A little kid running away from a man dressed as Paantu, a mythological demon/god who appears in a yearly festival on the island of Miyako in September.
 
The mythology behind the ancient, annual Japanese Paantu festival tells of how a mysterious and odd-looking wooden face washed ashore on a beach located on the northern shore of island of Miyako (or Miyako-jima). The arrival of the mask was the impetus for the festival which has been held over the course of several centuries. On other islands in the Miyako chain, the festival is closed to outsiders like many other religious ceremonies held on the various islands that make up the Miyako Islands of the Okinawa Prefecture, so not much is actually known about the gathering which is held in early September. However, details about the clandestine event are not a complete mystery.

Paantu is held in part to help drive out demons and removing any trace of bad luck that is hanging around on Miyako. In preparation for the festival, a group of local men are “elected” to portray the evil devil or god Paantu. The men then cover themselves with mud, leaves, and branches and finally the ceremonial black mask of Paantu. The menacing-looking group then rambles around visiting the locals smearing mud on folks, doors to homes and even police cars in order to ward off evil spirits. The popularity (and signifigance) of the festival has drastically faded in recent years as it has become increasingly difficult to recruit people willing to cover themselves in mud and scare the shit out of little kids—which I find hard to believe because all that sounds like a pretty fun time if you ask me. I’ve posted some photos taken at various Paantu Festivals for you to scroll through below and a couple of videos of good old Paantu terrorizing kids and covering them in mud.

If you need me, I probably won’t be anywhere near Miyako. That’s for sure.
 

PAANTU!
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
In January 1977 the Ramones released album number two, entitled Leave Home. It was another high-quality slab of straight-ahead punk in the acknowledged Ramones style. The album had fourteen songs, the longest of which clocked in at 2:42. Six of the songs, sublimely, didn’t even make it to the 2-minute mark. This was rock and roll at its purest and simplest. The most famous song on the album is probably “Suzy Is a Headbanger,” which, interestingly, was not released as a single. “I Remember You” was the first single off of the album, but “Swallow My Pride” as the only single from the album to crack the singles charts anywhere in the world (#36 in the UK).

The band got into some predictable minor trouble over the song “Carbona Not Glue” due to the fact of Carbona being a registered trademark. On later pressings the song was replaced with “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.”

To promote the album, Sire made a special switchblade-style letter opener with the words “Ramones Leave Home” on it. A letter opener is not as cool as an actual switchblade, but the real thing most likely would have been highly illegal to give away to antisocial punk rock fans. And switchblades actually were a part of the Ramones’ daily life. According to Marky’s memoir, Punk Rock Blitzkrieg: My Life as a Ramone, in 1980 there was an incident after a show at Six Flags in New Jersey in which Dee Dee “pointed” a switchblade at Marky, to which the drummer replied (after wresting the weapon out of his hands), “Do it again, ever, and the knife’s going into you.”
 

 
An auction has popped up on eBay for one of the switchblades. It’s not in mint condition—far from it—because the letter opener actually saw use at the offices of Punk Magazine. As of this writing, after 13 bids the price is at $305—the seller indicates in the body of the auction that there is a reserve of in excess of $1000 in effect.

The switchblade is not the only amusing Ramones promotional item in existence. In 1976 Sire created special Louisville Slugger baseball bats to promote “Blitzkrieg Bop.” (Sire publicist Janis Schacht wanted the bats to publicize “Beat on the Brat” but someone at Sire sensibly realized that might be one step too far.) Above is a picture of two of the bats, located at the Ramones Museum in Berlin, which I didn’t know existed until today.
 
Pics after the jump…...
 

 
Though one’s daily experiences on Facebook are generally fairly predictable (“like” cat pics, block racist uncle’s Alex Jones posts), a clever artist has created a tarot deck that allows for prognostication of your Internet existence.

Italian illustrator Jacopo Rosati has created a series of tarot images based on the modern experience of online social networking. Instead of the Fool, Magician, and High Priestess, Rosati’s series features Fake News, Trolls, and Dick Pics.

