If you have any interest in the overlapping categories of psych, new age and private press LPs, you’ve probably noticed the mindbending artwork and extraordinary claims printed on Master Wilburn Burchette’s record jackets. Playing a homemade guitar built of six different types of wood, Burchette proselytized a new-but-ancient type of music he claimed to have discovered called Impro. “IMPRO’S TRANSCENDENTAL TONE SCALE TAKES YOU INTO THE FRONTIERS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE,” the cover of Occult Concert, Burchette’s debut, promised. “EXPLORE THE UNKNOWN BEHIND YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND WITH THE IMPRO GUITAR OF WILBURN BURCHETTE.”
 

“Now YOU can experience transcendental consciousness without spending 10 years in a Tibetan monastery.”
 
Though Numero Group recently reissued Burchette’s last release to date, 1977’s Mind Storm, for members of their record club, and the song “Witch’s Will” appeared on Light in the Attic’s new age compilation I Am The Center, Burchette remains a mysterious figure. The little I know about him comes from Brad Steiger’s 1973 book Revelation: The Divine Fire, which devotes a few pages to the man and his musical theories. A taste:

For the past two years I have valued a friendship with a fascinating young occultist-musician named Wilburn Burchette. By the time he was twelve, Wil was deep into his unorthodox experiments with music. It occurred to him that since everything in our universe is composed of vibratory atoms, then vibration is movement, movement is time, and that, to achieve any creativespiritual [sic] breakthrough, man must rise above time.

“I considered music to be an art form of time, through time, and in time. I assumed that everything was time. However, that which conceives time doesn’t necessarily have to be in it,” Wil told me. “The breakthrough to Higher Reality is outside of time. When you break through time, that is revelation, that is breaking through to the Godhead.”

 

 
Steiger continues:

Wilburn Burchette’s personal revelation was given a marvelously translatable expression through a music which he calls Impro. It is Wil’s belief that he has cracked music’s emotional code, thus becoming able to trigger in his audiences the emotions that he, as performer, wishes to communicate. Wil further believes that he has rediscovered the occult music of the ancient mysteries. In his performances, he does not seek to play music but emotions. He has discovered that certain frequencies control certain moods, and he is able to directly involve the listener in his occult concerts.

The farther Wil was able to move his consciousness back in time, the more difficult he found it became to separate the concepts of music and altered states of consciousness. “I believe that in the early days of the Earth, communication was a thought-inference system,” Burchette says. “Under such a system any audible sound would have been communication of some sort. Consequently there would have been no differentiation between language and music.

“But I think that music became separated along the way, because of its special properties. It was more sophisticated. The division, then, between language and music would have come about as these special properties became more pronounced. Thus language became a lower means of communication. It was more precise and was used to carry out the affairs of material existence. It was more functional in a day-to-day situation.

“Music, on the other hand, would have been taken over by the priestcraft and made their special domain. For music is, and has been since its beginnings, the method of communication with the gods.”

 

 
After the jump, take the shortcut to enlightenment by listening to all of ‘Wilburn Burchette Opens The Seven Gates of Transcendental Consciousness’ with the aid of the text and illustrations from the “full color instruction book” included with the album…

 
It might merely be a product of nostalgia borne of rapidly encroaching middle age, but I’m not so sure. Whenever I find myself walking around a city where I used to live all I can see are the ghosts of what used to be in the spots where certain notable and unique places once existed. Book stores, art galleries, record stores, bars, night clubs, squats, drug dens and all manner of notorious afterhours sin emporiums that have been long been replaced by artisanal mayonnaise stores, gourmet cheese shops and Chipotle. Someone younger could visit any capital city and still find much to be excited about, of course, but for someone my age, it’s more about how much better things used to be. You know, back in the day.

But I just hate being that guy pointing out “See this deli? That’s where Max’s Kansas City used to be” (And besides that, Max’s was long before my time anyway.)

