“UFO Man” endorses Bush.  Photo: Times Democrat
 
Bowman, South Carolina (population 968) is home to the “UFO Welcome Center,” possibly the best/worst roadside attraction in America, which mainly consists of a dilapidated, ramshackle spaceship cobbled together from scrap wood and various repurposed construction materials. It’s one of my favorite places on the planet, and I’m lucky as a South Carolinian to get to visit it quite often. I treasure my meetings with the man behind the saucer, “UFO Man,” the adorably kooky Jody Pendarvis.

The giant UFO Pendarvis built in the front yard of his trailer home is in somewhat less than flight-worthy condition and is usually inhabited by a dozen or so feral cats. But if you ever find yourself in Bowman, Jody will gladly give you a tour of the ship and the philosophy behind the UFO Welcome Center, which is essentially a beacon for extraterrestrial visitors.
 

Jody Pendarvis. Photo: Bickel
 
“UFO Man” made the local newspapers this week with his endorsement of Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush. Bush seems like a good candidate for endorsement from the UFO people. Trump has made his stance regarding aliens quite clear (he’s against them), and Ben Carson has attempted to deny the hard work of aliens in building the Egyptian pyramids, claiming that the pyramids were built by Biblical Joseph to store grain—which is clearly insane. Bush is the clear choice for those of us who build giant wooden flying saucers in the front yards of our trailers.
 

 
We’re quite sure the Bush campaign will get a huge bump from this crucial endorsement.

For more on the “UFO Man,” check out Vice’s excellent short documentary on the UFO Welcome Center:
 

 
Here are a few pre-Bush-endorsement photos I took during my last trip to see Jody and the spaceship, three months ago:
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
The Secret Teachings Of Sam Walton

How do we give form to the formless? How do we name that which is unnameable? How do we describe the indescribable? These are challenges that religion, the occult and magic have addressed since humanity first appeared on this planet. In an effort to communicate the divine, the transcendent, the psychedelic, we use devices like art and ritual. We cloak the mystical in words and images in the same way that GOD cloaks itself in the visible world to tell its story. Is life a great metaphor representing something that we cannot see, but know is there? Anyone who has had a “spiritual” experience has had a glimpse into, or a sense of, something greater that we are all a part of. Some go toward this experience alone—St. John or Jesus. Some go as a group, feeling that the odds are better that someone among them will serve as antennae, to dial into the radio of the gods and share the signal. These groups require focus and ceremony (a process) in order to cement the bonds of community, to attain a group consciousness that elevates one and all. We see this kind of collective mindset in everything from sports to business teams to religious organizations. But communities we don’t understand, that we deem weird or esoteric, we pejoratively call “cults.” The fervent devotion of sports fans, the mind-obliterating, soul-destroying Wal-Mart cheer forced upon its employees, the idolization of Steve Jobs and sheep-like behavior of Deadheads, Ben Carson and his groupies for God, all have cult-like aspects to them. But we dare not call them cults. We reserve the word to marginalize and demonize spiritual movements we do not understand or forms of art considered degenerate. “Cult” is a dirty word.

Confessions Of A Teenage Hippie Pervert

I’ve often wondered if I’ve ever been a cult member. During the Summer Of Love I lived in the Haight with a dozen or more teenagers my age who dropped acid, fucked each other and danced to psychedelic music in the glow of black lights and incense haze. We chanted “OM” and passed joints and waited for some kind of magic to happen. And it was happening. It just wasn’t the dramatic type of magic we were hoping for. I do think we collectively levitated once. I lived in a Los Gatos home owned by an ordained priest of The Church Of Tomorrow. He had the best LSD and his stream of consciousness talks seemed to be filled with all kinds of mindblowing heaviness. He had a gravitational pull that seemed superhuman. Young beautiful women flocked to him and I flocked to them. Was this a cult or was it just a groovy hangout? I lived in L.A. in 1967 and worked for a telemarketing agency (definitely a cult) and my young longhaired co-workers were the kinds of Southern California hippies that seemed more like extras from Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls than actual hippies. I spent a night tripping with them in a suburban ranch house and all they talked about was having rough sex with each other involving beatings, leather and whips. I love all kinds of sex, but this talk was brutal, chilling. The words coming out of their mouths were ugly,  flailing through the room like syntactical succubi. What the fuck was I hearing? I fled the scene and ended up having a seriously intense trip in a telephone booth trying to call the only other people I knew in L.A. to come rescue me.

