Relatively new to Youtube is this 2008 documentary in its three hour (!) entirety. I’ll admit I haven’t watched the whole thing yet so can’t vouch for quality, though it evidently touches on the whole beloved Krautrock spectrum. Hell, I’d watch a documentary about plumbing if it had something about Can in it, so I’ll be diving right into this one shortly.
Meet the wolf-pack! They’re not goth. They aren’t “Emo,” either. They’re something altogether goofier! Not so much mall-rats as mall-wolves, I suppose. And they will have you know that they are not posers!
This is hilarious. Dig the audience! What is this? Who are Why are they there? It’s incidental that the Bay City Rollers happen to be onstage with a tartan-wearing Ann Margaret, but the audience! I love the range of reaction, from uninhibited dancing to the one lady knitting.
This wonderfulness via Lady Bunny blog/Marc Campbell.
Mark Twain, the revered American author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer left over 5000 pages of unedited autobiographical writing when he died, with the instructions that it not be published until 100 years after his death. And that’s now. I can’t wait to get my hands on this!
Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.
One thing’s for sure: by delaying publication, the author, who was fond of his celebrity status, has ensured that he’ll be gossiped about during the 21st century. A section of the memoir will detail his little-known but scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after the death of his wife Olivia in 1904. Twain was so close to Lyon that she once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy. But she was abruptly sacked in 1909, after the author claimed she had “hypnotised” him into giving her power of attorney over his estate.
Their ill-fated relationship will be recounted in full in a 400-page addendum, which Twain wrote during the last year of his life. It provides a remarkable account of how the dying novelist’s final months were overshadowed by personal upheavals.
“Most people think Mark Twain was a sort of genteel Victorian. