I wonder if Henry Rollins cut off his straggly, rock star locks because they gave a hint of Michael Hurchence-lite?
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Photos via Hello Henry, Fuck yeah, men with long hair!, I am a mountain, you are a sin, Only The Young Die Young, Scab Boy
3 more from Henry Hutchence, after the jump…
Day one of Occupy Austin has been orderly, enthusiastic, and free of any confrontations with police. An estimated 2000 people were massed in front of City Hall when I left the scene earlier this evening. It was a diverse gathering, ranging from young granola heads to gray-haired retirees, the unemployed, students, cowboys, members of the military and office-workers. The crowd was predominately white and anglo, but the number of Hispanic activists was encouraging. In Texas there can be no political uprising without the support of the Mexican-American community. Fortunately, Austin has one of the most vital, proud and potentially powerful Hispanic populations of any state in the Southwest and I think they’re going to become increasingly engaged in the OWS movement.
Overall, the atmosphere was festive, with pockets of people engaged in political discourse and speculation as to how long the occupation will last and in what form it will manifest.
It is against Austin city ordinances for the protesters to pitch tents or sleep overnight in the area around City Hall, so the occupation is quite limited in contrast to what has been taking place at Zuccotti Park in New York City. Many of the protesters say they may disregard the law and attempt to pitch tents or lay down bedding around City Hall. That would be the first test to see how much Austin authorities and the chief of police are willing to bend. So far the cops seem to be enjoying hanging out with the crowd and soaking in the sun. Hopefully they’ll continue to serve their roles as peace keepers.
I expect the crowds to grow over the weekend and I’ll be there to add my voice to the mix and film the action.
Here’s a short hi-def video I shot of today’s protest. The photos are by Mirgun Akyavas. Watch it full screen.
I suppose this could be a well-known fact in certain circles, but until this afternoon, I, myself, was unaware that the late Steve Jobs dated folksinger/activist Joan Baez in the late 70s/early 80s and according to several sources, wanted to marry her. On Joan Baez’s Wikipedia page it says the pair split up when the matter of Baez’s age (she was in her early 40s at the time) meant children would have been unlikely. Think about it: Baez dated Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs, and she knows Thomas Pynchon! She’s still has a Bacon Number of 2 in the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. How can this be?
Click here to watch an extraordinary live performance of one of the songs from the Sacco and Vanzetti soundtrack, circa 1979 on YouTube (I can’t embed the clip).
Below, The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti, lyrics by Baez from the actual words and letters of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, music written and conducted by Ennio Morricone. This is an absolutely incredible piece of music.
This looks more like a frosty Noel Fielding (from The Mighty Boosh) Halloween costume than Jack Nicholson in The Shining, doesn’t it? It’s all about the face! And this is the face of Vince Noir!
Below, Nicholson as “Jack Torrance” in The Shining. No way, right?
(via Super Punch)
Nice short article at Salon from Justin Elliott, who asked editor-in-cheif, Kalle Lasn about the role Adbusters magazine had in instigating the growing Occupy Wall Street movement:
SALON: You issued the original call to occupy Wall Street back in July. How did that come about and what was the thinking behind it?
ADBUSTERS: It was a poster that we put in the middle of the July edition of Adbusters magazine and a listserv that we sent out to our 90,000-strong culture-jammers network around the world. It was also a blog post on our website. For the last 20 years, our network has been interested in cultural revolution and just the whole idea of radical transformations.
After Tunisia and Egypt, we were mightily inspired by the fact that a few smart people using Facebook and Twitter can put out calls and suddenly get huge numbers of people to get out into the streets and start giving vent to their anger. And then we keep on looking at the sorry state of the political left in the United States and how the Tea Party is passionately strutting their stuff while the left is sort of hiding somewhere. We felt that there was a real potential for a Tahrir moment in America because a) the political left needs it and b) because people are losing their jobs, people are losing their houses, and young people cannot find a job. We felt that the people who gave us this mess — the financial fraudsters on Wall Street — haven’t even been brought to justice yet. We felt this was the right moment to instigate something.
