From the site of Canadian photographer, Holly Norris:

‘American Able’ intends to, through spoof, reveal the ways in which women with disabilities are invisibilized in advertising and mass media.  I chose American Apparel not just for their notable style, but also for their claims that many of their models are just ‘every day’ women who are employees, friends and fans of the company.  However, these women fit particular body types.  Their campaigns are highly sexualized and feature women who are generally thin, and who appear to be able-bodied.  Women with disabilities go unrepresented, not only in American Apparel advertising, but also in most of popular culture.  Rarely, if ever, are women with disabilities portrayed in anything other than an asexual manner, for ‘disabled’ bodies are largely perceived as ‘undesirable.’  In a society where sexuality is created and performed over and over within popular culture, the invisibility of women with disabilities in many ways denies them the right to sexuality, particularly within a public context.

 
Craig Kauffman, maker of sublime ultra-minimal vacuum molded acrylic wall hangings and original member of the famed Ferus gallery gang in the mid-60’s (along with the likes of Eds Ruscha and Kienholz, Wallace Berman, Warhol, etc) has died. I’ve always loved his somewhat erotically-shaped and candy-like art-for-art’s-sake and what I’ve heard described as a “finish fetish”. Oh, so smooth and shiny !
 

 

 
Los Angeles Times: Craig Kauffman dies at 78; artist captured the ethos of Los Angeles
 
thx Patrick Scott !

The King of Woolworths is the musical alterego of Mancunian Jon Brooks, who makes reprocessed tributes to 1960s BBC soundtracks. This is good shit. Here’s a BBC interview with him:

The King Of Woolworths is Jon Brooks, a man inspired by the soundtracks of 60s and 70s film and television like Get Carter, The Sweeney and the music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. “It was always my dream to work for them,” he says. “Just that kind of experimentation. I like that attitude where anything went. You could use guitar or trumpet but the way you treated it was something else, and they created some really amazing sounds.”

L’Illustration Musicale is his second album, the follow up to 2001’s sampledelic soundtrack Ming Star. “Ming Star was me and a load of samples, whereas there are no samples on this album, it’s just a load of loops and stuff.” The new LP also features Jon’s first work with vocalists, including tracks with Dot Allison who has previously added vocal flushes to Death In Vegas and Emma Pollack from indie rockers The Delgados. She features on Nuada, 60s sugary pop soul inspired by the film The Wicker Man. “It was a very different thing to do for Emma, but I kind of had an idea it might work.”

Throughout the album, the Roy Budd-influenced instrumentals are cut up with Scott Walker-tinged pop. “I love pop music as well, especially 60s and 70s pop, and I wanted to get an essence of that,” he says. “I didn’t want to do the same thing again. I didn’t want the album to sound like the last one.”

(The King of Woolworths)

(Kings of Woolworths: Ming Star)

(You may recognize the song below as the source for Coil’s “Wraiths and Strays.”)

 
On May 21 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts is presenting a 35th anniversary screening of Tommy, the 1975 rock opera directed by Ken Russell, based on the album by The Who. There will be an all new digital cinema presentation with the original quintaphonic soundtrack. Best of all, the legendary Ken Russell will be there for a panel discussion about the film with Who documentarian Murrary Lerner and the film’s editor Stuart Baird.

Tommy earned an Oscar nomination for Pete Townshend. The cast includes Roger Daltry as Tommy, Oscar-nominated Ann-Margret (she’s fantastic in Tommy!), Keith Moon. Elton John, Eric Clapton, Jack Nicholson, Tina Turner (as the Acid Queen) and Oliver Reed. I hope this means they’ll be putting out a Blu-ray of Tommy soon.

Samuel Goldwyn Theater at 8949 Wilshire Blvd. Friday, May 21, at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
 

 
Thank you Rupert Russell!

 
Ken Goffman, R.U. Sirius, also know as Ken Goffman was the editor/co-founder of Mondo 2000, one of the most visionary and influential publications of late 1980s and ’90s. He’s looking to use Kickstarter to finance a “collective memory project” about the magazine and its history, for posterity. It’s certainly a worthy subject to my mind. Goffman’s project would take the form of a physical book and possibly become a documentary, too. Kickstarter has a podcast interview about the project and the history of Mondo 2000.

This project stemmed from your original desire to do a memoir, but seems to have become something much more.

Originally, I had the idea that I could work with the idea of memory and perception in the context of writing a memoir. I probably didn’t remember my life that accurately, and perhaps not that interestingly, but if I made my memoir open-source and brought people who had their own memories of interacting with me in their own lives — during the late ’60s/’70s and the period when I was doing Mondo 2000 and earlier magazines — then something really interesting would come of that. It’d be a literary experiment and an exploration of memory and psychology.  That’s where it started.

On one level it seemed really self-indulgent; in another way, it seemed like a fairly original project.  There’ve been a lot of books where it’s “as told to,” starting with a book called Edie by George Plympton, where they go around and talk to a whole lot of different people and quote them verbatim about some person’s life and what they witnessed.

