From a moving tribute to his old friend, mentor and tormentor by one of the finest drummers to ever walk the earth, John “Drumbo” French:

Van Vliet had a real love for a movie called Jeremiah Johnson, and I could see why.  It was a man’s film in the sense that it showed the bonding between Johnson and the character played by Will Geer.  As Geer’s character walks away, after telling “Pilgrim” that he had done well, his farewell line was “watch your topknot and keep your eye on the skyline.”  The brevity of their words made each hang in your ears and pulled you into the emotion and the bonding that had occurred between these two and you understood exactly what was going on between them in a way a billion words could have never described. 

After “Doc” sessions, in 1980, on which I played mostly guitar, I had to walk away from Captain Beefheart for the last time.  He had asked me to learn a ridiculous amount of music on the guitar in an impossible amount of time.  After hearing my decision, he slammed his hands angrily into the door of my vehicle, and it was scary and sad at the same time.

A few months later, I drove by his mobile home one night.  He looked out the curtain, as though he knew I was coming and came out to greet me.  “I thought I’d come by and break the ice.”  He said, “well, you picked a good night for it,” and gestured at the sky.  There were tiny ice crystals falling.  Not snow, not anything I’d ever seen – before or since—tiny crystals of ice slowly floating to the ground. 

One night while I was playing with a jazz group, he happened into the club with Jeff “Moris” Tepper.  After Tepper left, Don and I went to an old hangout from the early days of the band – before I was even a member – a coffee shop at The Antelope Valley Inn.  We sat for a time as he told me that he was going to paint. He was moving to Northern California and said “Jan finally got the house she wanted – the one with redwood shingles.”  I asked, “will you still do music?” and he said, “Of course!”   As we know, he never did. 

After observing a miniature drunken marine trying to pick a fight with one of the customers, I drove Don home.  He got out of his car, turned to me and said, “Watch your topknot – and keep your eye to the skyline.” 

I sensed then with sadness that it was the last time I would see him. He was gone, and though I spoke once with him later on the phone, requesting that he give me credit for drums on the CD release of Trout Mask Replica, I never saw him in person again, nor did I speak to him again after that phone call – which was quite entertaining and very expensive, as Don decided to play me a number of blues pieces I’d heard a thousand times before. 

The phone number was soon changed, and though I sent Christmas cards journaling my marriage and the growth of my daughter Jesse, there was no reply and I rationed out a bit of grieving here and there until it ran out with the dulling of time.  I heard the rumors of his physical decline, the last being that he was bedridden and could no longer speak.  It came to me that it may have been God’s way of silencing him long enough to whisper His own message to him, to prepare him for his next journey.  

I was gathering firewood in the rain when my cell phone rang and I received the news.  Scott Collins, the guitarist from my Drumbo group said to me, “I don’t know if you heard yet, but Don died today.”  I thanked him for relaying the information and became numb for a few days, then angry, then complacent. 

I went out tonight and found my Sherman cigarettes, lit one, and stood in the door of my garage, staring out through the cool rain and the cloudy sky.  “You would have liked this weather, Don,” I said to myself, and the words to a Richard Thompson song came to mind, so I sang them quietly into the night air:
“I am a bird, in God’s garden.
And I do not belong to this dusty world. 
For a day or two, they have locked me up, in this cage of my own body.
And He, who brought me here, will take me… back again.
To my own country.  To my own country.”
Goodbye Don. Watch your topknot, and keep your eye to the skyline.

- John French, 21 December 2010

 
Bonus clip : The classic Electricity from the Safe as Milk LP set to previously unseen photos of the infamous 1967 show where Don (probably on acid) tumbled off the stage after playing a song and a half, essentially putting an end to his commercial prospects…
 

 
If I was to send one Christmas card this year, then it would be Alessandro Cima’s beautiful short film Glass Boulevard.

Cima is a film-maker and editor of Candleight Stories and he has just directed this enchanting short film, Glass Boulevard, which was shot in “the dullest imaginable environment of shops along a major Los Angeles street at night when the shops were closed.” This is Cima’s Christmas film and it is one to be smitten by - a cinematic poem reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s work, filled with delightful images loaded with suggestion and meaning.

The music is “There’s Something in the Air” by Artie Shaw and his Orchestra, from 1936, with Peg La Centra on vocals. 
 

