Very much like “Monopoly,” the enduringly popular board game “Clue” (known as “Cluedo” in the civilized world) has goosed its sales by offering niche-y special editions, mostly for franchises with heavy geek appeal—Firefly, Harry Potter, D&D, Game of Thrones, even that god damn Big Bang Theory crap. But somehow the gaming world has been mighty lean on Twin Peaks tie-ins. I searched in vain for board games, card games, video games, anything. I find this baffling—a murder mystery with a massive ensemble of odd characters would seem a natural for a board game, but evidently the only one that ever existed was regarded very poorly and is now a bit difficult to come by, even in internetland.

So I would Kickstart the absolute living hell out of this: way back in 2007, a Craftster forum user by the handle of “riverwatson” posted a detourned Twin Peaks version of “Clue,” renaming the conservatory, kitchen, study et al things like “The Red Room,” “One Eyed Jack’s,” “The Palmer Residence,” and subbing the show’s characters in for Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet and Colonel Mustard. (I hope it goes without saying that Laura Palmer is Mr. Boddy?)
 

 

 
More after the jump…

Malls are not the center of our cultural sphere anymore. They’re not new and shiny. We’ve moved on, and now we have the Internet. ~ Michael Galinsky

For the past few years I’ve seen these photos making the rounds on the Internet—usually uncredited—and I never really knew their provenance, but I was always intrigued by them. Well now I know where they’re from. The photos, of American malls and the folks who occupied them, were shot back in 1989 by the then 20-year-old photographer and student, Michael Galinsky.

Starting in the winter of 1989 with the Smith Haven Mall in Garden City Long Island, Galinsky photographed malls from North Carolina to South Dakota, Washington State and beyond. The photos he took capture life in these malls as it began to shift from the shiny excess of the 1980s towards an era of slackers and grunge culture.

Malls Across America is filled with seemingly lost or harried families navigating their way through these temples of consumerism, along with playful teens, misfits, and the aged with best ps3 bluetooth headset. There is a sense of claustrophobia to the images, even in those that hint at wide commercial expanses – a wall or a ceiling is always there to block the horizon. These photos never settle or focus on any one detail, creating the sense that they are stolen records of the most immediate kind.

The images are nostalgic as hell and bring me back to the days of Aqua Net hairspray, food courts and acid-washed jeans.

If you’d like to see more images like this, they’re available in Galinsky’s book Malls Across America.

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Klaus Kinski had the look of man of a man possessed—a cross between Iggy Pop and a comic book psychopath. It was a look that could convince the unwary he had just escaped from Arkham asylum and was now out for bloody revenge. It was a look earned by painful experience which hid the deeply troubled and sensitive artist underneath.

In truth, Kinski’s mental health was an issue. In the 1950s, he spent three days in a psychiatric hospital where the preliminary diagnosis was schizophrenia—the “conclusion psychopathy.”

He attempted suicide first with an overdose of morphine tablets and then a few days later with an overdose of sleeping pills. One doctor wrote that Kinski was “a danger to the public”:

His speech is violent. In this, his self-centred and incorrigible personality is evident as one that can’t blend in civil circumstances. He remains consistent to his egocentric world view and declares all others prejudiced [...] The patient hasn’t had a job in one year, but still speaks confidently of the new film in which he will star.

Another doctor concluded the young actor showed “signs of severe mental illness.” After a series of insulin treatments, Kinski was released. He believed he was being persecuted which made him all the more determined to make a success of his life.

A few years later, Kinski established himself as an up-and-coming actor in Vienna. But his volatile personality—the anger, the passion that fueled his performances—caused him to be labeled as too difficult. To compensate, and keep a roof over his head, he performed one-man shows reciting Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Francois Villon.

He found some financial security as a bit player in movies—most notably the spaghetti western For a Few Dollars More and war films such as A Time to Love and a Time to Die and The Counterfeit Traitor. But Kinski had a talent and an ego that inspired him to hold bolder, greater, more personal ambitions.
 

