“Today, Father, it’s Father’s Day and we’re giving you… a tie.”—Groucho Marx

Is it just me, or does shopping for Father’s Day gifts get a little more difficult with each passing year? Ties? Tools? Antonio Banderas after shave? Does your dad even use any of it? POPmarket, the flash sale music site has put together a little gift guide of killer vinyl that would make any cool dad’s day more than another hammer would.

Give the turntable in the house some love by getting your father what he REALLY wants, box sets like The Clash’s Sound System collection, KISS’s Casablanca Singles on 7” vinyl, or the 5-CD Velvet Underground Peel Slowly & See collection.

As a little added bonus, POPmarket are giving away a copy of The Gonzo Tapes: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to one lucky Dangerous Minds reader.

Check out the curated POPmarket Gift Guide here.

Rock on.
 
This post was sponsored by POPmarket.
 

 
If you’ve ever wanted an interesting way to recycle all those empty beer cans left after a weekend party, then take a tip from retired bus driver Phil Muspratt, who has clad his house in Hartlepool, England with over 75,000 of them.

Muspratt started collecting beer cans and bottles in 2005, and soon began sticking the empties to the outside of his house. It’s been thirsty work, as for every eight cans there’s a drunken man, for every 150 there’s been a party. At roughly a dollar a can, you could say Mr. Muspratt has added considerable value to his home.

The house has become a tourist attraction, but there are plans to demolish it along with over 70 other houses in the area. A campaign has been started to save the Mr. Muspratt’s art house but going by the lack of activity on the the supporter’s Facebook page, it’s unclear whether “Can House” will survive.

In 2012, first time director Maxy Neil Bianco made a documentary about Phil Muspratt’s endeavors:

The Can House is a piece of contemporary folk art, made by Phil, a man on the margins of society, a man who’s life is in freefall. This is what you come up with when you run out of nothing- the Can House is an act of defiance, a two fingers up to the hand of fate, to a world slowly degenerating and disappearing. It is a memorial to alcoholism and to wasted lives, but it is also an act of creativity that gives Phil"s life a sense of meaning, that helps it make some kind of sense.

Hartlepool is known as the city that supposedly tried and hung a monkey as a spy during the Napoleonic wars in the 1800s (though it has also been suggested this was no ape but a “powder monkey,” the name given to young boys who served on ships of war). The legend of the hanged monkey is still associated with Hartlepool, but perhaps it’s time to move on and have the city associated with something equally bizarre, like Phil Muspratt’s “Can House”?
 

 

 

 

 
With thanks to Paul D. Brazill
 
More pictures of ‘Can House’ after the jump…
 

 
In the early ‘90s a small independent underground comic by Diane DiMassa featuring a rumpled, wild-eyed, overcaffeinated “homicidal lesbian terrorist” was frequently listed among Riot Grrrl and Queercore zines of the day. The main character, Hothead Paisan, spent a lot of time pissed off at the world, nursing crushes on Madonna and Joan Jett, or looking for love, once finding it in a shaggy-haired character named Daphne whose gender was never specified. The humor was dark and sometimes vicious, but there were also glimmers of a sweet vulnerability in the characters. Giant Ass Publishing’s Stacy Sheehan would send small gifts with the comic to young riot grrrls, including pins/badges and dog tags with messages like “Dyke Warrior” and “No Guilt.”

DiMassa developed the comic while journaling during her early days of sobriety and recovery. She also illustrated writer Kathy Acker’s chapbook Pussycat Fever. In some moments, Hothead Paisan was the kind of character you wanted to read when it felt like having to deal with one more stupid person would be enough to push you to consider vigilante behavior. At other times, when the injustice and prevailing unkindness of the world became overwhelming, Hothead’s depression won out and she would retreat into herself, emerging from the darkness only to interact with her Higher Power (which was a shadeless lamp she named Donna Summer) or her blind, sensible, serene, hippie friend Roz, who would offer her herbal tea and talk her down from the ledge. Then there was the hilarious afterthought known as the Menstruation Museum, complete with Big Ass Mattresses (do you put the emphasis on “big-ass” or “ass-mattress”?).
 

 
The comic was never going to fly under the political or sociological radar for long, even before people became twitchy over the use of the word “terrorist.” For one thing, her cat, Chicken, wore a fez, which was just one thing that pissed some people off. There was a backlash from the trans community because of DiMassa’s trans-critical opinions. Then there was all the hyperbolic anger toward men and “spritz-head” women and the violent, ax-wielding, gun-toting revenge Hothead fantasized about, the sort of thing anti-feminists suspect is a not-so-secret man-hating blueprint for daily action, not catharsis in the form of a fictional comic book character. Revenge fantasies in feminist work, going so far as armed revolution in the ‘60s and ‘70s, were nothing new. Would there have been more of an outcry against the anger and violence if the genders had been reversed? You bet.
 

