My grandmother could have been Margaret Rutherford, or even the Queen Mother, for she had the same type of eyes, smile and well-lined face. Maybe, they were all sisters? If they’d been lined up together, you might think they were some ancient showbiz troupe like septuagenarian Andrews Sisters. Or maybe, like babies, all old people eventually begin to look the same? (My grandfather had a hint of Stan Laurel.)

I quite liked the fact my old grandmother had the look of Dame Margaret Rutherford, as I loved this fine actress as Miss Marple, and it took years before I could accept anyone else playing that role. She was unforgettable. It was like Rutherford’s turn as Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit—no one could ever better her performance.

Dame Margaret was beloved by millions, and greatly praised for her various stage and cinematic roles, winning an Oscar for her scene-stealing performance in the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton movie, The V.I.Ps.

Yet behind all this talent and success was a woman terrified of inheriting the murderous mental illness that had destroyed her family.

In 1882, ten year’s before Margaret’s birth, her father, William, had battered his own father to death with a chamber pot. No matter the potentially comic value of murder weapon, it was a brutal and bloody crime, and let’s be honest, most working class killers would have been sent to the gallows for such an offense, but William was sent to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where he was detained for seven years. He was then allowed to return to his family.

In a bid to start a new life, her father changed his surname from “Benn” to “Rutherford” (The family were related to British Labor politician Tony Benn.) After Margaret’s birth in 1892, the family moved to India, where the mother suffered severe depression and committed suicide by hanging herself. The three-year-old Margaret was then entrusted to her aunt, who raised her in a comfortable lifestyle in suburban Wimbledon, London.

As Margaret grew-up happy and loved, her father had another breakdown and was re-admitted to Broadmoor. To shield her of this “blight,” Rutherford was told her father had died.

A few years later, the young Margaret was confronted by a strange, disheveled man who claimed he had a message from her father. The news devastated the impressionable girl, who on being told the truth of the matter by her aunt, was terrified that her father might escape and murder her.

The twelve-year-old Rutherford was sent to a boarding school, where she developed her talents for music and acting. She spent her twenties leaning her craft, and joined the Old Vic Theater company in her early thirties. Once established, her career blossomed with great and rapid success. She met and married fellow actor Stringer Davis, who became literally her dog’s body, looking after every aspect of Margaret’s life. This included nursing the actress during her long bouts of depression; her electro-shock therapy; and her “bad spells.”

Having no children of their own (it’s uncertain if the pair ever had sex with each other), Margaret and Stringer adopted a young man, Gordon Langley Hall, who was in his twenties and had started a promising career as a writer. Gordon later said he was born intersex, and had “an adrenal abnormality that causes female genitalia to resemble a man’s.” He changed his name to Dawn Langley Hall and began a long career as writer, eventually having gender reassignment surgery in 1968. Dawn then married a motor mechanic, John-Paul Simmonds, and wrote a biography of her adoptive mother, Margaret Rutherford: A Blithe Spirit in 1983.

Margaret Rutherford described herself as a buff of all things paranormal, and had an interest in ghosts, hauntings and things that go bump in the night. In 1965, Dame Margaret appeared in the NBC documentary film, The Stately Ghosts of England, alongside her husband Stringer Davis, and “society clairvoyant” Tom Corbett. This trio of ghostbusters visited three stately country houses that are claimed to be haunted, Longleat, Salisbury Hall, and Beaulieu. They interviewed the householders, and witnesses, and even captured a “ghost” on film. Based on Diana Norman’s book The Stately Ghosts of England, this is a beautifully made and thoroughly delightful film.
 

 
The remainder of Dame Margaret Rutherford’s ‘The Stately Ghosts of England,’ after the jump…

 
Next spring Hunter S. Thompson’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky will unveil a public mural banner on a downtown building honoring him as one of their Hometown Heroes, nine years after his death. The banner will feature a portrait of HST by his friend and collaborator, Ralph Steadman, the British artist whose drawings appropriately illustrated Thompson’s work: wild, flowing, surreal, sometimes elegant, other times grotesque, and wildly funny.

