Well, would you look at that, another anti-gay Republican has just been outed…
Mike Rogers is the Managing Director of The Raw Story and the director of the Netroots Nation Netroots Connect program. Yesterday, after GOP Sen. John Barrasso denounced Obamacare during an appearance on Fox News, Rogers tweeted:
Mike Rogers, it should be noted, has a perfect record in such matters. He’s exposed several anti-gay conservatives such as Congressmen Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Dreier, Edward Schrock and former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, who ran George Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004.
Barrasso, a twice-married Presbyterian with three children, has voted against the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. He has also bragged about his votes against gay marriage.
Said Barrasso in 2004: “I believe in limited government, lower taxes, less spending, traditional family values, local control and a strong national defense. In the state Senate, in addition to receiving an ‘A’ rating from the NRA, I have voted for prayer in schools, against gay marriage and have sponsored legislation to protect the sanctity of life.”
Lucky for Barrasso, this news came in the midst of all of the Breaking Bad / impending reichwing government shutdown media hoopla. That hasn’t stopped mention of Rogers’ allegation from making it to Barrasso’s Wikipedia page already.
Below, Barrasso, himself a physician, delivers a GOP radio address against Obamacare. I’d love to know if this Republican hypocrite is opposed to the Affordable Care Act in the same “principled” manner that he is against gay rights?
Augustin Lesage (1876-1954) was a French coal miner who became a self-taught spiritualist artist. He was possibly also schizophrenic.
He began painting in 1912 at age thirty-five a year after hearing a voice while working in a coal mine in northern France. The disembodied voice told him “Un jour, tu seras peintre” (“One day, you will be a painter.”)
Already a spiritualist, while Lesage was experimenting with communicating with spirits during seances and through automatic writing, spirits reassured him that the voice he heard had been real. The voice returned and soon instructed him not only to become an artist but what specific art supplies to buy, where to find them, and what to paint. He believed that his works were dictated by spirits, specifically Leonardo da Vinci, Marius of Tyana, Apollonius of Tyana, or Marie, his little sister who died at the age of three.
A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World,1923
A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World, 1925
Before I start to paint I never have any idea as to what I want to portray. I never have an overview of the entire work at any point of the execution. My guides tell me : ‘Do not try to understand what you’re doing.’ I surrender to their impulse.
After World War I he found a patron in Jean Meyer, the director of the Spiritualist journal La Revue Spirite and was able to quit working in the coal mine. He spent all of his time painting until his eyesight failed shortly before his death.
Many of his works, as well as others from the “Art Brut” (rough art) movement, are at the Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art in Villeneuve d’Ascq, France.
Untitled, oil on canvas
Christian Delacampagne wrote (translated by blogger Emily Ann Pothast):
The first large painting of Augustin Lesage is one of the most daring in modern art. Although not, strictly speaking, non-figurative (figures both architectural and anthropomorphic abound), it explores almost all possibilities of abstraction — lyrical as well as geometric — at a time when the latter, among professional artists, was still in its infancy. They are no less ornamental and decorative than the works of Kandinsky, Lesage’s spiritual contemporary. Indeed, is the distance so great between the the Theosophy dear to the Russian artist and the Spiritualism embraced by the French? The former hearkens to Rudolf Steiner, the latter to Léon Denis.
Augustin Lesage, un messager de Dieu pas comme les autres (Augustin Lesage, a messenger of God like no other):
If you’re impatient with the hypocrisy of politicians and media figures and you’re not reading Salon’s Alex Pareene, well, you really should be. Having specialized of late in a distinctive,no-holds-barred, high-octane brand of takedown of those who most need taking down, he may be the only writer at Salon worth reading. (The topic’s lost interest, of course, but you can get a big taste of his sensibility in his Rude Guide to Mitt, released during the 2012 campaign.)
So it was quite a thrill to learn that Pareene paid the studios of CNBC a visit last Friday. I avoid CNBC due their insufferably warped and platitudinous self-regard, all of which would be quite well and good if they weren’t such blatant shills for the New Gilded Age and everything connected with it. One of the most objectionable things about the Wall St. mentality, quite apart from the occasional bouts of economy-destroying greed and dishonesty, is the smug assurance that they and they alone understand how the world works and that every other yardstick available can easily be shown to be wanting by reference to the massive piles of cash in the vicinity.
