I haven’t managed to sit down and watch this yet, but I hear it’s great. Join me, won’t you ?
 

Watch the full episode. See more American Masters.

 
This is sort of a dark and depressing take on mental disorders by Winnie the Pooh and characters. I don’t know about you, but these kinda gave me a serious case of the sads.
 

 
More after the jump…

Lori Davenport of St. Petersburg, Florida is the first in the nation to camp outside a Best Buy for this year’s Black Friday sales. The retailer gave her an iPad for her dedication.

Watch this. This fuckin’ says it all. And it says it so much better than any commentator could. Kudos to whoever produced this segment for leaving out the voice over and just letting this batshit crazy lady talk about “firstness.”

This is POETRY (of a fashion). American poetry.
 

 
Here’s an odd clip of a woman with lethal razor blade tassels. I have no clue what film this is from. If you know, do tell!

Update: The clip above is from the film The Man From S.E.X., directed by Lindsay Shonteff.

(via Unique Daily )

 
Philip K. Dick’s third wife Anne R. Dick has written “a biography dressed as a memoir” called The Search for Philip K. Dick which has just been published by San Francisco press Tachyon. Anne and Philip were married for only five years but it was a very vital period in Dick’s evolution as a writer. As poet Jack Spicer said in regards to his own Muse (and this could certainly apply to Dick) “the Martian kept rearranging the furniture in his head.”  In Dick’s case, the Martian was moving at the speed of sound.

Any new book on Dick is an event as far as I’m concerned and this one looks to be a significant contribution to the understanding of one of America’s most underrated and least understood writers of major distinction.

The book, while refraining from literary analysis, is invaluable for Dick fans and scholars because it’s told by the one person he was close to at an important turning point in his career. He wrote or developed roughly a dozen novels during his time in west Marin, including “The Man in the High Castle” (1962), his only novel to win the Hugo Award, science fiction’s biggest prize.

The writer Jonathan Lethem, who included five novels from this period in the Library of America anthologies he edited of Dick’s essential works, calls it Dick’s most fruitful time.

“The river of his literary ambitions — his interest in ‘respectable’ literature — joins the river of his guilty, disreputable, explosively imaginative pulp writing,” Mr. Lethem said in a phone interview. “It’s the most important passage of his career — more masterpieces in a shorter period of time.”

Read the NY Times piece on The Search For Philip K. Dick here. And to purchase it click here.

 
Rare color footage of The Doors performing on September 7,1968 during their two night stand at London’s Roundhouse.

Other than when and where it was shot, I can’t find any information about this video. I know it’s not from the Roundhouse footage (‘Doors Are Open’) which was broadcast on Granada TV. I know that the sound source is not the mixing board and may have been synched after the fact. And I know as a Doors fan I dig it.

If anyone knows more about the history of this footage, please share.
 

In place of the DM talkshow this week, here is a music video for an enigmatic cult band called The Beme Seed that I co-directed in 1989. The Beme Seed were fronted by Kathleen Lynch, the utterly psychotic go-go dancer whose distinctly dada take on the art of burlesque made Butthole Surfers’ concerts so demonically powerful in the 1980s. Although never an official member of the group, she was a major, major part of their reputation for legendary live shows (along with the pyrotechnic cymbals, Gibby’s flaming hand, the films of dental and penis reconstructive surgery, etcetera, etcetera). Kathleen’s inspired go-go dancing was as surreal as it was pagan. At one late 80s New York show I saw (held at The Ritz nightclub, now Webster Hall), she went from sporting a huge afro wig and an extremely hairy “merkin” to being completely naked (and shaved) and then back again, as violent strobe lights provided cover—in other words, it happened in such a way that it seemed like a special effect to the audience—stunning, I tell you. Later in the show, she came out nude, painted gold and wearing tennis rackets on her feet.

For someone who has made an entire career of seeking out oddballs, I’d have to say that Kathleen Lynch, truly, is one of the weirdest people I’ve ever met. But in a good way! There was nothing negative or mentally unstable about her, she was just fuckin’ odd. But cheerfully weird. Her weirdness was organic, not forced, let’s just say. I’d call her a hippie, but she was too punk rock for that. She was a most singular creature, Kathleen, fitting no easy categories.
 