 
In 1971, Kinski hired the Deutschlandhalle to perform his own 30-page interpretation of the life of Jesus Christ—Jesus Christus Erlöser (“Jesus Christ Saviour”). It was no ordinary show. It attracted an audience of diametrically opposed fans—radical students, religious followers and those intrigued to just see the “madman Kinski” did next.

A production about Jesus Christ by one of Germany’s most notorious actors was bound to cause confusion and controversy. Some of the audience seemed to think Kinski was evangelizing, rather than interpreting a role. This led to constant heckling from the spectators. The Christians thought he was blaspheming. Those on the Left thought he was a snake oil salesman for Christianity. Kinski was doing none of this. His Christ was part Kinski, part revolutionary, and part troubled soul. As the audience heckled, Kinski responded to the abuse, as Twitch Film notes:

[A]fter someone stated that shouting down people who disagreed with him was unlike Christ, Kinski responded with a different take on how Christ might respond: “No, he didn’t say ‘shut your mouths’, he took a whip and beat them. That’s what he did, you stupid sow!”

He challenged the audience: “can’t you see that when someone lectures thirty typewritten pages of text in this way, that you must shut your mouths? If you can’t see that, please let someone bang it into your brain with a hammer!” The evening’s festivities also turned physical as an audience member is shown getting bounced from the stage by a bodyguard. Someone responds that “Kinski just let his bodyguard push a peaceful guy, who only wanted to have a discussion, down the stairs! That is a fascist statement, Kinski is a fascist, a psychopath!”

 

 
Kinski was unbowed:

I’m not the official Church-Christ, who is accepted by policemen, bankers, judges, executioners, officers, church-heads, politicians and other representatives of the powers that be. - I’m not your super-star!

In a filmed interview, Kinski was asked whether in light of the popularity of such shows as Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell if he was merely riding a fashionable wave to win popularity. Kinski replied he’d had the idea of making a play out of Christ’s life for some time.

I originally had this idea twenty years ago. When I was six years old I received my only praise…usually I got punished in school…I got praised because I learnt the New Testament by heart, I didn’t really understand it but I was just good at learning texts by heart. But accusing me of riding a popular wave is just plain stupid—it was already in the papers twelve years ago that I’m going to interpret the New Testament and already twelve years ago people were annoyed with me because of that. And what do you mean by “riding the popular wave”? I’m a good rider, but on a horse.

Kinski thought the church distorted the New Testament “with murderous intent—because the church, as everyone knows, did interpret it to fit their intentions.”
 
More Klaus Kinski after the jump…

Van Halen during their ‘house band’ era at the Sunset Strip club, Gazzarri’s (mid-1970s).
 

“One day, we’re going to be the the Kings of Gazzarri’s.”

—A teenage David Lee Roth accurately predicting Van Halen’s future

 
The person who uploaded the audio of Van Halen performing as a “cover band” places the year at 1975—not long after VH had transitioned from the name Mammoth, and were in the process of blowing the fuck up after Sunset Strip club Gazzarri’s (RIP) gave the band their first big break.
 

David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen on stage at Gazzarri’s, mid-70s.
 
 
An early shot of Van Halen and the band’s first logo design created by original VH bassist, Mark Stone (Stone is pictured to the far left).
 
And when I say big break, I mean that before Gazzarri’s, DLR and the boys were literally playing house parties and high schools. After getting the green-light to play Gazzarri’s by the club’s owner, Bill Gazzarri (who initially didn’t like the band, he later maintained that Van Halen was the best band to every play there), the band became Gazzarri’s house band playing the club several nights a week and would often run the dance contests held at Sunset Strip club. VH vocalist David Lee Roth recalls that in addition to getting paid $75-$125 bucks a night, another perk was getting to watch Gazzarri’s famous “Go-Go” dancers who also performed at the club regularly. It was a huge upgrade from their usual gigs. 1975 sounds like it was a pretty sweet time if your name was (or was associated with), “Van Halen.”

