In 2000, at my favorite outré movie rental shop B-Ware Video, a cheap, bootleg-looking DVD arrived in stock, with a shoddily designed cover announcing its contents to be footage of founding Pink Floyd top dog Syd Barrett’s first psychedelic trip. I never did rent it—though I was keen to see it, I hadn’t partaken of psychedelics or even pot in years by then, so my interest wasn’t so great that there wasn’t always something else I’d have rather rented. So a long succession of “maybe next times” turned into an unequivocal “never” when, to my heartbreak, the store closed. I attended their inventory liquidation, but though I came home with a lot of brilliant stuff, someone seems to have beaten me to snapping up that Syd Barrett DVD; I couldn’t find it, so my curiosity about the formative psychedelic experience of one of the great architects of psychedelic music went unsatisfied.

But time and YouTube heal many of those kinds of wounds, and sure enough, it’s online in all its amateurish 8mm glory. The first half of the film features some dreamy and quite lovely overexposed footage of the young Barrett and some fellow hallucinogenic travelers gamboling through a field and setting a small brush fire - kids, don’t set fires when you’re tripping at home, OK? Then, at about 5:38 of the 11:34 opus, the scene abruptly shifts to the outside of Abbey Road Studios in London, where Pink Floyd are celebrating the signing of their recording contract with EMI. It would only be a few years before Barrett’s gifts were lost to the world due to drug-fueled mental illness, and the band would go on to inconhood without him. The man who shot the footage, Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, contributed this synopsis to the film’s IMDB page:

I am Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon and I shot this film of Syd on a visit from film school in London to my hometown, Cambridge. We were on the Gog Magog hills with a bunch of friends. David Gale is there along with Andrew Rawlinson, Russell Page, Lucy Pryor and my wife, Jenny. She’s the one in the yellow mac talking to the tree. The mushroom images are iconic and will last forever. It is an unselfconscious film. It was not planned. It just happened. The guy on the balcony is me at 101 Cromwell Road, London SW7. This footage was shot by Jenny. When David Gale wrote about 101 in The Independent he recalled: As the 60s began to generate heat, I found myself running with a fast crowd. I had moved into a flat near the Royal College of Art. I shared the flat with some close friends from Cambridge, including Syd Barrett, who was busy becoming a rock star with Pink Floyd. A few hundred yards down the street at 101 Cromwell Road, our preternaturally cool friend Nigel was running the hipster equivalent of an arty salon. Between our place and his, there passed the cream of London alternative society - poets, painters, film-makers, charlatans, activists, bores and self-styled visionaries. It was a good time for name-dropping: how could I forget the time at Nigels when I came across Allen Ginsberg asleep on a divan with a tiny white kitten on his bare chest? And wasn’t that Mick Jagger visible through the fumes? Look, there’s Nigel’s postcard from William Burroughs, who looks forward to meeting him when next he visits London! The other material is of the band outside EMI after their contract signing. It’s raw, unedited footage and stunning even so. It is silent but many people have subsequently put music to it on their youtube an google postings. Good luck to them.

I’ve heard it told that among the party with Barrett that day was the young, soon to be legendary (and sadly, as of April 2013, deceased) graphic artist Storm Thorgerson, who would go on to co-found the design group Hipgnosis, and to personally design some of the most indelible album covers in rock history, including many for Pink Floyd. But as the actual shooter’s synopsis omits that bit of rock lore, I’m becoming inclined to doubt that legend’s veracity.

The accompanying music is spacey and ambient, and though maybe more than a hair too new-agey, it underscores the film’s dreaminess well. But as is noted in the synopsis, it was added later and it’s not Pink Floyd, and so this relic may not be of significant interest to the band’s more casual fans. But as a document of one of rock music’s consummate originals, it can be enjoyable in its own right so long as your expectations for it aren’t unrealistic. Copies are available for purchase in DVD and VHS formats.
 

 
Thanks to DM reader Rafael de Alday for shaking this loose from my memory banks.

 
This compilation of some of the most famous scenes in cinema history subtitled so that the typical Ed Hardy devotee can understand them is awfully good—the only flaw is that it’s not longer! Chinatown, Gone with the Wind, and 2001: A Space Odyssey—now, they’re not just for high school graduates anymore!