Why has it taken so long? The Greater Louisville Pride Foundation’s president admitted that Thompson had “some issues with his life that didn’t really qualify for the banners.” Even so, fans, family, and friends, including Louisville poet Ron Whitehead, have been lobbying for some kind of major memorial for eight years.

Louisville’s list of native heroes is thick with athletes and seriously short on people from the arts. Come on, Louisville, don’t be like those po-dunk small towns who can only be bothered to honor natives who went on to professional sports or marriage to William Shatner. 

Here is a list of all the people, institutions, and entities already declared heroes: boxing legend Muhammad Ali, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, jockey Pat Day, broadcaster Bob Edwards, NBA star Darrell Griffith, sculptor Ed Hamilton, Louisville Slugger inventor Bud Hillerich, Heisman Trophy winner Paul Hornung, musician Patrick Henry Hughes, The Kentucky Derby, surgeons Dr. Harold E. Kleinert and Joseph E. Kutz, New York City Ballet principal dancer Wendy Whelan, whiskey distiller George Garvin Brown, University of Louisville men’s basketball coach Denny Crum, explorer Tori Murden McClure, Olympic swimmer Mary T. Meagher, Hall of Fame baseball player “Pee Wee” Reese, KFC founder Colonel Harland Sanders (I am not kidding), TV journalist Diane Sawyer, New York Giants quarterback and sports commentator Phil Simms, and welterweight boxer Rudell Stitch. It would be nice to see a banner for The Gits’ Mia Zapata someday too.

Steadman wrote to Roger Riddell of Louisville Magazine in 2012:

Who in all of Louisville is blameless that they should throw the first stone? Is there such a person in all the world who can claim such an awesome distinction? C’mon, good folks! Own up and celebrate the life of a man who wasn’t afraid to call a spade a spade… I believe that the citizens of Louisville should feel real proud to call ‘HST,’ one of their favorite sons, a true Kentucky pioneer!

Ron Whitehead produced The Hunter S. Thompson Tribute in Louisville in December 1996, where Mayor Harvey Sloane presented Thompson with the key to the city, and Governor Paul E. Patton bestowed the title of Kentucky Colonel on Thompson, as well as his pals Whitehead, Johnny Depp, and Warren Zevon. The Hometown Hero banner proves that all the upstanding people who held a grudge against him for writing “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” are probably long gone. Res ipsa loquitur.

Below, Hunter S. Thompson is confronted by an angry Hells Angel on Canadian television in the late 1960s:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Double Gonzo: Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards

 
I really like this remix of David Bowie’s “Love is Lost” from his album The Next Day, which came out earlier this year. It was undertaken by James Murphy, recently of LCD Soundsystem, and it incorporates as the primary bed a recording of Steve Reich’s 1972 “Clapping Music.” In fact it’s called the “Hello Steve Reich Mix.”
 

 
“Clapping Music” must be one of Reich’s most popular works. While researching this piece I found a textbook in which the class was told to break up into groups for the purpose of “composing your own ‘Clapping Music.’” Reich wrote it for two people (the video below has ten), and it’s based on a very simple idea. The two clappers clap the same pattern, but one of them adds a slight pause every few bars, which generates interesting and unexpected patterns until it eventually moves back into phase again. Since the notes don’t change in pitch, the notation looks like this:
 

 
Here’s Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music” performed by the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble in 2006:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
LCD Soundsystem’s last ever gig in full
‘Wavelength’ live score with members of Jesus Lizard, The Melvins & LCD Soundsystem

 
Being a Lady Gaga fan is akin to being in the closet. Like a deep, dark, terrible secret you cannot truly avoid for fear of going insane, one day you will have to face the music and admit to this forbidden desire, with the danger of losing the love and respect of your (more tasteful) friends.

So says my boyfriend, anyway. 

