The current government shutdown has brought out the worst in the Republican Party and the pundits who align themselves with it. In a way I feel bad for regular, non-Tea Party Republicans—they’re faced with following some elusive notion of party loyalty even as most of them, possibly, are genuinely appalled by how radical the demands of the Tea Party have been. The Republican Party is (and has been for a while) the party of immediate gratification—they were happy enough to take over the House in 2010 on a head of Tea Party steam, but now they’re paying the rent on that move—and how. A savvier, more responsible party would have found a way to placate the batshit crazies on the fringe—instead they hoped to “use” them as a means for checking President Obama but now find themselves just as wigged out by where the Tea Party will take them as anybody.

At least that’s my read.

As the Beltway idiots argue about who caused the government shutdown and who’s being intransigent, in my mind it’s a settled issue. It’s sad to watch Bill Kristol on CNN try to argue that Obama’s unwillingness to open the World War II Memorial shows him to be the stubborn one. Obama has no true option—he must stand firm because the Tea Party/Republican Party has so often proven itself to be opportunistic negotiators who won’t hold to earlier promises. If Obama gives an inch, they’ll take a mile—that’s what Obama learned the last time we went through this. Curiously, Benjamin Wittes, the legal writer who helped convince President Bush to select John Roberts and Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, is having no difficulty figuring out who’s to blame—he says this is all the fault of the Republican Party. Pity that most CNN/New York Times journos can’t figure that out.

But let’s move from the current crisis to the next one. I’m referring to government default on the national debt, of course, which clearly is the next item on the agenda of the Tea Party. Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida’s 3rd district alarmed a great many people when he was quoted in The Washington Post on Friday as saying that “I think we need to have that moment where we realize [we’re] going broke. ... I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets.”  Business Insider has called this “the stupidest thing said about the debt ceiling.”
 

 
If you had any doubts about the Tea Party’s rabid insistence on the denial of reality and the recourse to potentially catastrophic solutions to … well… to problems as severe as a national deficit that’s been decreasing sharply over the last two years (at precisely the moment that the economy most needed stimulus) and the possibility of providing health care services to our nation’s uninsured in a way that too decreases the deficit—well, get a load of this.

Earlier today TPM reported that John Boehner’s press secretary, Michael Steel, sent out an email urging Democratic opinion-makers to emphasize the calamitous effects of a default, linking to this Bloomberg article.

You read that correctly: Boehner is so bewildered with what to do about the far right of his own party that he’s seeking help from Democrats in order to avert a catastrophe. He daren’t ask his own party members to do the same thing because they’ll just demand his ouster for ... well, for pointing out that a government default would be really bad for the country—and the entire world. Just yesterday Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was on Meet the Press reassuring viewers that a default would not be so bad, for which lefties Bob Somerby and Kevin Drum promptly chided him. That’s the context for Steel’s email—Democrats being insufficiently alarmist about the road to ruin Tea Party folks are hell-bent on taking this country on.

This ties into my overriding theory about John Boehner. I actually think he sees the current shutdown as part of a master plan to deal with the out-of-control GOP fringe. It’s likely that Boehner can properly disobey the Tea Party in a major way precisely one time. Once that happens, he’s out and most likely, Eric Cantor becomes the new Speaker of the House. I think Boehner is keeping that one rebuke in his pocket until the day that really counts—when the fight over defaulting on government debts happens.

Steel’s email is the icing on the cake. So take a moment and send the Great Orange One your prayers—he’s got an awfully tough lot, and, as annoying as he can be, I think he’s doing something genuinely patriotic here. And he’ll never get due credit for it.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Who’s (still) Afraid of the Big, Bad Republicans?
The nightmare (free market) scenario the GOP faces: THEY’RE A VERY BAD INVESTMENT

 
It isn’t so often that a song becomes singularly wedded to a specific movie or TV show. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” will forever be associated with the Sopranos finale. Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” now has David Lynch’s kinky stank all over it. And who can listen to Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” and not think of vivisecting an undercover cop after seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs?

We may have to add Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” and Breaking Bad to the list.

