British artist Nic Ramage describes the Jelly Wobbler as being non-utilitarian, fragile, struggling to do its job and always on the verge of giving up. All of which sounds like bad sex to me.
In this video, the oddly erotic Wobbler starts slowly, hesitantly, but eventually finds a groove as its little mechanical pelvis starts thrusting and trembling with increased frenzy toward a gelatinous petite mort.
At first, Christian fundamentalist group Repent Amarillo’s recent charming video of their firing-squad execution of a Santa piñata in the name of putting the Savior back in to the holiday seems typical.
But after reading Canadian cannabis activist Dana Larsen’s 2003 article on the apparent psychotropic and shamanic origins of Santa Claus and many other Christmas traditions, it made some deeper sense to me.
Skip down to the explanatory vid…
According to Larsen, the Lapps of modern-day Finland and the Koyak tribes of the central Russian steppes had holy men in their ranks who regularly imbibed the hallucinogenic red & white amanita muscaria mushroom (also known as “fly agaric”). These ‘shrooming shamen proved to be the model of the figure we now know as Santa Claus.
Larsen also contends that the Christmas tree was originally seen as a “World Tree”, typically a fir or evergreen, species under which the amanita muscaria mushroom thrived:
The World Tree was seen as a kind of cosmic axis, onto which the planes of the universe are fixed. The roots of the World Tree stretch down into the underworld, its trunk is the “middle earth” of everyday existence, and its branches reach upwards into the heavenly realm.
So, of course, the North Star around which all stars seemed to revolve was always aligned with the top of the tree—thus the star on top of the modern Christmas tree. These ancients also saw the magic mushroom springing up as “virgin births” seeded by the morning dew, which is symbolized by the tinsel on the tree. Trippy, eh?
Also:
Below is the least campy video I could find that draws a bunch of the connections between Santa and the ‘shroom. Enjoy!
Thanks to Lexie T. for the heads-up!
Koons and one really big expensive balloon dog.
The owners of San Francisco’s Park Life gallery and retail store have been threatened with a lawsuit by multi-millionaire artist Jeff Koons. Jamie Alexander and Derek Song were selling a small plastic balloon dog sculpture that kind of looks like Koons’s balloon dog sculptures which kind of look like the balloon dogs clowns have been twisting and tying at children’s birthday parties since the 1920’s - 30 years before Koons was born.
Alexander and Song posted the following message on their website:
Park Life just received a very formal Cease and Desist Letter from Jeff Koons’ Lawyers calling for an “Immediate Cessation” of selling our Balloon Dog sculptures.
Wait, I’m confused, isnt his ENTIRE FUCKING CAREER based on co-opting other peoples work/objects????
So going forward, just so you know; Jeff Koons owns all likenesses of balloon dogs.”
Ironically, Koons has been sued repeatedly for copyright infringement for his use of…
[...] pre-existing images, the original works of others, in his work. In Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a judgment against him for his use of a photograph of puppies as the basis for a sculpture, String of Puppies.”
A Koons balloon dog (of the smaller variety) will set you back several thousand dollars. The Park Life balloon dog was 34 bucks.
Park Life balloon dog
Via TB
Glasgow architects NORD have built a stunning new holiday home, Shingle House, on Dungeness beach, just a stone’s throw away from Derek Jarman’s famous Prospect Cottage. The Shingle House was built under Alain de Botton’s Living Architecture scheme, which offers “a chance to rent houses for a holiday designed by some of the most talented architects at work today, and set in some of the most stunning locations in Britain.”
Living Architecture is a social enterprise dedicated to the promotion and enjoyment of world-class modern architecture. We have asked a series of great architects to design houses for us around Britain and are making these available to rent for holidays all year round.
We started the organisation from a desire to shift perceptions of modern architecture. We wanted to allow people to experience what it is like to live, eat and sleep in a space designed by an outstanding architectural practice. While there are examples of great modern buildings in Britain, they tend to be in places that one passes through (eg. airports, museums, offices) and the few modern houses that exist are almost all in private hands and cannot be visited.
