A clever, simple and powerful idea, well executed. Grab ‘em fast.
A project by Happiness Brussels
Designed by Anthony BurrillLimited edition of 200 posters,
screen printed with oil from the
Gulf of Mexico disasterAll benefits go to CRCL,
(Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana)
A non-profit organisation dedicated
to restoring the Gulf of Mexico’s
coastal wetlands
Thanks Sara Padgett Heathcott !
The Burning Hell, produced by Baptist minister Estus Pirkle and directed by exploitation schlockmeister Ron Ormond, is one of the creepiest Christian scare films you’ll see. It was released in 1974 with a promotional campaign that included the ghastly catchphrase “20,000 degrees Fahrenheit and not a drop of water!” The film was screened in churches, where it scared the living shit out of children. Ormond was the Hershell Gordon Lewis of religiosity.
The entire film is available on Youtube. Unfortunately, most of the film isn’t as freakishly over-the-top as this clip.
Another fiendish concoction by Pirkle and Ormond is the 1971 “red scare’ laff riot If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?. This flick imagines a world in which the Communists take over America. The only way to avert such a crisis is to believe in God and pray to Him daily. Okay?
In this scene, a little boy loses his head over Jesus. This would have totally freaked me out when I was a kid. Looks like a scene out of 2000 Maniacs.
Thanks Ralph Carney
When I was a bored teenager living in Wheeling. West Virginia in the early 1980s, the absolutely indisputable highlight of my month was receiving my subscription copy of The Transatlantic Trouser Press magazine, of which Mick Farren was one of the two main writers. As I also felt about CREEM’s Lester Bangs (who had a huge, huge influence on my musical tastes and indeed, my young mental growth, in general), when a new group had the Trouser Press/Mick Farren seal of approval, I had to rush right out and check it out.
In the post-punk era, there were fantastic new bands coming out every week and the Trouser Press (named for a Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah song, so I was already inclined to love it) was the indispensable guide to this era, musically speaking in the US, for extreme music heads (and it had a flexi-disc in each issue. This is how I first heard groups like REM, Human Switchboard. Japan, OMD and others). The Trouser Press was where Mick Farren came into my life, but British readers of the alternative press already knew Farren from his stints at the International Times, Oz magazine, and the NME. His famous essay “The Titanic Sails at Dawn” predicted that *something* like punk was bound to happen, and presented as inevitable (Rod Stewart, Queen and the Stones were the objects of his analysis, and ire) several months before the first spiky-haired, safety-pinned punk rocker appeared on the streets. Some recall Mick Farren from his time as a doorman at the UFO Club in 1967, where Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine played for the nascent psychedelic underground. Or as one of the hell raisers at the Isle of Wight festival. Or for his amazing proto-punk group, The Deviants, and their Fugs and Mothers of Invention-influenced “balls to the wall” rock.
Mick Farren’s been active for five decades now and at 67, can still outdrink you.
In 2005, Mick wrote a cover story about me and Adam Parfrey of Feral House for the now defunct City Beat alt weekly (where Farren also wrote the best TV column in history, bar none). Thirty years after I waited patiently for Mick’s monthly recommendations and reviews in the Trouser Press to arrive in the post, he was writing about little old me. If you’d have told my 14-year-old self that 25 years later, I’d be a subject of a Mick Farren profile, he’d have been quite thrilled, too, but no less thrilled than I was at 39 years of age, I can assure you.
But soon, Los Angeles is about to lose this prophet without honor: in just a couple of days Farren’s moving back to England, the seaside town of Brighton, specifically. I got a chance to say goodbye to Mick—who told me bluntly—“I don’t want to die in America”—at a bon voyage party this past weekend. Pandora Young was there, and wrote at Fishbowl LA:
After nearly three decades in the states, prolific author, punk musician, and counterculture journalist Mick Farren is returning to jolly old England. La La land yokels who don’t know their punk rock history may still recall Farren from his stints as a columnist at the now-defunct alternative rags LA Reader and LA CityBeat.
This past Saturday night the 67-year-old Brit celebrated his departure at El Chavo in Silver Lake, signing his many books, reminiscing, and drinking friends half his age under the table. At the end of the evening, as we were saying goodbye, he put his hands on my shoulders and slurred at me, “Pandora, what this town needs is a proper alternative press. You have the talent and you have the readers. Someone just needs to make it happen.”