Last week (as you may have heard) the Breaking Bad series finale was broadcast, garnering an audience of 10 million viewers, an incredibly high figure in this splintered, post-Netflix era—especially for a smaller channel like AMC. And that audience, while not large compared to that of, say, the series finale of M*A*S*H, consists almost entirely of media-literate tastemakers with purchasing power.

Without spoiling even a single plot detail, the “outro” to the series was Badfinger’s “Baby Blue,” a catchy ditty that a good portion of the audience might not have heard before, a song that references regret but in a curiously upbeat way—and the damn thing even features the word “blue” in the chorus! The first line of the song is “Guess I got what I deserve,” and it’s impossible to hear the lines “Did you really think I’d do you wrong?” and not think of Walter White’s maniacal fidelity to his family or the apparent father-son bond he shares with Jesse Pinkman. As with so much else, Vince Gilligan and his colleagues chose very, very well.
 

 
Originally from Wales, Badfinger is famous for two things most of all: they were one of the first bands signed by the Beatles’ Apple Records label, and they were snakebitten by tragedy at every turn. The chaos stemming from the dissolution of Apple affected the band in myriad unfortunate ways; facing financial disaster, singer and songwriter Pete Ham hanged himself in 1975, cursing the band’s manager Stan Polley in his suicide note (“Stan Polley is a soulless bastard”). In 1983, with Badfinger income from the Apple era still in escrow, singer/bassist Tom Evans hanged himself as well. Stan Polley was to Badfinger what Allen Klein was to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the unscrupulous manager who mercilessly took advantage of the inherent naivete of pie-in-the-sky musician types.

By the Monday morning after the Breaking Bad finale, “Baby Blue” had been downloaded more than 5,000 times, according to Nielsen SoundScan—an uptick of almost 3,000 percent. Nielsen’s tracking week ends on Sunday night, so only the first few hours of the mad rush to download “Baby Blue” is represented in that week’s figures—it will surely chart higher in the following week, according to Bloomberg/BusinessWeek.

In the wake of the tragic suicides of Ham and Evans, the royalties accruing from Badfinger’s estate are today more fairly apportioned, according to a royalty and publishing payment agreement that was hammered out in court. For all songs released by Apple and Warner Brothers under the name Badfinger—this group includes “Baby Blue”—the main songwriter (most often Ham) or the main songwriter’s estate receives 32 percent of the publishing royalties and 25 percent of ASCAP’s songwriting royalties. The rest is divided equally among the band members and the group’s first manager, Bill Collins. Ham’s estate receives an annual income of about $150,000 unless something unusual happens, as when Mariah Carey covered “Without You” in 1994—Ham’s estate received more than half a million dollars that year.

It looks like 2013 will be another “unusual” year! It couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.
 
Have a listen to “Baby Blue” on YouTube (or even better, buy it!)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Maybe Tomorrow’: The Iveys’ 1969 album and the genesis of Badfinger

Not just a potato twice the height of the Rock of Gibralter… a sexy potato twice the height of the Rock of Gibralter

You may be familiar with Disney’s most famous World War Two propaganda, Der Fuehrer’s Face, in which Donald Duck dreams of an alternate life under Nazi rule. It’s weird, but not nearly as weird as Food Will Win the War. During both World War One and Two, the slogan, “Food will win the war,” was bandied about to both discourage food waste and encourage an increase in agricultural yields; the idea was that the U.S. needed to remain war-ready with a food surplus. In the film, however, the slogan is invoked more as a morale booster, and the result is a confusing mish-mash of messaging.

Instead of telling farmers to produce more and families to waste less, the narrator emphasizes our current glut of food, which is really counterintuitive to a message of prudence and industriousness. It’s as if the writers got so carried away with nationalist boasting, that they forgot the actual purpose of the film. Even more strangely, they demonstrate our surfeit of food by means of very strange scale comparisons.

For instance, did you know that if we had made all our wheat from 1942 into flour, we could bury every German tank in it? And if we had made it into spaghetti, we could weave from it a fashionably nationalistic sweater-vest to clothe the entire Earth! Why would you aspire to do such a thing, you ask? Why would we knit a celestial spaghetti sweater?!? Who cares! We’re America, fuck yeah!
 