But now I don’t have to be that guy, at least as far as London is concerned, I can just point “young people” towards Punk London: In The City, 1975-78, Paul Gorman and designer Mike Haddad’s walking guide to the bad old good old days of punk:

The Punk London guide:

“... charts the squats, clubs, shops and rehearsal spaces from which punk emerged and grew into a global phenomenon. It is the definitive tour of the city at a moment of febrile intensity.

Punk London takes us to Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Sex shop at 430 Kings Road; the Hampstead flat shared by Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious; Saint Martin’s School Of Art, where the Sex Pistols made their debut performance; Pathway Studios in Canonbury, where The Damned recorded “New Rose,” the first UK punk release; The Clash’s Camden Town rehearsal space and many more locations associated with all the movement’s key figures. “

 

 

 
Punk London: In The City, 1975-78 is 28 pages and includes a foldout A3 map. It’s published by Herb Lester Associates, who clearly are innovating travel guides. What’s next? Lemme guess Punk NYC?
 

 
There are lots of un-ironic reasons to love the 1970s, but most of them are musical—the punk explosion, No-Wave/mutant disco, Motörhead, Thin White Duke era Bowie, those really kickass King Crimson albums with John Wetton, and on and on and on. But the eye-bleed aesthetics that the normals embraced in that decade sure had moments, too, and outside of menswear, rarely did those aesthetics find purer expression than in the decorating flair of people with way more money than taste.

A choice example exists not just perfectly preserved, but frozen in time—this North Royalton, OH home for sale is so fucking ’70s you can still smell the heady aftermath of key parties just by looking at the pictures. Built in 1949, last sold in 1971 for a modest-seeming 85K, it can be yours now! The lucky buyer gets a 13-acre lot with an in-ground pool (kidney-shaped of course) and a 6,300 square foot museum of glorious tackiness. Pea-green tassled curtains; check. Wood paneled kitchen that’s an affront not just to trees but to the idea of trees; check. Fully equipped, shag-carpeted gym with floor-to-ceiling mirrors; check. Log-cabin den; check. Audibly red basement lounge with a vinyl-upholstered bar; check.
 

 

 

 
It keeps getting better and better, after the jump…

Stuart Gulliver, Group Chief Executive of HSBC, oversees a company engaged in conspiracy and fraud, painted by Mario “A.B.” Beltran (PRISON ID #437846), serving 3.5 years for receiving stolen goods
 
We at Dangerous Minds always admire passionate political art, so how could we pass up a chance to write up the Captured Project, a series of paintings of the criminals of the corporate world, undertaken (in their parlance, “captured”) by those serving time for more workaday crimes like assault and armed robbery?

Or as the Captured Project puts it:

“People in prison painting people who should be.”

Every painting is accompanied by a lengthy account of the subject’s crimes, and if you think that a rabble-rousing project of this type ain’t rigorous on the research, you really need to click through and read this shit. The crimes (and sentences) of the artist are presented as well, often to mordant effect.

The paintings, which mostly are angry by implication, favoring a fairly standard, if unflattering, portrait approach, remind me just a tad of Robbie Conal‘s enraged poster art from the 1980s depicting several evil Republicans as wrinkly zombies.

The book costs $40 and all proceeds go to help elect the only Socialist in the presidential race, Bernie Sanders.
 

Sepp Blatter, former president of FIFA, oversaw a company engaged in theft and supporting slave labor, painted by Lewis Walters (PRISON ID #38699-007), serving 72 years for assault with intent to commit murder
 

Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsico, oversees a company engaged in accessory to murder and conspiracy to deceive, painted by John Vercusky (PRISON ID #55341-066), serving 22 years for armed robbery
 
More portraits of white collar criminals ‘captured’ by prisoners after the jump…

 
A loft in Manhattan, New York, 1979: Talking Heads are working on their latest album Fear of Music. A TV crew from England are present making a documentary for the UK arts series The South Bank Show. They interview and film the band at work—writing, rehearsing and recording songs. At times, listening to Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison and David Byrne talk they all make it seem what they’re doing is really quite ordinary, almost mundane. Frantz says he considers his life quite normal when not on tour. He gets up early rather than sleeping all day and going to the clubs at night. Byrne, who sounds at times like Andy Warhol—nervous, shy—discusses his thoughts about dressing like ordinary working people in ordinary everyday work clothes, though he soon discovered keeping up with ordinary fashions was expensive. Tina Weymouth points out the band plays under full house lights and eschew spotlights on solos. They are earnest, conscientious, and make it sound as if what they are doing, what they are creating, is quite workaday when in truth this talented quartet are producing something very, very extraordinary.