For the time being, Rosati’s tarot images appear to only be available in poster form. Hopefully, we will see an actual deck of these things.

Rosati’s website does not have a “buy” link for the poster, but you can contact him through his email address jacoporosati@gmail.com or Instagram.
 

 

 
More social network tarot cards after the jump…

Lakota ghost shirt (via ndstudies.gov)
 
Gary Snyder’s “Passage to More than India” ends with “the chorus of a Cheynne Indian Ghost dance song—hi-niswa’ vita’ki’ni—‘We shall live again.’” Snyder’s essay, a fascinating survey of gnostic traditions, weaves in every thread of the Sixties counterculture: rock music, LSD, cannabis, Tantric Buddhism, Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, anarcho-syndicalism, Christian heresies, free love, alternative family structures and the American Indian vision quest. The hippies, Snyder argued, belonged to “the Great Subculture which goes back as far perhaps as the late Paleolithic.”

This subculture of illuminati has been a powerful undercurrent in all higher civilizations. In China it manifested as Taoism—not only Lao-tzu but the later Yellow Turban revolt and medieval Taoist secret societies—and the Zen Buddhists up till early Sung. Within Islam the Sufis. In India the various threads converged to produce Tantrism. In the West it has been represented largely by a string of heresies starting with the Gnostics, and on the folk level by “witchcraft.”

The Ghost Dance appears briefly in the essay as the apocalyptic religion that preceded the revival of the peyote cult. Its tenets, Snyder writes, were that “if all the Indians would dance the Ghost Dance with their Ghost shirts on, the Buffalo would rise from the ground, trample the white men to death in their dreams, and all the dead game would return; America would be restored to the Indians.”
 

‘Engraving Depicting the Ghost Dance,’ 1890 (via National Archives)
 
Wovoka, the Paiute prophet of the Ghost Dance religion, said it was revealed to him in a vision during the solar eclipse of January 1, 1889:

When the sun died, I went up to heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal, or lie. He gave me this dance to give to my people.

As Wovoka and his followers were at pains to point out after Wounded Knee—like the killing of Sitting Bull, a violent response to the Ghost Dance—the doctrine was nonviolent, and the prophet disclaimed the belief that the ghost shirt protected its wearer from gunfire. James Mooney’s The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 reproduces a contemporary account of Wovoka’s doctrine, “The Messiah Letter,” which emphasizes the importance of ethical behavior:

You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always. It will give you satisfaction in life[...]

Do not tell the white people about this. Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are all alive again. I do not know when they will be here; maybe this fall or in the spring. When the time comes there will be no more sickness and everyone will be young again.

Do not refuse to work for the whites and do not make any trouble with them until you leave them. When the earth shakes [at the coming of the new world] do not be afraid. It will not hurt you.

I want you to dance every six weeks. Make a feast at the dance and have food that everybody may eat. Then bathe in the water. That is all. You will receive good words again from me some time. Do not tell lies.

More after the jump…

 
Because her fame is perpetually tethered to her membership in the vocal trio Labelle, and because that group is most famous for the immortal disco fucksong “Lady Marmalade,” the idea of Nona Hendryx recording an album of Captain Beefheart covers with a member of the Magic Band may at first seem pretty weird.

But then it’s useful to recall that it was Nona Hendryx’s songwriting that played a large role in their successful transition from the ‘60s girl-group Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles into the more daring R&B trio they’d become in the ‘70s as Labelle. And that Hendryx’s post Labelle afterlife included a stint in the New Wave band Zero Cool, and one in Bill Laswell’s defiantly genre-indifferent jazz group Material. Just this past August she participated in a collaboration with Nick Cave at MASSMoCA. Hendryx’s admirable willingness to go off the map is a tradition of long standing, and in that context, her singing Beefheart seems like something that could have happened sooner.
 

When you can pull off this look, you get to cover whoever the hell you want.

