So it turns out that the owner of the L.A. Clippers, Donald T. Sterling, is a loathsome racist who told his girlfriend V. Stiviano that recent photographs of her and Magic Johnson bothered him “a lot, that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people.” Naturally the media jumped on this and Sterling has been ridiculed and denounced just about everywhere. In racist Amerikkka, it’s nice to have such a clear-cut, undeniable example of racism so that even the “somewhat” racist crowd have an opportunity to prove how not-racist they are.

In addition to harboring these loathsome views, Sterling has committed some other unpardonable sins, first and foremost being just about the nastiest thing I could ever think to call anyone, a West Coast version of Donald Trump. Attentive readers of the L.A. Times will be familiar with these bizarre advertisements sprinkled about occasionally in which Sterling is touting not so much any enterprise he’s associated with, but Donald T. Sterling himself.

Here’s Irvine resident and astute blogger Kevin Drum describing the horror:
 

He gives away lots of money, and when he does he makes sure everyone knows about it. Ads thanking Sterling for his good deeds simply litter the Times. ... They’re all the same: they have terrible, amateur production values; they all use the exact same cutout portrait of Sterling; and they all feature photos of the people honoring Sterling that look like they were taken with a 60s-era Instamatic. These ads appear multiple times a week. Sometimes multiple times a day. Sterling is constantly being honored for something or other, and every single honor is an occasion for him to advertise the fact in the LA Times. And always with the exact same cutout photo of himself. It’s kind of creepy.

 
Here’s an example, taken from Sunday’s paper:
 

 
Here are a couple other examples of the light Sterling touch, always with the same stupid photo:
 

 

 
While we’re cataloguing the bizarre workings of Sterling’s brain, I have to mention quickly this amazing thing that Josh Marshall at TPM caught over the weekend. In 2003 Sterling sued a former mistress of his to get back the house he once gave her. Asked to identify his own handwriting, Sterling answered as follows (the questioner’s follow-up is just about the funniest thing ever):
 

 
By the way, apparently Sterling’s racist views have been public knowledge for quite a while now. In addition to this helpful Deadspin guide to Sterling’s racism going back decades, here’s comedian/rapper/entrepreneur Nick Cannon on ESPN nine months ago having difficulty defending the owner of his favorite basketball team (jump to the 1:30 mark):
 

 
Videotaped recordings of early Patti Smith concerts tend to be well, scarce for one and when they do exist, they’ve almost always been amateurishly shot on some sort of crappy video format like B&W half-inch open reel tape. Most of the time you can tell that the master recording was poor to begin with. I can count the number of high quality early Patti Smith shows, ones with good audio, professional camerawork, multi-cameras, etc. that I’ve seen from the first years of her career at… one and I saw it yesterday for the first time. From the rock snob high I got from it, like a fine wine I think it was probably worth the wait.

During an era when a bohemian weirdo like Patti Smith actually could get on Saturday Night Live or The Mike Douglas Show or even on Kids Are People, Too for a guest shot, there was still practically zero chance of seeing a full set of the Patti Smith Group on American television. Let us thank the gods that when Smith played Stockholm’s Konserthuset on October 3, 1976 supporting Radio Ethiopia, that the Swedes were there to record it for posterity.

There’s an interview before the music starts that gets to the essence of what makes Patti Smith so great, and what made her work seem so exciting, inspiring and utterly revolutionary at the time.

Radio Ethiopia is the name of our new record and it represents to us a naked field wherein anyone can express themselves. It’s a free radio, ya know. We’re the DJ’s. The people are the DJ’s. When we perform “Radio Ethiopia,” I play guitar. I don’t know how to play guitar, but I just get in a perfect rhythm and I play, I don’t care. And the people are allowed to do as they wish. If it’s a really good show, there’s like a thousand, 10,000, 50,000 people. 50,000 minds, 50,000 sub-consciousnesses that I can dip into. I mean, the more people submit and the more I submit, the greater show it’s going to be, the greater we’re going to be. I mean, I don’t like audiences who sit there and act cool like this—“pfft”—because nothing’s going to happen.

If you are a Patti Smith fan, prepare to watch what is undoubtedly the best long form record we have of The Patti Smith Group from their early days, maybe the best full show period. Smith is in her full on Mick Jagger meets Rimbaud mode and she kills it here, just kills it. There are two Velvet Underground covers—the band walks onstage and starts up with “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” and later does “Pale Blue Eyes.” There’s also a Stones cover “Time Is On My Side” before Patti straps on a guitar for a rather incendiary, you might say Dionysian take on “Radio Ethiopia” at the 38 minute mark.
 

