Why not? Jesus turned water into wine and stones into loaves of bread.

This odd fellow is Minister Joshua Mills and, according to his website, he’s no stranger to miracles:

During his services signs and wonders are commonplace with manifestations of supernatural oil and gold dust, creative healings, supernatural weight-loss, financial miracles, Angelic visitation and heavenly encounters.

During his visits to indigenous people of Canada, Mills really pulled out all the stops and managed to shift his miracle-making powers into high gear.

God began to move upon the Inuit people with signs and miracles – saving the lost, healing the sick, raising the dead, mending broken hearts and performing unusual wonders.

What? No teeth whitened? No fragrance of toothpaste? Watch the video!

Mills’ take on humanity is pretty dire and you’ve got to wonder why he gives a shit about people’s teeth. Among his list of seven things he believes in, here’s an upbeat nugget:

The utter depravity of human nature, the necessity of repentance and regeneration and the eternal doom of the final impenitent.

Somehow he manages to smile through it all as he goes about raising the dead only to condemn them to eternal doom. He’s kind of like Jesus with a cruel streak.

And ladies, in case you’re wondering, unfortunately, Minister Mills is married.
 

 
Now for the musical side of Minister Mills. For close to two hours, Mills vamps over the jazz/rock noodlings of his back-up band. Nothing quite coalesces into actual song. But at the 11:15 mark, Mills starts singing in tongues and giving up the funk.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Silly evangelists expect followers to believe in the lamest ‘miracle’ of all time!

 
On Friday bOING bOING featured a YouTube video of a section of Bizet’s Carmen reworked with lyrics pertaining to the trials and tribulations of Toronto’s singular mayor, Rob Ford. Ford has become a magnet of media interest lately, due to the surfacing of videotape proving that he smoked crack, his excuse for doing so (he was in a “drunken stupor”), and so forth. Basically Rob Ford is what would happen if you took your typical NCAA linebacker and made him mayor of one of the largest cities in North America.

The new Rob Ford version of Carmen is funny, but, to give you an idea of how long Torontans have been dealing with the insane Rob Ford phenomenon, there was an actual opera written and staged in Toronto nearly two years ago. Andrew Jaji (pictured above) played the title role.

Rob Ford in costume for a Christmas performance of The Nutcracker last year

On January 22, 2012, the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music put on a one-time-only performance of Rob Ford: The Opera. It was written by four student composers as part of a writing workshop with the considerable assistance of Michael Patrick Albano, resident stage director of the Faculty’s opera division. Albano spoke to The Torontoist while Rob Ford: The Opera was in production:
 

Well, [Ford] is quite bigger than life, which is very interesting. And I don’t mean physically bigger at all. That’s not what I mean. I mean, bigger than life the way operatic characters often are. He really seems to have a spotlight following him no matter where he goes. And what’s interesting about that kind of character—the same as whether you’re talking about Rob Ford, or King Lear, or Richard Nixon, or whoever you’re talking about—is the tremendous catalyst abilities that he has. He has very strong effects on other people around him.

 
According to the Musical Toronto website, “It looks like the opera includes a scene where Ford goes to Heaven, to discover that God looks an awful lot like Margaret Atwood. There is another scene where Ford is judged by a jury made up of Toronto librarians.”

God, I’d love to see this thing. Until then, shaky audience video will have to do.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Cramps ‘Human Fly’ opera version
War of the Worlds: The Rock Opera

Aaron Freeman, formerly of Ween
 
In May 2012 it was announced that Ween would be breaking up for good. Anyone who’s been following the progress of the band can plainly see that the breakup was mostly the doing of Aaron Freeman (Gene Ween), whereas Mickey Melchiondo (Dean Ween) seemed perfectly content with the status quo, that is, the intact and occasionally inactive duo they’ve been since the mid-1980s. (For his part, Melchiondo has been spending his time fishing on the South Jersey shore—in fact, you can pay to spend a few hours in his company reeling in a few flounder.)

It became apparent that Freeman has been battling substance abuse for a good long while: he had a few “problematic concerts” in the last years of Ween and had showed considerable weight gain. He’s since successfully completed a rehab regimen and is looking trim these days. For him, the sad dissolution of one of the most fertile groups of recent years was necessary to his own well-being: “All that matters to me is that I’m getting sober. Becoming an out of control drug addict and alcoholic is my own fault and I take responsibility for it. I HAD to leave the Ween organization to stay sober.”

Since the breakup of Ween, Freeman has stopped doing solo performances under the name Gene Ween and has started using his own name as a performer. Last year he released Fabulous Clouds, a touching album of covers of songs by Rod McKuen.
 