Her album with latter-day Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas (Doc at the Radar Station, Ice Cream for Crow) is due out on November 10; it’s titled The World of Captain Beefheart and it’s a goddamn stunner. It’s jarring at first to hear Beefheart songs covered by someone who can sing so well—so much of these songs’ original feel was dependent on Don van Vliet’s celebrated gravel-throated vocal stylings that Hendryx’s equally celebrated husky alto can seem almost alien to the material, but unsurprisingly, she totally slays it. Standout tracks include “Sure ‘Nuff ‘N Yes I Do,” “When It Blows Its Stacks,” and “I’m Glad”—that last one being kind of a gimme as it’s pretty straight R&B, but Hendryx nails more angular and difficult material like “When Big Joan Sets Up” equally well.

We were fortunate enough to get some time to talk with Gary Lucas about how how the project came to be

Gary Lucas: This all came about because our bass player and my co-producer on the record, Jesse Krakow, did a tribute to Captain Beefheart some years ago, in a place called the Bowery Poetry Club, and Nona was one of his guests. I was invited to come and play on a couple numbers—Jesse and I had played in Fast ’N’ Bulbous, we did two records for Cuneiform—so I met Nona at this tribute, and she was very friendly. Co de Kloet, who’s like a Beefheart/Zappa go-to guy in the Netherlands, a producer & DJ, he asked me if I would do a symphonic Beefheart night at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, and in casting about for a singer I thought Nona could do it. She was really cool, and she came and did a great job. There were some Dutch vocalists as well, someday maybe that’ll come out.

But so anyway, when that was done, I wasn’t going to wait around to get more kicks with a 65-piece orchestra, as great as that was, I wanted a way to do that with a more portable ensemble. So I stripped it down to just drums, bass, guitar, and keyboards, and Nona. It took a few years to get it done, I was busy with some other projects, but we tackled it and we nailed it, I guess it was almost a year and a half ago we turned it in. It’s been a tortuous route to it finally coming out, but it’s coming out on Knitting Factory, who’ve been very gung-ho and supportive. The package is beautiful, they really committed to it.

Dangerous Minds: There are songs on this that significantly predate your tenure in the Magic Band, was any of it new to you, or was it all material that had already been in your repertoire?

GL: Not really. Even things I didn’t actually play in the Magic Band I played in Magic Band reunions with Rockette Morton and John French, so I did that for a while, and it was a comprehensive overview of Captain Beefheart, so anything I hadn’t learned in my time with him I learned for that project and for Fast ’N’ Bulbous. Some of it I hadn’t played in some years but we definitely went into the recording very prepared and rehearsed. It was a good mix of weird dark stuff and more accessible R&B stuff. It’s a pretty endlessly fascinating repertoire with a lot of payoffs.

Keep reading after the jump…

 
We live in an age in which the urge to combine one’s desire to self-administer sexual pleasure and one’s obsession with an addictive pop culture artifact can easily be gratified, no problemo.

In other words: Stranger Things dildo? Yup, Stranger Things dildo.
 

 
The good people at Bad Dragon unveiled their new “Demogorgon” model of imitation penis on October 20, and it might be the only dildo ever to come with its own teaser video with no sexual angle whatsoever, as well as a highly produced six-minute commercial lovingly shot with all the 80s goodness you could ever muster. They even made sure to include Spielbergian forest flashlights right out of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

The closing credit sequence features various “making-of’ clips of the actors in action, also surely a rare occurrence for a dildo commercial. The cast includes the intriguingly named Elise Brillig and Katsuri Epsilon. You can be certain that a tri-colored royal mesh trucker hat was included among the wardrobe effects.

The base price of the Demogorgon is $55 and comes in a large variety of colors, including Demogorgon’s Natural, Demogorgon’s Signature, Ectoplasm, Sinister Pumpkin, and Salted Caramel Blondie. Most of the styles come with an additional charge of $10 to $20.
 
Promo videos after the jump…....
 

‘The Observer,’ a startling self-portrait by David M. Bower, 2011.
 

“Making art has always been inside of me.  I think most artists would say that art choose them and not that they had chose art.”

