FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Fake dominatrix tricks ‘slaves’ into doing her farm work!
09.27.2013
12:50 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
Earlier this month an amusing police incident was reported in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard. Sometime last year, in the Austrian province of Lower Austria, a 35-year-old farmer and mother of two needed some work done on her farm, so she devised a rather creative way to get the labor she needed: she went online and solicited her services as a dominatrix. “Instead of providing pleasurable pain,” wrote Der Standard, “the men who had responded to the ad were put to work mowing grass while wearing rubber masks and stacking wood naked.” News reports prominently featured the term Arbeitssklaven, or “work slaves.”

At some point one of the men went to the police to file a complaint for fraud. A police spokesman stated, “We have identified two to three counts of illegal prostitution.” The police report refers to “15 submissive men,” one of whom apparently financed a roof extension on the farm!

Some wags commenting online in the Der Standard article thread wondered whether any fraud could truly be said to have taken place…. good point! Another commenter suggested that Ulrich Seidl, the Austrian movie director who recently completed an acclaimed trilogy called Paradise: Love / Faith / Hope that cast a particularly critical eye at Austrian life, may just have found the subject for his next movie.

The woman said that it was her husband’s idea.

via Spiegel Online

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Shame Wave: Greg Barris and the Dominatrix
Music Drives Me Crazy: Austrian Space Disco Band Ganymed

Posted by Martin Schneider
|
09.27.2013
12:50 pm
|
J. G. Ballard: A gallery of 1980s book covers
09.27.2013
11:51 am
Topics:
Tags:

0011jgbrisecrash.jpg
 
James Marsh designed these iconic covers for J. G. Ballard’s novels in 1985. His style, a mix of Surrealism/Futurism/Art Deco and Allen Jones-ish fetishism, certainly captured something of the themes contained in Ballard’s beautifully constructed fictions.

I had quite a few of these (and most of the David Pelham’s Penguins), as they were eminently collectible. Marsh also supplied memorable covers for Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing, Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter and Lewis Carroll.

Amongst my favorites here are the instantly recognizable covers for Crash, Hello America and the beautiful one he did for The Crystal World. If you look closely, you will also note a small portrait of Ballard contained within the rear-view mirror for Concrete Island.

These images were uploaded by Wire-Frame, and there is a fabulous collection of other covers on his or her Flickr page. There is also a good article over at Ballardian on the artwork for Ballard’s novels.

More on James Marsh can be found here.
 
0022jgblowcraftameri.jpg
 
0033jgbconcislatroexhi.jpg
 
More images of the near future, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
09.27.2013
11:51 am
|
‘The He-Man Woman Haters Club’ of literature classes
09.27.2013
11:14 am
Topics:
Tags:


“Peace is Tough,” Jamie Reid

And the University of Toronto R.J. Gumby Chair in Literature goes to…..

Canadian novelist David Gilmour (author of Sparrow Nights, The Perfect Order of Things) teaches a literature class at Victoria College at the University of Toronto. Note that he is not Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, although you have to wonder if he has ever used a fake British accent and pretended to be the other David Gilmour (like this guy) just to get laid, taking into consideration his rather low opinion of women (see below).

Gilmour teaches a class about only authors he personally enjoys and knows well. Fair enough. That’s what happens in academia. I should know, since I have to regularly endure unavoidable social events where I hear about this or that academic’s pet mania ad nauseum to the point where I consider committing homicide with flatware.

So I’m used to hearing about entire centuries of writers or historical events written off as meaningless if they do not fall into a professor or adjunct’s personal expertise. But I hadn’t heard about an entire gender (well, except for radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly’s classes at Boston College that men weren’t allowed to take) and an array of sexual orientations written off completely in one class until yesterday.

Dammit, David Gilmour doesn’t like female writers… with the kind of condescending exception of Virginia Woolf.

He told Random House Canada’s Hazlitt magazine:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

“What Would John Wayne Read?”

Okay, so no women of any sexual orientation whatsoever. And specifically no bisexual or gay men (but maybe, just maybe, ones who look, sound, and act like “guy-guys”). 

But what about manly gay writers? Where do they fit into the curriculum? Walt Whitman, Gore Vidal, Robert Bly, Thom Gunn, or Augusten Burroughs? Does Jack Kerouac get excluded because, although he played football, he had a fling with Gore Vidal? Do butch lesbians (like Gertrude Stein) count? What about transgender writers like Leslie Feinberg?