Tom Cruise

Seriously, do you really want these people staring at you all day, every day?

Stallone

Britney Spears

Oasis

Andrew Garfield

Charlie Sheen

Twilight
 
More shitty celebrity wall art after the jump…

 
And really, that’s just a fraction of the charm in this charm-filled clip. Michael Parkinson’s interviews are always great (he did his research and showed genuine interest), but Davis is just electric. In addition to wearing her 67 years with the utmost chicness, she’s characteristically frank and bawdy—just how you want her to be. Davis always thought of herself as an actress first and a movie star second, but it’s strange to hear her talk so casually about “trying out” films early in her career. It’s stranger still to hear her belittle her undeniable beauty, with no trace of fishing. (Bette Davis did not fish for compliments.)

Speaking of her refusal to conform to the default Hollywood starlet mode, Davis quite bluntly refers to herself as a “meddler,” who had no problem arguing with the higher-ups over her career and presentation. And for anyone who thought Tinsel Town was ever a bastion of natural beauty, she bluntly declares that plastic surgery was a presence from the get-go. It’s really a lovely moment, hearing this broad talk about her early “dreadful” films with no shame, smoking cigarettes and holding her purse. The English audience even bursts into applause at her campy Cockney accent. How can you not love her?
 
Jump to the 24:29 mark to watch Davis:

 
“A certain magician may 100% believe in the existence of spirits or gods actually existing in the universe,” explains Adrian Dobbie, President of the Electoral College of the UK chapter of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis. “Or, if you do some magical evocation to summon a spirit of the Goetia and you communicate with it, that it is definitely a thing. And then there’s a whole other bunch of people, Crowley being one of them, who say, ‘actually these are simply properties of the mind.’ Personally”—he takes a pull on his pint—“I fall into the camp of the agnostic concerning whether these things exist.”

The two of us are sat in a very old pub in the City of London, near where Adrian works, surrounded by lawyers and bankers whose girth looks directly proportionate to their wealth—as if they got so fat literally eating money. For his part, the magician opposite me is a lean, healthy early forties, with short dark hair, a neat beard, and a ready wolfish smirk. (We have, unsurprisingly, picked out a quiet corner for our discussion.)

“The first solo ritual I ever did was very powerful to me,” he continues. “Because although I thought I’d rid myself of the whole Christian dogma—of a God in the sky who’s gonna punish me and all that stuff—the impact of that first, relatively innocuous ritual had on me was incredible. I thought: if the Bible is right I’m going to hell. That’s the line in the sand.”

A longtime Crowley reader and admirer, Adrian joined the OTO about a decade ago. I ask him about his first impressions—how the OTO’s 21st Century incarnation compared, say, to the Crowley heyday he must have grown up reading about…

“My initial experience was extremely positive. I was looking to contact the genuine article; I was looking for mentors, and I got that in spades. The OTO’s ‘heyday’ is today. When Crowley was alive, there was basically just one lodge in the whole world, and when he died there was still just a handful of people in the OTO—fifteen or thirty. Now, there’s over three thousand… But it’s nowhere near what it could be,” he concedes. “We’re still hiring community halls, and we’re still meeting in people’s houses. One of the biggest thing people have to overcome when they first get involved is a sense of disappointment. But that’s one of the first tests.”

Following our four-pints/interview, Adrian is nice enough to invite me to a Gnostic Mass in his native Brighton. (The official invitation attached to the email informs me that the ritual—designed by Crowley, and the organisation’s central rite—was to be preceded by a “TEDx” style talk!)

So, on an overcast September Sunday, I jump on a train from London, arriving in Brighton around midday. It is drizzling and cold. Stripped of her summer finery, the city feels provincial and drab, abandoned to its druggy intrigues for another nine months.

I may as well lay my cards on the table. Raised Catholic, and carrying a jangling jumble of latent Christian bric-a-brac, I prefer to remain precariously perched on the metaphysical fence. In short, I’m keen to cop a glimpse of a Gnostic Mass, but averse to actually nibbling some Cake of Light.