Above, Kathleen Lynch on the cover the Butthole Surfer’s Double Live album.

Here are a few statements made about Kathleen Lynch by the Butthole Surfers themselves:

Paul Leary - “The whole band got scabies once, and we had to hold Kathleen down and get her medicated. She had decided she didn’t want to kill the scabies because they were her friends.”

Gibby Haynes - We’d roll into a town, I was booking the shows, we didn’t know where the clubs were. We’d literally pull over somebody and say, “Hey, where do the queers hang out? Where’s the college area?” Just follow the queers to the club. We played the Celebrity Club in Atlanta when RuPaul, Lady Bunny, and all the other drag queens were hanging out there before they all moved to New York. It was this weird, artsy, funky, disco crowd in Atlanta that for some reason liked us. Kathleen was friends with this friend of ours from Atlanta.

Teresa Taylor (AKA Teresa Nervosa) - Later we met Kathleen again in New York. She was working for Sex World in Times Square. She was known as Ta Da the Shit Lady, she could really control her shit. We took her on the road as our dancer and started building the whole package. She was kind of into her spiritual thing; she stopped speaking for a year, and I asked her why, and she wrote down that God had told her to take a vow and stop speaking. She loved the human body, smells of the human body, dirty socks, urine, things of the body were really beautiful to her, b.o. was beautiful, and we had a hard time making her bathe. I remember once we pretty much had to hold her down and do her laundry, and she was yelling, “no, no!”

Paul Leary - We were at a house and we watched Kathleen perfectly pee a spoonful of urine without spilling a drop, she put that teaspoon of urine into a pot of old dried macaroni and cheese, and that’s when this drag queen came in and started eating the dried macaroni and cheese with that spoon and we were like, Felicia, didn’t you just see Kathleen putting her pee in that pan? She said, “I’m eating on the side.”

Jeff Pinkus - We all went down to Key Largo—it was one of our first vacations that we actually took as a band. We decided to go snorkeling, but Ta Da stayed on the boat with the captain. We come back and the captain of the ship was just looking at us like we were all crazy, and we couldn’t figure out what was going on, he wouldn’t talk to us. Later we found out that when we were in the water Ta Da had thrown up and had diarrhea at the same time. She had the diarrhea in her hand and she threw up into the water. She said she was feeding the fish.

Paul Leary - “What’s my resume going to say? For the past 12 years I’ve been touring with someone who shits in their hand and feeds it to the fish in front of a bunch of people?”

Okay, I think you must get the picture by now. (So, she was a little eccentric. Haven’t we all shit in our hands and fed the fishies at least once in our lives? No?)

When I met Kathleen, I think she was paying the bills by being a professional dog walker, but she’d been a “live nude girl” at Sex World in Times Square. That’s where she got her evocative nickname. Since I’m sure this has already been told elsewhere (and because it’s so damed funny) here’s the gist of it: She was working, had eaten some Chinese take-out and gotten food poisoning. While with a customer, she had an “accident,” which caused the poor guy to run out of the booth, exclaiming what had happened. The octogenarian woman who owned and ran the place—one of old skool 42nd St’s more memorable characters—could be seen there daily wearing a mic around her neck the way Bob Dylan wears his harmonica, hawking her live nude girls over the PA system. Without missing a beat, she started hyping, “Step right up guys, ta-da, it’s the shit lady!”

I heard that story directly from Kathleen, herself. I recall being in tears from laughing so hard the way she told it.

So the Beme Seed. I don’t know much about the actual band. I think they were actually broken up at the time we made the video and may have reformed with different members later. The music of Beme Seed was psychically disturbing and featured a lot of chanting and quasi-formless guitar feedback. They sounded really evil and their live show was like a LOUD seance. (The closest comparison I can think of is the early Virgin Prunes). They made three albums for the Blast First! record label, who also distributed Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Afghan Whigs and Big Black and disbanded for good in 1992.

