“Sailing” courtesy of Rod Stewart. Quite fitting, eh?

(via TDW)

 
I’m going through one of my periodic Captain Beefheart obsessions, mostly due to being immersed in John “Drumbo” French’s harrowing memoir. It’s always been a point of pride for me as a life long denizen of the San Fernando Valley that much of Beefheart’s history took place here, so in planning a pilgrimage to the Woodland Hills house where the Trout Mask Replica LP came tortuously into being, I happened to notice the place is still on the market for a much reduced 325k. Mind you in 2006 it was going for 849k ! Hard to believe a Matt Groening or a Julian Schnabel hasn’t snatched it up yet !
 

 
Buy the Trout Mask Replica house
 
Obama endorses Beefheart
 
Beefheart: Through the eyes of magic
 
Banned Captain Beefheart TV commercial
 
Run Paint Run Run: The Painting of Don van Vliet AKA Captain Beefheart

 
Here’s a really cool image captured by a small pinhole camera on the top of a turntable. This beautiful photo was shot by photographer Tim Franco. I really dig it.  

(via Mister Honk )

 
What a brilliant antidote to the current highly lame trend of attempted personalised music selection software (Pandora,etc). This Brian Whitman fellow has got it right (even though he’s admittedly part of the problem, ha!). These services are only going to point you in the direction of some major label hackery you’d never notice on your own, anyways. Nothing will ever beat word of mouth and the recommendations of friends and relatives with excellent taste. Let the deletions begin !

I have a strong aversion to music recommenders and music similarity services. I especially deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance as the company I co-founded makes a lot of $$$$$ (that is 5 dollar signs) selling ordered lists of artists to multinational music streaming conglomerates.
Nonetheless, we recently completed our first live recommender system (to be announced near the Boston Music Hack day in October) and to perhaps get myself more comfortable with a future in which children will no longer ask their cooler older dope-smoking brothers what to listen to in lieu of some HTML table in a UL, I decided to really sign up wholesale to this movement. If we rely on these computer programs to learn about music, well we might as well rely on them to fix the sins of our past and delete the crap we are obviously not meant to listen to anymore.
“Future of Music (2010)” is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin. Just like other recommender systems, it uses a lot of fancy math (and data from Echo Nest and last.fm) that really doesn’t matter in the end. Just click the button and let it take care of your life. I want it to also delete scrobbles and spotify playlists that feature the artists. Maybe it should read your email too and tell you who you shouldn’t talk to anymore, i could use that

 
Future of Music (Music Hack Day)
 
Thanks Kurt Ralske!

 
Absolutely gorgeous high definition video of The Honeycombs doing their Joe Meek produced hit “Have I The Right.” Honey Lantree on drums. Nuff said.
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds: The Incredibly Strange Life Of Rock and Roll Alchemist Joe Meek.

 
Oh, the horror!

(via KMFW)

 
Stefan Nadelman’s Terminal Bar is a document of the infamous New York City dive located across the street from the Port Authority bus terminal near Times Square. Stefan’s father, Sheldon, was a bartender at the Terminal from 1972 to 1982 and took thousands of photographs of the drunks, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes that hung out at what was considered to be the roughest bar in NYC.

Sheldon also photographed the bartenders, bouncers and porters that worked the joint. I can’t imagine a tougher gig. I used to poke my head into the Terminal back in the late 70s. Its notoriety drew artists and punks and the curious. But, it wasn’t welcoming to slumming hipsters or bush league Bukowskis. It was an enclosed society with it’s own brutal code, not easily cracked by the voyeuristic aesthete.

Stefan recalls what it was like to live among the images of the Terminal:

Our house [was] basically my father’s gallery, I grew up looking at these faces of the Terminal Bar. My father would also paint on the matte around the photos to further make his point. He used a lot of wordplay…like GRAPE/RAPE/APE (the effects of wine). Each picture had its lesson or story and I think they subconsciously warned me of the ramifications of heavy drinking. Looking back, I can see how odd it may have seemed to have your house’s walls filled with 16x20’s of drunken strangers.

Terminal Bar is a stunning achievement, an evocation of a period in New York City’s history when the streets were wild with life and filled with the stench of garbage, booze, sex and death. The city is cleaner now, domesticated, safe, but lacking that certain soulfulness that is at the heart of Sheldon Nadelman’s dark and deeply human photographs.
 
Here’s the trailer and a clip from Terminal Bar. The entire 23 minute film is available on DVD here. Stefan is working on new video vignettes using his father’s photographs and I’m looking forward to future installments.
 

 
More of The Terminal after the jump…

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Chewbacca hairdid
The ultimate silent ‘Star Wars’
Sarah Brightman & Hot Gossip: I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper
Japanese ‘Star Wars’ Sea Chicken Commercial (1978)
70s French Disco Dance-Off Between Darth Vader And C-3PO
A-Team Intro vs. Star Wars
Darth Vader moonlights as symphony conductor
Star Wars vs. The Mighty Boosh
Star Wars: The Environmentalists Version
Robotic French Space Disco inspired by Star Wars (1977)
21-87: How Arthur Lipsett Influenced George Lucas’s Career
C-3PO Catches R2D2 Smoking

The director in a scene from Nice Bombs…
 
Chicago-based Iraqi director Usama Alshaibi seems to be one of the most prolific Arab filmmakers in the American independent film scene—and he’s almost certainly the most experimental. Working often in close collaboration with his wife Kristie, Alshaibi has jump-started the canon of what we might term transgressive Arab-American film.

In his over 50 short films, Alshaibi has updated the techniques of transgressors like William Burroughs and Kenneth Anger to transmit his obsessions with culture-clash, technology, religion, violence, sexuality and identity. He’s finished four features, two of which deal with porn and STDs, one with cross-cultural relationships and another with the personal reality of post-Saddam Iraq. He has three in production or post-production now, two of which—American Arab and Baghdad, Iowa—portray growing up Arab in the heartland in the in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and today, and the third, Profane, about a Muslim dominatrix in spiritual crisis.

As the news media shamelessly reduces the complex relationship between America and its Arab and Muslim communities into a dopey controversy over where to build a friggin’ cultural center or mosque, we need the perspective and imagination of Alshaibi’s work now more than ever.

Like most hard-working indie filmmakers, Alshaibi can always use financial help making his vision manifest. Click to donate to help him finish Profane or American Arab.
 

 
After the jump, check out a clip from American Arab…
 

 
Anthony Newley’s misbegotten take on The Beatles’ “Within You Without You” is so stunningly bad it has a certain hideous allure. It’s from the 1977 TV special The Beatles Forever, which featured Newley, Tony Randall, Ray Charles, Bernadette Peters, Paul Williams, among others, eviscerating Beatles classics. It doesn’t get much worse than this…and that’s why I dig it.

The Youtube description of the video is almost as amusing as the clip itself:

Movietone News footage of Sunbury 1974 (the end of the 60s) with Mr Newley’s epoch defining reading of George Harrison’s exotic toe-tapper from the Beatles Pop Art album Sgt Peppers. Newley is magnificent as always.

Tony Randall introduces the song.