To this day I’m not sure that what I experienced with those “kinky perverts” actually happened. I may have been projecting my id into the situation, my repressed fantasies. After all I was raised in one of the biggest cults of them all, Catholicism. Were they a sex cult? Was what I was hearing all in my own head. Cults are crazy that way. They’re open to interpretation and are often victims of what people think they’re perceiving as opposed to what’s actually happening. Cults are often the repository for the desires we fear. And some cults are created to fuck with those fears, fantasies and projections.
 

Processeans
 
Altamont: Hitler’s Woodstock

The French surrealists and dadaists employed occult imagery to shake up the status quo.They were called a “movement.” They could have just as easily been called a cult. New York’s Living Theatre used confrontational ceremony and transgressive ritual to tear apart the restraints that bound their audiences to dead and archaic modes of thinking. As a theater group, they worked intensely and constantly with each other and often lived communally. Were they a cult? Was Altamont the biggest black mass ever held and were those of us who attended unwitting members of some kind of Satanic sacrifice? (I was there. It sure looked like Hell to me.) Is Facebook the ultimate cult, dwarfing any cult or religion known to man or woman, unstoppable in its indoctrination of every living breathing human being on this earth? I see more devotion directed toward Facebook than any religion I’ve ever encountered. More people are facing their monitor screens than Mecca or reading from their Bibles.
 

The Living Theatre

Facebook: The Bible Of The Damned

Dr. Timothy Leary was vilified for turning on a generation of young people to the vast beauty and possibilities of their own minds. Mark Zuckerberg is celebrated for reducing our consciousness to the dimensions of a 14-inch screen filled with pictures of food, cats, obituary notices and forlorn pictures of aging rock and rollers. Jesus (who had a cult of just 12) was crucified for being a weirdo. Joel Osteen has made a fortune playing Jesus in a Brooks Brothers suit. Given the choice between Aleister Crowley   or Ted Cruz for President, The Beast gets my vote. I always go with the Devil I know. They turned David Koresh and a bunch of innocent children torched to a pile of ash and yet war criminal Dick Cheney still walks among us, his mechanical heart still beating, his rictus smirk still mocking us all. Donald Rumsfeld lived in Taos, New Mexico within spitting distance of where Marshall Applewhite leader of the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult ran a health food restaurant. Did Rummy eat Beezlebub’s bean sprouts? Did he dream of weapons of mass destruction hurtling toward us like a comet. In a world where companies make billions selling video games (talk about cults) in which teenage boys roleplay as carjackers, murderers and thugs, a kid named Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school. The mass hypnosis taking place in this world right now makes Charles Manson look about as intimidating as Chuck Woolery. Most Americans have been, and will continue to vote for a government that is actively working against their best interests. Under what spell have we fallen? We follow blindly, faithfully, surrendering our will to higher powers, both political and religious. Welcome to the biggest cult of them all: the United States Of America. Rant over.

Crazy Wisdom Drove Me Crazy

Back in simpler days when a cult was a cult and easily identifiable—they wore robes or funny hats—a group of young men and women gathered together in 60s London to form The Process, a quasi-religious group that were part spiritual seekers, part performance art and more than a little bit rock and roll. They had long hair, were beautiful and dressed like priests styled by a Carnaby Street tailor. Their methods were a mashup of Scientology, occultism, psychedelia, pop culture and dada. The members of The Process Church Of The Final Judgement were genuinely on a path to find out the answers to life’s most profound questions: how did we get here, what are supposed to do here and where the fuck are we going? But unlike most religious folk, the members of The Process realized that the journey was the goal and didn’t have to be deadly serious. The Process was all about the process. Enjoy it. In many respects it resembled Chogyam Trungpa’s teachings on crazy wisdom. I was a student of Trungpa’s. From an idiot’s point of view, Trungpa was a cult leader.
 

