Wonderful time yesterday as Dangerous Minds taped for an upcoming show “cultural engineer” Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.  Not to tease something that won’t show up here for a week or so, but Richard’s interview with Gen was at times so captivating I was practically crawling into the speakers beyond our “black box studio” so as to not miss a single word.  In the meantime, check out Psychic TV covering the Velvet Underground classic, Foggy Notion:

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Thee Psychick Bible Now Out! , The Infinity Factory: Genesis P-Orridge Interview,
The Infinity Factory: Robert Anton Wilson, Genesis P-Orridge and Me

 
Could the artistry of David Bowie be tied somehow to the appearance of his teeth?  That appears to be the subtext of the following video.  Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie?  As “Surgeon To The Stars” Alex Kardis points out, “his teeth don’t look particularly great.”  By the time he got around, though, to recording Let’s Dance, Bowie’s choppers look brighter and tighter.

I find it interesting that Rolling Stone’s Alan Light feels that after Bowie cranked out not only Ziggy Stardust, but Hunky Dory, Low, Station to Station, etc., the one thing “holding him back” was a self-consciousness about his teeth.  Hmm, by that logic…did cosmetic surgery beget Tin Machine?!

 
What’s wrong with “bite the wax tadpole” as a slogan for Coca-Cola ?
 
via Coca-Cola Conversations :

When Coca-Cola was first sold in China in 1927, it was obvious to the Coke employees in China that the Coca-Cola trademark must be transliterated into Chinese characters. To find the nearest phonetic equivalent to ?

 

 
(via BuzzFeed)

A Taunton father is outraged after his 8-year-old son was sent home from school and required to undergo a psychological evaluation after drawing a stick-figure picture of Jesus Christ on the cross.

The father said he got a call earlier this month from Maxham Elementary School informing him that his son, a second-grade student, had created a violent drawing. The image in question depicted a crucified Jesus with Xs covering his eyes to signify that he had died on the cross. The boy wrote his name above the cross.

?

(Via An Idiot’s Guide to Dreaming)

Hazel Hill, the designer of Thee Psychick Bible and one of the masterminds of Show Cave, showed this video to an awe-struck crowd this weekend at her art space. Jaws dropped.

(Via Made of This)

 
From Pea Hicks, The king of the Optigan.

This is a GE Play-Talk from 1950. It’s a kid’s toy, but it’s actually pretty advanced for the time, since tape recorders were just starting to become available. This is a tape recorder / record player hybrid. The paper disc is coated with magnetic tape and the tonearm has a tape recorder head on it. The little plastic disc that goes over the “tape” disc has a spiral groove for guiding the tonearm. The speaker serves double duty as the microphone. All tube electronics.

What’s great is the way you can play/record in random access mode. There’s no erase head, so the sounds just keep building on top of each other until you erase the disc with a bulk tape eraser.

In the 2nd part of the video, I use another fantastic GE toy- the Tote-A-Tune keyboard from the early 70s. I record a scale onto the disc, then attempt to play a tune by manually moving the tonearm over the disc. Lots of creative lo-fi applications for this sucker!!

 
Never mind its off-putting appearance, what with its Cthulhu like tentacles and weird lil’ miniature celery tops (not too nice to eat those), the celery root or as the French know it, celeriac, is a multi-faceted delight once you get to know it. Chop all the nasty bits off (it’s easier than you would think) then dice into cubes and basically treat it as you would a potato, turnip or any other root vegetable. Roast in the oven, saute with garlic and olive oil, puree into soup, eat raw in a salad, you can’t go wrong. What you taste is the essence of celery-ness but with heavier presence and substance than your standard stalk variety. It’s in season now until spring, so harass your grocer !
 

 

 
Sketchy Santas is a WONDERFUL photoblog dedicated to evil mall santas. Ummm… Err….
 
Sketchy Santas