VH drummer Alex Van Halen remembers that the “crowd” at the band’s first gig at Gazzarri’s consisted of about four fans. Van Halen would go on to play approximately 90 gigs at Gazzarri’s to ever-growing crowds before Eddie Van Halen told Bill Gazzarri that they were “never going to get anywhere” by honing their ability to kick out disco jams like the 1975 hit by KC and the Sunshine band, “Get Down Tonight.” And as much as I love that song (I don’t judge and neither should you), he wasn’t wrong. Sometime in 1976 KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer met up with KISS loudmouth Gene Simmons to see one of VH’s gigs at Gazzarri’s. Simmons dug what he heard and got the band to record a demo, but things didn’t pan out. Luckily, Warner Brothers Records producer Ted Templeman (the famous voice behind the line “Come on Dave, give me a break” from the Van Halen’s 1981 classic “Unchained”) caught a live gig of the still under-the-radar band, and ushered the boys into the studio to record what would become VH’s seminal debut record, 1978’s Van Halen.

As I’m a huge fan of digging up interesting historical rock and roll artifacts, I have to say I was super entertained listening to 32 minutes of the then-emerging young Van Halen covering songs by David Bowie (specifically “The Jean Genie” during which Roth amusingly confesses to forgetting the lyrics), Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, and “Twist and Shout”—all while emceeing one of Gazzarri’s many dance contests. While the audio isn’t good (and the band doesn’t really sound that great either), it truly has its priceless moments. Mostly due the antics of the then just 21-year-old “Mr. Entertainment” David Lee Roth. I’ve included a number of photos of Van Halen’s days at Gazzarri’s as well as a few cool other artifacts from that mythical time when it seemed that most people in LA didn’t know who Van Halen was. Yet.
 
Much more early Van Halen after the jump…

 
Beloved inspiration to the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, Morrissey, and countless trans people the world over, Candy Darling surely had one of the most poignant stories of the tumultuous and influential 1965-1975 “Warhol New York” period.

Born James Lawrence Slattery in Queens in 1944—the year of her birth is actually disputed—Candy met Warhol in 1967 while appearing in Jackie Curtis’ play Glamour, Glory and Gold, which also starred a young actor named Robert De Niro playing six parts (!). A year later Candy appeared in Warhol’s Flesh, after which her career took off.

Over the next few years, she would travel all over the world as one of the most alluring new stars of the alternative entertainment circuit. Tennessee Williams himself urged Candy to appear in his play Small Craft Warnings—Williams himself would opt to act in the ill-fated production midway through rehearsals—and she appeared in Alan Pakula’s Klute as well as a Sophia Loren movie called Lady Liberty. She would, of course, also work with Warhol again, in the Paul Morrissey-directed 1971 satire Women in Revolt. 
 

Candy Darling in Tom Eyen’s The White Whore and the Bit Player, 1973
 
Almost exactly a year before her tragic death of lymphoma in March 1974 at the tender age of 29, Candy acted in a low-budget revival of a 1964 play called The White Whore and the Bit Player by Tom Eyen, a prolific writer who for many years worked out of La MaMa in the East Village. In 1970 he scored a hit with the attention-getting title The Dirtiest Play in Town.

Premiering just two years after Marilyn Monroe’s probable death by suicide in the summer of 1962, The White Whore and the Bit Player was a work that endeavored to represent the subjective state of a blonde movie goddess just moments before her own death by barbiturate overdose—the parallels to the recently departed Marilyn would have been hard to miss in 1973, much less 1964.

The decision to cast Candy Darling in the role—nobody could have known that she would be dead just 13 months later—understandably acts as a spur to contemplate some parallels between Candy and Marilyn. At a minimum, both Candy and Marilyn were creatures of inordinate fabulousness who were taken from us much too early and whose lives contained no small amount of showbiz glamour as well as emotional tumult. As the title suggests, The White Whore and the Bit Player explored the virgin/whore dichotomy—in the play, the main character is sent to a sanitarium run by Franciscan nuns and develops split personalities, namely her own self as a nun and as a whore.
 

