Bill Maher slapped down the GOP last night, for calling the Occupy Wall Street protesters “hippies”. Maher made his comments at the end of the “New Rules” section of his Real Time show:

And finally, New Rule: Republicans have to stop calling the Wall Street protesters “hippies”.  Yes, they’re peeing outdoors, and having sex in sleeping bags, or as Bristol Palin calls it, “dating”.  But they’re not hippies!

The hippies are all gone.  Woodstock was 42 years ago.  Forget the brown acid, the people who were at Woodstock are now taking the blue Viagra.  “Turn on, tune in, drop out”, refers to their hearing aids.  Wavy Gravy is 75 years old.  He’s making wavy gravy in his pants.

Maher continued by saying how he had visited the OWS in Washington DC, last Saturday and had found:

Everyone was extraordinarily well-behaved, and contrary to reports, I was not offered a single marijuana cigarette.  And I’m a little insulted.  All right, someone did give me a magic mushroom, and it did blow my mind, and I thank you, Senator McConnell.  And sorry about your eyebrows, I’m sure they’ll grow back.

Anyway, the next morning, when I woke up bloody and naked in the woods, I had a relevation… I mean, a revelation.  Of course conservatives want to make this about hippies, because they like to live in the past!  Rush Limbaugh, who really is too square to be a drug addict, said, “When the free drugs run out, when the free sex runs out, they’ll get bored and move on to something else.”

Oh that’s right, Grandpa.  Look at them, strumming their sitars and wearing dungarees.  Whatever happened to the good old days of segregation and date rape?  But I get it.  You’re bitter because we fought a culture war in the ‘60s and the Right lost.  Rick Santorum is like that Japanese soldier on the island who doesn’t know the war is over, so he’s still fighting against birth control and butt sex.

Plus, Republicans are now mostly a Southern party, and if there’s one thing Southerners don’t do well, it’s lose a war and get over it. The ideals of the youth movement became assimilated into American society.  That’s why we have gays in the military now, and pre-natal yoga classes, and tofurkey.  And that’s why Rick Santorum will never be President, and a black guy who snorted cocaine is.

Maher went on to explain how the people who are occupying locations across the US are not the counter-culture:

These people down there, they’re not the counter-culture.  They’re the culture. They don’t want free love.  They want paid employment. They don’t hate capitalism.  They hate what’s been done to it.

And they resent the Republican mantra that the market perfectly rewards the hard-working and punishes the lazy, and the poor are just jealous moochers who want a handout.  Yeah, because if there’s one group of people who hate handouts, it’s Wall Street.

Maher’s comments are apt as a breakdown of people taking part in OWS shows that while two-thirds identified themselves as under the age of 35, 13% are aged between 35-45, and 20% are over the age of 45.

50% of protesters were in full employment, 20% were part-time workers, and the remaining 30%, just under half 13.1% said they were unemployed.

This is hardly the hippies the GOP is helping the media to portray.

Transcript of Bill Maher’s commentary here.
 

 
Via Alter Net
 

 
Color photographs and footage of London’s Carnaby Street from 1968. Doesn’t look all that swinging, does it?
 

 

 

 

 
Via How to be a Retronaut
 

 
The Rum Diary is the product of hugely talented people. It’s based on a book by Hunter Thompson and stars one of Thompson’s biggest fans and acolytes Johnny Depp who also produced the film. In Bruce Robinson it has a director and screenwriter that is responsible for one of the best comedies of the past three decades, the hilariously bleak Withnail And I. This is the coolest trio since Cream broke up.

Pulling The Rum Diary out of development hell (for years studios tried to get the film off the ground) was obviously a labor of love for Depp and that may be why it doesn’t work as well as it might have. Depp’s love for Thompson could be the problem here. Love is blind… or at the very least nearsighted. Depp’s approach to Thompson is too cautious, too safe, too reverent. I think if Thompson were alive he would have instructed Depp to loosen up, too untighten his ass and go for it…gonzo-style.