Mike Lacher, who put this assemblage together, has also written a “bro” version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road called—you guessed it—On the Bro’d. You can read some excerpts on Lacher’s website. It’s been so long since I’ve read On the Road that I can’t assess this translation adequately, but if it’s anything like “Classic Movies Subtitled for Bros,” it’s probably excellent. The only question would be if the gag runs dry after a few chapters.

In any case, the best bro-subtitling job in the montage is on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a movie I don’t think very much of, even if that one scene (the one in this clip) is admittedly pretty great.

You can set up Google so that the default language in the Settings is “Bork, bork, bork!” (Swedish chef), “Elmer Fudd,” “Hacker,” or “Pirate.” How long until “Bro” makes that list?
 

 
So, Peter Capaldi has finally arrived as the new Doctor Who, making a promising (though fleeting) appearance at the end of a rather indulgent (and dire) Christmas Doctor Who special. I do hope Mr. Capaldi brings the tired series back to some quality story-lines, and less of the puerile, narcissistic, self-referential navel-gazing of recent years. (Or, in the words of Elvis Presley, the series needs “A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action.”) Capaldi certainly has the pedigree to deliver this, as he is already an Oscar-winning film director and writer, who picked up an Academy Award for his fabulous short Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life in 1995.

Capaldi’s film features Franz Kafka (wonderfully played by Richard E. Grant) suffering a frustrating bout of writer’s block, as he works on the opening line to his story Metamorphosis:

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

Brilliantly imagined, with superb supporting performances from Ken Stott, Elaine Collins and Phyllis Logan, this is a perfectly enjoyable winter treat.
 

 
Harlan Ellison describes himself as “a child of the Disney era,” whose first taste of the magic of cinema was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. But Disney’s latest movie (made in collaboration with BBC Films) Saving Mr. Banks has so pissed off the already notably cantankerous Mr. Ellison that he has felt it necessary to post a rather disconnected (one might say rambling) video on YouTube calling out the film as “bullshit.”

Saving Mr. Banks stars Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as P. L. Travers, the author of the book Mary Poppins, which was first published in 1934. The film concerns Disney’s attempts to convince Travers to allow him to film her famous novel. It took Disney over 20 years to achieve this, and eventually his company filmed Mary Poppins, with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, in 1964.

Ellison has great praise for Hanks and Thompson in the film, but his main beef with Saving Mr. Banks is not the acting but a pivotal scene at the end of the movie, which he claims is bogus and bullshit. One can surmise what this scene may entail, as Ellison declares how Travers hated the movie, and went to her grave regretting her decision to ever allow Disney near her work.

Ellison gets all fired up about this, which (I suppose) is understandable as Ellison is a writer who is deeply proud of his own work, and sees anything he writes as sacrosanct. However, I (like no doubt millions of others) have known for decades that P.L. Travers hated Disney’s Mary Poppins. It’s not new news.

When musical impresario, Cameron Mackintosh asked Travers, who was then in her nineties, if he could produce a musical version of Mary Poppins, Travers stipulated (confirmed in her will) that this musical must be adapted by English writers and no Americans, or anyone involved with the film or the Disney empire were to be directly involved with the creative process of the musical. Mackintosh adhered to Travers’ wishes, and the musical opened in London’s West End in 2004, where it ran for four years.

Okay, so it’s not news, but what Ellison is really getting at is his disdain for the…

“...refurbishing of Disney’s god-like image, which he spent his entire life creating, and it is so fucking manipulative…”

Particularly when this involves the misuse of a writer’s work, especially when that work is exploited and bastardized for commercial reward, and in this case, to create propaganda to “burnish” the image of Walt Disney.  Which probably is something to be pissed-off about.
 

Photo by Glen E. Friedman.
 
Check out legendary ripper Tony Alva doing what he does best in a pool at an abandoned Hollywood Boulevard apartment building in this gorgeously sinister testament to the beauty of skateboarding as an art form.
 
L.A. production company, Six Stair, perhaps best known for their righteous 2002 documentary, Fruit of the Vine, about the search for skateable empty pools around the U.S., shot the footage below for Gus Van Sant’s 2007 film, Paranoid Park, but it was never used.

