Dangerous Minds doesn’t have an official mascot, but if the possibility ever manifests, I’d like to suggest Morticia Addams, as embodied by the delectable Carolyn Jones, for the position. Morticia and her brood made the potentially awkward leap from the pages of The New Yorker, where they were a tad more convincingly ghoulish—a classic panel involved the family tipping hot oil on a gaggle of trick-or-treaters—to the mass medium of network television in the mid-1960s, a transition the entire gang achieved with remarkable aplomb.

As it existed on TV, the Addams Family was the approximate correlative of Bizarro in the Superman universe. Since you can’t roast little children on a spit on prime-time TV, the gang took a left turn to perversity. Many gags played on some humorously “opposite” reaction to events (“Oh thank you, this makes me totally miserable!!”), and that very bent for unorthodoxy turned the Addamses into natural and unwitting (?) stand-ins for bohemians, beatniks, freethinkers, and weirdos of all stripes.

The subversiveness of the Addams Family, if it needs spelling out, involves an extreme embrace of tolerance and a perhaps-radical notion that even weirdos could raise a good family. Morticia and Gomez (played wonderfully by John Astin) loved their children every bit as much as the Cleavers did, and said children almost certainly ended up with fewer neuroses. Gomez was some kind of mad millionaire, and for her part Morticia may have been the most refined creature available for view on network television. It can’t be missed that the Addams brood is notably heterogeneous—in other words, composed of a diverse variety of freaks. The Addamses embraced difference as well, opening their doors even to those lacking a torso, or an epidermis. Nobody expressed relish, zeal, or ardor with more brio than Gomez, and Morticia’s alert form of ennui had a certain proto-postpunk edge to it.

The show ran from 1964 to 1966. In 1974 Gold Key Comics ran three issues of a projected Addams Family comic book. One of Gold Key’s early titles was called Space Family Robinson, and if you think that sounds a lot like Lost in Space, Gold Key’s legal team held much the same perspective. Another feather in Gold Key’s cap was its status as the first comic book publisher of any type to run a Star Trek title, one of its longest-running features, and it also found success with a Twilight Zone title. Gold Key also had many, many licensed titles along the lines of The Flintstones, Beetle Bailey, and The Pink Panther.

According to Wikipedia, many of Gold Key’s flirtations with licensed material “were characterized by short runs, sometimes publishing no more than one or two issues.” The Addams Family outlasted that, at least—it ran for three issues. It’s noteworthy that the cover images are copyrighted to “Charles Addams,” and indeed, the pictorial representation of the gang does hark back to the characters’ New Yorker origins.

What follows are the remaining two covers (you’ll find the third one at the top of this page) and a few representative panels.
 

 

 

 
Much more after the jump…....
 

Andy Kaufman’s yearbook photo from Grahm Junior College
 
This video of Andy Kaufman as “Indignation” Jones in a production of Spoon River Anthology was shot in 1969, when Kaufman was enrolled at Grahm Junior College in Boston. Lost in the Funhouse says the young actor got to show off his range in Don Erickson’s TV production class:

He became a stalwart among TV thespians in the innovative live-tape class productions conceived by Don Erickson, climbing into whichever personas were requested of him—he would somberly sing Jacques Brel dirges or issue grandiloquent soliloquies or pantomime street loon histrionics in sync to Top Forty hits. He inhabited several deceased lamenters who populated the ghostly town of Spoon River, Illinois, in Spoon River Anthology—a failed Broadway show based on a collection of woebegone poems by Edgar Lee Masters, which Erickson adapted for a class television project. He played a dead laughing guy and some dead old guys and a dead mystical guy and one dead extremely angry guy who spouted scorn through pursed and smacking lips that flapped and pouted under his thick-droop mustache (this was a very good look for a mean bastard, he thought)—“You saw me as only a rundown man with matted hair and a beard and ragged clothing!” he bitterly groused. “Sometimes a man’s life turns into a cancer—after being bruised and continually bruised until it swells into a purplish mass like growths on stalks of corn!!”

There doesn’t seem to be a tape of Andy’s reading of “MacArthur Park” in character as an aggrieved 80-year-old Jewish man (“Someone left their cake out in the rain? Oyyy, I don’t think that I can take it”), which Erickson later remembered as an outstanding performance. Kaufman read “MacArthur Park” again years later, in his Saturday Night Live audition, but he read it straight.

Below, Andy reads “Indignation” Jones’ part in Spoon River Anthology. (A maddening video here claims to show Kaufman’s performance of Jacques Brel’s “The Desperate Ones,” but ends before he appears. It does not, however, omit a second of Don Erickson’s introduction, in which he answers, at length, an Esquire article uncharitable to his productions. By the time he pauses in reading a letter from Lynne Margulies to complain that Esquire never ran his eight-page rebuttal—about 10 minutes in—you’ll envy “Indignation” Jones.)
 