The Rum Diary wants us to enter Thompson’s deliriously intoxicated world, but it’s just too damn tidy and slick for its own good. The squalor, mayhem and debauchery lacks any genuine sense of danger and the delirium is never delirious enough. And I’m definitely not buying into the film’s depiction of Thompson as some kind of romantic saint. Spinning Thompson into hero material might make for a crowd pleasing narrative but it stretches The Rum Diary into mythic places it doesn’t belong. By trying to do right by Thompson, Depp may have done him a disservice by turning one of pop culture’s biggest bad-asses into a Mr. Goody Two Shoes.

As frustrating as The Rum Diary is, there’s much to like in the film. Which is why it’s frustrating. Robinson’s direction is filled with brilliant moments - a menacing, sexually-charged scene inside a night club choreographed to scorching blues music, a visit to a hermaphrodite Voodoo priestess/priest who dispenses some powerful reptilian mojo, and a chase scene involving a decrepit Fiat, some high octane hootch and a bunch of pissed-off Puerto Ricans. Giovanni Ribisi is wonderfully deranged in a performance that channels Richard Grant from Withnail And I and there’s some brown acid weirdness that seems to have wandered in from Terry Gilliam’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas which, despite being recycled, is still good for a contact high.

The weakest part of the movie is supposed to be its dramatic core: a plot involving a bunch of greedy industrialists attempting an illegal land grab. But it is so undercooked and dull that the film walks away from it way before Thompson does. As a result, his character building moment, his crisis of conscience, lacks punch because most viewers won’t give a flying fuck about the whole damned thing. I suggest you forget about the particulars of the plot and just dig the atmosphere and the film’s all too rare leaps into the unknown.

When Bruce Robinson’s vision becomes disengaged from the story, dances outside the script and elbows the actors out of the way to let something organic and real in, The Rum Diary becomes as drunken as Rimbaud’s boat. My sense is that after Robinson started shooting the film with his cinematographer, the incredible Dariusz Wolski, he became increasingly engrossed with Puerto Rico’s shadow side and the mystery of the moment took over as the screenplay receded into the background.The movie finds itself in the interstices where life slips through and the audience is allowed to simply take it all in - the lysergical light, the sway of sun-sharpened silhouette, the fetid murk and tangle of tree vine, rotted root and gnarled limbs, the bristling feathers of a cockfight, the murderous intent tattooed on faces of people done wrong, the unraveling of symmetry and beautiful decay of streets and ancient buildings that stagger under the weight of forgotten crimes and deadly secrets. Within this sweetly malodorous topography lurk the kind of dark dreams that press in on a man. This is the kind of shit that writers pull inspiration from with the fervor of mad dogs digging for a hank of flesh and bone. This is where Hunter Thompson found his fucking muse. And Robinson may have as well. In these all too brief moments, The Rum Diary reminds me of Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus. It is at its most sublime when its characters become figures in a landscape that throbs and surges with a sexual heat and as they move into the foreground we see in their eyes bottomless desire. Had Depp lost himself as Robinson did he may have found the redemption that the film cries out for.

Should you see The Rum Diary? Absolutely. Just prepare yourself for an experience that could have used more of what Depp describes as Thompson’s “savagery.” Or some of whatever that Voodoo priestess was doling out. Ask Bruce Robinson exactly what that shit was. I bet he knows.

The Rum Diary opens in theaters on October 28.

 
Johnny Depp and Bruce Robinson at the Austin Film Festival screening of The Rum Diary. Film critic Elvis Mitchell is conducting the interview. October 21, 2011. This is absolutely lovely, as you will see. I think everyone in the Paramount Theater was drunk. Hunter would have loved it.
 

 
Buzzfeed have found this clip from the series Second Chance, which seemingly predicted the correct year of Colonel Gaddafi’s death.

Yep, it’s Friday.
 

