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Tales from the Crib: A deranged horror/thriller about an adult baby
03.24.2020
05:19 pm
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Hollywood is a weird town. I mean, where to begin with that statement? Perhaps we should just jump to the topic of this post, the 1973 film The Baby, a movie about a mentally incompetent man who lives his life as an adult baby along with his mother and two Stepford Wife-esque sisters. If you’ve never seen this film, just trying to wrap your mind around the idea of watching a movie about a grown man operating at the capacity of a breastfeeding infant (because, yeah, that happens in the film) is probably enough to make you consider your current life choices. However, I bring good news to all you subversive content-loving freaks, The Baby is a strangely well-acted mind-fuck of a film which somehow, despite its putrid pediatric subject matter, received a PG rating upon its release in 1973.

Ted Post’s many directorial credits include classic television series such as The Twilight Zone, Rawhide, and Gunsmoke, and films, including two Clint Eastwood gems, Magnum Force, and Hang ‘Em High. Post’s work earned the director two Emmys and the admiration of his peers. He took the job of directing The Baby after writer Abe Polsky spent a year trying to convince him to do it. The film—a peculiar psychological/horror/thriller, is quite a departure from Post’s tough-guy wheelhouse. What made Post so perfectly suited to direct The Baby was his reputation for not interfering with his actors so they could do what they did best, bringing the characters to life and making the audience believe they are the person they are seeing on screen. Even if that character is an infant trapped inside the body of an adult. So when actor David Mooney (billed as “David Manzy” in the film) got the role of “Baby” in The Baby, he shaved his entire body in order to look like a 21-year-old baby (He was then 32). You’d think someone might have told the poor guy about the smelly miracle that is Nair, but I digress. Here’s Mooney from a 2011 interview where he spoke briefly about his experience filming The Baby:

“One of my most challenging experiences was playing [an impaired] boy… in a movie called The Baby. And that’s now become a cult film. The acting part of that was so difficult because I had to totally de-man-ize myself and become a baby, act like a baby. And I just, I’d always loved babies, so I was around baby cousins and all this, and had held babies and babies sat on my lap and all that, so I was aware of how babies, the innocence they had and the dependability they have on you and how they’re so real because they react to the stimulus that’s given them at the time. So I had to learn all those things and make sure to incorporate that into that role.”

 

Actor David Mooney as “Baby.”
 
Shortly after the opening credits, which are shown over a scene with social worker Ann Gentry (played by the Lynda Carter-looking Anjanette Comer) looking over photos of Baby at various stages of his development, it’s clear something is amiss with Baby, and Gentry’s character is going to be the one to find out. This brings us to our dramatic introduction to Mrs. Wadsworth, Baby’s mother, who commands the screen, much like the unsettling forcefulness of a chain-smoking Joan Crawford (think 1964’s Strait-Jacket), or a fired-up Elizabeth Taylor. When Mrs. Wadsworth (played to the hilt by actor Ruth Roman), greets Gentry on the porch of their regal home, it seems abundantly clear the young social worker is in over her head. During her visit, she meets one of Baby’s sisters, the odd, big-haired Germaine, and finally, Baby, who is taking his afternoon nap. So begins Gentry’s role as the family’s new social worker, and things get very, very weird, and very, very sinister quickly. Specifically, there is a scene in The Baby depicting the most unsexy, unsettling catfight in cinematic history. This is a fact.

Another bizarre aspect of the film is the use of real baby sounds instead of baby soundsas mimicked by actor David Mooney. Allegedly, the original audio for the film was of Mooney making adorable baby noises. The Baby‘s soundtrack, scored by Gerald Fried, does its best to invoke, at times, the masterful vibe of Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Taxi Driver, Citizen Kane) along with some foreboding beatnik-bongo jazz flute jams. Of all the stand-out performances Post got from his actors, it is Mooney’s deep dive into becoming Baby that you will never forget. Since we’ve all got so much time on our collective wash-your-fucking-hands right now, I’m happy to report that it is streaming for free in all its beautifully paced, deranged entirety on Tubi. It was also released on Blu-ray in 2014 by Severin and is well worth owning if you are a collector of physical media, especially oddball films that defy explanation. The trailer, some stills, and movie posters for The Baby follow.
 

The scene where social worker Ann Gentry first sees Baby asleep in his adult-sized crib.
 

