This is one of those things I clearly missed the boat on. Okay, let’s just call for what is… I missed the damned yacht! (This is some 2013 shit right here!) If you, like me, haven’t seen the Chinese bootleg of Break So Bad you’re in for an eyeful treat.

With the cancerous concern lonely man must use chemistry skill in making most potent of drugs methamphetamine. Danger and serious threat comes to man’s family to bring his to life to serious impact.

According to what I’ve read online about the glorious bootleg cover art is that it was done on purpose to avoid legality issues. Whether or not this is true, I simply don’t know? Could it be the work of an evil genius photoshopper? Perhaps. Perhaps.

Update: It was done by these folks back in 2012. 
 

 

 

 
I am forbidden to drink coffee. My wife says it turns me into a speed-talking, speed-walking lunatic (“and an asshole” she insisted I add) and this is, if I am honest, undeniably true. It was none other than Lemmy himself who once told me that speed really did what cocaine is supposed to do, but as far as my body processes caffeine, it has a far greater effect on me than even the best coke does. My wife is right, it does turn me right into a Tasmanian devil. Sometimes I sneak coffee behind her back and I feel like I’m a former drug addict backsliding. As pathetic as I realize this sounds, it feels kind of shameful. She always knows when I’ve had a cup or two. Every time. Without fail. I try to lie about it, but she sees right through that.

Yep, coffee has a super-pronounced effect on me. Personally I really enjoy the effects, but when your partner can peg your “wired” and “weird” behavior just as easily as if you had snorted a pound a blow, there might be a problem, right?

In any case, knowing how coffee transforms me into a complete maniac, I have long suspected that the rise in “road rage” in recent years had much in common with the parallel increase of premium coffee chains like Starbucks and Peet’s popping up on every street corner like mushrooms after it rains… People drink a lot more coffee than they used to, this much is undeniable. When did we first start hearing the term “road rage” or experience it ourselves? Coincidence? I think not.

Which brings me to my next topic: Red Bull. The first time I drank a Red Bull, it was at a party and about 9pm. I drank two because I was really exhausted and because it tasted like a liquid version of Flintstones Vitamins.

I perked right up to be sure, but I also did not sleep again for two whole days!
 

 
With the above in mind, this morning I became aware (via Caffeine Informer) that on average (because caffeine levels can vary so widely) a 16oz Starbucks Grande coffee, with approximately 330mg of caffeine is FOUR TIMES stronger than a Red Bull, two times stronger than a Monster Energy Drink and eight times stronger than a Coca-Cola Classic.

When coffee was first introduced into the European diet in the 16th century, there were calls to ban what was then thought of as a “Muslim drink.” (Coffee was also banned for quite some time by Arab societies.) Some of the earliest examples of what we’d now call an “advice column” apparently address the problem of coffee addiction causing weird behavior. In 1511, according to Terence McKenna in his Food of the Gods, the Prince of Waldeck set up what was basically the first “drug snitch” program and offered monetary rewards to anyone who turned in a coffee drinker. People were fined and given floggings over coffee. After a few centuries, most of us (not me!) are accustomed to the effects of caffeine, but for some people it can cause anxiety, depression and other psychological discomforts.

Or perhaps make you act like an asshole when you’re driving? I’m not a scientist, I’m just throwing it out there.

Here’s some nice road rage footage. Not sure what this driver drank before this unfortunate incident, but I suspect that it had a lot of caffeine in it. Skip to the 1:00 mark.
 

Via reddit

 
I suppose the right word for describing the cover of this South Korean edition of The Diary of Anne Frank is “puzzling.”

How did they come up with this exactly? It looks like an 80s Sweet Valley High novel! Whoever bought this judging the book by its cover, I’m pretty sure came in for quite a shock.

Via Kotaku

 
The summer of 1985 was an awfully interesting moment in the struggle to achieve gay rights. AIDS was in full swing but “the story” had not “broken” in the general media—Rock Hudson’s death of that terrible disease, which would do so much to “mainstream” AIDS, hadn’t happened yet. The gay community was obviously acutely aware that an epidemic was occurring, but clueless Ronald Reagan refused to countenance it. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, the gay community was intensely politicized, in a way that we have to some extent forgotten. A gay pride event was no ordinary thing, it was politicized by definition. (The Oscar-nominated 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague does an excellent job of documenting this period.)