And I can see what he means. Admit to liking Lady Gaga and prepare yourself for a shower of derision and condescension, most of it from so-called “real,” self-appointed, “sophisticated” music fans.  The kind of people who overstate their own knowledge of pop but use it to patronise anyway, as if the only people who can possibly like Lady Gaga are dumb listeners who don’t know their music history. Puh-leeze. It is possible to know what Gaga is ripping (and riffing) off and still enjoy her work. It is possible to like Gaga not because of lack of knowledge, but because, you know, regardless of where they came from, you like her tunes.

But that’s the thing about Gaga, for me, anyway. I WANT to like her, I really do. And I do like her, to an extent, as far as all her visual and presentation work is concerned. But I have tried to get into her music, and failed. And in the proper context too: drunk, snorting poppers in a gay bar. But, alas… Nothing.

Until I heard “Do What U Want” that is, a relatively slow groove that marries the cold electronics of Glass Candy/Italians Do It Better with the over-heated melodramatics of guest vocalist, R&B don R Kelly. The wisdom of putting Kelly on a track with that name/hook may be very questionable (as are the lyrics of the track itself) but the song and production are pretty undeniable. Musically at least, Gaga seems to be finally transcending her influences.

Yet it seems like the irony of life, which has happened before, that once a major pop act begins to release interesting, decent music that I like, the public goes off them. Which, if the lukewarm response to the ArtPop album leak last week is anything to go by, is already happening. To an extent it is understandable. Gaga’s “weirdo” schtick could be said to be wearing thin, and perhaps she is presenting nothing new to the fans who have been soaking all this up for the last five years. Especially now that practically everyone in pop has to feign some kind of wacky weirdness in the wake of her huge success. But maybe just because of that overload of the faux-strange, right now Gaga actually comes across like she’s, whisper it, the real deal.

And before anyone starts, don’t bother trying to throw names of artists and bands at me in the presumption that, like, if only I’d heard that Nina Hagen b-side from ‘82 I’d see that the only proper course of action to regain credibility is to dismiss Gaga out of hand as just another pop product. Pop she may be, but so fucking what? I mean, seriously, who else is out there doing anything close to these things in popular music right now? Being the first musician to perform in space (yeah, let’s repeat that: IN. SPACE.) Her performance art tutelage under Marina Abramovic. Handing over design duties to Jeff Koons (even if he is over-rated, name another pop act who have given an artist of his stature control of their whole aesthetic, not just a record sleeve.) Her recent red carpet, ugly-teeth look (which seems to me as much a tribute to Jodorowsky as Michael Jackson.) Creating, and piloting, a flying dress called Volantis.

I have yet to see Gaga perform live, and from what I have heard, it is her live show that will make a convert of even the most cynical stone-heart. Looking at this very recent ArtRave show, I can see why that may be. Nevermind the Jeff Koons set design and the bizarro Gareth Pugh inflatable outfit (which already has come in for stick for apparently resembling the KKK) there’s stuff going on here that reminds me—in a good way, not a reductive way—of one of my all time favourite acts, the Pet Shop Boys, a band that managed to combine all the best bits of art and pop with genuine sophistication and class. 

Yes, she is pretentious, yes, she is over-rated, but maybe now that she’s on her fourth album, and actually beginning to deliver some decent music, Lady Gaga will shed some of her more fickle fanbase and begin to appeal to the real weirdos out there. I think it’s beginning to happen already, but we shall see. Would it even be possible to convert some of you dyed-in-the-wool, cynical DM readers to the dark side?

Lady Gaga - ArtRave (Full Show)
 

 
PS I don’t know if this rip is legit or not, but somehow I doubt it. Watch it now before it gets pulled!

 
CineFix does a very good job here of translating the unforgettable images and motifs of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining into the halcyon days of about 1989, when the most effective hack to fix your malfunctioning cartridge was to blow into it.
 

 
The game that CineFix shrewdly chose to mimic here appears to be the old LucasFilm (later LucasArts) game Maniac Mansion—the title alone is an almost perfect recapitulation of The Shining, and the gameplay appears to have been too.

