The Masonic Lodge in Los Angeles
 
As pretty much anyone within the reach of the Internet can tell you, this is the week of the big SXSW music, film and interactive festival/convention here in Austin, TX.

The big names are starting to arrive in town. Jay-Z’s in Austin, there are rumors of a super secret Bruce Springsteen show and the whole city is abuzz with movie stars, rock and rollers, rappers, folkies and even a fair selection of computer geeks. [Lots of ironic facial here in Austin, too, but that’s for another discussion.]

Suffice to say, if a nuclear bomb got dropped on Austin this week, the music industry as we currently know it would pretty much cease to exist.

 
But if you can’t make it to Austin yourself (or if I just scared you away with my irresponsible nuclear bomb talk) and if you are lucky enough to live in Los Angeles (I love saying that), fear not because the fine people at MasterCard PayPass® and Google Wallet have teamed up with Cool Hunting and Dangerous Minds to bring a little of what’s cooking in Austin to you, the Dangeorus Minds reader. And they’re going to feed you and treat you to an open bar.

This Friday night, March 16th, at the Masonic Lodge at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, you can catch a big-screen simulcast of the Sub Pop Records showcase, live from Red 7 in Austin. featuring Niki & the Dove, THEESatisfaction and South Africa’s exciting Spoek Mathambo

 
The Los Angeles event will be MC’d by “America’s Funnyman” Neil Hamburger and DJs that evening will include Chris Holmes, Elijah Wood, Brie Larson and TURQUOISE WISDOM.

Food will be served by Grill Em All and Mandoline Grill with sweet deserts from Coolhaus.

Please click this link to RSVP

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Hollywood Forever Cemetery Masonic Lodge
6000 Santa Monica Blvd , Los Angeles, CA 90038
Friday, March 16, 2012 from 7:30 PM to 11:30 PM (PT)

Must be 21 or older with photo ID.

And if you don’t live in Los Angeles you can attend the other events happening in:

New York

Chicago

San Francisco

Washington, D.C.

 
The Source, an extraordinary new documentary feature about the “Source Family,” a little-known hippie counterculture enclave living in Los Angeles in the 1970s, premiered at the SXSW Film festival this year. Co-directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos, The Source intimately examines the lives of a group of spiritual seekers who came to follow a charismatic but deeply flawed polygamous guru who opened one of the very first vegetarian restaurants in America. The Source restaurant was a Sunset Strip landmark for over two decades, attracting clientele like Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Willam Morris super agents and various other Tinseltown notables with its healthy food and good-looking staff.

Who were the Source Family?

Jodi: They were a utopian group of 140 beautiful young people who, for a time in the 70s, lived together in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills and explored the cosmos with a man named Father Yod, a controversial restaurateur turned spiritual leader. They had a popular vegetarian restaurant on the Sunset strip that movie stars and musicians frequented and they had their own rock band.

What was it about Father Yod that was so special that he could attract followers so easily?

Jodi: He was a wizard, a war hero, an outlaw, a conceptual genius, a father figure and a friend. He was fearless and he had a sense of humor. He showed those who were seeking how to make magic real in their own lives. And the ladies loved him.

Didn’t Woody Allen use the commune’s health food restaurant as the backdrop for some anti-Los Angeles sentiment in Annie Hall?

Maria: Indeed he did. It’s an iconic scene because it defines the great polarity at the time between the two coasts. The Source was an epicenter and represented the West Coast’s fixation on health and mysticism, which his character, “Alvy Singer,” a cynical New Yorker, perceived as self-indulgent and superficial.

 
How did you come to make a film about The Source?

Jodi: While I was helping to put together the book about the group (The Source, Process Media 2007) with Isis and Electricity Aquarian, Isis suggested we shoot our interviews with family members on video. Once Isis’ showed me her mind-blowing Source archives with the Super 8 home movies, color slides, scrapbooks, and hundreds of hours of audio recordings, I knew we had to make a film. I then brought in Maria, a talented and experienced commercial director and a longtime friend, to help bring things to the next level. The universe unfolded from there.

Are the Source Family still together, in some form, in 2012?

Maria: They’re no longer an active family— they dispersed in 1977 after Yod’s death. But the internet has reconnected many of them and they also have occasional Source Family reunions. The band reunited in 2007 when the book came out, and since then they’ve toured nationally and released new three albums. While the Source Family members all have their own lives now, it’s clear when you talk to them that most still have one foot in Yod-land.

