Bill Murray, Ken Kesey, and the video crew at the First Perennial Poetic Hoo-Haw, 1976 (photo by Clyde Keller)
 
“Everybody with his fucking hand out,” William S. Burroughs slurs, deep in his cups. He and Bill Murray are discussing the custom of bribing officials when traveling south of the border.

Murray calculates how much it will cost to keep things friendly in TJ. “We figure we’d buy off everybody in Tijuana, just give ‘em two dollars every time they came by.”

Burroughs shakes his head. “No, listen—as soon as you give ‘em two dollars, the next time they come back, they want four dollars. It’s geometric!” He pulls another smoke from his pack of Senior Service. “See, you do not get rid of people by giving them money.”

The occasion, I learn from RealityStudio, was Ken Kesey’s First Perennial Poetic Hoo Haw, held on Kesey’s farm and the University of Oregon campus in June 1976. Photographer Clyde Keller says Murray was there as part of the crew from Eugene’s KVAL-TV, and the gig may also have been related to Murray’s work with the TVTV video collective. Too bad the clip of this historic meeting, with Murray in between The National Lampoon Radio Hour and Saturday Night Live, is only a minute long.

But wait—there’s more! Keep scrolling down for the full, hour long documentary Murray and crew shot at the Hoo Haw, which turned up on YouTube about a week ago. The video includes the moment Burroughs and Murray met in Kesey’s blueberry patch, Burroughs’ reading of “When Did I Stop Wanting to Be President,” and performances by Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Watch it all, after the jump…

 
Creepy politicians and media personalities are losing their jobs and stature left and right over revelations of sexual importuning, and we fully support that (just as we support more rapey conservative policymakers stepping into the light of the shining beacon that was Dan Johnson—grab that brass ring, Roy, you’ve got nothing left to lose!). And yet, open, unreconstructed, virulent racism no longer costs anyone face—it’s become a positive boon in right wing careering. For nostalgia’s sake, we decided to revisit an incident when a conservative figure lost his job for a racist remark, albeit one that went on to bear some rather unlikely but utterly glorious cultural fruit.

In the 1970s, Earl Butz was Secretary of Agriculture under GOP Presidents Nixon and Ford. He was a reactionary anti-New Dealer whose ridiculously pro-corporate policies arguably were main drivers of an environmental crisis North America now faces due to the various pollutants created by massive-scale factory farming, but his most memorable contribution to our culture was a terribly rude remark: When asked by I shit you not Pat Boone in 1976 to explain why African Americans tended not to vote Republican (I want to know how even Pat Boone could be that clueless—seriously how is that even a question?), he replied, “I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.”

That’s right: he actually said “the coloreds.” MAN, those were different times.

Initial reportage of the remark protected Butz’s identity, attributing the quote to “a Cabinet officer.” But once the remark’s author was outed, he resigned. He continued to serve the nation as an unholy piece of shit, being convicted of tax evasion and serving on agri-business boards of directors, until society was at long last relieved of him permanently in 2008. But his infamous remark proved enduring.
 

 
Loose Shoes is a comedy anthology movie roughly in the vein of The Groove Tube or Kentucky Fried Movie, except that unlike those films, Loose Shoes really, really sucks. It was shot in 1977, but not released until 1980—it was saved from obscurity by Bill Murray. A pre-fame Murray acted in one of its sketches, and as he had gone on to fame as Chevy Chase’s replacement in Saturday Night Live and the star of Meatballs and Caddyshack, disingenuous marketing claimed Loose Shoes as, ahem, “a Bill Murray movie.” None of the sketches are especially funny or memorable—not even Murray’s—save for one, the film’s closing set piece, “Dark Town After Dark,” an INSANE and wonderful fuck you to Butz, in the form of a Cab Calloway style revue embedded within a parody of ’30s black cinema! This clip is brilliant enough to justify the film’s existence—it features NY stage and character actor David Downing as the Calloway clone who dwells in abject poverty until MOVIE MAGIC™ transforms him into the singer of the film’s namesake song. It’s an incredible jazz arrangement performed by a fine (and sadly, uncredited) band, creatively shot, and sepia-toned to maintain a ’30s feel. I warn you: after you watch this, the obscene chorus will be stuck in your head indefinitely.
 

