When the movie Frances Ha came out, named for its choreographer protagonist, I had hoped for a renewed interest in modern dance—perhaps a small, young fandom would emerge over Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring, or maybe Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel, which has the added cool cred of a score by David Byrne. Tragically, most folks are still pretty put off by dance, and I can never find a date to anything at The Joyce. However, the perspicacious readers of Dangerous Minds are always willing to try new things, right, especially when they’re as bold as Der Untermensch (German for “under man”, “sub-man”, or “sub-human”), a short dance film from Quebecois dancer and choreographer Simon Vermeulen. The concept is as daring as they come:

Staged against minimalist backdrops and accompanied by a hypnotic original score, this highly cinematic contemporary dance film abstractly depicts the persecution of homosexuals at the hands of the Third Reich.

That’s right; not only is it modern dance, it’s gay, French-Canadian political modern dance. If you’re intimidated by the medium, allow me to give you my simple dance appreciation advice for the unsure: it’s art made with the body. You have a body, too. Don’t overthink it. There’s no “plot,” and the performance isn’t literal, so Der Untermensch is pretty accessible, and whether you’re a fan or not, the visceral performance and abstraction of theme is absolutely captivating.
 

 
On Wednesday, February 5, 1969, ABC debuted one of the most forward-looking and controversial comedy sketch shows of all time—although viewers in much of the country never got to see even a single episode aired to completion. The show was Turn-On, George Schlatter and Ed Friendly’s more conceptually rigorous follow-up to their smash hit Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Today it is regarded as one of television’s most cringeworthy failures—just check on Google Books if you don’t believe me—but it’s not at all clear that it deserves such derision. It may not have worked entirely—it’s difficult to tell, as episodes are awfully hard to come by—but it was probably the closest thing the United States had to Monty Python’s Flying Circus during that whole era. But, of course, that show didn’t even exist yet.

The premise of Turn-On was that the show had been generated by a computer, at that time a heady concept indeed, as few people had ever had any real-life contact with such an object. Replacing the colorful and groovy sets of Laugh-In was a blank, featureless landscape taking place inside a large white orb—I grope to imagine it, and all I can come up with is Woody Allen’s 1973 movie Sleeper. The ostensible “host” was a young Tim Conway, who apparently spent the entire episode seeking to kill himself. Much of the audio track of the show was not a laugh track but was instead supplied by a Moog synthesizer, which was also quite a new sensory experience for audiences to deal with. I’ll let Wikipedia finish this paragraph: “Several of the jokes were presented with the screen divided into four squares resembling comic strip panels. The production credits of the episode appeared after each commercial break, instead of conventionally at the beginning or end.” Bracing stuff, indeed.

The cancellation of Turn-On is the stuff of legend. Again, Wikipedia is the most efficient way to express this:
 

Conway has stated that Turn-On was canceled midway through its only episode, so that the party the cast and crew held for its premiere as the show aired across the United States also marked its cancellation. Cleveland, Ohio’s WEWS-TV did not return to the show after the first commercial break (after “11 minutes”, according to Conway). The station sent ABC network management an angry telegram: “If your naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don’t use our walls. Turn-On is turned off, as far as WEWS is concerned.” Denver, Colorado’s KBTV did not air the episode, stating that after previewing it “We have decided, without hesitation, that it would be offensive to a major segment of the audience”; Portland, Oregon’s KATU and Seattle, Washington’s KOMO-TV also decided to not show the episode. Viewers of Little Rock, Arkansas’s KATV, which disliked the show but decided to air it, “jam[med] the station’s switchboard” with complaints.

 
If you watched “The Monolith,” the most recent episode of Mad Men, you probably failed to catch an exquisitely opaque reference to Turn-On—thing is, if you blinked, you missed it. The episode focuses on the installation of a large computer in the offices of Sterling Cooper & Partners, with all the doomy implications that implies. (In my sincere opinion, this does not qualify as much of a spoiler.) The computer thematically dominates the proceedings; in one scene two characters even discuss the device’s “metaphorical” implications. At a certain point, Harry Crane is seen through a smoky windowpane bellowing to an unseen character about how (this is a total paraphrase) “The writers of that show had clearly never seen an X-2000 in person”—and you can barely make out the words “Tim Conway” as well. I reckon that “The Monolith” takes place around April 18, 1969.
 