Chogyam Trungpa

Attack Of The Hooded Snuffoids

In their zeal to shake things up, The Process occasionally went off the deep end and this is where they ran into problems. People, particularly the British press, could not separate the theatrical from the real. And the The Process was very theatrical. Like Antonin Artaud or Andy Kaufman, The Process was adept at elaborate mindfucking. They were the mystical turd in the very bland punch bowl of British society. In mocking religious hypocrisy, they were often mistaken for being the very thing they were mocking. Their shock tactics often backfired. Surrounding themselves with the iconography of Satanism was a heavy metal move years before Black Sabbath had ever released a record. But try explaining that to the tabloids who called them Satan worshippers and sex deviants. Or worse, Ed Sanders’ hate-filled description of The Process as “hooded snuffoids” and “an English occult society dedicated to observing and aiding the end of the world by stirring up murder, violence and chaos, and dedicated to the proposition that they shall survive the gore as the chosen people.” I’m as big a Fugs fan as anyone out there, but Sanders really missed the irony of him, of all people, writing this shit. Sanders’ band The Fugs were themselves quite skilled in the art of the mindfuck. Using majikal incantations to Egyptian gods, The Fugs attempted to levitate the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam war. When you’ve successfully conned a con artist like Ed Sanders, you’ve managed something to be quite proud of.

Power to The Process. And Ed, to quote the title of your once infamous literary ‘zine, fuck you.
 

Ed Sanders’ exorcism chant
 
Skinny Puppy Housebroken By Satan

While I’m not an expert on any of this cult stuff, like most people, I find it immensely fascinating. The Manson Family creeps me out in ways that deeply disturb me, although groups like The Source, The Process and even Scientology provide me the kind of amusement that diffuses some of the darker shit. If you want to delve further into The Process from the point of view of someone who knows far more than me and does it objectively and with just enough wit and empathy, check out filmmaker Neil Edwards’ insightful and thoroughly entertaining new documentary Sympathy For The Devil. Full of interviews with surviving members of The Process and various experts in the field of all things “cult,” Edwards’ film will introduce you to the real truth behind the head games, rumors, bullshit and theater. And as Edwards told me, like its subject, the movie is a work in progress. There is more to be told and probably more that will never be told.
 

 
After the jump, an interview with director Neil Edwards…

 
The Flaming Lips’ track “Hot Day” was originally released on the original soundtrack CD of Richard Linklater’s indie hit Suburbia. Long out of print and unavailable on Spotify or iTunes, the track is going to make its first appearance on vinyl via the upcoming Heady Nuggs.

With the (quasi) premiere of this track, the group is announcing the November 27th release of Heady Nuggs: 20 Years After Clouds Taste Metallic 1994-1997, the deluxe 20th anniversary box set edition of The Lip’s seventh album, Clouds Taste Metallic, which is packed with rarities from the era and a live show. It was the last Lips album to feature guitarist Ronald Jones.

Heady Nuggs will be released as a three-CD set (plus digital) and as a numbered, limited edition five-LP box set. (Individual vinyl LPs will be released at a later date.) The Official Flaming Lips Store will carry an exclusive numbered and colored vinyl version of the five-LP box set along with three exclusive out-of-print t-shirts and three out-of-print posters, all designed—and personally signed—by Wayne Coyne, that were originally sold during the Clouds era.
 

 
I was never going to be Spider-Man—no matter how I tried to swing from washing lines or scale neighborhood walls or tumble out of trees. My enthusiasm for imitating Peter Parker always ended in disaster and bruised limbs. Obviously being a superhero was not all it was cracked-up to be. And when I thought about it further it seemed a rather silly career option—there was no pay, no pension plan, and the insurance premiums, well, they had to massive. Before hitting double-figures in years I’d given up on joining the the Avengers or the Justice League and was happy just to read of their incredible adventures in the pages of comics.

Being born and raised in Scotland meant an intermittent supply of such comic books capers. Most of these magazines way back then were brought over to Glasgow as ballast on cargo ships delivering goods and produce from America and beyond. This premium ballast would later be sold in the likes of a wee crammed kiosk near Queen Street Station, or the local newsagent and grocer (McGregor’s) in Blairdardie. Yet, the pleasure of the action-packed panels in every Spider-Man or Batman, was equalled (and often bettered) by the thrill of the adverts for toys, goods and services posted in every issue.

