Apparently yesterday’s “Cyber Monday”—a great American tradition, right?—was the single biggest online shopping day “in history.” (That’s how it’s being reported this morning, with a straight face). As someone who positively loathes the holiday season, the rampant consumerism, the hoards of mindless shoppers and all the rest of it, I think I have something DM readers might be interested in, and even if it’s not exactly your thing per se, it still might make a seriously rockin’ gift for someone you know. Especially for someone who really hates Christmas…

First off, to show you how objective my opinion truly is, I didn’t even know this book existed until it arrived in the post on Saturday. I did not seek it out. Secondly, it’s not on a topic that really tends to interest me all that much, either. But there it was, right in front of me. It was weighty to hold and a quick perusal said “definitive” to me loud and clear, obviously an attractive quality in a book. It looked interesting. It appeared to be very comprehensive. It’s a nicely produced object, too. It was calling out—in a voice that sounded oddly just like Mercedes McCambridge’s—“Read me, read me,”

It was thus that I promptly dropped whatever it was that I was doing and spent most of the day Saturday and part of Sunday between the covers of Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult by Dayal Patterson (Feral House). It’s a fascinating overview of Black Metal written by a seriously otaku expert on the genre. At nearly 500 pages, it’s instantly the defining book on Black Metal, even a kind of minor masterpiece of the rock book form, featuring dozens of interviews with the luminaries (would that be the right word?) of the Black Metal scene. I got totally lost in it. I mean, hey, who doesn’t like books on extremist musical sub-cultures?

I got something from this book that I didn’t get from Didrik Søderlind and Michael Moynihan’s Lords of Chaos—which was more the tale of the church burnings, suicides, murder and general mayhem of the Norwegian Black Metal scene. Lords of Chaos, a classic in its own right, was a sociological examination of Black Metal, even a bit of a “true crime” book, whereas with Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult, I came away with a list of albums that I had to hear. NOW.

My idea of what Black Metal sounded like, frankly had a lot to do with the personalities and the criminal incidents that many writers have focused on. I had never really listened to it, just read about it. What was presented to me, well, it just struck me as idiocy—drunken Viking idiocy mixed with a healthy dollop of goofy Lord of the Rings playacting and blasphemy. Blasphemy? Really guys? Blasphemy was kinda cool when John Lydon or Crass did it, but the idea of a bunch of Venom-obsessed Vikings on a bender singing about how they hate God and worship “evil” and stuff just struck me as something I’d never be interested in listening to in a million years.

I’m not saying this is necessarily accurate—it’s partially accurate to be sure—but it’s the idea that I had of the genre. All very interesting from a sociological perspective, but when I read Lords of Chaos, I didn’t rush out looking for any of the music. After finishing Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult, I couldn’t wait to hear some.

Thank you, Internet. The first thing I listened to—and I turned this shit up so loud it felt like there was wind in the room—was Mayhem’s 1994 album, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, an iconic album generally agreed upon as one of the pinnacles of the Black Metal art form, an unholy grail if you please. Owing to the fact that to describe this music with adjectives like “Satanic” or “evil” would be utterly pointless when you can just hit play, crank this as loud as your speakers can possibly go, or right at the pain threshold if you’re wearing headphones.
 

 
Holy shit, right? Two of the members of this band were dead before this album even came out. One was the vocalist, a fellow called “Dead” who blew his head off with a shotgun, the other was the guitarist, “Euronymous” who was killed by the former bass player, Varg Vikernes, AKA “Count Grishnackh.”

