Apparently these porcelain Rorschach test plates by designer Isabelle Foirest “discourage getting depressed from the routine of eating breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
They’re $180.00 for a set of four over at Fitsu.
(via Book of Joe)
Limited edition of 100, signed and numbered 13” x 19” print on fine art, acid-free paper
Limited editon print by Jason Edmiston.
This painting is inspired by the scene at the beginning of the first Apes movie. Gorilla soldiers are standing posing for a photo after the great human hunt. This is the view from the photographer’s perspective.
(via Laughing Squid)
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 utilizes dozens of hours of 16mm footage shot by Swedish documentarians during the height of the Black Power movement to tell the era’s story of radical revolutionary promise and what happened when that promise went unfulfilled. The film sat in the basement of a Swedish TV station for decades.
Contemporary director Göran Olsson (who also helmed 2009’s Am I Black Enough for You? doc about the Philly music scene) used this footage, including interviews with Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and Kathleen Cleaver, along with modern commentary from Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Talib Kweli and Melvin Van Peebles, to create this new film, now being released by Sundance. After a limited NYC/Los Angeles theatrical run, it’s supposed to air on PBS.
I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff anyways, but damn this looks amazing:
(via Nerdcore )
I like this Full Moon Odyssey floor-mattress by Korean designer Lily Suh of i3lab. According to i3lab, “The print is a real image of the moon which includes 65 individual frames of the lunar mosaic images.”
The only downfall I see is the price tag: $1490.00. Yikes!
(via Like Cool)
Dangerous Minds pal Matt Dunnerstick’s directing debut, The Custom Mary—which Tara and I have cameo roles in—premieres this week in New York City:
When a spec of Christ’s blood falls into the hands of a pair of preachers, they hatch a scheme to clone Jesus. All they need is a willing host.
Mary is a modest young Latina churchgoer. It doesn’t take much convincing for her to carry the Lord’s child. As the pregnancy progresses, she finds comfort and support in Joe, an African-American low-rider mechanic and aficionado. Nine months later, the outcome is not quite as expected—and Mary finds herself desperate and scared.
God reveals Himself in unexpected places. But there’s no mistaking justice when it’s low-rider style!
The Custom Mary will be premiering at the HBO New York International Latino Film Festival on Wednesday August 17th at 5PM and Saturday August 20th at 4PM. The screenings will be at the AMC Empire 25.
Click here to purchase tickets.
It’s the summer of 1969 and The Parliaments (pre P-Funk) are conjuring a soul inferno in the studios of WGBH TV in Boston.
George Clinton, in a mohawk and purple jumpsuit (or full-body thong), is on fire. He’s joined by Eddie Hazel, Fuzzy Haskins, Grady Thomas, Ray Davis, Billy Bass Nelson and Calvin Simon.
Like Motown on acid, this will take you higher and higher. Not even Sly Stone took it to this level of insane funk sublimeness. It just keeps getting more intense. This will sear the flesh off your face and your face will become a mask of cosmic goodness whereupon you will be beamed up to the mothership where George Clinton awaits you with open tendrils and a hamhock in your cornflakes.
Shit, I’m still vibrating after watching this.
Circle Jerks on late night TV show Rock Palace in 1985.
Founding members Keith Morris (in Michael Jackson drag) and Greg Hetson are joined by Chuck Biscuits on drums and Earl Liberty on bass.
Sonny and Chastity Bono (“in her concert debut”) do “I Got You, Babe” on the TV special Rockin’ The Night Away which aired in 1988.
It’s rare to see Sonny with Chastity after she had grown out of her “cute” phase and become an adult. Chastity told her parents she was gay in 1987 right around the time Sonny was running for Mayor of Palm Springs. This TV appearance may have been a calculated political move on Sonny’s part to create the image of an adoring father when, in fact, he had turned his back on his daughter. Chastity’s gayness alienated one of pop culture’s most visible hippie icons. But Sonny in reality was as much a hippie as Al Jolson was Black.
After a half an hour of searching the Internet, I gave up trying to find a picture of Sonny with an adult Chastity. So this video is some of the only existing footage of father and daughter together. Sonny’s good vibes seem about as authentic as one of his old wigs while Chastity is doing her best to be a dutiful daughter. And she does sound a lot like Cher.
A Youtube premier from our good friends at Bubbling Over.
The interview below with the Texas Tribune was done during Rick Perry’s successful run for re-election as Governor of Texas last year. In it, I hear an echo of George W. Bush’s good ol’ boy stupidity that is frightening. Listen and look. Do you recognize the lack of focus, the evasiveness, the failed logic, the goofy chuckle and aw shucks who gives a shit about the facts attitude we had in the White House for 8 long and ugly years? The resemblance in style, or lack of it, between Bush and Perry is uncanny.