 

 
Here’s a rather more baffling take on the comment—one that not only pre-dates Loose Shoes’ release, but comes from The Netherlands. G.T. Walls is a singer about whom I can find almost no information except that he’s Dutch, and that he released in 1977 an album uncleverly titled Rhythm and Booze, which featured at the close of its A side a song called “A Tight Pussy, Loose Shoes And A Warm Place To Shit,” which was released as a single the following year. It features contributions from Holland’s somewhat better-known Arnie Treffers, and while it’s not remotely as catchy as the song in “Dark Town After Dark,” it boasts a pleasant enough ragtime influence.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Nothing Lasts Forever’: Bill Murray in ‘lost’ sci-fi comedy set in a totalitarian New York City
‘Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary: Language of Jive’ (1939)

Bill Murray tending bar at SXSW in 2010
 
Time Out New York‘s Christina Izzo reported yesterday that Bill Murray would be tending bar on Saturday and Sunday evening at 21 Greenpoint, a Brooklyn restaurant owned by Syd Silver and Bill’s son Homer Murray.

Murray has some experience tending bar—as was widely reported at the time, in 2010 he infamously materialized with Wu-Tang Clan at the Austin bar Shangri-La during SXSW and spontaneously started sloshing tequila into every shot glass he could find before retiring to a corner to hang out with GZA. (Hey, nobody said that Murray was actually good at bartending….)

The news from Time Out New York had the effect of bedazzling those star-struck would-be dipsomaniacs into thinking they’d have Murray running back and forth all evening doling out tequila shots, but alas, the story’s been updated with the news that the two evenings are “a private event” and are “invite-only.” Good luck scoring an invite!

Well, think of it this way, if it were truly open to the public, the place would have been mobbed by thousands of Garfield fans, and who needs that?

Here’s footage of Bill Murray tending bar six years ago at SXSW in Austin:

 
via Consequence of Sound
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Bill Murray and Christopher Guest cover Super Bowl X, 1976
Wu-Tang Clan and Bill Murray plan to steal their album back from Martin Shkreli

 
Some quick ‘n’ dirty animation, a few cleverly pinched audio clips from Rushmore and Coffee and Cigarettes and you’ve got a full-blown operation, to perpetrate a heist on the one motherfucker in the world who needs to get boosted.

You know exactly the motherfucker I mean.
 

The Motherfucker
 
This immensely satisfying animated video comes from ProbCause TV.

Enjoy.
 

 
Thanks to Lawrence Daniel Caswell!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Wu-Tang Bang!: ‘The Man With The Iron Fists’ directed by RZA
Wu-Tang knit sweater

 
In 1974 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was working on a documentary on National Lampoon magazine that was never completed. In the 1970s National Lampoon was quite the comedy force, producing radio shows, comedy albums, and live theater shows alongside the publication—the movies would come later and have as much impact as anything they did. In these brief clips, released yesterday by the CBC, you can see three future stars of Saturday Night Live (original title NBC’s Saturday Night) in Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, and John Belushi on the cusp of superstardom.

Note that the guy in the first clip is Brian Doyle Murray, Bill’s older brother—Bill’s the one with the full beard. Cavorting with the aforementioned are comedy luminaries Joe Flaherty (in some of the footage wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey) and Harold Ramis, who would both soon contribute to the glories of SCTV, Ramis as the show’s original head writer. Ramis of course would go on to be a legendary movie director, writer, and actor, playing a part in the success of Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, Knocked Up, National Lampoon’s Animal House, and so on.

Boy, I wish everyone on SNL today had those exact same haircuts.
 

 
via Salon

Tubbs & Edward from The League of Gentlemen

UK-based advertising and design company A Large Evil Corporation has these amazing vinyl dolls they’re creating daily for their blog to get into the Halloween spirit. I’m completely drooling over the The League of Gentlemen and Mighty Boosh vinyl toys. I never thought in a million years I’d see Tubbs and Edward dolls! They’re just brilliant!

Keep checking out A Large Evil Corporation’s blog as they’re adding new ones all the time. I’m curious as who or what they’ll do next (and if one can purchase these masterpieces? It’s unclear.) Maybe a Jill Tyrell figure (played by Julia Davis) from the dark British comedy Nighty Night?

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
 

Christopher Walken
 

The Hitcher from The Mighty Boosh
 

The Torrances from The Shining
 
More after the jump…
 

 
Readers “of a certain age” will fondly recall the “Schiller’s Reel” segments that aired during the early years of SNL right up until 1990. Both Gary Weis and Albert Brooks had previously directed short films (shot on film) for SNL, but when Tom Schiller, one of the show’s original writers, came into the picture the “film” segment was dubbed “Schiller’s Reel” and later “SchillerVision.”

