“Battle of the Trident”—Seiji writes: “This is the iconic duel between Robert Baratheon and Rhaegar Targaryen that preceded the series by seventeen years. Instead of a war hammer, Robert wields a Kanabō, a club-like samurai bludgeoning weapon. His antlered helmet is inspired by the famous helmet of the warlord Honda Tadakatsu.”

What would “Westeros” be in Japanese? “Wesatarosu”? (Apologies if that’s way off.) At any rate, That’s the question prompted by these marvelous artworks by imgur user seiji, who is clearly a fan of the HBO series/endless series of novels by George R. R. Martin as well as of the distinctive visual steez of 18th-century Japanese woodblock prints.

As Seiji commented on his imgur page:

“I thought it would be interesting to draw a retelling of the [A Song of Ice and Fire] universe as if it took place in feudal-era Japan. These drawings are inspired by the Ukiyo-e style.”

Now I’m imagining Toshiro Mifune occupying the diminutive shoes of Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister. Nah, can’t see it without Dinklage….
 

“Tyrion at the Eyrie”—“Catelyn Stark, her uncle Brynden Tully, and a dispatch of the Knights of the Vale journey to the Eyrie while transporting their captive, Tyrion Lannister. Tyrion is dressed in the robes of a nobleman.”
 

“Bran Stark and Hodor Journey North”—“Weirwood lore shares some interesting similarities to Shinto practices, so I drew a shimenawa (prayer rope) around the tree trunk.”
 

“Jon Snow Duels Qhorin Halfhand as Wildlings Look On”—“The wildlings are dressed like the Ainu, who are the indigenous people of northern Japan. The Ainu are thought to be the descendants of the first inhabitants of the islands, and throughout history they have lived independently in the cold far north, beyond the grasp of the Emperor.”
 

“The Execution of Eddard Stark”—“Instead of having Ilyn Payne simply execute Ned Stark, an amused Joffrey orders Ned to commit seppuku. Ilyn is on hand to perform the kaishaku, or ritual decapitation to quicken the death. The paper in front of Ned is a death poem, which a samurai would traditionally write before ending his life.”
 

“Mother of Dragons”—“Danaerys wears traditional Heian-period royal clothing and is seated on the Mongolian Steppes, a fitting analogy for the Dothraki Sea, far from Westeros.”
 
via RocketNews24

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Hilarious mashup of ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘The Goonies’
James Brown meets ‘Game of Thrones’

 
“You’re an actor, you can sing, now let’s record some tunes.” That’s probably how it went for all those sixties’ film icons like Richard Chamberlain, Albert Finney, Richard Harris, and even Dirk Bogarde (though admittedly he only spoke the words).

“It’s merchandising, baby, this could be another career for you. Today the album, tomorrow Las Vegas!”

David Hemmings could sing, well, that is he had sung, and to great acclaim. Okay, as a boy soprano, but it was with the English National Opera, in a production of Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw. Very impressive. And Hemmings had also performed with a handful of folk bands in the early sixties before hitting it big as an actor in Blow Up.

So, it must have seemed like a win-win proposition to have Hemmings record a selection of tracks with his musical pals Roger McGuinn (guitar), Chris Hillman (bass) and Ed Thigpen (drums) for an album David Hemmings Happens. Happens? Well, it was the sixties.

To be fair it’s not bad, and opens with the rather impressive “Back Street Mirror” before going onto Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe,” and on side two, Bill Martin’s “After the Rain.”

In between is a selection of songs (some co-written by Hemmings) that vary in quality, ranging form the stream-of-consciousness ramblings of “Good King James,” “War’s Mystery” and “Talkin’ LA,” to “Anathea,” which Jarvis Cocker rates as one of Hemmings’ best recordings.

That said, at times the actor in Hemmings tends to take over proceedings, and the singer’s left behind. Yet, it’s certainly no “dud,” but an interesting collaboration between Hemmings, McGuinn, and Hillman, that brings out another side to this iconic star.