Gay Pride Day in London that year was June 29, and as the blog Gay in the 80s well demonstrates, after lackluster turnout in the previous two years, there were many passionate protest events.

At this point in his career, Divine was spending a good deal of time in London and Europe generally, as Richard lovingly outlined in this post a couple of months ago; the same post includes several videos from Divine’s Hi-NRG/disco phase. He appeared on Top of the Pops, and some of his tracks made the charts. The beloved DJ John Peel lavished praise on him on the radio.

For the Gay Pride event in London, someone had the bright idea of showcasing Baltimore’s favorite drag queen on a boat on the Thames River. It’s difficult to reconstruct from the vantage point of today, but there just weren’t that many celebrities who were out in 1985. Being an out gay actor was tantamount to ensuring oneself marginalization, if not penury.

But as the star of several of John Waters’ scummy cinematic masterpieces, Divine was used to marginalization. His qualified successes on the pop scene surely felt like a measure of acceptance. It may also have been clear to him that his appeal cut across the regular lines of sexuality. Humor does that; if you’re funny and lighthearted (no matter how much pain you may be masking), people are going to respond to that.

Having insisted that his appearance not be “political,” Divine sang two songs as the “pleasure boat” floated past the Jubilee Gardens. But that appearance was as political as anything he ever did. The video below is enjoyable just to hear a portly 39-year-old former hair stylist from Baltimore belt out, with a voice as raspy as can be, his cover of the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man” and then “Native Love (Step by Step),” the latter of which includes the defiant lyrics: “Hey GQ man, here I stand / For everyone to see / And if I’m not your type, well that’s alright / ‘Cuz that don’t matter to me.”

And there’s nothing quite so “Baltimore” as Divine’s between-songs patter: “Well fuck you all very much! … Let’s hear it for London, yeah! … Okay, It’s real good to be here, I fucking love you, yeah!” Pithy and to the point.

Divine’s manager Bernard Jay, in his book Not Simply Divine, reveals some of the background of the event:
 

Although he was always loyal to and appreciative of his gay audience, he was also very well aware that it wasn’t every one of them who approved. “I am trying to say to people, ‘Learn to laugh at yourself,’” he said. “Gay or straight, it helps if you can look at yourself for what you are and either accept it or do something about it.” For those gays who believed he demolished their public relations efforts, he added, “I cannot believe anyone can be so prissy and humorless. I am sure they are closet numbers who go home from the office, slip off their three-piece suits, and cook dinner wearing a silk slip and high heels.”

When he finally decided to stop avoiding the issue and answer the probing journalists directly, his astute comment was more amusing than revealing. “Don’t tell me about minority groups,” he told them. “I am a gay actor trying to make his living wearing a dress. Now that really is a minority group.”

Our good friends at Heaven in London [one of the largest gay discos in Europe] had approached Divi about being this year’s guest performer on Gay Pride Day. Divi and I agreed that he owed it to the club that started it all for him in Europe. And this particular community who had always supported him so loyally and enthusiastically. However, we were still insistent that his participation—without fee, of course—be as an entertainer and not interpreted as a political statement. He would make no speeches from the stage.

Heaven’s man in charge came up with the novel idea of Divi performing two songs, standing on the roof of a hired pleasure boat as it sailed slowly along the Thames and passed the Jubilee Gardens, where the celebrations would be taking place.

It was a huge success. The sight of Divine, in a body-hugging silver-blue gown, precariously balanced in heels on the sloping roof of the small craft, gently rocking on the tide of the Thames, while the makeshift speakers screamed “You Think You’re a Man,” was definitely one for sore eyes. As he performed, gyrating to the beat in his usual outrageous manner, another pleasure boat—this one full of innocent tourists—passed by. I noticed their tour guide busy trying to explain this extraordinary additional London attraction of a huge bum, swaying and rocking on top of a boat, to music that they couldn’t hear in their position on the Thames.

 
As Gay in the 80s noted, “All-in-all, it was an extraordinary – and empowering – day. It was the day that our community came together to ensure the future of Lesbian and Gay Pride. The rest, as they say, is history.”
 