I want to play!
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Kubrickian: Winter wool cap inspired by carpet in ‘The Shining’
Amusing 8-bit “Dallas” Intro

 
I regard bike helmets simultaneously with contempt and reverence. Reverence because I have flipped over my handlebars - unhelmeted - and gone skull-to-pavement in such a way that the temple arm of my eyeglasses ended up embedded in my forehead. I still have that scar. I could have majorly fucked myself up for life that day, and absolutely should have been wearing a helmet, there is no question about that at all - those things have saved some of my friends lives, and I have never been so reckless as to go without since. Contempt because, well, every complaint about the goddamn things has a point. They’re heavy, bulky and uncomfortable. They mat your hair down, which can legitimately be a problem if you’re commuting to a job where appearances count. And there will always be a tremendous temptation in how great the breeze feels when you ride bare-headed. Helmets rob you of a lot of the sense of freedom in the open-air experience that’s such an important part of cycling’s appeal.

But now, two Swedish design students have invented a helmetless helmet. It has its basis in a familiar automotive technology, but I will not describe it to you in any further detail. The video below has an amazing reveal that I don’t wish to spoil. I believe you will find yourself wondering - as I did - why nobody has thought of this before.
 

 
In Laurie Anderson’s first, brief public statement after the death of her lover Lou Reed, some people may have been surprised how much she emphasized Lou’s tranquil appreciation of nature, a product (in part) of his many years dedicated to the ancient Chinese martial art of tai chi:
 

Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.

 
This paragraph was one of five in the statement, also the longest paragraph of the statement.

I was reading a very insightful and informative remembrance of Lou’s life by the esteemed record producer Tony Visconti, and a detail towards the end caught my eye:
 

[O]ver the past 10 years, he became one of my best friends. I used to study tai chi in London, which has been a mainstay of my whole life. When I was speaking casually to David Bowie about how it was hard to find a teacher as good as the one I had in London, he said, “Why don’t you speak to Lou? Lou studies tai chi.” I said, “OK, that’ll be interesting.” Now I felt that I could confront Lou face to face.

All I had to do was mention those two words: tai chi. Lou just opened up like a flower and said, “Wow, I didn’t know you were interested in that. I have a great teacher and his name is Master Ren Guang-Yi.” I signed up immediately after I saw Lou’s teacher. Lou started a year earlier with the same teacher.

I had seen Lou hundreds of times in the past 10 years, mainly almost every Sunday in New York City at our Sunday class. We lived only four blocks away in the West Village. I would go over to his place and practice with him. We became very close friends.

We had people from all walks of life in our class, a banker, a plumber, a construction worker, a Japanese translator . . . all these varied people from all walks of life, and Lou was just one of us. Afterward sometimes as many of 12 of us went out for brunch right after class and Lou was right there sitting in the middle of it. It was wonderful. To know him on that level was just incredible. I can’t tell you how serious he was about it. He was one of the most serious people I know about studying some arcane subject like that.

-snip-

Last night at tai chi we were very choked up. The class is very, very strict. It runs a certain way. But the teacher turned to us at the beginning and said, “Can we have a moment of silence for Lou?” He got very emotional and turned to the back of the room and turned up the music that Lou made for us. He mad special tai chi music that we trained to at every sessions. The teacher turned up the music so loud that it was rattling the windows. It was a whole minute with this synthesizer drone, a very deep note that Lou made just for tai chi. The windows rattled and we’re sitting there in the tai chi position, the tears welling up. When the minute was over we resumed class. It started out extremely depressing, but it got better and at the end we had an impromptu storytelling period. We shared our memories of Lou.

 
So Lou Reed scored his own tai chi sessions.

As a prolific musician and artist, it isn’t surprising that Lou channeled his art into his tai chi, which was so important to him in his last years. In 2008 he released Hudson River Wind Meditations, a collection of music suitable for the practice of tai chi.
 

