photography technology.

You can view more of Klimas’ work at his website. 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
One of the most notorious, brilliant, and amusing copyright news stories surrounds Negativland’s appropriation of Casey Kasem and U2, when they provocatively released a single with “U2” emblazoned in huge letters on the cover with the silhouette of a Lockheed U-2 spy plane (cover image is below). The song featured a hilarious recording of Casey Kasem getting frustrated over the pointlessness of enthusiastically introducing U2 to an American audience, eventually to a tinny backbeat of U2’s 1987 track “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”—indeed, the track is listed simply as a cover of that song.

Island Records didn’t find the jape very funny. With Achtung Baby due to hit stores—readers will find this hard to remember, but U2’s status as a worldwide force was far more questionable before that album came out—Island sued Negativland with great alacrity and proved remarkably effective at gathering up as many of the extant copies as it could. Negativland soon countered with a book, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2, that included a CD as well as documentation from all the legal wrangling. The whole thing was a masterful bit of culture-jamming, and for fans of out-there assholery before the widespread existence of the Internet, Negativland’s “U2” became a much-sought-after cultural artifact that proved devilishly difficult to find.
 

 
Now, with the Internet and everything, it’s not hard to find at all, and since nether Island Records nor U2 probably cares much whether iTunes sales of Achtung Baby are affected anymore, Negativland has chosen this, the week of Casey Kasem’s death, to release the masters for today’s generation of culture jammers to fuck with. On Negativland’s website, “Hal Stakke, legal counsel of Seeland Records” has issued a press release after the demise of Kasem under the following title: “In Memoriam, Kemal Amin “Casey” Kasem (27 April 1932 – 15 June 2014): Negativland releases ‘U2’ tracks for remixing and reuse.” Here’s the content of the release:
 

One of the most beloved voices in music radio, Kemal Amin “Casey” Kasem, died on Father’s Day 2014 after a long illness, and also a very public family squabble over his continuing care. Negativland pays tribute to this broadcasting legend by reaching into its vaults and presenting what is perhaps Kasem’s best-known work, on Negativland’s long-unavailable U2 maxi- single, offering up for public consumption (and now, for creative reuse) what has been hidden from view for 23 years.

In 1991, Negativland’s “U2” single had one of the shortest releases in music history, squashed like a bug after less than ten days on store shelves, under legal fire from the Irish rock band U2′s music publisher (Warner/Chappell) and then-record label (Island). The history of this fracas was detailed in their 1995 book and CD release, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (Seeland 013).

Now, instead of merely reissuing the U2 record itself, Negativland presents, for free digital download, the original un-mixed studio multi-track tape for re-mixing, re-purposing and re-inventing in whichever way the listener may choose. Negativland encourages the re-contextualization of this seminal work for whatever reason, whatsoever. In keeping with the working methods and philosophy of Negativland, and the Fair Use provision in U.S. Copyright Law (Section 107, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html), the group offers up this raw material in the hopes that entirely new versions of the work are created and disseminated. Listeners/remixers are encouraged to post their creations in these locations: www.negativland.com and https://www.facebook.com/pages/Negativland/131759750185111.

 
If you want the masters, all you have to do is download them here. It’s all pretty exciting, although of course, it’s always possible that, to paraphrase Kasem himself, “Nobody gives a shit.”
 

 
via Slicing Up Eyeballs

 
Antonio Rodrigues Mororó, 50, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was left with over 400 quills in his hand after trying to slap what he thought was an opossum which turned out to be porcupine.

Mororó was having a party at his house and a female guest said she was too afraid to enter his home because the animal was sitting near the stairs.

So, in a bid to remove it, Mr Mororó slapped the animal, resulting in him receiving a handful of quills. He was taken to the Emergency Unit of the local hospital and despite three shots of anaesthetic, the pain continued.

According to neighbors, “the porcupine is still living in the neighbourhood.”

You sir, that’s what you get for going around and slapping animals. I’m sure a loud clap or startling noise would have scared the wee spiky creature off just fine. The Internets shall forever remember you as “The Porcupine Slapper”!