—painter David M. Bowers.
 
Two paintings by artist David M. Bowers are a part of the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery—which is no easy feat by any measure. Though some of his works have surrealist qualities, Bowers’ paintings also possess similarities to the craftsmanship of the great masters of the Renaissance such as Sandro Botticelli, and Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Robert Campin. Bowers himself likes to describe his work as “realism with an edge,” words which pretty much nail his impactful, breathtaking paintings.

Once Bowers graduated from art school in 1979, he immediately landed a gig working as a staff artist in and around his native Pittsburgh. A couple of years later he would accept a teaching position at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh that lasted a decade. His official career as a serious artist didn’t begin until he was 35 at which time he created artwork for over 100 book covers as well as work that ran on the cover of TIME magazine. All this makes it very possible that you’ve seen Bowers’ extraordinary artwork before but perhaps were not entirely sure who was responsible for creating such ethereal and mind-bogglingly realistic paintings. Here’s more from Bowers on his vibrantly imaginative concepts: 

“People always want to know what I was thinking when I create one of my more unusual paintings. My answer to them is simple: I just really wanted to paint that girl wrapped in plastic, holding a dead rat. The story sometimes just happens during the painting process. Sometimes the hidden narrative or true meaning is in the title itself. I am often inspired by an image that I see and my painting materializes from that image. It will often morph into so much more.”

Bowers’ long list of contributions to the art world have received an equally long list of accolades, and when he officially moved into the world of fine art, he would be recognized by The Art Renewal Center as a “living master.” Some of Bowers’ work that I’ve featured in this post is NSFW, but I do hope that doesn’t stop you from exploring the images of his extraordinary paintings below. If you like what you see then you’ll also be happy to know that Bowers’ work is the subject of the 2006 book, David Michael Bowers: The Evolution of an Artist.
 

 

 

‘The Three Graces.’
 
More after the jump…

Joni Mitchell, in blackface, as Art Nouveau on the cover of ‘Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter’
 
Love, released in 1982, is a Canadian anthology movie written and directed by women. Producer Barry Levinson told the Los Angeles Times he was thinking of the success of Emmanuelle when he set about making an erotic movie from a female point of view. His pitch:

Write a 10-minute script on the subject of love, preferably from a sexual point of view. Whatever you write, I’ll produce.

Barry aimed high: after he was turned down by Simone de Beauvoir, Jackie O, Jeanne Moreau, Rebecca West and Gloria Steinem, he got scripts from Lady Antonia Fraser and Germaine Greer, neither of which made it into the finished picture. Ultimately, Love comprised six short films written by Nancy Dowd, Gael Greene, Edna O’Brien, Liv Ullmann, Mai Zetterling, and Joni Mitchell. (Zetterling, Ullmann, Dowd and Annette Cohen directed, and Renee Perlmutter produced.) The New York Times called Love “the biggest thing to come along for women in the movie industry since 1933, when Dorothy Arzner directed Katharine Hepburn in ‘Christopher Strong.’”
 

 
Levinson approached Mitchell about writing the music for Love, the LA Times reported, but she opted to write and star in her own segment instead. Fans will recognize her drag in “The Black Cat in the Black Mouse Socks” as one of her personae on the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, a hot young black man named Art Nouveau. That image led to her collaboration with Charles Mingus, as she told Greg Tate:

At a certain point in my career, only Blacks and women understood what I was doing. The white male rock ‘n’ roll press really didn’t get it. They’d go, ‘There’s no rhythm here!’ When in fact there was a lot. Or they’d say that it was too ‘jazzy.’ That fear of jazz thing…. And the harmony eluded them from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter on. The album got reviewed in a Black magazine—accidentally, I think, because I was dressed like a brother on the cover—and they got everything about it, from the cover on. Whereas the white press said, ‘What’s she trying to say, that Black people have more fun?’ When Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter came out, Charles Mingus found out about it somehow. I think, for one thing, that he was intrigued that I dressed up as a brother on the cover ... so he was curious about me.