 
Citing Hothead Paisan with Valerie Solanas’ S.C.U.M. Manifesto, the Radicalesbians’ “Woman-identified Woman,” and Monique Wittig’s novel Les Guérillères, Sara Warner, author of Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure, wrote:
 

These lesbian revenge fantasies are deadly serious satires featuring vigilante feminist heroines, graphic scenes of retaliation and retribution, cunning linguistic puns, and black humor. Lesbian comedies of terrors exploit for humorous effect the compulsory rites and rituals of heteronormativity. Their plots revolve around the frustrations and unrepressed rage of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. Episodic in nature, they depict highly theatrical spectacles, dark play, blood sports, and war games.

—snip—

Their humor stems from the protagonist’s skillful manipulation of ludicrous situations and her virtuosic display of anarchic wit.

 
There has been one performance of the musical adaptation of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, staged at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in 2004, with music and lyrics by Animal Prufrock of the punk band Bitch and Animal. Animal had discovered the comic in a bookstore while she was a frustrated theater student in Chicago. She told Sara Warner, “I SAW ME. I immediately said, ‘I’m gonna make a fucking musical out of this.’”

The cast featured cult singer-songwriter and Righteous Babe Records founder Ani DiFranco, wellness activist Susan “Stop the Insanity!” Powter, Toshi Reagon from Sweet Honey in the Rock and BIGLovely, and Alyson Palmer of BETTY RULES! and The L Word. To many attendees, who had been buying the comic by mail order or at the shrinking number of feminist bookstores in the country, the Hothead musical was the highlight of Michfest. Animal intended to take the musical all the way to New York but immediately encountered roadblocks. A project about a lesbian terrorist is not easy to fund, even if the country isn’t at war against terrorism. Rumors occasionally surface of a new production with the likes of Joan Jett involved (may I suggest Brody Dalle?), but they disappointingly remain rumors.

After over twenty years Hothead isn’t as well known as one would expect, still a fringe character, unlike the sexier Tank Girl, who at least got her own movie and decent soundtrack. DiMassa and Hothead were the subject of Heather Pearl’s independent film The Village Idiot, which included songs by L7 and Joan Jett, that was screened at the Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 1993. “Gayploitation” fimmaker Lola Rocknrolla is still looking for investors to fund her live-action Hothead film.
 
LGBT Authors Gather in Boston, 1993, with a brief chat with Diane DiMassa at 1:37:

 
These tasty pictures are by Tisha Cherry, who makes food art to “enhance the experience of eating and not just consume for sustenance.” Cherry uses whatever foodstuffs or utensils she has in her kitchen to create these masterpiece morsels—and if she makes a mistake? Well, she can eat it and begin again.

See more of Tisha Cherry’s work here.
 

 

 

 
H/T Neatorama
 
More of Tisha’s edible artworks after the jump…
 

 
Raven, Your Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness and her pal Tara are on a goth-lite freakout!
 
Meet the new store-bought modern angst. The truth found herein is something even Marilyn Manson probably couldn’t have predicted. Amazingly, these girls were lucky enough to find each other, their short-lived cohort Azer, and YouTube. And now we can look into their black fishbowl and see what goes on in the deepest recesses of the mall goth’s bedroom. Watching them strangle themselves, bitch each other out and desperately try to lip-sync while losing themselves, busting out with grunts & out of tune screaming is a revelation! Not from The Satanic Bible though, but more from a redecorated-in-black Barbie comic book. Having been in Danzig for a bunch of years, I had met tons of demented teens with good & bad ideas, but this is a whole new thing. I would put money on the fact that Raven, Your Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness and her pal Tara have never heard of The Church of Satan. Anton LaVey’s photo would surely bring a collective “ewwwwwww.” Their taste in music (and their terrible Harry Potter fan fiction) is appalling and their motivation is quite skewed (to me). It’s new! It’s now! It makes no sense! Gotta love it.
 
In this early video that they made with their friend Azer, Mime of Satan’s Bidding (whose father wouldn’t let him be on YouTube, but then didn’t care, so they posted it), we have a perfect introduction to our new “serious as death” friends:
 

 
If they weren’t so young & so real it could be a Saturday Night Live sketch, but as much as I don’t get their motivation, I love how happy and in-the-moment “the darkness” makes them. When they really let go and forget they’re lip-syncing and the grunts of joy burst forth it’s like a cute exorcism.
 