 

 
Via Arbroath

 
Last December the choreographer and dancer Raja Feather Kelly premiered an audacious and touching new “vogue-ballet” that honored two artists important to his work: pop artist Andy Warhol and choreographer Faye Driscoll. The title incorporated both of them; it was called “Andy Warhol’s DRELLA (I Love You Faye Driscoll).” Here is the tongue-in-cheek description of the show, somewhat in the manner of one of those interminable titles (including liberal capitalization) of a ... seventeenth-century scientific tract:
 

Andy Warhol’s DRELLA (I Love You Faye Driscoll) Is A Movement-Based Drag Performance Essay Inspired By Andy Warhol’s Alter Ego “Drella”—A Contraction Of Dracula And Cinderella, Envisioned By Warhol Superstar Ondine. Beyond The Focus On Warhol’s Legacy, Raja Feather Kelly’s Interest Is In Addressing His Concerns With Identity, Sexuality And Self-Worth. In His Vogue-Ballet, Kelly Creates A Surreal World; A Gender-Bending, Race-Shifting, Multi-Medium “Artsploitation” In Response To Today’s Consumer Culture, And Celebrity Worship. It Is The Latest In The Choreographer’s Warhol-Driven Series Leading To A Final Staging Of The Feath3r Theory Presents: ‘WHO’S AFRAID OF ANDY WARHOL?’

 
Raja Feather Kelly’s dance troupe is called feath3r theory, after a novel he wrote in 2008 while in Sydney, Australia.
 

 
In the early 1980s, Warhol famously took up the Polaroid camera as his medium of choice, producing memorable images of Debbie Harry, Dennis Hopper, Mick Jagger, Muhammad Ali, Sylvester Stallone, etc. He also turned the Polaroid on himself—but with a difference. Many of Warhol’s Polaroid self-portraits presented himself in drag, as a character named “Drella”—the name is a portmanteau of “Dracula” and “Cinderella,” made most famous by Lou Reed and John Cale in their Songs for Drella.

Among the most obvious descriptors for “Drella” would be “pale”—given the white shirt, white makeup, and platinum blond wig, it was only the bright red lipstick and tartan necktie that saved Warhol/Drella from blending into the white background altogether. So in a brazen move of identification, the African-American Kelly took up the semiotically charged method of blackface—well, “whiteface” in this case—possibly to alienate audiences mildly but, far more important, to forge a deeper connection with the nakedly performative essence of Drella.
 

“Self-Portrait in Drag” (1981)
 

“Self-Portrait in Drag” (1981)
 
Raja Feather Kelly as Drella
 
The word “vogue” is the giveaway here. Kelly’s intentions are so obviously benign, and the outcome so joyous, that nobody could object to it. Kelly’s term for it is “artsploitation.” As he says, “I don’t know art without Andy Warhol. ... I was born into the challenge of Andy Warhol.” If you think there might be a dodge going on here in the use of racially coded/offensive blackface, note that the slogan for the recent performances (June 5/6) at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn was “Black by Popular Demand.”

If you’re in New York, keep an eye out for future performances of this exultant and challenging work; Kelly’s already brought it back once, he may do so again.
 

 
Here’s a teaser for the performances at the Invisible Dog on June 5 and 6:

 
Here’s Raja Feather Kelly discussing the importance of Warhol on his artistic development:
 

 
via Hyperallergic

Just A Boy’s Game

Though there is a mass availability of choice most of today’s television dramas are cut to the same unimaginative pattern. Indeed, there are computer programs to help writers “craft” their material to fit a dramatic template. These writers are helped by script editors trained to implement politically motivated agendas and then focus group administrators who screen the “finished” dramas to selected audiences to gauge their responses, influencing the creators to make changes accordingly. The producers are usually more concerned with maintaining this farce rather than allowing originality and talent to flourish. In other words, the writer is secondary, or is part of a team of “professionals,” performing dogs who bark for the needs of their employers. In a world of off-the-peg TV drama, truly original writing is a rare thing. 