Mistah Kurtz… he fucking nuts.

Boris Karloff is a bug-eyed Mr. Kurtz in this hip, bongo-fury, sub-beatnik fifties adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s tale Heart of Darkness. Karloff does his best over-the-top batshit crazy thing and is joined in a face-off by a half-naked, scenery-chewing and equally bug-eyed Roddy McDowall as Marlow, who overacts his way through the proceedings with considerable gusto.

This ain’t no run-of-the-mill take on Conrad’s classic story but one written by Stewart Stern the screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause. And like that famous paean to teenage acne and angst, Stern has introduced a psychological subtext that gives the matter a topically Freudian twist which, to be frank, doesn’t quite work.

But heck, that don’t matter when there’s so much fever onscreen with Karloff and McDowall ably supported in their psycho-drama by Eartha Kitt as the Queen, Oskar Homolka as the Doctor, Inga Swenson as Maria, and Cathleen Nesbitt as the Crone.
 

Gone Daddio, solid gone…
 
Heart of Darkness was loosely based on Conrad’s own experiences of his time spent in Africa and was intended as a condemnation of the racist imperialism he had witnessed firsthand. This might get a bit lost in Stern’s script where the Africans are mainly presented as little more than enthusiastic child-like bongo players—but it is what it is and you’re all grown-up enough to make up your own mind about this strange and quite daring television drama.

And if you can’t, well, take a taste of what it’s all about from Gonzo-theorist Erich Kuersten’s long essay “Ride the Snake” over at his blog Acidemic, where he explains just how this “primitive TV broadcast of Heart of Darkness spews forth an admission of evil and in the process exorcises it.” Kuersten is one of those rare original and essential writers who really should have a book of his articles published. ‘Nuff said.

Any-old-how, enjoy the madness of King Boris.

Watch it, after the jump…

 
What if I told you there was an album that sounded like The Faust Tapes meets Raymond Scott meets the BBC Radiophonic Workshop? Like Stockhausen meets skiffle meets the Moby Grape? Like if La Monte Young made a cover version of “Popcorn”?

Haven’t you ever wondered what a dadaist cartoon scored by a meeting of the minds between Carl Stalling and Einstürzende Neubauten would sound like?

This exists. The soundtrack to the French cult cartoon Les Shadoks is such a rare bird. Aesthetically triangulated by musique concrète, Perrey & Kingsley’s electronic whimsy and Pink Floyd’s “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict,” the music of Robert Cohen-Solal—a member of les Groupe de recherches musicales, or GRM, the French equivalent of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop—nearly defies description. Lucky for you, you needn’t take my word for any of this, as there is a long excerpt/audio collage of the Les Shadoks soundtrack album embedded below for you to partake of. Please make it your soundtrack to reading this post.
 

 
Les Shadoks was created by French cartoonist Jacques Rouxel and animator René Borg—taking an obvious inspiration from Paul Klee’s painting “La machine à gazouiller”—and was broadcast in France from 1968–1974 as 2-3 minute cartoons. The Shadoks were absurd bird-like creatures, the inhabitants of a two dimensional planet. Their language has just five monosyllabic words—“Ga,” “Bu,” “Zo,” “Meu,” and “Ni”—but their primitive brains possess but four brain cells and they can only know four things at a time. The Shadoks represent French society. The Gibis are their intelligent and far more cautious opposites who are supposed to represent the buttoned up people of Great Britain.

“It was a long, long, long… long time ago. In that time, there was the sky. To the right of the sky, there was planet Gibi. It was flat and tilting from left to right. So sometimes when too many Gibis were on one side on the planet, it tilted too much and some Gibis fell into space. It was a big trouble… especially for the Gibis. To the left of the sky, there was planet Shadok. It had no precise form, or rather… its form kept changing. So sometimes some Shadoks fell in space. It was a big trouble… especially for the Shadoks. And on the middle there was Earth, that was round and moved.”

So the Shadoks and the Gibis are in competition for the Earth’s resources. Or something like that.

The simpleton Shadoks were famous for their dumb philosophies, and for their incessant pumping—“Better to pump even if nothing happens than to risk something worse happening by not pumping” being one of their mottos. Another example of Shadok philosophy is “When one tries continuously, one ends up succeeding. Thus, the more one fails, the greater the chance that it will work.” This theory is put to the test when a rocket launch is rushed through 999,999 failures on the calculation that it had a one-in-a-million chance to launch successfully…

Here are some more:

“Why do it the easy way when you can do it the hard way?”