We see ourselves first and foremost as an educational body, dedicated to enhancing the appreciation of architecture. But we also hope that you will have an exceptional holiday with us.
Other holidays homes have been built in Suffolk, Kent and Norfolk, and are all currently available to rent.
NORD’s beautiful Shingle House is near the famed cottage of legendary film-maker Derek Jarman, with its beautiful garden among the shingle and salt air of the Dungeness coast. He described this retreat from London life in a collected volume of his diaries, Modern Nature:
Prospect Cottage, its timbers black with pitch, stands on the shingle at Dungeness. Built eighty years ago at the sea’s edge - one stormy night many years ago waves roared up to the front door threatening to swallow it… Now the sea has retreated leaving bands of shingle. You can see these clearly from the air; they fan out from the lighthouse at the tip of the Ness like contours on a map.
Prospect faces the rising sun across a road sparkling silver with sea mist. One small clump of dark green broom breaks through the flat ochre shingle. Beyond, at the sea’s edge, are silhouetted a jumble of huts and fishing boats, and a brick kutch, long abandoned, which has sunk like a pillbox at a crazy angle; in it, many years ago, the fishermen’s nets were boiled in amber preserve.
For more information about NORD or renting Shingle House visit Living Architecture.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Derek Jarman: A Film by Steve Carr
More photos of Nord’s cottage plus bonus clip, after the jump…
Huh ? Rapture must be nigh because I’m pretty sure I’m not hallucinating the uber-horrible right wing Jeezer supremo making total sense on the wisdom of pot decriminaliztion in this clip which was broadcast today.
Thanks Jason Witherspoon via Cheech & Chong (natch)
To jolly us along with a festive feel, here’s Kate Bush singing a live version of “December Will Be Magic Again” from her 1979 BBC Christmas Special.
With thanks to Misty Roses
Little Lamb of the GOP: oil on panel 36” x 24”
“Little Lamb of the GOP” from Michael Caines’ Perfect Happiness series.
Michael’s work is currently showing at:
Mulherin Pollard Projects
317 10th Ave (between 28th & 29th)
New York, NY 10001
(via BB Submitterator)
Sixties pop diva Julie Driscoll
Julie Driscoll’s powerful voice, striking good looks and distinctive fashion sense made her forever an icon of the late 60s Swinging London music scene, but her career never took off in America. Her way ahead-of-her-time manner of presenting herself as a female pop artist can be seen echoed today by the likes of Alison Goldfrapp (and in the Austin Powers movies!). She still performs, under her married name, Jullie Tippetts.
“Season of the Witch”
After the jump, two more amazing videos of Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity!
When the DTs were bad, the writer Malcolm Lowry had a trick to stop his shaking hands from spilling his drink. He would remove his tie, place it around the back of his neck, wrap either end around each hand, take hold of his glass, then pulled the tie with his free hand, which acted as a pulley, lifting the glass straight to his mouth. Lowry drank anything, hair tonic, rubbing alcohol, aftershave, anything. But unlike most drunks, Lowry was a dedicated writer, a constant chronicler of his own life - everything was noted down as possible material for his novels, and generally, it was. He couldn’t enter a bar or cantina without leaving with at least four pages of hand-written notes. That’s dedication.
In 1947, when Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano was published, he was hailed as the successor to James Joyce, and his novel hit the top of the New York Times Best Seller List. Move ten years on, to the English village of Ripe, Lowry is dead from an overdose, at the age of forty-eight, penniless, forgotten, with his books out of print. It was an ignoble death for such a brilliant writer, a death that has since been clouded with the suspicion he was murdered by his wife, Margerie Bonner, who may (it has been suggested) have force-fed him pills when drunk - for the pills he swallowed were prescribed to Margerie, and Lowry was unlikely to have taken his own life without writing copious notes of his final experience.