“Why not you, Mick?” I asked, wiping the spittle from my cheek.
“It’s nothing to do with me,” he replied, stumbling towards a waiting car. “I’m going home.”
Godspeed. Mick. Respect and love.
And people of Brighton, buy the anarchist a beer, won’t you? There will be a living legend amongst you, take advantage of this fact.
Below, a recent interview I did will Mick Farren about his new book Speed, Speed Speedfreak (Feral House):
More Mick Farren after the jump…
Exquisite time-lapse photography of marijuana plants growing from seedlings to harvest. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s just in time for grow season. Amazing!
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)
Do I smell a new Baby Preacher in the making?
(via Arbroath)
Sammy Davis Jr leads Max Harris’ ‘Dee Time’ orchestra in an utterly-unrehearsed version of the then-new Bacharach/David number ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’. The band is sight-reading, Sammy’s winging it, and the result is magic.
‘Dee Time’, hosted by Simon Dee, was a British variety show that aired in the late 1960’s.
Watching this clip tonight revived my love for Sammy. I read ‘Yes I Can’ as a kid and Sammy, along with James Brown and Chuck Berry, was one of the Black cats who really shook up my cracker ass. I grew up in the South at a time when most my white friends hated “niggers”. I didn’t. Whitebread American suburban life in the sixties deadened my soul. Rock and roll and rhythm and blues changed all that. Sammy Davis Jr. was accused by some of being an Uncle Tom, a sellout to the man. But, for kids like me, seeing Sammy on hipster TV like ‘Laugh In’ was the beginning of a process of breaking down age old racial barriers that reached its apotheosis with the powerful energy of Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Huey Newton and Martin Luther King. I didn’t give a shit what anybody said, Sammy Davis was a god.
This video is sublime.
I’m seein’ Andre 3000 in a biopic of Sammy’s life. Right?
Grandpa Woodstock hosts his show ‘The Flower Power Hour’ from wherever he might be at any given time, whether it’s a box or a cave in Arizona. I like him. This old flower child is a perennial. An American sadhu.
He has a Facebook page. You can check it out here.
“I will continue to spread peace and love for the rest of my life.”
Even if peace comes I still won’t stop.”
I like the way Grandpa schools that young fuckin’ punk hippie.
“Now you wanna lay on Grandpa’s bed and smoke the bowl all day.”
I wrote a version of this for Planet Paul, but as it’s getting near time for Halloween I thought I’d share. I love horror movies, and when I was younger I was a member of the Peter Cushing Fan Club. No seriously, it was cool. For your dollar a year you received a monthly newsletter, lots of free pix, and many other oddments. One such was a news clipping about the great actor and his longing for death, after his wife, Violet Helen Beck died. Helen gave Cushing purpose and meaning and although he was born in 1913, the world famous actor preferred to see the year of his actual birth as 1942 – the year he met Helen.
It was a love-at-first-sight thing, and the couple married in 1943, and thereafter, Helen, a former actress became the centre of Cushing’s life, encouraging him, and supporting him throughout the early, lean years of his career. As Cushing later said, “I owe it all to Helen. She was an actress and gave up her career for me. She made me what I am. She gave me a confidence, I could never have found on my own.”
If you look closely, you’ll see, in many of Cushing’s movies, a small silver framed portrait of Helen, placed as a prop on the desk of Baron Victor Frankenstein or in the study of Professor Van Helsing.
Cushing’s life with Helen was lived more on a mental plane than a physical one, as he told New Reveille in 1974, “We didn’t consider the physical aspect of marriage very important,” he explained. Yet, their love was so great that Cushing claimed his life ended the day Helen died in 1971.
That night, Cushing repeatedly ran up and down stairs in an attempt to induce a heart attack. He failed and later claimed his actions had been caused by the trauma of his Helen’s death - “I had always hoped that we would depart this life together, but it was not to be.”
From then on, Cushing had a death wish, and stated death was the only happy ending to his love affair with Helen.