Vikernes, who spent years in prison for the murder (and who has been in the news again recently for inciting racial hatred and glorifying war crimes) released this utterly demented one-man band album, Filosofem, under the name Burzum. I’m not endorsing this guy’s repulsive political views in any way (or that he named himself after an orc from Tolkien), but Filosofem, like De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, is an utterly mind-boggling work of art. It’s music that feels like it’s devouring you. It probably helps not to understand what he’s singing…
 

 
In any case, you can see what kind of fun I had with Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult. To me, there’s no gift better than new music, or a book like Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult that draws back the curtain on a musical genre perhaps previously overlooked, providing plenty of grist for the rock snob mill. Am I likely to become a raging middle-aged Black Metal fan? That’s perhaps a little far-fetched, but as I fan out through some of the groups that seem the most interesting according to the author, I’m liking what I hear. I think most serious music fans who would get this book as a gift would appreciate it as much as I have. It’s a winner, one of those books that leads to further (rewarding) discovery. I really can’t recommend Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult highly enough.

Below, Burzum’s closest thing to a single, “Dunkelheit,” the epic opening track from Filosofem. How the fuck did something like this ever get on VH1???
 

 
The BetaBrand store, located in San Francisco’s Mission district, has a vile, blobby yuletide greeting I can totally get on board with: Santa the Hutt! 

According to Chris from BetaBrand:

Our aim: To poke fun at holiday excess and explore anti-Santa sentiment. Our achievement: Over a thousand people have taken holiday photos at our Valencia Street store since rolling him out last week.

snip~

He now begrudgingly poses for holiday photos with Valencia Street shoppers if only because he’s too obese to move.

Santa the Hutt seems unlikely to be posing for Playgirl anytime soon…
 

 

 
Via Boing Boing

 
In what would surely be the most amazing troll posted to a serious web site in recent memory if it didn’t seem to be perfectly earnest, columnist, author, and apparently completely shameless toady to the ruling class Virginia Postrel has argued on Bloomberg View that ordinary people are better off economically today than we typically reckon - because the quality of TV has improved. I’m not even slightly kidding about the impossibly stupid thing I just told you.

On a flight across the country, you watch the playoff game on live television, listen to some favorite playlists as you catch up on work, then relax with some video poker. Arriving home, you delete the game from your DVR and consider your options. Too tired for an intense cable drama—which you prefer to experience in immersive weekend marathons of at least three episodes each—you stream a first-season episode of “Duck Dynasty” from Amazon.com, then run last week’s “Elementary” from your DVR queue. While watching, you check IMDB.com to see where you’ve seen that familiar-looking guest star before, then you jump to your Facebook and Twitter feeds. You finish the evening with “SportsCenter,” recorded just far enough ahead that you can skip most of the commercials.

Little of this customized entertainment would have been possible a decade ago—and almost none of it shows up in the income and productivity statistics that dominate our understanding of the economy. A form of progress that large numbers of people experience every day, the increase in entertainment variety and convenience represents a challenge to the increasingly conventional wisdom that American living standards have stagnated, at least for the middle class.

Hear that, middle class? Standard of living, schmandard of living, you people have TIVOS!

Now, I suspect that viewings of Duck Dynasty and SportsCenter don’t show up in income stats because TV shows aren’t income. But what do I know? I’m not the former editor of Reason. Or a shockingly tone-deaf, overprivileged asshole.

After all, it’s not as though no one has noticed the improvements. Critics often opine on whether the proliferation has produced a “new golden age of television,” while media companies and advertising agencies live in fear of what all that competition means for future profits. From the mobile-phone business to social media—not to mention movies, games, music and sports—an enormous amount of innovative talent goes into developing new entertainment goods and services.

Yet in the economic statistics that measure living standards, this real-life value goes largely ignored. For the very reason that entertainment is so cheap, the enjoyment people derive from having a better chance of finding exactly what they want, when and where they want it, doesn’t count for much. Giving consumers new features for little or no additional money increases well-being but doesn’t do much for productivity statistics.

I would venture a guess that the proliferation of the entertainment industry into every nook and cranny of American life doesn’t find its way into productivity statistics because sitting on your ass watching So You Think You Can Fart Your Life Away is the opposite of productivity. But of course, I’m just a humble pop culture scribe for Dangerous Minds, not a respected, Ivy League-educated columnist for The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New York Times and Forbes. Or a self-satisfied, grotesquely over-rewarded libertarian tool.