Below, an exclusive clip from The Source.

 
Roddy McDowall’s behind-the-scenes look at the making of the classic film Planet of the Apes in 1968. The quality is incredible as we watch McDowall slowly made-up to look like Cornelius, and then join his co-stars, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans and Charlton Heston, on the beach at Malibu for the film’s shock ending. I can still recall the playground buzz over this film, months before its arrival in the U.K. The bubble gum trading cards came first, only one grocery store stocked them, its owner, a thin, waxen-faced man in his late 50s, couldn’t fathom the film’s attraction. “Talking apes? What utter nonsense…tsk..tsk…tsk. Whatever next?” But it was believable to our fertile minds, and revolutionary.

This was the film that inspired my admiration for Roddy McDowall - how could he wear all that make-up? What was it like to act with it on? McDowall later said:

“A year before production, [the producer] Arthur Jacobs talked to me about the project. I was one of the few people he explained the whole thing to, including the ending. He talked with me about playing Cornelius, and I thought it was all intriguing. About a year later, I signed to do the film, and to have my face molded for the makeup. The first film was very difficult because it was made in the summertime, at the Malibu Ranch. In August, with all those quartz lights, it hits like 140*, and it’s just unbearable. Although it was a wonderful experience, because I like [director] Frank Schaffner very much, I thought I would never do one again….”

“The heat made us perspire, which in turn worked on the spirit gum which in turn forces the reapplication of the adhesive - which in its turn works on the skin….”

“Planet of the Apes is a very hard film for me to judge because it was such a physical agony doing it. I’d begin to sweat remembering the heat. I think it’s a fabulous movie, up until I come into the film, and then it’s just purely a subjective reaction.”

The difficulties of wearing his make-up didn’t stop McDowall returning to the role of Cornelius in Escape from Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), and a Planet of the Apes TV series, all which I followed through the books, the comics, the cards and the films.
 

 
Probably one of the top questions many (most?) SXSW attendees ask themselves upon looking at the (frankly overwhelming) festival schedule is (to be very frank) “Who ARE all of these bands? I’ve never heard of half of them.” (No, you’re not alone!)

One thing for sure about SXSW—but you can say this about music in general in 2012—is that there are a lot of great acts around, but how do you find out about them?

We asked Sean Moeller, Daytrotter’s man with the golden ear how he discovers emerging bands and lures them to his Rock Island, IL studio for a session.

Since a large part of Daytrotter’s appeal is the “filter” of your ear—you’re kind of like the Internet generation’s John Peel—I’m curious about what filters Sean Moeller himself employs to find out about new music before anybody else (or is that a closely guarded trade secret?)

I kinda just have one filter and it’s if I like it or not. A song or a band hits me rightly or wrongly, pretty quickly. It doesn’t take much. The ear “guts” just get it or they don’t. As far as outside filters, some of the greatest things that I hear about are from bands that we’ve worked with in the past and have become friends with. As everyone knows, great writers and musicians gravitate to other great writers and musicians and everyone’s always excited to talk about something great that they just heard. I learn a lot about different scenes and what’s happening there through friends like that. Sometimes they’re dead wrong and I’m not hot on something, but the majority of the time, it’s interesting.

What was the original impetus behind starting Daytrotter?

The original impetus was really just wanting to have some kind of platform—however big or small it was going to wind up being—to showcase artists that I really believed in or thought were incredible. I was that guy in college who was always listening to and recommending things to friends that were so foreign to them. I hardly had anyone listen to me. I was writing for a number of music magazines and even there—my pitches would fall on deaf ears, so I just started my own thing. And the idea of taping the sessions—and doing it the way we do them, live to tape—was something that me and our original engineer thought would be best. The sessions were just supposed to be something different. A new way to hear someone.

Which performers have produced the most magical Daytrotter sessions?

That list would be a long one. I think there are a bunch of different kinds of magic. There are the ones where the mere presence on tape and who they were was so special—Kris Kristofferson, Charlie Louvin or Raphael Saadiq. But then there are SO many who just surprise you. Even bands that you’re sure will be great, come in and we’re able to/they’re able to capture a truly inspired performance. It’s why anyone goes to see a live performance. It’s that chance that everyone hopes for. It’s the essence of what we try to do every day.

What sessions are you looking forward to recording this year at SXSW?