“I am not a religious man, but I try to live by Christian ethics. Helen has passed on but she is with me still. She is all around. What I am doing is merely existing – longing for the day when I shall die and join her for ever. We will be together again but time does not heal.”
Before she died, Helen wrote Peter a poem telling him “not to be hasty to leave” until he had lived the life he had been given.
“I could not take away my life, because that would be letting Helen down. But I would be so happy if I could die tomorrow.”
But death did not come quickly for the great, good Gentleman of Horror, Cushing lived for a further 23 years, during which time he made some of his most memorable and successful films.
Bonus clips of Peter Cushing after the jump…
Where would we be without a good conspiracy theory? Here’s one that’s currently circulating the web, from a Doctor of Inter-Stellar Anthropology (no really), who was allegedly hired as a “special consultant” to the CIA, on the project “dubbed Red Rock,” to locate and operate a mysterious “device” that emitted all-powerful sound waves, which the Doc had to get working before 2012, otherwise we’re all dead. This, according to the voice on the video, is the reason America invaded Iraq. Hm…so that explains it..eh?
The people controlling our planet DO NOT WANT YOU TO HEAR what this guy has to say, but he is a respected academic and has first hand knowledge of the real reason the US invaded Iraq and ancient, alien tech - ET disclosure in imminent, we may as well know the truth. This video explains why everyone is trying to buy up the gold, the stuxnet virus, the NWO’s plans to attack China, the real reason behind the September 11th attacks and what is going to happen on December 21, 2012.
Make your own mind up, but just remember, this guy gets to vote.
Happy Birthday Pablo Picasso, born today in 1881, the artist whose talent and vision revolutionized art in the 20th century, and who once famously said, “Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.” Throughout his long and prolific life he did this and more. Out of all his incredible and brilliant work, perhaps his most famous picture, along with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, is his giant black and white painting Guernica.
Picasso painted Guernica in response to the German Luftwaffe’s and the Italian Fascist Aviazione Legionaria’s aerial bombing of the Basque town, Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937. Between 200 and 400 innocent civillians were slaughtered in the attack, which led the Fascists, under Genral Franco, to defeat the Republicans, and seize control of Spain.
Originally commissioned by the Spanish Republican government for the ‘Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques la Vie Moderne‘ in Paris, Guernica became a symbol of the harrowing tragedies and suffering the Civil War inflicted on the innocent. As he worked on the mural, Picasso said:
“The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? … In the panel on which I am working, which I shall callGuernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.”
After the ‘Exposition’, Picasso refused to allow the painting to return to Spain, until the country was a Republic once again. Between 1939 and the late 1950s Guernica toured the world as a symbol against war. At Picasso’s request the painting was then exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, where it remained until Franco’s death in 1975, and negotiations began to have Guernica returned to its rightful home, which eventually happened in 1981.
There is a story that while Picasso was in Nazi-occupied Paris, during World War II, he was asked by a member of the Gestapo, upon seeing a postcard of Guernica in the artist’s studio, ‘”Did you do that?” To which Picasso responded, “No, you did.”
As a statement against war, Guernica continues to resonate. In 2003, the painting was covered up with a blue curtain, when the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the press over the American case for war in Iraq - the horrific irony of this would not have been lost on the great artist.
This 3-D animation by Lena Gieseke examines the details of Pablo Picasso’s powerful painting.
Via Planet Paul
Two elephant seals duke it out for the right to claim their beach and mates. I wouldn’t want to mess with either one of these guys.
In what is beyond the shadow of a doubt UK pop crooner Paul Young’s finest moment I have somehow found the mythical and difficult to obtain Dangerous Minds toaster post. I guess this was a top 20 hit in Blighty back in ‘78. Fine topic for a tune,really. Any song wherein actual toast is used as an instrument is just fine by me. Every time you go away you take a piece of toast with you.
Thanks again, Tony Coulter !
More sad news in the music world: the great roots reggae crooner, Gregory Issacs has died. Issacs was well-known for his soulful vocalizing and “lover’s rock” sound. He was also known for being the reggae world’s answer to Keith Richards. Issacs died in his London home after traveling around Jamaica for a while following a lung cancer diagnosis last year. He was 59-years-old.
Below, “the cool ruler” in a memorable performance from the movie Rockers:
