This year marks the centenary of the birth of pioneering filmmaker Norman McLaren, whose multi-award-winning animations inspired generations of filmmakers including Francois Truffaut, George Lucas and Michel Gondry. 

McLaren’s best-known for his work with the National Film Board of Canada, for whom he made his Oscar-winning 1952 short Neighbours, which mixed pixilation, stop-frame animation and live action to create a powerful anti-war message. The film reflected McLaren’s mixed feelings about the Korean War as he had just returned from China where he had been greatly impressed by the way the Communist country was progressing. He found his own experience of Chairman Mao’s China at odds with its representation in the West during the war.

McLaren was born on April 11th, 1914 in Stirling, Scotland. He attended the Glasgow School of Art, where he decided filmmaking rather than painting was the future of art. He started making short animations by painting and scratching directly onto the film. His first experiment proved so successful that the film was worn-out through continual screenings. His next film Seven Till Five (1933) told the story of a day-in-the-life of the art school. The film used various techniques such as montage and editing-in-camera lifted from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. McLaren followed this with Camera Makes Whoopee (1935), which covered the celebration of a student party. Again, the film is now best-known for McLaren’s innovative use of camera effects.

In 1936, McLaren collaborated with fellow student, sculptor Helen Biggar on a far more ambitious and political project, an anti-war film called Hell Unltd.. McLaren was a pacifist and, at this time, also a Communist, who believed he could change people’s attitudes through his films. Together with Biggar he created a highly imaginative (if politically simplistic) anti-capitalist take on the cause and effect of war and profiteering from it. The film mixes stop-frame animation with filmed and archival footage, captions and rostrum camera work. It’s a powerful little film and one that showcases many of the talents that made Norman McLaren a dynamic, imaginative and brilliant film-maker.
 

 
More after the jump…

“Untitled,” 1985
 
Anyone with any familiarity with Kurt Vonnegut’s literary output probably knows that the man liked to doodle. His whimsical self-portrait, the one that emphasized his mustache, is very familiar, making an appearance in his 1973 masterpiece Breakfast of Champions and many other places. Breakfast of Champions, of course, featured all manner of little drawings as a non-textual means of furthering the story.

Next month a handsome coffee table book, Kurt Vonnegut Drawings, from the Monacelli Press, featuring hitherto unavailable artworks, will go on sale (the list price is $40, but you can pre-order it for $25.40). The book will feature 145 selections of his work.
 

 
Vonnegut was a fervent believer in the importance of art as a means of enhancing everyday life, and these interesting drawings are the proof. He used pen and (quite clearly) magic marker for these artworks. They remind me most of all of Joan Miró (esp. the Janus-like piece from 1987) and Saul Steinberg (esp. the one with the wavy hair from the same year).
 

“Untitled,” no date
 

“Untitled,” no date
 

“Untitled,” 1980
 

“Self-Portrait,” 1985
 
More of Vonnegut’s amusing art after the jump…..

 
Confusingly, Roxy Music have used “The High Road” as the title of two different live releases with the exact same cover art.

In 1982, the group was on a major world tour in support of their Avalon album. The show taped for the four song EP titled The High Road was a performance at The Apollo, Glasgow August 30, 1982, whereas the one on the home video release also titled The High Road was shot in the Côte d’Azur in Fréjus, France, three days earlier on August 27th.  I always wondered why the version of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” was different on the VHS. Now I know.

To make matters even more confusing, just the soundtrack from the video was released as Heart Still Beating on CD in 1990. The High Road DVD, which you could think of as Heart Still Beating with newly added picture if you didn’t know any better, I suppose, was re-released in 2004.

Set list:
1. The Main Thing
2. Out Of The Blue
3. Both Ends Burning
4. A Song For Europe
5. Can’t Let Go
6. While My Heart Is Still Beating
7. Avalon
8. My Only Love
9. Dance Away
10. Love Is The Drug
11. Like A Hurricane
12. Editions Of You
13. Do The Stand
14. Jealous Guy

Bryan Ferry on vocals; Phil Manzanera on guitar; Andy Mackay - saxophone and oboe; Neil Hubbard - guitar; Andy Newmark on drums; Alan Spenner - bass; Jimmy Maelen - percussion; Guy Fletcher on keyboards and Fonzi Thornton, Michelle Cobbs and Tawatha Agee on backing vocals.

The Avalon tour would be the last time Roxy would perform together for eighteen years.
 

 
In 2011, photographer Marc Mol captured these intense aerial shots of hippos and crocodiles battling it out over Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park. Large herds of two different species going at it, is a pretty incredible thing to witness, IMO.

I’m not entirely sure if the crocs took down a single hippo—hippos are known as one of the most aggressive and vicious animals on the planet—or if the crocs were feeding on a dead one and then other hippos came in to protect their territory? Either way, it’s like a The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers epic battle scene, but in nature.

If you are going to be lucky enough to be around at exactly the right moment to photograph such a thing, hope that your luck holds out and that you’re airborne when it happens, like Marc Mol was!

 

 
Via reddit

 
File this under “If You Like Jobriath”:

One day I found myself looking for obscure glam rock compilations on Amazon and the “customers who bought this” recommendation led me to an album called Breathlessly Brett, an LP originally recorded in the mid-1970s—but not released until 2003—by a then-teenaged performer named Brett Smiley. It seldom left my CD player for the next month.

I’d never heard of Brett Smiley before that, but when I did a search on him, an interesting story emerged. A child star who who went to junior high school with Michael Jackson (the shared a woodworking class), Smiley once played the title role in the musical Oliver!. He was just a sixteen-year-old when he was discovered by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, then keen to take his career down a Phil Spector-type producer/Svengali path. and feeling competitive with Jobriath’s manager, Jerry Brandt.
 