According to Buddy Nichols, who also appears in the segment along with Rick Charnoski and Ivory Serra (Buddy and Rick are the brains behind Six Stair, and Ivory is sculptor Richard Serra’s nephew), the deserted apartments were once home to drag queen actor, Divine, and are rumored to have hosted a few Marilyn Monroe/JFK liaisons.

The spastic, sludgy free-jam supplied by former Don Cabellero bassist, George Draguns, is the perfect accompaniment for this nightmarish (in a good way) clip shot at 54 frames per second on super 8.

You can hear more from George Draguns at his Soundcloud page.  Paranoid Park is streaming on Netflix.
 

 
By the time of the U.K.‘s Great Train Robbery in 1963, train robbing had already passed more or less into quaintness. But quaintness did nothing to deter 15 men from stopping a train in Buckinghamshire and hauling in what would be equivalent to over $7 million USD today. Several of the robbers were sentenced to a rather harsh 30 years in prison, including Ronnie Biggs, who, though not the caper’s ringleader, achieved the gang’s greatest notoriety by escaping from prison less than a year and a half into his sentence, fleeing to France for appearance-altering plastic surgery, and eventually living openly as a fugitive in Brazil, who would not extradite him to the U.K.

Then, in 1978, at age 49, he became a punk singer.
 

 
Julien Temple’s preposterous and incoherent Sex Pistols film The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle brought that band—by then halved to just drummer Paul Cook and guitarist Steve Jones—to Rio de Janeiro, where they met up with Biggs and with him recorded “No One Is Innocent” and “Belsen Was A Gas.” A ridiculous but very, very fun scene in the film shows the band, with Biggs as their new singer, performing “Innocent” with bass player/Nazi fugitive Martin Bormann—actually an actor. One conceit of the film had it that rather than dying in 1945, Bormann escaped to Brazil. And joined The Sex Pistols. Did I mention preposterous?
 

 
Biggs was no newbie to music, though—he’d already participated in the creation of a jazz album in 1974! The collaboration with Bruce Henry was titled Mailbag Blues, and the album finally saw release in 2004. Per Bruce Henry via whatmusic.com:

Mailbag Blues was written over a couple months’ period ... with Ronnie at our side telling us his story and us breaking it down into events that we most related to musically. The songs are structured as a soundtrack, each one telling us part of a story and leading on to the next. When we went into the studio to record, we had the whole album pretty well defined, but we left a lot of room for individual improvisation, as was the style in 1974.

The recording took place in a very small room, on a four track Ampex Tape Recorder. Everybody played together, and we only used playback on one or two tracks for additional percussion. We were so young and eager back then, and we took ourselves so seriously, that we wouldn’t let Ronnie sing, which is too bad because he had a terrible voice but the Sex Pistols did all right with it didn’t they?

“London ‘63” from Mailbag Blues

Later, in 1991, German pin-up punks Die Toten Hosen tapped Biggs to sing “Carnival In Rio (Punk Was),” the lone original song on their covers/tribute album Learning English - Lesson One. For the b-side of the song’s single, he reprised his turn on “No One Is Innocent” and also covered The Equals’ classic “Police On My Back.”
 

Die Toten Hosen with Ronnie Biggs, “Police On My Back”

After years of ill health, including multiple strokes, Biggs surrendered to British authorities in 2001. He was promptly arrested, and confined to complete his original sentence. He was released, due to further deteriorating health, in 2009, and was able to contribute to the book The Great Train Robbery 50th Anniversary:1963-2013. His years of illness finally claimed his life today.

Rest in peace, Mister Biggs. Nobody can say you didn’t live an amazingly colorful life.
 

 
When it comes to modern film scores, there are very few that stand out, to my mind, as being classics. The kind that stand out not just for helping to define a film’s aesthetic, often in such an integral way that you couldn’t imagine the film existing without the music, but that then take on a life of their own separate from, while still acknowledging, the film itself.

If I had to name some classic modern film scores, though, top of that list would be the music for Nicolas Winding Refn’s noir thriller Drive, and Steven Soderbergh’s 2003 remake of Solaris. I managed to see both these films when they were first on theatrical release, and both soundtracks had the incredible effect of standing out from the usual homogenized Hollywood fare, creating their own highly unique sound worlds, so much that they actually helped shape the aesthetic of the film, and, in turn, made the cinema-going experience even more immersive.