 
The 1973 production of The White Whore and the Bit Player ran for two weeks in February 1973 at the Theatre at St. Clements on West 46th Street. The production was directed by Manuel Martin. According to Thomas S. Hischack’s American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1969-2000, Eyen’s play had often been performed in Spanish, and in the St. Clements production of 1973, the eighteen showings alternated between Spanish and English.

The show was not a great success, alas. In his review of the show, Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold averred that Candy Darling’s performance was somewhat better than the production:
 

Miss Candy is fascinating to watch, one of the very few convincing women of her type on the stage these days. But at the moment ... she is fulfilling the director’s play rather than the author’s. Her presence is magnetic, but her performance lacks the nuance and drive I’ve seen her bring to other productions.

 
More after the jump…

 
On September 16, 1979, the Stranglers held a cricket match to promote their new album The Raven and raise money for Capital Radio’s charity Help A London Child. They assembled a black-clad group of punk and reggae musicians to face a team made up of their usual adversaries and objects of abuse: rock journalists. Earlier that year, JJ Burnel had gaffer-taped writer Philippe Manoeuvre to the Eiffel Tower (Burnel: “it was only about 300 feet up”) and left him there, with his pants pooled around his ankles. “He wasn’t best pleased,” Jet Black remembers.

Cricket is played by teams of eleven, but the Stranglers were only four. To fill themselves out to the Stranglers XI for the charity match, the band recruited members of Motörhead, the Damned, X-Ray Spex, Flying Lizards, Steel Pulse, and other bands—a lot of people, according to their opponents in the Music Press XI, who claimed they saw a few supernumerary players on the field. Even Eddy Grant was on the massive team of rockers (“as many as 40 [...] at any one time,” the NME reported) that assembled at Paddington Recreation Ground on that storied day.
 

via Aural Sculptors
 
Lemmy showed up with a note from his doctor excusing him from the match because of a wart on his foot, but he lent his team moral and chemical support, while Kate Bush cancelled, according to Hugh Cornwell’s account in The Stranglers: Song by Song:

That was a fantastic event. [The Stranglers’ publicist] Alan Edwards came up with the idea of playing against the music press and managed to secure Brondesbury cricket ground in north London. Our team were dressed head to toe in black and wore black pads, black gloves and black caps. We even used black bats.

Kate Bush was going to play but pulled out. Lemmy turned up but had injured himself and had a sick note from his doctor, which was quite funny. He said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be watching on the boundary. If anyone needs a pick-up, my friend has a bag of whizz!’

Jet played and maybe John did. Some of the Finchley Boys played and a couple of members of the Damned. It just so happened that a friend of our dealer at the time had been a Hampshire [C]olt and was a demon fast bowler in his youth, so we got him out of retirement.

We batted first, with Jet and one of the large Finchley Boys opening the batting. We were all out quite cheaply, but managed to secure a tie because when the other team batted we kept sneaking on extra fielders to stop the run flow.

The opposition started complaining, but it was all for charity, so it got a bit ridiculous. The funniest point was when Richard Williams, who was editor of Melody Maker, came out to bat. He was brimming with confidence and had very expensive new equipment and strode out looking very professional. But our dealer clean bowled him almost immediately and Richard became very upset.

 

via Aural Sculptors
 
The blog Aural Sculptors has three press clippings about the match, and all of them contradict Cornwell on its outcome (“a fairly comprehensive drubbing,” the NME reported; “the Stranglers [...] spent a lot of their time lying down and threatening to take the bus home”), but at least Record Mirror corroborates Lemmy’s “bag of whizz”:

The Motorhead bit of the team had to keep vanishing behind bushes and under trucks. I really couldn’t figure out if this was for Lemmy to rest or to have some more talcum on his feet which he kept whipping out from the little paper bag. At least [I think] it was talcum, you never can tell with these rowdier boys.

Continues after the jump…

 
This remarkable footage of Pink Floyd live at “The Amsterdam Rock Circus” was shot on May 22, 1972. The festival was held at Olympic Stadium and the other acts included Donovan, Gene Clark, Dr. John, The New Riders Of The Purple Sage and Buddy Miles. Pink Floyd were the headliners.