 

Baby isn’t happy!
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.24.2020
05:19 pm
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Satan is back! With boobs, pubes and rock and roll

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In the world of adult magazines, the devil girl has always been one of the standby icons. And not just there, but in comic books, film, art, tattooing and just about anywhere else you might look. Almost always a positive thing and a fantasy bigger than all the Bettie Pages, Marilyn Monroes and Jayne Mansfields combined. By the 1950s fantasy and reality started having blurred lines. Oh it always existed, but in the late 1940s when John Willie created the first full on fetish magazine, Bizarre, the devil girl was made flesh. This magazine influenced Irving Klaw and all the publishers of the now beloved “vintage smut” (a major hashtag on Instagram and other hashtaggy photo display sites). Magazines like Exotique, the art of Eric Stanton, Gene Bilbrew (Eneg), and others became a long running mainstay. Many of these magazines existed to display personal ads for things, even now, that many people just couldn’t come out and say they were into. Even today, the bizarre content of these 50, 60 and 70-year-old magazines is truly BIZARRE! These are the most collected adult magazines the world over.
 
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When the 60s rolled around and free love, paganism, communal living, more open nudism and—furthest from center, Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan—split the population in two as far as people interested in these activities. In pre X-rated adult films, adult magazines were approaching porno rapidly. There were the people that actually lived this stuff and even more people who wanted to know about it, but couldn’t possibly do it! This audience created the massive business we are about to discuss.

The slightly older suburban set (not the wife swappers and swingers, but the lonely uptight fellas) really wanted a glimpse into this other world, and there became the essence of adult and underground film and publications, especially the kind you could secretly take home. This audience is what is known in the adult film world as “the raincoat crowd”—horny guys who went alone to the theaters in Times Square and other places like it around the country. Many of these films are so insane they must be seen to be believed and most of them, literally thousands of them, can be bought or downloaded from Something Weird Video.

There was a great interest in the Church of Satan as they used nudity and sex magick and weren’t just some stuffy new religion, but seemed like the ultimate party! LaVey and his church got so much magazine play (they’re in movies as well including a documentary on them, Satanis The Devil’s Mass, just reissued on Blu-ray). This subject proved so popular that a cottage industry of Satanic porn magazines, some lighthearted, some very dark popped up. As innocence ended with the advent of mass-produced, readily available porn, everything rushed out the door as fast as it could be printed. These particular magazines are just about the rarest, most collectible and most expensive porn mags on the collectors market.
 
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I had heard about an underground cult of collectors putting out a compendium of these almost secret magazines and set out my feelers to find and talk to them. When I found them I had to agree to their terms and be put in a car, blindfolded, and driven to an amazing space where I sat with a man in a leather mask. Offered a drink, I steadfastly refused. Here’s the interview…
 
So…do you represent some newfangled vintage smut collecting anonymous devil cult?

Vintage smut collecting is a solitary path. There is no unity or group activities that we promote. While we often encourage collectors to communicate with others regarding the titles they are actively hunting since this sort of networking may aid the buyer in searches, our sense of community does not proceed much further than communication among peers to meet collecting milestones. Sharing this material with others, is often beneficial for amorous rituals. So, it is advisable to view with one or more partners in a sensual setting to facilitate sexual rites. Publishing this book allows us to share our unholy sacrament with the chosen few. So, these interested individuals can finally obtain the hidden knowledge and elusive ritual tools that will allow them to explore this realm for themselves.

I hear just a lucky few get the wild evil record made in conjunction with this book. What does one have to do to get it and what’s on it?

To spice up this already mega tasty publication we wanted to include one of our favorite bands; the mysterious slime hard rock psycho band Ball. In the past Ball has really managed to summon the crazy satanic and murky occult vibe of these mags, in their song and video “Satanas” for example. So, we bribed them with smut and asked if they to record a new song that could be featured on an exclusive flexi-disc single for a few select copies of the book and they came up with the crazed “Horny Highlights from Debauched”. The ways to actually procure a copy are most mysterious but probably includes a solemn request directly to Ball.

How long did it take to amass this incredible collection & what else do you collect? Are there more volumes in store?

