If you got a problem with the smell of your own nutsack or somebody else’s, here’s the towel for you.
The True Clean Towel is screen printed with a diagram that specifies what sections are for cleaning certain parts of your body so, gawd forbid, you don’t accidentally wipe your face with residual sex juice or whatever.
Body loathers rejoice!
Step out of the shower and have the confidence of knowing that you are drying your freshly cleaned face with a section of the towel which has not been used to dry ‘other’ places. Reusing towels makes sense, so why not be smarter and healthier about how you use your towel.
I’ve always thought highly of Christopher Hitchens even when I’ve disagreed with him. As he deals with his own mortality, I now find him not only brilliant and witty, I find him inspirational. In this interview broadcast the other night on Australian TV, Hitchens discusses living (and perhaps dying) with cancer and his evolution as a thinker. Even with death lurking over his shoulder, Hitchens displays an amazing clarity of mind and fearlessness - a warrior.
William Burroughs: A Man WIthin, Yony Leyser’s new documentary, five years in the making, is screening this weekend at the IFC Center in New York with special guests, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Hal Willner, Eileen Myles and Penny Arcade appearing, along with the director, himself.
The film, which features music from Patti Smith and Sonic Youth, is getting a limited theatrical release during the holiday season and will be screened as part of PBS series “Independent Lens” next year.
From the decade that fashion forgot, a men’s style catalog that reflects more innocent times with some questionable dress sense and a bizarre advert for “New Adam Scented & Flavored Genital Towelettes.”
The Ah Men Super Summer Catalog 1972 can be viewed here.
The campaign to Save the 100 Club continues apace with support from a host of rock musicians including Mick Jagger, who came out in support of the campaign earlier this month saying:
There’s a real need for these places - they have a connection with the past. And what is important is that you have places where bands can cut their teeth and places of a certain intimacy and size, that new bands can experiment in. There aren’t that many great places in London, or indeed any city, that you can say that about.
Jagger isn’t the only legend offering his support, Ray Davies of The Kinks has said:
Simon Cowell should underwrite the money needed to save the 100 Club, that would be a real payback. The amount of money he takes out of pop music he could put some back in. I’‘m very concerned about the 100 Club, The Kinks played there and it’s such an iconic venue we shouldn’t allow things like that to close down. Everything is being overrun by the chain stores and the conglomerates and it such a pity that the 100 Club has to suffer like that.
Other musicians including Mick Jones and Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie have also spoken out against the possible closure, while Brian Travers from UB40 said:
It feels like live music is being pushed out of our cities to make way for car parks and duplex apartments. You are not on your own, all over the UK small live venues are being closed down. Just last November in Birmingham, the city’s premier live music venue The Rainbow was threatened with closure as well as noise abatement orders because a private property company had built downtown duplex apartments for the upwardly mobile who now don’t like the sound of downtown and wanted to turn it into a haven of peace and tranquility, live music being the first noise they wanted to mute.
This is a much bigger issue than just a noisy musicians being told to turn down the volume, this an all out attack on the UK’s finest export, music. If we are not careful our culture will be irreversibly damaged. As you have quite rightly said pretty soon there will be no where left for young bands to learn their craft.
Steve Diggle from The Buzzcocks said:
The 100 Club is as important as St Paul’s Cathedral!
While Frank Black from The Pixies has pledged £100,000 to the campaign and Liam Gallagher wrote a letter in support saying the 100 Club is “very rock n roll” and that its a shame as he “fancied playing there with the mighty Beady Eye.”
Save the 100 Club organizer, Jim Piddington tells Dangerous Minds that £150k has already been raised, but more is needed if they are to reach the target of £500k. A fund-raising gig is to be held at the venue on Thursday, 25 November, headlined by Specials guitarist Roddy Radiation and the Skabilly Rebels, and a line-up that also includes Chas Hodges, and a selection of “very special guests” who “are also expected to join the bill”.
If interested in attending the gig or in Saving the 100 Club please check details here.
This latest gem to be excavated from that endless trove of inscrutable weirdness known as Soviet era Ukrainian TV is a small masterpiece of people’s collective comedy. I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned somewhere in all of this. But no matter ,I’m a sucker for peppy musical numbers that involve deconstructed instruments, factories, mimes and sausages. That’s entertainment !
Above, Katja Kean in Pink Prison, shot on the same prison set as Dancer in the Dark.
Although this is hardly a secret In Europe, few American fans of Oscar-nominated Danish director Lars von Trier are aware of the fact that the controversial Dogme auteur responsible for films like Antichrist, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, also produces porno films.
“High Art” porn, to be sure, von Trier’s company Zentropa has owned two subsidiary companies, first Puzzy Power, then Innocent Pictures, aimed at the elusive female/couples sex film market. The goal is/was to produce porn with mainstream cinema production values and their movies have few anatomical close-ups of female genitalia. A Puzzy Power manifesto laid out the original company’s aims and can be read here.