 
It’s hard to judge without access to the episodes themselves, but Turn-On may have been the boldest expression of “sick” humor, à la Lenny Bruce, on American television up to that point. (Hell, it quoted the renegade LSD advocate Timothy Leary in its very title.) It reminds me of nothing so much as another colossal misjudgment of mass satire that dates from the same period—the Monkees’ movie Head, which by a neat coincidence premiered almost precisely three months earlier, on November 6, 1968.

Schlatter is something of a legend in certain nostalgic TV circles. In addition to Laugh-In, he spent the 1970s and 1980s producing a number of expensive, garish, and kind of awesome celebrity TV galas, all of which have titles like Goldie and Liza Together and some of which will surely pop up on DM at some point, probably in posts authored by me. He also produced NBC’s Real People in the early 1980s. He’s clearly a little bitter about the Turn-On experience, which if nothing else killed his buzz after riding so high after the success of Laugh-In.

In any case, Schlatter is still among us, and fairly recently, judging from the clip posted below, has been defending Turn-On as a brilliant piece of television and writing off its quick cancellation as the whim of a misguided exec in Cleveland (and not, conveniently, a massive misjudgment of the audience’s appetite for odd satire).

I’m quoting a couple of snippets from the Schlatter interview embedded below because it’s important to get some of Turn-On‘s content into the record.
 

The original commitment was for 13 shows, we sold it to Bristol Meyers, who were a very, very conservative sponsor. And when they saw the pilot, with Tim Conway … trying to commit suicide all through the show, they increased the purchase from 13 to 16. It went on the air, and there was a guy in Cleveland who wanted to keep Peyton Place on the air, he hated the idea of losing Peyton Place, so he got on the phone—he’d never seen the show—and called all of the affiliates, and said, “This is terrible, we have to get rid of it, it’s gonna ruin your station and my station” … so they kept cancelling the show before anyone had seen it because of this one wingnut in Cleveland. … He was very effective, though. … It was just this one wacko in Cleveland.

One girl had a vending machine, and she put a quarter in, and you panned down and it said, “The Pill.” And she went crazy—it wouldn’t come out of the vending machine, and she went nuts, screaming. They thought, “Well, this is a woman. This is … sexually aggressive women.” And I said, “Yeah. That happens, you know. Where do you think all these babies come from?” But they resented that there was a sexually aggressive woman going crazy when she couldn’t get a pill. And then we had the Pope there, and the Pope would say, “Peace, baby.”

Here’s a curious, minute-long excerpt from the show (actually an un-aired episode), complete with intrusive voiceover:
 

 
And this is a wildly entertaining clip of Schlatter discussing the show, lasting about 6 minutes. My new home town of Cleveland comes in for its share of abuse, but whatevs.
 

 
(Top image via Showbiz Imagery and Chicanery, which helpfully figured out the Mad Men connection so I didn’t have to.)

 
In an unexpected marriage of macabre and chic, designer Victoria Ledig has created a collection of leather goods from what’s normally considered unusable leftovers—faces, ears and tails. The pieces themselves strike me as cool and gruesome, especially in the shots with the inexplicable nudity—perhaps an intentional juxtaposition of “pretty” skin against “ugly” skin? I’d say there’s something hypocritical about being grossed out by a material I regularly use, but even Ledig herself validates the cognitive dissonance. 

Leather is dead animal skin. This is perhaps the raw reason behind the human fascination with it. It is beautiful, precious and grotesque at the same time. We sometimes forget that touching leather is to handle a former living being’s hide. Most leather is processed to the point of becoming unrecognizable as what it is and this contributes to a general attitude, which I chose to question in this project.