 
As DM reported several weeks back, Melvins singer/guitarist Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne went on an unlikely-seeming acoustic tour this year, and released a now sold out tour-only acoustic E.P. on the Amphetamine Reptile label. (It’s since been announced that he’ll be releasing a full length acoustic album on Mike Patton’s Ipecac label in June.) Osborne has always been an affable storyteller in interviews, so it was no surprise to hear that his stage banter in these intimate shows were just as worthy of the ticket price as the music, but THIS story, told last week in Chicago about Nirvana/Foo Fighters/Them Crooked Vultures/total rock god Dave Grohl, is just AMAZING:
 

 
Poor bastard COMPLETELY BLEW IT.

In case you were wondering how the music on the tour was, there’s more live King Buzzo after the jump…

 
Appearing in a Hollywood musical was a dream come true for Tim Curry, as he explains in this extended vintage interview. Curry grew up on film musicals and at the time of the interview, he had just starred alongside Albert Finney, Carol Burnett and Bernadette Peters in Annie as Daniel “Rooster” Hannigan, a character he describes as “a cartoon villain… a failed gangster,” who thinks he is George Raft.

Tim Curry: He has a truly mean streak which finally develops in the end when he tries to kill Annie. [Pause] He does want to kill her, I think.

Interviewer: Does that bother you?

Tim Curry: No, not a bit. [Laughs] I find that quite easy.

Curry rarely talks about the The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but here he admits it probably damaged his film career.

“For when it worked, it worked so strongly that it left an image it was hard for producers to see through.”

But it wasn’t all bad, as the iconic role of Frank N. Furter was “practically a pension” for Tim and without it he believes he would never have made an impact on America.

This charming interview from 1981 is yet another reason to love Tim Curry.
 

 
Part deux avec Monsieur Curry, après le saut…

 
It is difficult to think of Jean-Paul Sartre without thinking of Simone de Beauvoir. They were lovers, comrades, friends whose lives were intrinsically entwined. Each morning they would work separately, then at four o’clock in the afternoon, they would meet and dine at La Palette, continuing their conversation, where it had left off. Then they would return to Sartre’s apartment, where they would work together until evening.

Sartre had moved to a tenth-floor, studio apartment on 222 Boulevardd Raspail in 1962, after the right-wing paramilitary group OAS had twice bombed his previous home on Rue Bonaparte.

It was a modern studio in one of the top floors of a modern building: one big wall full of books, a great leather armchair and a long worktable, thick and old—the kind of table used for meals in a convent—laden with manuscripts. From the table, one could see far into the distance, toward the Eiffel Tower. This new abode was Sartre’s farewell to Saint-Germain-des-Pres, to the postwar period, to the existential explosion—his return to Montparnasse, where, from then on, all those close to him would meet…

In the early 1960s, Sartre’s fame was at its height. He had been famously awarded and then rejected the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964. He was seen internationally as man of intellect, politics and scandal, yet at the same time, Sartre’s strict adherence to his singular brand of politics and philosophy often made him seem outdated to younger radicals and thinkers.

Even though at the time France was excited over Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault, Sartre refused to confront their fertile methods of investigation in any way whatsoever, let alone with the open mind that would have been useful in such a confrontation.

In an interview with L’Arc, Sartre restated his central beliefs:

“Philosophy represents totalized man’s struggle to recapture the meaning of totalization. No science can replace it, for each science applies itself to a well-delineated aspect of man… Philosophy is the investigation of praxis, and as such an investigation of man… the important thing is not what one does with man, but what he does with what one has done with him. What one has done with man, these are the structures, the signifiers, that the social sciences study. That which he does is history itself… Philosophy is the hinge.”

To the likes of Foucault, Sartre’s emphasis on:

...consciousness, subjectivity, freedom, responsibility and the self, his commitment to Marxist categories and dialectical thinking… his quasi Enlightenment humanism, Sartre seemed to personify everything that structuralists and poststructuralists like Foucault opposed. In effect, the enfant terrible of mid century France had become the “traditionalist” of the following generation.

Sartre was probably aware of this, and his rejection of the Nobel Prize was in part over a fear of being seen as part of the French establishment. This at a time when Sartre was dedicating himself to a biography of Gustave Flaubert, which Sartre (erroneously) believed would eclipse all of his previous work. This only convinced Michel Foucault that Sartre was a man of the 19th century.