Regarding which, incidentally, I have other, altogether more mundane concerns…

A couple of days ago, I emailed a friend and mentioned my pending trip to Brighton. Their unexpected, seven-word response had read precisely thus: “DO NOT EAT THE CAKE OF LIGHT.” When I had inquired as to the source of such uncharacteristic upper-case vehemence, he had briefly responded that said cake reportedly included the priestess’s menstrual blood!

[Author’s Note: The OTO would like me stress that in fact the Cake of Light contains the merest homeopathic hint of this, shall we say, unorthodox ingredient. “A single drop of blood (which may be of any kind),” they write—sort of almost disappointingly really—“is mixed into the dough of one singular cake. That cake is then baked before being burned entirely to ash, which is then mixed into the dough of a batch that could make up to 50 or more cakes.” Your correspondent had imagined a kind of womb-drawn black pudding or occultnik yucky cookie. Which it very definitely is not. No occultists are ever harmed in the making of a Gnostic Mass.]
 

 
Quarter of an hour early, and frowning at my creased and printed map, I nervously shuffle up a gravel driveway running beneath a block of flats corseted in scaffolding. I’m early. At the end of the driveway less than half a dozen men are standing around outside the entrance of a small faux-Victorian community center.

Before I even reach them I can already hear the tripwires in my psyche (and stomach) a-twanging.

Adrian isn’t about, but I mention his name and introductions are made. This is a special, invitational Gnostic Mass, and a couple, like me, are invitees (though presumably bona fide neophytes rather than tremulous hacks). At least one seems a little nervous, while the OTO initiates—mostly middle aged men with either long hair or none, each with unusually pale blue eyes—inspect us with that slightly salacious curiosity with which people on one side of an experience examine those at its verge.

In the pub Adrian had referred to magick as “psychological transgression.” I can see what he means! The atmosphere is a distinct mixture of the religious and the illicit—as if we were all here for an afternoon of metaphysical dogging.

More people start to arrive, men and women now of varying ages and types. Adrian, our priest, emerges from the community hall along with our priestess, a beautiful Eastern European with dark eyes and darker jewelry. I smile and nod and shake hands, leaning up against a parked car and feeling disingenuously attired in the guise of a prospect.

A thickset guy perhaps in his early thirties, with protuberant features and a hoodie baring a Crowley sigil, strikes up some conversation. He seems simultaneously affable and sly, and describes a weekend that has taken him from Glastonbury to London to Brighton, conducting various initiations. “We have a saying here,” he says matter-of-factly, fishing out a prepackaged sandwich. “No-one’s going to teach you but there’s lots of people who will help you learn.” He tucks in. It’s cheese and onion, and with each dizzying bite it occurs to me that, given the choice between this and Cake of Light, I might very well plonk for the latter.

“The tech,” he mutters (I think—?), “is powerful.”

“The tech?”

He looks at me, a little incredulously.

“The magick. The magick is very powerful. You might leave with a big smile on your face and you don’t know where it’s come from, or you might not get anything for a couple of days. But you’ll get something.”

“I was kind of hoping just to observe. Is it obligatory to participate?”

He gives me a very close look. It enters me like a stick gauging the depth of the water.

“Everyone,” he says, firmly, “is expected to take the sacrament.”

Shit.

He slips off, leaving me to freak out. I’m feeling as conspicuous as the copper in The Wicker Man

To my left stands a rather dapper old hippy with bright white beard and hair. I seem to remember being introduced to him as a fellow guest. We nod at one another.

“So,” I ask, venturing some occult small talk, “is this your first Gnostic Mass?”

“No, but it is my first for maybe… fifteen years.”

“Why the wait?”

“Oh,” he says, narrowing his (very blue) eyes. “I haven’t been waiting at all.”

Hail Mary, full of grace

I’m just readying myself to go scrambling back up the drive, pebbles pinging off my kicking heels, when the rain picks up, and the congregation, now thirty strong, begins to file into the community hall. And, against my better judgment, I file in along with them.