 
Via Buzzfeed
 

 
Captain Beefheart and The Tragic Band, recorded live H.E.C., HEC Jouy-en-Josas, Paris, France May 24, 1974

01. “Mirror Man”
02. “Upon The My-O-My”
03. “Full Moon, Hot Sun”
04. “Crazy Little Thing”
05. “Improvisation”
06. “Peaches”
07. “Who Will Be Next?” (Chester Burnett)
08. “You’re Gonna Need Somebody On Yer Bond” (Traditional)

 
Bonus:

Captain Beefheart and The Tragic Band, recorded live at the Cowtown Ballroom, Kansas City, Missouri, April 22, 1974

“Tragic Live Band”

Captain Beefheart Don Van Vliet vocals, harmonica, saxophone, clarinet
Fuzzy Fuscaldo guitar
Ty Grimes drums
Del Simmons tenor saxophone, flute
Dean Smith guitar
Michael Smotherman keyboards
Paul Uhrig bass

01. “Mirror Man” (0:00)
02. “Upon The My-O-My” (7:31)
03. “Crazy Little Thing” (10:48)
04. “Full Moon, Hot Sun” (15:56)
05. “Sugar Bowl” (20:17)
06. “This Is The Day” (23:19)
07. “It’s Mighty Crazy aka Keep On Rubbing Lightnin’ Slim” (31:17)
08. “Be Your Dog” (36:14)
09. “Sweet Georgia Brown” (43:32)
10. “Abba Zaba” (47:18)
11. “Peaches” (50:46)
 

 
With thanks to bookheaven1000
 

 
In the 1980s every home in Glasgow had a copy of a Blue Nile album - either Walk Across the Rooftops, or Hats. Or so it seemed. Paul Buchanan (vocals, guitar), Robert Bell (bass), Paul Joseph Moore (keyboards), achieved a level of worship amongst their followers that it was almost religious.

Formed in 1981, The Blue Nile formed their own label, Peppermint Records, through which they and released their first single, “I Love This Life”. Though picked-up by RSO, it disappeared after that company was taken-over by Polygram. Undeterred, the trio kept writing and working on new material. When an engineer at the hi-fi firm Linn Electronics heard their music, he offered to finance the band to record a track - intended to showcase the quality of Linn’s hi-fi systems. The result so pleased Linn that an album Walk Across the Rooftops was recorded and released in 1984. It was a local hit, and cult everywhere else, but attracted allegiance from Rickie Lee Jones, Robbie Roberston and Annie Lennox.

It took 5 years for the follow-up Hats, but was well worth the wait, as it show-cased a 5-star album of adult love songs, which undoubtedly led to a population increase. Since then, it’s been slow and far between, with Peace at Last in 1996, and High in 2004.

In 1990, the film-maker Bernard Rudden made this documentary Flags and Fences, which followed The Blue Nile on their tour of America. It’s long been thought “lost”, but writer, adventurer and all-round-gentleman, Trevor Ward, located and forwarded this copy, which captures Blue Nile as they seemed on the cusp of world success.
 

 
With thanks to Trevor Ward
 

 
Dutch designers Merel Slootheer, Pieter Frank de Jong and Liat Azulay have created a bike that plays music. Feats Per Minute (fiets is Dutch for bicycle) was designed using a basic $90 bike and with a few changes converted into a record player on wheels.

Simple alterations to the bike’s structure makes it easy to change records, and a few tweaks to the “crank of the bike and the chain” ensures records don’t skip. The record screws onto the bike frame with a small cap, and the needle is spring-loaded to keep it steady. To allow (or force?) pedestrians to hear your tunes as you zoom by, the designers installed a megaphone-style amplifier made out of plumbing materials.

In order for the records to sound as intended, you need to be a real steady peddler.
 

 
Via The Daily Swarm

 
(via BuzzFeed)

 
Treasure trove of photos taken (mostly) in the East Village, circa 1979 to 1985 by Michael Sean Edwards. Many of these photographs were taken within a few square blocks of where I lived until the early 90s. Leshko’s Coffee Shop, above, was on the corner of the block where I lived, on 7th Street and Ave. A. KIng Tut’s Wah Wah Hut was on the opposite corner and the Pyramid Club around the corner. I’ve eaten in Lesko’s more times than I would care to remember, although I’m sure remnants of my many hundreds of meals there live on in the arteries of my heart. When I finally started making real money, I promised myself that I would never eat there again, and I didn’t for about a decade. I did finally relent and meet Douglas Rushkoff for breakfast there one morning, although by then, it was Leshko’s in name only, having turned into a white plastic upscale hipster joint, with nary a trace of it’s former down-at-heel Ukrainian dinner chic or greasy menu.
 