Whilst always seeming to be hidden by the shadow of Sartre, it was in fact Simone de Beauvoir who was becoming far more relevant and radical in the 1960s, as her 1949 epoch-changing book The Second Sex was inspiring a generation of feminist writers and thinkers. There is a slight irony that this interview with Sartre and de Beauvoir, recorded for the French television series Dossiers in 1967, should focus so much attention to Sartre, when it was de Beauvoir’s ideas and writings that were more influential at the time. The film does capture the couple’s unique dynamic and discusses Sartre’s rejection of the Nobel Prize, his biography on Flaubert; while de Beauvoir discusses The Second Sex.  In French with subtitles.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Simone de Beauvoir: Why I am a Feminist
Albert Camus vs. Jean-Paul Sartre

Hi. Let me introduce myself. My name is Christine Notmyrealname, and I am a completely unlicensed for-amusement-and-entertainment-purposes-only uncertified conspiracy therapist. My job in life—self-appointed—is to bring conspiracy theorists, and those who aren’t, together, so that we can all unite and fix what’s wrong with society, the world, et cetera.

With those words, we are ushered into the over-the-rainbow, everything-you-know-is-fucking-WRONG-maaaaan world of Christine Notmyrealname, whom you surely know better as Exene Cervenka, singer of the seminal L.A. punk/roots rock band X. When DM last checked in on her, she was holding the punkest garage sale ever, in preparation for a move from L.A. to Texas, which, it turns out, may be in preparation for SHTF. But don’t worry, ladies, you can survive the coming apocalyptic nastiness if you just land the right man! Forget about that metrosexual Beverly Hills pantywaiste in his BMW, you want a redneck with a front porch, a pickup truck with a gun rack and the manly ability to put food on the table that he has killed himself. Just make sure you have skills to offer, and try not to be a tarted up, fake-tits whore.

Exene, she calls it as she sees it…
 

 
WATCH OUT FOR ALLIGATOOOORRRRRS!
 
Cervenka has a kooky YouTube channel full-to-burstin’ with bonkers shit. Samples from her playlists called “Liked videos,” “Favorite videos,” and “random greatness” include “exposés” of Reptilian shape-shifters, “proof” that the tragedy at Sandy Hook elementary was fake, and the Internet paranoiac’s usual array of 9/11-OMG-the-currency-is-about-to-crash-wake-up-sheeple-everything’s-a-false-flag crap. It’s useful to have this background to her proclivities, because she steers clear of explicitly pushing those buttons in her own videos, which give them a kind of inchoate vagueness that actually augments their unhinged appeal.
 

 
Look, we can surely all agree that consensus reality absolutely does not always match up with what’s actually happening, and that information gleaned from corporate media invariably comes with a heapin’ helpin’ of veiled agenda. But there’s a whole lot of excluded middle between sensible advice to question the information that’s fed you and “The End-Time Adventures of Lucifer and His Illuminati Gang.”
 
Some of Exene’s favorite “informations,” after the jump…

 
In December 2005, The Scotsman newspaper published a story about “Stalin’s half-man, half-ape super-warriors”:

THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a “living war machine”. The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

The Scotsman must have thought they had uncovered one of Soviet Russia’s darkest secrets. The article went on to detail how Stalin financed a scientist Doctor Ivanoff with $200,000 to find out if it was possible to create a human-ape hybrid, the “Humanzee.” 

In order to do this, Ivanoff decided he had to impregnate chimpanzees with human sperm. With assistance from the Pasteur Institute, Ivanoff was able to use their primate facility in Conakry, Guinea to carry out his experiments. It was in 1926, Ivanoff had three chimpanzees artificially impregnated at the facility. However, the experiment failed.

Back in Russia, Ivanoff decided to impregnate Russian women with ape sperm. A “Woman G” was set to be impregnated with orangutan sperm, but the donor ape (called “Tarzan”) died, and the experiment was canceled. In one of Stalin’s political purges, Ivanoff was removed form office, and died not longer after.

However, as explained in this documentary on the “Humanzee,” Ivanoff was not creating a hybrid ape army, but was attempting to discredit religious belief in creationism. For Ivanoff hoped his experiments in cross-fertilization would prove (once and for all) the evolutionary theory that man came from apes.

