Black Shampoo is a 70s blaxploitation groaner that gained extra currency in the 1980s due to its ubiquity on the “Midnight Movies” shelves of the first wave of VHS rental stores.

While it’s not nearly as brain-damaged as Rudy Ray Moore’s cheerfully demented Dolemite films, or, say, The Black Gestapo, Black Shampoo is still pretty mind-melting. It was directed by Greydon Clark, who helmed such grind house gems as Satan’s Cheerleaders, Dracula vs. Frankenstein and Skinheads.

Black Shampoo is a bit like two films in one: In the first part of the film, as with Warren Beatty’s Shampoo, we meet a super-stud playboy hairdresser (John Daniels). As we find out, he also happens to be a highly skilled fighter.

Here’s the plot description from the DVD cover. It’s pretty succinct:

John Daniels plays Jonathan Knight, the owner of “Mr. Jonathan’s” the most successful hair salon for women on the Sunset Strip. His reputation as a lover has become so awesome that he is sought after almost as much in that capacity as he is for his experience as a hair stylist. Everything is cool for Jonathan until he messes with the mob in an effort to protect his young attractive receptionist, played by Tanya Boyd (Celeste in Days of Our Lives), from her former boss. Action explodes when the “loving” machine becomes the “killing” machine. Jonathan, chainsaw in hand, gets down to the get down on the vicious mob gang that wrecked his shop and kidnapped his woman.

Chainsaw in hand? Yes, chainsaw in hand. Black Shampoo is highly entertaining, if somewhat crude. I confess to having watched this sucker three times!
 

 
David Johansen, then at the height of his fame as Buster Poindexter, made a 1988 appearance on The Tonight Show and charmed the shit out of Johnny Carson and the audience.

Johansen was made for this kind of thing. Perfect timing, perfect delivery, a smooth operator. The Robert Goulet story is hilarious and Carson can’t help but burst out laughing even at the expense of one of his regular guests.
 

 
First broadcast in America by PBS in 1979 (in Great Britain it aired the year before) Jonathan Miller’s classic 13-part series on the history of medicine, The Body in Question, was one of the most celebrated PBS “big events” of that decade. The creator’s goal? To explain life itself to a mainstream television audience.

The Body in Question, an internationally funded production spearheaded by the BBC, did for medical science and physiology what Lord Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos did for Western art, history and our understanding of the universe. Like these other series, Miller’s program is regarded as a landmark in long-form television documentaries, but unlike them, it has curiously never been made available for the home video market. This is beyond tragic, but The Body in Question can now be seen on YouTube.

Although Jonathan Miller is a well-known and (generally) much-beloved pillar of British society—a member of that endangered species they used to refer to as “public intellectuals”—sadly, he is less recognized as a freakishly smart cultural treasure in the former colonies. This was not always true. For a few years at least, Miller was actually somewhat of a frequent sight on American television. More than once he appeared on five daily episodes of Dick Cavett’s PBS series in a row. These marathon conversations made for some of the most fascinating television I’d ever seen and I recall taping the audio from the TV speaker so I could at least listen to them again. Although I have not heard these tapes since I was probably 15, I can still hear, in my mind’s ear, Miller explaining to Cavett about Franz Mesmer, “mesmerism” and hypnotism. (And indeed here that show is, via Dick Cavett’s New York Times blog.)

When I was a kid, Jonathan Miller seemed absolutely heroically brilliant to me (he still does, I hasten to add). I didn’t find out about him via The Body in Question or the Cavett shows, I knew of him because of the “Original Broadway Cast Recording” (the American version, in other words) of the Tony-winning satirical revue, Beyond The Fringe (which also starred Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and the great playwright Alan Bennett). A friend of mine’s father had seen the show on Broadway in the 60s and he owned the record. Because I was such a Monty Python nerd, I’d read about Beyond the Fringe. Eventually, I was pulling it out and listening to it every time I was at their house and he told me I could just have it. I still have it. I also still have my copy of the coffee table book of the series, as seen above. When The Body in Question aired, to my pre-teen mind, it was hosted by the comedian who did the Bertrand Russell imitation—not to mention the Shakespearean character who refuses to die (“Now is steel ‘twixt gut and bladder interposed!”)—in Beyond The Fringe. He was also a doctor? And he directed Gilbert and Sullivan?

Jonathan Miller seemed to be the single most erudite man alive.

But back to the series, The Body in Question is on YouTube in decent quality, and if you’ve never seen it, it’s an amazing treat. I guarantee that you will be smarter after you’ve watched it. Miller was the first person ever to perform an autopsy on a human cadaver on television, an act that would have seen him put to death just a few centuries earlier, not that they had TV back then, of course.
 