What if a woman is straight but presents as masculine and likes guns, booze, and fishing like Hemingway did? Or does bro-ishness not save us? What if, say, a gay writer is not yet officially “out” but is posting personals ads looking for DL anonymous sex with other married men in the Lowe’s Home Improvement men’s bathroom? Does he qualify as an acceptable writer, if everyone who knows him thinks he is heterosexual??? Which basically means, you can be a passably straight gay but not a “fag”? (Sorry, Quentin.)

gilmourclass
Novelist David Gilmour busily crushing the literary career dreams of several vagina owners—who appear to be the majority of students—in his class in 2011

In all seriousness, Gilmour can still be a good novelist while having obnoxious opinions and saying things in interviews that make him come off as ridiculous and petty. He doesn’t have to be a likeable guy to have talent. I still wouldn’t want to have a beer with him.

Maureen Johnson wrote in response to Gilmour’s doozy of an interview:

Literature is kind of full of assholes.

And that is okay. Some great books have been written by assholes. I am looking at my shelf and it is full of beloved books by known assholes, and that’s fine. Assholism is one of the most common afflictions of literature. Certainly literature and writing programs are full of them. They are like wildlife refuges for assholes.

—snip—

I will continue to read the works of assholes. I do not discriminate. We all have our faults, and there is good in everyone. And you can be an asshole in life and somehow distill something good and pure by pushing it through the grit in your system.

Below, “man” of the hour, David Gilmour, not exactly oozing machismo, with his son, discussing The Film Club:

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
|
09.27.2013
11:14 am
|
T-Rextasy: Dinosaur-on-Girl romance novels are apparently a ‘thing’ now
09.27.2013
10:43 am
Topics:
Tags:

T-Rex Troubles
T-Rex Troubles

Christie Sims is the foremost practitioner and almost certainly the founder of a new literary genre: “Dinosaur Beast Erotica.” It seems likely that she is the only practitioner of the genre, but give it time. Over the past year or so, Sims has flooded Amazon’s Kindle Store and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Book section with dozens of curious ebooks for sale, several of them centering on sex with dinosaurs. (Alara Branwen is credited as coauthor on all the volumes I checked—I checked a bunch of them—but it seems that Sims is the main author.)

But that’s not all—Sims hardly limits herself to actual beasts from the historical past. In addition to sex with T-Rex, she’s written erotica about imaginary monsters including gryphons, orcs, weretigers, wargs, centaurs, and many more.

Here’s Sims’ author statement from the Kindle Store:

Hi! I’m just a plain old, everyday Midwestern girl that lives a normal life. However, while my outward tastes are relatively simple, my inner thoughts are filled with lusty thoughts of big, strong, powerful monsters having their way with beautiful maidens.

It all raises so many questions…. I assume the Institute for Creation Research looks on these books with favor? Or maybe not, because as upstanding religious folk they disapprove of interspecies sex? I must know more!

I guess I could always sign up to Alara Branwen’s newsletter…..
 
Mating with the Raptor
Mating with the Raptor
 
After the jump, a few of Sims’ non-dinosaur titles….

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
09.27.2013
10:43 am
|
The ‘Invisible Hand’ of the free market flips ‘Atlas Shrugged’ trilogy the bird
09.26.2013
08:33 pm
Topics:
Tags:


Who gives a shit?

After the unfettered free market showed with extraordinary clarity that nobody gave a shit about the crappy Atlas Shrugged movies, its producers are on Kickstarter to finance the third installment. Per Filmdrunk’s Vince Mancini:

According to Ayn Rand’s most fervant fanboys – Shruggalos, as I like to call them – Atlas Shrugged, her 1139-page anti-collectivist screed about what would happen if society’s movers and shakers decided not to work (shrugged, if you will) remains as relevant today as it was when it was published during the days of Mao and Khrushchev in 1957.

When Shruggalos John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow couldn’t get socialist Hollywood to follow through with making an Atlas Shrugged movie, they produced it themselves, releasing it on tax day in 2011, when it earned $4.6 million on a $20 million budget. A second installment made $3.3 million in 2012, and now the producers are on Kickstarter raising money for a third installment, Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt?, with a video featuring celebrity Shruggalos Dennis Miller, Sean Hannity, John Stossel, Penn Jillette, Glenn Beck, and that one fat guy with no forehead. WHO’S LOOKING FOR HANDOUTS NOW, PAULTARDS?!?

At least, that’s what they want the story to be. They’re basically financing the $10 million movie themselves again, but they’re using the $250,000 Kickstarter campaign as a publicity stunt, since no one paid attention to their crappy movies the last two times. A canny strategy?

