I Am a Hotel is a rather odd (occasionally kitsch) musical written by Leonard Cohen which was broadcast on Canadian TV in 1983. The plot is composed of a series of five vignettes dealing with love, sex and longing. Each story is based on a Cohen song.

The action takes place in the King Edward Hotel in Toronto. Cohen portrays a character known simply as The Resident, a Greek chorus of one.

Co-written by Mark Shekter and directed by Allan F. Nicholls.

Scenes:

   1. The Guests - the characters enter via the lobby and are taken to their rooms; the bellboy and chambermaid meet in the corridor; and the manager and his wife apparently have angry words in the lobby after which she strides off.
   2. Memories - the bellboy pursues the chambermaid around the laundry and ballroom.
   3. The Gypsy Wife - the manager’s wife, in fetching attire, dances on the boardroom table.
   4. Chelsea Hotel # 2 -  two lovers try, and fail, to make love, and the admiral and diva at last face each other across the hallway.
   5. Suzanne - scenes of “Suzanne” with Cohen are interspersed with shots of the two couples reunited and dancing together, and the hotel manager distraught and then drinking at the bar.

A short epilogue repeats the opening material from ‘The Guests’.

This template for the SOPA blackout (the one we used) was created by Zachary Johnson.

Depending on where you live, you might not be able to read the thought-provoking polemic posted by the Pirate Bay yesterday, so here it is in full. It’s well worth reading.

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012. PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.

There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it’s all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between each other, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).

It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition.

We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:

The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to therest of us obedient consumers.

The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that no one wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the American people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.

To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world - because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.

—THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

UPDATE: The reddit thread about this essay is also worth reading.

Bono ‘Twat’ t-shirt by publicgriefjunkie

I really dislike Bono. Not for the usual reasons - he’s not cool, he’s not sexy, he’s not funny, etc - no, it’s none of those. Well, it’s a little of those…  No, this excellent article from today’s Independent newspaper by James Bloodworth, should go some way towards explaining why I, and a fairly large chunk of the population of Ireland, hate this guy:

Another type among the super-rich, however – some would say the dominant type – is the wealthy individual who very publically gives generously with one hand while ruthlessly seeking to minimise what they pay in tax with the other. The moralising hypocrite, you might call this lot.

Perhaps the most well-known figure in this mould is Bono, the lead singer of U2. As well as being the frontman of one of the world’s biggest rock bands, Bono fancies himself as something of an anti-poverty activist, and can often be heard urging people to give generously to a number of causes. Bono has even been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times for his charity work.

In 2006, however, on the back of the massive Live 8 concert the year before – which U2 played a large part in organising and which was supposed to “make poverty history” – Bono’s band moved part of their tax liability from Ireland to the Netherlands. The move came after Ireland scrapped tax breaks that allowed musicians and artists to avoid paying taxes on royalties. When asked about the decision, U2’s lead guitarist David Evans, aka “The Edge”, said that of course the band were trying to be tax-efficient, because “who doesn’t want to be tax-efficient?”

The answer, at a guess, would be those who spend a great deal of time moralising about the world’s poor. Away from the self-congratulatory press conferences where Bono smugly demanded we send our money to the dispossessed, U2 were simultaneously cutting the feet from under their own government’s ability to help the world’s most desperate people– the same people Bono was proclaiming such grave concern for.

This makes for a great read - it’s not all about Bono, mind you, some of it’s about Princess Di - and you can read it all here.

Thanks to Helén Thomas!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
’U Pay Your Tax 2’

 
Dangerous Minds pal artist/filmmaker/musician Brian Butler will be premiering an ambitious live performance art piece this Saturday, January 21 in Los Angeles at the Ruskin Theatre in Santa Monica. His muse, Annakim Violette (daughter of rockstar Tom Petty) will be at the center of this black magic occult ritual.

From the press release:

Union of Opposites is an experiment in ritual magick, combining the use of sound and light with the intent of creating a collective out-of-body experience. A film screening will transform into a live performance in which the artist and his team execute an occult rite inspired by Aleister Crowley’s mysterious Ritual of the Mark of the Beast. In this incantation, Butler explores ideas of reversal and the use of geometric figures as channels of occult power. The work will feature a spontaneously improvised soundtrack that experiments with the effects of sound frequencies and rhythmic chanting on our chakras and mental state.

Butler’s interest in expanded cinema will fold the performance space into the work. He views the film, performance and musical accompaniment as a singular entity, where the performers will “expand from two dimensional screen to three dimensional existence” as themes of astral projection and projective geometry interplay with the auditory and visual stimuli.

Butler—who has communed and consulted with occultists and magicians from Europe to South America—explains that “magick is an art unto itself. In a sense, is the art of living in a creative and free way.” Influenced by the work of British arch-occultist Aleister Crowley, Butler believes that magick is conducive to and “complements” all manner of creativity, helping practitioners access different parts of the mind as well as spiritual realms. Butler explains: “The occult is defined as the hidden levels of the mind or the hidden information about how things work…A really intense performance is like hypnosis. You go to a certain state of mind and your presence brings those around you to the same place.”

A part of Art Los Angeles Contemporary, in the Ruskin Theatre at the Santa Monica Airport, 3000 Airport Ave, 5pm. Produced in conjunction with Annie Wharton Los Angeles.

Below, Butler’s 42-second film “Night of Pan” from the OneDreamRush collective show, featuring Kenneth Anger, Vincent Gallo and Twiggy Ramirez.
 

 
Thank you Susan von Seggern!