America was known as “the land of plenty,” and going by the vast range of toys and goods advertised, this seemed to be true. Toys were not only plentiful over there but cheap, bewitching and utterly exotic. Coins to hypnotize your friends. Sea monkeys that could live in a goldfish bowl and be trained to perform tricks! X-ray specs guaranteed to make everything see-thru. A Polaris submarine—more than seven feet long—which I dreamt of traveling in along the Forth-Clyde Canal, avoiding the ghostly weeds, the garbage, discarded shopping trolleys, and the imaginary gangsters—pale, bloated and tethered to weighty blocks of concrete. But of course I knew—just like my failed attempt to imitate the web-slinger—that these adverts of youthful dreams were equally illusory and would always seem far, far better in print than ever in real life.

These are the ads I salivated over most—and to be frank a part of me still does hanker after them.
 

This was top of my list as must have.
 

Kinda looks like that monster from ‘Night of the Demon.’
 

 

I eventually bought a rubber skull mask from a joke shop—it gave me… er… minutes of fun.
 
More comic book ads, after the jump…

Willie Nelson “hobo nickel” by Aleksey Saburov
 
The origins of using coins as an artistic medium can be traced back to the late 1700s. Sometime around 1850, artists started altering the half-dime Seated Liberty coin to make it appear as though the “Goddess Liberty” (a title that was used as far back as ancient Rome, who knew) clad in a flowing dress seated upon a rock, was actually sitting on a toilet. Classy.
 

Hobo nickel by George Washington ‘Bo’ Hughes, early 1900s
 

 
In 1913, the “Buffalo nickel” (or “Indian Head”), became popular for coin carvers as it provided a larger, thicker canvas to work on - enabling artists to create more detailed pieces. Around that same time, two teenage transients (or “hobos”) Bertram ‘Bert’ Wiegand and George Washington ‘Bo’ Hughes met in a “jungle” (or a “hobo camp”) and quickly rose to prominence as masters in the trade.

Using chisels to alter coins, solid currency was easily had within the transient community who were then enabled to make money selling their carved coins (something that was especially useful during The Great Depression). Thus the adoption of the common reference for these defaced coins—“hobo nickles”—came to be. I’m sure some Dangerous Minds readers more enlightened with Americana than I, have heard this phrase before, but it was new to me and I suspect the artform for which it is named, will be new to many of you as well.
 

 

Jack Torrance hobo nickel by Mr. The
 
More ‘hobo nickels’ after the jump…

 
Here are some photos of Marilyn Monroe you may have or may not have seen before. I’m so used to the iconic “blonde bombshell” images of Monroe, that I was slightly taken aback (in a pleasantly surprised way) when I saw these.

The photos were shot by Bert Stern for Vogue magazine in 1962 (six weeks before Monroe died). What you see are some outtakes from the the photoshoot. Monroe is paying homage to Jackie Kennedy by donning a black wig in the style popularized by the First Lady.

I love these.

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
The term ‘Blaxploitation’ was coined by NAACP head/film publicist Junius Griffin in the early 1970s to describe the genre of African American action films that followed from the examples set by Cotton Comes to Harlem and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, but the term certainly could have had other applications—racially targeted marketing that sought to move destructive commodities like malt liquor and menthol cigarettes to underclass populations has long been, and justifiably remains, a highly contentious matter, and is inarguably more literally exploitative than any “exploitation” film. Flashbak.com compiled a lode of eye-popping examples from a print campaign for Winston cigarettes.

After World War Two American tobacco companies started to explore new markets to maintain their not insubstantial prosperity. The growth in urban migration and the growing incomes of African Americans (called at the time the “emerging Negro market”) gave the tobacco companies what was sometimes called an “export market at home”. Additionally, a new kind of media started to appear after the war when several glossy monthly magazines including Negro Digest (1942, renamed Black World), Ebony (1945) and Negro Achievements (1947, renamed Sepia) began to be published.