 
As we jingle along in our festive pop tunes, here’s Neil Innes singing “Dear Father Christmas” live on BBC Breakfast Time from 1984. The jaunty little tune was a single release from Innes’ fourth solo album, Off the Record, co-produced by Rod Argent.

For TV trivia fans, Innes is introduced by the legendary British TV host, Frank Bough, whose career would be cut short after a sex and drugs scandal. Nice.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
With thanks to Neil McDonald
 

 
A version of this appeared last week in The Huffington Post, but as Richard Metzger and myself think Joyce Farmer’s graphic novel Special Exits a truly amazing work, we’ve decided to re-post here.

There’s a line in Joyce Farmer’s excellent graphic novel Special Exits that hit home with me this week. Her rather more than semi-autobiographical book tells the story of Farmer’s alter-ego, Laura, as she copes with the declining, final years of her father and step-mother, Lars and Rachel Drover. In it, there’s a line said by Lars, which captures the slow erosion of time: “Things get worse in such small increments that you can get used to anything.”

The line hit home because over the past week, I found myself stranded while visiting my parents, as Scotland ground to a halt under heavy snowfall and sub zero temperatures. My father’s 84-years-old, with a heart condition, which means he may drop dead at any moment; my mother, in her seventies, is breathless but still feisty. They both thought it fortunate I was there to help clear the drive, get the groceries, do the chores, and tend to those things my parents would hope to do. As the winter moved in, we became snowbound and the snow, like age, slowly closed down the once busy highways, until all transport ceased.

Farmer’s beautiful, moving and truly exceptional book deals with the very real closing down age brings. Rarely have I read such an honest, heart-breaking, yet darkly humorous tale. It is understandable why Robert Crumb has compared Special Exits to
such classic graphic novels as Maus by Art Speigelman and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, for truly Farmer’s book is in that league.

In Richard Metzger’s interview for Dangerous Minds, Farmer explained how the impetus for the book was her step-mother’s treatment in a nursing home. “I was so outraged by her experience,” she said.

As her father was too frail and Joyce didn’t have the time to take care of both her father and step-mother, it was decided to find her
step-mom a nursing home.

“The way to do that was to take her to an emergency room, where they would then recommend a nursing home because
of the situation. And I’ve dealt carefully with this in the book, but when I took her to the emergency room the doctor said ‘She’s perfectly
healthy, there’s nothing wrong with her’ and you can take her home.”

This indifference to her step-mother’s plight put Joyce in a difficult position.

“I was forced to find the quickest nursing home I could find, because they wouldn’t hold her in the emergency room, I couldn’t take her home and then take her out again It was an ambulance trip every time and it wasn’t possible.”

One was found, and her step-mother, who was ill and blind, was admitted. What should have been an ideal respite, turned into a nightmare.

To ensure the nursing staff knew her step-mother was without sight, Joyce wrote the word ‘BLIND’ on a sign and placed it above her bed. Joyce hoped the staff would see the sign and then help her step-mother to be fed and looked after properly.

“When I would visit her, every time I visited her, she was enormously hungry, and I didn’t realize they weren’t reading the sign, and then I’d go and the sign would be torn in half or non-existent. I realized there was a bunch of angry people taking care of helpless people in the nursing homes.

“Ten days after this healthy woman went into the nursing home, they left the sides of her bed down, and she decided to go get her own
food. She was hungry, and she fell and broke her hip, and the nursing home hospital didn’t recognize this for several days and when they did, there was nothing that could save her and she just ended her life after two-and-a-half months of pain and suffering. It was beyond my ability to handle anything at that point. I was completely outraged at the nursing home and how they took care of elderly patients.”

It was this sense of outrage that later inspired Joyce to start work on Special Exits. Over thirteen years, she worked on the book, drawing, penciling, inking, writing each page frame-by-frame. She worked in black and white, as Farmer thought she might have to publish the book herself, and didn’t know how to publish in color, let alone know who would take her stories or even if they would be interested.

But Farmer shouldn’t have feared, for this was really a return to her talents than starting something anew. Back in the 1970s, Farmer and creative partner Lyn Chevli kicked off a feminist revolution in comics.  Horrified at the “violent take on women” depicted in the
underground press and through magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, they decided to do their own “violent take on men and get even.”