 
In 2010 his own tai chi master, Ren GuangYi, released a DVD of tai chi instruction under the title Power and Serenity: The Art of Master Ren GuangYi. On Lou’s website, in an entirely humble and unfussy way, it states that the DVD ” features six new tracks of original music composed and performed by Lou Reed and Sarth Calhoun: ‘The Power of Red,’ ‘Cymbalism,’ ‘Power and Serenity,’ ‘Liquid,’ ‘Metallic Opera,’ and ‘Guitar Mountain.’”
 
Hudson River Wind Meditations:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Allen Ginsberg doing Tai Chi in his kitchen
Lou Reed’s final interview: ‘My life is music’
‘Not joking: Lou Reed is at this Starbucks’

 
The world’s most sophisticated malware worm, Stuxnet, has gone “rogue” and “badly infected” a Russian nuclear power plant, and the International Space Station.

This may sound like the plot to a new Terminator film, but it’s something that has actually happened.

Last week, IT security expert, Eugene Kaspersky, revealed at a press conferece in Canberra, Australia, that he had been “tipped-off” about the Stuxnet infection by a friend who works at the Russian nuclear plant.

Stuxnet is “an incredibly powerful computer worm” that was allegedly created by the United States and Israel to infiltrate and attack Iran’s computer systems, as i09 explains:

It initially spreads through Microsoft Windows and targets Siemens industrial control systems. It’s considered the first malware that both spies and subverts industrial systems. It’s even got a programmable logic controller rootkit for the automation of electromechanical processes.

Let that last point sink in for just a second. This thing, with a little bit of coaxing, can actually control the operation of machines and computers it infects.

Though Kaspersky did not say when the attacks occurred, it was “implied” that they took place in 2010, around the same time as the Iranian infection was reported.

Kaspersky did not reveal the extent of the damage, but he did say the Russian facility had been attacked several times, which is surprising, as “the public web cannot be accessed at either the nuclear plant or on the ISS [International Space Station] — [which] is a guarantee that systems will remain safe.”

The identity of the entity that released Stuxnet into the “wild” is still unknown (although media speculation insists it was developed by Israel and the United States), but those who think they can control a released virus are mistaken, Kaspersky warned. “What goes around comes around,” Kaspersky said. “Everything you do will boomerang.”

Stuxnet was first identified by researchers at anti-virus company Symantec in 2005, according to the Times of Israel:

Stuxnet, said Symantec, was the first virus known to attack national infrastructure projects, and according to the company, the groups behind Stuxnet were already seeking to compromise Iran’s nuclear program in 2007 — the year Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, where much of the country’s uranium enrichment is taking place, went online.

Though it is unknown when Stuxnet began its “rogue” activities, it is believed the virus was introduced to the Russian nuclear plant and the ISS via a USB drive.

Now that the plague has been unleashed, said Kaspersky, no one is immune — and that includes its originators, who are no longer in control of it. “There are no borders” in cyberspace, and no one should be surprised at any reports of a virus attack, no matter how ostensibly secure the facility, he said.

Let’s just read that last bit again:

“Now that the plague has been unleashed, said Kaspersky, no one is immune — and that includes its originators, who are no longer in control of it..”

Pretty darn scary, hm?

And if all this wasn’t bad enough Stuxnet has been implicated as a “contributing factor to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.”

Below is the press conference where Eugene Kaspersky made his revelations about Stuxnet.
 

 
Via i09 and Times of Israel.
 

 
Duran Duran has had more ups and downs than your typical 1980s teen sensation. They’re still as active as they ever were—they were touring as recently as 2012 and reportedly are working on their 14th album, this time with the help of Mark Ronson, who has produced albums by talents as notable as Q-Tip, Amy Winehouse, Black Lips, and Paul McCartney. Being Duran Duran, there’s more than a faint whiff of “1980s has-been” connected to them, but it would be preposterous to claim that they’re anything remotely close to one-hit wonders—their first four albums went platinum in the U.S., and eleven of their singles cracked the top 10 in the U.S., a list that for some unfathomable reason doesn’t even include “Rio.”

