Cult figure Kim Fowley, record producer, rock impresario, songwriter and musician. Manager of The Runaways, Animal Man and the original Mayor of the Sunset Strip. “One of the most colorful characters in the annals of rock & roll.” Thrill to gossipy stories of Sly Stone and Doris Day; Sonny and Cher; Cat Stevens, Led Zeppelin, Gene Vincent and more. Part 1
Left image: SATANIC RAM. A tactile picture of a naked voluptuous woman dressed as a Satanic ram. She wears a long cardboard mask of spires, a beard and an inverted cross. Her pubic hair forms a triangle between her legs.
Right image: POSING IN SNAKESKIN SHOES. A tactile picture of a naked woman standing in snakeskin shoes. She wears a plastic bag over her head, with paper cones for eyes. This photograph was taken from a lower angle revealing a vagina shaved bare.
Just two of seventeen images for the visually impaired by Toronto artist Lisa Murphy. Her book, Tactile Minds—part erotica, part objet d’art—was created after Murphy realized that the “blind have been left out in a culture saturated with sexual images.”
Simply stated, for someone running for office to have done something like this—repeatedly—that person probably should not be running for that office in the first place. But don’t you love how the Republicans keep bringing the funny? This is too good.
From TPM:
An online news outlet in New York state has obtained dozens of emails, many of them racist and sexually graphic, which it reports were sent by Carl Paladino, the Tea-Party-backed Republican candidate for governor of New York, to a long list of political and business associates. One email shows a video of an African tribal dance, entitled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal,” while another depicts hardcore bestiality.
Paladino’s campaign manager, Michael Caputo, would not comment on specific emails, but acknowledged to TPMmuckraker that Paladino had sent emails that were “off-color” and “politically incorrect,” saying that few such emails represented the candidate’s own opinion. Caputo accused Democrats of wanting to change the subject from substantive issues to “having sex with horses.”
Um, I think it was you who gave them that particular “in” buddy! This is is hardly a good time to pull out the look what you made me do argument also! Why not blame Michael Steele?
Here’s a description of some of the emails:
• An October 2009 email with a photograph showing President Obama and the First Lady dressed in 70s-era blaxploitation pimp and prostitute costumes while attending a formal event at the White House.
• A December 2008 email showing a video of African tribesmen performing a traditional dance. The video is entitled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal.”
• A September 2009 email entitled, “Easy Steady Big Fella….XXXX,” with a photograph that graphically depicts a horse having sex with a woman.
• A January 2010 email, containing a hardcore pornographic video entitled “Miss France 2008 F[***]ing.”
• A July 2009 email showing a photograph of an airplane landing directly behind a group of black men. The caption reads: “Holy Sh*t. run ni**ers, run!”
Sez Paladino: “I’m going to be the same Carl I have always been. I’m not going out of my way to be blunt or politically correct or anything. I’m going to be me.”
Don’t ever change, Carl baby, don’t ever change…
“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating.” Building A Green Economy, Paul Krugman’s Sunday magazine article in the NYT was hardly that day’s only 60’s-inspired story.
Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again describes how, once again, scientists are looking to psilocybin and other psychedelics as a possible cure for cancer-related depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and drug and alcohol addiction.
This week’s gathering in San Jose, California, promises to be the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the U.S. in forty years and will include Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins. While psychedelics may indeed bring comfort to people seeking to repair some mind-body schism, Griffiths belongs to the new breed of researchers grappling with their spirit-expanding potential:
In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered. The findings were repeated in another follow-up survey, taken 14 months after the experiment. At that point most of the psilocybin subjects once again expressed more satisfaction with their lives and rated the experience as one of the five most meaningful events of their lives.
Roland Griffiths at TED follows below:
The masked birch caterpillar, as shown in this video, apparently defends its territory by scraping its anus loudly across a leaf. It has anal-scraping duels with other caterpillars. Hm… sounds like every office I’ve ever worked in, art gallery opening I’ve attended, and comments thread in any given blog post on the Internet. The video is oddly mesmerizing.
The masked birch caterpillar creates its own home by weaving leaves together with silk. Once built, it vigorously defends its territory but, like many animals, it prefers to intimidate its rivals before resorting to blows. To display its strength and claim its territory, it drums and scrapes its jaws against the leaf. It also drags its anus across the surface to create a complex scratching noise. This “anal scraping” message seems utterly bizarre, but its origins lie in a far more familiar activity – walking.