The collection has been growing in size for roughly seven years. Satanic Mojo Comix and Jason Atomic was the catalyst that first awakened our interest in these devilish artifacts. Collecting vintage magazines currently consumes most of our waking hours. All other pursuits have been obliterated to focus on “adult slicks.” The records, jukeboxes, Italian horror fumetti, and original art acquisitions are all currently sidelined and paused. Magazines reign supreme in the top collecting spot, draining bank accounts and sending us scrambling like rabid addicts to our local post office whenever a delivery is missed. There are more volumes currently in the works, and we are more than excited to continue sharing the wealth with open minded adults over the age of 18, seeking to learn more about vintage smut. There have been numerous recent 60s and 70s magazine discoveries by our acquisition team that will blow minds and leave the reader breathless and begging for more. At this precise moment we look forward to continuing and enhancing our current exploration of witchery and devilry in the next volume, being assembled in our labs.

 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Howie Pyro
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12.26.2019
09:27 am
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Residential: Homer Flynn on the Residents’ ambitious ‘God in Three Persons’ show at MoMA


God in Three Persons 2020, courtesy of the Cryptic Corporation

Next month, the Residents will perform their 1988 narrative album God in Three Persons at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show will combine new video projections by the artist John Sanborn with a live performance by the Residents and vocalist Laurie Amat, whose contributions to the original LP are memorable. 

Homer Flynn, the president of the Cryptic Corporation, has handled the Residents’ affairs since the 1970s. I called him just before Thanksgiving, interrupting his graphic design work on an upcoming release involving the Mysterious N. Senada to pepper him with questions about the Residents’ next moves.

Dangerous Minds: Has God in Three Persons ever been performed in front of an audience before?

Homer Flynn: Well, not in the way that it’s being done now, I’ll put it that way. You know, the Residents always felt that God in Three Persons was probably the thing that they had done that most lent itself into being expanded into more of a theatrical-slash-visual form. And one way or another, they’ve kind of worked around with that for some time now. But what happened was that they made contact with a producer, a guy named Steve Saporito in New York, and, you know, one of the Residents did a solo performance, I don’t know, seven or eight years ago, in San Francisco and New York. It was called “Sam’s Enchanted Evening.” And Steve, that producer, was the one responsible for getting that to New York, and afterwards he asks, “Well, what else are you interested in doing?” And the first thing in the meeting that came up was God in Three Persons. And so, in a lot of ways, that kind of picked up the energy, in that way. 

But they did a reading of God in Three Persons for ACT, the American Conservatory Theater, which is a very well-established theater in San Francisco, and that happened, I think, a little over two years ago or a little over three years ago. They got some interest at that, but then the woman who was the artistic director left, and there was a big changeover. And they are still interested, but meanwhile, in between, they’d also been talking to the Museum of Modern Art, and the interest really started picking up there, so the energy started going in that direction.

So in answer to your question, they did do a reading of it at ACT about three years ago; they also worked with an American classical composer and conductor who was doing a museum show at a contemporary art museum in Rotterdam, and they performed some pieces of it with him as part of a museum installation. And then they did some more pieces of it at a performance in Bourges, France, just this past April. So they’ve done pieces of it here and there, but they’ve never done anything nearly as extensive or ambitious as what they’re doing now.
 

Homer Flynn, courtesy of the Cryptic Corporation
 
Can you tell me how it compares to the original touring show that was planned? I don’t know how far along that got.

You know, that really didn’t get very far. They had some conversations with BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, oh, back in the late Eighties, about potentially doing God in Three Persons with them. But ultimately, what happened was that, one, they felt like they were not gonna be able to do justice to it in a touring scenario, and then also, two, before anything could happen, they completed their King & Eye album, you know, which was all Elvis covers, and they just felt like that was gonna lend itself much more to touring than God in Three Persons. So at that point they kinda dropped God in Three Persons as a performing piece and moved towards The King & Eye, which ultimately became their Cube-E tour. That was probably about ‘89.

It would probably have been harder in a number of ways to stage God in Three Persons in ‘89. For one thing, you have the video doing some of the work in this version—

Absolutely.

—but also the content. The end, I find it hard to imagine taking that on the road with the ending it has, which I think is still pretty shocking, actually.

Yeah. Well, in some ways, it almost seems like it’s more shocking now than it was then. But it also feels, in a lot of ways, you know, the whole idea of the twins being very gender-fluid—you know, that idea was kind of completely off the charts, at that point, and now it actually feels very much in line with the times, in a lot of ways.

Is [genderqueer porn star] Jiz Lee playing both of the twins?

Yes. Right. Correct. There are a few shots that John did where he brought in another one, another person that looked very similar to Jiz, so there would be some times when both of ‘em were in the frame, and he wasn’t having to do video doubling or whatever. But for the most part, Jiz plays both twins. 
 