The entire budget for the “God Inside” video was around $60 bucks. It was co-directed with a friend of mine named Alan Henderson, who was also the editor. Although it may seem very “so what?” by today’s standards, the digital layering on this video had only recently made possible, due to the introduction of what was then a brand new digital video compositing computer known as the Abacas A-62 (which cost $160,000 at the time—Alan and I were both working in a high tech digital video post-production facility and used their expensive equipment off-hours). What Alan did was to feed an signal through the device and then he could control the level of feedback via an analog video switcher while he controlled the output. (Such was the level of technological advancement 21 years ago. Now, of course, After Effects is a million times better than anything available then for a fraction of the price).

We considered the “God Inside” video an homage to Kenneth Anger, albeit one with tiny, tiny budget. Kathleen herself, initially at least, was not down with this treatment for the song, but she also didn’t want to turn down a professionally produced music video, something she knew she’d never be able to afford otherwise, so she went with it. (Her idea, which surprised me when she told me about it, was to use all found footage and archival films of people doing nice things for each other—a nurse helping a patient, someone pushing an elderly lady in a wheelchair, uniformed school crossing-guards with children—and I was like “What?” She also told me that the song was about the female orgasm and masturbating, so the “happy people” concept was a real disconnect for me).

The costume, as such, consisted of Kathleen painting her naked body white, wrapping tin foil around her teeth and cutting a lock of hair from her head and gluing it to her chin. She also had these yellow, almost glow in the dark, strands of fake Halloween costume hair which she glued to her arms. The overall effect, I think you’ll agree, was striking. I also had something I really wanted to shoot for this and that was Kathleen emerging from water like some sort of sea creature. To get this shot, we got up at 4:30AM and hightailed it up to Central Park for sunrise and hoped no one would be around. Kathleen was wrapped only in a sheet. There were a few joggers, but we got the shot.

In the studio, we shot take after take, especially of the lip-sync. I wanted her to do the speaking in tongues part at the end and really go to town on that, but each take was too subdued. She complained that we were working her too hard, but I insisted. Finally, I think she was so mad at me, that she let loose and did what I wanted and you can see this in the final video. As soon as that was in the can, we turned off the camera and went home.

When the video was finished, I showed it to Kathleen and she cried tears of joy. Then she asked me if I could leave the room and she watched it several more times alone. She really loved it. However, later that night when I showed it to the young woman I was living with at the time, she was so freaked out that she asked me—I’m not kidding—to remove it from our apartment! (Turn it up loud, so it seems extra infernal!)

Needless to say, a music video featuring full frontal nudity was never going to be shown on MTV or anywhere else for that matter. The “God Inside” video, made 21 years ago, for all intents and purposes (a few crappy YouTube versions aside) is being premiered here now. I hope you enjoy it, if that’s the right word…

Beme Seed (The Book of Seth’ at Julian Copes’ Head Heritage)

Beme Seed MySpace page

How Did It Come to This? An Oral History of May 3, 1987: The Day The Butthole Surfers Came to Trenton, New Jersey (The Rumpus)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Bongwater: The Power of Pussy

 
Hands down the best version of “This Is How We Do It” you’re ever going to hear. Indeed, this is how we do it.

It feels so good in my hood tonight
The summertime skirts and the guys in kani
All the gang bangers forgot about the drive-by
You gotta get your groove on, before you go get paid
So tip up your cup and throw your hands up
And let me hear the party say

Im kinda buzzed and its all because
(this is how we do it)

(via Certified Bullshit Technician)

 
This video for ‘Thin Moon’, from James Pants’ album Seven Seals, brilliantly captures the lo-tech weirdness you’d see on Public Access TV back in the ‘80s. I’d say it’s just about perfect. One of my favorite videos of 2010. 

Seven Seals is available here. At times sounding like a mashup of Joy Division, Boney M, The Flying Lizards and Passenger-era Iggy, Pants conjures up intergalactic road trip music and electronic soul for the lounges of Venus. Neo-neo-spaceage bachelor pad music.
 

 
National Geographic is holding its annual Photo Contest, with the deadline for submissions on 30th November. Alan Taylor over at Boston.com has published an excellent selection of some of the entries so far, on his always wonderful The Big Picture.

National Geographic is gathering entries in categories of People, Place and Nature, and is showing some of these on their website for readers to rate them. Below is a small selection of this year’s entries.

If you would like to submit a photograph for the National Geographic Photo Contest, please check details here..
 

 
More entries from this year’s National Geographic Photo Contest after the jump…