Here, she plays Paula, who dresses as a “black cat” to dance at a Halloween party where DEVO is on the turntable. This slightly dark, fuzzy video—the same version embedded at Joni Mitchell’s site—might be the only way to see “The Black Cat in the Black Mouse Socks,” since Love doesn’t appear to have had a proper DVD (or VHS?) release. I wonder if that has anything to do with Hollywood’s contempt for women. 

Faith No More, early 1990s.
 
Da Show was a blink-and-you-missed-it program on MTV hosted by Doctor Dré (not to be confused with Dr. Dre of N.W.A) and Ed Lover of Yo! MTV Raps fame. It was best described as a kind of variety show that would welcome timely guests and musical acts including a rather epic appearance by Faith No More on December 26th, 1990. 

It’s been said that Faith No More was the only metal band to ever appear on the short-lived show and man, did they ever fucking bring it and then some to the studio’s tiny stage and live audience. After the band spits out a blistering version of “Epic,” Dré and Ed Lover crash the stage so Ed can do his famous(?) “Ed Lover Dance.” Following that Dré and Ed stick around on stage while Faith performs “Edge of the World,” a downtempo number from their 1989 album The Real Thing. This is yet another bizarro time capsule from the 90s that I had no idea even existed until today and the nine-plus minute video is well worth watching as the then 22-year-old Patton delivers a more than solid performance on this long-forgotten show. Patton in pajamas for the WIN!
 

Faith No More performing “Epic” and “Edge of the World” on the ‘Da Show.’
 
More after the jump…

 
In the mid- to late 1960s, there was no shortage of attempts to explain what “the kids” were up to, an understandable impulse given that they were variously letting their hair grow out, protesting the illegal war in Vietnam, using the pill, smoking reefer, listening to the devil’s music, et al. In the past we’ve noted the tour buses that would wend their way through Haight-Ashbury so that the squares could gawk at the this new breed of hippie.

To be sure, the market for “concern about the youth” was so ripe that hardly anybody could louse up the opportunity. But then, some people are singularly talented. In 1967 an exploitation movie directed by Norman T. Herman was released about the kids that tried to have it both ways, hilariously calling itself Mondo Teeno for the kids themselves while targeting the concerned parents with the more chin-stroking title Teenage Rebellion. It seems that the wishy-washy approach of trying to be all things to all demographics backfired, as the movie made little impression on the moviegoing public.

Teenage Rebellion or Mondo Teeno, whichever you prefer, was a straight documentary of the type that might have appeared on CBS during the same period, with bracing footage of demonstrating teens and so on. Fascinatingly, the movie spawned a soundtrack that today is a surefire guarantee of amusing background music for any social gathering—some of the tracks feature Burt Topper’s overwrought narration, some don’t, but all feature perfectly good, often psych-tinged music from the era. It’s as groovy and funny as only a super-“serious” “expose” of 1960s youth culture can be.
 

 
The movie appears to have been structured as a tour of youth culture, with sections devoted to drug use, homosexuality, the anti-war movement, and on and on. The introductory track, “Teenage Rebellion,” is perfectly riveting chunk of garage psych courtesy of courtesy of Davie Allan and the Arrows, and “The Gay Teenager” unexpectedly uses a rousing string arrangement not unlike something from Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, which came out four years later.

Norman T. Herman’s only other directorial credit is the 1959 potboiler Tokyo After Dark; most of his IMDb page is taken up with exploitation fare like Bloody Mama. In For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films, Ric Meyers says with some regret, “The 1960s were a turbulent but important decade. It’s too bad that films like this make it look ridiculous.”

One of the noticeable credits on the soundtrack is Mike Curb, who both produced the album and composed some of the music. Curb is a fascinating figure who had a hit called “Burning Bridges” as the Mike Curb Congregation (!) which was used in the 1970 Clint Eastwood joint Kelly’s Heroes and he later ran a label called MGM. In 1970 Curb made a splash when MGM dropped 18 acts because of drug use (!!).
 
Much more after the jump….......