01. “Back Street Mirror”
02. “Reason to Believe”
03. “Good King James”
04. “Bell Birds
05. “Talkin’ L.A.”
06. “Anathea”
07. “After the Rain”
08. “War’s Mystery”
09. “The Soldier Wind”
 

 
Bonus, Dirk Bogarde sings ‘Lyrics for Lovers’ after the jump…

 
The talented Emily V. Gordon, cohost of the delightful gaming podcast The Indoor Kids and recently the manager of the NerdMelt comedy space in Hollywood, yesterday wrote a post on her Gynomite! blog in which she calls attention to a possible disturbing trend in the recruitment practices of the KKK.

It’s barely more than a sentence: “In my own hometown, the KKK is putting lollipops alongside their stupid flyers in people’s driveways. Fucking ridiculous.” Gordon linked to a gallery posted by imgur user crick3t4.

Under the image at the top of this page, crick3t4 wrote, “My daughter found this at the end of our driveway, candy and hmmmm.” The paper inside the bag is pictured below.
 

 
Gordon hails from the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina, and the area code in the leaflet, 336, corresponds to the Winston-Salem area too. So if you live near there, tell your children to beware of intolerant white men bearing candy.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Crappy Klansman statue labeled ‘historical item’ for sale on website
Ku Klux Klan on a ferris wheel, 1928

 
This fascinating 50-minute mishmosh of a documentary was created in 1969 as a kind of promotional movie for The Magic Christian. It defies summary primarily for being noticeably under-produced, that is to say, practically free-form. It features a somewhat fatuous voice-over by his fellow Goon, UK comedy legend Spike Milligan that I would reckon is at least 50% extemporized—no less entertaining for that. It’s difficult to envision such a shambolic program making it to air today. Milligan’s text is a masterpiece of pop psychologizing—it’s entertaining to imagine a similar strategy being used to explore Lady Gaga or Kanye West.

The footage provides no coherent through line, which in some ways is a strength and tends to reinforce the underlying point, which is that Sellers has no essence to grasp onto. Late in the documentary we see an editorial cartoon after one of Sellers’ marriages in which he sits at the breakfast table surrounded by portraits of his various roles—Sellers himself has no face at all. Wifey says, “So that’s what you really look like.” It’s been said that Sellers wasn’t pleased with this cartoon.

The documentary, in true 1969 fashion, has a few NSFW elements, including nudity and footage of a bullfight and open-heart surgery. It also is crammed with famous people, including 3 of the 4 Beatles, Roger Moore, Lucille Ball, Richard Attenborough, and so forth. We hear a lot about Sellers’ love of gadgets and cars as well as some frank footage in which Sellers discusses one of his (many) heart attacks. Naturally Sellers speaks in a bunch of wildly varying registers throughout.

The documentary was never re-broadcast by the BBC, reportedly because Sellers thought he came off as depressed (fair enough). As the documentary makes abundantly clear, Sellers was a depressed sort, and his quicksilver personality changes were likely the product of no small anxiety. However, no amount of pop psychology can really settle the question of the “real” Sellers, as it cannot settle the question of the “real” anybody. Sellers’ characterizations had a peculiarly inflexible aspect to them that made them seem marvelously true-to-life. His work is one of the glories of the twentieth century; as Milligan (I think? the voice sounds different) says, “He’s Mr. I-Don’t-Know of the twentieth century. He is Mr. Twentieth Century.”
 

 
via Cinephilia and Beyond

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘I am desperate to have some real fun again’: Peter Sellers’ final telegram to Spike Milligan
Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan & John Cleese star in a ‘Goon Show’ TV special, 1968

 
Just the facts: Within the past few days, the Creation Records and Slowdive Facebook pages posted notices to their followers to be sure to engage with the newly created official Slowdive Twitter feed. That Twitter feed’s first four followers were four of the band’s members. Though no tweets have been posted by the band yet, singer Rachel Goswell and other ex-divers have, for the last several days, been posting a countdown that seems to be pointing to January 29.
 

 

 
And so now speculation abounds that Slowdive may be making an announcement on that date—and might that announcement be of a reunion? Given that the band is within the target zone of the standard 20-25 year nostalgia cycle, and that shoegaze godfathers My Bloody Valentine and bro-gaze champs Swervedriver have already taken the reunion plunge, it seems like a tantalizing possibility. Though their hastily recorded 1991 debut LP Just for a Day fell victim to a shoegaze backlash in the UK press, Slowdive proved that they were more than just the sum of their bowl cuts with 1993’s brilliant and luminous Souvlaki, and followed it up with the minimalist experiment Pygmalion in 1995. All these years later, it’s the strange and adventurous (and kind of Talk Talk-ish) Pygmalion that stands as my favorite of their albums, but at the time it was not a fan fave, and the band was dropped from Creation records almost immediately after its release. Three of the band members changed their name to Mojave 3 and continued on the 4AD label, and they’ve remained intermittently active under that name.
 

