I really, really dig this one-piece anatomical swimsuit appropriately called “Dem Guts Swimsuit” by Australian-based Black Milk Clothing company. It’s pretty, right? The suit is retailing for $90.00 AUD (around $85.00 US) + shipping. It’s a limited edition and it already appears that a lot of the sizes have been nabbed. Grab it while you still can!
Via Everlasting Blort
I wish more of the discussion that takes place about Sonic Youth would bring that band’s collective sense of humor to bear. Yes, they are of course very very important, so talk of their innovative early days is all alternate tunings, noise, and no-wave nihilism. Their later days, it’s all blah blah blah elder statesmen of alternative rock—which, again, yeah, they absolutely were, but they’ve done some funny, funny shit that’s every bit as praiseworthy. Last fall, we showed you their preposterous video “Lou Believers,” but there’s much more to share, so let’s get on with it, shall we?
In 1986, Sonic Youth teamed up with Minutemen/fIREHOSE bass player Mike Watt for a Madonna covers 7”. Having temporarily re-dubbed the band “Ciccone Youth” in a nod to Madonna’s disused surname, they recorded ridiculous travesties of the pop icon’s hits “Burnin’ Up” and “Into The Groove” (renamed “Into the Groovy”), with the latter introduced by way of “Tuff Titty Rap,” which gave Thurston Moore a fine forum in which to be a complete fucking goofball for 40 seconds.
The band was giving vent to a bizarre Madonna obsession in other ways at the time—on their EVOL LP, released the same year, they listed the song “Expressway to Yr Skull” as “Madonna, Sean and Me” on the album cover, and as “The Crucifixion of Sean Penn” on the lyric sheet. Two years later, Ciccone Youth expanded the gag to a full album’s worth of, um, stuff. The Whitey Album included all three tracks from the single, plus a mix of the inane (“Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to NEU!,” “Silence,” both of which are exactly as stated by the titles), some material that recalled SY’s experimental early days before they fully embraced pop song structures, a bit of spoken word, and a version of “Addicted to Love” (about which, previously on DM, enjoy all the Robert Palmer white-knights in the comments). Check out Dave Markey’s video for the Whitey cut “Macbeth.”
The Whitey Album is singular in the Sonic Youth catalog—the only other SY release I can think of that approaches its pure diverse weirdness is the Master=Dik E.P., released six months earlier, the title track of which just happens to be laden with “Ciccone” references. Six months later and the goofing off would be over. In October of 1988, Sonic Youth would release their 2XLP masterwork Daydream Nation, which left zero room for doubt that the band belonged in the pantheon of art-rock’s greats. Enjoy a bonus video of that album’s “Silver Rocket,” from a STUNNING network TV performance on the far too short-lived Night Music.
Big hat tip to Rust Belt Hammer for inspiring this post.
If you can get around the fact that it’s an insidious racist pseudoscience, phrenology is actually kind of a hoot. These illustrations from the 1902 book Vaught’s Practical Character Reader assure you that you can ascertain a person’s character and temperament from the shape of their head and facial features. Since physiognomy certainly has ethnic tendencies, the danger there is pretty outright (see the money-grubbing man with the big nose above?), but it’s the head-shape thing that really kills me. You’re going to try and discern a personality from a lumpy skull? Really? Like doesn’t a flat head just mean that someone was left on their back a lot in the crib? What if someone got dropped or hit in the head with a golf ball?
Nevertheless, Vaught was confident in his work.
From the preface:
The purpose of this book is to acquaint all with the elements of human nature and enable them to read these elements in all men, women and children in all countries. At least fifty thousand careful examinations have been made to prove the truthfulness of the nature and location of these elements. More than a million observations have been made to confirm the examinations. Therefore, it is given the world to be depended upon. Taken in its entirety it is absolutely reliable. Its facts can be completely demonstrated by all who will take the unprejudiced pains to do so. It is ready for use. It is practical. Use it.
A million observations, you say? Mr. Vaught, I’m beginning to question the scientific validity of your methodology!
More after the jump…
I need more vintage science fiction weirdness in my life, don’t you? This is an early production from future Tron creator Steven Lisberger and was made through his Lisberger Studios, an animation business he opened while still an art student at Boston’s SMFA. “Cosmic Cartoon” saw Lisberger receive a Student Academy Award nomination in 1973, which ultimately led to Animalympics (featuring the voices of Billy Crystal, Gilda Radner and Harry Shearer) for NBC in 1980, and then to the creative development of Tron at Disney.