That’s quite a feat, but most impressive of all, these two wildly different soundtracks came from the mind of just one composer, Cliff Martinez. A well-respected music industry veteran, Martinez started out drumming for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the early 1980s, but tired of the live-band lifestyle and decided to apply his love of making music to other media, namely films. With the British label Invada having recently re-released the Solaris score on deluxe 180 gm vinyl picture disc (which our readers have a chance of winning, at the bottom of this interview) I took the chance to speak to Martinez about his work on both these films, their respective directors, and his past life as a drumming Chili Pepper:

Dangerous Minds: Before you started scoring films you were drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. How did you make the move into full-time soundtrack work?

Cliff Martinez: Well, I had a fascination with music tech in the mid/late 80s. I had one of the first samplers, the Prophet 2000, and the very first hardware sequencer, the MSQ200 by Roland. These new tools allowed you to think about music in different ways, plus, being primarily a drummer and percussionist, the technology allowed people who didn’t have composition training to write and create music.

So I wrote a lot of strange musical sound-effect collages, and I was looking for an outlet. The band I was in wasn’t really appropriate for experimental electronic music. One day I stumbled across Pee Wee’s Playhouse on TV. On paper this was a children’s show, but it was actually a very subversive adult comedy, too. They had a lot of innovative composers involved, like The Residents, Danny Elfman and Mark Mothersbaugh. I happened to know the director at the time so I gave him a cassette of my sound collage stuff, I got hired to do one episode, and I just fell in love with the process of putting music to picture. I also felt that soundtracks allowed for a more experimental approach to composing, as opposed to straightforward songwriting. After that I had a credit to my name, and through a mutual friend I was introduced to Steven Soderbergh and scored his first film. And of course, that was very successful.

DM: Indeed it was! Did anyone involved in the making of Sex Lies & Videotape have an inkling of how successful it would be?

Cliff Martinez: I don’t think anyone involved could have guessed the success of that film. We all knew it was a quality picture, but I guess we just didn’t know what to expect. It was very different, it was very independent minded film, and indie films were not that popular at the time. I was at Sundance for the second screening, and there was already a big buzz about it after the first screening. It was a bit like driving a rocket ship, I mean it took me by surprise! I knew it was a good film but I thought the sexual content made it uncommercial. Also, there wasn’t a precedent for independent films becoming hits back then. We all knew Steven was very talented and would go on to make great films, but I didn’t realize the commercial potential of these very personal films.

DM: I remember seeing Solaris in the cinema when it was released and thinking I had never heard a film score quite like it. It chimed very much with that kind of “chill-out” music popular at the time. What were the influences for that particular score, and what is your process in general when working on a film?

Cliff Martinez: As with most films the director has a big impact. They cut the film before I ever see it, and in most cases they put in temporary music that can have a big impact. Especially Steven, who makes some very interesting choices. Steven has always liked to make ambient music whenever appropriate, and he wanted something like that for Solaris, but has also wanted the sound of the orchestra, which is unusual because he generally prefers an electronic sound. So I had to approach it as an ambient score, but not ambient electronic, an ambient, minimalist, orchestral score. My philosophy is that if you model yourself on another composer too closely, it becomes plagiarism, but if you take from two different composers and combine them that can make for something original. At the time I was fascinated with the baritone steel drums I had bought and put in my living room, so I was adamant about using them in the film. At the same time Steven was cutting to a lot of different types of music, he was really jumping around. And the two things I really fell in love with that he had used were the work of Giorgi Ligeti and the music of Tangerine Dream, which was very rhythmic. Those two things were the biggest influences, so I would throw them together and add the baritone steel drums and some other bell-type percussion instruments. It ended up coming together really well, Solaris is one of my favourite scores.
 

 
DM: Was Tangerine Dream a big influence on the 80s/analog-electronic score for Drive?

Cliff Martinez: Oddly enough not really, the film I did right before Drive was Soderbergh’s Contagion. Steven went through different phases of influences for the score; the first one was All The President’s Men, The French Connection, these 70’s scores, sort of conspiracy films, but then he threw that out and used some Tangerine Dream. It was the second time he’d used this kind of rhythmic synth stuff as an influence, and then he also scrapped that too, and started using more contemporary rhythmic, electronic music.