‘Holy Kiss of Flesh,’ the ‘almost danceable’ single version of ‘Kiss of Flesh’ (via Discogs)
 
I have a sense that the story of God in Three Persons is about show business, more than anything else, and I wonder if the Residents see it that way.

Well, it’s interesting that you would say that. How do you make that connection?

Maybe the horrible celebrity environment we live in has just permeated every last fold of my brain. There’s something about the Colonel Parker aspect of Mr. X, and the road show, freak show aspect of the story.

Well, it’s interesting you would say that, especially given the fact that Cube-E, you know, The King & Eye, with Elvis and the obvious Colonel Parker connection, and then Freak Show were the next few things that came after that.

Right. Elvis is a thread, in a way.

In a way, yeah. The Residents—well, they’ve always found connections in, shall we say, unpredictable ways. 

One of the things that’s interesting about seeing what the Residents are gonna do at MoMA is, with this piece, the lyrics carry so much of the story, it seems like there would be a lot of really interesting staging decisions. At some places what’s happening in the lyrics is really explicit, and in other places, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on in the story. Can you tell me about the staging?

In the same way that the original piece is really a monologue set to music, the staging will be similar, but there will be other performers. The primary additional performer will be a shadow Mr. X, who will be a dancer that, at times, will be like a kind of a doppelgänger, in a way, echoing Mr. X. And then, other times, there will be three projections in the performance. One will be the primary projection which will go all the way across the back of the stage. But then there will be another narrow vertical screen that will kind of come up and down, and it will bisect that larger screen. And then there will be a third screen that the shadow Mr. X will carry, at times, and then there will be another performer holding a hand-held projector, in order to project upon the hand-held screen. So that’s the basic setup, from a performance point of view. And then, of course, all the music will be live.

Staging Mr. X with a double: I can’t help but make the connection with the songs that inspired the album: “Double Shot,” which is two, and “Holy, Holy, Holy,” which is about the Trinity. And that’s kind of what the story is about, right?

Right, exactly. Yeah. But, you know, the Residents kind of love dualities, and you see dualities reoccuring throughout their pieces all the time. The twins are a certain duality, and Mr. X and the shadow Mr. X become another duality, and there’s probably other ones in the same piece, too. It all kinda fits in with the Residents’ world.
 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.06.2019
12:22 pm
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‘The Monkey’s Teeth,’ French cartoon written by patients in a mental hospital


 
Les dents du singe (The Monkey’s Teeth) is the directorial debut of René Laloux, the animator who made Fantastic Planet and Time Masters. This, his first short, came out of the experimental La Borde clinic at Cour-Cheverny. As supervisor of artistic activities at La Borde, Laloux staged therapeutic puppet shows with the resident malades mentaux during the years before he gave them their big break in the motion picture business. 

According to his obit in Positif, Laloux and his patients were aided in writing the screenplay for Les dents du singe by Félix Guattari, later the co-author of a number of influential books with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze; the group’s screenwriting method was something like a combination of “automatic writing, exquisite corpse, and Jung’s tests.” In 1960, Guattari was working at La Borde as a therapist. He had been drawn to the clinic by its founder, the Lacanian psychiatrist Jean Oury.

The biography Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives conveys a sense of life at La Borde:

Oury baptized his clinic as soon as it opened in April 1953, writing a constitution that he dated Year I (a tongue-in-cheek reference to the French Revolution) and that defined the three guiding principles for this collective therapeutic undertaking. The mangers were protected by democratic centralism, reflecting the Marxist-Leninist ideal that was still popular in the year of Stalin’s death. The second principle reflected the idea of a communist utopia whereby each staff member would alternate between manual labor and intellectual work, which effectively made any status temporary. Tasks were assigned on a rotating basis: everyone in the clinic switched from medical care to housekeeping, from running workshops to preparing theatrical activities. The last principle was antibureaucratic, so things were organized in a communitarian way whereby responsibilities, tasks, and salaries were all shared. Although the term “institutional psychotherapy” had not yet been coined, many of its themes were already in evidence: spatial permeability, freedom of movement, a critique of professional roles and qualifications, institutional flexibility, and the need for a patients’ therapy club.