Slowdive, ”Alison” from Souvlaki
 

Slowdive, ”Blue Skied an’ Clear” from Pygmalion

More Slowdive after the jump…

 
Here’s what a burning match looks like when it’s at shot at 4,000 frames per second. Oddly soothing, in my opinion.

I could do without the voiceover during the video. It’s distracting. Might I suggest muting the sound and playing some Tangerine Dream whilst you watch?

 
Via Laughing Squid

 
Ah, Quentin Crisp, what a wonderful man. Witty, intelligent, and very brave. He was out as gay in 1930s England, when such an admission was punishable by imprisonment.

Mr. Crisp described himself as “effeminate by nature,” dyed his hair, wore make-up, painted his nails, and sashayed through London’s busy streets in his open-toed sandals. This is how he described himself in the opening of The Naked Civil Servant:

“I wore make-up at a time when even on women eye shadow was sinful. From that moment on, my friends were anyone who could put up with the disgrace; my occupation, any job from which I was not given the sack; my playground, any cafe or restaurant from which I was not barred, or any street corner from which the police did not move me.”

Mr. Crisp never had a problem with who he was. No, it was only other foolish people who had a problem. Quentin presented himself as how he wanted to be seen, or as he said in this interview on CBC in 1977:

”I laid it out so everyone would know what they were getting.

“[The public] were extremely hostile. And I think it’s because they saw my difference from the rest of the world was sexual. And in England, sex is not popular. Not of any kind. No display of sex, no talk about sex was popular until the permissive society began.

When asked why he had not thought of moving to a more expressive and liberal city like Paris, Mr. Crisp replied:

“There’s no good doing it in Paris. If it causes no stir, then it covers no ground.

“I wanted to survive the stir. The idea was not to create it but to outlive it. To show that people like me had to go on living. That they had to take their laundry to the laundry, they had to eat their meals in restaurants, they had to had to go to work, they had to come back.

“This is what people had to learn.”

All these decades later, it would appear there are many people who could still learn a thing or two from Quentin Crisp.
 

Just look at this jar full of used dentures!

According to Justin Hunter at Blazen Fluff there’s an underground market that can’t wait to buy your (or a jar full of) used dentures. Hunter made this discovery not too long ago when he sold a jar of used dentures (just for shits and giggles to see what would happen) on eBay and they sold for $110.00! He was shocked and little confused by this, natch.

Here’s his hypothesis on why folks can’t wait to snatch up used false teefs:

A set of custom fit dentures can cost $900+. A set of used dentures?  $100-200. All it takes is a dremel to make the used dentures fit the mouth, some material called a reline kit to make the dentures fit better, and you have yourself a set of teeth again.

So there you have it. Why pay those exorbitant prices at the dentist? Buy some used dentures online and make sure your dremel is handy. Presto! Beautiful teefs Gary Busey would be envious of, for a fraction of the price! 

Via Nerdcore

 
For the record, I like babies. I think self-proclaimed baby-haters are usually just acting out bogus irritation so they can feel important by taking umbrage with someone who can’t fight back. And I’m not one of those self-righteous people who constantly feels the need to declare (a little too forcefully, and generally apropos of nothing), that new parents can be weird. Of course they can be weird—they’re sleep-deprived and incredibly emotional and their lives suddenly revolve around a tiny living creature totally dependant on them. It’s a weird situation, and I think we can all stand to give parental weirdness a little break now and then.

However, I will always find the obsession with sonograms completely weird. That shit is notably, exceptionally, particularly weird. It’s not the sonogram itself, nor the idea that a parent might get excited about it—it’s the conflation of sonogram “photography” with actual baby pictures.  Sonogram pictures are “photography” only in the most literal way, and a sonogram print-out is no more a “baby picture” than a colonoscopy photo is erotica, and yet there is this reverence for that blurry little photo, which almost never presents anything even halfway resembling an actual baby. And then there’s that 3-D ultrasound imaging—more identifiable, I suppose, but far grosser-looking.