Some of the most iconic moments of the show’s entire tenure were from “Schiller’s Reel” such as his pitch-perfect Fellini parody, “La Dolce Gilda” (with Gilda Radner as a neurotic European actress in exquisite existential agony), “The Acid Generation Where Are They Now?” “Java Junkie” (with Teri Garr and Peter Ackroyd as the caffeine fiend) and “Don’t Look Back in Anger” (an elderly John Belushi who has outlived all of his SNL costars makes a trip to the “Not Ready for Primetime Cemetery” and dances on their graves.) In his SNL segments, the director proved himself to be a master of many cinematic genres, a mimic, if you will, of movie styles throughout the decades. Unfortunately, not a lot of them have been posted online.
 

“Java Junkie”

Thankfully there is a good quality copy of Tom Schiller’s wonderful short film “Love is a Dream,” made for SNL with Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks and producer/cinematographer Neal Marshad (followed by more SchillerVision goodness):
 

 
In 1984, Tom Schiller made his feature film debut with a terrifically ambitious and idiosyncratic little movie titled Nothing Lasts Forever, the tale of a young man (Zach Galligan from Gremlins) who aspires to become “an artist” but whose lofty ambitions are foiled by the Port Authority of New York who run Manhattan like a totalitarian state. He fails the test for a “creativity license” and they assign him to direct traffic at the Holland Tunnel. The film is shot mostly in black and white, with limited but effective use of color and deftly used cut-ins from from vintage movies, giving it a uniquely timeless feel (especially for a film made in the 1980s).

Nothing Lasts Forever is similar in some respects to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, with its depiction of a bureaucracy run amok, but with a hefty dollop of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 thrown in for good measure: While the Port Authority may run New York City like a police state, it’s really a fraternal order of benevolent Illuminati tramps who are calling all the shots. There’s also a bus trip to the moon and true love. Along the way are vivid cameo appearances from Bill Murray as a suspicious bus conductor, Eddie Fisher playing himself as a broke lounge act, Dan Aykroyd as Zach’s uptight manager, Mort Sahl, Lawrence Tierney, Imogene Coca and Larry “Bud” Melman. Lauren Tom (later of Friends) plays the intergalactic love interest. John Belushi was to have played a small role in the film, but died six weeks before photography began.
 

 
Nothing Lasts Forever is as difficult to see as Tom Schiller’s SNL shorts. In fact, the film was never given a proper theatrical release to begin with. It was screened once—once—for a test audience in Seattle who gave it the thumbs down and then shelved. For reasons perhaps having to do with clearing the vintage footage Nothing Lasts Forever has never been released on VHS or on DVD, either, although it’s been screened on the German TCM channel in a dubbed version titled “Alles ist vergänglich” (a version has made the rounds on Demonoid that used that retracked with a visually inferior English language VHS bootleg’s soundtrack). From time to time Tom Schiller, who has gone on to direct over 500 television commercials (I’d love to know which ones) will appear at a screening of the film or Bill Murray will request that it be screened at a retrospective honoring him. Barring one of those rare screenings, you can watch Nothing Lasts Forever, where else, on YouTube:
 

 
Bill Maher was on a roll last Friday with a “New Rules” rant about a—ahem—maximum wage. It’s an idea whose time has come.

Did you know that during World War II, FDR actually proposed a cap on income that in today’s dollars would mean that no person could ever take home more than about $300,000? OK, that is a little low. But wouldn’t it be great if there were Democrats out there like that now, who would say to billionaires, “Oh, you’re crying?  We’ll give you something to cry about. You don’t want a minimum wage?  How about we not only have a minimum wage, we have a maximum wage?”

That is not a new idea.  James Madison, who wrote our Constitution, said, “Government should prevent an immoderate accumulation of riches.”  Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, they all agreed that too much money in the hands of too few would destroy democracy.

Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison… those guys the Tea partiers are always (selectively) quoting…

This clip is not only worth watching, it’s worth sharing with other people and encouraging them to watch it and pass it on themselves if they deem it worthy. When “the situation” the United States finds itself in, at this point in history, can be summed up so succinctly and be understood so readily by the man on the street, real change is coming. Maher articulates this matter masterfully, indeed. A very few people at the top have engineered it so that the spoils of Wall Street and the capitalist system flow to THEM and ONLY TO THEM. These lucky, er, bastards then promptly kicked the ladder out from underneath the rest of us with the help of both political parties. (Clinton signed NAFTA, ‘nuff said.)