SALON: One Adbusters editor was quoted saying the role of the magazine in this is “philosophical.” Can you define the philosophy behind this?
ADBUSTERS: We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote “The Society of the Spectacle.” The idea is that if you have a very powerful meme — a very powerful idea — and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come out of.
1968 was more of a cultural kind of revolution. This time I think it’s much more serious. We’re in an economic crisis, an ecological crisis, living in a sort of apocalyptic world, and the young people realize they don’t really have a viable future to look forward to. This movement that’s beginning now could well be the second global revolution that we’ve been dreaming about for the last half a century.
Read more of The origins of Occupy Wall Street explained (Salon)
Occupy Wall Street FAQ (The Nation)
Who needs Martin Scorsese’s documentary on George Harrison, when you can have this roughly cobbled together sequence of prime cuts of Pirate George causing mayhem on Eric idle’s Rutland Weekend Television Christmas Special.
So, here’s one somebody prepared earlier.
Previously On Dangerous Minds
Rutland Weekend Television: Eric Idle’s nearly forgotten comedy classic
With thanks to Neil McDonald
The following tribute to the late Steve Jobs was posted at The Residents’ website:
I wasn’t going to say anything. After all so many people are covering his accomplishments. But I thought it would be important to note how Steve Jobs has helped change and create The Residents.
Apple computers had a perspective that regular people should be able to do remarkable things that they would not normally be able to do if assisted by computers. Technicians should not be the exclusive controllers of that world.
The Residents have always been masters of using technology on a human scale. Ralph Records in the late ‘70’s ran on an old Apple II. The software used was custom written by Cryptic. That system meant that Ralph could operate cheaper and cheaper meant it could exist on smaller margins.
Macintosh arrived in 1984 and went to work immediately creating graphics. Album covers from 1984’s George & James to 2011’s Coochie Brake have been done on Macintosh computers.
Cryptic and Ralph launched a bulletin board on-line system (BBS) on an Apple II in 1984 named Big Brother. It is the Big Brother which this site honors as our first venture into on-line interactivity. You can read more about Big Brother in The Last Word.
The Residents ran MIDI live on an old Apple II at the Snakey Wake in 1988. The following year they toured CUBE E carrying their entire studio which centered around a Mac II, the most powerful personal computer that existed at the time.
When Apple invented Quicktime, the wiz kids that actually did it were Residents fans. The original logo which was a big “Q” had a top hat to reference The Residents and the videos used to demo the software were the One-Minute Movies from The Commercial Album.
I was one of the people who appeared in the Apple “Think Different” campaign.
There is no way I can cover all the ways Apple and Steve Jobs impacted The Residents. I do think it fitting to conclude with the fact that Chuck on the Talking Light tour was controlling a Mac Air computer with an iPad that was running wirelessly on a local network utilizing an Airport, all Apple products, to make the statement that The Residents appreciation of the technology of Steve Jobs’ company has never faltered.
Cryptic and The Residents join the long list of people who are saddened by the lose of Steve Jobs.
-Hardy Fox, The Cryptic Corporation
Below, recent 3-D live footage of The Residents performing in San Francisco.
A new HD presentation of the Giorgio Moroder-scored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis will take place at Cinefamily in Los Angeles for ten screenings from October 7th through October 11th:
The legendary rockin’ alternate version of Fritz Lang’s silent sci-fi classic, on the big screen for the first time in almost thirty years! In 1981, electronic music pioneer/three-time Oscar-winning composer Giorgio Moroder began a years-long endeavor to restore Metropolis, the very first attempt since the film’s original 1920s release. During the process, Moroder gave the film a controversial new score, which included pop songs from some of the biggest stars of the early MTV era (Pat Benatar, Billy Squier, Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler, Adam Ant, Jon Anderson and more!) Missing footage was also re-edited back into the film, intertitles were removed and replaced with subtitles, and sound effects/color tinting were added, creating an all new experience, and an all-new film. But for more than a quarter century, Moroder’s Metropolis has remained out of circulation, until now. Utilizing one of the few remaining prints available, Kino Lorber has created a brand-new HD transfer in the best possible quality — just as it was seen in its August 1984 release!