Gener’s Gone: The Final Demo Recordings of Gene Ween (2009-2011)
 
Today Freeman quietly dropped an unexpected message to his fans, via email: what is most likely the final nail in the coffin of the persona of Gene Ween. On the bandcamp.com website, for a suggested price of $6, you can download Gener’s Gone: The Final Demo Recordings of Gene Ween (2009-2011), which has six tracks. If you are a Ween fan or generally wish Freeman well, I highly recommend laying out the six bucks.

The last song of the set of songs is called “Gener’s Gone.” For anyone who’s been following the progress of Ween and Freeman over the last few years, the lyrics just could not be more gut-wrenching:
 

“Gener’s Gone”

Gener’s gone
Let’s hold a candle up for Gener
He loved you all just like his children
And it broke my heart to say goodbye

Where have you gone?
Some say you took off with the Argus
Prancing lightly with the Stallion
No man should ever be so free

If everyone had a hit, there’d be a poll to count up the styles in culture
If I could sing like the old man, he’da slapped my back and ground me for a week
But the kids in City Hall strut along, their beauties by their side
I see them and love them with tears of age falling from my eyes

Gener’s gone
Could be there be hope for redemption?
Maybe he’s locked up in detention
A detention of time

Fly Gener
Fly Gener fly

If everyone had a place
A place to go with other like-minded people
A simple place
Where Betty throws the ball to Jimmy
The new youth pushes limits of destiny and fate
I look to them with love and forgiveness
I forgive them

Gener’s gone
Let’s hold a candle up for Gener
He loved you all just like his children
It broke my heart to say goodbye

 

I’m a huge Ween fan, so this new material, along with all it implies—it’s hitting me hard. In my opinion, Ween richly deserve the descriptor “criminally underrated”—their jocular approach to songcraft and their ability to mimic pretty much any form of popular music has won them a devoted following of obsessives but has (IMO) also meant that the pointy-headed critics have tended to forget them in favor of depressing acts like Radiohead (you know it’s true). I deviate from most Ween fans in that I consider Ween’s last four or five albums to be possibly their strongest material. Most Ween fans favor The Pod or Chocolate and Cheese, both of which date from the early 1990s—I love the early stuff too, but I find myself constantly returning to their later work. Some of my very favorite Ween tracks include “Woman and Man,” “Light Me Up,” “Your Party,” and “Transitions,” all of which were released in 2005 or later. The epic “Woman and Man” in particular pretty much melts my brain every time I hear it.

On the Bandcamp page, there is a terse note that will tear to pieces the heart of any truly “brown” fan of the Boognish: “After 20+ years of near-fatal drug & alcohol abuse (thankfully culminating with intensive but successful rehab), AARON FREEMAN (aka Gene Ween) was left in a dire financial situation. All proceeds will go directly to Aaron, as he continues down the path toward creative freedom and personal health.”

For those who want Freeman to release more music in the future, the info section ends with these words: ” On that note, we have received a two word personal statement from Aaron: “stay tuned.”
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Push th’ Little Daisies: Alt rock weirdos Ween split after 25 years together
Dean Ween reveals the two guitar solos he’s been ripping off for years

 
From 1941 until 1949, Orson Welles, director of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, was a serious object of surveillance by the FBI. This is not new information; you can read about it in biographies about Welles. You can read the actual FBI file on Orson Welles on the FBI website section called “The Vault” (PDF file). It’s 194 pages long, contains a great many documents from different places and times. Once you get used to the bureaucratic throat-clearing, it makes for very diverting reading.

It’s not stated in so many words, but Welles seems to have become a subject of FBI interest after Citizen Kane was made. William Randolph Hearst, thinly disguised subject of the movie, was friendly with J. Edgar Hoover. As is well known, Hearst mobilized his vast network of newspapers against Welles after the movie was released. To judge by the nomadic second half of Welles’ career, which he spent mostly in Europe and in which he made many literary adaptations on a low budget, it’s reasonable to posit that Hearst’s campaign against Welles had some success.

Little of that is in the file, however. To read the file is to be transported back into the pages of a James Ellroy novel, perhaps The Big Nowhere (that one’s my favorite) in which powerful wealthy white men deploy scandal and innuendo in order to defend their increasingly unhinged vision of American empire.

Most of the material pertains to two periods, 1941/42 and 1945. Welles’ association with various left-wing organizations is described in portentous terms. It is reasonably clear that Welles was left-leaning and lent his name to a great many organizations deemed subversive by the federal authorities, but that he was not a particularly organized political thinker and probably never joined the Communist Party.

What is so fascinating in retrospect is that many of the actions held against him do not appear to be very objectionable in the clear light of day. Two examples of this.