“If there is no solution, it is because there is no problem.”

“To reduce the numbers of unhappy people, always beat up the same individuals.”

“Every advantage has its disadvantages. And vice versa.”

To this day, the French will compare their politicians with the idiotic Shadoks.
 

 
The soundtrack to Les Shadoks has been released in the past, but that 1969 album featured narration and character voices over the music. It’s also rare and very, very expensive. For the 50th anniversary of Les Shadoks, the complete soundtrack by Robert Cohen-Solal is available for the first time ever in its entirety, cut and mastered from the original reels and made in cooperation with the artist. Released by the marvellously named Swiss label WRWTFWW Records—that stands for “We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want” (and clearly they do)—the album comes in a glossy, high quality vinyl pressing (with 7” record) and on CD in a digipak.

If you tend to like—broadly defined, of course—“this kind of thing” then I highly, highly recommend this release. There’s really nothing else like it. The Les Shadoks soundtrack album is easily destined for my top 10 of 2018 and it’s not even March yet.
 

In 1973 ‘The Shadoks’ appeared on Thames Television in the early evening. Kenneth Robinson provided the narration in English. Sadly this is the SINGLE example that I can find of an English episode of ‘The Shadoks’ anywhere on the Internet. The French DVD box sets have only French narration. Someone needs to put this out in English, like NOW.

 
It’s hard to watch this achingly wonderful unplugged jam the Minutemen perpetrated on Los Angeles public access TV sometime in 1985 without meditating on the tragic early departure of D. Boon. It’s really almost the only thing one can think about.

Aside from that, however, this is an unusual document presenting the seminal San Pedro punk band with no way of knowing that in just a few weeks the band would no longer exist as a unit. On December 22, 1985, Boon was killed when a van he was riding in swerved, with the result that Boon was forcibly ejected from the vehicle through the rear doors. He was 27 years old (yes, D. Boon is definitely in the Club of 27).

The show is called “Acoustic Blow-Out,” which is certainly apt. Hurley has nothing but a set of bongos in his lap the entire time, and the show pretty much sounds like what would happen if the Minutemen decided to do an inpromptu, covers-heavy set at the campfire you just made.

The show appeared on L.A. public access TV but there seems to be no date associated with the airing. It is commonly stated, however, that it was just “weeks” before Boon’s death. It does seem likely that this was late in 1985. Minutemen’s last album 3-Way Tie (For Last) was recorded in August and came out in December, and it’s just barely possible that this appearance was intended to promote that album.

Watt starts things off by reciting a favorite line: “Never gave a damn about the meter man until I was the man who had to read the meters, man….” The set is just a half-hour as the trio plows through 13 songs with zero banter. The high point, if you have to isolate one, is “History Lesson: Part II.”
 

Setlist:
Corona (Double Nickels)
Themselves (Double Nickels)
The Red and the Black (3-Way Tie (For Last)/Blue Oyster Cult cover)
Badges (The Politics of Time)
I Felt Like a Gringo (Buzz or Howl)
Time (Richard Hell cover)
Green River (”Tour-Spiel” EP/CCR cover)
Lost (3-Way Tie (For Last)/Meat Puppets cover)
Ack Ack Ack (The Politics of Time/The Urinals cover)
Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love (Double Nickels/Van Halen cover)
History Lesson Part II (Double Nickels)
Tour Spiel (Project: Mersh)
Little Man With A Gun In His Hand (Buzz or Howl)

 
Addams Family fan and LEGO enthusiast Hugh Scandrett has created a nearly-3,000 piece modular recreation of the creepy/kooky Addams Family mansion which he has submitted to LEGO Ideas. If 10,000 people support his build idea, LEGO will review it to possibly make it an actual set. So far, as of this writing, the project has nearly 3,000 supporters.

Scandrett had previously submitted a larger build of the Addams’ mansion in 2016—in honor of the show’s 50 anniversary—but the original build had 7,000 parts, exceeding the 3,000 piece limit imposed by LEGO Ideas.

Scandrett’s earlier 7,000 piece build.

Details of the new construction:

Three floor Mansion, each floor is a removable segment, like standard LEGO modular construction.
The Mansion measures 23” (57cm) high, 10” (25cm) wide and 15” (38cm) deep.
A full glass greenhouse.
Includes 8 minifigs: Morticia, Gomez, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, Cousin It and Lurch.
The build includes 2,975 original LEGO pieces, no modifications.

You can vote to support Scandrett’s set idea HERE. We give it TWO SNAPS.
 