This admittedly ragged, yet still quite compelling document is notable for so many reasons: First of all, there is so very little footage of Pink Floyd just before (and after) The Dark Side of the Moon came out in 1973. They were obviously a pretty well-documented band from the very start of their career, but there’s only a small amount of live visual Floyd material from this particular era.
 

 
Second, the band is on fucking fire here. Please don’t take my word for it. It starts with an orchestra-less “Atom Heart Mother” (which includes a berserk David Gilmour guitar solo) and then goes into an extra dramatic and extra heavy “Careful with that Axe, Eugene” complete with a massive “festival-sized” pyrotechnics display during “the scream” bit. From the looks of the pyre they had going on there, this cool-as-shit conflagration probably singed some fringe off at least a few of the hippies in attendance that night. There was more fire during Nick Mason’s drum solo as he pounds on a giant flame-encircled gong. They also do “Saucerful of Secrets.”
 

 
Lastly, it was the final ever live performance of “Atom Heart Mother.”

Keep reading after the jump…

 
On August 30th, Criterion will release Blu-ray and DVD editions of Orson Welles’ The Immortal Story. This 1968 work was Welles’ first color picture and would also prove to be the last fiction film he completed, as well as his shortest feature at 58 minutes. It was originally produced for French television and ran at just 48 minutes, though the English-language version, which hit U.S. theatres in 1969, is ten minutes longer.

Criterion has produced a newly restored, 4K digital transfer of the English-language cut, but the French-language TV version will be included, as well. Criterion is also readying the restored version of Chimes at Midnight, Orson’s 1966 film, which has recently been making the rounds in art house theatres. Both films star Welles and actress Jeanne Moreau.
 

 

Stills of Welles and Moreau in ‘The Immortal Story.’

The Criterion releases will mark the first time either picture has been made available on home video in the U.S. Pre-order both through Criterion’s website. Amazon has listings for The Immortal Story and Chimes at Midnight, though they can’t be pre-ordered just yet.

Here’s a restored clip from The Immortal Story:
 

 
H/T: Wellesnet

 
George Harrison’s 1976 hit “Crackerbox Palace,” the second single from his Thirty Three & 1/3 album, is one of those vaguely worded songs (Sample lyric: “Sometimes are good . . . sometimes are bad. That’s all a part of life”) that could be just about anything. It’s a happy little tune that you could project just about any happy thoughts onto while you hum along.

In actual fact, the song was written about his visit to the Los Angeles home of the great Beatnik comic, Lord Buckley, after a chance meeting with Buckley’s former manager George Grief in France. Harrison was a big admirer of Buckley (as was Frank Zappa) and thought the name of his house would make a great song title. The song includes references to both George Greif (“I met a Mr. Greif”) and to his Lordship (“know that the Lord is well and inside of you”).
 

 
Monty Python member Eric Idle directed a promo film for “Crackerbox Palace” that was shown on SNL (along with another for “This Song”) that featured Neil Innes (in drag and in other weird costumes). Harrison appeared—as himself and as “Pirate Bob” his sea-shanty singing alter ego—on Idle and Innes’ BBC Rutland Weekend Television, on the show’s Christmas special.
 

A compilation of Harrison’s bits on the ‘Rutland Weekend Television’ Christmas special
 
Continues after the jump…

 
Come on, you know you’ve thought to yourself, “I wonder if there’s a way to lick my cat and groom him or her at the same time?” We’ve all been there with similar thoughts, right? Well never fear, ‘cause your kitty-lovin’ hopes and dreams have been answered with this innovative new pet brush called the Licki Brush! Yep. It’s a tongue-shaped brush that allows you to lick your cat just like a cat would! It also prevents YOU from getting hairballs. Win/win?

 
Now this could very well be a joke product. But it’s 2016 and I put nothing past anyone. Nothing. Especially on the Internet. So far there’s just this website for the Licki Brush. It might be a real thing. I’ll keep you posted here, on Dangerous Minds, as I know you’re all on pins and needles.

Watch the Licki Brush in action, below:

 
via Bored Panda