The documentary tends to errs on the more sensationalist aspects of this story before hurriedly tying-up the true story of the “Humanzee.” It also includes the tale of Xena, a “hairy woman,” believed to be a seven-foot-tall “abanu,” or ape-human; and the very disturbing Doctor Moreau-like experiments of Doctor Robert White, who transplanted a living monkey head onto another monkey’s dead body in 1970.
 

 
When Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, I recall reading about his passing and being quite depressed at the thought of a world without him in it. I read all of his books when I was a kid—some of them several times over—and like many of my generation (and the one above it) I very much internalized Kurt Vonnegut’s notoriously pessimistic, but ultimately kind-hearted view of mankind. I can also say, without hesitation, that his way of looking at the absurdities of life made a lot more sense to me than the religion that my parents tried to stuff down my throat at that age.

His was one of the most important moral—and comic—voices of 20th century American literature. Who else besides Kurt Vonnegut could be considered in the same league as say, Mark Twain?

When he died a great voice was silenced, but from time to time, something unanthologized or a previously unseen letter will surface (Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him by Loree Rackstraw, a woman he’d once had an affair with and stayed friends with, is a terrific, if little-known, intimate portrait of the man, including many of his letters). Recently Letters of Note uncovered Vonnegut’s contribution to a Volkswagen ad campaign that ran in TIME magazine in 1988. The campaign asked notable people to write letters to those living 100 years in the future:

Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088:

It has been suggested that you might welcome words of wisdom from the past, and that several of us in the twentieth century should send you some. Do you know this advice from Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’? Or what about these instructions from St. John the Divine: ‘Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come’? The best advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’

Our century hasn’t been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable information about the human situation: how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather, how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?

For me, the most paralyzing news was that Nature was no conservationist. It needed no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living things. It set fire to forests with lightning bolts. It paved vast tracts of arable land with lava, which could no more support life than big-city parking lots. It had in the past sent glaciers down from the North Pole to grind up major portions of Asia, Europe, and North America. Nor was there any reason to think that it wouldn’t do that again someday. At this very moment it is turning African farms to deserts, and can be expected to heave up tidal waves or shower down white-hot boulders from outer space at any time. It has not only exterminated exquisitely evolved species in a twinkling, but drained oceans and drowned continents as well. If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

Yes, and as you people a hundred years from now must know full well, and as your grandchildren will know even better: Nature is ruthless when it comes to matching the quantity of life in any given place at any given time to the quantity of nourishment available. So what have you and Nature done about overpopulation? Back here in 1988, we were seeing ourselves as a new sort of glacier, warm-blooded and clever, unstoppable, about to gobble up everything and then make love—and then double in size again.

On second thought, I am not sure I could bear to hear what you and Nature may have done about too many people for too small a food supply.

And here is a crazy idea I would like to try on you: Is it possible that we aimed rockets with hydrogen bomb warheads at each other, all set to go, in order to take our minds off the deeper problem—how cruelly Nature can be expected to treat us, Nature being Nature, in the by-and-by?

Now that we can discuss the mess we are in with some precision, I hope you have stopped choosing abysmally ignorant optimists for positions of leadership. They were useful only so long as nobody had a clue as to what was really going on—during the past seven million years or so. In my time they have been catastrophic as heads of sophisticated institutions with real work to do.

The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms:

Reduce and stabilize your population.

Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.

Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.

Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.

Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.

Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.

And so on. Or else.

Am I too pessimistic about life a hundred years from now? Maybe I have spent too much time with scientists and not enough time with speechwriters for politicians. For all I know, even bag ladies and bag gentlemen will have their own personal helicopters or rocket belts in A.D. 2088. Nobody will have to leave home to go to work or school, or even stop watching television. Everybody will sit around all day punching the keys of computer terminals connected to everything there is, and sip orange drink through straws like the astronauts.

Cheers,

Kurt Vonnegut

A perfect prose diamond, right?

I can think of no better coda to this bleak epistle than this clip of Alan Weissman, author of Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, a new book about the disturbing mathematical trajectory of the overpopulation problem on Real Time with Bill Maher earlier this month… Have a nice day!