Within the twee, cake-sale space, an OTO temple has been installed – an effect both amusingly incongruous and disturbing, like an Alsatian mounting a poodle. I clock an embroidered checkerboard, Eye of Horus and nosediving dove, but much seems to be “occluded” in anticipation of the mass (we have, remember, that “TEDx-style” talk scheduled first)—what looks like an alter peeps out above a thick purple curtain.

Chairs have been laid out in rows before a little lectern, which Adrian presently ascends for the oration.

“There’s been a lot of speculation,” he begins, “about this being some kind of big OTO recruitment drive or something like that. So I just want to clear this up right away… it absolutely is.”

The room cracks up. Adrian, in his hyper-articulate fashion, talks Crowley, the OTO, and religious freedom for half an hour. The atmosphere, to be sure, is pretty dense—I’m certainly feeling the tech—and I sit desperate to leave but pinned to my seat by a combination of politeness and self consciousness.

Following the talk a loose-limbed discussion ensues, until the seated priestess starts catching Adrian’s eye and tapping her wrist. I try to remember if, in the Inferno, Virgil ever sweeps a hand across a burning lake of yelping Englishmen, nonchalantly explaining to Dante how “these dickheads managed to damn themselves out of social awkwardness.” Any second, I guess, the Gnostic Mass will get underway, they’ll break out the Cake of Light, and it’ll be even harder to leave.

“Right everyone,” says Adrian, taking the priestess’s visual cue. (This, I suppose, is it. Open wide.) “We’re going to have a short break now, while we get everything ready for the Gnostic Mass.”

Hallelujah! The rain has let up, and about three quarters of the congregation shuffles back outside for a pre-prandial cigarette and chat, while the remaining occultists busy themselves rearranging the chairs, pulling back the curtains, and preparing the hall. I goosestep over them, making a beeline for an amused and bemused Adrian, who I shower in incoherent apologies before hightailing it back to London…
 

 

 
After Edward Snowden’s shocking revelations about the depth of NSA surveillance were published in The Guardian and other outlets earlier this year, wondering just who is watching you and how is something that a whole lot more of us are doing. We now take it for granted that the NSA is reading our emails and tracking our movements via our smartphones. One way to protect ourselves is to use camouflage, to baffle security cams and common software such as Facebook’s facial recognition program, which makes tagging your face and the faces of your friends in your uploaded pictures much easier.

Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic has a terrific post about radical-fashion techniques to counteract such software—techniques that include misleading garb, face paint, and wacky haircuts. We don’t anticipate that everyone will turn to these tactics, but a select few may find them very useful in subverting central control (however defined). Best of all, the techniques are a subset of camouflage known as “razzle dazzle”—actually, most of the time it’s called just “dazzle”—these techniques were first developed by the U.S. and British navies during World War I. As Wikipedia explains, “dazzle works not by offering concealment but by making it difficult to estimate a target’s range, speed and heading.”
 

The U.S.S. West Mahomet, 1918
 

“Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool,” Edward Wadsworth, 1919

Amsterdam-based designer Simone C. Niquille—who, appropriately, has obscured her face on her LinkedIn picture—has developed some intriguing shirts that can prevent people from being recognized by facial-recognition software. The trick? Put pictures of famous people all over it. Hell, it isn’t all that different from fashionable tops that aren’t designed to evade facial recognition.
 

 
Adam Harvey invented the term “CV dazzle” (computer vision dazzle) to describe some of his work, which includes clothing, but he has also developed makeup and hair style techniques as well, as seen below.
 

 
Here, Jillian Mayer teaches you some practical guidelines on how to apply CV dazzle makeup on your own:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Whisker Wars’ - the world of competitive facial hair
New Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets

 
Before he settled in to his current incarnation as a neck-tatted steampunk junkie purveyor of industrialized speed-metal for dimwitted bros, Al Jourgensen was a genuine innovator in post-punk synthpop and industrial music. The consensus narrative of his main band Ministry’s career trajectory holds that after an early anglophile period that’s as big of a let’s-pretend-it-didn’t-happen embarrassment to most their fans as Pablo Honey is to Radiohead snobs, the band really got started with the industrial dance masterpiece Twitch. From there, three breathtaking and influential albums of increasingly unparalleled aggression appeared, Land of Rape & Honey, Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, and Psalm 69, which brought Ministry to an acutely mid-‘90s alterna-fame, whereupon they proceeded to dive more or less headfirst into metal, and, depending on your particular bent, either totally, fist-pumpingly FUCKIN’ RAWKED BRAH or descended into a spiral of cartoonish self-parody and never released another listenable recording ever again ever.