 
“We like” (together) “BEING GOTH! It’s not a hobby, it’s a lifestyle.” Their relatives think Hot Topic is a devil store. “AFI & My Chemical Romance saved my life!” they scream desperately.

Azer, Mime of Satan’s Bidding got caught going into the “prep mall” while they were being goth across the street at Hot Topic, causing his ousting, explained here:
 

 
Death to false goth! Easy come, easy go. See ya Azer, Mime of Satan’s Bidding! These girls are so insane & so funny I just hope that there’s a lot of them out there! Haha! Tara’s mom comes in at one point and tells them to be quiet just before they sing “Hate will kill us all!” Then Raven accuses Tara of stealing her moves. I could watch this all day. Oh, I have! This was all uploaded five, six years ago, so I wonder—what are these two doing now?
 

 
And finally this last message, probably the best video I’ve seen in years, the poignant “A Message To The Haters.”
 

 
Hail Satan.

 
I approached the news of Super Duper Alice Cooper with some trepidation. That story has been told to death, hasn’t it? I feel like I’ve seen a gazillion VH1 shows about the rise and fall of Vincent Furnier, misfit preacher’s son from Phoenix who became the most outrageous rock star of the era… or maybe it was just the same one over and over again?

The dramatic arc of fame and fortune followed by Cooper’s debilitating drinking problem and his subsequent comeback as the “godfather of heavy metal” oldies act and happy family man is one we’re all familiar with. Still, there is much to love about Super Duper Alice Cooper, which I enjoyed much more than I expected I would.

The filmmakers, Scott McFadyen and Sam Dunn, call their project a “doc opera” and it’s a nicely textured mosaic of archival footage, live performance, TV talk show appearances and the like. What we don’t see are any contemporary interviews with any out-of-shape old rockers—and that includes Alice Cooper himself, who is in great shape at 66—as is now the fad with music documentaries. The interviews are audio only and frankly, I prefer it when rock docs are made this way. You want to see rock stars in their prime, when they’re old it’s just an annoying reminder that you’re getting old too, I suppose, but it really does elevate productions like this to a higher level. There’s an (effective) framing device of the Dr. Jekyll vs. Mr. Hyde element to the singer’s personality that was clever, but not too clever. Overall I liked it quite a bit and give Super Duper Alice Cooper high marks.

I watched with my wife and there’s one part that shows the media of the time seeming kind of confused about what Alice Cooper stood for. She laughed about the notion of parents thinking this stuff was in any way dangerous and I was like, “Hey, wait a minute, they put out three albums’ worth of songs celebrating death and dead babies and all kinds of morbid things with a pretty straight face. Naturally it came off like some kind of freaky death cult to parents just a few short years after ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’!”

The biggest revelation in the film is that Alice Cooper had a major coke problem, a habit that he indulged in quite heavily in the early 1980s (long after he’d dried out from booze) hanging around with lyricist Bernie Taupin (who only agreed to be interviewed for the film on the condition that Alice’s coke problem be addressed). Everybody knows Alice Cooper was a drunk, but even when he was looking fucking insane (if not literally moments away from death) when Tom Snyder interviewed him, who ever heard of Alice Cooper freebasing cocaine? They kept the lid pretty tight on that, but it all comes out in Super Duper Alice Cooper.

WHEN is someone going to post the full “Levity Ball” clip on YouTube?
 

 
Usually, I’m pretty forgiving of social media gaucherie. I’m off Facebook, which certainly helps, but when it comes to Twitter or Instagram, I figure it’s your account, post whatever you want—no one’s forcing me to look at it. People take such personal offense to someone taking a million pictures of their cats/children/food/selves, but they’re going through their own lives—what right have we to demand entertainment or intellectual stimulation from them? We could so easily unfollow if we don’t like what they post.

But I have recently found my breaking point.

You may remember a post I wrote a little while ago on Kara Walker’s giant sculpture of a sugary sphinx. The piece is a gargantuan sphinx coated in sugar, invoking racist “Mammy” imagery of a black woman, and Walker (who yes, is black) is well-known for her use of uncomfortable racial and sexual iconography.

I get that we live in incredibly vulgar times, but Jesus Christ on a Goddamn Pony, you don’t have the presence of mind not to suck face in front of obviously slavery-themed art?