 

 

 
Much more after the jump…

 
In 1977, Gore Vidal went head-to-head with Roy Cohn, onetime mentor of the president*, on the NYC talk show Midday Live. Cohn was promoting his new book, which sported a cover blurb by, uh, Roy Cohn: an “answer to” the recent TV movie Tail Gunner Joe, in which Peter Boyle portrayed Joe McCarthy as a crapulous commie-baiter who lied about his military service. Roy was hopping mad. He published his book-length screed a month after NBC aired the movie, and he sued the network for libel, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court. (He lost.)

Cohn’s performance is a master class in demagoguery. He accuses everyone else of lying. McCarthy is the victim of a vicious smear campaign. If elites in New York and Washington, D.C. don’t like what McCarthy stands for, it’s because they’ve lost touch with the decent, vital, God-fearing people of the heartland, who understand the stakes in the fight against Communism. Most instructive is his fluid interpretation of the word “McCarthyism.” Vidal defines the term early in the broadcast and uses it consistently throughout; for Cohn, it means anything that confers a momentary rhetorical advantage. In the same breath, he casts doubt on the validity of the concept (the word first appeared in The Daily Worker!) and tries to use it like a curse (the real exponent of McCarthyism is… Gore Vidal!).

The real fun starts when Vidal brings up the topic of personal sexual habits, which is right in the wheelhouse of Jack Kerouac’s seducer, and a subject Cohn would rather avoid:

Vidal: To me, the nicest thing—let’s be affirmative. The nicest thing that I have ever heard about Joe McCarthy was told me by Senator Flanders of Vermont: that he was a full-time homosexual. Is this true?

Cohn: No, I’m sure you’d think that merited a badge of honor, but it is not true.

Vidal: Well, I’m getting to you in a minute, but what about Senator McCarthy?

Cohn: Oh, sure, that’s your favorite topic of conversation. I know that.

Vidal: I know; it’s aroused by the obvious.

Vidal later remembered telling Cohn on this broadcast, “We regarded [you and G. David Schine] as the Damon and Pythias of the homosexual movement,” and said Cohn responded by “shaking all over in a ghastly way.” This moment, alas, does not appear on the tape; I like to believe it occurred during a commercial break. But Cohn does appear shaken by all this talk of manly love, and eager to change the subject. Immediately, he produces a sheet of paper and reads some of Vidal’s cutting remarks about LBJ, Jimmy Carter, and General MacArthur, to prove that Vidal is the real McCarthyite. (As if “McCarthyism” just meant “saying unfavorable things about public figures.”)

Don’t worry; host Bill Boggs circles back to Joe McCarthy’s sex kicks—a hot topic since the early Fifties, when, as McCarthy ginned up the Lavender Scare, the Las Vegas Sun reported that the senator himself was “the queer that made Milwaukee famous”—and Vidal makes Cohn squirm some more.

Cohn: I hate to eliminate or eradicate the one plus you ever did give to Senator McCarthy, but the statement and the charge is totally untrue.

Vidal: You would know.

Cohn: Well, I don’t know, you’ve been around a man for a certain period of time, you know his wife, uh, you know his family, uh, you see him, I suppose you can know as well as anybody can know, and if I knew or didn’t know, I’d wanna have a little more proof before I start throwing it around the way you’ve done.

Vidal: But Senator Flanders did.

Cohn: Well, that’s McCarthy—Senator Flanders apologized for having made a statement which was not based on fact, but based on something somebody told him, which when he checked it out, felt was so unfounded that Senator McCarthy deserved and received an apology from Senator Flanders—

Vidal: I would be happy to see that.

Me too. When 67 senators voted to condemn McCarthy on December 2, 1954, the New York Times reported that Flanders apologized for one thing only: comparing McCarthy to Hitler.

More after the jump…

Frankenstein’s monster reimagined as Franken Berry (the General Mills cereal monster mascot) by Michael Burnett.
 
In 2011, 80 artists were invited to create their own version of Hollywood’s most famous monster of filmland—no, not Harvey Weinstein, but rather the creation of author Mary Shelley, James Whale and Boris Karloff, Frankenstein’s monster—for a charity art endeavor called the It’s Alive Project. For the show, the artists were simply required to utilize a bust of actor Boris Karloff in character as Frankenstein’s monster and do whatever they wanted. Over the next few years the It’s Alive Project would take on the monster’s better half, as famously portrayed by actress Elsa Lanchester in the 1935 film, Bride of Frankenstein. Updates to the monster’s made-to-order bride and her black and white look were quite imaginative—such as depicting Lanchester as a punk rocker with a dangerous looking blue mohawk or a sinister-looking version of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

The impressive life-sized busts were sold for equally impressive prices in various auctions—some going for several thousand dollars each. All proceeds from the sale of the various tricked-out monsters and his bride were donated to the St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which provides cost-free treatment to children diagnosed with cancer and other life-threatening diseases. Some of the images that follow are slightly NSFW.
 