More information at Cinefamily’s website. Tickets are $10, free for members. Kino Lorber are going to release the Moroder version of Metropolis on DVD and Blu-ray by year’s end.
When the 1965-1968 core Velvet Underground lineup of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker reformed for a 1993 European tour, I was excited but worried that a VU reunion couldn’t help but to be a disappointment. I didn’t want to spoil my image of the band, but when the live recordings of the Paris shows (mostly the second evening of a three night stand, a show described by John Cale as a “home run”) was released as Live MCMXCIII, I thought they pulled it off admirably, even if it’s not an album I’d ever think to pull out to play when I felt like listening to the Velvet Underground…
Cale and Reed fell out again during the shows in Europe (which included the Velvets opening for.. U fucking 2?), so a US tour never took place. Fans left distraught to have been shut out of the reunion shows had to satisfy themselves by watching the live concert video taped at L’Olympia. That material is now on YouTube in very good quality. Watch the opening numbers, “Venus in Furs” and “White Light/White Heat,” below:
Oh my god, this is my new favorite Flickr page, Nightmares Fear Factory‘s photostream.
The photos you see here are people’s actual reactions during the scariest moment of the haunted house’s tour. Must be a real shock from the looks on these faces!
More after the jump…
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ll tell you of the time I saw one. It was summer, I was 18 and working in a 7/11.
Early one morning, at seven-thirty to be precise, I was awoken by someone pinching my toe. There, clearly at the foot of my bed, was my great aunt, dressed in a dark overcoat, as if she had somehow arrived to see me.
“I’ve come to say goodbye,” she said, but never opened her mouth.
We looked at each other for several moments. Then I rubbed my eyes, and she was gone.
Fifty miles away, in a hospital ward, my great aunt died at exactly seven-thirty in the morning. How to explain it, I can’t say, but there it is.
I’ve always had a fondness for ghosts stories, tales of horror and things unknown - they are fine entertainments. Of late, I’ve been collecting such stories recorded in journals and biographies, which often reveal a similarity in the haunting or, in the telling of the tale.
The following come from the journal of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the great writer of supernatural tales, Algernon Blackwood, a man whose stories chilled my schoolboy days. Like the tale of my great aunt, there is a similarity to these tales, of ghosts returning to visit the living.
IX. - Journal
Geneva, Sunday, 18th August, 1816
See Apollo’s Sexton,* who tells us many mysteries of his trade. We talk of Ghosts. Neither Lord Byron nor M.G. L. seem to believe in them; and they both agree, in the very face of reason, that none could believe in ghosts without believing in God. I do not think that all the persons who profess to discredit these visitations, really discredit them; or, if they do in the daylight, are not admonished, by the approach of loneliness and midnight, to think more respectfully of the world of shadows.
Lewis recited a poem, which he had composed at the request of the Princess of Wales. The Princess of Wales, he premised, was not only a believer in ghosts, but in magic and witchcraft, and asserted, that prophecies made in her youth had been accomplished since. The tale was of a lady in Germany.
This lady, Minna, had been exceedingly attached to her husband, and they had made a vow that the one who died first should return after death to visit the other as a ghost. She was sitting one day alone in her chamber, when she heard an unusual sound of footsteps on the stairs. The door opened, and her husband’s spectre, gashed with a deep wound across the forehead, an din military habiliments, entered. She appeared startled at the apparition; and the ghost told her, that when he should visit her in future, she would hear a passing bell toll, and these words distinctly uttered in her ear, “Minna, I am here.” On inquiry, it was found that her husband had fallen in battle on the very day she was visited by the vision. The intercourse between the ghost and the woman continued for some time, until the latter laid aside all terror, and indulged herself in the affection which she had felt for him while living. One evening she went to a ball, and permitted her thoughts to be alienated by the attentions of a Florentine gentleman, more witty, more graceful, and more gentle, as it appeared to her, than any person she had ever seen. As he was conducting her through the dance, a death-bell tolled. Minna lost in fascination of the Florentine’s attentions, disregarded, or did not hear the sound. A second peal, louder and more deep, startled the whole company, when Minna heard the ghost’s accustomed whisper, and raising her eyes, saw in an opposite mirror the reflection of the ghost, standing over her. She is said to have died of terror.
