Dazed Digital, the web arm of the Dazed & Confused publishing group in London have posted a short Q&A with me about Dangerous Minds. Dazed editor-in-chief, Rod Stanley, asked the questions. Read it here.
Dazed Digital: Come the apocalypse, where will you be hanging out and what will you be doing?
Richard Metzger: Tara and I will be with our dogs. We don’t have anything special planned.
(The image is a drawing that Michel Gondry made of me and Tara and the original photo. I’m totally baked as you can see from my eyes. I think Gondry must have known this from the way I am drawn, don’t you think? Tara is the blond, blue-eyed Cheech to my Chong…)
The Edge Of Dreaming, Amy Hardie’s investigation into the prophetic quality of dreams has just opened theatrically in Manhattan. It was broadcast on PBS last August. And you can stream it now from Netflix.
My dream life has been very active of late and I’m starting to pay more and more attention to the patterns of images and information in my dreams. I feel as though I’ve never taken my dreams seriously enough, which is odd, considering how much time I spend dreaming and how often the dreams do seem to be sending messages, teachings or warnings. So, Amy Hardie’s film is of great interest to me. Are dreams cognitive tendrils into the future? Should we give them more respect by simply paying more attention to them.
Do dreams, especially the portentous kind that you cannot easily shake off, predict the future? That question is investigated in “The Edge of Dreaming,” a deeply personal film by Amy Hardie, a Scottish science documentarian whose world was shaken after she experienced a series of related nightmares.
The first, in which her beloved horse keeled over and died, so alarmed Ms. Hardie that she ran out of her house in the Scottish Borders and found him dead of a heart attack. In the second, her oldest child’s father, who had died in 2004, appeared and told her sadly that her 48th year (the one that was coming up) would be her last. The third dream showed her how she would die.
Ms. Hardie, who is married to a psychotherapist, became obsessed with the possibility that the dreams were prophecies. She became even more frightened after she developed a mysterious breathing ailment that threatened to collapse her lungs.
“The Edge of Dreaming,” which carries her through her 49th birthday, does not have the trappings of a psychological horror film. Ms. Hardie, a self-described scaredy-cat since childhood, systematically searches for explanations, both medical and spiritual. She studies Jung; consults with Mark Solms, a neuroscientist; and ultimately revisits her dreams with a shaman. This shamanic journey is visualized in an extended montage sequence.
“The Edge of Dreaming” is not the confession of a true believer who has found the Answer but of an intelligent woman with an open mind and heart who embarked on a serious metaphysical quest.
If you have a Netflix account, stream here. This compelling interview with Hardie should pique your interest.
Here’s a compilation of video clips made in the 1960s for French television. Most of these videos were new to me when I discovered them and the quality is impressive.
The Spencer Davis Group, The Equals, Vince Taylor, Tom Jones, Jacques Dutronc, Johnny Hallyday, Francoise Hardy and Marianne Faithfull.
If you love this stuff and must have more, it’s available on import DVD here. It ain’t cheap and you’ve got to have an all-region DVD player, but man what a goldmine.
Proshot high quality video of the Bad Brains playing in Florida on March 20, 1987. Shorter clips from this show have appeared on the Internet but nowhere near this quality. This is the Bad Brains’ performance in full and it looks and sounds great.
The Chevrolet banner hanging from the stage declares that “This is the heartbeat of America.” I agree. But the college kids on spring break that make up the audience seem clueless.
Setlist:
1. Intro
2. I
3. House of Suffering
4. Daytripper/ She’s a Rainbow
5. She is Calling you
6. The Youth are getting Restless
7. I against I
8. At the Movies
Here’s an incredibly generous and, truth be told, unconventional (hello Kate Bush !) look at the so-called genre known by some as Shoegaze. I personally can’t stand the term (yes I’m being sarcastic in my use of the word in the masthead here on DM) despite the fact that my early-mid 90’s band Medicine is often lumped in with it. But Mr. Ning Nong here has not only shown the excellent/highly questionable taste to lead off with Medicine but to also include many other possibly controversial, yet tasty choices. It would be churlish to complain when being presented with 3 bleedin’ hours of the stuff though, right ?
A fresh, sun-drenched Typecast from Boston mainstay Ning Nong, diving into the world of classic guitar rock and indie some of us are still so afraid of. Go on, dip your toe in – nobody’s watching I promise.
If you like this, check the Ning Nong Radio show on WZBC 90.3 Boston every Tuesday evening (10-12) for more epic musical voyages.
