Mark Dery writes in today’s New York Times of the continuing influence of Edward Gorey, author of Amphigorey and The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Dery is currently writing a biography of the gruesome author and illustrator, a book the linguistically exact cultural critic seems to have been born to write:

Gorey was born to be posthumous. His poisonously funny little picture books — deadpan accounts of murder, disaster and discreet depravity, narrated in a voice that affects the world-weary tone of British novelists like Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett — established him as the master of high-camp macabre.

Told in verse and illustrated in a style that crosses Surrealism with the Victorian true-crime gazette, Gorey stories are set in some unmistakably British place, in a time that is vaguely Victorian, Edwardian and Jazz Age all at once. Though Gorey was a 20th-century American, he conjured a world of gramophones and cars that start with cranks, of boater-hatted men in Eton collars knocking croquet balls across the lawn while sloe-eyed vamps in cloches look on, and sinister things sink, bubbling, into the reflecting pond. His titles are instructive: “The Fatal Lozenge,” “The Deadly Blotter,” “The Hapless Child,” “The Haunted Tea-Cosy.”

Read more at The New York Times.

Below, Edward Gorey’s iconic opening sequence for PBS’s Mystery! television anthology:
 

 
Via the heroic and always on-the-money Glenn Greenwald comes this nauseating video of a truly hateful mob of so-called Christians and Teabaggers as well as various Republican government officials staging an anti-Islam demonstration outside of a harmless Muslim charity fundraising event in Yorba Linda, California last month. It breaks my heart to see such virulent hatred and ignorance and fear of the “other” in this day and age. Greenwald says it best:

I think what was most striking about that video is that the presence of small children didn’t give these anti-Muslim protesters even momentary pause; they just continued screeching their ugly invective while staring at 4-year-olds walking with their parents.  People like that are so overflowing with hatred and resentments that the place where their humanity—their soul—is supposed to be has been drowned.

 
In which embattled Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker gets what he deserves, a good **cking.

The latest from the brutal satirists behind Mock the Dummy. Lorne Michaels should be offering these “Dummies” a contract to produce these for SNL.

Please share far and wide, this is guaranteed to annoy your teabagger relatives!
 

 
John Galliano is a goddamn fool. ‘Nuff said.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Pissed as a Galliano

(via WOW Report)

 
You can contact SikRik via his email to be added to the waiting list for your very own GG Allin latex mask. From Rick’s website Sikrik Masks:

GG Allin Officially Licensed unlimited 2nd edition $89.00.

Production for the unlimited 2nd edition will begin in mid April 2011 once I have completed all of the orders for the 1st edition.

Each edition has been handcrafted, casted and painted one at a time by me. The designs are intended for display purposes; however they can be modified with vision/breathing holes to be worn.

(via Cherry Bombed)
 
 

 
Cozy Powell plays 400 drums in under a minute on the British children’s TV show Record Breakers. As one YouTuber points out, “He´s a record breakeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!”

(via HYST)

 
One of the UK’s premiere dubstep producers Shackleton this week releases a new EP called Deadman on London’s reggae and dub imprint Honest Jon’s. Dead Man is also the name of a fantastic 1995 film by Jim Jarmusch starring Johnny Depp as a man called William Blake, wandering through a black and white recreation of the old West while nursing a fatal gunshot wound.

I don’t know if the Shackleton release (sleeve pictured above) is an hommage to the film, but the enterprising folks at The 29th Nov films have made a video for the track itself using footage from the Jarmusch film. It’s great. Rivaling Neil Young’s original minimalist guitar score for haunting atmosphere, Shackleton’s signature sound of Eastern hand percussion hits, disembodied voices and washes of dub noise prove a perfect accompaniment to the gorgeous monochrome footage of Johnny Depp slowly dying:
 

 
Shackleton’s Deadman is available to buy on vinyl and download from Juno.

Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man is available to buy from Amazon.

 
Journey In Time is some wacky anti-drug propaganda from 1971. Chock full of unintentional humor and bogus facts about drugs, this sucker is a classic. The narration by director Alan Hodd sounds like it was written by a precocious, glue sniffing 12 year teenybopper.

What makes the film particularly groovy is the footage of hippies shot on location in San Francisco and Dallas and the soundtrack featuring The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Texas psyche-rockers Kenny And The Kasuals singing “Journey To Time.” Reputedly, the Kasuals disavowed the film and claim the song was used without their permission. As fas as I know, The Beatles and Bob Dylan have no comment.

I hope you enjoy every sordid minute of this hippie/rock’n’roll/drug scarefest.

 
Norwegian Recycling performs some alchemy on eleven recent hit records and turns a handful of turds into one semi-palatable tune that illustrates the unrelenting sameness of mainstream pop these days.

1. Katy Perry – Firework
2. Flo Rida feat. Akon – Who Dat Girl
3. Black Eyed Peas – The Time
4. Snow Patrol – Open Your Eyes
5. Snow Patrol – Chasing Cars
6. Mike Posner – Please Don’t Go
7. Jason Derulo – Whatcha Say
8. Usher feat. will.i.am – OMG
9. Timbaland feat. Keri Hilson & D.O.E. – The Way I Are
10. Jay Sean – Do You Remember
11. David Guetta feat. Kid Cudi – Memories
 

 
Via The High Definite

 
The composer Kurt Weill was born today March 2 1900. Best known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht on The Threepenny Opera,Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Der Jasager and The 7 Deadly Sins, Weill was a committed socialist, who believed music must serve a socially useful purpose. However, it was politics that eventually split the brilliant partnership of Brecht and Weill, as the musician felt the playwright was pushing too far to the left without question, or as Weill joked, he felt unable to set the Communist Party Manifesto to music.

Weill was married to the brilliant actress and singer, Lotte Lenya, who starred in The Threepenny Opera and later played the SMERSH assassin, Rosa Klebb in the Bond movie, From Russia With Love. With the rise of Hitler, the couple quit Germany and moved to America, where they worked in Hollywood (as did Brecht).

Though Weill’s music is best associated with cabaret and political theater of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s (influencing John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical Cabaret), he also wrote two symphonies, several cantatas, a great number of songs, set the poetry of Rilke and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myslef to music, and worked with Ira Gershwin on the Hollywood musical Where Do We Go From Here?. Weill died of a heart attack in 1950.

To celebrate Weill’s birthday, here is the brilliant Lenya from 1962, in fine form, singing a selection of her husband’s best known songs “Mack the Knife”, “Pirate Jenny”, “Sarabaya Johnny” and “Alabama Song”. This clip has sub-titles, but that’s unimportant, when compared to the quality of her voice and performance. The production was filmed by Ken Russell for the BBC’s arts series Monitor, and the segment was introduced by legendary arts editor, Huw Weldon.
 

 
Previously on DM