But let’s skip to the money shot, huh? Does she or doesn’t she tell us to watch cake?

“Too many people presume that what the poor want from the Internet are the crucial necessities of life. In reality, the enchantment of the Internet is that it’s a lot of fun,” the Indian journalist Manu Joseph observed in a September New York Times essay. “And fun, even in poor countries, is a profound human need. Quality of life is as much an assortment of happy frivolities as it is the bare essentials of survival.”

Holy free market, she actually managed to outsource her “Let them eat cake” line to India. Got that, poor people? Quit hogging those public library Internet terminals for your stupid job searches and bill payments! There’s fun to be had - ENCHANTMENT, even!

So let’s recap - time wasted is income! We can fairly extrapolate from this that the unemployed are the wealthiest people in America - so long as they watch assloads of TV. Thinking of goosing your budget by canceling that cable subscription and using the savings for unproductive mundanities like heat and food? Not so fast! Grey’s Anatomy is health care! The Apprentice is a national jobs program! BY GOD, THE SYSTEM WORKS.
 

Virginia Postrel, totally down with the commoners—the kind of Libertarian you can have a beer with!

 
Throughout his long career, Allen Ginsberg was keenly aware of the power of music—and an association with generationally key musicians, like Bob Dylan and The Clash—as the candy-coated bullet to see his poetry and ideas for social and political transformation reach the younger generation.

“The Ballad Of The Skeletons” with Philip Glass, Lenny Kaye, session guitarist David Mansfield, Marc Ribot and Paul McCartney (on organ, maracas and drums) was Ginsberg’s final 1996 release and in many ways, it’s probably the best of his recorded work. Even at nearly 8-minutes in length, the number never never gets dull—well with a backing band like that one...—as Ginsberg voices the lines of 66 skeletons representing American culture and hegemony. The poem was first published in the pages of The Nation in 1995.

Gus Van Sant directed a video for “The Ballad of the Skeletons” with a visually arresting Día de Muertos-style that saw the clip become an MTV “buzz clip.” Ginsberg told Steve Silberman:

“He went back to old Pathé, Satan skeletons, and mixed them up with Rush Limbaugh, and Dole, and the local politicians, Newt Gingrich, and the President. And mixed those up with the atom bomb, when I talk about the electric chair– ‘Hey, what’s cookin?’–you got Satan setting off an atom bomb, and I’m trembling with a USA hat on, the Uncle Sam hat on. So it’s quite a production, it’s fun.”

 
The Beat bard and Sir Paul perform “The Ballad of the Skeletons” at the Royal Albert Hall, October 16, 1995. During a visit with McCartney, Ginsberg mentioned that he was looking for a guitarist to back him during this performance. Macca said “What about me?” and below we can see the closest Allen Ginsberg ever got to being a Beatle. There’s more information about the song at The Allen Ginsberg Project.
 

 
h/t WFMU on Twitter!

 
If you think of Kate Bush as some kind of intense Catherine Earnshaw-type, wafting silk scarves while rolling about on the windy moor, then you may be delighted by this clip of Kate duetting with comic actor Rowan Atkinson on the song “Do Bears….” for BBC’s charity telethon Comic Relief from 1986.

It’s an amusing little number and reveals Kate’s finely-tuned ability for comedy. Is there nothing this woman can’t do?
 

 
But this wasn’t Kate Bush’s only foray into the world of comedy, as she later appeared in The Comic Strip Presents in 1990 playing the bride to Daniel Peacock’s uncouth groom in the episode “Les Dogs.” This can be viewed in its entirety here, but a taster, mixing a performance from Kate’s 1979 Christmas Show with clips from “Les Dogs” can be seen below.
 

 
And if that weren’t enough, here’s “Ken” written especially for The Comic Strip Presents GLC—their satire on the rise and fall of London Labor politician “Red” Ken Livingstone. With Robbie Coltrane as a Charles Bronson-esque “Ken” and Jennifer Saunders as a Thatcher-esque “Ice Maiden.”
 

