Twenty-three years ago today, Fawn Hall became the most famous secretary in America. On June 8, 1987 Hall testified in the Iran-Contra hearings  to helping her boss Lt. Col. Oliver North shred documents having to do with the affair, in which senior Reagan administration officials facilitated arm sales to Iran in order to fund the Nicaraguan contras.

According to Hall’s unsubstantiated Wiki entry, that wasn’t her only lapse of judgment:

Fawn Hall dated Contras politician Arturo Cruz, Jr. In one mishap, she transposed the digits of a Swiss bank account number, resulting in a contribution from the Sultan of Brunei to the Contras being lost. On November 25, 1986, she smuggled confidential papers out of her employer’s office hidden inside her leather boots…

Life after the hearings proved just as interesting for the late-20s Hall, who predictably pursued a modeling career and eventually met and married former post-Morrison Doors manager and archetypal L.A. music business maven Danny Sugerman. The Inside Edition clip below—hosted by a then-second-tier Bill O’Reilly—provides a snapshot of mid-‘90s tabloidism as the sordid strands of politics, drugs and entertainment tangle together deliciously. Sugerman later died of lung cancer in 2005 at age 50.

John and Yoko - $1200

John Cage and Merce Cunningham - $800

Harold and Maude - Sold
 
Here’s a fantastic collection of wedding cake toppers by seattle based artist Mike Leavitt. It’s totally worth a look. From Mike Leavitt’s website:

No longer shall little random plastic people rule the top of your cake. Why suffer the cruelty of impersonal sculpture poisoning the cake frosting you lick from your fingers? Weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, retirement, online bingo… The cake topper figurines can be of any person in any style. Some ‘cake toppers’ aren’t even the bride and groom, just plain loved ones. The finished figures are protected and sealed from any frosting surface damage. For further protection, they aren’t posable with the multiple body part pieces like the action figures. These are finely crafted sculptures that will be enjoyed as long as the union of love that they honor.

(via The Jailbreak)

Following up on Brad’s post on butoh, my gifted illustrator friend Michael Wertz notes that Antony Hegarty (of the Johnsons) has written the obituary for Kazuo Ohno—one of the stark dance/performance form’s originators—who died on June 1 at the age of 103.

Ohno and fellow choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata created butoh in the ‘50s as Japan roiled in young, tortured energy, and the proliferation of butoh groups throughout America and Europe since the late ‘70s speaks to their legacy. Check out Edin Velez‘s excellent film Butoh: Dance of Darkness here.

You can see butoh’s influence on Western avant-garde pop on both the Virgin Prunes live clip and the excerpt from ½ Mensch, Ishii Sogo’s 1986 film of Einsturzende Neubauten, below.

 
Edison Lighthouse was a bunch of British session musicians who were fronted by a most excellent singer by the name of Tony Burrows, who had a pervious chart success as one of The Flowerpot Men with Let’s Go to San Francisco. (Nick Simper and Jon Lord, later of Deep Purple were also in the group and there is an in-joke reference to the Flowerpot Men in This is Spinal Tap.). Edison Lighthouse had one worldwide hit single, Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes, which sold millions of copies throughout 1970. Burrows was basically the voice and persona for songwriter/record producers Tony Macaulay and Barry Mason.
 

 
At one point the trio had four nearly simultaneous entrants to the pop record charts, all of which are posted here. If you are, ahem, of a certain, cough, age, you will probably know at least two of these songs, if not all four (guilty). These guys all had especially impressive batting averages when it came to creating hit records, together and separately.

Amusingly, when I was looking at the various YouTube videos of Tony Burrows-fronted groups, some of the Edison Lighthouse music videos had him in them, but others have another guy lip-syncing to his vocals. The other “band members” seem to be hired actors, too.
 

 
Here he is again, with the Brotherhood of Man performing United We Stand, Divided We Fall. Of course this was a second worldwide smash and I remind you, released within weeks of the Edison Lighthouse hit. Lest you think that Top of the Pops presenter Jimmy Saville was wearing the same groovy Nehru jacket each week on TOTP, this clip was culled from the very same show, broadcast January 29, 1970. In fact, Burrows was actually onstage a third time in that same show and was unofficially black-listed from the program for years, lest the audience think the pop charts were rigged in favor of this one singer! (The ban notwithstanding, he returned to TOTP but a few weeks later as one of The Pipkins.)
 