I took those body parts not normally used in leather goods, as the cow’s head, tail or lower leg and turned them into leather, highlighting their natural forms and textures. These parts would normally be discarded within the process or be processed further into an unrecognizable animal ingredient.

This is a statement about luxury—it’s a privilege to ignore “how the sausage is made,” so to speak. We’re as far removed from the labor of our leather as we are the labor of our food, and since both tannery and butchery are now mainly performed in far-off, industrial settings, we can conveniently forget about the animals involved. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to stop carrying and wearing leather—while I like my art to be gross and discomfiting, I also like my purses sans face.

“Precious Skin” can be seen at Self Unself at the Collective Design Fair in New York from May 8th to 11th.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Fast Company

 
You may not know the name Graham Stark, but you will certainly recognize this stony-faced comic actor from the dozens of British movies in which he appeared, such as the second Inspector Clouseau film A Shot in the Dark, Alfie, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, The Magic Christian, and Revenge of the Pink Panther. Stark also provided voices for The Goon Show, and regularly featured in TV comedies like The Benny Hill Show and Sykes. When he died last year, at the age of 91, Stark was described as an actor who was frequently cast in supporting roles, but never quite achieved stardom:

“Stark moved on the periphery, appearing in nearly 80 films, often as the fall-guy or put-upon sidekick.”

He was also described as “a close friend of Peter Sellers,” his confidante, who had been best man at all four of Sellers’ weddings.

Stark was regarded in the film world as Sellers’ sycophantic sidekick, who would do anything to brown nose his famous friend. The character actor John Le Mesurier once said of their relationship:

“Graham Stark is the only man in London with a flat up Peter Sellers’s arse.”

Some of the strange things Graham Stark did to appease his friend Sellers have been well documented in various biographies, most assiduously by Roger Lewis in his superb The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (the UK edition not the anemic US version). In this massive volume, Lewis detailed how Stark “had fetched and carried for his pal,” and:

had been so devoted to him, indeed, he’d even allowed Sellers to lock him in the boot of his car, on the pretext of getting him to locate the source of an annoying squeak.

An article Lewis wrote, ten years after Sellers’ death in The Daily Telegraph, he joked about their odd relationship, explaining how:

As a reward for his services, Stark used to be given Sellers’s discarded cameras or hi-fi equipment. He had parts in the Pink Panther films. He was best man at various Sellers weddings, and was taken on holiday to Paris and New York. Stark was the one constant element in Sellers’s zig-zag life, and he didn’t object when Sellers dressed him up as Hitler and had him parade along the Hong Kong waterfront, where he ran into a party of Jewish tourists.

 

 
Instead of “laughing along with this,” Stark had his lawyers send a letter threatening legal action:

...three days after the article was published, I received a ferocious letter from Carter-Ruck. Well, not a letter exactly. A declaration of war. “It is untrue that Peter Sellers and/or Blake Edwards talked to our client excitedly of a new penis-enlarging ointment and went to enormous trouble organising a mail-order address in Copenhagen, whence a confederate sent our client a tub of rancid garlic butter.”

Carter-Ruck continued: “Due to the gravity of the allegations our client will require a Statement in Open Court and accordingly proceedings for libel will immediately be issued.” The name and address of my solicitors was demanded, who could accept service of a writ. As, only the previous year, Carter-Ruck had checked a manuscript of one of my own books for defamation, and had charged me £2,415 for the privilege, I suggested that they serve the writ on themselves. (Not my exact wording by any means.)

Lewis “couldn’t take any of it seriously – the paranoid overreaction; the disappearance of common sense and smug pomposity of the legal profession; the sanctimony; the Kafkaesque nincompoopery.” The legal process dragged on for several years, even going to the Court of Appeal. But these actions revealed a far more troubling, and horrific side to Graham Stark.