 
After watching this video of a man tripping his balls off in the Thar Desert (northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent), you kind of walk away from it… happy? He seems to be having the time of his life. His headphones are (obviously) plugged right in to the Akashic Record player. Dude is having a good time.

There are so many choice quotes from this short video that I’m not going to type them out for you (don’t want to spoil ‘em). Just watch, listen and learn from your new Spiritual Guide.

From the YouTube description:

it was the most beautiful and yet frightening experience of my life, i spend whole day from Noon 12 & whole night in Thar Desert, i was alone in whole Thar Desert accept lots of Scorpion ,insects lolz, snakes come in Desert not in this month but in may ,june haaaa heeee but i will advice Tripping in Desert is not for everyone ,it can be tough job,as body need proper nourishment water etc also, during tripping, and my water got finished lolz very earlier , i bear hotness of desert as well as coldness in night, .The Dose was very Strong & Visions were like anything spectular i had seen ever seen…..knowledge , beauty , & Universal Love, as well as Death & Destruction. lolz it was all Paradoxical.

There’s actually a longer description of this guy’s trip. You can read it here.

Meanwhile, enjoy his soothing profoundundities…

 
Via reddit

 
Fans of avant-rock percussion should already know the name of Kid Millions. It’s the nom de rock of John Colpitts, best known as the drummer for the long-running, krautrock-influenced NYC band Oneida, who became notorious in 2002 for the 14-minute, one-note song “Sheets of Easter” from their essential 2xCD Each One Teach One. Millions’ uncannily metronomic timing, enviable stamina, and the fact that he’s one of the nicest guys on Earth has made him a sought-after percussionist, and he’s served stints with Ex-Models, Spiritualized, and the terrific Marnie Stern. He’s currently on tour with his recurring heavy-friends project Man Forever, whose new LP is Ryonen, a collaboration with Sō Percussion. From MF’s FB:

Man Forever is actually a band. It’s not a statement about men. It’s a compositional vehicle that tends to have a lot of drums but sometimes it doesn’t.

I’ve seen Man Forever three times, and I’ve yet to see them sans a lot of drums. The first show I caught had pounding from the likes of Obnox honcho Bim Thomas and Call of the Wild’s scary-good Allison Busch. The second time, Millions recruited local musicians at every tour stop to perform a drums-and-drone composition. But last Saturday, Man Forever were in Cleveland, and members of Yo La Tengo were also in town, doing a DJ set for Record Store Day. And so it came to pass that that night, YLT’s Georgia Hubley became a part of Man Forever with Millions, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Brian Chase, and Amy Garapic of the percussion ensemble Tigue. Shame there was apparently only a hi-hat available for Hubley to play, but then Garapic made just a snare go a pretty darn long way.

It merits mentioning that Millions had played with Hubley before—he was one of the supporting drummers in Yo La Tengo’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon appearance in 2013, along with with Portlandia’s Fred Armisen. The clip, sadly, has been nuked from NBC’s website and Hulu, but if you’re really jonesing to see it, there’s a vid posted by someone who shot it off his TV screen here.

Here’s the video of Kid Millions’ ability to make drum circles cool again. I only got a few minutes of the set before my phone’s memory filled up, because I suck at phones. Additional footage comes courtesy of Jon Morgan and Lou Muenz.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Midi-Minuit Fantastique was a French cineaste magazine dedicated to fantasy, horror and science fiction films of the 1960s to early 70s. It was one of the first “serious” publications to explore genre films. Later on, Midi-Minuit Fantastique dealt with more mainstream culture and subject matters with profiles on directors like Samuel Fuller, Otto Preminger or Federico Fellini.

But honestly, who cares what Midi-Minuit Fantastique wrote about. Just look at these incredible covers! They’re up there with Girls & Corpses (NSFW) magazine!
 

 

 

 

 

 
More covers after the jump…
 

 
Jack Ruby were an early “lost” NYC proto-punk and no wave pioneers, a supergroup of sorts who existed in various configurations from 1973 to 1978. As well as vocalist Robin Hall and guitarist Chris Gray, they numbered Randy Cohen–later to write The Ethicist column for the New York Times as well as writing for David Letterman and Michael Moore – legendary no wave bassist George Scott (of The Contortions and 8-Eyed Spy) and notorious NYC performance artist Boris Policeband, known for playing live police scanner broadcasts alongside squalls of feedback wrenched from a viola fed through various effects pedals.