On page 48 his membership in the Negro Cultural Committee is discussed. The group is ominously described as a pro-Communist organization, but one of the charges leveled against it is: “The Negro Cultural Committee was reportedly a group organized by the Communist Party for the purpose of agitating in favor of anti-lynching bills.” That’s right—if you are the member of a race that is the systematic target of violent terrorist activity and you try to organize against it, then you are suspicious in the eyes of the FBI.

A page later we read the following: “An article appearing in the New York Times for January 17, 1939, stated that Welles was among the signers of a petition protesting the dismissal of 1500 employees of the WPA Federal Arts Project.” Again—if you belong to an interest group affected adversely by a decision made by the federal government, and you sign a petition protesting this, then you might be labeled a subversive. Eighty years later, it’s difficult to see why either of these two activities should be considered especially noteworthy.

In 1945 you can see the hysteria of the Red Scare cranking into gear. Welles’ support of the UN is held against him, and several times it is mentioned as a point of some interest that Welles undertook some travel for, or otherwise was working at the behest of Franklin Roosevelt, who, let’s remember, was the president of the United States at the time. Similarly, wartime activities in support of the USSR—at the time an ally of the United States in the global conflict known as “World War II” against Nazi Germany—that’s also used as evidence that Welles is probably a subversive.

There’s a bit of business involving Hedda Hopper and Welles’ increasingly estranged wife Rita Hayworth—there’s a good deal of talk of informants revealing this or that, a group that apparently includes Hayworth. On page 90 there is mention of of “extra-marital activities with [REDACTED] former Main Street burlesque strip tease artist.” Those of a salacious cast of mind are recommended to go to this series of pages first.

On page 119 (1949) a memo glumly admits that “In view of the fact that WELLES has never been placed as a member of the Communist Party by confidential informants of this office,” it is time to seriously consider “cancellation of his Security Index Card,” which I think means that they’re going to stop treating Welles as an active subject.  A few pages later this recommendation is approved.

Sigh. After the PATRIOT Act was passed into law, there were ample stories that it was being used against, among other people, harmless left-wing activists in New England. Given the fates of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Aaron Swartz as well as the spate of shocking recent stories about the breadth of NSA surveillance, it seems safe to conclude that the age of federal agency files of this type is far from overwith.
 

 

 
via Cinephilia and Beyond

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Orson Welles: Trashing Rosebud In Paris
Orson Welles hated Woody Allen

 
British folk singer Roy Harper, 72, has been charged with nine counts of sexual assault perpetrated on a girl from the age of twelve according to published reports.

On Monday, Harper is due at the Hereford Magistrates’ Court to answer the charges. Police in West Mercia have revealed that the alleged offenses were to have been committed between 1975 and 1977.

Harper lives in County Cork, Ireland. The summons was issued on October 16th, but Harper was first questioned about the matter at Heathrow Airport back in February.

Harper has performed with Pink Floyd (that’s his voice on “Have a Cigar”), recorded with Jimmy Page, and Led Zeppelin did a tribute to him, “Hats Off to Roy Harper.” He was having a late in life career resurgence and has just ended a sold-out tour. Harper was awarded MOJO magazine’s “Hero Award” in 2005 and fetted at a 70th birthday celebration at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2011.

 
Unlikely as it may seem, around 1966 Pete Townshend penned a harsh little ditty dividing the world up into the “lazy fat” and the “beautiful young,” warning that the lazy fat are complacent, unperturbed, obsessed with money—and will eventually win out over the beautiful young.

Lazy and fat they are, they are.
And because they are all the same..
They laugh and exclaim
“The young are so funny”

They burn in the sun, the sun
And though painfully pink, when it rains
They always complain
“We all paid our money.”

Oh! The lazy fat people
Are a terrible sight to see.
And the lazy fat people will
Get the better of you and me…….

Lazy and fat they are, they are.
Their children diet till thin
To leave more for them
“To save us some money.”

Oh! The lazy fat people will
Try to sit on you and me
If we dont watch out theyll
Get the better of you and me.

How to tell the young from the
Lazy fat is easy to do…..

LAZY FAT ARE PINK (them) AND THE
BEAUTIFUL YOUNG ARE BLUE (you)

Obviously, this song, called “Lazy Fat People,” was never released as a Who single, although Pete did lay down a demo recording of it. He offered it to Episode Six, a band that at the time contained the core of what would become Deep Purple, in the form of Roger Glover and Ian Gillan, but they passed on it. Townshend then offered it to The Barron Knights, who said yes—their version appeared as a single in 1967.

The Barron Knights were an interesting group—hell, they are an interesting group, they’re still active. They spent some time in Hamburg, like the Beatles did. Bill Wyman saw them in 1961 using an electric bass, an instrument he had never seen before, and the gig inspired him to take it up. The Barron Knights were one of the few groups to tour with both the Beatles and the Stones. The Barron Knights appear to have had a facetious streak, which made “Lazy Fat People” ideal for them, and they seem to have been irreducibly British in comparison to the Beatles and the Stones. Much later, in 1978, they reworked a song about the Smurfs so that it was about a group of British bank robbers.