 
Everyone who writes about this song emphasizes how unlikely a pairing it is ... and most everyone concede that the song works perfectly well. Erik Adams at the A.V. Club at least had the wit to point out a few basic similarities that DEVO and Jermaine share, such as growing up in tough Rust Belt towns.

If it was Jermaine’s idea to seek out DEVO, it was a good one, and Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale—introduced here as “Spud and Pud Devo”—gamely agreed to pitch in. The song ended up cracking the top 20 on the Billboard charts in August of 1982.

I’d love to know what TV special this was, exactly; Adams identifies it as a “Dick Clark Productions Halloween special.” Anyone who is old enough to possibly have been watching at the time (I am, but I don’t recall catching it) will surely be able to identify the MC as funnyman Fred Travalena—he was the kind of guy to whom the identifier “funnyman” just comes naturally. (He did impressions, like Rich Little, Kevin Pollak, or, ah…. Frank Caliendo?)

In any case, it’s a Halloween special, as evidenced by the occasional camera pans over a pair of hearty jack-o’-lanterns. As I tried to figure out who changed to accommodate whom, DEVO or Jermaine, it became clear that nobody did—it turns out that DEVO and Jermaine fit together just fine exactly as they are.

But what makes this video truly special is Jermaine’s ... extraordinary technique on the guitar.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
John Lydon almost joined Devo in 1978? Well, I’ll be.
Devo performing live on TV in 1978: Secret teachings of the SubGenius

 
Allegedly this pleasant-looking “hardcore” band didn’t pay their audio engineer for working on their music video.

According to Dans Lab on YouTube:

Ever wonder what happens to bands videos or music when they decide they don’t want to pay the engineer for his time he spent? Well hopefully this video answers that question.

The band is now known as “Hardcore EDM Dance Band!”

Let this be a lesson to other deadbeat punks: Best to pay your bills on time, you wouldn’t want something like this happening to you!
 

 
Via BuzzFeed

 
So here’s the deal. David Lynch made this highly entertaining video of himself explaining how to prepare a quinoa recipe of which he’s particularly fond as an extra on the DVD of Lynch’s 2006 movie Inland Empire. The video made the rounds a couple of years ago, and then the lawyers got involved and it was pulled down.

Now it’s back, but, well, in a compromised fashion: it looks like crap, it’s been broken up into two separate YouTube files, and there’s at least a couple of minutes missing, it seems—but take it from me, it’s still worth a look. Tongue lodged firmly in cheek (I reckon), Lynch manages to bring both his famously gee-whiz affect and his random, surrealist sensibility to bear on his sure-to-be-delicious quinoa concoction.

When you make the transition to the second video, the thought will cross your mind that a mistake has been made, that this is not the same video—trust me: it is.

These videos have been up since February, but I’d imagine that further exposure will endanger its existence on YouTube—watch it while you can! I’m awfully glad I did.

Truly, Lynch is a born performer—can we get this guy a cooking show, for goodness’ sake?? And definitely, definitely let Lynch have final cut.

David Lynch’s Quinoa Recipe, Part 1:

 
David Lynch’s Quinoa Recipe, Part 2:

 
After the jump, the recipe itself, as transcribed by Jack Cheng….

 
To be a great artist, one must be ready to fail, is just some of the advice offered up by performance artist, Marina Abramović in this recent interview.

This idea of failure echoes Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Abramović seems to agree:

“I think a great artist has to be ready to fail, which not too many people do. Because when you have success in a certain way, then the public accept you in a certain way, and you start somehow involuntarily producing the same images, the same type of work, and you’re not risking.

“Real artists always change their territories, and they go to the length they’ve never been. And there, [in] this unknown territory, and then you can fail, you can risk, and that failure is what actually makes this extra, you know.

“Being ready to fail makes a great artist.”

Abramović goes on to discuss what does it mean to be an artist, how one know they are an artist and why everyone isn’t an artist.

As for performance art, it is about finding the right tool for expression, but the key element, she emphasizes, is how the artist occupies the space:

“The idea can be totally shit, the execution can be wrong, but it is just the way how he stands. That’s it. In the space. How you occupy physically the space, and what that standing does to everybody else looking at [that] person. That kind of charisma really makes the difference. It’s a certain energy you can recognize right away. And you can learn later on how to execute these ideas, and all the rest, but it is about energy you cannot learn: you have t have it—it’s just there, when you are born.”

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Sex Magick: Marina Abramović‘s Balkan Erotic Epic
 
With thanks to Christian Lund

 
Dreamies by Auralgraphic Entertainment, AKA Bill Holt, is ranked at #37 on MOJO magazine’s list of the “Top 50 Most Out-There Albums of All Time.” Pitchfork gave it an 8.7 review and compared it favorably to the early work of The Residents.