 
Smiley was given a $200,000 advance and recorded an album produced by Oldham with Steve Marriott from the Small Faces and Humble Pie on guitar. An amazingly raucous single “Va Va Va Voom” was released and heavily hyped with Smiley’s blonde pretty-boy face appearing in ads all over London, and in an extremely over the top performance and interview on the popular Russell Harty Plus TV program. Disc magazine proclaimed Brett to be “The Most Beautiful Boy In The World.”
 

“It wasn’t a slipper he slipped to Cinderella…” Brett Smiley as “The Prince” in the 3-D erotic musical version of Cinderella.
 

The insanely catchy single “Va Va Va Voom”
 
Hard to see how a tune that catchy failed to storm the charts, but the single bombed and the album was shelved. Although Smiley auditioned to replace David Cassidy in The Partridge Family and made a film appearances (like 1977’s erotic Cinderella and American Gigolo), he must’ve fallen into some sort of “velvet goldmine” and wasn’t really heard from again until 2003 when RPM Records acquired the master tapes. The sad truth was that Brett Smiley wallowed in serious skid-row drug addiction for years. His legend proved mysterious and intriguing for glam rock fans and Johnny Thunders’ biographer Nina Antonina wrote a book, The Prettiest Star: Whatever Happened to Brett Smiley? about how Smiley’s super brief pop supernova moment—just the idea of him—so strongly influenced her teenage years.

Now recovered from the drug excesses of his past, Smiley continues to record and perform, mostly around New York City.

This Russell Harty clip features a young Brett Smiley performing his Ziggy-influenced “Space Ace” (the “Va Va Va Voom” B-side) and it’s pretty incredible if you like this sort of thing (Turn the sound up really loud as the audio here sounds pretty weak here.)
 

 
From the Dangerous Minds archives

 
This isn’t going to be one of those preachy posts where I tell you meat is gross and this is why you should become vegetarian—I do a enjoy a nicely grilled steak from time to time m’self—but you have to admit that these images by photographer Per Johansen are more than a tad unsettling.

Johansen’s new series titled Mæt (Danish for “full”) is a take on human consumption, gluttony and ethics in the meat industry. The plastic recycled bottles represent the human stomach gorging itself with raw, bloody meat.

Are you full yet?

 

 

 
More meat-stuffed bottles after the jump…
 

 
Although the intention of Elvis’ Greatest Shit to wallow in bad taste is pretty obvious from its use of the infamous coffin shot of a dead King of Rock and Roll (allegedly shot by Elvis’ cousin BIlly Mann and sold to the National Enquirer for $18,000) on the album cover, let alone the blunt title, can it honestly be said that the external trappings are any worse here than the music within?

Probably not.

Compiled by a mysterious bootlegger named “Richard” on “Dog Vomit Records”—purveyors of “Let’s Drop Some ‘Ludes And Vomit With Jimi Hendrix”—the collection was exactly what you’d think it is, the worst of the worst of Elvis Presley’s musical output, most of it sourced from his Hollywood films, with a few numbers recorded in the waning years before he’d eaten his last deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich.

With song selections like “He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad” (about an IRS audit), “Dominic” (about an impotent bull”), “Queenie Wahine’s Papaya” (don’t wanna know) and “Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce” (what?), Elvis himself probably would have agreed that this was the worst dross he’d ever recorded. Hell, no wonder he became such a waste case. Imagine how humiliating these songs were for him to sing, and this was still a good few years away from Elvis’ awful BJ Thomas cover version-era of the 1970s!
 

“Old MacDonald Had a Farm” from Double Trouble
 

“Yoga Is As Yoga Does,” a duet with Elsa Lanchester(!) from 1967’s Easy Come, Easy Go
 

“He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad” from Speedway
 
More of Elvis’ Greatest Shit after the jump…

 
Somehow I missed these amazingly detailed face paint album covers—done as an appreciation for Record Store Day—by professional face painter Natalie Sharp AKA Lone Taxidermist. As sick and tired as I am of seeing Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover art—I mean, it’s been done every which way by now, except maybe for this way. Yup, Sharp did a terrific job with it.

Her face paint for Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest is mighty impressive, too.

You can see more at The Quietus.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Improbably, I suppose, Iggy Pop, born James Newell Osterberg, Jr. on this day in 1947, turned 67 years old today. No longer the world’s forgotten boy, but a wealthy senior citizen.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Idiot: Iggy Pop totally charms square daytime TV audience, 1977

Iggy’s jacket: The rock and roll Shroud of Turin

Iggy Pop’s tour riders are hilarious

Iggy Pop Action Figure

Iggy Pop in the late 70s/early 80s, previously unseen photographs taken by his girlfriend

Your Pretty Lemon Face is Going to Hell: Iggy Pop shilling for Schweppes

Iggy Pop explains the meaning of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ to Howard Stern, 1990

When Bowie got busted: Local news reports from his 1976 Rochester, NY pot arrest with Iggy

Like ‘The Wicker Man’ on heroin: Nico and a young Iggy Pop in ‘Evening of Light,’ 1969

Below, Iggy and a jar of peanut butter invent stage diving at the Cincinnati Pop Festival in 1970:
 

 
I have to admit that Sparks are my most favorite band in the whole wide world. But you don’t really need to know that. All you need to know is that Russell Mael visited a karaoke parlor in Tokyo last year during Sparks tour of Japan, when he noticed they carried the Mael brothers’ classic hit “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us.” What else could Russell do but have a go?

Mr. Mael’s rendition is certainly superb, and would definitely pass any audition for a Sparks tribute band. He may also have hit upon a new trend for touring bands: visit karaoke bars and sing along to their hits. Russell Mael has certainly thrown down a gauntlet that will be difficult to better with this performance.
 

 
With thanks to Michael Gallagher