1. Medicine – One More (Creation)
2. Serena-Maneesh – Honeyjinx (4AD)
3. Slowdive – Morningrise (Creation)
4. Arab Strap – Last Orders (Chemikal Underground)
5. Yo La Tengo – Saturday (Matador)
6. Unrest – Imperial (Teen Beat)
7. Moose – Suzanne (Hut)
8. Altar Eagle – Spy Movie (Type)
9. His Name Is Alive – Lip (4AD)
10. Swirlies – Bell (Taang!)
11. Dinosaur Jr – In A Jar (sst)
12. Swervedriver – Duel (Creation)
13. The Verve – Drive You Home (Hut)
14. Blur – Resigned (Food)
15. Pale Saints – Kinky Love (4AD)
16. The House Of Love – Love In A Car (Creation)
17. Ride – Like A Daydream (Creation)
18. The Boo Radleys – Almost Nearly There (Creation)
19. Teenage Fanclub – Alcoholiday (Creation)
20. The Jesus & Mary Chain – Something I Can’t Have (Blanco Y Negro)
21. Interpol – Not Even Jail (Matador)
22. Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci – Where Does Yer Go Now? (Mantra)
23. Mogwai – Year 2000 Non-Compliant Cardia (Chemikal Underground)
24. Sunset – Man’s Heart Complaint (Autobus)
25. Flying Saucer Attack – In The Light Of Time (Domino)
26. Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career (4AD)
27. My Bloody Valentine – Sometimes (Creation)
28. Swallow – Peekaboo (4AD)
29. Kate Bush – Cloudbusting (emi)
30. Tindersticks – Drunk Tank (This Way Up)
31. Bark Psychosis – All Different Things (Cheree)
32. David Sylvian – Let The Happiness In (Virgin)
33. Cocteau Twins – Ella Megalast Burls Forever (4AD)
In 1975, a year before NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft orbited Mars, Orson Welles presented Who’s Out There?, a NASA produced documentary examining the “likely existence of non-Earthly life in the universe.”
Thirty-six years on, this is a fascinating piece of archive, and rather timely with the news that NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory is due to be launched in November in a bid to make the first precision landing on Mars in August 2012.
Starting with H G Wells novel, and his own infamous radio production of The War of the Worlds, Welles, together with Carl Sagan, George Wald, Richard Berendzen and Philip Morrison, explore what was then “the new view of extraterrestrial life now emerging from the results of probes to the planets,” and conclude that “other intelligent civilizations exist in the universe.”
Carl Sagan: The most optimistic estimates, in the view of many, about the number of civilizations that there might be in the galaxy is of the order of a million, which means that only one in a few hundred thousand stars has such civilizations.
George Wald: That would mean a billion such places just in our own galaxy that might contain life.
Philip Morrison: As I believe there’s a society of these groups, not just one, there’re probably very many. There’s only one, we have no hope of finding them; there’re probably thousands, maybe as many as a million. They probably already have had long history of this same experience, of finding new ones and bringing them into the network.
Carl Sagan: And I would imagine, an advanced civilization wanted to talk to us, they would say “Oh, look, those guys must be extremely backwards, go into some ancient museum and pull out one of those – what are they called – radio telescopes and beam it at them.”
In summation, Welles says:
In 1976 we’re going to be able to explore Mars for perhaps not so humble microorganisms. Before and after that, we’ll be searching the planets and the galaxies for clues to fill in the new patterns we’re discovering, the evolution of evolutions that has produced us and the possible millions of other civilizations….
...The difference between the spacecrafts of NASA and the lurid flying saucery of that old radio War of the Worlds is the difference between science and science fiction and, yes, between war and peace. It’s our own world which has turned out to be the interplanetary visitor; we’re the ones who are moving out there, not with death rays but with cameras, not to conquer but simply to learn. We are in fact behaving ourselves far better out there than we ever have back here at home on our own planet.
Bonus - Orson Welles directs The Mercury Theater’s radio production of The War of the Worlds
Michael McClure, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at City Lights Books, 1966
Poet, playwright and novelist, Michael McClure discusses his “poetic processes and experiences with peyote” in this extract taken from the USA Poetry series by Richard O. Moore (1966).
A key figure in The Beats, a mentor to Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, McClure has just released his latest book of new and selected poetry Of Indigo and Saffron, details for which can be found here.
In his 1986 New York Times best-seller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, an examination of various bizarre neurological disorders, Oliver Sacks provided an account of oppositely impaired patients – aphasiacs, who can’t understand spoken words but do take in information from extra-verbal cues, and tonal agnosiacs, who understand the actual words but miss their emotional content – watching a speech by President Reagan.
“It was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice,” wrote Sacks, which caused the word-deaf aphasiacs to laugh hysterically at the Great Communicator, while one agnosiac, relying entirely on the actual words, sat in stony silence, concluding that “he is not cogent ... his word-use is improper” and suspecting that “he has something to conceal.”
“Here then,” wrote Sacks, “was the paradox of the President’s speech. We normals – aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled ... And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived.”
Excerpted from the “Reagan Centennial Edition” of my 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor, available here as an enhanced eBook.
Let it be no secret hyenas terrify the shit out of me. Ever since I saw these photos, the idea of hanging out with hyenas is my worst freakin’ nightmare. Ethiopia’s Hyena Man must have big balls… some seriously big balls. From world photographer Michael Sheridan:
Harar is a mainly Muslim town in Eastern Ethiopia. Hyenas are common in the area. Every night, they come to the outskirts of town where they are fed by the Hyena Man. The ritual is carried out whether or not there are any onlookers.