 
Next up was My Baby Love Lovin’ by the White Plains, yet a third huge hit.
 

 
And finally in June of 1970 came Gimme Dat Ding under the name The Pipkins. Gimme Dat Ding was used as background music on The Benny Hill Show and was in Ally McBeal several times when Peter MacNicol’s character would do his “Angry Dance” to it. Quite an amazing string of hits, I think you’ll agree! Tony Burrows resurfaced in 1976 as the singer of First Class and scored another popular hit with Beach Baby. Burrows is still performing today.

 
In 2006, the late Dennis Hopper confessed to Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes that he thought his career was a failure. This despite revolutionizing American cinema by directing Easy Rider, and becoming an icon via characters like the lost American photojournalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and the sinister Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. He likely wasn’t otherwise convinced by the star he received on the Hollywood Walk of Fame a couple of months before he died.
 
These clips from Lawrence Schiller-directed 1971 documentary The American Dreamer find the Dodge City, KS-born Hopper in a reflective and quietly desperate place. Shot while he completed post-production on The Last Movie—Hopper’s convoluted, Peruvian-filmed follow-up to Easy Rider—Dreamer follows the scraggly and bearded director as he wanders,  parties and babbles around his Taos, NM ranch.
 
You’d think that triumph of Easy Rider would somewhat make up for Hopper’s emotionally damaged childhood, career troubles, two divorces, and the trauma of his good friend James Dean’s death. But Hopper here is deep inside his alcoholism, musing on his alienation, and treating the filming as a sort of therapy. As you’ll find in the second clip below, part of that therapy involves what he termed a “sensitivity encounter” with about a dozen variously undressed groupies who the mad director harangues with some group-psych babble before disrobing himself. Hopper would eventually hit bottom, wandering literally naked in a South American jungle, before being hospitalized, rehabilitated, and eventually redeemed in the later phase of an enviable “failure” of a career.
 

 
What with John Waters seemingly everywhere these days (Salon, the NYT, Fresh Air) as he promotes his new book, Role Models, I thought it’d be a fine time to revisit one of his former film muses, Edith Massey.

Along with Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce, Massey was a stock player in the Dreamlander universe, and a key contributer to that trilogy of Waters films I and many others consider particularly essential: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living.

Watching those three films growing up (and watching them, and watching them), Massey always struck me as being infinitely stranger than larger-than-life drag queen, Divine.  Maybe it was because I somehow grasped that “drag” was, by definition, “performative,” and thus safer than the whacked-out maternalism that Massey so artlessly channeled.  In fact, whereas Divine’s acting method might be described as quotation-marks-within-quotation-marks, Massey seemingly acted without the cushion of any marks whatsoever—quotation or otherwise.

Massey’s life after Waters was perhaps no odder than her life before it, and its trajectory has an arc straight out of Dickens: from orphanage to reform school, from freight train rider to brothel madam, and then, as these things sometimes go, to Hollywood.

Some of this ground is covered in the ‘74 documentary on her life: Love Letter To Edie (you can watch a clip from that film here).  The below interview from the early 80’s is also amusing:

 
Of course, no Massey entry would be complete without the infamous “Egg Man” moment from Pink Flamingos.  That follows below:

 
After a battle with cancer and diabetes, Massey passed away in Venice, California, in 1984.  That was 2 years after Massey and her band, called, naturally, Edie and the Eggs, released the below Rodney on the Roq staple, Punks, Get Off The Grass:

(above: Heita, daughter, aokubi daikon)
 
Surely the key to ultimate happiness must be in the creating of wind instruments out of a variety of vegetables, because this gentlemen, known simply as Heita, is just preternaturally happy. Just look at his magical wares ! It’s nice that he’s not trying too hard to present it as “serious” music so much, more that it’s just so delightful that musical sound is coming out of this produce ! Can you believe it ?
 

 
Many more homemade vegetable instruments : Heita 3’s Youtube channel
 
Allee Willis’ Blog – Plastic Fruit & Vegetable People and The Most Talented Man You’ve Ever Seen Playing Music On Vegetables
 
thx Richard !