Writing today in The Guardian, Thurston Moore describes them as a “sacred stone of sorts” within the diverse swirl of groups and sounds that constituted the downtown New York City music scene of the 1970s.

Jack Ruby were young and wild early 70s rock’n’roll intellectuals. They knew the real deal of emotional expressionistic text was in the underpinnings of the avant-garde – the NYC lineage of William Burroughs and the Velvet Underground, the poetry and radical high energy of Detroit’s John Sinclair and the MC5, and the questioning neo-noir visionaries of European art-house cinema.

In early 1974, Jack Ruby recorded five songs, several as a demo for Epic Records at the behest of Sly Stone’s A&R guy, Stephen Paley–none were released at the time–and played just five shows. Their final gig at Max’s Kansas City in November 1977 was with Kongress (an extraordinary show previously covered on Dangerous Minds) and marked the debut with Jack Ruby of artist Stephen Barth, who had replaced Hall on vocals. Then they split, leaving almost no trace of their existence. But even that slim history somehow served them well as all the right people had seen and heard them–including Moore, Lydia Lunch, James Chance and Jim Sclavunos–and kept their memory alive for almost forty years, until now.

The group’s collected recordings–which veer from Stooges/VU noise-rock to wild avant-garde electronic pieces, located somewhere between Whitehouse and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – have just been released as Hit & Run in a slick deluxe double CD set on Saint Cecilia Knows with gorgeous artwork by Japanese artist, Ken Hamaguchi, as well as on two limited edition vinyl releases through Ted Lee, Byron Coley and Thurston Moore’s Feeding Tube label. With extensive history and liner notes from Thurston Moore, Jon Savage and Chris Campion.
 

Credit: Stephen Barth
 

Sacrosanct, 1986
 
The range of punk aesthetics is pretty firmly rooted in the brain of any fan, even for the most hopeless of fashion victims. The era just after its zeitgeist however is much hazier—we seem to recall only a loose amalgam of New Wave and post-punk bric-a-brac. Indeed subculture fashion became more diffuse, meandering and harder to pin down, but Derek Ridgers’ new book, 78-87 London Youth is a great photo account of a rich and creative time for underground style that often goes overlooked in the shadow of its (ironically) more uniform punk predecessor.

There’s a few famous faces, including a cherubic Hamish Bowles, but it’s largely anonymous faces that entrance you. You see proto-club kids, luxury goth, high femme skinheads, Norma Desmond-David Bowie hybrids and (my personal favorite) the New Romantic style virtually unknown in the US, but for Boy George and that dashing post-apocalyptic gentleman, Adam Ant. Can we have a comeback? I think I still have my marching band uniform jacket from high school!
 

Leicester Square, 1982
 

Hamish Bowles at Café De Paris, 1986
 

Joshua, Camden Place, 1982
 
More photos after the jump…
 

 
Have you been to Scarfolk? If you haven’t visited, you really should. You’ll learn about the dangers that babies pose to public safety, the fortifying properties of totalitarian salads, and the basic principles of scarecrow biology, among many other useful things. It’s a place in which the two most important facets are pagan rituals and totalitarian thought control. Rabies is a very serious problem. Best of all, the entire philosophy of the place is communicated via dog-eared paperbacks, stilted pamphlets, bizarre public-information posters, and thuddingly unsubtle PSAs. 

 
Scarfolk is a multi-pronged attack on British culture, it seems, but it will surely resonate anywhere public officials use the deadening power of blandness to terrorize their citizens into conformity. Scarfolk might be the most satisfying bit of sustained satire I’ve encountered since, well, The Onion. It’s so incredibly well thought out and executed that it’s very difficult to do it justice in a blog post of this type. It’s got a little Monty Python in it, some League of Gentlemen, too, and it partakes of the same general wellspring of psuedo “vintage” weirdness as Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz’s Look Around You. What makes it register so deliciously is that, since the primary medium is a trove of “found” filmed and printed detritus, it all works by the power of implication.

 
Scarfolk is a village in northwestern England that has some become stuck in the 1970s (just like poor Phil Connors in Punxsutawney) until it has become a deathly chilling simulacrum of itself. It and all of its attention-getting materials are the brainchild of a designer named Richard Littler, whose introduction to Scarfolk reads as follows:
 

Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever. “Visit Scarfolk today. Our number one priority is keeping rabies at bay.” For more information please reread.