Once, writing and writers were respected and allowed the freedom to create, to imagine, to write. One series, which allowed such freedom was the BBC’s Play for Today (perviously known as The Wednesday Play), which produced work by the likes of Dennis Potter, David Mercer, Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, Barrie Keefe, and Stephen Poliakoff. Play for Today offered imaginative, issue-based, social drama. One of the single most important writers to come out of this strand was Peter McDougall, whose plays put real working class experience on television for the first time—unfiltered from middle class agendas.
 

Peter McDougall at his home in Glasgow.
 
McDougall once gave me the simple advice that every writer should heed:

“Write about what you know.”

That’s what McDougall did—he wrote from his own experiences, writing down on wee bits of paper stories, dialogue, he was at first ashamed to show anyone until one day when he was working as a painter and decorator in London, the actor and writer Colin Welland told him to write about his life. This Peter did: starting with his adventures as an apprentice boy twirling the baton on Orange walks, those sectarian parades where Protestants in Scotland and Northern Ireland celebrate Prince William of Orange’s victory over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. This he turned into the Prix Italia winning drama Just A Boy’s Game (1975), one of the most controversial plays ever screened on British television, as it questioned the brutality of sectarian violence then as now endemic in Scottish society. It was so controversial that the Glasgow police banned the filming of the drama;s central Orange walk from the from city in fear of “bloodshed on the streets.” The production was forced to relocate to more genteel Edinburgh to film.

Born in Greenock in 1947, McDougall left school at fourteen and started his working life in Glasgow’s shipyards, where he first met and worked alongside Billy Connolly. As McDougall has recounted, working in the shipyards was brutal, the conditions so cold in winter that skin stuck to the iron rungs on ladders. His experience in the shipyards and his knowledge of the people he worked alongside were incorporated into his most notorious drama Just A Boy’s Game (1979).

Just A Boy’s Game was a morally complex drama that starred singer Frankie Miller as the grandson of a local hardman, who wants to win his respect. The film was described by Martin Scorsese as Scotland’s Mean Streets, while playwright Tom Stoppard thought the script contained some of the best dialogue ever written. The play opens with a bloody razor gang attack in a small night club and ends with a brutal fight between Miller’s gang and an up-coming younger generation of thugs, before a powerful final scene between Miller’s character and his grandfather.

Not all of McDougall’s work is about violence—he wrote a beautiful, moving and funny drama The Elephant’s Graveyard (1976), a kind of modern-day ghost story, which starred Jon Morrison and Billy Connolly as two men running away from the own separate problems. He also wrote the powerful and harrowing drama on Edinburgh drug dealers and heroin addiction, long before Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, called Shoot for the Sun (1986), which starred Brian Cox and Jimmy Nail, and then a drama about the life of a US Navy shore patrol officer based in Greenock, Down Where the Buffalo Go (1988), which starred Harvey Keitel.

His last major drama, Down Among the Big Boys (1993), was originally intended as a three-part series focussing on different characters form the same story—a bank heist—which was eventually cut down to a single drama starring Billy Connolly and singer Maggie Bell.

McDougall still writes, though these days mainly plays for the stage, as TV wants dramas that will satisfy focus groups, advertisers and fit the constricting formatted structure of today’s programmes. Intelligence isn’t required, good writing isn’t required, and experience certainly isn’t necessary for today’s television dramas.

However, for those who are serious about writing, and serious about learning how to write, then this documentary on Peter McDougall will help supply the information and inspiration on how best to write.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Peter McDougall’s classic gangland film ‘Just A Boy’s Game’ starring singer Frankie Miller

 
This could be viewed as a ballcap-tip between African-American and Hispanic exponents of ‘80s SoCal gang culture. Or I could be viewed as a pasty Jewboy from the Ohio ‘burbs who should seriously just shut his matzah-hole about ‘80s SoCal gang culture. But whatever, this rules!

Ice-T’s notorious rap-rock crossover band (be cool, just because the genre they spawned sucked balls doesn’t mean they did, but if that’s how you wanna play, go ahead and blame Eno for new age) Body Count released their new album Manslaughter last week, and it features a cover/update of “Institutionalized,” the classic and definitive 1983 Suicidal Tendencies song that pushed hardcore perilously close to the American mainstream. But instead of ST singer Mike Muir’s litany of parents-don’t-understand grievances, Ice-T airs 21st Century complaints about Xbox, Oprah Winfrey, ISP customer service, nosy co-workers… it’s pretty nuts.
 