 
The man who helped usher black pop music into the future turned 52 years old today. With rumor of a new album entitled Androgynine due for release this month, it’s a fitting occasion to harvest his Wikipedia entry for some of the odd and maddening details of his life:

• Prince was named after his [pianist] father, whose stage name was Prince Rogers, and who performed with a jazz group called the Prince Rogers Trio. In a 1991 interview with A Current Affair, Prince’s father said, “I named my son Prince because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to do.”

• Prince’s childhood nickname was Skipper.

• In a PBS interview Prince told Tavis Smiley that he was “born epileptic” and “used to have seizures” when he was young. During the interview Prince also said that “my mother told me one day I walked in to her and said, ‘Mom, I’m not going to be sick anymore,’ and she said ‘Why?’ and I said ‘Because an angel told me so.’ “

• After Tipper Gore heard her 12-year-old daughter Karenna listening to Prince’s song “Darling Nikki”, she founded the Parents Music Resource Center…[which] advocated the mandatory use of a warning label (“Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics”) on the covers of records that have been judged to contain language or lyrical content unsuitable for minors.

• Prince was set to release [The Black Album] with a complete monochromatic black cover with only the catalog number printed, but at the last minute, even though 500,000 copies had been pressed, Prince had a spiritual epiphany that the album was evil and had it recalled, although it would later be released by Warner Bros. as a limited edition album in 1994.

• Prince became one of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 2001 following a two-year-long debate with friend and fellow Jehovah’s Witness, musician Larry Graham. Prince said he didn’t consider it a conversion, but a “realization”; “It’s like Morpheus and Neo in The Matrix”, he explained. He attends meetings at a local Kingdom Hall and occasionally knocks on people’s doors to discuss his new faith. Prince has reportedly needed double-hip-replacement surgery since 2005 but won’t undergo the operation unless it is a bloodless surgery because Jehovah’s Witnesses do not accept blood transfusions.

• At the 2008 Coachella Music Festival, Prince performed a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep”, but immediately after he forced YouTube and other sites to remove footage that fans had taken of the performance, despite Radiohead’s demand for it to remain on the website. Days later, YouTube reinstated the videos, while Radiohead claimed “it’s our song, let people hear it.” In 2009, Prince put the video of that Coachella performance on his website LotusFlow3r.com.

Here’s the man himself talking chemtrails, prophesy, and various other nonsequitors:

(via Cynical C)

 
Looking every bit like a Jodorowsky film made out of clay, well known psychedelics enthusiast and Gumby creator, the late Art Clokey’s little seen 1964 psychedelic masterpiece Mandala is a truly wonderous thing to behold.
 
Via Gumbyworld:

“Well, we shot that in our basement in Topanga. We had an 1100 square foot basement in a A-frame on a hillside. It was perfect for our needs. My whole family worked on it, my daughter and Gloria’s daughter. That was our second marriage for both of us. She had a daughter and I had a daughter. They were both artistic, and my son and Gloria worked with the camera. So it was a family effort all in clay.”
Art explained that the goal of Mandala was to communicate “the idea of evolving our consciousness from primordial forms to human form, and then beyond the human to the spiritual and eternal. The theme was the evolution of consciousness: we begin in the mud and we just go out and up.”
The film shows lots of masks and tribal images. “The masks were symbols of the condition that we live in where we are all behind the masks and the whole process of life is to discover who it is behind that mask,” Art told us. “Who are we? Who is that guy behind the mask we’re holding up there? That ‘s the purpose of all religion. You just have to find out who that guy is behind the mask.”

 
bonus goodness: Clokey’s title sequence for the 1965 cheese epic Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine with theme song by the Supremes !

 
previously on DM: Viva Art Clokey !
 
thx Carmel Conlin !

 
Sorry to hear this sad news about Mick Karn, whose distinctive rubbery bass lines fueled the lush sound of 80s new wave group, Japan (and the brief Dali’s Car project with Peter Murphy from Bauhaus):

With great sadness we regret to inform you that Mick has recently been diagnosed with advanced stages of cancer. Mick is currently in a positive mood and undergoing further tests and treatment. His family and friends are close with him, supporting him in practical ways, and surrounding him with their love, friendship and care.