 
The Valencia Hotel, then a shithole renting $18 rooms to junkies and hookers,now a place that probably charges $450 a night. It was the kind of place where someone like Johnny Thunders would live until he’d get thrown out. A friend of mine who was foolish enough to stay there—and leave valuables in his room—was ripped off badly. Trash and Vaudeville is still there. I used to walk past this place every single day. St. Marks Baths, the infamous gay bathhouse, was a few doors away and had a powerful exhaust that smelled horrible blowing into the street.
 

 
And these guys. New York City used to be FULL of these guys, “popeyes” as they were called, drunks so incorrigible that the gin drinkers’s eyes would pop out of their heads for a certain sort of look. Hence the name. In certain areas, there could be dozens of these fellows on every block letting it all hang out, so to speak. Times Square, 9th Ave., much of Lexington Ave, and especially on 14th Street and 3rd Ave., near the notorious Variety Photoplays grindhouse theater and The Dugout, the lowlife dive bar made famous in Taxi Driver—these were the places where the popeyes lived, but you never see guys like this in New York anymore. Not even on the Bowery.
 
Via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk

 
First look at the new documentary film, The British Guide to Showing Off, which celebrates Andrew Logan, artist, living legend and creator of the outrageous, anarchic and always spectacular Alternative Miss World Show.

The Alternative Miss World Show, is a pageant and fancy dress party for grown ups, launched back in 1972, it has involved the participation from the likes of Derek Jarman, Divine, Duggie Fields, Leigh Bowery, David Hockney, Richard O’Brien Zandra Rhodes, Molly Parkin, Angie Bowie and Grayson Perry over the years

“In The British Guide to Showing Off, director Jes Benstock takes us under Logan’s glittering wing to take a joyous look at this most quirky and exotic subculture event.

“Raucous, liberating and sexually charged, The British Guide to Showing Off speaks to the outsider in all of us. For anyone who has ever wanted to break out.”

The film goes on general release in the U.K. on November 11th, with special ‘Dress Up and Show Off’. Previews starting 6th November! See BritishGuideToShowingOff on Facebook for details or at the website here.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

O, You Pretty Thing: The Wonderful World of Andrew Logan

 
Well, according to Harold Camping it is. And to think I almost forgot!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
New Rapture date predicted, just 11 days away!

Artist, alchemical filmmaker, musical archeologist and avant garde shaman, Harry Smith’s obsessive interests made him an influential, yet not widely known, figure of 20th century Beat culture and beyond. If Smith was only responsible for preserving the folk and blues musical traditions of early America in his Anthology of American Folk Music set from 1952, we would have him to thank for providing a way forward for a young Bob Dylan and the whole of the 60s/70s folk scene.

But Smith was far more than that, he was a filmmaker of astonishing originality, making stop motion animations influenced by 19th advertising art and the elaborate Middle Ages alchemical paintings of Robert Fludd. When I first saw VHS dubs of Smith’s films in the 1980s, I was impressed of course, but as I later learned, in actual fact what I had seen was only a part of what Smith had intended. He made his films as magic lanterns, with several projectors running at once and spinning lamps complementing the central image. When I saw his restored masterpiece No. 18: Mahagonny at the Getty Center in Los Angeles a few years back, it struck me how difficult it must have been to sync up four projectors at once (and the musical accompaniment, a recording of Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny opera).

The restored version of Smith’s celluloid tetraptych was a marvel to behold, with all of the four images now perfectly in time to one another, and looking like a great psychedelic kaleidoscope of imagery taken around New York City, in particular the Chelsea Hotel and its bohemian denizens. Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and the Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin all make cameo appearances. Seen, digitally restored and as Smith had intended, it was simply breath taking.