 
For comparison’s sake, here’s the original, from Suicidal Tendencies’ debut LP.
 

 
And because it almost feels obligatory, here’s Ice-T ranting about somewhat more serious matters on “Cop Killer,” the song that made Body Count so notorious to begin with.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Kiss My Baadasssss: Ice-T’s guide to Blaxploitation

 
The images below are from the Soviet anti-religious magazine, Bezbozhnik, which translates to “Atheist” or “The Godless.” It ran from 1922 to 1941, and its daily edition, “The Godless at the Workplace,” ran from 1923 to 1931. The scathing publication was founded by the League of Militant Atheists, an organization of the Soviet Communist Party members, members of its youth league, workers and veterans, so while it was in many ways a party project, it was not state-sponsored satire.

The Soviet Union adopted a formal position of state-atheism after the revolution but it wasn’t a clean break. The expropriation of church property and the murder or persecution of clergy was certainly the most obvious supplantation of power, but the USSR was a giant mass of land, most of it rural and much of it pious, so the cultural crusade against religion was an ongoing campaign for the hearts and minds of citizens who might resist a sudden massive secularization. The monstrous, violent art you see below depicted religion as the enemy of the worker and footman to capitalism. You’ll notice a wide array of religions depicted, as the USSR was very religiously diverse.
 

Depicting the Muhammad, the Christian god, and a Jewish Kabbalist. Despite the ethnic cartoons, the founder and majority of staff were Jewish.
 

Mocking the “piety” of racist America with the title, “God’s country”
 

The Pope, with Jesus and the Bible astride a cannon, aimed at the 35 million European unemployed
 

Jesus, dumped like so much industrial waste
 

Deities getting smooshed by a Five Year Plan
 

Even Buddha gets his share of hate
 

God is responsible for plagues
 

Luring the people to church with music
 

A soldier literally skewering god. The books under his arm read “Lenin” and “Technology.”
 
Via The Charnel-House

 
It kind of figures that Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin would be a fan of Marvel Comics’ The Fantastic Four, with its strong main characters, who may often bicker and argue with each other, but always unite to fight various dastardly enemies. The other Marvel characters—with a few exceptions (mainly team-ups like The Avengers, and Thor)—tend to be geeky loners, who have difficulties fitting into society. The Fantastic Four are their own little society, just like all those families in Martin’s Game of Thrones.

In 1961, a 12-year-old George wrote a gushing letter of praise to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for their #17 August issue of The Fantastic Four, which was published in the #20’s letter page:

Dear Stan and Jack,

F.F. #17 was greater than great. Even now I sit in awe of it, trying to do the impossible—that is, describe it. It was absolutely stupendous, the ultimate, utmost! I cannot fathom how you could fit so much action into so few pages. It will live forever as one of the greatest F.F. comics ever printed, ergo, as one of ALL comics. In what other comic mag could you see things like a hero falling down a manhole, a heroine mistaking a toy inventor for a criminal, and the President of the U.S.A. leaving a conference that may determine the fate of the world to put his daughter to bed. The epic story, spectacular and exciting as it is, is not all that made this mag so great. The letter column was top-notch, too. I nearly died when I saw Paul Gambaccini’s letter. You’ve really made him change his tune; that letter was a far cry from the one printed in F.F. #9. Then there’s your cover boast—THE WORLD’S GREATEST COMIC MAGAZINE! Brilliant! You were just about the World’s worst mag when you started, but you set yourself an ideal, and, by gumbo, you achieved it! More than achieved it, in fact—why, if you were only half as good as you are now, you’d still be the world’s best mag!!!

George R. Martin
35 East First st.
Batyonne, N.J.

The Bullpen replied:

We might as well quit while we’re ahead. Thanks for your kind words, George, and now—it’s time for our favorite department—where we talk to you straight from the shoulder———

I wonder if the Paul Gambaccini mentioned in George’s letter is the BBC radio presenter?
 

 
Via Neatorama

 
This is an update of something that I posted here two weeks ago, so if it looks familiar, there’s a good reason for that.