 
Here’s a little something by Glasgow purveyors of rocktronica Errors, in the run up to the January 30 release of their new album Have Some Faith In Magic on Rock Action Records. Taking as much influence from modern and classic electro as they do from shoegaze and kosmiche, Errors genuinely bring something fresh to the table, and have been steadily building up momentum over the last five years. From the Rokbun website:

A group who emerged at the tale end of a period when anything purely-instrumental and guitar- based became lazily tagged “post-rock,” Errors have now distanced themselves from that loose genre so much that any fleeting comparison to it is now completely redundant.

Have Some Faith In Magic is an LP of sprawling pop, with delicious hooks applied liberally across post-electro scatterings; a complete turn away from previously lauded albums It’s Not Something But It Is Like Whatever, and last year’s Come Down With Me - not least with vocals now being included prominently for the first time.

“It was just something that naturally happened,” comments the group’s Steev Livingstone, “we had the idea to put vocals in the music a while ago but we always intended that they should be treated as another instrument.

“We’ve used them in a way that sits really naturally so the music and the vocals don’t feel like separate entities.”

Judging by the simultaneously wistful-yet-pumping sounds of “Pleasure Palaces,” the new album could be very special indeed. As for the video… well, I don’t really understand it, but I do like it. A lot. Directed by Rachel Maclean, and coming across like New Order by way of Tim & Eric, there is a whole host of strange and humorous imagery to digest here:

Errors “Pleasure Palaces”
 

 
You can pre-order Have Some Faith In Magic from iTunes or physically from the Errors webiste, and for more info visit www.havesomefaithinmusic.com.

 
During Ron Paul’s 2008 run for President, he had a cringe-inducing and gut-bustingly funny encounter with the fabulous Bruno (Sacha Baron Cohen).

Paul’s description of his encounter with Bruno:

We were in a studio situation, I wasn’t invited into a hotel room. There were lots of lights and blaze and commotion and they said we better get in this back room which had been fixed up as a bedroom.

‘So there was some dishonesty getting me into the interview, I was expecting an interview on Austrian economics. That didn’t turn out that way.

‘By the time he (Cohen) started pulling his pants down, I was like what on earth is going on here and I ran out of the room. This interview had ended.

I’d forgotten about this and I think Paul would like for you to forget about it too.
 

 
On his 70th Birthday, here is Muhammad Ali (or as he was then, Cassius Clay) explaining why he is The Greatest.  From his 1964 single.

Happy Birthday Muhammad!
 

Bonus: “Stand By Me” as sung by The Greatest.
 

 
By way of the food blog, Eat Me Daily:

Taking its cues from Schoolhouse Rock, “My Name is Potato” is an Italian novelty song by Rita Pavone from 1977. It features Ms. Pavone — who was apparently 32 when she recorded this, despite looking to be about 17 — singing to a cartoon of a potato. An American potato, as he gruffly insists, who shoots guns and flies off in an American flag spaceship at the end. The animation was done by Guido Manuli, who was famous for his collaborations with director Bruno Bozetto, particularly on the film Allegro Non Troppo, a sort of spoof on Fantasia.

 
The 1981 German synthpop cult hit “Fred vom Jupiter” was recorded by a teenage boy named Andreas Dorau along with a chorus comprised of some of his female school chums. It is an unbelievably catchy tune about Kosmonaut Fred, who comes from Jupiter, obviously, and is beloved by all the Earth girls.

Enterprising young Andreas put out “Fred vom Jupiter” as Die Doraus und die Marinas on his own record label and it was eventually picked up for release in the UK by Mute’s Daniel Miller, who released it between records by Depeche Mode and Yaz (“Fred vom Jupiter” is not all that dissimilar from what Miller was trying to do with his pre-Gorillaz/post-Archies group Silicon Teens).

There are several amusing PR shots, like the one above, of young Andreas dressed in a tuxedo ala James Bond surrounded by a bevy of pre-teen girls with guns. Dorau, who is still active in music as Andreas Johnson, clearly knew how to work the popstar thing to his advantage with the ladies, even at a tender age.
 

 
Dreams Money Can Buy is a 1947 film made by artist/author Hans Richter and collaborators like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Ferdinand Leger, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Paul Bowles, Max Ernst and others. There is a number by scandalous bisexual torch singer Libby Holman and popular African-American singer Josh White (who was later caught up in the “Red Scare” and black-listed) on the original soundtrack titled “The Girl with the Pre-Fabricated Heart” that plays during Leger’s segment.
 
Richter’s goal was to bring the avant-garde out of the museum and into the movie house and the results, predictably, are rather unique. Certainly Dreams Money Can Buy must have been a stunner at the time and it still is. The plot, such that there is one, revolves around a man who rents a room where he can peer into the mirror and see people’s dreams. He sets up shop and we meet his clients and see their surreal interior lives in the dream sequences. As you can imagine with the above list of collaborators, the film is a dizzying treat of audio-visual creation.
 

 
Marcel Duchamp’s contribution, “Discs,” is especially interesting. Here we see Duchamp’s famous Rotoreliefs in action, with a “prepared piano” soundtrack performed by John Cage. [I was once offered a box of glass and wood reproductions in miniature of Duchamp’s kinetic sculptures—at a good price, too—and like a fucking idiot I passed on it].
 

 
Below, Dreams Money Can Buy in its entirety on YouTube. If you want to watch with the original soundtrack, it’s here. The “modern” soundtrack, in the version embedded below, was recorded by The Real Tuesday Weld and is pretty faithful to the original music.
 

 
Thank you Vanessa Weinberg!