Warding a rival off with your anus might seem unseemly to us, but caterpillars that do this turn out to be rather civilised species. The scraping is based on the same walking movements that their ancestors used to chase after rivals. The other parts of their signalling repertoire – drumming and scraping jaws – are ritualised versions of fighting moves like biting, butting and hitting. While their earlier cousins might resort to such fisticuffs, the anal-scrapers conduct their rivalries with all the restraint of Victorian gentlemen.
These signals and their evolution have been decoded by Jaclyn Scott from Carleton University. They a great examples of how ritualised animal communiqués evolve from much simpler actions that have little if anything to do with communication – walking, breathing, hunting and the like. Crickets, for example, sing by rubbing their wings together, which may originally have been done to release pheromones or to prep the wings for flight. The whistling of wind through the feathers of crested pigeons has turned into an alarm. The competitive knee-clicks of eland antelopes are made by tendons that slide as a natural part of their gait.
(Discover: Caterpillars must walk before they can anally scrape)
Biologist and conservationist E. O. Wilson just released Anthill, a novel about… ants. (I imagine this will be better than the Woody Allen animated flick “Antz,” and can probably tell us a thing or two about human society.)
From Publisher’s Weekly:
A Pulitzer Prize–winning nonfiction author and Harvard entomology professor, Wilson (The Ants) channels Huck Finn in his creative coming-of-age debut novel. Split into three parallel worlds—ants, humans, and the biosphere—the story follows young Raff Cody, who escapes the humid summers in Clayville, Ala., by exploring the remote Nokobee wilderness with his cousin, Junior. In one adventure, sneaking onto the property of a reputed multiple murderer to peek at his rumored 1,000-pound pet alligator, 15-year-old Raff faces down the barrel of a rifle. Raff’s aversion to game hunting, ant fascination, Boy Scout achievements, and Harvard education all support his core need to remain a naturalist explorer. A remarkable center section meticulously details the life and death of an ant colony. Nearing 30, Raff’s desire to preserve the Nokobee reserve from greedy real estate developers galvanizes an effort to protect the sacred land and a surprise violent ending brings everything full circle. Lush with organic details, Wilson’s keen eye for the natural world and his acumen for environmental science is on brilliant display in this multifaceted story about human life and its connection to nature.
New Scientist’s Culture Lab has an interview with E. O. Wilson here:
Why would E. O. Wilson write a novel? He says he hopes Anthill - about militant ants and the coupled fate of humans and nature - will spark a conservation revolution
Why did you feel your novel, Anthill, had to be written?
This is the first time anyone has written about the lives of ants from their point of view. And I think this is the first novel set in the American South that pays close attention to the environment. I have made the environment, the treasured habitat that Raphael Semmes Cody fights to save, a character in the book.
You have said you wanted the book to lay out nature as it is. Why?
Over 90 per cent of novelists present nature simply in terms of its impacts on human emotions. I wanted to develop in vivid detail the living environment - which is so important for the fate of the human characters - as it really is. That’s something really new in this novel, and I hope it takes.
Ah, Criterion! What with your glorious transfers and generous heapings of bonus material, you make it all too easy to justify the dropping of 30 bucks to secure a copy of, say, Dillinger Is Dead. Now, though, thanks to YouTube, you can often skip right to the bonus material without paying for the movie.
Case in point, Naked Making Lunch, director Chris Rodley’s account of David Cronenberg‘s ‘91 effort to bring to the screen William Burroughs‘s Naked Lunch.
Far more than just another “making of,” Naked Making Lunch not only has Burroughs himself chiming in on his “unfilmmable” novel‘s transference to the screen, but it takes the time to go on a number of fascinating detours, none more so, perhaps, than a discussion on the aesthetics of rubber.
Bollywood session keyboardist Charanjit Singh released Synthesizing: Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat in 1982 to an uninterested Indian public. Having loaded up on all the then current electronic music goodies (a Roland Jupiter-8 keyboard, a Roland TR-808 drum machine and a Roland TB-303) he spent two days making his version of Indian classical music and inadvertently invented acid house in the process. It’s lovely stuff, have a listen !
thx Andy Davis and Tara !
(Charanjit Singh, acid house pioneer)