Pareene is precisely the person from whom the likes of CNBC most needs to hear—not that they are actually capable of hearing him. His visit was a masterpiece of unintentional black comedy—I would compare it to Sasha Baron Cohen, but Pareene scarcely had to say anything to elicit oodles of ill-considered, self-justificatory blather. Just a few intimations to the effect that Jamie Dimon, having admitting that the company of which he is CEO, JPMorgan Chase, will probably have to pay untold billions of dollars in fines, has likely demonstrated himself to be unfit to run such an important firm, and the other panelists, Dimon apologists all, could hardly restrain themselves from blustering that clearly Pareene didn’t understand anything and look at all the money JPMorgan Chase is generating and don’t stockholders all like that sort of thing?
There’s no better or more economical way of witnessing “the divide between the finance media bubble and the normals,” as Kevin Roose tweeted, than by watching the video below. The interview started with the following exchange and just got better and better once they let some Fortune employee named Duff McDonald open his yap.
Maria Bartiromo: Alex, to you first. Legal problems aside, JP Morgan remains one of the best, if not the best performing major bank in the world today. You believe the leader of that bank should step down?
Alex Pareene: I think that any time you’re looking at the greatest fine in the history of Wall Street regulation, it’s really worth asking should this guy stay in his job. In any other industry — I can’t think of another industry. If you managed a restaurant, and it got the biggest health department fine in the history of restaurants, no one would say “Yeah, but the restaurant’s making a lot of money. There’s only a little bit of poison in the food.”
The best thing about the clip is that Pareene has the good sense not to be bothered by the inanity of his co-panelists—he just smiles and brushes it off.
Two more quick observations and then I’ll leave you to enjoy this masterpiece of satire-in-action. First, after McDonald hears the above exchange, he instantly sneers that Pareene “obviously got attention with this article,” as if Pareene is some opportunistic stringer looking to make his name—uh, Duff, who the fuck do you think you’re talking about? Alex Pareene writes brilliantly scathing (and very difficult to controvert) articles about all sorts of people in the media and political worlds—that’s just what he does, and he’s damn good at it.
Second: there’s something rather touching about Maria Bartiromo’s snorts of contempt directed at The New York Times about halfway through: The poor woman actually thinks that she works for a news organization!
As someone who has collected many a Neil Young bootleg over the years—especially on video—I’m of the opinion that this B&W pro-shot performance from 1976 is one of the very best. Watch it now, it probably won’t be there for long.
Taped during four shows at London’s Hammersmith Odeon that were part of Young’s Europe and Japan tour with Crazy Horse (the music video for “Like a Hurricane” with the famous fan blowing Neil’s hair furiously, as seen in Year of the Horse was shot at one of these shows). A fellow named Tony Fahy was in attendance at all four shows and had this to say in a few consecutive Facebook posts back in 2011 on the Thrasher’s Wheat (a great Neil Young blog) page back in 2011:
Tony Fahy: I was at this gig in Hammersmith. All four in fact! 3 on the last three days of March and the fourth on the 1st April 1976. Best set of gigs I was ever at.
[T]here was a huge fan to the side of the stage, that Neil would just lean into when he played lead. He actually balanced against this ‘hurricane.’ If the fan had been turned off, he would have fallen on his face! The fan was about 5 feet in circumference…if my memory isn’t fooling me. I took a pic, which is still the best I’ve ever seen of Neil leaning in…
There was another guy who was there the first three nights he shouted out for Neil to sing: “I am a child’. Finally on the last night a very loud ‘I AM A CHILD’ was heard all over the theatre….Neil said dryly into the microphone: “Me too, man!”
In those days, there were no bouncers and immediately after the last gig, I waited till the crowd had gone, climbed up on the stage only to run straight into Neil! Had a long chat with him and somehow had the nerve to ask him why he had never played Ireland. He said to me that they had considered it back in Hamburg, but because of what they were reading in the paper about what was going on in Ireland, that they wouldn’t play there!
I said to him: (wherever I got the nerve from): ‘Neil, you should listen to your own songs more!’ ‘I guess you’re right at that’ he said. The next European tour, he did play Ireland. I often wondered if I’d played a part!
Here’s a pic Tony took of Neil leaning into the fan.