Writing at Daily Kos, Lawrence Lewis nicely summed up another facet of “the American predicament” which has become so incredibly obvious over the past few decades, the Republican Party’s transparent fealty to the wealthy to the detriment of the working man’s lot (mind you, not that the Democrats are all that much better. They’re just not Republicans.). It is an actual class war that they’re waging, and it’s becoming more and more difficult for them to deceive their base about what they’re up to with just the standard GOP tropes of pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Jesus and anti-gay, anti-immigrant rhetoric, when the lives of their constituents are crumbling:

The final piece of the puzzle is the Republican focus on making life more difficult for those who do have work. Republicans oppose increasing the minimum wage. They want even the employed to know economic want. Republicans oppose workplace safety regulations, and they want to destroy unions. They want workers completely subject to the whims of management, and unable to quit lousy jobs because there are no good alternatives and there is no social safety net to protect them. Under the Republican agenda, workers have to do what they’re told or suffer even worse consequences.

In short, the Republican agenda is to keep people desperate for work, with more people seeking jobs than can find them, with no laws or other forms of assistance or protection for those who can find jobs, and no safety net for those who can’t. Lack of opportunity ensures a glutted labor market, which drives down wages, forcing many of even those who do find work to seek more. Exhausting hours, inadequate pay, and broken unions ensure that workers are hungry and tired and incapable of defending themselves.

It could be called a new form of feudalism, but that feudalism actually made necessary more responsibility from the aristocracy toward the peasants and serfs than does unregulated bastard capitalism from owners and management toward labor. It is class warfare. Simple, straightforward, class warfare. For Republicans, poverty, hunger, and unemployment are not tributary outcomes of their economic model, they are deliberate means toward insidious ends. Make people hurt. Make them desperate. They will do what they are told. They will ask for no more than that they be allowed to survive another week.

Or so Republicans hope.

Everyone is starting to realize exactly—and if not exactly exactly, then CLOSE ENOUGH—what’s going down.

It simply can’t continue on like this. It’s not going to.

[And if you haven’t heard about this guy, he’ll blow your mind. Ladies and gentlemen, meet THE PERFECT Republican spokesperson, Josh Miller of Arkansas. Keep talking buddy, you are doin’ the Lord’s work…]
 

 
UPDATE: As posted on the Dangerous Minds Facebook page (thank you Eric Blahbson) Jello Biafra on the maximum wage:
 

 
A young Bill Murray stars as The Human Torch, aka Johnny Storm, in this 1975 radio adaptation of The Fantastic Four, narrated by Stan Lee.

This episode is #4 “Dreaded Doctor Doom.” You can listen to the whole series (10 eps) here.

‘Nuff said?
 

 
Via Scheme 9

 
The Thrill Murray Colouring-in Book has a delightful selection of 23 illustrations, by artists including James Burgess, Alice Devine, Logan Fitzpatrick, Hattie Stewart, Brooke Olsen and Bridget Meyne, to paint, crayon, or pencil over. The images are taken from some of Murray’s finest films including, Groundhog Day, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Lost in Translation. What a beautiful way to celebrate the lovely Bill Murray, and I certainly want one.

Thrill Murray: A Colouring-In Book is published by Belly Kids at £6.99(GBP), and you can order your copy here.
 

 

 
Via Design Week with thanks to Scheme Comix
 

 
Happy Birthday John Belushi, who would have been 62 today. Born in 1949, Belushi’s big break came in 1971 when he joined The Second City comedy troupe in Chicago. Cast alongside Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest in National Lampoon’s Lemmings (which Richard Metzger wrote a great article on last year), Belushi’s natural comic talents shone. He moved to New York, with his girlfriend Judy Jacklin, and became a regular on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, working with such future Saturday Night Live performers Gilda Radner and Bill Murray. The rest we know.

It’ll be SNL and The Blues Brothers that Belushi will be remembered for best, and watching clips of his TV or film work now, only re-enforces what is so sad about his early demise.
 

 
Previously on DM

 
Bonus clips plus interview with Belushi and Dan Ackroyd after the jump…
 

 
The Lizard King has an epiphany and starts channeling Bill Murray…all the way from the future.

Great minds meld outside of time. Can ya dig pure unbounded joy?