The oughts were banner years for grind bands with pets for singers: there was Caninus, a side project of Most Precious Blood whose 2004 album Now The Animals Have A Voice I purchased because I figured I might someday have to prove that yes, there was a metal band with two pit bulls for singers. And there was Baltimore’s Hatebeak, formed by members of the Index and Pig Destroyer, who featured a front-bird, a parrot named Waldo.
 

 
Though they released splits with Caninus and Birdflesh (I have a feeling I know what you’re thinking, but sadly, no, the latter band does not also have a bird in it), Hatebeak broke up in 2009 before ever recording a full length LP of its own. That’s about to change—they’ve reunited, and will be releasing The Number of the Beak next week. It collects their split tracks on side one, while side two is all new. They’ve pre-released a handful of songs on Soundcloud, all titled with preposterous metal/avian puns, like “Hell Bent for Feathers,” “Roost in Piece,” you get the drift. Check out “The Thing that Should not Beak”:
 

 
In an interview with Consequence of Sound‘s Sami Jarroush, drummer Blake Harrison informed us that the band will never tour:

Parrots like doing this stuff—the mimicry is kind of like a form of play, so it’s more like they have to be in a relaxed ... playful mood. You know the sound of your smoke detector when the battery is low? And it’s like a really loud chirp? He will do that when he’s uncomfortable.

The bird really shouldn’t and probably couldn’t—I don’t want PETA after me for subjecting a bird to like 120 decibels of distorted guitars. And you know, it’s kind of more of like a fun thing. Playing live would be a pain in the ass, and if it’s not fun I don’t know if I would necessarily want to do it.

 

 
The Number of the Beak is due out on June 23, 2015. We’ll leave you with one of Waldo’s finest performances, “Seven Perches.”
 

 
Much love to Christian Taylor for alerting me to this excellent news.

 
Perhaps I’m just projecting how I would feel (if someone did this to me) onto Merlin the Cat, but doesn’t he look just a wee bit humiliated sporting The Dragon Cut? I could be wrong (but I don’t think I am).

The Main Lion cat grooming salon located in Paoli, Pennsylvania offers this ‘do. It’s unique!

via Neatorama

Frida And Her Ducks, 1948-49
 
Recently, the New York Botanical Gardens recreated parts of the extensive tropical gardens from Frida Kahlo’s famous “Casa Azul” home in Mexico. It’s the first solo NYC presentation of her work in 25 years, and fans are thrilled to see her art in such an immersive, lush setting. In conjunction with the show, Throckmorton Fine Art is showing a rare collection of photos from Frida until September 12th, many of which are set in the beautiful the gardens of the Blue House.

Though many of the photos appear to be candid snapshots, the images are textured with story. For example, Frida’s hand-painted “plaster bodice”—a cast she wore after one of her many surgeries—contains the hammer and sickle (a pretty explicit nod to her belief in revolutionary communism), but below that is a fetal image, a tragic reference to her failed attempt to have a child due to the bus accident in her youth that left her in constant pain. There are sweeter moments too. While her tumultuous relationship with her husband Diego Rivera produced some warm moments in front of the camera, it is with her many pets that you see Frida at her most gentle and caring.
 

Frida Wearing Plaster Corset, Which She Decorated With Hammer And Sickle (And Unborn Baby), Coyoacán, 1951
 

Frida With Michoacán Gourd On Head, 1933
 

Frida Winking, 1933
 
More after the jump…

Ouch: The x-ray of a Jack Russell Terrier who ate a 10-inch bread knife.
 
The excuse of the dog ate my homework might not be so far fetched as these X-rays of things our fine four-legged friends have swallowed shows.

Dogs are supposed to be carnivores, but omnivore or hoover might be more appropriate, as some of the items gulped down by these intrepid pooches include knives, a skewer, a phone charger, a light bulb and a rubber ducky. The images come from the They Ate What? competition, where vets submit X-rays of the most shocking items discovered inside family pets in the hope of winning a $1,500 prize. This selection is things the dogs ate….but don’t worry all foreign objects were successfully removed—to the relief of both dogs and owners.
 

This dog ate a phone charger.
 

Shish-kedog: A dog from Germany called Marley ate this kebab skewer.
 

Stoned: A seven-year-old Jack Russell from the UK devoured 80 small stones.
 