Hollywood has not yet produced many tales about bike-riding simians meting out justice at the dentist’s office, but I expect we’ll see a “reboot” of The Monkey’s Teeth before long.

 
via Reddit

Posted by Oliver Hall
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09.27.2018
07:38 am
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The British neurologist who uses William S. Burroughs’ ideas to treat Parkinson’s disease


 
Though he never met William S. Burroughs, the British neurologist A.J. Lees credits the author as an important teacher in his recent book, Mentored by a Madman: The William S. Burroughs Experiment.

The expert in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases first encountered Burroughs on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. During the 1970s, after reading Naked Lunch, Lees began experimenting with apomorphine, the substance Burroughs advocated to cure junk addiction, as a treatment for symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

In 2013, again following Burroughs’ example, Lees traveled to the Amazon rainforest to take yagé, or ayahuasca. He told the Guardian that taking the drug “broke down certain rigid structures that were blocking innovations in Parkinson’s disease research.”

Lees has also used apomorphine and Brion Gysin and Burroughs’ Dreamachine to investigate visual hallucinations in Parkinson’s patients.

Below, in an interview at the Beat Hotel, Lees talks with Andrew Hussey about Mentored by a Madman. He’s also spoken about the book on Erik Davis’ Expanding Mind podcast and in a video for ACNR Journal
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.14.2018
07:08 am
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‘Instrumental Stylings’: Dangerous Minds interviews pop maestro Ben Vaughn
02.28.2018
10:36 am
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In the ‘oughts, when I was working as an art director at an alt-weekly, I’d often supplement my musical discoveries by raiding the music editor’s stack of unassigned promos. Because we weren’t a particularly undergroundist publication (by then “alt” no longer meant “counterculture”), his rejects often dovetailed rather nicely with my tastes, and one time, some cover art caught my eye well enough that I nabbed the disc though I had no idea who the artist was. It was an abstract painting that put me in mind of that Mid-century moment in art when Surrealism was crossing over into Abstract Expressionism, and the press information that came with it detailed a really charming story about how the music was inspired by AM radio offerings on an overnight drive from L.A. to Las Vegas.

The album was Ben Vaughn Presents Designs in Music, and when I got home and put it on I was transported. The Mid-century visual design affectation was consistent with the music, an utterly mad collision of Duane Eddy/Link Wray reverb guitar twang, orchestral easy listening, Italian film composers, South American pop, Exotica, even commercial bumper music. I have, previously on DM, claimed it as a desert island pick, a call I stand by.
 

 
But as it turned out, this wasn’t even close to the first time I’d heard his music. I didn’t catch the connection at the time, but this was the same Ben Vaughn who’d written the theme music for 3rd Rock from the Sun, and who’d transformed the Big Star b-side “In the Street” into “That ‘70s Song,” intro music for guess what show. (He also wrote the theme for the US version of Men Behaving Badly, but I doubt anyone will fault me for never having seen that.) That rather wonderful career was launched when just the right people heard his 1995 Bar/None album Instrumental Stylings. That record’s general vibe isn’t so different from the later Designs—it’s perhaps more guitar-oriented, but it’s no less imaginative. To mark the occasion of its reissue, DM has been given the go-ahead to stream the entire album for our readers, you’re welcome, and Vaughn was kind enough to chat with us about it.

Dangerous Minds: All the different musics you combine into a sort of self-knowing kitsch that’s still really forward thinking and unironic is impressive, and I’m wondering what your inspirations are and what your composing process is like.

Ben Vaughn: I think the difference between homage and parody are lost on me sometimes, maybe more so than for other artists—you mention self-knowing, but I’m not sure how self-knowing it actually is! [laughs] I like to have fun with genres, but I also feel like I’m a part of them. It’s an interesting process for me writing instrumental music, or even writing in general, because I’m such a fan of music from all eras, big-band, folk, blues, jazz, punk rock, The Stooges, everything. So when an idea comes, it kind of comes out of self-education, which is just listening to a lot of music, and the process is hard for me to describe for that reason. Even the way I make records—I come into it on a visceral level, but then there’s a lot of listening and absorbing and data input that goes on.

DM: How did you become such an omnivore? Like what formed those listening habits?

Vaughn: When I was a kid, I was a fan of music before The Beatles came out, that’s how old I am! I was a little kid, but I was tuned in. When I was six years old my uncle gave me a Duane Eddy record, I was at his apartment and he put that on, and this would be around the time when “The Twist” was a craze, so ’62? And Duane Eddy had a record called Twistin’ ’N’ Twangin’, just a guitar instrumental record, and my uncle put it on and I flipped out, so he gave it to me. I’ve probably played it a hundred thousand times.