Perry’s approach to sex education reminds me of Wilhelm Reich’s book The Mass Psychology Of Fascism, in which Reich theorizes that
Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.
Perry and his creationist state board of education eliminated two six month sex education classes in Texas schools in 2004 and replaced them with abstinence-only education, which, to my mind, is not education. In 2010, Texas had a teen birth rate more than 50% above the national average. It also led in the rate of repeat teen pregnancy .
Female college students have to get parental consent to get birth control in parts of Texas.
Eliminating sex education in the schools and replacing it with a rule of abstinence keeps teenagers in the dark about sex at a time when they should be given the guidance and tools to approach sex intelligently. Telling kids to suppress their sexuality is like telling a Priest to keep his hands off the altar boys. You want to see sexual suppression at work, just take a look at the Catholic Church or the Nazis…or Texas.
Teenagers with a healthy, informed approach to sex are more inclined to make the right choices about when, where and how. Keep em stupid and they’ll do stupid things. Making it impossible for them to get birth control and guilt tripping them with religious screeds just makes things worse. Thus, we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation in Texas. Additionally, there’s a sexually transmitted disease boom in the state. “Just say no” seems to be saying yes to syphilis, gonorrhea and HIV. The philosophy of ignore it and it will go away just doesn’t work.
Imagine having Rick Perry counsel your kid on sex.
Rick Perry in 1972. Aryan superman, TexaSS division.
Thanks to Henry Baum for steering me to the Perry photo.
Michelle Bachmann enjoying a John Holme’s memorial corn dog gives new meaning to “head of state.”
Update 8/14: Marcus Bachmann undergoes aversion therapy.
Fun and informative mini-documentary from 1968 on the animators and studio behind the creation of Yellow Submarine.
Plus, a trailer for Yellow Submarine, which, given its age, looks like it was shot underwater.
In recent news, Robert Zemeckis’ plan to make a 3D version of Yellow Submarine for Disney has been given the red light. It ain’t happening. Zemeckis’ last big-budget animated flick, Mars Needs Moms (dreadful title)) was a mega bomb. It took in $7 million at the box office while costing $150 million to make. Disney figured investing in another Zemeckis project was just too risky. I doubt that fans of the original Beatles’ film are shedding any tears over this turn of events. And for some of us, Yellow Submarine has always been in 3D.
The 1970 documentary Satanis: The Devil’s Mass is a goofy, occasionally fascinating, exploitation flick that takes us “behind the scenes” of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. It’s all rather silly and even though it contains plenty of nudity the overall effect is about as sexy as watching snails copulate.
The interviews with LaVey’s neighbors and followers are often hilarious. And LaVey oozes all of the smarmy charm of a used car salesman in a 5 dollar Halloween costume. This is sinema verite for the raincoat crowd.
NSFW unless you’re working in the anteroom of a cathedral in Hell.
While England tries to come to terms with the rioting of the last seven days, politicians and pundits, of both the right and left persuasion, are still using the looting as a means of point-scoring against their traditional enemies on the other side of the fence. ‘Twas ever thus, etc. But at what point are both sides going to be honest, put their hands up and admit that they have both made mistakes?
Call names all you want, pick holes in opposing ideologies all you want, but it’s fair to say that the pontifications of the left and the knee-jerk reactions of the right are neither going to satisfactorily explain what has been happening, or prevent it from happening again. More useful, I think, is to look beyond the cyclical, circular arguments of politics. This piece from the blog potlatch has a fair stab at detaching the riots from dead end political dialogs, and has valid criticisms of both the left and the right:
The dilemma for the Left, and for sociologists, is the following: whether or not to trust people’s own understanding of what they’re doing. And if a young looter says nothing about politics or inequality, and displays no class consciousness, to what extent can a culturally sensitive democratic socialist disagree with them? For sure, the Old Left would have no problem re-framing the behaviour of an egomaniac teenager burning down his neighbour’s shop in terms of class. That’s what crude Marxist ‘critical realism’ meant. But the New Left, along with the ‘cultural turn’ in sociology, was meant to be slightly more capable of listening.
...
Strangely, other than the repeated mantra that there is “no excuse” for looting, I’ve been surprised by how guarded the political classes have been on this occasion. I assumed that moralistic rhetoric would be raining down by now, focused on absent fathers, bringing back the birch, national service and banning computer games. But no. Could it be that the absence of politics, of sociological rationale, and of socialist ambition in these events means that they are, from a Rightwing perspective, comparatively safe?
It’s a very interesting read, and I wish there was more like it.
Right now it feels like the same old arguments are getting trotted out again and again, people are not willing to budge from their positions and open up to new ideas, and no real, genuine progress is being made to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Either it’s time for a new kind of politics, or it’s time to accept that politics is not going to solve the problems we face - surely I can’t be the only to feel that the ENTIRE political system, both left AND right, have failed us?