In August 1990, Lewis and the paper’s lawyers received a letter from a Mrs Shirley Cheevers:

Mrs Cheevers said that “Graham Stark had to creep away pretty smartish with his tail between his legs” when her friend’s niece, then a minor, had visited the actor in a television studio, where she’d gone in a group to watch a recording. Stark “picked her up and showed her a good time”. When she went back to boarding school, her widowed mother “was horrified to discover a pile of letters from Stark, giving in great and obscene and graphic detail descriptions of what he was going to do to her next holiday and what he had done to her already.”

Her family took the documents to a firm of solicitors, Tatton, Gaskell & Tatton, who were ready to take Stark fully to task, but “her mother felt she could not cope with it all and drag her daughter into it anymore”. Stark got away with just a warning and an injunction to keep clear of the schoolgirl. Mrs Cheevers concluded: “None of them has ever forgotten this incident. It has coloured their lives in one way and another ever since.” (It says a lot about the Sixties that no one thought to go to the police.)

Richard Sykes decided to investigate. “I do not have any great hopes,” he said, “but it is worth a try.” By October 1990, however, he had located the child’s surviving family in Hove, East Sussex. Her aunt wrote: “I confirm that my niece was made a Ward of Court in 1967 following our discovery of very explicit correspondence from Graham Stark, including one called The Lesson … The whole episode was a dreadful shock and affected all our lives for a very long time. My niece was corrupted both physically and mentally by this awful man.”

Lewis was incredulous that this was the same man who was attempting to punish both himself and the newspaper for presenting him as:

“contemptible, sycophantic and self-debasing parasite who had willingly allowed himself to be humiliated and treated as a stooge by Peter Sellers, in return for the latter’s patronage and largesse”

Which was surprising considering the number of defense witnesses, including Spike Milligan, film producer Roy Boulting, writer Wolf Mankowitz, presenter David Jacobs and scriptwriter Frank Muir, who all agreed that Stark was “a creepy, humourless sleazeball and hanger-on.”

As Lewis goes onto explain, the child’s aunt had discovered an incriminating stash of letters sent by Stark to her niece, which detailed the actor’s obscene desires for the child:

From the set of a film he was making at Shepperton called Salt and Pepper, starring Sammy Davis Jr and Peter Lawford, in which he portrayed a police sergeant, Stark wrote: “You will be taken to the bedroom where you will strip in front of me … You will put on the black nylon stockings and the very high-heeled shoes … Needless to say under no circumstances will panties ever be worn and I will be able to see your adorable——whenever I wish … I shall arrange to have a car bring you down to the studios for the day.”

Other (much more explicit) material pertains to sado-masochistic scenarios involving corsets, instructions for the child to “parade in front of Bobby “without your panties on” – who was Bobby? – and practical arrangements about dates and phone numbers. Then there’s the contract that Stark wished her to sign: “I hereby sincerely swear that from this day forward I intend to give my body willingly to my lover GRAHAM STARK to do with as he pleases … Should at any time he wish other people to be present to look at me I will not protest.” And so on and so forth.

As Lewis points out, it has taken until the recent exposure of the horrific child and sex abuse scandals involving BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, which was only investigated after his death, for the police to take an interest and action over the long list of allegations from the 1960s and 1970s against celebrity sex abusers. So far, these have included another BBC presenter, the convicted Stuart Hall and most recently the PR guru Max Clifford, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for his indecent assaults on women and girls.

As is becoming apparent celebrity abuse of women and children is far more common than ever supposed. It was only after his death that comic actor Arthur Mullard was revealed to have raped his daughter when she was thirteen, and groomed her as his “sex slave.” The past may be a “another country” but there still appears to have been a willfully perverse and utterly unacceptable attitude towards sexual abuse amongst generations of men during the sixties and seventies, and no doubt beyond.

Read Roger Lewis’s full article “The stark truth about Peter Sellers’ sidekick” here.