Apparently Smith never met a drug he didn’t like and would take any pill, drink any drink, smoke any joint, or snort any powder offered him and he was not at all averse to huffing gasoline, it’s been said, when that’s all that was around. For long periods of time he lived off the kindness of others and borrowed lots of money he had no intention of ever repaying. Yet Smith himself was said to be generous to a fault. Strange anecdotes about Harry Smith abound, many of them collected in two books about him American Magus: Harry Smith (edited by Paola Igliori) and Think of the Self Speaking (edited by Rani Singh, who is Smith’s archivist). My favorite story about Smith is how, if he’d find a pair of glasses, try them on and could see out of them better than the ones he was wearing, he’d toss the old pair in the garbage. Smith also claimed that Aleister Crowley was his father. All in all, you could say he was a colorful guy.

I am reminded of Harry Smith every day. I have one of the original Tree of Life prints that Smith made in the 1950s and gave as a gift to Allen Ginsberg. It’s still in the original brass frame that Ginsberg put it in. His handwriting is on the back in pencil along with a sticker from the Whitney. It’s in our dining room now.

In the last couple of years, New York-based artist M Henry Jones, who worked with Smith and continues to project Smith’s work as it was intended to be seen (click here for a short interview with Jones and some footage of one of his special Smith screenings. It’s really interesting to see, trust me) has put up a few fascinating videos of Smith being interviewed:

 
There’s an edge here you never see on TV anymore. Actually you couldn’t see this on television when it was first recorded - Johnny Thunders ‘banned’ performance from Swedish TV in 1982.  Even looking death-warmed-up,Thunders had that edge, an urgency that makes you sit up and take notice.
 

 
Bonus interview with Johnny Thunders plus performance, after the jump…
 

 
Brought to you by our pals at One Long House. Those are man boobs, BTW.

Thank you, Alan!

In the summer of 2004—much to my beautiful and patient wife’s annoyance and consternation—I went through a HUGE “reggae phase.” I could not get enough of the classic 70s roots reggae sound and I absolutely gorged myself on it. But within this gluttonous, bass-heavy musical feast, that year and the year following, the artist I listened to the most was Manley Augustus Buchanan better known as Big Youth. I played Big Youth obsessively. His music was deep, scary and DREAD and was exactly the sound I was looking for in the genre.

Big Youth was a “toaster” or “DJ” who would basically rhyme and rap over records during the large outdoor Jamaican dance parties that used to be known as “sounds.” Taking his cue from U Roy, who was more or less the first DJ (or at least the genre’s first star), Big Youth would chat, chant, sort of sing and just bullshit on the mike, offering humor, politics and heady doses of Rasta spirituality. I was transfixed by Big Youth’s voice, subject matter and… just the whole image he projected of a wise God-loving and yet sexy ghetto preacher. The guy was incredible! Why didn’t the whole world know about him? Why wasn’t this guy acclaimed as a musical genius? He was the coolest motherfucker I’d ever heard of.

I blasted his music so loud and so often, that our next door neighbors—who were from Jamaica—must’ve thought I was one seriously eccentric middle-aged white guy, but at least I had good taste in music.

Big Youth was Bob Marley’s favorite musician in Jamaica and he praised Jah Youth in many interviews during the 70s. Marley actually copped quite a bit from Big Youth, not the least being his clothes, his dreadlocks—Big Youth was the first Jamaican musician of any note to flash his dreads onstage as followers of Rastafari were still semi-social outcasts even then—and even his use of the words “Natty” and “Dread” in his lyrics. Yes, it’s a historical fact that Bob Marley stole a bit of his swagger from Jah Youth (who seemed mildly pissed off about this in several 70s vintage articles I’ve read).

But as any reggae fanatic can tell you, during the classic roots era of the 70s, there were very, very few film or video cameras floating around the Kingston ghettos. Unless it was a part of Bob Marley’s scene, the era, aside from photographs, remains more or less unrecorded. There are some quite good documentaries on Jamaica music, but they can be counted on one hand. So it was very exciting to discover this brief but amazing B&W video clip of Jah Youth during his prime. I’ve searched for Big Youth clips from his 70s peak on YouTube for years and come up empty-handed until now. Even if it is under two minutes, it’s still Big Youth and it fucking slays.