So for Drive, it was really a combination of all of those influences; the retro 70s stuff, a retro 80s synth pop thing, and tried to make it contemporary sounding and rhythmic. Tangerine Dream was an influence on Contagion but I wouldn’t say so much with Drive, although there was an 80s synth pop aesthetic. That was set up by the songs being used, and I felt obligated to incorporate that into the score as well.

DM: And as with Sex, Lies & Videotape, did you have any inkling of what a success Drive would become?

Cliff Martinez: Again, I knew it was an indie film made for not a lot of money, so I didn’t think it would be marketed aggressively with commercials or a big campaign. But I knew it was good. But I underestimated that one too. For some reason I thought it was a very male movie, I underestimated the star power of Ryan Gosling. So I thought it would be an underground movie for men, ha ha!  And the success of the soundtrack shocked me too, because while I knew the sales were driven by the songs, the songs had all been previously released and hadn’t been big hits. And certainly dramatic underscore is rarely a popular hit. So the fact that it did so well as a soundtrack would shock anybody! Usually you don’t hear the word “hit” and the word “soundtrack” in the same sentence. Ever.

DM: So, surely the songs Refn had already chosen to use in the film had an influence on your score? Do you usually take into account a film’s incidental music when composing its soundtrack?

Cliff Martinez: Usually for me the song and the score go their separate ways. That’s usually because the selection of songs is not as focused as it was on Drive, it’s more eclectic, so it’s hard to define what the style of a score is. With The Lincoln Lawyer, for example, I don’t know what you would call it, it’s kind of a mixture of urban contemporary and hip-hop, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was but I knew that I couldn’t work out a way to accompany that style so I didn’t try. But with Drive it was five songs, and four of them sounded like they could have been composed by the same artist. So it was a very narrow style which was an homage to the 80s. So I thought “Ok.” At the time all the rage in software was vintage synth sounds, so it was a very easy style to incorporate. But usually I don’t [take influence form a film’s songs], though it depends to a degree on the importance of the songs. Sometime, like Contagion only had one song, a U2 song at the end. and I don’t feel much of an obligation to accommodate that in the score. But in the case of Drive with that pink fog at the opening, and that song over the titles, it felt like the songs played a very important role in defining the style of the film. So in that case I decided to try and go in that direction, which turned out to be a good idea. It was the synergy of all the different elements that made Drive work: the music, the cinematography, the locations, the performances of course. And the sound design! That was the only thing that got an Oscar nomination and it was important as well. All those things seemed to work really well together, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole in the end. You know I wish I knew what the recipe for a successful film and score is because I would love to repeat the experience!

DM: What is your own favorite score you have written? If you had to choose one of your own works to place in a time capsule, which one would it be?

Cliff Martinez: Solaris, that’s always been my favorite and it still is. I wish I could roll out of bed every day and write something like that. Sometimes the force is with you, and I think in part it was also the film, it had some interesting themes like existence and love and some far out existential concepts. I also had the backing of a big film studio, which I normally don’t have, I don’t have the financial wherewithal to hire a 90 piece orchestra, so that made a huge difference. The music wasn’t initially intended to be emotional, so this kind of cold and austere music had a life to it that I didn’t really expect. It wasn’t until I heard it on the Fox studio stage that I realized the music had been transformed by this orchestra. For some reason, it’s the one score I can still stand to listen to! Usually I know every molecule of a score and I’m sick and tired of it when I am finished, but Solaris seems to have a life of its own, which for me is rare. I can’t pinpoint what makes it time capsule-worthy, but if I had to stick one in that would be it.

DM: OK, last question. You started out as drummer, if there was any one band you could drum for, who would it be?

Cliff Martinez: I wouldn’t wanna drum for anyone at all, ha ha! You know I gave it up because I started to have hearing loss issues. I didn’t like the touring lifestyle and I didn’t like the idea of repeating the same material night after night. If I sound like a sourpuss, I guess I am. Being a drummer is great in your 20s, but I much prefer being a composer and writing music than drumming live, though I guess in my heyday, if I had the ability to be a really great jazz drummer, I would have loved to have played with Miles Davis in the 70s.

DM: Thanks Cliff!