 
Over the weekend, I re-read Loree Rackstraw’s tender memoir Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him. I’ve mentioned the book on this blog a few times, it’s an absolutely charming read and certainly a book that will be seen, in time, to be one of the most important works that has been, or will ever be written about the great novelist. The reason for this is simple: None of the rest of Vonnegut’s biographers have slept with him and none of them knew the man for 40 years

For now though, the book is unfairly unknown except by the most hardcore Vonnegut fans (you can buy it for a penny on Amazon). Rackstraw met Vonnegut in 1965. She was a divorced single mother and second year student and he was a married writer teaching at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop MFA program. Slaughterhouse-Five was still a few years away from publication, although his star had been rising for some time. They had an affair that turned into a lifelong friendship and Rackstraw’s book contains significant excerpts from Vonnegut’s deeply tender (and funny) letters covering the four decades of their relationship. “I realized I possessed quite a remarkable chronological story of his life,” Rackstraw said. “We were very close. It was a friendship unlike any I’ve had with anyone.”

Seriously, if you’re at all interested in what Kurt Vonnegut was like as a person, Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him is a book you’ll want to pick up. I’m happy to plug it on DM again.

But as I got to the book’s final pages, I noticed something interesting and that was a mention of one of Vonnegut’s last major television appearances, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 2005. Vonnegut was then 82 and promoting his then recent book, A Man Without a Country. Although the effects of advancing age are apparent on his body as he walks slowly to his chair, his mind was still quite sharp as he sits down to offer his wisdom on the topic of evolution. The great writer then proceeds to give George Bush a rather spectacular back-handed compliment…

Wunderbar stuff, but with these two meeting face to face, what else could it have been? After Vonnegut absolutely excoriates Donald Rumsfeld, Stewart quips “I’m very sorry to see you’ve lost your edge.”
 

 
While the style is certainly recognizable, the tone of George Dunning’s 1970 cartoon “Moon Rock” is a vastly different from its predecessor, Yellow Submarine. After a countdown and blast-off, our faceless astronaut lands on what appears to be the Moon, where a series of psychedelic characters are there to greet him, including a Blue Meanie-reminiscent slug-thing requesting chocolate and jelly. Interspersed with real video footage, the surreal subjects and austere setting make “Moon Rock” a product of its time without being dated. The trippy ambient music is from Ron Geesin, who also co-composed the “Atom Heart Mother” suite with Pink Floyd.

Apparently Dunning based the narrative on the notion of “lateral thinking,” a creative problem-solving concept from New Agey self-help consultant, Edward de Bono. For some frame of reference on de Bono, in 2000 he recommended sending Marmite to Israel and Palestine because he believed an unleavened bread-related zinc deficiency was exacerbating aggression in the region. Crazy? Sure, but it makes for darn good animation!
 

 
North Carolina native Jason Trammell began collecting records when he was a kid, first buying 45s at the local mall before becoming a full-fledged vinyl junkie and obsessive music fan (with the encouragement of his parents). Along the way he also picked up the drums and a keen interest in the mechanics of audio design and film soundtrack work that serves him well in his career as a drummer for Brooklyn-based group Sinkane and as an electronic dance music remixer.

In this short video profile, Trammell shows the camera around his apartment (and part of his floor-buckling record collection) and rehearsal space and he discusses the passionate craftsmanship that goes into creating his music. Tonight in San Francisco at the Warfield and Thursday at the Greek in Los Angeles, you can catch Jason playing live with Sinkane as part of the big David Byrne-led musical celebration, “Atomic Bomb! The Music of William Onyeabor”
 

 
This sponsored post is brought to you by Ketel One.

 
As someone points out in the YouTube comments, “She was just giving back what she took.” Which, I guess, is very kind of her. Otherwise, I have no freakin’ clue what’s going here.

Her body shape doesn’t look like someone who’s given birth. But then again, everyone loses pregnancy weight differently. Is this some snippet from a weird fetish porn or is it real? Is this a thing or is it Jimmy Kimmel trying to make it a thing? So many burning questions with zero answers.