You can really see Lisberger finding his artistic voice here. You got your psychedelic choreography of the galaxy! You got your Utopian futurist landscapes! You got your naked dancing lady montages (possibly NSFW, cartoon pubes alert!). All of this 70s sci-fi goodness is set to an epic synthy score—it should be projected on a planetarium dome. This thing is so fluid and trippy and so damned cosmically prog-rock that I had to make sure I hadn’t accidentally taken the cat’s medication by mistake.
Via Network Awesome
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Watch ‘Moon Rock,’ a 1970 psychedelic sci-fi cartoon from ‘Yellow Submarine’ animator George Dunning
As a fan of the fabulously sinister reefer-smoking Austrian actor Peter Lorre, I was delighted to find this little clip of him singing. Peter Lorre singing? Although it seems almost unthinkable, in the 1920s the diminutive Lorre was a stage actor sometimes even appearing in musicals such as Happy End, the (flop) followup to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera.
After gaining a level of cinematic notoriety for playing the serial child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, Lorre was forever typecast as the creepy character, but here he gives this little ditty about the police a decidedly jolly air.
The singing kicks off about 40 seconds in.
Part psuedo-documentary about the Italian counterculture and drug scene (Dr. Humphry Osmond appears as himself) and part straight up LSD exploitation film, Acid Delirio Dei Sensi (“Acid, Delirium Of The Senses”) is an obscure Italian cult movie directed by Giuseppe Maria Scotese. The plot involves some free-livin’, free-lovin’ hippies who get mixed up with the Mafia.
Acid Delirio Dei Sensi is one of those films best known for its poster art—some examples here—which is highly collectible and molto expensive. The little-seen film itself, however is surprisingly decent.
If you click on subtitles, an English translation will appear. Buy Acid Delirio Dei Sensi on DVD at ModCinema.
Thank you, Daniel Gibson!
Fans mobbed singer Morrissey last night during his gig at the City National Civic, in San Jose. Morrissey was in the middle of his second encore singing “One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell,” which obviously proved to be too much for some fans who jumped onstage to give the singer a farewell hug.
Hugging may have been okay, but according to the OC Weekly, some fans “tackled” Morrissey and there were “a couple creepy attempts by fans to mount him like a steed”. Say what? Then things really got further out of hand as:
...someone broke through and took Moz to the ground, causing the band to stop playing as boos roared through the crowd. What a way to start the U.S. tour! Moz’ new album, World Peace is None of Your Business, is slated for release in July. Hopefully he’s okay, but as of now, there’s no official word on his physical condition.
Fans now wait to see if Morrissey will play his show tonight at The Observatory in Santa Ana, otherwise there will be a lot of people miserable now.
If you’re not able to see Morrissey on his current tour (details here), you may be interested to hear of plans to make a movie about Morrissey’s pre-Smiths days. Honlodge, a production company based in Manchester, England, are in development with a script written by director Mark Gill and William Thacker. The movie is currently under the working title “Steven Morrissey” and according to Gill:
“The film covers Morrissey’s life pre-Smiths and is more of a portrait than a conventional biopic.
“It’s as much a film for non-Morrissey fans as it is for die-hard devotees, but I can’t deny that this is a love letter to Steven Patrick Morrissey and the dark satanic mills of Manchester.”
Filming is scheduled to start at the end of this year. More details here.
Via OC Weekly
The Domino Sugar refinery, an iconic part of the East River view from Manhattan and closed since 2004, is undergoing slow demolition. It’s a contentious subject. The building was erected in 1882, and while not everyone wants to preserve it, many locals in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn have expressed anger and frustration at the plan to erect luxury apartments on the land, further gentrifying the area. It’s amidst this conflict artist Kara Walker‘s exhibit, “A Subtlety,” finds an appropriate home.
The show is billed as an “homage to the unpaid and overworked artisans who have refined our sweet tastes from the cane fields to the kitchens of the new world on the occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.” Walker’s monumental sphinx centerpiece is 75.5-feet long, 35.5 feet high, and 26 feet wide, with a “mammy” kerchief and caricaturized, animalistic stance. There are also amber-colored “Sugar Babies,” realistic, life-size children that drip and melt with a molasses-like substance. The work certainly feels like Walker, though the materials are unexpected, as she’s most well-known for her disturbingly beautiful silhouette depictions of the plantation South.