OK, first, I’m totally stealing “Shruggalos.” Second, it seems unlikely that this “publicity stunt” (riiiiiiiiiight) is going to get anyone out to see the end of a preposterous oligarchic fantasy trilogy to which nobody saw the first two installments. There’s no getting around it, Atlas shat the bed. These are self-described Objectivists—elite Objectivists, even—begging for money because their business failed - being, what’s that word they love to throw at the disadvantaged? PARASITIC. Just like their maven herself. Financially, however, it appears to be working.

Here’s the only Ayn Rand film adaptation that anyone ever needs to bother with.
 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
|
09.26.2013
08:33 pm
|
William Burroughs sings
09.26.2013
06:46 pm
Topics:
Tags:


“Bill Burrough’s Recurring Dream,” David Wojnarowicz, 1978

I think it’s safe to say that many, many more people have heard William Burroughs’ 1990 Dead City Radio album than have ever picked up one of his books and read it from cover to cover. I don’t feel this way at all, but I’ve heard from a lot of people that they think it’s the best thing Burroughs ever did.

Ignoring that uniformed sentiment and moving on, for most people, seeing the “A Thanksgiving Prayer” video every year on bOING bOING is practically the only exposure to Burroughs they’ll ever get and so therefore Dead City Radio assumes an unwarranted, out-sized importance in his body of work. (Personally I don’t find it that satisfying. Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, a selection from Burroughs’ archive of his occult reel-to-reel tape-recorder experiments, is 100x more interesting, but would be of no use whatsoever to most people who might profess to like “weird” stuff and just sound like someone messing around. That’s the material they should’ve slapped the Sonic Youth music over.)

Ultimately what can be gleamed from this is that it’s more Burroughs’ “image” than anything else about him that has so much continuing—and even widespread—iconic currency in popular culture.

Timothy Leary? Abbie Hoffman? Younger people hardly have any idea of who they were or what they were all about. William S. Burroughs on the other hand? Well, do a search for his name on Tumblr and you’ll see.

He’s well on his way to becoming as iconic as Che Guevara, James Dean or Marilyn Monroe. Give it more time, he’s only been dead since 1997. In terms of ready-made rebellious iconography for the Facebook generation, William Burroughs is the ultimate semiotic symbol for a truly dangerous mind.

So let’s celebrate him today, with a selection of lesser heard Burroughs-related musical material that’s not from Dead City Radio:
 

 
“T’aint No Sin” from The Black Rider
 

 
“Sharkey’s Night” from Laurie Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak album
 

 
Burroughs reads poetry by Jim Morrison over music by The Doors on “Is Everybody In?”
 

 
Guesting with Ministry on “Just One Fix.”
 

 
“Star Me Kitten” William Burroughs and R.E.M. (This comes from the Songs in the Key of X-Files album. It’s terrible. Loutallica terrible!)
 

 
“What Keeps Mankind Alive?” from Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, as heard on September Songs

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.26.2013
06:46 pm
|
Pitch-perfect Scorsese homage in Au Revoir Simone’s wonderful new video
09.26.2013
03:44 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
After Hours, released in 1985, is far from Martin Scorsese’s greatest film—it feels a bit tossed-off—but its strange fascination persists to this day. I would wager that for a lot of people who grew up in the ‘80s, it was After Hours (Desperately Seeking Susan, too) that most cemented the image of downtown NYC as a strange and wonderful nocturnal wonderland of hostile eco-activists and winsome/menacing artistes that would be a fun place to spend one’s twenties. What makes After Hours so remarkable is that each of its dozen or so vignettes could easily be a movie on its own—it’s just so packed with stuff....

This week the NYC dream pop band Au Revoir Simone released its latest album Move In Spectrums, and with it comes an amusing music video for the song “Crazy,” which, with uncanny accuracy, lovingly rejiggers the 100 or so minutes of After Hours into a tight, three-minute wordless narrative—populated entirely by women, with the exception of a brief shot of a male bouncer (I think?). (The band’s name is a Pee-Wee Herman reference, so their 80s bona fides are not in doubt.)
 

via Fluxtumblr

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Martin Scorsese takes a stand against the Realtors and landlords destroying New York City’s Bowery
Stunning movie posters for Martin Scorsese’s film restoration project

Posted by Martin Schneider
|
09.26.2013
03:44 pm
|
Dylan reselling everything at once, because, hey, let’s face it, people will buy it
09.26.2013
03:33 pm
Topics:
Tags:

that bucket is full of cash
 
At age 72, with a career behind him spanning just a bit over 50 years, Bob Dylan is releasing this November a boxed set spanning his entire oeuvre, titled The Complete Album Collection Volume 1.