More things the dog ate, after the jump…

 
This HUGE needle-felted cat head was made out of wool by Housetu Sato and his students at the Japan School of Wool Art. It’s not exactly “hot off the presses,” but the more I saw it making the rounds on the Internet… the creepier it got for me. Every time I encountered it, I was even more disturbed. To add insult to injury, the cat is cross-eyed.

We try to avoid cat-related posts here on Dangerous Minds as the blogosphere is saturated with ‘em. But this one was just too… er, special to pass up!

Sadly (thankfully?) there are currently no plans to manufacture the cat head. I’m positive that will change the more these images get passed around.

The cat head will be on display at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum from April 18-23.

 

 

 
via Laughing Squid

 
Roar (1981) has been called “the most dangerous movie ever made.” How did it earn such a dubious distinction, you ask? Well, the cast and crew of the film worked with more than 130 wild animals—including panthers, tigers, lions, and elephants—that were allowed to roam free while the cameras rolled. The actors often appear to be genuinely terrified as these animals pursue them, knowing they could strike at any moment (and they often did). 70 people were injured during the making of the film.

Roar was the brainchild of Noel Marshall, one of the executive producers of The Exorcist, and his wife, actress Tippi Hedren, most famous for her lead role in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Over a period that lasted more than a decade, Marshall and Hedren, along with Noel’s sons John and Jerry and Tippi’s daughter Melanie Griffith, lived with these animals, while simultaneously shooting Roar. The entire family starred in the film, which Noel wrote and directed.
 

 
Roar has also been called the most expensive home movie ever made, costing $17 million. It tanked upon release, grossing just $2 million. Marshall, who died in 2010, would never direct another motion picture.
 

 
Roar defies categorization. On the surface, it’s an action/adventure film, but there are also elements seemingly taken from horror movies, documentaries, and slapstick comedies. At times it feels like you’re watching a bizarro-world live-action Disney film! This movie is totally captivating, comical, suspenseful, and terrifying. In short, Roar is nuts.
 

 
Alamo Drafthouse CEO/founder Tim League is a big fan of the film. In fact, he’s so passionate about Roar that he became an expert on its history and secured the rights to re-release it. A limited theatrical run in select cities begins April 17th, with Blu-ray/DVD/On Demand availability coming this summer.

I emailed Tim League a number of questions about this one-of-a-kind motion picture.

It took eleven years to make Roar—what took so long?:

Tim League: I like to think of Roar as a sort of Boyhood where the family expands beyond the mom, dad and children to include an adopted family of more than 130 lions, tigers, leopards, panthers and jaguars. Tippi Hedren and Noel Marshall first had the idea to shoot Roar back in 1971 when they were on safari and saw an abandoned house overrun with lions; they thought the concept of a family living in a house with lions would make an excellent premise for a film. Daktari had been wildly popular a few years prior, and they figured Roar would be a similar hit while upping the stakes. So, they immediately sought out world-renowned big cat experts to find out if such a thing could be done. These experts responded unanimously with words to the effect of, “You must be brainsick. Do NOT do this.” Undeterred, Marshall and Hedren set about the ten-year process of bringing big cats into their Hollywood home in small batches, one after another, to acclimate the animals to the family. The theory was that if they lived together with the lions from the time they were cubs, they would then escape injury when on set with these “familiars.” The other factors that caused delays with the production were two floods that wiped out the entire set, one raging forest fire, and times when the entire crew would quit after a particularly harrowing day. They also lost their financing halfway through the production and stopped to gather personal funds to get the film across the finish line. Most experts consider Roar to be the most disaster-plagued film in the history of Hollywood.
 

 
More with Tim League, plus an exclusive clip from ‘Roar,’ after the jump…

 
When I think of my family’s first VCR, a massive, noisy metal box, I think of one of the machine’s early missions: recording a rerun of Steve Martin’s 1980 NBC special Comedy Is Not Pretty (not to be confused with Martin’s album of the same name). It’s a brilliant collection of sketches, and as a lad I put even more wear on that tape than I put on the local library’s copy of Cruel Shoes. The dry-cleaning evangelist bit with Louis Nye, the insurance ad for “Mutual of Steve,” Socrates drinking hemlock, the search for the Abominable Snowman, the date with Joyce DeWitt—they’re all solid gold.