* Mr. G. Lewis, so named in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers - M. S.
The second story comes from Mike Ashley’s Starlight Man, the biography of the fantastic writer, Algernon Blackwood. In this extract, it is 1887 and the young Blackwood, just in his early twenties, has taken a keen interest in the Society of Psychical Research, an organization established by “some of the most notable men in the land and devoted to the series exploration of psychic phenomena.”
This group can be traced back to the Ghost Club, which was established at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1850. By 1882, this club had galvanized into the Society of Psychical Research (SPR), and conisted of “highly respected men - no charlatans. And early members to the SPR were of similar stature - Lord Tennyson, William James, John Ruskin, W. E. Gladstone, Mark twain and Charles L. Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) plus eight Fellows of the Royal Society, including the later Nobel Prize winner Joseph Thomson.”
Blackwood’s father Sir Arthur Blackwood was loosely involved with the group, but only as a debunker of spiritualism. Any evidence that the group provided to confirm Sir Arthur’s no-nonsense, rational view of life was to be commended. However, for Algernon, stories of ghosts, ghouls and things-that-went-bump-in-the-night proved far too attractive for the young man.
Of course, Algernon went on to become world famous for his chilling stories of the supernatural and the occult - as well as his more spiritual and esoteric tales, including the original book for Edward Elgar’s Starlight Express, which later formed the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical. In 1887, Algernon was interested in joining the SPR after reading one of the group’s books
This was Phantasms of the Living (1886) and it was a book that young Algernon found fascinating. It includes several cases that he adapted for his own stories. Perhaps the best known was a case reported by Lord Brougham (1778-1868) while at Edinburgh University in 1799. He had made a pact with a university friend that whoever died first should try to appear to the other. Brougham was one day relaxing in his bath when he saw his friend sitting on a nearby chair. The vision soon faded but he made a note of the occurrence. Soon afterwards he returned to Edinburgh, only to receive a letter to say hat his friend had died in India. The core of the story is the same as Blackwood’s “Keeping his Promise”, also set in Edinburgh, where a dead friend keeps an appointment.
Blackwood rarely mentioned his involvement with the SPR, though he touched upon the subject in his last television talk “How I Became Interested in Ghosts”, in which he discussed the investigation of a haunted house. Blackwood is a superb horror writer, and is better than H. P. Lovercraft, who once said of him:
“Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood’s genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences..”
He lived a rich and full life, worked at dozens of jobs, including farmer, undercover spy during the First World War, adventurer, writer, and lastly as a regular presenter of the BBC in the 1940s. His stories of the supernatural and the unknown are amongst the greatest written. They have also provided episodes for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and his classic tale “Ancient Sorceries” was more than an influence on Val Lewton’s The Cat People.
With Halloween coming these stories may provide some atmosphere to all that Trick and Treating.
Now behave, here’s The Fall.
The answer is probably “no.” Their hearts are in the right place, but this is just kind of silly.
(via reddit)
Brilliant analysis, as usual from Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. When you’re watching this, contemplate how the Fox News clips featured in this segment will look when viewed again a few years from now. The Fox News and CNBC talking heads all look, to me, like people who are on the wrong side of history.
“You go into this thing and you build your own world.”
Captured from Watchman Broadcasting’s net stream in July 2011. Dorothy Spaulding and guests unintentionally entertain with their views on digital entertainment.
“Isn’t there a… uh… guitar that’s called ‘something Hero’?”
“That’s a new thing that they’re coming out with and the kids are really addicted to it.”
The best part starts at 2:50 when she asks him about how the “occultists” tried to intimidate him with over 100 dead ravens after he was on her show the last time.
(via BuzzFeed)
Steve Jobs 1955-2011.
A fine reminder of Steve Jobs’ passion, enthusiasm, vision and thought, from his key note speech during the introduction of the Apple IIc at the Moscone Center, in April, 1984.