From the French television program Numero Un in December 1969. Most people think this song originates with The Muppets or Sesame Street, but it’s actually from a film called Sweden: Heaven and Hell, a racy “mondo” documentary which has scenes of swingers parties, nude beaches, porn films and lesbian nightclubs. The song was written by the great Italian cinema composer Piero Umiliani.
As I recall “Mah Nà Mah Nà” accompanied the nude beach scene. In that context, the tune takes on a comic “leering” quality.
Now this something I’d like to own. Eva Alessandrini and Roberto Saporiti designed this clever “Read Your Bookcase” bookcase for Italian furniture design firm Saporiti. I wonder what it looks like with books on it?
There’s no price listed on the website, but you can contact them here, if you’re curious. I have a feeling it’s going to be quite pricey, though.
This is some scary shit. If I was confronted with an evil-looking clown like this creepy-looking, hamburger-obsessed motherfucker wanting to sell me some processed meat products when I was a child, I think it would have changed the course of my life and not for the better.
The original Ronald McDonald was really the John Wayne Gacy of corporate mascots, wasn’t he?
In retrospect, viewing this commercial, the entire history and worldwide growth trajectory of the McDonalds multi-national corporation appears to be a massive global conspiracy to cause severe obesity in the population, and making billions of dollars in the process. What if???
P.S. If it’s not obvious, Ronald is played here by future Today Show weatherman Willard Scott. I can never look at him the same way ever again… THIS is where evil dwells!
P.P.S. Something else occurred to me and that is that playing Ronald McDonald might be a great second act for hapless former CNN reporter Rick Sanchez…
This is one of those images that’s being passed around on reddit right now. I have no clue whose tattoo this is nor the artist who created it. But yeah, here it is.
New York-based artist Zach Bellissimo AKA Seizure Demon, drew 100 tiny portraits of Vincent Price in his various roles on Post-it notes in honor of what would have been Mr. Price’s 100th birthday (May 27th, 2011). I like the Dr. Phibes and Witchfinder General ones the best. January Q. Irontail was an unexpected choice!
Click here to see a larger image of Bellissimo’s work.
Although I doubt that the farmers in Humbolt County will have much to worry about in the short term, Arizona’s looking for its own piece of the medical marijuana gold rush, with the weGrow superstore catering to marijuana growers, opening yesterday in Phoenix. Think of it as a big hydroponic garden center that sells everything you need to lovingly grow the chronic save for the plants themselves. Two weGrow big box locations already exist in California, in Oakland and in the state capital of Sacramento. Via Reuters:
The 21,000-square-foot store offers some 2,000 products, including soil, grow lights and irrigation trays, specially designed for effective marijuana growing, [weGrow founder Dhar ] Mann told Reuters.
A doctor also is on site to furnish eligible patients the initial medical approval needed to apply to the state health department for cards authorizing them to legally grow and use marijuana as treatment for a variety of qualifying ailments.
Alluding to some of America’s leading big-box chains, the company’s own press materials describe the weGrow franchise as the “Wal-Mart of Weed,” while various media reports have referred to it as “Home DePot.”
The store’s opening came on the same day that Arizona was to have begun accepting applications from individuals seeking one of 125 permits the state plans to grant for the operation of medical marijuana dispensaries. But that process was put on hold last week.
On Friday, the state went to federal court seeking to clarify whether its citizens were at risk of federal prosecution for participating in activities sanctioned under Arizona’s medical marijuana act, passed by voters in November.
Arizona is the 16th state in the nation, plus the District of Columbia, to decriminalize marijuana for medical purposes.
So far under 4000 people in Arizona have been approved for medical cannabis use, but Mann is taking his weGrow franchises going nationwide with a store to open in Washington, DC in July and outlets in Denver, Detroit and perhaps Los Angeles to follow soon after.
Zhar Mann told the San Francisco Chronicle that he already had contracts in hand for an additional 75 weGrow locations. The Oakland store, which I hear is 60,000-square-foot. supposedly made over $500,000 in the first two months of operation. The “grow your own medicine” movement is a market estimated to be worth billions of dollars. I think that’s a pretty good estimate!
This pair of exquisite little objects of curiosity will be auctioned off at Christie’s, the estimated sale price is from 2 to 5 million dollars. Covet!
This spring has seen 20-year-old Toronto-based R&B singer Abel Tesfaye—who does business as The Weeknd—zoom suddenly across the radar screen of the alt-music blogosphere and into the starry-eyed attention of pop star Drake and still-boring institution Rolling Stone.
And as if you need further proof of the irrelevance of the music industry, he’s done it as an unsigned artist on the strength of House of Balloons, a free downloadable mixtape of his tunes.
The hype surrounding Tesfaye springs from a couple of factors. One is the anxiously defiant swagitude in his smooth, loping, MDMA-tinged electro-soul sound. The other is the guy’s tantalizingly un-R&B low visual profile, which has resulted in the dissemination of a handful of mostly black-and-white photos of the handsome cat.
Tesfaye’s relative anonymity has also resulted in his fans producing some video interpretations of his tunes. Most of these have gone for a pretty literal black-&-white noir-city-apartment setting & narrative.
But Jamaican indie filmmaker Storm Saulter—director of the feature Better Mus’ Come and curator of the New Caribbean Cinema series—sets his disturbingly sunshine-soaked take on The Weeknd’s “Wicked Games” off the waters of his home island’s coastal parish of Portland.
After the jump: a more typical, though well-crafted, take on “What You Need”…
Loosely based on an infamous 1984 Long Island murder case involving Satan-worshiping, teenage drug freaks (Knights of the Black Circle), David Wojnarowicz and Tommy Turner’s Where Evil Dwells is a low-budget D.I.Y. movie that walks the jagged lines between splatter flick, experimental film and transgressive art. The original footage was destroyed in a fire and the only footage that survived is this 28 minute preview that was put together for the Downtown New York Film Festival in 1985.
Wojnarowicz and Turner’s black and white Super 8mm trailer is a fragmented and disorienting nightmare, a series of stark and fiendishly weird images. Shards of a transgressive masterwork? Only the Devil knows.
Starring Wojnarowicz, Turner, Scott Werner, Joe Coleman, Jack Nantz, Baby Gregor, Rockets Redglare, Richard Klemann, Charlotte Webb, Lung Leg, Devil Doodie; music by Jim Thirwell & Wiseblood.