 

 
Scarfolk is approximately what you would get if you put Fernwood 2Night, The Stepford Wives, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and say, John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise into a blender. What makes the project so remarkably effective is Littler’s deep command of the peculiar tone of public life in the 1970s, as reflected in the lovingly re-created and vaguely official gibberish and deadpan layout of news reports, well-meant public safety videos, and so forth. At a glance you could mistake one for the real thing (often the printed covers have little stickers on them, just as you would find on the real-life equivalent today). Its primary form of existence is a blog masquerading as the mouthpiece of the “Scarfolk Council” that has dozens of immaculately produced Penguin paperbacks, posters, pamphlets, et al., all with the weathered look of something you might find at a yard sale or a Salvation Army. (I collect Penguin paperbacks myself, so I’m particularly fond of his dead-on renditions of those.) 
 

 
The source of all this macabre hilarity stems from some vivid memories of how scary the 1970s actually were. As Littler explained to The Independent:

I was always scared as a kid, always frightened of what I was faced with. ... You’d walk into WH Smith [a popular newsstand-type retail chain in the UK] and see horror books with people’s faces melting. Kids’ TV included things like Children of the Stones, a very odd series you just wouldn’t get today. I remember a public information film made by some train organisation in which a children’s sports day was held on train tracks and, one by one, they were killed. It was insane. ... I’m just taking it to the next logical step. ... What if people learned that it was a good idea to have your legs removed, or wash your children’s brains? I’m pushing reality into absurd horror but, because life was already absurd and terrifying, it only takes a nudge.

 
A book version of Scarfolk is due in October 2014 but I think it’ll be available in the UK only, at least at the outset. There’s so much sheer awesomeness at Scarfolk that the best approach is probably just to direct you to the blog and leave it at that. By all means, visit it and wade around in its glories until your brain cracks in two. But here are two representative video clips just in case of a rabies outbreak or something.
 

 
Along with being a poet, Beat writer, radical, teacher, diarist, singer, musician, photographer and Buddhist, Allen Ginsberg was also the pioneer of the selfie. Long before everyone was posting their self-portraits on social media, Ginsberg was out there taking snaps of himself in front of every hotel mirror. He snapped himself crossed-legged, naked, half-dressed, fully dressed, vulnerable, confident, unwashed, washed, smiling, squinting, happy-face, ugly-face, old-man-tired-and-going-to-bed-face: the Ginsberg selfie captured it all.

But above all that, Ginsberg was a brave man who challenged and changed (sometimes half-in-jest, most times seriously) our perceptions and unquestioning acceptance of the world as it’s presented to us. The documentary No More To Say And Nothing To Weep For - An Elegy for Allen Ginsberg examines the poet’s life and work, with archival interviews with Ginsberg (including his last) and his many friends, admirers and critics (including Paul McCartney. Peter Orlovsky and Patti Smith) and also includes footage of the poet’s death. It’s a beautiful film and one you’ll have to find a quiet hour in the day to watch.
 

 
Do you like terrible art? Terrible art made by war criminals? And paraphernalia thereof?!?

Well, you’re in luck! An anonymous prankster at Society6 has been hawking prints, canvases, tote bags, throw pillows and wall clocks featuring the creepily naïve paintings of George W. Bush! You have your choice of Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin, Hamid Karzai, or if you’re feeling Freudian, daddy George Bush! All proceeds after production go to War Child International, a nonprofit describing itself as a family of independent humanitarian “organisations which work together to help children and young people affected by armed conflict.” How apropos!

The folks over at Animal NYC checked on the ethics/legal end of the copyright issues with their expert, Greg Allen, who described the stunt as, “kind of a dick move, supposedly by someone without the guts to come forward and claim their bad boy gesture.” He’s of the opinion that the merch is “purely a slow-off-the-line publicity stunt by Society6, which is the merchandising subsidiary of online content mill Demand Media. And it’s a dick move whenever a corporation rips off the creative output of an artist, especially an emerging artist. Even if he happens to be a war criminal.”

I have no such qualms with this kind of “theft”! For all I care, you can go steal the garden gnomes off of George W. Bush’s lawn—assuming, of course, you could manage to not get shot in the process. You can say that you’re “liberating” them!  At the same time, I’m sure Allen is right, and this is just a gesture from Society6—unless you really like owning ugly conversation pieces, you’re better off just donating your cash or time to antiwar groups or foreign aid. Remember folks, having ugly throw pillows doesn’t fight the power!
 

 

 

 
Via Animal