As the documentary develops, the disparity between their artistic aspirations and their personal points of view of what they’re all about becomes apparent—with Frantz musing on whether it’s good old rock ‘n’ roll or actually art that they are producing. History’s jury has already returned the verdict on that—a unanimous decision in favor of art—great art.
 

 
Weymouth, Frantz and Byrne first played under the name The Artistics. They had an idea of “combining conceptual and performance art with popular music (their sound earned them the nickname The Autistics).” Then a friend suggested the name “Talking Heads” lifted from the TV Guide—which appealed as it had no genre defining angle. Dressed in button down shirts, sensible shoes and corduroy in amongst the ripped T-shirts, leather jackets of New York’s punk clubs, Talking Heads was a vision of the future, belonging to no genre or scene, ultimately. This became more than evident through the eight studio albums the band produced between 1977 and 1988.

Keep reading after the jump…

Promo ad for Blondie’s ‘Plastic Letters,’ 1978. This might even be an in-store stand-up, hard to tell

If you are of a certain age, you will remember what it was like to get pretty much all your rock and roll knowledge from magazines. Wanted to become a part of the The Cramps Fan Club (and who didn’t), you filled out a request from a magazine or perhaps signed up for the band’s “mailing list” at a live show. If there was a new record on the way, you probably saw it on the pages of CREEM (my all-time favorite), Trouser Press or Billboard. If you were aspiring young punk in the UK, you learned likely learned about the latest record from The Jam by reading mags like Zig Zag, Sounds, and Smash Hits.
 

New York Dolls ad for their 1974 album, ‘Too Much Too Soon’
 

An ad for Mick Ronson’s first solo record, ‘Slaughter on 10th Avenue,’ 1974
 

Japanese ad for T.Rex records, 1974
 
Check them all out after the jump!

 
During the 80s, Shelley Duvall hosted a Showtime series for children called Faerie Tale Theatre. It attracted what we call in Hollywood “quality-ass talent.” Jeff Bridges and Gena Rowlands joined Duvall for “Rapunzel,” Paul Reubens played Pinocchio, Susan Sarandon and Klaus Kinski starred in “Beauty and the Beast,” and, perhaps most extraordinary of all, Mick Jagger underwent the showbiz Caucasian-to-Asian transformation (local stylists call this dangerous procedure the “Mickey Rooney”) for the series’ adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale,” in which Mick portrayed the Emperor of China. What the fuck.
 

Mick Jagger as the Emperor of China on ‘Faerie Tale Theatre’
 
But the 1983 episode “The Boy Who Left Home To Find Out About The Shivers,” based on a tale by the Brothers Grimm, is remarkable because it’s got Frank Zappa playing a Transylvanian hunchback named Attilla and Vincent Price narrating, not to mention performances by Christopher Lee and David Warner. Here’s the plot, as summarized on the back of the old Betamax box:

Overcoming fear is a problem for most people. But there once was a boy whose problem was his complete lack of fear! Peter MacNicol stars as that boy in this amusing production narrated by Vincent Price. The King, played by Christopher Lee, promises the boy treasure and a beautiful Princess, Dana Hill, if he can defeat an Evil Sorcerer who has haunted the King’s castle. The boy meets an ominous mute hunchback, a headless man, and finally, in a duel to the death, the Evil Sorcerer himself! Yet still he knows no fear—until the surprising conclusion. Featuring production design inspired by the work of Breughel and Durer and marvelous performances from a superior cast, this is a tale you should be afraid… to miss!