But in the spirit of embracing all things that creep me out, I have decided to grace you, dear readers, with a short list of some of my favorite ways people memorialize their ultrasounds, starting with the delightful little hellspawn you see at the top of the screen.

Sonograms themselves are a product of fairly recent technology, meaning we are at the dawn of a new baby-era. But forget 3-D imaging, for $600, you can 3-D print a life-size model your fetus! Their tagline is “Imagine holding your baby before he or she is born,” (No thank you! Before they are born, they belong on the inside!) and they come in a satin-lined box. You know what other kind of box is usually satin-lined? A coffin. Coffins are lined with satin.

I’m not a Luddite by any means, but one does have to wonder if this micro-observational tendency will escalate further as the technology becomes available. Will we someday regularly witness fertilization, perhaps watching sperm swim across a high-definition screen? Will we root for the little guys like they’re pro athletes? Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone envisioned the escalation of “test-tube” babies to the advent of robotic wombs—perhaps we’ll view fetal formation entirely outside the body! Honestly, I’d find that all preferable to dead fetus doll in a coffin, but let’s move on to the lower-tech options.
 

 
Custom sonogram portraiture posed sort of an aesthetic quandary for me. Which feels more uncanny—the chintzy, sentimental folk art sonogram painting, or the stylistically mature product of obvious training?
 

 
I’m going with the second one, if only because the store-front’s pitch leads with death:

Every life is a miracle to be celebrated and remembered. My Miracle Ultrasound Paintings were inspired by the memory of our niece who’s [sic] life ended just three short days after her birth. We were left with her ultrasound picture, one of our first and most precious memories.

While I make a point to avoid criticizing anyone’s mourning rituals, I would say, of the women I know, very few would be inclined to make a baby-related purchase from a vendor who begins their sales pitch with an anecdote about the death of a baby. Then again, very few of the women I know would invest $100 in custom sonogram portraiture. I’d wager the artist is addressing a very niche target audience.
 

 
This is simply too literal for my tastes. Much like those leggings that simulate the appearance of human muscles, I’ve just never been a fan of any clothing that brings to mind the removal of skin. I once had a friend who had her fallopian tubes tattooed over their location and it was a semi-distracting reminder of her guts. The difference is, of course, that she got the tattoo specifically to embrace the discomfort surrounding reproduction and our fundamental existence as, to quote Vonnegut, “meat machines.” This T-shirt, on the other hand, is supposed to be “cute.” Ah the subjectivity of beauty!
 

 
I would not eat a cake with a sonogram cake topper. The visceral reminder of a fetus generally kills my appetite, and frankly, I question the motives of anyone who gets too hungry around fetal imagery. There’s also a store that prints your sonogram on water bottle labels. Drinking the fluid from a container with a fetus printed on it has got to be some kind of Freudian cannibalism thing, right?
 

 
I saved this one for last, mainly because totally I dig it. I totally dig sonogram cufflinks. They’re functional. They’re subtle and discreet—they don’t scream to the unwilling world, “hey, look at my fetus.” The idea is morbid, but quietly so, and can therefore be executed with some degree of self-awareness. Plus, I can imagine totally going through a Patti Smith-style post-baby menswear phase that would necessitate the use of germane cufflinks. Most importantly though, it’s a disarming object of subversive style, and it can be used to creep out and embarrass your children someday—I mean, why else would you even have kids?

 
The 1989 Pontiac Stinger was the ideal car for those drivers whose activities ranged the whole spectrum—from surfing all the way to wind surfing. The Stinger was going to clean up on that surefire demographic, blond 23 year olds who average four or more picnics, clambakes, bonfires, keggers, bakeoffs, and/or badminton tournaments every week of the year.

The less I reveal about this promotional clip, the better—suffice to say, it truly had me in stitches. A quarter of the way in, you’ll wonder what the fuss is all about. By the time it’s over, you’ll be forced to conclude—narrowly—that it wasn’t really a Phil Hartman-esque fake commercial from Saturday Night Live.
 

 
Here’s to the Pontiac Stinger, a car with more tools up its sleeve than a Swiss Army Knife and probably more durable than a Swatch wristwatch—probably.
 

 
via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Ford really should have let Marianne Moore name the Edsel