My feeling was this would dig a little bit deeper, more interactive and more probing. Eventually, largely as a result of thinking about raising capital to get started on Kickstarter, trying to get the equivalent of the small amount book companies give for an advance, I decided I needed to narrow my focus.  People would be interested in doing this just with Mondo 2000 and the magazines that preceded it.  So it was narrowed down to a period from 1984-1997, starting with a magazine called High Frontiers that mutated into Reality Hackers and then Mondo 2000.

Mondo 1995: Up and Down With the Next Millennium’s First Magazine by Jack Boulware (SF Weekly)

 
I love it when this sort of thing happens:

A telly viewer in China rang the BBC claiming he heard a character in hit kids’ show In The Night Garden say: “F*** your mother”, we can reveal.
The gibberish talk of one of the tumbly, pepper-pot Tombliboos - Unn, Ooo and Eee - made it sound like the toy had sworn in Mandarin.

A spokesman for BBC Worldwide, who sold the show to China, last night pledged to investigate.

A source said: “Someone was watching the show in Beijing and was convinced they heard a Tombliboo say ‘f*** your mother’ which, as you can imagine, is not on in any language.”

“Mandarin is all about tonality so you can end up saying something quite different to what you actually mean if you get it wrong.”

The series is produced by Ragdoll, which makes the Teletubbies.

It features several odd-looking characters and is set in a magic kingdom “that exists between waking and sleeping in a child’s imagination”.

BBC childrens’ show character says ‘Fuck your mother’ in Mandarin (The Sun)

(John Phillip Law and Marisa Mell in Danger: Diabolik)
 
There’s no question that one of the more beloved movies here at Dangerous Minds is that deliriously kitschy caper film, Danger: Diabolik, Mario Bava‘s ‘68 ode to love, leather, Marisa Mell and…Marisa Mell.  The same could be said for its somewhat hard-to-find Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

While uniformly great from start to finish, and full of quotable dialogue, it’s perhaps best remembered for its insanely catchy main title song, Deep Deep Down.  You can hear Christy‘s renditions of the song below (in both English and Italian), but below that is one from Mike Patton.

Say what you will about Patton’s various bands (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle), because I can say very little.  He does, though, do a fully committed Deep Deep Down!

 
Yep, look out, the Hoopster’s comin’. Better watch out! He’ll like “hoop” you or something…

 
This is recent New York Times article is awesome for so many reasons. I used to live a block away from the Stonewall Bar for a number of years and I never saw a single superhero walking in or out of the place. Then again, Clark Kent could have changed into his Superman duds after he was amongst his super friends?

Dim lighting. Rendezvous-friendly nooks. Muscled bartenders. Pulsating dance music. At first glance, it could be any Saturday night in any gay bar in New York.

But then you notice, off to one corner, Superman flirting with Green Lantern. And there, across the room, someone in the form-fitting outfit of Black Adam, Captain Marvel’s foe, determinedly working the floor. In fact, there seems to be an inordinate number of men here tonight who look as if they have all but jumped from the pages of a comic book. And in some way, they have.

This is Skin Tight U.S.A., the occasional costume-fetish party held at the Stonewall Inn in the West Village, which draws a regular group of men (and their admirers) who enjoy a special kind of dress-up. Some wear heroic outfits; some, wrestling gear. The crowd can range from 25 people on an average night to 250 on a spectacular one. The common thread is that the muscle-cuddling garb often leaves little to the imagination.

“I was always attracted to the superhero physique,” said Matthew Levine, 31, who helped found the party in 2005 with Andrew Owen, 44, and who was one of the few participants willing to be named. The two become friends as, respectively, the graphic designer and Webmaster for Hard Comixxx, a predecessor of Skin Tight, once held at the Eagle bar in Chelsea. Mr. Levine is a big fan of the X-Men (who have a handful of gay characters) and the Transformers (all of whom seem straight) and has been reading comics since he was 8. “As I got older,” he said, “I realized, ‘Oh, this is why I admire the Grecian ideal of manhood and musculature.’

Out of the Closet and Up Up and Away (New York Times)

Thank you Alexandra Le Tellier!

 
In his new autobiography, The Nine Levels between Heaven and Earth, Yang Liwei (above), the Chinese commander of ‘03’s Shenzhou Five spacecraft, revealed some of the dining habits of highly effective astronauts:

A local proverb in the south of China is that “Huajiang dog is better for you than ginseng,” referring to the medicinal root that plays a vital role in traditional Chinese medicine.

He added that the diet had been specially drawn up for the astronauts by Chinese nutritionists and that the food had been purchased from special suppliers in Beijing.  Dog is widely eaten in northern China, where it is believed to help battle the winter cold.  The menu was still in use last year, when Chinese astronauts conducted their first ever spacewalk.  China has plans to land a man on the moon by 2020.

The revelation drew an angry rebuke from animal rights campaigners, who said Mr. Yang was setting a bad example to his millions of fans.

Intake of nutrients aside, Yang Liwei has less kind things to say about their elimination.  When asked about his experience aboard the Shenzhou Five he said, “Better not to piss in diaper…baby doesn’t like it, neither does an adult.”
 
Dog on the menu for Chinese astronauts