 
Andy Kaufman’s stretch as an object of cultural attention was surprisingly short, 1975 to 1984, yet he packed a remarkable number of first-rate stunts into that time, including boorishly challenging to beat any female alive at wrasslin’ and spending his off-days as a key player on the sitcom Taxi bussing tables at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City, California.

One of his finest instigations came in 1978, when he somehow inveigled his way onto the set of The Dating Game as a contestant vying for the favor of comely Patrice Burke, identified in host Jim Lange’s intro as a “chronic disco dancer” who wants to know whether “the Hustle [can] really clear up the stress in the lower tract” (your guess is as good as mine). In hindsight it’s clear that Kaufman was in full-on Latka Gravas mode on this occasion, although in the guise of “Baji Kimran.”
 

Bumfuzzled Jim Lange
 
It’s a pity, really, that Kaufman’s refusal to play by the games of the entertainment industry precluded a regular career as a thespian, because his acting here is truly nonpareil. Note at 3:30 his convincingly guileless inability to understand the rules of the show, responding to the prompt “I’ll do anything for you, except—“ with “Except what?” There’s no break in character, no laughing that gives the game away. At one point “Baji” even solicits assistance from his clueless fellow bachelors. At the end of the show “Baji” (somewhat implausibly) engages in a minor meltdown because of the inherent unfairness in Patrice choosing studly Bachelor #1 even though “Baji” had “answered all de questions right!”

What a brilliant way to explode the witless, salacious premises of The Dating Game—by denying their very existence.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
When Debbie Harry wrestled Andy Kaufman, 1983
Is Andy Kaufman alive? His ‘daughter’ says that he is

 
Although the story about Stephen Stills auditioning for the Monkees is apparently at least somewhat apocryphal—Stills says that he only wanted to sell the group’s management some of his songs—he did play guitar on one Monkee’s song, the Head soundtrack’s “Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?”

Stills longtime musical partner Neil Young, however, was a Monkee himself—well, so to speak—for four numbers.

Young plays guitar on Head‘s gorgeous “As We Go Along” and he also played on a few tracks recorded by Davy Jones in a session produced just days after he left The Buffalo Springfield: The lovely, but slight “Smile”; a backing track for the never completed “That’s What It’s Like Loving You” and the simply incredible “You And I,” which appeared on the underrated Instant Replay album in 1969.

This features some of the best, most blistering Neil Young guitar work like… ever. Such a great pop song. Why was this not a massive, massive hit?
 

 
Pop Artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol divulge some of the influences and techniques to their work in this documentary by Lane Slate from 1966.

Artists are not always the best expositors on their art. There are the exceptions like David Hockney, who inclusively shares his knowledge through television documentaries, or Francis Bacon, who spent hours in conversation with David Sylvester discussing the influences and sources for his work. Here, we find Lichtenstein enthusiastic though slightly inconclusive, and Warhol being just Andy.

Roy Lichtenstein’s bold, bright, iconic paintings of comic book panels and advertisements offered an ironic commentary on sixties’ consumer society, while at the same time showed an artist attempting to make art viable in such a world. When Lichtenstein explains the ideas and intentions behind his work, his answers come spilling out like the contents of a shaken can of cola, the bubbles of information frothing over into long stream of consciousness answers, which never really come to a formal resolution.

Lichtenstein begins with a description of the modern landscape that inspired his work and influenced his style:

”I think we’re living in a society that is to a large extent is Pop, I think it’s one of the facets of our society, and it’s one of the facets of present society which is new, and is one of the facets which hasn’t existed before.

“It’s made in a way, partially, a new landscape for us. In the way of billboards, and neon signs, and all the stuff we’re familiar with, and also literature, and television, radio, almost all of the landscape, all of our environment seems to be made, partially, of a desire to sell products.

“This is the landscape that I am interested in portraying. I’m also not only portraying it, but I am working in the style of it, or a style which at least parodies the style of everyday art, everyday society. 