As mentioned above, Invada records are giving one lucky Dangerous Minds reader a chance to win each of the Solaris vinyl pressings; black vinyl, white vinyl and picture disc. For a chance of winning simply send your name and address to info@invada.co.uk. The winner will be notified by email.
 

Honey, Lenny and daughter Kitty

As the grandfather of gadfly stand-up, Lenny Bruce is unquestionably brilliant. But nothing so quickly puts genius in perspective like a failed attempt at another genre. Dance Hall Racket was Bruce’s first movie (and pretty much his last), and after sitting through the whole thing (I was mesmerized), I can see exactly why his talents never translated into a film career.

I actually found the film trying to look up Bruce’s wife, “Hot” Honey Harlow, who played the leading lady in this celluloid atrocity. Before meeting Lenny, Harlow was actually convicted of stealing cars & trying to steal from a candy machine (apparently it wasn’t quite as easy as stealing cars). After spending over a year in jail, she worked as a stripper, marrying Bruce in 1951. While he was determined to give her a respectable, clothed life, Harlow actually stripped for quite a few years after their marriage, and was still working as a stripper in ‘53, after this movie was released. Lenny emceed some of her shows, as his brand of comedy did pretty well in strip clubs. Though they had a tumultuous relationship, they managed to stay together until the late 50s.

So of course I had to see a movie with her in it! She’s a woman after my own heart! And yes, she does gratuitously take off her clothes in the movie (though only revealing her frumpy 1950s skivvies.)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a truly terrible film, but hypnotically so. It’s bad on so many levels that it actually insulates Lenny Bruce from criticism. Though he wrote the screenplay and took the lead role, he simply can’t be blamed for the entirety of the film’s shortcomings; there are just too many of them. I mean yes, the acting is terrible and the writing is weak (I won’t bore you with the cliched “plot”), but also: the pacing is disorienting, the camera-work is half-assed, the sets are threadbare, and legendary B-movie director Phil Tucker appears to have given the actors no instruction, leaving them to move, stand, and speak with a cringe-inducing awkwardness.

There is ONE funny line in the entire film “What, so I killed somebody, that makes me a bad person?” But don’t let that stop you from watching the so-bad-that-it’s-just-terrible Dance Hall Racket.
 

 
Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One (AKA Sympathy for the Devil) contains fly-on-the-wall footage of The Rolling Stones in the studio during the 1968 Beggar’s Banquet recording sessions that yielded one of their most famous numbers, “Sympathy for the Devil.” The Stones footage is intercut with set pieces for his camera by Maoist-types and (apparent) Black Panthers who kidnap and kill a group of white women. A feminist is interrogated and at one point there is a reading from Mein Kampf in a bookshop and the customers walk out “Sieg Heiling.” It’s a mess, even by Godardian standards.

The bits with The Stones aside, One Plus One is a terribly boring film. I saw it in a London art-house cinema when I was seventeen and had I been, oh, I don’t know eighteen, I probably would have had the presence of mind to simply walk out. It’s not just a little boring, it’s an epic snoozefest (I should point out that I tend to love pretentious art films with Situationist elements, this one… not so much).

Godard stated many times throughout his long career his belief that Western culture needed to be destroyed, but he felt this could only be achieved by the rejection of intellectualism:

“There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that is to give up being an intellectual”

Well, sure, but you can’t exactly go around boring people to death, either! There’s nothing revolutionary about being a bore, JLG…

One Plus One was such a financial disaster—it flopped even in France—that Iain Quarrier, the film’s producer, retitled it Sympathy for the Devil and added the completed song at the end. When Godard found out about this, he punched Quarrier in the face.

Amusingly, a DVD of this film was given away free with the purchase of a Sunday Times newspaper in Britain in 2006. I wonder what the average Sunday Times reader who bothered to pop the disc into their DVD player thought about Godard’s decidedly radical film?

Below, all the best bits and none of the nonsensical parts from Godard’s One Plus One
 

 
Via Open Culture

 
I guess it could keep your face warm during cold winter days, too, but maybe this is more of a “night piece.” Anyway, Etsy shop Knitrocious designed this lovely handmade Alien Facehugger to keep yer face all toasty and cozy. I like how the eyeholes are perfectly placed.

It’s a $150 + shipping here.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Suck on that: ‘Alien’ facehugger bong
 
Via Nerdcore