These relatively expensively produced magazines were far more attractive to the tobacco advertisers than the cheap ‘negro’ daily newspapers of the pre-war era, with glossy pages and a far wider national distribution. The magazines meant for a purely African American audience also meant that advertisers could produce adverts aimed and featuring African Americans away from the eyes of white consumers.

 

“Rich.” “Long.” Got’cha. Wink wink.

The juxtaposition of aspirational fashion, rogue-ish male confidence, and burning cigarettes carries an unmistakable message so old it’s hardly worth spelling out. The longing looks from the women in the near-backgrounds aren’t terribly nuanced in their subtext, either. But all the problematics of death-dealing aside, these are objectively awesome photos, amazing snapshots of a time and place when African American culture was asserting a more prominent place in the US mainstream. Airbrush out the cigarettes (or don’t) and change the captions, and these would be amazing menswear ads, too.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

Photo by Steve Tremlett

I have to admit I kinda love this. In honor of Guy Fawkes Night, a giant paper sculpture of a naked David Cameron with a decapitated pig’s head will go up flames tonight on Lewes bonfire, in East Sussex.

Apparently #PigGate is still not over. Fuck him. The Prime Minister I mean, not that poor defenseless pig he (allegedly) molested

(Once we get footage of the burning “pig fucker,” I’ll add it to this post.)

Photo by Matty
 
via Metro

 
The purple and teal Jason Voorhees Nintendo game figure that was introduced at the 2013 Dan Diego Comic-Con resurrected a great deal of interest in the 1989 Friday the 13th NES video game—considered by many to be one of the worst video games of all time.
 

 
The notoriously stupid, extremely difficult game has achieved a kind of fandom for being so utterly terrible and is held in the same sort of esteem that Atari’s infamous E.T. game is among vintage game aficionados. The fact that the Friday the 13th film franchise has so many die-hard fans insures its popularity, even if 8 bit purple Jason and his mother’s floating severed head aren’t exactly terrifying. And let’s not forget about that classic bum-out end screen:
 

 
The fans at YouTube channel Maga64 have created a faux trailer for an imagined movie version of the video game (complete with old-school VHS tracking adjustment issues) and they totally nail every inexplicable aspect of the gameplay (right down to the cleaver that looks like a toothbrush). If you are a fan of the movie series or the video game, this may very well be the funniest thing you see all day.
 

 
Via: ihorror.com. H/T: Mike Bracken

 
“Shadrach,” from the Beastie Boys’ psychedelic collage masterpiece Paul’s Boutique, should have been a hit. The band made a gorgeous rotoscope video for the song and featured the tune prominently on the EP An Exciting Evening at Home with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, but “Shadrach,” with its sample from Sly and the Family Stone’s “Loose Booty,” its mystical wisdom, and its defiant tone, proved just too stupid fresh for the suits at Capitol to get behind.

When the Beasties paid their second and last visit to Soul Train (see their first appearance here), they wanted to perform “Shadrach” live, but host Don Cornelius said no. From Dan LeRoy’s book on Paul’s Boutique (my favorite number in the 33 1/3 series, which last year spawned a sequel co-authored by the excellent Peter Relic):

The Beasties got revenge, says [their friend] Max Perlich, by preparing a special version of “Shadrach,” which included the soundbite, “Do the Don Cornelius.” “He freaked on the spot, because he thought it was live,” remembers Perlich. “And he stopped the taping. But they said, ‘No, this is on the record.’ So they got away with it.”

 

 
In other words, forced to mime their mighty jam on TV, these world-class practical jokers modified “Shadrach” (doesn’t it almost rhyme with “Ad-Rock”?) to at once sound live and to poke fun at Cornelius, who was left believing that the Beastie Boys’ latest single paid him tribute. At least, I think he was; he seems a little confused during the interview that follows the song, which departs a little more from the recorded version than LeRoy suggests. You’ll see. It’s nuts.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering why the Beasties are rapping about three characters from the Book of Daniel, LeRoy says that their split with Def Jam is not so neatly identifiable with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego’s righteous refusal to bow down before the image of Nebuchadnezzar as you, or they, might be tempted to think; he also reports that Adam Yauch “was then spending lots of time ‘taking acid and reading the Bible,’ according to his girlfriend, Lisa Ann Cabasa.” I wish he was still around.