This painting is inspired by the scene at the beginning of the first Apes movie. Gorilla soldiers are standing posing for a photo after the great human hunt. This is the view from the photographer’s perspective.
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 utilizes dozens of hours of 16mm footage shot by Swedish documentarians during the height of the Black Power movement to tell the era’s story of radical revolutionary promise and what happened when that promise went unfulfilled. The film sat in the basement of a Swedish TV station for decades.
Contemporary director Göran Olsson (who also helmed 2009’s Am I Black Enough for You? doc about the Philly music scene) used this footage, including interviews with Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and Kathleen Cleaver, along with modern commentary from Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Talib Kweli and Melvin Van Peebles, to create this new film, now being released by Sundance. After a limited NYC/Los Angeles theatrical run, it’s supposed to air on PBS.
I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff anyways, but damn this looks amazing:
I like this Full Moon Odyssey floor-mattress by Korean designer Lily Suh of i3lab. According to i3lab, “The print is a real image of the moon which includes 65 individual frames of the lunar mosaic images.”
The only downfall I see is the price tag: $1490.00. Yikes!
Dangerous Minds pal Matt Dunnerstick’s directing debut, The Custom Mary—which Tara and I have cameo roles in—premieres this week in New York City:
When a spec of Christ’s blood falls into the hands of a pair of preachers, they hatch a scheme to clone Jesus. All they need is a willing host.
Mary is a modest young Latina churchgoer. It doesn’t take much convincing for her to carry the Lord’s child. As the pregnancy progresses, she finds comfort and support in Joe, an African-American low-rider mechanic and aficionado. Nine months later, the outcome is not quite as expected—and Mary finds herself desperate and scared.
God reveals Himself in unexpected places. But there’s no mistaking justice when it’s low-rider style!
The Custom Mary will be premiering at the HBO New York International Latino Film Festival on Wednesday August 17th at 5PM and Saturday August 20th at 4PM. The screenings will be at the AMC Empire 25.
It’s the summer of 1969 and The Parliaments (pre P-Funk) are conjuring a soul inferno in the studios of WGBH TV in Boston.
George Clinton, in a mohawk and purple jumpsuit (or full-body thong), is on fire. He’s joined by Eddie Hazel, Fuzzy Haskins, Grady Thomas, Ray Davis, Billy Bass Nelson and Calvin Simon.
Like Motown on acid, this will take you higher and higher. Not even Sly Stone took it to this level of insane funk sublimeness. It just keeps getting more intense. This will sear the flesh off your face and your face will become a mask of cosmic goodness whereupon you will be beamed up to the mothership where George Clinton awaits you with open tendrils and a hamhock in your cornflakes.
Sonny and Chastity Bono (“in her concert debut”) do “I Got You, Babe” on the TV special Rockin’ The Night Away which aired in 1988.
It’s rare to see Sonny with Chastity after she had grown out of her “cute” phase and become an adult. Chastity told her parents she was gay in 1987 right around the time Sonny was running for Mayor of Palm Springs. This TV appearance may have been a calculated political move on Sonny’s part to create the image of an adoring father when, in fact, he had turned his back on his daughter. Chastity’s gayness alienated one of pop culture’s most visible hippie icons. But Sonny in reality was as much a hippie as Al Jolson was Black.
After a half an hour of searching the Internet, I gave up trying to find a picture of Sonny with an adult Chastity. So this video is some of the only existing footage of father and daughter together. Sonny’s good vibes seem about as authentic as one of his old wigs while Chastity is doing her best to be a dutiful daughter. And she does sound a lot like Cher.
A Youtube premier from our good friends at Bubbling Over.
The interview below with the Texas Tribune was done during Rick Perry’s successful run for re-election as Governor of Texas last year. In it, I hear an echo of George W. Bush’s good ol’ boy stupidity that is frightening. Listen and look. Do you recognize the lack of focus, the evasiveness, the failed logic, the goofy chuckle and aw shucks who gives a shit about the facts attitude we had in the White House for 8 long and ugly years? The resemblance in style, or lack of it, between Bush and Perry is uncanny.
Perry’s approach to sex education reminds me of Wilhelm Reich’s book The Mass Psychology Of Fascism, in which Reich theorizes that
Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.
Perry and his creationist state board of education eliminated two six month sex education classes in Texas schools in 2004 and replaced them with abstinence-only education, which, to my mind, is not education. In 2010, Texas had a teen birth rate more than 50% above the national average. It also led in the rate of repeat teen pregnancy .
Female college students have to get parental consent to get birth control in parts of Texas.
Eliminating sex education in the schools and replacing it with a rule of abstinence keeps teenagers in the dark about sex at a time when they should be given the guidance and tools to approach sex intelligently. Telling kids to suppress their sexuality is like telling a Priest to keep his hands off the altar boys. You want to see sexual suppression at work, just take a look at the Catholic Church or the Nazis…or Texas.
Teenagers with a healthy, informed approach to sex are more inclined to make the right choices about when, where and how. Keep em stupid and they’ll do stupid things. Making it impossible for them to get birth control and guilt tripping them with religious screeds just makes things worse. Thus, we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation in Texas. Additionally, there’s a sexually transmitted disease boom in the state. “Just say no” seems to be saying yes to syphilis, gonorrhea and HIV. The philosophy of ignore it and it will go away just doesn’t work.
Imagine having Rick Perry counsel your kid on sex.