Still, Kurt Cobain and N.W.A. more or less smashed to pieces any pretension of relevance to which Duran Duran may have laid claim to in the 1990s. Even after that point, however, their journey was not altogether embarrassing. Allmusic.com gives high marks to their 1993 self-titled effort (many refer to it as The Wedding Album), even as it disparages their “wretched” cover of the Velvet Underground classic “Femme Fatale.” Jumping ahead to our own era, Allmusic.com similarly has positive feelings for their last two studio efforts, 2007’s Red Carpet Massacre and 2011’s All You Need Is Now.

It will be clear that my purpose here is not to heap derision on Duran Duran. I was in middle school in 1983, and I recall full well how thoroughly they dominated the 13-year-old demographic, particularly the girls. I respect the supreme popcraft of Duran Duran at their best. But it would be foolish to pretend that there haven’t been some low points.

Foremost among them may be their cover of Public Enemy’s “911 Is a Joke” off of their 1995 covers album Thank You (even reflexively generous Allmusic.com gives that album a single solitary star).

Here’s the album cut:

 
Duran Duran’s version of the Flavor Flav classic off of Fear of a Black Planet takes the unimpeachable Hank Shocklee beats into a more rootsy direction—many have commented that it sounds a lot like early Beck, in fact (Beck, of course, was probably at peak visibility around then). In the video below, it’s hard to feature to what extent Simon Le Bon and the boys (former Zappa player Warren Cuccurullo without a shirt seems like a version of Glenn Danzig) are taking themselves seriously or not. After all, the song is a pointed critique of the deeply embedded racism that may or may not be peculiar to the United States, where your address will determine the level of social services that you receive. It’s difficult to imagine that Duran Duran ever had any such problems with the emergency services in the UK, or if they did, it’s pretty certain that race wasn’t a factor. (Also, 911 doesn’t even mean anything in England, where they use 999 for that purpose.) Point being, surely none of this was lost on them, right?

In the end, the key miscalculation may have been to underestimate the skills of Flavor Flav. As PE’s court jester and figure of fun, Flav doesn’t conform to anyone’s idea of an artistic master. But “Cold Lampin’ with Flavor” off of Nation of Millions is a work of sheer, unbridled genius; as far as I know, there’s nothing in the rap canon that can touch it (hey, refresh your memory if you disagree). And “911 Is a Joke” ain’t far behind.
 
Here’s that live rendition of the track, taped at Musique Plus in Montreal:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
When Duran Duran supported Hazel O’Connor’s Megahype
He Ain’t No Joke! Flavor Flav’s awesome cameo in decidely old school 1987 Eric B. and Rakim video

“New York Rainy Night”
 
Full disclosure: I’m not a seasoned art person, at all. I get the bulk of my education by wandering around museums with my smart phone and Googling everything that looks cool to me. (I Google a lot of large installations and almost anything contemporary with nudity.) Despite my lack of expertise, I have a prejudicial skepticism of musicians’ visual art. I never got Joni Mitchell’s paintings, and I’m sure I’m just not cosmopolitan enough to wrap my brain around Kim Gordon’s. However, I kind of dig… Tony Bennett’s?

Honestly, when I heard Tony Bennett painted, I was anticipating something a lot more… hotel? Huge fan of his singing; the man is a Sinatra-level chanteur, but that doesn’t mean his art is going to be anything interesting. It turns out Anthony Benedetto (his given name, and the one he signs his canvasses with) studied music and painting at New York’s High School of Industrial Art, before dropping out at 16 to support his working class Italian immigrant family in Queens.

Benedetto’s work covers a lot of subjects, but I think New York City is his strongest suit. There’s a lot of Ashcan School in the brushwork and colors, and some of it has a bit of a Ben Shahn feel, with the compression of the foreground and elastic geometry. Or… something.
 

“New York Waterfront”
 

“New York Cityscape 2”
 

“New York Yellow Cab Study”
 
More after the jump…