Then when the Beatles and Stones and the whole British Invasion happened, and Motown happened, I absorbed everything. And AM radio at the time would play Louis Armstrong next to the Beatles, or Roger Miller or Buck Owens next to Wilson Pickett. It wasn’t like that for long, but it was that way when I first started listening to music, so my tastes developed all over the place because radio was all over the place. I never knew that music was supposed to be in compartments until later, and I remember how disappointed I was with such narrow thinking—people who only like hardcore, or people who only like disco but hate punk, or who only like punk but hate disco. I was confused by that. I think about people who only listen to bluegrass—that’s crazy!

DM: Yeah, that to me seems like just listening to one song your whole life.

Vaughn: Bluegrass is kind of the speed-punk of country music! You know what the instruments are going to be, you know the songs are either going to be quick-tempo, fiddle dominated, or you’ll have a waltz. Same thing with punk rock. I’m good with one genre for about three songs, and then I’m looking for something else!

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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02.28.2018
10:36 am
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‘Bare-ass naked’: The KLF and the live stage production of Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Illuminatus!’


Prunella Gee as Eris in ‘Illuminatus!’ (via Liverpool Confidential)

In 1976, the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool mounted a 12-hour stage production of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy. It was a fateful event in the life of the show’s set designer, Bill Drummond, for reasons he’s detailed in the Guardian: for one thing, it was in connection with Illuminatus! and its director, Ken Campbell, that Drummond first heard about the eternal conflict between the Illuminati, who may secretly control the world, and the Justified Ancients of Mummu, or the JAMs, who may be agents of chaos disrupting the Illuminati’s plans. (Recall that in Illuminatus!, the MC5 record “Kick Out The Jams” at the behest of the Illuminati, as a way of taunting the Justified Ancients—or so John Dillinger says.)

Before they were known as the KLF, Drummond and Jimmy Cauty called themselves the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, appropriating the name for the eschaton-immanentizing hip-hop outfit they started in 1987. Over the next few years, they seized the pop charts and filled the airwaves with disorienting, Discordian hits, until a day came when you could flip on the TV and find Tammy Wynette singing “Stand By The JAMs,” or Martin Sheen narrating the KLF’s reenactment of the end of The Wicker Man.
 

Bill Drummond in Big in Japan, live at Eric’s (via @FromEricsToEvol)
 
After the Liverpool run of Illuminatus!, Drummond rebuilt his sets for the London production, but he suddenly bailed on the show, walking out hours before it was to open. I guess he missed the nude cameo appearance Robert Anton Wilson describes in Cosmic Trigger, Volume I:

On November 23, 1976—a sacred Discordian holy day, both because of the 23 and because it is Harpo Marx’s birthday—a most ingenious young Englishman named Ken Campbell premiered a ten-hour adaptation of Illuminatus at the Science-Fiction Theatre of Liverpool. It was something of a success (the Guardian reviewed it three times, each reviewer being wildly enthusiastic) and Campbell and his partner, actor Chris Langham, were invited to present it as the first production of the new Cottesloe extension of the National Theatre, under the patronage of Her Majesty the Queen.

This seemed to me the greatest Discordian joke ever, since Illuminatus, as I may not have mentioned before, is the most overtly anarchistic novel of this century. Shea and I quite seriously defined our purpose, when writing it, as trying to do to the State what Voltaire did to the Church—to reduce it to an object of contempt among all educated people. Ken Campbell’s adaptation was totally faithful to this nihilistic spirit and contained long unexpurgated speeches from the novel explaining at sometimes tedious length just why everything government does is always done wrong. The audiences didn’t mind this pedantic lecturing because it was well integrated into a kaleidoscope of humor, suspense, and plenty of sex (more simulated blow jobs than any drama in history, I believe). The thought of having this totally subversive ritual staged under the patronage of H.M. the Queen, Elizabeth II, was nectar and ambrosia to me.