The slave labor used on sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Americas is the obvious reference, but it’s also worth noting that the purpose of a refinery is to remove the molasses from raw sugar, thereby turning brown sugar into a sparkling crystalline white. “A Subtlety,” which is free, will be open to the public Saturday, May 10th. It will be open Fridays 4 to 8 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 12 to 6 p.m. until its close on June 6.
During construction, before being coated in sugar
Via Gothamist
Made at a time when you saw breakdancers pulling windmills and body popping on their cardboard everywhere you turned in NYC, The Big Break Dance Contest is a wonderful time capsule of the early days of hip-hop. Produced locally by WABC, it’s literally a breakdance contest from 1983 with the top prizes being $2500, an appearance on New York Hot Tracks and a role in the movie Beat Street. Hosted by actress Leslie Uggams and the host of NYHT Carlos De Jesus, the B-Boy crews seen here include the Magnificent Force, Uptown Express, the Fantastic Duo, the Flash Dancers, Larry Watson and Jason Twigg, the Heartbreakers and the Dynamic Breakers.
After a short introductory documentary on early hip-hop culture with Afrika Bambaataa and other members of the Zulu Nation, the contest begins. There’s a even a goofy Burger King commercial with a hip-hop theme that was recorded during the airing that they purposefully left in.
If I was in charge of the world, Failure would have been HUGE. The Los Angeles band boasted an adventurous musical and sonic profile that few other bands that flirted with the mid-‘90s mainstream could match. Though they grew tremendously with every album they released, and seemed to be perpetually on big tours with Tool, Failure only ever managed one minor radio hit, and then they were done.
My first exposure to the band was when their debut 7” “Pro-Catastrophe” somehow made its way to the midwestern college radio station at which I did a show, and a friend and fellow DJ there began proselytizing the song. Soon after, in 1992, no less a label than Slash—onetime home of The Germs, X, and Violent Femmes—released Failure’s debut album Comfort. The album was a Steve Albini production, and his typical sonic fingerprints intrude WAY too deeply into the band’s sound, but it’s still a really good record. The band ably explores everything from shoegaze textures to thick, noisy riffs to huge, soaring choruses, and the album points clearly to the band’s future.
It was in that early era that Failure treated me to one of the weirdest concert experiences of my life. They were on their first tour, and whoever booked them in my town really munged things up. Though they had plenty of college radio support in the area, nobody knew they were coming. Rather than get them into one of the small venues where an audience for their kind of thing already existed, someone booked them into FAR too big a room for a nascent indie band, and nobody seemed to have bothered with any publicity. I only found out about the show because a tiny mention of it in the weekly entertainment fish-wrap happened to catch my eye. As it turned out, I was literally the only paid audience member. It gets betterworse. The venue had two theaters, and in the other theater on the same night was that dreadful Laurel Canyon country-rock band Poco. Failure’s opening band prompted noise complaints from that show’s attendees, so Failure weren’t permitted to play until Poco’s last encore was over. Failure ended up playing their first several songs to a variously baffled and scornful crowd of dreary old complacent hippies who were filing past the room on their way out. I have to give them a lot of credit; they played to those people (and me, and their openers) like they had a full house of rabid fans. I think that right there cemented me as a perma-fan every bit as much as the excellence of their subsequent records.
The disappointing inadequacy of their debut’s production prompted the band’s principals, singer/guitarist Ken Andrews and bassist Greg Edwards, to learn production on their own. The move paid off. Their second album, Magnified, was a major leap for the band, sonically. But the third, Fantastic Planet was a bigger leap still, both in sound and conceptual ambition, and it’s the album that inspired the cult following that only grew after the band’s demise. It’s full of bold experiments, great guitar ideas, and fine songs like “Daylight,” “Heliotropic,” “Solaris,” and the luminous single “Stuck on You,” which finally won the band a modest place on MTV and mainstream radio’s rotations.
Sadly, though, by the time Failure were poised to level up, the corporate music sector’s throw-money-at-everything-that-moves approach to “alternative” had petered out. It wasn’t enough to have a foundation of consistent growth and a modest hit. All of Failure’s eggs were in the basket of “Stuck on You,” and since it was merely a minor hit, that spelled the beginning of the end for the band. Greg Edwards graciously took some time to tell DM all about it in a recent phone conversation.