“Volume 1.”

At a cost of over $250, the massive set contains 35 studio albums, 6 live albums, and two discs of rarities, some remastered, some appearing on CD for the first time, posh book, blah blah blah, can we circle back to this “Volume 1” thing? It implies a presupposed Volume 2, kinda, a little, doesn’t it? But for such a volume to be comparably exhaustive, it would seem like it would have to wait until the durable (won’t get off the stage) and prolific (enraptured by the sound of his own voice) icon reaches about 120 years of age. Or so.
 
look at all that crap
 
Come to think of it, it’s not so doubtful that he could pull that off. Though haggard, he’s still decently preserved and he has more money than God. Might a Volume 2 comprise his groundbreaking head-kept-alive-in-a-jar years? Will submersion in formaldehyde affect the tone of his harmonica reeds?

Or, given that he’s hardly released a single note worth listening to since Desire, maybe this set is a bloated, hubristic exercise in wrenching one last big wad of cash out of nostalgia-obsessed baby boomers before they all go on Social Security?

Obviously early Dylan is worth being nostalgic for, and if someone is really itching for a box set, there’s already 2010’s The Original Mono Recordings, comprising his first eight LPs, and though it’s a few albums shy of completely collecting his best work, it doesn’t charge exorbitantly for three and a half decades worth of stuff that nobody wants.

For a taste of Dylan’s mastery at the height of his early, folkie phase, check out this stunning rendition of “North County Blues,” from 1963.
 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
|
09.26.2013
03:33 pm
|
When Jean-Luc Godard met The Jefferson Airplane
09.26.2013
02:55 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
During his Marxist/Maoist phase, French film director Jean-Luc Godard traveled to New York to film the Jefferson Airplane who he (quite rightly, in my opinion) regarded as exemplars of the American revolutionary vanguard, playing on a rooftop in Midtown Manhattan. The performance, for which no permit was either sought or granted, took place on the morning of December 7, 1968 as people were making their way to work.

The event was staged for Godard’s projected One American Movie project. That film was also to feature segments with Black Panthers leader Eldridge Cleaver, Rip Torn, LeRoi Jones and Tom Hayden and to generally take a survey of the New Left’s “American revolution.” When Godard ultimately abandoned the project, the footage was assembled as One P.M. by D.A. Pennebaker in 1972.

The Airplane play a long, almost menacing version of “House at Pooneil Corner” which starts to gel nicely at the 2:30 mark. The reaction shots are priceless. You can see Godard himself in the first few seconds, waving the camera away. Makes you wonder where Paul McCartney got the big idea for the rooftop concert in Let It Be, doesn’t it?
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.26.2013
02:55 pm
|
Before ‘Fantastic Planet’ there was the surrealist short, ‘The Snails’
09.26.2013
01:52 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
Marc Campbell’s post yesterday on the Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary—he was even more effusive in his praise of the film on the phone—reminded me of something that I wanted to post here:

Before their collaboration on the classic 1973 animated sci-fi feature, Fantastic Planet, René Laloux and Roland Topor made “Les Escargots,” (“The Snails”) an exquisite stop-frame animated short in 1965. (If the Jodorowsky link isn’t clear, in the early 1960s, Fernando Arrabal, Roland Topor and Jodorowsky mounted entrail-covered Hermann Nitsch-like theatrical performance art happenings as “the Panic Movement” in Paris.)

Here’s how IMDB describes this little-known mini-masterpiece:

A gardener tries his best to make his salad plants grow. It is only when he cries that his tears finally water the field and the salads grow huge. The incredible size attracts a multitude of snails that quickly become giant too, causing disasters and panic in the nearby city.

I think that about says it all… The film’s message is a bit ambiguous, as you’ll see. “Les Escargots” won Special Jury Prize at the Cracow Film Festival.

Fun facts: Roland Topor wrote the novel of the same title that Roman Polanski’s creepy as fuck psychological thriller, The Tenant was based on and he played the role of “Renfield” in Werner Herzog’s movie Nosferatu the Vampyre.
 

 
The year before “Les Escargots,” René Laloux and Roland Topor collaborated on “Les Temps Morts” (“Dead Times”) an anti-war meditation on what it means to be human.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.26.2013
01:52 pm
|
Page 974 of 2338 ‹ First  < 972 973 974 975 976 >  Last ›