The songs included here are “Tell Me Why,” “Stringman,” “Human Highway,” a strong “Down By The River” and then an outstanding rip through “Cortez The Killer.” At the end, the famous clip of Neil Young busking in Glasgow is tacked on.
Neil Young’s “people” are usually super aggressive with YouTube takedowns, so watch this while you can.
And just because I’m feeling nice today, here’s another amazing document of Neil Young from 1976: “The Complete Joel Bernstein Tapes.” Joel Bernstein, as every Neil Young fan knows is Young’s biggest fan and longtime archivist. During the acoustic tour in fall of that year supporting Zuma, Bernstein collected the tour’s very best performances from the set list. Eventually, probably on purpose, the compilation he made “escaped” and became one of the most famous Neil Young bootlegs. The full set list is here.
Fifteen-year-old, John Lennon McCullagh was one of the first signings to Alan McGee’s new label 359 Music. At the time of his signing, McGee said of the singer:
“John is an amazing talent for such a young kid! To be honest, he’s just a natural!“
But it’s not just his record label who are enthusing about this prodigious young talent, John has been receiving rave reviews for his live performances, and has been described as a teenage Bob Dylan, which even led Courtney Love to ask:
“Who is this 15-year-old kid doing Dylan better than Dylan?”
Singer/writer/author John Robb has also been equally impressed and wrote the following appraisal on his music and culture blog Louder Than War:
You know when you hear someone really good that it blows you way- it transcends influences and decades and makes something old sound brand new?
John Lennon McCullagh is a prodigiously talented 15-year-old who has got that early Dylan folk blues thing so down that it sounds like a lost demo of some American troubadour of the times that we don’t know about yet. With a middle name like ‘Lennon’ you really are going to have to be able to back it up and he does.
Don’t take their words for it, have a listen to the stunning first single from John Lennon McCullagh “North-South Divide.”
Pulp! The Classics publishes classic works of literature with retro-pulp fiction covers. The books are redesigned and reset with the original texts, while the covers mash-up images of such Hollywood stars as Marilyn Monroe as Tess of the D’Ubervilles, and Humphrey Bogart as Heathcliffe on the cover of Wuthering Heights. Others include Colin Firth as D’Arcy in Pride and Prejudice, Alistair Sim as Scrooge, Ryan Gosling as Dorian Gray, and Alan Ladd/Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby.
The covers were painted by David Mann, who explains the story behind the covers on the Waterstone’s Blog. Here he explains his cover for Thomas Hardy’sTess of the D’Ubervilles:
This version is a second attempt. Watch what you say about the body because that’s my wife! No seriously, that’s my wife. The head is that of a famous Hollywood sex object from the olden days. There was going to be a rustic pipe dangling from her mouth in keeping with Tess’s agrarian credentials. However somebody at the New York Times (fancy!) made the suggestion of a bottle of whisky and a smattering of pain killers. No pain killers (leaning too much towards MM reference), but here’s the whiskey…. with a comedy straw. My personal favourite of the covers.
This cover was originally painted only as a sample for the publisher, but ended up being published on the first Pulp! The Classics. I used a photo of Colin Firth to paint from, as I felt that he’s still the definitive Mr Darcy for most people, the aim was to produce a Colin Firth-esque visage, not necessarily a bang-on portrait. I’ve subsequently been told it looks just like him/ nothing like him / a bit like him / just like myself!
The cover is a pastiche of the old Alan Ladd movie poster (but you knew that right?). I’ve made the cross-reference to Robert Redford in the head area.
Another mash up, featuring Alistair Sim’s mug, but the body is courtesy of Googling ‘scrooge’ . My rendering features the threat of a possible ultra-violent outcome, for increased comic effect.
I love watching old commentary on punk rock as a social phenomenon, especially in the staid, square format of conventional TV news. When they get it wrong, it’s usually an attempt at sensationalism, moralist hysteria or some such “kids these days” sentiment. Old people panicking (or attempting to incite panic) about youth culture is almost always amusing in retrospect.
But it’s even more of a trip when they get it right.