“But we soon realized we couldn’t do violence, and we thought, ‘What else can we do?’ We’re angry and we realized none of these magazines that were out there at the time, that thought they had a bead on what women wanted, were all off track and just saw women as photographs that needed to be air-brushed and women who were bed mates and not much else. We started looking at ourselves and our sexuality and we realized our idea of sex had a lot to do with birth control, and menstruation and sanitary pads going FLOP on the ground when you didn’t want them to.”

This was how Farmer and Chevli started the legendary proto-punk Tits & Clits Comix, which ran intermittently from 1972-87. Tits & Clits was condemned on both sides, but has now rightly proven to be an inspirational influence on younger feminists, as it “exposed the phoniness of what men thought about women.”

In the same way her comics changed views on sexism in the 1970s, Farmer hopes Special Exits will inspire people to think differently about older people and the aging process today.

“If anything I hope the book gets people who are working with the elderly, to understand that the elderly have had a past life that is way more interesting than you’ll ever know. And if that’s interesting to you, well that’s interesting to them, and they should be honored for having lived that long.”

 
Special Exits by Joyce Farmer ($26.99) is available from all good bookstores or direct from Fantagraphics
 

 
Via The Huffington Post
 

 
Russia Today reports of a Romanian man who threw himself from a balcony onto the parliament benches below:

Romania’s Parliament cancelled a no-confidence vote on Thursday after a father whose payments for his disabled child had been cut by the Romanian government leapt from a balcony in the parliament in protest against the decision. He was not seriously injured. A loud thud reverberated in the chamber after the man, Adrian Sobaru - identified by the country’s public television station as one of its engineers - hit the benches shortly after Prime Minister Emil Boc greeted the lawmakers.

As he jumped, he could be heard shouting: “Boc, you’ve taken away the rights of our children.” Mr Sobaru, who suffered fractures to the face, and other non life-threatening injuries, was able to get into the parliament because he works as an electrician for the national television station. He then shouted “Liberty and Justice” as he was taken to hospital. He was also wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “You’ve killed our future,” according to reports.

 
This speaks for itself.

(via BuzzFeed)

 
Things are not always what they seem in this dramatic recut of Mad Men by EditorLosAngeles.

 
(via The High Definite)

 
Each year animator John Butler produces his own distinct Christmas image to send to friends. Rather than the traditional jolly Santa or nativity scene, John creates “a sinister festive image,” inspired by a work of classic science-fiction. This year’s image was inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing and John has sent it to Dangerous Minds for all of us to share. Nice.
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

The charming cover of Merry Crassmas
 

Click play to hear all of Merry Crassmas!
 
The end of 1981 likely saw highly influential British anarcho-punk band Crass both energized and exhausted after dropping their third album, the remarkably complex feminist manifesto Penis Envy.

One speculates that the idea for their final release of the year came to the band as a “eureka!” moment. Why not release a 7” novelty record made up of a department-store-style, organ-and-drum-machine medley of their anthemic and obnoxious tunes, including “Big A Little A,” “Punk is Dead,” “Big Hands,” “Contaminational Power” and others? Slap on an innocuous Santa Claus intro and obnoxious outro at the end, pop it into a sleeve with a strange and horrific collage of an Xmas-day family holiday scene by Gee Vaucher, and you’ve got an instant inside-joke punk classic on your hands.

As a horror-day bonus for you Crass-heads, here’s a wide-ranging, as-yet-spotlighted 2007 interview from pancrack.tv with your man, drummer Penny Rimbaud…
 

 
Part 2  |  Part 3  |  Part 4  |  Part 5  |  Part 6  |  Part 7  |  Part 8 
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Crass remasters and epic interview
Crass: There is No Authority But Yourself
Music for Crass: Mick Duffield’s Christ the Movie
The unexpected Crass-Beatles Nexus Point

“You better not pout, you better not cry”

Westboro Baptist Church would be dangerous if they weren’t so fucking insane. In this sick little ditty sung to the tune of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” the Phelps clan concoct a rape scenario involving children and a non-existent mythic character named Santa Claus. These freaks are fantasizing on a level so evil that Charlie Manson would cross the street to avoid their collective bad karma.

Forget about chestnuts, these religious whack jobs would love to see us all roasting on an open fire.

Santa ain’t coming to town. He doesn’t exist. But Jesus does and he’s pissed.