For a week in February of 1972 John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted the Mike Douglas Show and America was introduced to macrobiotics, experimental film, bio-feedback, Elephant’s Memory, Yippee prankster Jerry Rubin and Chuck Berry sitting yoga-style watching it all pass before his bemused eyes.
The footage of John and Yoko playing “Johnny B. Goode” and “Memphis” with Chuck Berry is all over YouTube. It’s not included here. The clips that I’m sharing have been less available ever since they went out of print. While not as musically historic as the footage of Berry and Lennon playing together, these conversations with John and Yoko are a charming and inspiring look at one of rock and roll’s great marriages. The love and respect between Lennon and Ono is palpable and you can feel the creative energy that is sparking between them. And their earnest enthusiasm in turning people on to new ways of treating their bodies and brains is testimony to John and Yoko’s continuing journey in raising consciousness, ours and theirs. Their message is refreshingly free of cynicism and rock star jadedness.
Mike Douglas seems genuinely engaged by John and Yoko.
We begin with day two of John and Yoko’s residency, February 16,1972.
Religious groups in New Zealand are up in arms over Hell Pizza’s new ad campaign featuring inverted pentagrams on pizzas and buns. From The Christian Post:
The controversial pizza chain has put up billboards in Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, with a photo of its hot cross bun decorated with an inverted pentagram, which Satanists have adopted as their symbol. Next to the photo of the bun is the tagline, “For a limited time. A bit like Jesus.”
“They [Hell Pizza] join a long line of advertising that’s in questionable taste that slings off things that lots of people hold precious,” said Lloyd Ashton, the media officer of the Anglican Church in New Zealand, according to The New Zealand Herald.
Hell Pizza director Warren Powell says:
“First of all, we’re acknowledging that Jesus Christ may have been on Earth for a limited time,” said Powell, according to the local publication. “Again, it’s a debate. I think if people take it that way then they’re being a little bit single-minded.”
If I saw this ad I would totally order from Hell Pizza.
Update: A couple of savvy DM readers point out that Hell Pizza reminds them of Mr. Show’s “Marilyn Mozzorella’s Pizza Rella Pie Parlours” sketch. Indeed, it does.
Of course, it’s something many of us have suspected all along, but a new study published yesterday in Current Biology reveals that the differences in our political views are tied to differences in brain structure.
The next time you look at a Republican and wonder in astonishment at how small-minded, unscientific, inflexible and sometimes scarily racist their belief systems often are, well, wonder no more: They can’t help themselves…!
And the way you wince at them? It goes both ways, mate. Might be hard-coded into your gray matter as well. No wonder Conservatives find Liberals so infuriatingly condescending…
Individuals who call themselves liberal tend to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes, while those who call themselves conservative have larger amygdalas. Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to cope with conflicting information and a greater ability of conservatives to recognize a threat, the researchers say.
“Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual’s political orientation,” said Ryota Kanai of the University College London. “Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure.”
Kanai said his study was prompted by reports from others showing greater anterior cingulate cortex response to conflicting information among liberals. “That was the first neuroscientific evidence for biological differences between liberals and conservatives,” he explained.
There had also been many prior psychological reports showing that conservatives are more sensitive to threat or anxiety in the face of uncertainty, while liberals tend to be more open to new experiences. Kanai’s team suspected that such fundamental differences in personality might show up in the brain.
And, indeed, that’s exactly what they found. Kanai says they can’t yet say for sure which came first. It’s possible that brain structure isn’t set in early life, but rather can be shaped over time by our experiences. And, of course, some people have been known to change their views over the course of a lifetime.
This is not the first attempt to locate the biological roots of party affiliation. In an October 2010 study, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University identified a “liberal gene” — a variant called DRD4-7R, which affects the neurotransmitter dopamine — that has been linked with a personality type driven to seek out new experiences.
Another study from the University of Nebraska found that liberals and conservatives had different reactions to “gaze cues” — whether they tended to look in the same direction as a face on their computer screen. Liberals were more likely than conservatives to follow another person’s gaze, suggesting that people who lean right value autonomy more; alternative explanations suggest that liberals might be more empathetic, or that conservatives are less trusting of others.
The thing this study doesn’t explain is why progressive women are so much hotter than Republican women!
Bebop jazzmen Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter are greeting each other with
“Bell man! where have you been?”
Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter demonstrate the art of the bebop greeting as featured in Life magazine, October 11, 1948.
The bebop greeting is an esoteric jazz tradition going back to the bop dens of ancient Egypt (home of the Pharaoh of Sanders). Initiates have passed these bebop handshakes, mudras and mantras down over the centuries and they were a highly kept secret until revealed in the mid-twentieth century by unscrupulous jazzbos who clearly had no understanding of the old ways. The bebop greetings Benny and Dizzy are demonstrating in these photos are not authentic bebop ritual. If they were, both men would be subject to immediate elimination by the society of jazzassassins, a ninja-like organization originated by Rahsaan Roland Kirk and formerly known as the saxassassinators.