It was a weird time in the music business. “Stuck on You” as a single did moderately well, but we didn’t have a follow-up that fit the format that radio was looking for. Everybody in the business just loved the cookie-cutter thing, funnel it into radio, make a big splash, and have a video—that was sort of at the end of those days. But if you didn’t follow that path then oftentimes you just sort of faded away. Luckily that didn’t really matter to us because we’d made a record that had a lot of substance to it, but it was still difficult to take, the fact that the profile of our career at that point hinged entirely on whether this ONE SONG really hit on radio.
So label support was pulled from the album, and after recording a covers album with Paul D’Amour of Tool under the name “Replicants” and contributing a cover of “Enjoy the Silence” to a Depeche Mode tribute album, Failure were through. Andrews’ production work on Failure’s albums made him an in-demand producer. Edwards has since played in Lusk and Autolux (who are still active and are really, really awesome, not incidentally). Second guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen has played in Queens of the Stone Age and A Perfect Circle, and has even been honored with a signature model Fender Jazzmaster. But as Fantastic Planet’s reputation only grew over the years—and seriously, I’m sure plenty of us can name a lot of 1996 albums that sold way better but don’t hold up for shit—the reunion bug bit. Per Edwards:
Ken and I didn’t have contact for awhile, then we came back together as two fathers. We both had children right around the same age, so we started hanging out in that context, and it just naturally happened that we eventually found ourselves talking about making more music. The reality is, if we didn’t have this experience of writing and creating new stuff that we were pretty excited about, we wouldn’t be doing the reunion thing. We’re not doing it to do it for a second and then fade away, it’s part of a longer term plan. We’ve worked on some new material that we’re pretty excited about, which gave us the momentum to do this. The thought of doing a reunion with nothing new fueling it is kind of unappealing. I can’t say for sure that there will be a fourth album, but right now there are a handful of songs that definitely seem to sound like the foundation for a fourth Failure record.
It really got into full swing in 2013. At the end of 2012 we were working on stuff, then the idea of a live show came up very innocently. Ken and I were having lunch and it just came up that maybe it would be fun to play a small club or something, and maybe some people would come who would enjoy it. We had no idea that the first show at the El Rey, we had no idea that it would be such a success. We weren’t even thinking we could DO a venue like the El Rey, so it was really gratifying to have that experience. We were aware that there was an intense following that still listened to the records, and that there were some younger people who’d discovered it, but that kind of stuff you can analyze from social media doesn’t necessarily have a direct correlation to what happens when you play a show. So we didn’t have any confidence, then the EL Rey show sold out in five minutes. That really blew us away. After that it seemed like it was worth it to do a reunion headline tour. The feeling we got from the fans at the El Rey show made us fell like maybe we were obligated to play these songs for these people who never got to see them live. We’re more connected as a band when we’re onstage, and so far it’s been a very positive situation with a lot of momentum.
That reunion tour begins this weekend with two sold-out shows in Los Angeles, with Puscifer and A Perfect Circle (those two shows are the 50th birthday celebration for Maynard James Keenan). Here are the dates. Check with venues for ticket availability:
May 10 Los Angeles, CA The Greek Theatre
May 11 Los Angeles, CA The Greek Theatre
May 14 San Francisco, CA Great American Music Hall
May 15 San Francisco, CA Great American Music Hall
May 17 Vancouver, BC Rickshaw Theatre
May 18 Seattle, WA The Showbox
May 21 Minneapolis, MN The Varsity
May 22 Chicago, IL The Metro
May 24 Milwaukee, WI The Rave II
May 25 Detroit, MI St. Andrew’s Hall
May 26 Toronto, ON Mod Club
May 27 Toronto, ON Mod Club
May 29 New York, NY Irving Plaza
May 30 Philadelphia, PA Theatre of Living Arts
May 31 Asbury Park, NJ The Stone Pony
June 1 Boston, MA Paradise Rock Club
June 3 Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg
June 5 Silver Spring, MD The Fillmore
June 7 Atlanta, GA Masquerade
June 8 Nashville, TN Exit In
June 10 Dallas, TX House of Blues
June 11 Houston, TX House of Blues
June 13 Phoenix, AZ The Marquee Theatre
June 14 Pomona, CA The Glasshouse
June 15 San Diego, CA House of Blues
June 18 Los Angeles, CA The Mayan
June 19 Los Angeles, CA The Mayan
If you’re on the fence about going, checking out the El Rey show from February might help you decide. Here it is:
Bonus: here’s a terrific interview with both Edwards and Andrews from radio.com.