Lowry was born in Cheshire in 1909 and educated at The Leys School and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. At school he discovered the two passions that were to last the whole of his life - writing and drinking. He wrote poetry and became friends with the American poet and novelist, Conrad Aiken, sending him letters about his drunken excesses. Aiken recognized Lowry’s natural talent and encouraged the teen literary tyro to write. But Lowry didn’t have the experience to write from, so between school and university, he enrolled as a deckhand and sailed to the far east. This provided him with the material for his first novel Ultramarine (1933), the story of a privileged young man, Dana Hilliot, and his need to be accepted, by his shipmates. The story takes place during 48-hours on board a tramp steamer, the Oedipus Tyrannus, “outward bound for Hell.” Like all of Lowry’s work it is semi-autobiographical, and contains the nascent themes he would develop in Under the Volcano (1947), Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (1968) and October Ferry to Gabriola (1970).
Booze flows through Lowry’s writing. It’s a way of escape, as much as the sea voyages and plane journeys he wrote about. In Medieval times, a definition of possession included drunkenness, and Lowry was well aware of drink’s shamanic association:
“The agonies of the drunkard find their most accurate poetic analogue in the agonies of the mystic who has abused his powers.”
Few writers physically endured the excesses of alcohol or wrote about them so powerfully. While everyone knows Under the Volcano and its tale of the descent into Hell of alcoholic British consul, Geoffrey Firmin, during the Day of the Dead, in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, it is his novella Lunar Caustic which gives the clearest insight into the cost of Lowry’s alcoholism. It’s the harrowing tale of Bill Plantagenet, a pianist and ex-sailor who, after a long night’s drinking, awakens to find himself in New York’s Bellevue psychiatric hospital surrounded by the dispossessed and insane.
The story is as much about Lowry as it is about the “collective and individual anxieties of the age,” and it was a story Lowry worked on repeatedly during his life. Early versions were published in literary magazines, and Lowry eventually spliced it together into a novella he thought too “gruesome” to publish in his lifetime, though he gave it a most interesting title:
Lunar Caustic as a sardonic and ambiguous title for a cauterizing work on madness has, | feel, a great deal of merit. But lunar caustic is also silver nitrate and used unsuccessfully to cure syphilis. And indeed as such it might stand symbolically for any imperfect or abortive cure, for example of alcoholism.
Like many drunks, Lowry teetered between self-pity and self-loathing, but the writer in him kept a careful watch on his often disastrous and eventful life, and it is because of this his writing never indulged in the worst excesses of the bar-room drunk of being boring. Indeed, Lowry’s books are complex enough to deserve more than one reading, for as Schopenhauer once wrote:
“Any book that is at all important ought to be at once read through twice; ... on a second reading the connection of the different portions of the book will be better understood, and the beginning comprehended only when the end is known; and partly because we are not in the same temper and disposition on both readings.”
Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry is an Oscar nominated documentary which:
focuses on Malcolm Lowry, author of one of the major novels of the 20th century, Under the Volcano. But while Lowry fought a winning battle with words, he lost his battle with alcohol. Shot on location in four countries, the film combines photographs, readings by Richard Burton from the novel and interviews with the people who loved and hated Lowry, to create a vivid portrait of the man.
It does create a vivid portrait, but one under the shadow of Lowry’s last wife Marjorie Bonner, and it was not until after her death, in 1988, and the publication of Gordon Bowker’s top-class biography, Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry, that a complete picture of Lowry came to fruition. Still it’s a damn fine documentary, and well worth the watch. As for an epitaph, I’ll leave that to the man himself:
Malcolm Lowry
Late of the Bowery
His prose was flowery
And often glowery
He lived, nightly, and drank daily
And died, playing the ukelele
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Kerouac’s Boozy Beatitudes on Italian TV, 1966
The Kinks perform “Father Christmas” on German TV variety show Plattenküche,1977.
Have yourself a merry merry Christmas
Have yourself a good time
But remember the kids who got nothin’
While you’re drinkin’ down your wine
“Father Christmas” was never a hit for The Kinks, but it’s become a bit of a rock and roll Xmas standard over the years. This clip is the best quality I’ve seen. Enjoy.