I’m really excited to tape Eric Burdon of The Animals, Jimmy Cliff, Built To Spill, PAPA, Counting Crows, Of Montreal, Spoek Mathambo, Diamond Rugs, Father John Misty, Youngblood Hawke, Harriet and a bunch of others. We’re gonna tape a good handful of old friends and that’s always a good time down there too, people like Barnstormer alums Hellogoodbye, Miss America (which is all of Nathaniel Rateliff’s band), Delta Spirit and Madi Diaz. Good times!

Who would your “dream” act be to record a Daytrotter session with if you could get into a time machine and travel back to their heyday?

I think Hank Williams or the Beach Boys during the “Pet Sounds” years would be the cream for me.

Check out the Daytrotter app at the iTunes store.
 

 
More SXSW 2012 coverage at Tap Into Austin 2012

 
The world’s first computer generated pop promo? Possibly. “Camoulflage” was a single released by the late Chris Sievey (a.k.a Frank Sidebottom) in 1983, on his Random Records label. Sievey had started programing on his Sinclair ZX81 Home Computer, and included on the B-side of his single, the data (in audio format) for 3 programs to run on the Sinclair ZX81. All of the programs were written by Sievey himself, but most intrestingly, one of the programs was an animated video for the song “Camouflage”. Now, more than thirty years later, here is “the first ever real-time home computer generated pop video.”

For more details on the making of the promo, check soundhog09 notes here.
 

 
With thanks to Tom Law
 

 
A powerful performance by The Flaming Lips - St. Louis, Mo. 1987.

Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins, and Richard English.

Songs:

“One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning”
“Just Like Before”
“Prescription: Love”
“With You”
“Charlie Manson Blues”
“Unplugged”
“Staring at Sound / Everybody’s Talking at Me”
“Scratchin’ The Door / Who Do You Love / A Day in the Life”

This band soars on huge metallic wings.
 

 
Springsteen at The Apollo on March 9 with Ben Stiller, Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the mosh pit.

Is The Boss singing “Waiting On A Sunny Day” with any hint of irony in front of his well-heeled audience? The sun shines for all or none at all.
 

 
So-called “slash” fan fiction has been around since the 1970s and is usually written by women. Slash fan fiction is notable for taking characters from popular TV shows, movies and books and imagining them in romantic and sexual situations... normally sans the involvement of any female characters. For instance, slash fan fiction written about characters from Twilight probably underplays Bella or leaves her out entirely in favor of some hot mano a mano action with the male characters? Why? SImply because the average (lonely?) author of sexually charged fan fiction tends to be so besotted by the objects of their affections that they want no competition from other females, even if they are fictional!

So, as must seem pretty obvious by now, this leaves only the male characters to, er, indulge the sexual fantasies of the slash fiction writers. Starksy and Hutch, Batman and Robin, Sawyer and Jack from Lost, even Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy get it on in the pages of fan fiction. (I’ve seen Master and Commander slash as well).

Here’s a fun slash music video that examines the love that dares not speak its name between Kirk and Spock.
 

 
When I was a kid I’d always see comedy albums by Nichols and May in the cut out-bins and eventually I became curious about them after hearing their classic Telephone routine on the radio. Mike Nichols played a hapless man, stranded and down to his final dime, trying to use a pay phone with disastrous results. Elaine May played three different telephone operators, none about to give him his dime back.

In the landscape of 1960s comedy, Mike Nichols and Elaine May were quite unique. They were more “sit down” comics than stand-ups, and their sophisticated dark satire was more about motivation, psychological set-up—and torture, usually directed at the male characters—than of going for easy laughs and gags. Which is why, of course, the comedy recordings of Nichols and May are still so highly regarded today. All comedy snobs will eventually discover the genius of Nichols and May. It’s the canon!

In this black and white kinescope of Nichols and May doing their classic “$65 Funeral” skit on the Jack Paar Show, we get a rare glimpse of their particular chemistry and comic magic as they take on an industry that was then very much in the news due to Jessica Mitford’s best-selling book, The American Way of Death, which Paar alludes to in his introduction. Check out their timing! They’re both wonderful here, of course, but in my opinion Elaine May was the Tina Fey of the 60s, a comparison which should flatter both.
 

 
My word, this is something. “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush slowed down to a 36-minute symphony of gorgeous spookiness and thrills by Looking At Blue from the Kate Bush News and Information forum.