Dreamies is one of those long fuse “outsider” musical masterpieces, known only to elite crate diggers before being re-released on CD to a world—well, admittedly a pretty small world—finally ready to hear it. I love the shit out of this album. I read about it on an audio blog and from the description alone, I knew that I was going to love it even before I heard it. There’s nothing else like it.

In the early 1970s, Bill Holt, then in his late 20s with a young family and living in Delaware, quit his job, bought the necessary gear and musical instruments and taught himself how to do the things he needed to be able to do to record Dreamies, his one and only album. “Dreamies” refers to manufactured dream sequences, a term coined by Isaac Asimov in a short story called “Dreaming is a Private Thing.” The LP consists of two long tracks, “Program Ten” and “Program Eleven,” clocking in at about 26 minutes each. Holt was greatly inspired by The Beatles’ “Revolution #9” sound collage and saw his own work as picking up on that thread (hence the numbers). He was also clearly influenced by John Cage’s “Williams Mix” and “Fontana Mix” pieces (John Lennon had obviously heard them, too.)

Bill Holt still makes music today at his Dreamies.com website, often with a political bent (see below for the most recent example). A new vinyl version of Dreamies has just been released by Out-Sider Records.
 

The first part of “Program Ten”
 

The promised Dreamies DVD will marry visuals to a 5.1 Dolby surround mix. How I would dearly love to hear that.
 

 
Ned Donovan over at The Kernel informs me of something of which I was not aware: there’s a computer game that’s a massive blockbuster in Germany but in no other major market, and it’s a game that sounds to the rest of the world as dull as dirt—literally. The game is Farming Simulator 2013 (or Landwirtschafts-Simulator 2013, as it’s called in Germany). It and its previous versions are mainstays on the top ten list in Germany, whereas in the UK, the country that manufactures it, it’s more likely to be found at rank 243.

Farming Simulator is the David Hasselhoff of the computer game industry.

The Kernel piece is titled “How Germans Do Escapism,” and it’s a worthwhile subject to ponder. Donovan points out that many of the people who enjoy the game are farmers themselves, and even ferrets out this fabulous quotation from GameStar.de: “I am fulfilling my childhood dream.” The kicker, of course, is that the man who offered up that explanation is himself a farmer.

Farming Simulator is made by UK computer game company Excalibur Publishing, which also publishes—I’m not making any of this up—Chemical Spillage Simulation, Airport Ground Crew Simulation, Road Construction Simulator, Camping Manager, Stone Quarry Simulator, and Underground Mining Simulator.
 

 
In America we favor GTA 5 and Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption, violent adventures in which the player is encouraged to “act out.” Donovan points out that Call of Duty in particular is notably unpopular in Germany. Remember, we often make fun of the Germans for being so martial. Maybe we need to rethink our assumptions here.

Here’s what I think. I think Americans like dull games as much as the Germans do. Donovan goes out of his way to present these Excalibur games as being essentially identical to the office life many of its players endure in the daytime, but anyone who has ever gotten addicted to The Sims has surely wondered why it was so important to keep the Sims’ goddamn plants alive even as the actual plant in the actual living room slowly turns brown. Lots of “action” games rely on very repetitive actions, such as reloading weapons, looting corpses for ammo, and the like. I can vividly remember playing Red Dead Redemption and spending untold hours scampering all over Cholla Springs and Tall Trees in search of plants like Hummingbird Sage and Wild Feverfew.

Why? Whether it’s Tetris, Farming Simulator, or Call of Duty, it’s all about the oxytocin hit. We like piling up accomplishments, and we like leveling up, it’s good for one’s self-image. I don’t want to play Farming Simulator, but I can understand its soothing appeal.

For the curious, here’s 24 goddamn minutes of someone baling hay in Farming Simulator 2013 to a driving dubstep-ish soundtrack:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Does ‘Dancing Outlaw’ Jesco White have a cameo in the new Grand Theft Auto?!?

 
If you haven’t heard, comedic genius Matt Berry (Snuff Box, The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace) has an outrageously funny new comedy series on Channel4 called Toast of London. It’s one of the most adventuresome comedies to debut on British television in some time. (What up with that BBC comedy commissioners?)

Sharply written by Berry and Father Ted‘s Arthur Matthews, the show revolves around the career and sexual exploits of one Steven Toast, a sleazy, egotistical middle-aged thespian. It’s pretty much the perfect role for Matt Berry and must have been a lot of fun to write. Berry told Radio Times that the character was inspired by some of the unsuccessful actors he met doing voiceover work.

It’s seriously funny stuff, jump on Toast of London right away.

Below, the Toast of London pilot from 2012