Dizzy and Benny are giving the shout “Eel-ya-da” which sounds like
bebop triplet notes.
Completely over the top, utterly ridiculous video for the 2011 National Day of Prayer. Like what is the message here supposed to be? That Christians can somehow stave off the Apocalypse and natural disasters by praying? I thought the end of the world and Jesus coming back were the whole point? Now I’m confused.
And what’s with the shitty bombastic music? Was “Carmina Burana” too expensive to license so they went for a cheapo knock-off instead? Note that the White House (where “that Obama” lives) and San Francisco (an American stand-in for Sodom and Gomorrah perhaps) have the ominous lightning flashes but the little church (which I presume resides somewhere in Sarah Palin’s “real America”) is bathed in a cone of holy light… Lame, but these things always are… Can’t these fucking assholes hurry up and be raptured already?
The funny part (if there is one) about all of the Christian apocalyptic madness of the current age is to consider how silly and dated this sort of superstitious insanity is going to look 100 years from now. Mark my words, after all of us are dead, there will be an ironic cult for Kirk Cameron movies and the Left Behind books. They’ll be collectibles from a less enlightened time for hipsters in the 22nd century.
I used to dance with the Hare Krishna people on Sproul Plaza in Berkeley back when I was a 17 year old longhaired hippie. The Krishnas always know how to party and they make delicious vegetarian food.
Every year the Hare Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork, Utah puts on the biggest Holi celebration in the Western Hemisphere. In 2011 the Spanish Fork Police department estimated that over 40,000 people attended in the first day alone of the two-day festival. Organizers carefully rationed their stash of approximately 120,000 bags of colored powder.
Attendees come from all over the country (and some from abroad), but the majority of attendees are students from Brigham Young, Utah Valley, and Utah universities.
Holi celebrates the triumph of good over evil and ushers in the spring season. The festival commemorates a Hindu myth about a witch who burned children in a fire. One child repeated the Hare Krishna mantra as he was carried into the flames and the witch was burned instead. At the Spanish Fork festival, rock and roll, R&B, and other modern interpretation of the mantra are played by musicians throughout the day and chanted in a call and response game between performers and attendees. The main event of each festival is the coordinated throwing of colored powder, when the sky above the crowd is filled with rainbow puffs of dye.
Who knew Mormon country could be so psychedelic? Beautiful.
You gotta hand it to him, Rick Santorum, that wacky wingnut Republican no-hoper presidential candidate, a man with even less of a chance of gaining the GOP nomination than, say, Newt Gingrich (or any of the rest of them for that matter), just won’t give up. Despite the fact that NO ONE, I mean NO ONE thinks he’s got a snowball’s chance in hot hot Hades of gaining traction with, you know, actual voters, Rick’s out there, fighting the good fight… or something. It’s hard to say what he’s really doing or what he thinks he’s accomplishing.
Could there be a less-inspiring, less-intelligent, less-attractive candidate than Rick Santorum? Of course there could be, never count out the GOP when it comes to scraping the bottom of the loony bin, but the odds are against a lesser contender turning up in this election cycle. Even Ron or Rand Paul have better chances of moving into the White House than Santorum—effectively none, of course—and yet like a buffoonish Energerizer Bunny, he just keeps on going. BUT WHY? WHO is urging him to run? What kind of people shows up at his campaign events? What’s his motivation to run for President in spite of overwhelming indifference?
Who the fuck knows? Michele Bachmann probably even thinks Santorum is a pinhead. What alternate conclusion could anyone, even a Republican, come to when faced with a statement like this one:
“The social security system in my opinion is a flawed design, period. But, having said that, the design would work a lot better if we had stable demographic trends. … The reason social security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.”
Pastor Sheryl muthafuckin’ Brady lays it down in her peculiar gravel-voiced white-lady-meets-James Brown-style at ManPower 2010. Scroll in to about 1:20 for her entrance. When the music starts she really goes for it. Quite an act she’s got there, that Pastor Brady…
The GOP presidential primary just gets better and better all the time! Michele Bachmann? Newt? Haley Barbour? Rick “frothy mixture” Santorum? If this primary season wasn’t already shaping up to be an embarrassment of comedic riches, look at the latest kook to throw his tin-foil hat in the Republican ring. From the Wall Street Journal:
Remember Judge Roy Moore? He was the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice removed from office over the Ten Commandments monument he erected outside the state courthouse. Now, he’s about to jump into the presidential election in Iowa, GOP officials say.
Eight years after a state panel removed him from the bench over the commandments spat, and five years after he lost in the Republican primary in the Alabama governor’s race, the 64-year-old judge is preparing to launch a presidential exploratory committee and enter the Iowa fray, according to multiple Iowa GOP officials.
Below, Moore speaking at an anti-gay rally in Iowa. These guys are the best. Another Republican culture warrior no-hoper who’ll siphon off some bucks from the most reactionary radical right-types. Go get ‘em. tiger.