Their Instagram, called “kissmeeverywhere,” is nothing but 642 pictures of them kissing—a monument to performative affections. The description of their profile reads, “Why should we stop kissing? if it’s the best way to remember why we are together.” I’ll give them this, I think that’s probably an accurate statement, since both these people probably require constant reminding that other people exist, including their significant other.
 

 
So let’s get some Photoshops going! I picture the lamprey-lovebirds at the base of of the “The Sculpture of Love and Anguish.” Or maybe locking lips in front of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial? There’s a lovely arch along The Trail of Tears, and I hear there are some truly scenic ex-gulags in the former USSR. Let’s get creative!
 

 

 
Two of the greatest home-grown American inventions—indeed, grassroots institutions—are jazz and baseball. The consensus greatest practitioners of both pastimes—Louis Armstrong and Babe Ruth, respectively—were in their prime at the exact same time, the 1920s, and both men were raised in orphanages. Shit, it’s jazz and baseball, I’ve just accidentally named two Ken Burns PBS series, that’s how freaking iconic those two things are. You can tell the story of America through baseball, or through jazz. They’re both rich mines of meaning.

And if you have something that combines the two, well, that’s something I want to know about. Smithsonian Magazine recently came up with some truly remarkable footage, dating from around 1941, of the legendary jazz bandleader and composer Duke Ellington playing a little bit of baseball during an off moment with a few of his bandmates, namely cornetist Rex Stewart and valve trombonist Juan Tizol. For the record, that’s the Duke pitching and then swinging the bat from about 0:15 to 0:30. (That’s tenor sax man Ben Webster in the bathrobe at the end, clearly communicating something along the lines of “You guys can play out there if you want, I’m hung over and I’m staying right here.”)
 

 
This fantastic image actually has nothing to do with the footage. That picture was taken sometime in the mid-1950s—the massive slogan on the bus, “Mr. Hi-Fi of 1955,” in addition to being my own future nickname if I have anything to say about it, surely puts us pretty close to that year. The appearance of the neon word “Colored” at left certainly suggests that this little game of pickup ball took place somewhere in the South.
 

 
Dangerous Minds is proud to present the exclusive premiere of the new Sweet Apple video, “Let’s Take the Same Plane.”
 

 
Sweet Apple is the indie supergroup formed by J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr, Dave Sweetapple of Witch, and Tim Parnin and John Petkovic of Cobra Verde. Their current album, The Golden Age Of Glitter, is earning raves, and “Let’s Take the Same Plane” is the third of a planned six videos to complement it. (You can see the first two in this DM post from April.) This one stars Minutemen/Firehose bassist and stalwart rock lifer Mike Watt as a kayaker launching his boat and roaming out into the Pacific, shot on the same San Pedro beach where Watt took photos for his book On and Off Bass. And that’s pretty much it. That’s all it needs to be! It’s a disarmingly poignant video for the album’s most contemplative song, a lonely acoustic number with gorgeous backup vocals from the Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan and Rachel Haden of the Rentals and That Dog.

Here’s the video. Enjoy.
 

 
Mike Watt is currently a member of il sogno del marinaio, who will be touring this fall. Dates are listed at his web page.

 
In recent weeks, when former child star Macaulay Culkin’s headache-inducingly stupid vanity band—the now infamous pizza-themed Velvet Underground “tribute” called The Pizza Underground—was booed and bottled off of a UK festival stage and subsequently canceled its tour, most sane observers were heard to say (in my imagination, anyway) “WHEW! Guess that’s the last we’ll hear of high concept, non-sequitur Lou Reed related cover bands.” But such declamations would have been premature—for on the horizon, a challenger appears, and it’s a credible challenger.
 

 
All I have to share with you is this: a flier exists advertising an appearance by Lou Man Group (there’s no way this joke needs explaining, right, we all know about Blue Man Group?) this past Saturday at L.A.’s Cowboy Gallery, whose FB page says exactly squat about such an event. The “band” has a web site with a video and a few photos, which directs the reader to an equally sparse Facebook page, just established in March. About all that can be said for sure is that this Lou Man Group probably has nothing to do with Lou Piniella’s. Their YouTube channel so far boasts all of two videos, the weird and insidery “The Manager,” and a lengthier advertisement for the group that features actually really cool and worthy versions of “Vicious,” “Foggy Notion” and, unsurprisingly, “Walk On The Wild Side”.
 

 

 
So did any DM readers attend this show? Is this a real band, and not just a clever tease? I’m really keen to know what’s up, because I LOVE THIS.