I’m reposting it because the event that I was/am describing below—the presumed lost video footage, I mean—has been located. When Cinefamily in Los Angeles recently hosted Jodi Wille’s mega-amazing weekend-long celebration of the Unarius Academy of Science’s er… visionary cable access programs, Jello Biafra made it down from San Francisco and he brought with him DVDs containing over two hours of footage sourced from VHS copies made of just the interview segments of a video shoot that we had done at the Unarian Brotherhood center in 1992 for a Showtime pilot. (There was plenty of B-roll footage of a sparsely attended parking lot ceremony, shots around the center and an amusing moment where Biafra raided the costume room and got each of the Unarians to put on their outlandish intergalactic clobber. This is still lost. All of the camera originals and several dozen tapes of the Unarius cable access program were stolen. The only copies of anything were the tapes Biafra had.)

The footage, dubs of the camera originals, basically, were lightly edited by Biafra’s friend Erleen Nada, a graphic designer and musician who lives in Los Angeles who also happens to be a big Unarius buff herself. She also digitally blew the picture up to hide the timecode. Although it’s two hours long, it is, for the most part, highly entertaining. It’s not a documentary per se, but as a document of the several hours that an extremely quick-witted punk rock legend spent in the company of a goofy SoCal UFO cult over twenty years ago, you can’t really beat it.

Here’s what Erleen sent me in an email today:

My favorite part of this whole thing is watching him trying to hold back the laughter after every question, and his slight glances at the camera as if to say “Did you get a load of that question I just asked?”  Haha. 

I’ve probably watched the video about 50 times now, and his expressions still make me laugh every time. 

He has such a great way of asking potentially offensive questions, in a non-offensive way, and it’s complemented by the Unarians easygoing attitude about the whole thing. They were really good sports, laughing along with everything that Jello asked, they had a beautiful sense of humility about the whole thing that makes them seem that much more awesome.

I had gotten about as far as making a snarky twenty minute rough cut that incorporated a lot of footage from the Unarius TV shows, soundtrack music from Kramer’s three album set The Guilt Trip, and a voice-over narration that Biafra recorded about six weeks after we shot this in El Cajon. That’s lost and will never be found—all the tapes were stolen from the trunk of a car parked in the Playboy building in Beverly Hills. I’m sure that guy was disappointed!—but it might be that this is an even better way to watch this material. Seeing this for the first time in 22 years there were chunks of it that I could still recall from memory having edited the rough cut myself and hearing it so many times.
 

 
The original article, slightly edited for clarity:

At some point in the fall of 1992 Jello Biafra and I travelled to El Cajon, California with a small camera crew to shoot a short documentary about the Unarius Academy of Science for a Showtime pilot I was directing. The Unarius Academy of Science is a colorful (and quite harmless, no hint of a Heaven’s Gate vibe) UFO cult with their own cable access show, and was at that time housed across the street from both a center for recovering drug addicts/methadone clinic and a sleazy plasma center where you could sell your blood for cash. A Foster’s Freeze was a block or two away. There wasn’t much of anything else going on there. Just a bunch of empty parking lots and an occasional unoccupied building, some threadbare thrift stores and a funeral home. Not to say it was a ghost town, but minus the Unarians, and the junkies, in this part of town, there seemed to be almost no one else around.

To a certain extent, that might be the reason that people joined the cult in the first place: because there is next to nothing to do in El Cajon which isn’t related to gang activities, drug dealing, burglaries, car theft and crime in general. El Cajon’s crime rate is three times the national average. There are very few legitimate jobs for the people who live there, even at the best of times. Maybe some of the town’s residents looking for a little solace from a cruel universe that dealt them the shitty hand of ending up in El Cajon, might be an explanation for the goofy cult’s local appeal.

But then again, maybe nothing can adequately explain it. If you think of the Unarians as characters straight out of a Daniel Clowes comic, it might make a little more sense?
 