The Barron Knights’ version of “Lazy Fat People” is a bit laddish, using a muted trumpet for the interstitial musical sections. In Townshend’s acoustic demo, he appears to have used a slide whistle for those parts, and considering how blockheaded the lyrics are, his version is really quite sweet.

Barron Knights version:

 
Pete Townshend demo:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Pete Townshend’s nauseating PSA for The United States Air Force during the Vietnam War

 
I attended about half-a-dozen funerals before I was twelve years of age. To my young mind, they were all the same, dreary and cold, under slate-grey, rainy skies, which made me think that when my time comes, I’d like to be sent off by Viking long boat, set aflame on chilled northern waters. As you can tell, I was greatly influenced by the Kirk Douglas/Tony Curtis film The Vikings, and I’d decided it was either longship, or die like Ragnar (Ernest Borgnine), thrown into a pit to wrestle with starving wolves. Ah yes, a Viking’s funeral was my plan. But now, having seen these funerals from Taiwan, I may just change my future funeral arrangements.

Taiwanese funerals are certainly loud and cheerful, and make a change from the traditional damp-eyed family and friends pretending they actually liked you. It’s just a pity one has to die before enjoying such an exuberant send-off.

See more Taiwanese send-offs here.
 

 
H/T Arbroath, via RocketNews24
 

 
1984’s Beat This!: A Hip Hop History is one of the very first films to document Hip Hop culture at a time when it was entering its golden age. Made for British TV, the film is smartly done and includes lots of terrific footage of pioneers of the genre, including Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and The Soulsonic Force and Malcolm McClaren (in his role as yoof culture’s Richard Attenborough) describing his exotic journey into the depths of the Boogie Down Bronx. There’s some ultra-cool footage from Herc’s original dance parties.

Beat This! was directed by British filmmaker Dick Fontaine who has a history of intelligently chronicling the early days of R&B and modern jazz. This one’s another significant feather in his creative cap.
 

 
In 1977 Saturday Night Fever came out and the Bee Gees and John Travolta ruled the world. Probably the most intriguing and risible effort to cash in on Travolta-mania was Neri Parenti’s 1979 Italian movie John Travolto ... Da Un Insolito Destino (the title is a pun; in addition to including John Travolta’s name almost exactly, it translates to something like “John Overwhelmed ... by an Unusual Destiny”). The movie, released in the U.S. on DVD as The Face with Two Left Feet, pulls off a neat trick: ripping off John Travolta by concocting a plot that’s all about ripping off John Travolta.

The ace up Neri’s sleeve was Giuseppe Spezia, an Italian actor who indeed resembled Travolta—one commentator is convinced that Spezia underwent plastic surgery to supply the needed trademark Travolta dimple on his chin, and I’m in no position to disagree. The movie also featured an actress who would later garner world renown for different reasons—the female lead was Ilona Staller, AKA “Cicciolina,” the X-rated actress who would marry Jeff Koons and get herself elected to the Italian parliament.
 

 
As far as I can figure out the plot of this movie, Spezia plays “Gianni,” a hotel cook who’s a bit of a sad sack; he sits in the disco while all the sexy people get it on on the dance floor. The DJ of the establishment, hilariously called “John’s Fever,” is played by La Cicciolina. His co-workers notice that he looks so much like Travolta that he might be able to parlay that resemblance into success at the disco. There is the inevitable makeover (which is awesome), and then he returns to assume his rightful place as the king of John’s Fever. I think there is also a side plot in which rumors spread that John Travolta himself is in town or something.
 

A coworker uses a magic marker to convince Gianni of the possibilities that await him
 
Here’s the makeover scene, which is silly and campy and everything you would imagine such a thing to be. The tone reminds me a bit of La Cage aux Folles, which had come out a year earlier.
 

 
Here’s the climactic scene in which Gianni recapitulates the legendary dance scene of Saturday Night Fever. The pre-closing credits bit where the entire cast assembles on a fountain and ostentatiously either does or does not wink at the camera to signal the end of the movie is a perfection all its own. Both of these scenes are well worth watching, but you can buy the full movie too.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Shit sandwich Christmas music video re-teams John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John

15 minutes in. Before any noticeable effect.

I’m sure by now, a lot of us have seen self-portraits drawn during the course of LSD trips. The majority of examples I could find were all done by men. So, it’s pretty interesting to see a lady’s take on the lysergic experience.
 

45 minutes in.
 

1 hour and 45 minutes in.
 

2 hours and 15 minutes in.
 
More acid induced self-portraits after the jump…