The special’s greatest moment, however, is an ambitious fusion of the sublime and the stupid that comes right at the beginning. In the opening sketch, Martin, a burro, an elephant, and a cast of simians dramatize Marty Robbins’ love-and-death gunfighter ballad “El Paso.” There has never been a spectacle quite like this on TV, and—dare I say it?—there never will be ever again.

There’s not much else I can tell you about this wonderful artifact, but I will pass along a suggestive detail: according to a biography of Robbins, Martin opened for the country singer at the Sahara Tahoe in March 1973. Might that encounter have contained the germ of this sketch?
 
Only “El Paso” is embedded below, but you can watch all of Comedy Is Not Pretty on Hulu.
 

 
A 65-year-old Sao Paulo man visited his doctor complaining of sinus pain, swelling around his nose and worms coming out of his nose. That last should have been a big clue, for when doctors investigated further, by inserting a camera up the man’s nose, they discovered over 100 flesh-eating maggots chowing down on the poor man’s nasal cavity.

The maggots were burrowing, squelching, pulping up the man’s interior and doing that kinda gross maggotty thing maggots do. Doctors had to remove the maggots one by one being guided by the camera and using a saline solution.

The maggots were identified as Cochliomyia hominivorax (or the New World Screwworm) which is prevalent in Central and South America and in certain Caribbean Islands. Female adult flies lay batches of 200-400 eggs, in rows around a fresh wound on warm-blooded animals. The larvae then feast on the flesh. This 65-year-old was lucky, as the maggots could have eaten his face away from the inside.
 

 
Via Daily Mail.
 

 
NYC advertising creative director Cecilia Azcarate has an apparent fondness for the art of the Renaissance and a gift for connecting it to the present-day. Her Tumblr Ikea B4-XIV cleverly identifies centuries-old analogues to Swedish housewares in Renaissance paintings, and she curates a Twitter feed that’s heavy with the art of that era as well. But she’s hit on a rich vein of astonishing material with her Tumblr B4-XVI, wherein she highlights “an invisible conversation between hip hop and art before the 16th century.” The connections Azcarate identifies between painted portraits from the Renaissance and photographic portraits of 21st Century rappers are, at times, frankly amazing.
 

“The Adoration of the Magi” by Hugo van der Goes VS Wiz Khalifa
 

“Portrait of Henry the Pious, Duke of Saxony” by Lucas Cranach VS Takeoff of Migos
 
More after the jump…

 
There’s all kindsa Melvins news to report: they’re soon to be the subject of the documentary with the best name ever, The Colossus of Destiny - A Melvins Tale, which you can help Kickstart here, and they’ve announced a summer tour to support their LP Hold It in, with the Butthole Surfers’ Jeff Pinkus on bass (YAY!). But I’d way rather tell you about the band’s singer/guitarist Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne’s recent interview on Dogster. It seems that the godfather of sludge-metal and his wife have quite a few rescue dogs, and frankly, I respond to dogs the way the Internet writ large responds to cat pictures. I have a rescue, myself, a terrier mutt, most likely part miniature schnauzer, part Boston, possibly part Scottie, named “Lulu” after Emily Flake’s alt-comic, and she happens to be the single most adorable goddamn thing on Planet Earth. (I’ll spare you the treacly “who rescued who” shit, as I hate that kind of naked mawkishness with the power of a million squirrels.) If I lived on a huge property instead of in a rented duplex, I’d probably have a commensurately large number of rescue dogs. Dogs kinda rule.

Osborne talked to Dogster’s Kezia Willingham about life with his two Jack Russells and his Staffordshire, Buster, Coco, and Gigi (cool that he’s a terrier guy, too…), and how he and his wife came to be serial rescuers:

The first dog my wife and I had was a rescue Pit Bull-Whippet-Lab mix named Itchy. He lived to be 17, and we had to finally put him down a little over a year ago. That was tough. He was pretty much the best dog ever.

When we got him, he had been severely abused and had never been indoors, never slept on a dog bed, and never eaten or drank out of a bowl. He was malnourished and extremely skittish. The people who had him before us used to let their children throw baseballs and other assorted garbage at him while he ran around terrified and helpless in their backyard. People who behave like that should be in jail. They ended up abandoning him to a neighbor of theirs, who told us the whole story.

He didn’t trust us at first, but once we started treating him right he warmed up and became a wonderful companion for the better part of two decades. I can’t imagine a better dog. The first time he ever tasted steak, I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head.

Rest in peace, Itchy. G’boy.
 

 

 
More after the jump…