 
Via Gawker

 
A doff of the feathered hat to medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel working at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Last week he posted images on his blog pertaining to a most unusual book he had recently stumbled upon. It dates from 1692 and is credited to one “A. Boogert,” and it has to count among one of the most exhaustive explorations of color ever produced by the human mind. The book’s title is Klaer lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst…Tot Delft, gedaen en beschreeven dour A. Boogert or Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau [Treatise of colors used in watercolor painting].

In the book, which has more than 700 pages, Boogert executed a staggeringly impressive series of color samples; there must be several thousand different colors elucidated here. In the bulk of the book, Boogert used the left-hand side of each spread to explain the ratios of pigment and “one, two or three portions of water” to achieve the colors depicted on the right-hand page, usually five colors that are closely related (see picture at bottom for a typical example). The entire book was written entirely by hand, and only one copy of the book is known to be in existence. It’s likely that Klaer lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst, even if relatively few painters ever saw it, represented the most comprehensive account of colors ever achieved up to that juncture.

The natural reference point here, for contemporary graphic designers, is the Pantone Color Guide, which first saw print in 1963. I find myself wondering to what hell Glidden would have consigned this author, had they only had the chance.

You can see the entire book here.
 

 

 

 
via Colossal

 
Interviews with musicians can be really, really boring. It’s not a defect of the artists or the interviewers, it’s just that their content is so damned predictable because the occasion for an interview is the same most of the time—a new release and/or a tour. The newest album is always “the best we’ve done yet,” and everyone’s invariably “really excited” for the upcoming tour. NO KIDDING. Artists tend to favor their newest work, and even when they know it pales, they’re often obligated by label and PR contracts to hump it for the media. Plus, artists spend all day on the phone with interviewers, repeatedly answering the same questions. That’s got to be a brain-meltingly tedious chore, so moments of refreshing insight can be rare. So I was delighted to get hipped to the untrammeled awesomeness of Kids Interview Bands.

Kids Interview Bands is a video interview series hosted by 7th graders Olivia and Connie.

The site launched in August 2012 and the girls have done over 100 interviews with touring bands passing through the Columbus, Ohio area including some of their favorites (Neon Trees, Imagine Dragons, Phillip Phillips, Walk the Moon, Tegan & Sara, Matt & Kim).

Both girls are active in sports and other activities that typical 7th graders enjoy. They aren’t sure if they want to make a living interviewing bands but they are having a lot of fun getting the chance to talk to all the great artists who have agreed to sit down and chat with them.

If you’re following music that’s Pitchforkishly trendy at the moment, you’ll already know a lot of the bands that Olivia and Connie have spoken with. But while there are a lot of here-today-gone-tomorrow festival circuit hopefuls to be found in the dozens upon dozens of video interviews the pair have posted, they’ve also landed some marquee names. There are some truly wonderful interviews in the bunch, where the musicians don’t merely humor the kids, but let their guard down and have fun along with them. For example, I’ve never been much of a Garbage fan, but I LOVE this:

 
Insane Clown Posse have become a great American cultural punching bag, and for good reason, but they’re natural, forthright and even a bit illuminating here. Shamefully, they blew a huge opportunity when they were asked what subject they should have given more attention in school—staying awake through science might have clued them in on FUCKING MAGNETS.
 

 
Some of the questions lobbed at Queens of the Stone Age are genuinely tough. I harbor serious doubts that if I were put on the spot I could pick a favorite Muppet.
 

 
Here’s the Pixies’ Joey Santiago, probably enjoying the hell out of the one interview in which he doesn’t have to talk about Indie Cindy.
 

 
Mastodon’s drummer Brann Dailor is kinda my new hero. He’s really great here. In two words: headbanging lessons.
 

 
All of these are terrific questions, are they not? I wish the kids had had the chance to ask Lou Reed stuff like this. (Or better still, G.G. Allin., though it probably would have been inadvisable to let 7th grade girls anywhere near him.) But here’s their big coup—the most virally popular of all the kids’ interviews, and justifiably so—a friendly chat with the mild-mannered, upbeat, and almost Santa Claus-ishly genial Tom Araya, lead singer of Slayer.