The National Theatre flew Shea and me over to London for the premiere and I fell in love with the whole cast, especially Prunella Gee, who emphatically has my vote for Sexiest Actress since Marilyn Monroe. Some of us did a lot of drinking and hash-smoking together, and the cast told me a lot of synchronicities connected with the production. Five actors were injured during the Liverpool run, to fulfill the Law of Fives. Hitler had lived in Liverpool for five months when he was 23 years old. The section of Liverpool in which the play opened, indeed the very street, is described in a dream of Carl Jung’s recorded on page 23 of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The theatre in Liverpool opened the day Jung died. There is a yellow submarine in Illuminatus, and the Beatles first sang “Yellow Submarine” in that same Liverpool Theatre. The actor playing Padre Pederastia in the Black Mass scene had met Aleister Crowley on a train once.

The cast dared me to do a walk-on role during the National Theatre run. I agreed and became an extra in the Black Mass, where I was upstaged by the goat, who kept sneezing. Nonetheless, there I was, bare-ass naked, chanting “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” under the patronage of Elizabeth II, Queen of England, and I will never stop wondering how much of that was programmed by Crowley before I was even born.

 

Robert Anton Wilson (via John Higgs)
 
In 2017, 23 years after they split up, Drummond and Cauty reunited as the JAMs. Instead of a new chart-burning house record, they released their first novel…

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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02.27.2018
10:08 am
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For the lush who has everything: Hollowed-out A.A. ‘Big Book’ reveals a hidden hooch flask
07.14.2017
07:52 am
Topics:
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What better place to store your hooch than in an Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book?”

Punnily-named Etsy seller SleepyHollowedBooks deals exclusively in hand-made hollowed-out books, or “book safes.”

Another one of their listings first caught my eye, a hollowed-out Holy Bible that houses a paperback of LaVey’s The Satanic Bible.
 

Guaranteed to get you into Hell (if you believe in that sort of thing).
 
But it’s the A.A. book with the hidden flask that really won me over, conceptually. Pure genius.

This booze-safe is made from a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition from 2001. The cover is blue faux leather with gold print.

This is a one-of-a-kind item and may go fast. The price is $39, which is actually kind of a steal for a hand-made item that includes a flask.

According to the seller, the first two pages are not glued down, so at first glance, it appears to be a normal book. The book is glued with three layers of Mod Podge, reinforced inside with brad nails, and glued to the back with wood glue.
 

 

 
You can find more hollowed-out book treasures at the seller’s Etsy shop. The seller also offers a hollowed-out book on first-year parenting with a hidden flask.

Posted by Christopher Bickel
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07.14.2017
07:52 am
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Slave to Love: The strange fetishized romance between a Victorian Gentleman and a Servant

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Servant and Master: Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby.
 
Arthur Munby was a lawyer, civil servant, flâneur, and minor poet. Hannah Cullwick was a maid of all work—the lowliest of all servants. When they met each other by chance on Oxford Street, London in 1854, the pair began an obsessive and fetishistic relationship that lasted for over fifty years—until Hannah’s death in 1909.

Munby was a middle-class gentleman. He was therefore expected to perform his role as a gentleman by the class codes of Victorian society. Munby was respectable and seemingly decent but he had a dark secret—he was a voyeur who was deeply aroused by the appearance of grimy working-class women. He loved their hard, masculine shape. Their muscles, their scars, and deformities. He had one particular obsession for poor women who had lost their noses through accident or by disease. Munby photographed many of these women claiming it was part of his “studies” into working-class life.

Hannah was of yeoman stock. She started work as a servant girl at the age of fourteen. Her father had run several businesses which had failed. This meant Hannah was sent away to work as a drudge. But Hannah had a fetish for work. The dirtier, nastier, more degrading, the more she enjoyed it. She often stripped naked to clean out chimneys, sitting on a rafter high up in the chimney surrounded by and covered in hot smoldering soot.

It seemed this pair were somehow destined to meet.

There were two important events that pushed Hannah towards her relationship with Munby. She often read fortunes using tea leaves for her fellow servants. One day she saw the face of her future suitor—a respectable, bearded gentleman. It seemed highly unlikely that Hannah would ever enjoy a relationship with such a man, but she felt it might one day happen. The second event was when she attended a performance of the theatrical spectacle The Death of Sardanapalus. Based on the celebrated poem by Lord Byron, The Death of Sardanapalus tells the story of the love of a slave Myrrha for the weak king Sardanapalus:

Master, I am your slave! Man, I have loved!—
Loved you, I know not by what fatal weakness,
Although a Greek, and a born a foe to Monarchs—
A slave, and hating fetters—an Ionian,
And, therefore, when I love a stranger, more
Degraded by that passion than by chains!
Still I have loved you…

Hannah identified totally with Myrrha—who although a slave was free in her love.