 

 
As I learn from Román García Albertos’ detailed Zappa videography, Frank discussed the role on Australian TV a few days after the shoot:

FZ: Recently, just for a laugh, I did a role of a hunchback in a fairy tale that was completed about three days ago, in a show called Faerie Tale Theatre, which was produced by Shelley Duvall and airs on Showtime cable network here in the United States. I don’t know whether they have distribution outside the US.

Interviewer: Don’t think we get it, no.

FZ: Well, I think that they’re probably going to be trying to export the thing, but it’s a whole series of fairy tales. The first one that they did was “The Frog Prince” and it starred Robin Williams as the frog. He was really great. And things are all done on video, they use a lot of video effects. Mick Jagger did the last one that was on the air, he played a mandarin in “The Nightingale.” And so I got to be a hunchback in a story called “The Boy Who Left Home To Find Out About The Shivers.”

Interviewer: Did he?

FZ: Eventually, yes, he found out about the shivers in one of the more humorous scenes in the thing.

Interviewer: Did you have lines in it?

FZ: Yes. Here are my lines: “Uh uh uh!” and “Oooh, heh heh!”

Watch’s Zappa’s appearance as the “ominous mute hunchback” on ‘Faerie Tale Theatre’ after the jump…

 
Late last week the Cruz campaign released an attack ad against Hillary Clinton, spoofing the iconic printer-destruction scene from the 1999 film Office Space.

The ad itself completely misses the mark. Though the lyrics to the re-written parody of Geto Boys’ “Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta” play over the ad, painting a picture of Clinton as a corrupt, entitled Washington insider—the scene itself depicts Clinton as a take-no-shit badass.

The problem, and where the commercial totally fails as an attack ad, is that it depicts Hillary Clinton as one of the heroes from one of the most iconic and well-loved scenes of one of the biggest cult films of the last twenty years. On a subconscious level, if you are a fan of Office Space, you can’t help but view Clinton as the hero of this ad. They may as well have made a Bernie Sanders attack ad, casting him as “The Dude” from The Big Lebowski. It just doesn’t work to cast your political foe in a role completely associated with a hero—an anti-establishment hero AT THAT. Even the camera angles, parodying the original Office Space scene, make Clinton look larger than life and totally in charge. The ad works as a parody of a famous movie scene—as a political attack ad, it’s an utterly dismal failure. The Clinton campaign could take this spot as-is and dub in some different music (perhaps the original Geto Boys cut), and have a great ad of their own.

Republicans seem to have trouble getting the nuances of humor correct and they also seem to have a major problem with musicians getting angry when songs are used without permission in political campaigns.There’s a long history of this, and Cruz’ use of the Geto Boys’ music is the latest in that history.
 

Willie D of The Geto Boys, center
 
Willie D of the Geto Boys had some choice words of his own about the ad and the Cruz campaign’s (parodied) use of the Geto Boys’ music. Willie D called the ad “blasphemy” and “garbage” and asserted that the Cruz campaign runs completely counter to the Geto Boys’ ideals. “I don’t believe he’s all the way human,” he continued, comparing Cruz to “The Tin Man” from The Wizard of Oz. Willie D went on to call Cruz the “scum of the earth” and “a self-aggrandizing, insufferable douchebag,” ultimately demanding,  “you owe us and our fans an apology. I want an apology, Ted.”

Keep reading after the jump…

 
For intellectuals and leftists in continental Europe, the year 1968 has an iconic significance that it lacks in the United States and Great Britain. In France and Germany (as well as other places) the year was dominated by violent student uprisings, and to this day people are prone to identifying one another as being in or out of the group by just saying the all-important number 68: In Germany “ein 68er” is someone who developed a political consciousness during that pivotal summer. If you were born too early or too late to take part, well, tough titty, you missed out. The German student movement is interchangeably called the 68er-Bewegung, the movement of the ‘68-ers.

It’s now necessary to remind readers that when it comes to the German protest movement of the 1960s, we’re referring to West Germany, what was then known as the Federal Republic of Germany.
 