Frankenstein’s monster as Spock from ‘Star Trek.’
 

“The Bride of Oz” by John Allred.
 

“Punk Bride” by Barry S. Anderson. Other work by Anderson can be seen in the 1986 film ‘Day of the Dead,’ and 2001’s ‘Jeepers Creepers.’
 
More monsters after the jump…

Babalú-Ayé
 
Is I Love Lucy the real Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, the Vault of the Adepti, the Island Beneath the Sea? Robert Anton Wilson used to talk about “the sect of Fred Mertz, Bodhisattva,” and its adherents’ simple creed:

They believe that if you look at enough I Love Lucy re-runs when you’re really wasted, even­tually you’ll hear Fred reveal the most esoteric Zen teachings. . . .

If that sounds far-fetched, consider this: Ricky Ricardo’s signature song was addressed to a fearsome deity in the Yoruba pantheon. For practitioners of Santería, Babalú-Ayé is the orisha who controls health and prosperity. You want to be very cool around Babalú-Ayé because he can cover you with boils or give you the Ebola. The next time a conga drum tempts you to do your impression of Ricky Ricardo singing “Babalú,” remember that you might be mocking the god who decides whether you catch leprosy. Ixnay on the abalúbay!

After the jump, Ricky puts on voodoo drag for a big number at the Tropicana, and the Ricardos and the Mertzes fly to Cuba…

 
I’ve been a big Rick and Morty fan ever since the show debuted on Adult Swim in late 2013. (For the big Science March last year I carried a sign emblazoned with the image of Rick Sanchez—who is a scientist and genius.) I was a big Community nut and continue to be a Harmontown devotee, and so I was eager to see where Dan Harmon would land after the lengthy demise of Community. In addition to creating that Joel McHale vehicle for NBC, Harmon was one of the main minds behind the legendary failed 1999 TV pilot Heat Vision and Jack, which a young Jack Black teamed up with a young Owen Wilson in a parodic reworking of Knight Rider directed by a young Ben Stiller.

Harmon’s heart always lay more with visionary sci-fi (à la Robocop) and not the relatively sober sitcom trappings of Community, so Rick and Morty represented a return to subject matter like Heat Vision and Jack as well as a chance for him and show co-creator Justin Roiland to have a shit ton of fun. Reflecting the evident creative fulfillment that Harmon and Roiland have enjoyed, the show has found a solid cult following.
 

 
Purhasers of the box set of season 1 (Blu Ray version only) of Rick and Morty, which came out in 2014, received an odd little pamphlet with the title “The Good Morty.” The 14-page story was a pitch-perfect parody of the Chick tracts once unleashed by the millions by evangelical nut case Jack T. Chick. “The Good Morty” made a brief appearance in the season 1 finale “Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind.”

“The Good Morty” tells the story of the “good” Morty and the “bad” Morty—the latter makes the poor decision to join Rick for an adventure that is identical to any number of Rick and Morty episodes while the “good” version of Morty stays home and obeys the strictures laid down in Sacrimortys 4:23 to worshipfully kiss his own toes and so on. Meanwhile, Morty’s sister Summer becomes a heroin addict and eventually the “bad” Morty is transformed into a cockroach by a vengeful deity. Such are the risks in deviating from the true path of Morty!

The tract ends with a little list of things to do in order to avoid getting transformed into a cockroach:
 

1. Draw five scantily-clad or fully nude girls every day.
2. Kiss your toes three times each night before bed. Imagine each toe is a crying Morty who needs love.
3. Say Jessica’s name seven times each morning. Never above a whisper. Never above audible levels. Use your “six inch voice.”
4. Play with toys daily. Action figures, building blocks, remote control type toys. Bonus points for yo-yos. They’re a classic that holds up. Just be careful with them. No fancy tricks in crowded rooms.
5. Refuse all calls to adventure from Rick. Be like your dad. Be like Jerry. A simple life.
6. Play video games. Bonus points for handheld games. Never play freemium games.
7. Don’t worry about homework. You’ll be fine. The global economy is going to collapse soon anyway. Learn survival skills if anything.

 
Anyone who has listened to Harmon discourse on Joseph Campbell will recognize the Campbellian note in the phrase “calls to adventure.”

“The Good Morty” was written by Roiland and Ryan Ridley, and the art was created by Erica Hayes. You can read the entire thing below:
 

 

 
Read the whole thing after the jump…...