The consensus narrative has a point about Twitch. It WAS a huge leap over their debut, With Sympathy (listen to the full LP on YouTube here), to the point where it sounds like a totally different band (Ministry was by that point basically Jourgensen’s solo project), and compares extraordinarily well against the touchstones of its genre. Compare its single “Over the Shoulder” with the benchmark dance hit “Sensoria” by industrial founding fathers Cabaret Voltaire.
 

 
But largely because of that leap, With Sympathy remains Ministry’s early shame in the eyes of a lot of fans, and its creator, as well. Jourgensen has repeatedly disavowed the album, saying he wanted a harder sound, but that his vision was compromised by label interference and pop production. And every time he says that, eyes roll back in their sockets, and you wish he’d quit pretending he was born a cowboy-hat-and-facial-piercings hardass and just own his early work.

However, listening to live tracks from the band’s first incarnation - Jourgensen, drummer Steven “Stevo” George, and keyboardists Robert Roberts and John Davis - you really have to allow that the man has a point. The live band is sharp where the album is tepid, anxious where the album languishes. Sympathy has always had its defenders, and however fey it may seem in comparison to the work of Jourgensen’s enduring fame, it’s an important document in American post-punk. But good God, it could have been so, SO much better.
 

 
Much of the best live material that can be readily found from that era of the band has been uploaded by YouTube user TheRobSquaredShow, who, unsurprisingly, turns out to be early band member Robert Roberts. Roberts has also let slip an eye-opening CDR rarity called The Scam Lies Down On Fraudway, a recording of a 1982 Chicago concert that features KILLER versions of Sympathy tracks “Effigy” and “Revenge,” plus the very early single “I’m Falling” and its 12”  flipside “Primental.” Sadly, that recording is nowhere to be found online as of this writing - hell, evidence of its existence doesn’t seem to have found its way to the Internet yet - but what is there on Roberts’ channel is the band’s earliest known live recording. The early band comes off as caustic, headstrong and confident, and far more in line with the thorniness of the post-punk synth a-list than attempted radio singles like “Work For Love” would suggest. Credit drummer Steven George with a lot of that - few enough synth bands harnessed the energy of a live drummer, and it’s to Jourgensen’s credit that Ministry did. (It remains a major demerit that Jourgensen sang in an affected British accent so preposterous that Billie Joe Armstrong can almost be forgiven.)
 

 
For a treasure trove of information on Ministry’s earliest years, check out Roberts’ detailed interview on prongs.org. And while you’re devouring that info, enjoy “Same Old Madness,” the video for a terrific early track that, astonishingly, seems to have never had an official release.
 

 
Fans of Ministry’s late incarnation may be interested to know - if you already didn’t - that their new album, From Beer To Eternity, was released last month, and due to the death of longtime guitarist Mike Scaccia, it will evidently be the band’s last.

 
These little cards and advertisements that Sun Ra had printed up during his Chicago days in the 1950s are fantastic.
 

 
Note that the DRexel telephone number is different on this one, by one digit:

 

 

 
Possibly he didn’t have this ticket printed up, but it’s still nice:

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Sun Ra on Detroit TV, 1981
‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ ala Sun Ra and his Arkestra

Art: Guy Peellaert/Kristian Hoffman.
 
Artist, actress, rock ‘n’ roller and pop culture surrealist Ann Magnuson has written an open letter so brilliant in execution and so fucking true (Antonin Artaud is cheering in his grave) that it may shame open letter writers into burning their keyboards and reducing their deafening inconsequential tweets to an occasional emergency chirp.

Ann posted this on her Facebook page, a site from which she had once been banished for acts of artistic subversion and celebration.

Open Letter to an Open Letter,

With immense respect,
Ann Magnuson