“I am interested in portraying a sort of anti-sensibility that pervades the society and a maybe gross over-simplification. I use that more as style rather than actuality. I really don’t think art can be gross and over-simplified and remain art—it must have subtleties, and it must sort of yield to an aesthetic unity, otherwise it’s not in the realm of art, it’s something else probably. But I think using it as a style gives it a kind of brutality, and maybe hostility that is useful to me in an aesthetic way.”

Okay, Roy.

Andy Warhol starts his interview with a renunciation of the reverence with which art and paintings are given.

”Why I don’t paint anything? Because I hate objects. I hate to go to museums to see pictures on walls that look so important because they don’t mean anything, I think.”

It’s a good start, as Warhol could give a masterclass in being inarticulate. Of course, it’s all deliberately elusive, and just watch how quickly he loses interest once the questions become about the personal rather than his work.

“You should just tell me the words and I’ll repeat them. I’m so empty today, I can’t think of anything.”

The interview ends with Warhol talking about The Velvet Underground, before he is seen inflating silver balloons as the band rehearse in the background.
 

1958 Edsel Convertible
 
In the mid-1950s, the Ford Motor Company was working on a car that they fancied would represent the new cutting edge in automotive pleasure. History records that the Edsel, unveiled in 1956, stands as one of the epochal failures in the history of the horseless carriage. In the telltale detail that seemed to promise an unpropitious outcome, the Edsel was named after Edsel Ford, son of the great Henry Ford. Curiously, Henry Ford II was steadfastly opposed to naming the model after his father, and the decision was reached at a board meeting in which Henry Ford II was not present—still, even if it wasn’t sheer Fordist ego, the inescapably sycophantic quality of the name wasn’t promising.

In 1955 Robert B. Young of Ford’s Marketing Research Department reached out to poet Marianne Moore for assistance on the name of the astounding new jalopy, seeking a moniker that would “convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design.” Letters of Note posted the full correspondence over the weekend, and it is hilarious.

Moore comes up with a great many remarkable names, most of them apparently facetious or satirical in intent, although presented with an entirely straight face. Young remarks that “seldom has the auto business had occasion to indulge in so ethereal a matter as this” and appears to brush off Moore’s more ridiculous proposals, noting that “we should like suggestions that we ourselves would not have arrived at. And, in sober fact, have not.”

Among the names Moore offered were “Mongoose Civique,” “Dearborn Diamanté,” “Pluma Piluma,” and, fantastically, “Utopian Turtletop.” On December 23, 1955, Young sent Moore “a bouquet of roses, eucalyptus and white pine” with the note “Merry Christmas to our favorite Turtletopper.”

In all, Ford weighed roughly six thousand names before coming up with “Edsel,” which today is roughly synonymous with “stinkbomb.” It’s impossible to say whether the name was a true factor in the eventual failure of the car, which first hit the road in 1958. In the final note, written by Young’s boss David Wallace, Moore learned that Young was now in the employ of “our glorious U.S. Coast Guard.”

Honestly, the correspondence is so smashingly amusing that it feels like it has to be entirely fictional. But apparently that is not the case.
 
Marianne Moore reads “Bird-Witted”

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Riding along in my automobile’: Photos of Los Angelenos driving their cars by Andrew Bush
100 years ago, some people were REALLY hostile to the introduction of the automobile

 
It’s next to impossible not to use Upworthy-sprach in the title for something like this, so please bear with me and meet The Ross Sisters—Vicki, Dixie and Betsy—an all-singing, all dancing trio of contortionist siblings who were most famous in the 1940s. Among the amazing talents of the extremely flexible Rosses, they were able to touch their ass cheeks to the back of their heads.

“Solid Potato Salad” has already been an Internet sensation once (if not many more times), but the quality here is the best I’ve seen of this astonishing performance. They’re just singing for the first minute. Beyond that, there’s nothing to say but hit play.
 

 
Thank you kindly, Michael Simmons of Los Angeles, CA!