 
The Unarius Academy of Science was formed by Ernest and Ruth Norman, a couple of dotty New Agers, in the mid-1950s. Unarius is an acronym which stands for UNiversal ARticulate Interdimensional Understanding of Science. The story I heard was that Norman was a traveling psychic medium who put grieving WWII widows in touch with their dead husbands and Ruth was one of his clients. One of his wealthier clients, whose dead husband had left her a restaurant chain or so the story went…

The two met and were married within weeks. Soon Ernest would start self-publishing channeled books and they began having public meetings in Glendale, CA, ultimately publishing over 100 books and garnering several hundred followers. After Ernest’s death in 1971, Ruth Norman moved Unarius to the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, where she also bought up several parcels of now valuable real estate so that a landing strip could be built for the “Space Brothers” of whom Archangel Uriel (as Ruth Norman now called herself) was their emissary on Earth.

The Unarian cosmology predicted that 33 planets would simultaneously send ambassadors in spacecraft that would lock together and form a futuristic city. Uriel taught that beings outside of our direct experience and comprehension exist—she was one of them!—and that one day the Space Brothers will help us silly humans evolve, turn deserts into vegetable fields, stop wars and improve our architecture. 
 

 
In the late 1970s, “The Arrival,” an elaborate, seemingly high budget film about the Space Brothers showing up in the year 2001 was produced by the group, allegedly with the help of someone who worked for George Lucas doing special effects on the Star Wars films. Creatively fulfilled by this experience, by the early 80s, certain members of the cult began to take an interest in making a cable access television program promoting the group’s beliefs: “Everything is energy.” “You, as a form of indestructible energy, possess a soul that has recorded data from past lives.” “All happenings to you currently have their origins in past lives and past actions.” “Negative acts must be compensated for by positive acts.” And best of all, Asians are Martians and vice versa (Unarians are not racists, this is seen as a good thing, i.e. proof that the aliens have been here for millennia!). The “star” of these programs, naturally was Uriel/Ruth Norman, who took to wearing clothing that would make Liberace blush, often made with Christmas tree lights that needed to be plugged in, thereby awkwardly limiting her mobility!

Some of the shows would just be Uriel talking to her followers and others would be like super low budget “psychodramas”—think Kuchar Brothers, early John Waters, Andy Milligan, etc.
 

 
These “psychodramas” were unfuckingbelievable, featuring full outer space costumes, zany make-up and and batshit crazy scenarios. For instance, Uriel might decide that a certain Unarian had been a murderous space captain or an evil sea serpent in a past life. So the group would do these semi-improvised and somewhat elaborate plays, that were designed to “drastically relive” these past lives, so that the Unarian follower would be freed from their karma (more or less). In the one with the sea serpent, they literally videotaped it next to a swimming pool and several people got into a crappy aquatic dragon suit fashioned from floating pool furniture and inner tubes and swam around as the rest of them held a trial and passed judgement on the “creature.” A lot of their psychodramas had a “trial by jury” aspect to them. Holy shit were they tweaked. These programs made it as far as New York’s cable access weirdo home, Channel J.
 

 
The morning we got there and before Biafra arrived, we shot their Interplanetary Confederation Day, where far fewer than 33 Unarians marched around in a circle with far fewer than 33 banners representing the (hilariously named) 33 planets who were supposed to supply all 33,000 of the Space Brothers who would arrive here in 2001. A tin spaceship contained 33 doves who were supposed to spill out into the sky at the ceremony’s climax, but they didn’t figure on it being as hot as it was on the day and most of the birds could barely dribble out of the thing. Some probably fried inside as the fully-costumed Unarians marched around their parking lot to the amusement of the folks, like myself, who were there to gawk at them in amazement. Spectacular it wasn’t, but you had to admire their commitment in the face of mainly disinterest, secondarily people driving by and shouting insulting things at them the whole time and that it was boiling hot that day and they were all in their layered interplanetary garb.
 

The meaning of this painting gets explained in the video…
 
Biafra and I never did get to meet the then 93-year-old Ruth Norman herself, her health didn’t permit it, but he did speak to her on camera via a speakerphone as seen in the video. Frankly, I’m just amazed that twenty years after Ruth Norman’s death that the cult still exists. But they do. And even with their leader long gone, her prophecies that didn’t even remotely come close to passing and the sheer pointlessness of the whole thing, the Unarians persist, although the ones who we met 22 years ago are a bit longer in the tooth now (aren’t we all?) What’s weird is that they never grew out of their quirky belief systems even after the Space Brothers failed to arrive—the WHOLE THING that their belief system hinged on—in 2001. Like Jesus on Easter Sunday, Uriel herself was supposed to return then, too. She didn’t even send them a text!
 