This spot isn’t a probing exposé on The Damned (nor does it have the best visual quality, sorry), but the segment actually gives a fairly astute assessment of punk rock as an exploitable business opportunity. In addition to giving a decent description of punk’s appeal to working-class British kids, the piece is genuinely insightful about the relationships between capitalism, identity, youth, and “authenticity.” You can actually hear concern in the narrator’s oh-so-sober-and-respectable tone as he bemoans that “it is now possible to buy a gold safety pin for up to $100 to go with a hand-ripped t-shirt, that sells for $16.”
And those are 1977 dollars, folks! It stinks that the vid cuts out early, because it’s honestly kind of heartwarming to hear the narrator differentiate between fashion-plates and “true believers.” There’s a sweetness to this sort of mildly cynical anti-capitalist commentary; the idea that art shouldn’t have to be contaminated by profit motives is a noble one, and one that I still kind of believe in, after a few drinks. As absurd as it is, that Urban Outfitters jacket is nothing new. Art, rebellion, and youth culture get marketed as soon as the opportunistic catch a whiff, and all we can do is remember it’s the natural order of things, have a laugh, and try not to roll our eyes too hard.
Before embarking on her massively successful solo career as the best female blue-eyed soul singer of all time, Dusty Springfield (Mary O’Brien) was in a folk-pop trio, The Springfields, from 1960 to 1963. The other two members, her brother Tom (Dion O’Brien) and Tim Feild, had started out performing as a duo, The Kensington Squares. When Dusty left her own vocal trio The Lana Sisters to join her brother’s group, they adopted Springfield as their collective stage surname one day after rehearsing on a sunny spring day. Feild, now a Sufi teacher and writer called Reshad Feild, left the group due to his wife’s ill health and was replaced by Mike Hurst in 1962. Before Dusty was associated with Motown, Carole King, and Burt Bacharach, she was busy toiling away in the same genre as Peter, Paul, and Mary.
The Springfields were popular in the U.K., with successful charting singles on Phillips Records: “Breakaway,” “Bambino,” “Island of Dreams,” “Say I Won’t Be There,” and “Come On Home.” They stood out among their peers in the folk-heavy pre-beat music era. “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” reached the Top 20 in the U.S. about a year and a half before the official British Invasion. The Springfields recorded their 1963 album Folk Songs from the Hills in Nashville, where Dusty discovered and fell in love with American soul music.
Popular music in the years immediately before The Beatles began recording was, in many ways, a dismal wasteland. After discovering soul, it’s not hard to believe that Dusty found the folk-pop genre restricting. Her strong personal style evolved during The Springfields’ career, so that in the movieIt’s All Over Now she looks and sounds like the iconic, easily recognizable Dusty.
The Springfields made many appearances on British television and had their own variety-show series in 1961, two episodes of which were released on Goin’ Back: The Definitive Dusty Springfield box set.
The original trio broke up in 1963 when Dusty left, following a farewell performance on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Mike Hurst, now a producer, created a new version of the group in 2011 with two new members, Marina Berry and Andy Marlow.
NOTE: The following is SUPER-SPOILERIFFIC. Seriously. If you haven’t already seen at least Season 4 of Breaking Bad, you are urged to stop reading now.
Even with the above disclaimer, I’m going to be circumspect here. As Season 4 of Breaking Bad drew to a close, one of the plot points generated a fair bit of discussion among the show’s fans. In what Clive Thompson called “a great example of modern talmudic video-parsing via Tivo and Youtube,” a YouTube user named Jcham979—apparently the real-life identity of that user is still not known—cracked one of the central puzzles of Season 4 a few days before the airing of “Face Off,” the Season 4 finale, on October 9, 2011, posting an intelligent and carefully argued case positing a particular theory of the action. By the time the episode was over, Breaking Bad‘s viewership had been treated to a shocking revelation—but Jcham979, at least, wasn’t surprised.
A video like Jcham979’s is emblematic of what it is to be a devoted fan of a TV series today. It isn’t just the shows anymore, it’s recaps and online communites poring over every relevant detail. The shows are now clearly being made with this mode of consumption in mind.
We at Dangerous Minds wish all of Breaking Bad‘s fans a satisfying conclusion to the series tonight!
Here’s the remarkable Eartha Kitt absolutely slaying some of Cole Porter’s greatest lyrics in “Let’s Do It” with a minimum of effort, provenance unknown.
I can’t think of a performer today who has anything remotely like Kitt’s assurance and presence.