 
Born in Hamburg, Uwe Wandrey definitely qualifies as an ‘68-er par excellence. After getting trained as a shipwright in the late 1950s, he joined the army for a while and then enrolled at he University of Hamburg specializing in Germanistik (basically literature), and history and philosophy. In 1966 he founded a small independent press called the Quer Verlag (nothing to do with “queer,” the term Quer means “across” but also “oblique,” “askew,” etc.).

In 1968 he published a small volume called Kampfreime (War Rhymes), which is one of the few books in publishing history that was explicitly intended to be used in a confrontational protest context. It was small enough to fit in one’s pocket, and the edge of its metal sheath could be used to inflict damage of various types, not only against the bodily flesh of riot police, God forbid, but also for instance, to pry away the posters of the big bourgeois advertisements papering the walls where you would like to paste or scrawl your favored political message instead.
 

SHIT ON THE GERMAN FATHERLAND / RECRUIT THE RESISTANCE
 
Adam Davis at Spineless and Stapled writes:
 

I’ve often been told that the pen (and by extension, the book) is mightier than the sword. But what if the book is the sword?

Uwe Wandrey’s Kampfreime is a collection of rhymed chants meant for use during the German Student Movement. As far as my research can tell, it is also the first book to be designed as a weapon, and as such is a landmark in book design.

The book is small. It can be easily slipped into a protestor’s pocket. The chants are arranged thematically. The red card section dividers make it easy, presumably, to flip to the right chant even under the duress of a violent protest. The book takes full advantage of secrecy and random access - perhaps the two most historically useful aspects of the codex form.

The sharp fore edge of both of the aluminum boards extend about a quarter of an inch past the fore edge of the text. The book elegantly solves the structural problems inherent in a metal binding in that the upper board is curved at a 90 degree angle at the spine, while the lower board lies flat and is buttressed against the inward curve of the upper. Thus the book lies flat, yet is easily opened.

-snip-

Kampfreime had another use as well.

The business end of a book was also intended to tear away posters, flyers, advertisements - to clear an open space in an encroaching universe of bourgeoisie paper. After all, one of the main targets of the student protest was the Axel Springer publishing house. It belongs in the same lineage as another brilliantly designed book which in many ways laid a framework for the ‘68 protests—Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and V.O. Permild’s psychogeographical masterpiece Memoires, which featured a sandpaper dust jacket to destroy any book it was shelved against.

 

FOR BANNERS, WALLS, WOODEN FENCES, STONE WALLS, POSTERS, LEAFLETS, WALL NEWSPAPERS, CHALKBOARDS, AND TO BE CHANTED IN UNISON // GENERAL-POLITICAL / BUSINESS / ARMY / SCHOOL / UNIVERSITY / MORAL LIFE / TOOL
 

 
Read on, after the jump…

Sculptures by Marc Sijan
 
The uncannily realistic sculptures of Milwaukee-based sculptor Marc Sijan have been displayed in museums and galleries from coast to coast. His life-sized works are full-time residents at thirty museums. The running joke about Sijan’s creations is that they look so “alive,” that you might actually feel compelled to start a conversation with one of them. This is not at all difficult to understand once you have seen Sijan’s people. Sijan’s subjects are relatable everyday people. Your neighbors and inhabitants of middle-America, people you know or might see in the grocery store—to rather grotesque versions of the human form that have been maligned by age, indulgence or perhaps circumstance.
 

 

 
Part of the rigorous process the now 68-year-old sculptor goes through to achieve the all too human appearance of actual skin for his works consists of 25 coats of paint and varnish. An incredibly private man, it can take Sijan anywhere from six-months to a year to complete one of his contemplative sculptures, which the artist creates with plaster casts derived from actual live models. Nothing, especially imperfections, are spared when it comes to the detail Sujan brings to his sculptures. Goosebumps, broken blood vessels, saggy skin - Sijan’s “people” are about as real as any of us. Like it or not.

Some of the images that follow may be slightly NSFW.
 

“Cornered”
 

 

 

“All American”
 
More after the jump…