 
Here’s the trailer for the recent Cinefamily event. If you aren’t familiar with Unarius, this is a good two minute crash course before you watch the Biafra footage…
 

 
After the jump, Erleen Nada’s Unarius-inspired “Psychedelic Spaceship” video

 
Born Isabelle Collin Dufresne on September 6th 1935, but later but rechristened by Andy Warhol, Ultra Violet passed away Saturday after a long battle with cancer. She was brought up in a strictly religious upper-middle-class family, but she rebelled at an early age, and was supposedly exorcised at the insistence of her parents. Isabelle studied art in France and then ran to New York to live with her older sister.

After meeting Salvador Dali in the early 1950s she became his assistant, pupil and muse. Ten years later Dali introduced Isabelle to Andy Warhol and things would never the same.
 

 
When she was asked once for a short autobiography, she wrote this:

1935 - I was born a mystical child.
1940 - I was raised in France at the Sacred Heart Catholic convent where I became rebellious.
1950 - I was exorcised at age 15.
1951 - I was sent to a correction home at the age of 16.
1968 - I burned my bra as a sign of rebellion.
1972 - I questioned the masculinity imbued in religion and scriptures.
1998 - I had absorbed and accepted the gender differences.
Present - I believe Jesus Christ to be the Messiah and the Savior of the world.

 

 
At Warhol’s suggestion she changed her name to Ultra Violet as her hair was violet colored much of the time. Ultra Violet was one of Andy’s early Superstars and appeared in several of his underground films including I, a Man, The Life of Juanita Castro and Fuck aka ****. She was also in quite a few really good, weird, but more “above ground” exploitation or B films including The Telephone Book, Midnight Cowboy, Simon, King of the Witches, The Phynx, Cleopatra, Savages and Curse of the Headless Horseman.
 

 
Amazingly, you can watch The Life of Juanita Castro in its entirety via YouTube:

 
Ultra Violet narrated a very controversial “lost” film called Hot Parts, a compilation of hardcore porn scenes from vintage smokers and loops dating as far back as the turn of the century. It even had a soundtrack album released available here. The film was allowed to play as the police rushed in and busted it at its initial showing at the First Annual New York Erotic Film Festival. Still being talked about three years after the incident, this is from an article in Man to Man magazine from 1974:
 

 

 

 
Not too long after this, Ultra Violet made an LP for Capital Records. It was not promoted and had little to no publicity. Every known copy has a cut out hole, meaning it went directly to sale record bins, and usually sold for 99 cents. Today it sells on eBay for up to $5,200! Some tracks are actually pretty good. Ultra Violet really sounds like her friend Yoko Ono on this track, “Cool Mac Daddy.” The entire album is available on iTunes.
 

 

 
In 1973, a near-death experience launched Ultra Violet on a spiritual quest, culminating in her baptism in 1981, bringing her full circle back to her upbringing. From 1981 until her death, she was a practicing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Oddly enough one year before this Ultra Violet did her own version of The Last Supper.

“The Last Supper,” a performance and film—a re-enactment of the Last Supper—was conceived for the Kitchen by Ultra Violet in 1972 and performed by New York-based female artists. Recently it was shown at a Miami Beach Cinematheque screening for Art Basel in 2007 and is included in the collection of Centre Pompidou, Paris.
 

 
Ultra Violet never showed her work until much later in life when she devoted herself to her art and mounted celebrated shows the world over. She was also the author of the books, Famous for 15 minutes, Ultra Violet: Andy Warhol, Superstar and Ultra Violet: L’Ultratique. Her first book, Famous for 15 Minutes was made into an opera called Famous! with music by David Conte and a libretto by John Stirling Walker. That is something I’d really like to see. There’s a website with some video here.
 

 
Here’s a pretty in depth interview with Ultra Violet: