Dangerous Minds will be at SXSW from March 10 thru March 20 and beyond. If you want to make contact with us, email Marc Campbell: marcdangermind@gmail.com. We’ll be covering both the film and music fest with our gypsy film crew and intergalactic reporters.
Brooklyn post-punk trio Mr. Dream has just released their debut album Trash Hit and it is a fine slab of hard rock that reaches for and occasionally achieves some anthemic heights that recall The Pixies, Nirvana and 70s punkers The Skids, Stiff Little Fingers and a wee bit of The Birthday Party.
Mr. Dream is Adam Moerder (vocals, guitarist), Matt Morello (vocals, bass guitarist) and Nick Sylvester (drums, producer). Moerder and Sylvester are both rock journalists and they’ve managed to do something few rock writers pull off: rock it like they talk it.
The more I listen to this sucker, the more I’m digging it. Turn it up loud!
Here’s Trash Hit:
Anthony Stern’s San Francisco is a seminal work of British experimental and avant-garde cinema and one of the few art films to actually capture a little bit of the vibe of the hippie era. Stern describes the inspiration behind the film:
San Francisco was a response to hearing “Interstellar Overdrive” by Pink Floyd. It was my desire to make permanent the Pink Floyd lightshows created at the UFO club by Peter Wynne Wilson. The LSD-triggered psychedelic experience found its ultimate expression in this fusion of sight and sound, which achieved a visceral effect on the audience. San Francisco is ‘painting with light’ as well as a saturated archive of day to day life in the 1960’s. New rhythms were created in the language of film, in using single-frame exposures and freeze-frame techniques.”
Stern developed a friendship with Syd Barret while both were living in Cambridge, England. It was a relationship that would prove artistically productive, later evolving into a collaboration with Peter Whitehead on sixties pop culture documentary Tonite, Let’s All Make Love In London.
Here for your viewing and listening pleasure is Anthony Stern’s mindbending San Francisco:
Vanity Fair’s Mike Sacks (who authored And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on their Craft
Originally published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and McSweeney’s, there is no over-arching theme to these short pieces other than the fact that they are all “laugh-out-loud/piss-yourself-funny.” Covering topics as wide-ranging as the tell-tale signs your college isn’t very prestigious (“Your mascot is a tiger in a wheelchair”), conversational ice-breakers to avoid (“Lemme guess. Korean?”) and how teenagers aren’t keen on touching his bald spot with their bare feet, it’s one of my favorite books of its kind since Woody Allen’s Without Feathers or Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes. I hope Sacks won’t mind me saying that it’s a great book to keep in the toilet, but it is, especially keeping in mind the above-mentioned laughter/peeing connection.
Sacks exhibits a most unique talent for channeling idiots, particularly needy or desperate dorks like the guy who hires a plane to drop leaflets on his ex’s house to show her how “new & improved” he is, a groom who tweets his own wedding or delusional “author” Rhon Penny (silent h) who offers to blurb Thomas Pynchon’s next novel (even if he hates it!) in exchange for a reciprocal blurb from the reclusive author for his own unpublished book, “Cream of America Soup”:
You have to be wondering: What is this novel I’ve agreed to blurb actually about? And why is Rhon no longer married? Excellent queries both. I will not tell you why I’m no longer married, but my book’s subject matter is very much like Gravity’s Rainbow in a way, and in other ways not at all. It’s also very much a post 9/11 book, but not overtly. I’m not saying you need to know a lot about the medieval feudal system, Lady Bird Johnson, bats, my ex-wife’s fear of conjoined Siamese cats, democracy or linguini… but it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if you did.
Sacks is quite an accomplished word-smith (I genuflect to any writer who can compose a sentence like “Happiness isn’t… what you once did to my sandwich”) but even so, he’s capable of silently making readers laugh out loud with cartoon “Ikea Instructions” that just about every married couple can relate to, even if their own experiences assembling pressboard furniture do not end in suicide.
Meet Christeene Vale, one of the hottest drag artists in the US right now, and the weirdest thing to come out of Austin this week. If you think the Odd Future gang are shocking, then get a load of this chick. Sure, Tyler and Earl may feature blood and puke in their videos, but would they ever actually set a video inside somebody’s asshole? And as much as I like their beats, I don’t think they could make a dubstep track as downright nasty as “Slowly/Easy”. Still, they’re only teenagers and they’ve got a lot to learn about sex and sexuality. Maybe Christeene is the MC to teach them?
Christeene is the alter-ego of the artist Paul Soileau (who also performs as Rebecca Havemeyer) and since her debut in 2009 with the “Fix My Dick” clip, she has been making waves on both the gay and straight performance scenes. Although Soileau refuses to define Christeene or her “message”, others, like Skip The Make Up, have this to say:
[Even] though Soileau is of Cajun background, the way Chrsteene speaks/sings is clearly supposed to sound non-white. Therefore… the act is really him portraying a trans hooker of color who is massively fucked up and screwing to survive. You may now laugh.
While commenter TheWarholEffect defends her in the comments to the same post:
The patois you speak of is found in a variety of representations of impoverished ethnicities (incl those at least nominally labeled as white - but as you know in Louisianna whiteness ain’t monolithic, Cajuns being perhaps the best example) ... more productive, I think, would be to put Christeene alongside a performer such as Vaginal Creme Davis, whose brand of drag cultural critic Jose Esteban Munoz has branded “terrorist” drag.
Well, despite what you may think of her, you can’t deny that she’s pretty damn talented, with a lyrical flow that puts her beyond the realm of being a mere novelty act. Next weekend she will make her live debut as a showcase artist at the SXSW festival, where her video “Bustin’ Brown” will be shown as part of the Midnight Shorts schedule. Yes, “Bustin Brown” is the butt-set video. The director PJ Raval has this to say about itr:
In “Bustin’ Brown”, the fourth installment of the CHRISTEENE Video Collection, CHRISTEENE confronts the ever-present bastardization of anal sex from mainstream bourgeois heterosexuals by returning “da buh-hole” to its rightful owners.
Just when you thought drag was becoming safe and respectable! Christeene has been known to wear a butt-plug attached to helium balloons in her performance, and to set it free to sail up into the sky at the end of her shows. If you’re lucky, she might do that at SXSW. Now THAT"S something I would like to see on Jimmy Fallon!
Christeene - Bustin’ Brown (TOTALLY NSFW - duh)
“Fix My Dick and “Slowly/Easy” after the jump…
There’s more info on Christeene at her website: www.christeene.org
You can buy her EP Soldiers Of Pleasure here.
Over the past couple of years, the hyper-ascension of everyone’s favorite street artist has led to all kinds of phenomena, including the mainstreaming of the artform and, yes, its commodification.
In the case of Banksy, the adventure of anonymously creating public pieces is being matched by the similar adventure of swiping and selling them. LA Weekly photographer Ted Soqui’s report on the theft of Banksy’s Caution (after it got tagged) in East L.A. (pictured in sequence L-R above) put me in the mind of Jamaican edge-culture worker Peter Dean Rickards’s 2008 jacking of a larger piece that ol’ Mr. Anonymous tossed onto the outside wall of a Kingston pub. Rickards—who does business as Afflicted Yard—shot the video below, which also documents the amazing dynamics that can happen when a dozen Jamaican men work on the same project.
The Afflicted Yard: The Rock from Peter Dean Rickards on Vimeo.
After the jump: yes, a documentary about how to steal and sell a Banksy…
Professor Lawrence Lessig, lectures on “corruption” at Harvard’s Thinks Big forum. Essential viewing. Stay with it until the end.
The framers left open a path to amendment that doesn’t require the approval of Congress: a convention. Article V of the Constitution requires Congress to call a convention to propose amendments if 34 state legislatures demand it. Any proposed amendment would then have to be ratified by both houses of 38 state legislatures (three-fourths of the states). This entails 76 separate votes in the affirmative by two houses of 38 state legislatures. Easy to do? No. But possible? Certainly, yes. There hasn’t been a time when there has been such anger and frustration directed at our nation’s capitol. There hasn’t been a moment when the opportunity to organize to build a movement among the states has been as real. The beauty of a convention is that it would provide a forum of possibility for conservative Tea Party types who might want an amendment calling for a balanced budget, or a line-item veto for the president as well as progressives who would like to amend the constitution to make it possible to enact meaningful campaign finance reform. The only requirement is that two-thirds of the states apply, and then begins the drama of an unscripted national convention to debate questions of fundamental law. It would be a grand circus of democracy at its best.
—Lawrence Lessig and Mark McKinnon
I know all of the Charlie Sheen Internet memes are getting a bit stale, but this song by Apollo Run brings the lulz. BTW, No more Charlie Sheen nonsense on DM after this post. Hopefully.
(via TDW)
Not that this is meant to be bust-a-gut funny or anything (just to get that out of the way), here’s an early look at Tim and Eric’s budding comedic partnership from back when they were in film school at Temple University. Includes video montages, bird chasing, love and… more.
Via Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Blog!/Epic Ponyz