Nevertheless, they are hardcore fuck flicks, with two of them, Constance (1998) and Pink Prison (1999) starring Danish porn actress Katja Kean, who’s best described as Denmark’s Jenna Jameson (Kean, also called Katja K, is a crossover to the world of TV comedy and the lingerie business).
Lars von Trier himself is said to have little to do with the films, himself, except for signing off on them, and in a free-thinking country like Denmark, of course, pornography has never had the shame associated with it as in other countries. A 2005 film called All About Anna, starring mainstream Danish actress and singer, Gry Bay, and the third sex film produced by Zentropa, was their biggest success.
Innocent Pictures has also produced a hardcore gay feature, HotMen CoolBoyz, which starred bloody LA-based performance artist Ron Athey. It is the only hardcore gay porn film ever produced by a mainstream studio.
Okay, Mike Libby’s Insect Lab creations are not functional robot-insect cyborgs, but they’re so gosh darn pretty to look at. Prices can range anywhere between $400 to $1700. Now, when is Mike going to take it a step further and introduce us to our new robot-insect overlords?
Borrowing from science fiction and fact, Insect Lab customizes real insect specimens with antique watch parts and other technological components. From ladybugs to grasshoppers, each is individually hand adorned, and original- a unique celebration of the contradictions between nature and technology.
Swiss artist Zimoun creates spellbinding audio-based installations. This one in particular, using towers of cardboard boxes really floats my boat. Such a warm and strangely soothing sound and no computers involved. Just tons of tiny motors gently beating and scraping on the re-purposed corrugated paper products. I could listen for hours.
Lenny Bruce doing his famous airplane glue bit on the Steve Allen Show in 1958. A classic. I’ve heard this routine on record and read it on the page, but I’ve never seen Lenny perform it live.
Marvel at the patented Jabberwocky wordplay of Pete “The Mad Daddy” Myers on “What is a Fisteris?” Myers was a rock and roll radio madman of the late 50s and 60s in Cleveland and New York. He killed himself in 1968, despondent over professional problems.
I first heard this on one of those Cramps-related “Born Bad” compilations. It’s too bad Myers didn’t record more gems like this or he’d be a cult figure today. Read the “Mad Daddy” Pete Myers biography here.
“Fisterises like pretty girls named Ingaborg with silver snoopers in their hair, sometimes moping about the snurds and limrocks they’ve loved and lost, sobbing big teedle-dools. Like everyone, they dislike artichokes for breakfast when the bumblebugger’s gone.”
Little Annie AKA Annie Anxiety Bandez, has collaborated with a who’s who of avant garde musicians: Coil, Marc Almond Adrian Sherwood, Kid Congo Powers, Crass, Rubella Ballet and Nurse With Wound.
Her 2006 album, Songs from the Coalmine Canary was co-produced by Antony Hegarty. “Strangelove,” a song from the album co-written with Hegarty, was used as the soundtrack for a Levi’s campaign in 2007, going on to win a Cannes Bronze Lion award for “Best Use of Music.”
Tomorrow night, Little Annie and the fab Baby Dee are the opening acts for Marc Almond at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool and for several more UK gigs after that. What a great triple bill.
When I was 18-years-old, I saw her performing at a Crass gig at the Islington Bingo Hall. She stuck her hand down my friend’s pants!
Genderful, her latest album, with Paul Wallfischl is just out on Southern Records. The following statement was put on YouTube along with the video for “Billy Martin Requiem”:
December 1 marks the 22nd annual World AIDS Day, and while there is still no “cure” for or viable vaccine against HIV, the positive strides made battling the virus over the last few years are undeniable. New drugs are making what was a death sentence now a manageable - if serious and chronic - condition. Generic versions of these medications, along with ambitious public health policies are helping make real inroads against the disease in the developing world. There is space for much optimism this year. But what’s lost sometimes with the good news is a space to contemplate what has been lost to us - irrevocably. The talent unrealized, the creativity and vitality extinguished, the knowledge and experience that won’t be passed on to new generations - this was and continues to be the fall out from the AIDS epidemic.
At first I wondered why in the world Little Annie was singing about Billy Martin of all people, but DO keep watching, it’ll make sense. This is a really catchy song, too.
Glenn Beck thrives off criticism, it’s what gives him credibility. Ideally, it would be best to ignore him, but that is easier said than done. So, let’s turn Glenn Beck on his head. Let’s turn him upside down.
I think it was Norman Mailer who once suggested turning pictures of Lyndon B. Johnson upside down as a protest against the Vietnam War, now we can do something similar. Wherever there is a book by Mr Beck, turn it upside down. Move it to fiction by all means, but turn it upside down. When the American flag is inverted it means distress. Turning Glenn Beck upside down will mean the same - here is a middle-aged man who is deeply distressed. Go do it.
Turn Glenn Beck upside down today—and everyday.
When people see Mr Beck’s image upside down, they’ll know he cannot be taken seriously.
Let’s make it a meme to turn Glenn Beck upside down whenever and wherever we find him. We who cannot stand what Glenn Beck stands for how he preys on the thick and dim-witted and how he divides this country for personal gain and hubris need to make our distaste for the man known.