On May 26th, 1854, Munby stopped Hannah on the street and quizzed her about her work as a servant. Hannah recognized Munby as the face she had seen foretold in her tea leaves. It was literally a love at first sight. Munby asked Hannah to write to him describing in exact detail every aspect of her work. Munby expressed an interested in the more degrading, demeaning, and physically dirty details—how Hannah’s skin would be smeared with soot and grime, how the work exhausted her.

Hannah wrote Munby every week. She also kept a diary, which she read to him when they met. Together they played out roles. She called Munby “Massa” and wore a dog’s collar to show she was his slave. He measured her biceps (fourteen inches) and hands (four inches) and allowed himself to be carried by her around his home as if he were a child or baby. Hannah also had a fetish for cleaning Munby’s shoes with her tongue—claiming she could tell where “Massa” had been by the taste of the soil on his soles.

Munby photographed Hannah in her various roles—as a maid, blacked-up as a chimney sweep, dressed as a man, and as a middle-class lady in a fine dress. Munby’s love for Hannah led to his proposing marriage. Hannah was at first against this suggestion as she felt it would finish her sense of empowerment over Munby. Eventually, she relented and the couple married in secret in 1873.

But Hannah was stifled by their marriage and the pleasure she had once found in being a servant, a slave to Munby was gone. She left their home and returned to work as a servant in the north of England. However, their secret, obsessive relationship continued well into old age with secret meetings and a flurry of letters sent between the two.

During one of their last meetings, Hannah prostrated herself in front of Munby and licked his boots clean. Munby was embarrassed and pulled Hannah up to kiss the “sweetness of her lips—her country lips which [had] the velvet touch.” Though they unquestionably loved each other, it seems unlikely that their relationship was ever consummated. Their sexual pleasure appears to have been solely derived from their role-playing and the strange power games of master and servant.

As Munby was a respectable middle-class man, and Hannah a lowly servant, their taboo relationship and their marriage remained secret throughout their lives. Hannah died exhausted and senile in 1909, Munby died the following year. At the reading of his will, the full story and extent of their love for each other was revealed. A box containing hundreds of photographs, letters, and diaries between husband and wife was offered to the British Museum who refused it on moral grounds. This box was then given to Trinity College, Cambridge, under the proviso it was not to be opened until 1950.
 
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Hannah cleaning boots.
 
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Hannah blacked-up from cleaning the soot from chimneys.
 
More photographs of Hannah Cullwick plus a short film, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.13.2017
09:54 am
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New witchcraft museum features occult artifacts once owned by Aleister Crowley
04.28.2017
12:28 pm
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Any discussion of Wicca in America must begin with Raymond Buckland. A disciple and correspondent of English Wicca’s acknowledged father Gerald Gardner, Buckland established America’s first Wiccan coven on Long Island in the early ‘60s. He literally wrote the book on Wicca, Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft, along with dozens of smaller volumes. In 1968 (some sources say 1966), he established the USA’s first museum of witchcraft. Initially just a showroom in his basement, the collection grew and moved repeatedly, from Long Island to New Hampshire, to Virginia, to New Orleans. Sadly, in NOLA, the collection endured a period of neglect and damage.

Buckland has been an Ohioan since 1992, and two years ago, the collection returned to his Temple of Sacrifice coven, and is now going on display again, in a modest gallery in Cleveland. The Buckland Gallery of Witchcraft and Magick opens on April 29, 2017 in a room off of the Tremont record store A Separate Reality. (An aside—ASR should be a Mecca for punk, jazz, prog, and psych collectors. It’s owner, Gus Payne, has an incredible gift for procuring vinyl Holy Grails, and he’s a really swell guy, to boot.) The space has been a gallery before—a few years ago, under the name “Gallery Wolfy Part II,” it hosted a large exhibition of artwork by Half Japanese singer Jad Fair. That gallery was a white-wall space, but the Buckland incarnation is an intimate and inviting room in blood-red and exposed brick. The gallery’s curators Steven Intermill and Jillian Slane were accommodating enough to give Dangerous Minds some time with the collection. It features artifacts from a number of Wiccan luminaries, and even some possessions of legendary occultist Aleister Crowley’s.
 

Horned God Helmet - there’s a picture of this in The Complete Book of Witchcraft
 

Examples of Baphomet Talismans
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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04.28.2017
12:28 pm
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