Mick has been struggling financially for some considerable time now and we are hoping that this appeal may help to raise funds for any necessary treatment and perhaps go some way towards providing a small degree of financial support whilst Mick’s immediate family provide the care and comfort we would all wish for him. We are hoping that his friends, fans and musical colleagues will, over the coming months, offer any support they feel capable of giving. Quite aside from the sheer brunt of daunting medically-related costs, Mick’s clear and major concern is for the security and well being of his wife and young son.

If you would like to make a donation whether as an individual or as a group, you can do so via the PayPal link which has been set up for this sole and express purpose. Any support you are able to give, no matter how small, could make a difference in helping Mick cope during this difficult period. His friends will be looking at a variety of ways to raise funds.

Messages of support for Karn can be left on the forum boards here. Japan’s Steve Jansen is donating the proceeds from portraits of Karn sold on his website to the Mick Karn Appeal. The images for sale can be seen here.

 
Above, Japan perform Gentlemen Take Polaroids. Below, Mick Karn and Peter Murphy perform as Dali’s Car on The Old Grey Whistle Test.
 

 
Music by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips.

 
What’s with Sir Elton John performing for the, ahem, fourth (traditional) wedding of flaming asshole and noted homophobe, Rush Limbaugh?!?! And not only that fat piece of shit, but Karl Rove and Sean Hannity as well? Isn’t something very, very odd about this situation? Sir Elton has not—so far at least—made any statements regarding why an outspoken—and of course, notably flamboyant—gay man would sing for such a vile occasion, but I hope the answer is that he simply wanted to bleed Rush Limbaugh of a million bucks to donate to anti-Prop 8 and gay rights activists across the country. (I recall reading once the John donated all of the money he made from performing (or was it royalties?) to the Elton John AIDS Foundation which has raised $220 million dollars since 1992, so maybe it’ll go there).

I really don’t want to believe that Elton John would demean himself to perform for fucking Rush Limbaugh for a mere payday—if it was that idiot Sting singing for Kim Il Jong, I’d have no trouble believing that—but if he’s donating it to charity, then I can understand it.

As for Limbaugh, well, fuck that asshole. As for his new bride, Eva Braun Kate Rogers, with any luck, good ol’ Rushbo will drop dead before she’s 40 or 45 and she’ll still have plenty of time left to spend all of that lovely blood money of his. Ka-ching! (The News Corp wire report about the wedding quotes the new bride as saying of the couple’s 26-year age gap: “I’m sometimes not able to relate to the average person my age.” Memo to Kate: No one believes a word of it, doll…)
 

Kate Rogers, left,and her big fat idiotic payday.
 

 
Although it’s fairly obvious why someone would say hypnotist and mass “faith healer” Anatoly Kashpirovsky is Russia’s “new” Rasputin, calling him Russia’s Uri Geller or even Russia’s Benny Hinn, seems like a better fit. Kashpirovsky, a controversial—and very famous—television “remote healer” was all the rage when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, but the psychic left Russia 15 years ago to “treat” Russian ex-pats in the US (see what I mean about him being a Russian Benny Hinn?). Now he’s back on television in Russia and opinion is no less contentious. From a fascinating article in the Guardian by Moscow-based journalist Marc Bennetts:

Clad entirely in black, his piercing eyes staring into apartments across the vast territory of the USSR, Kashpirovsky “treated” millions, his voice both reassuring and oddly threatening.

“For those of you with high blood pressure, your blood pressure will lower… whoever has hip injuries, they will heal…” he droned, his litany of the suffering and the saved a potent lullaby that plunged the nation into a communal trance.

Who cared if the country was collapsing around them, if the shops were almost empty, and the threat of separatist violence in the Caucasus was moving ever closer? The USSR turned on, tuned in and switched off.

“The streets would empty whenever Kashpirovsky came on,” journalist Katya Murzina tells me. “I was just a kid, but I remember we all talked about his shows at school. Everyone was convinced he really could heal the nation.

“We had never seen anything like this on TV before,” she goes on. “You have to remember, there were basically no adverts on Soviet TV. Everything was taken at face value. So if state TV presented him as possessing these incredible powers, most people believed it.”

I suppose that would explain why anyone would be convinced of Kashpirovsky’s “talents: after watching something as silly as this:
 

 
Faith healer Anatoly Kashpirovsky: Russia’s new Rasputin (Guardian)

Thank you Chris Campion of Berlin, Germany!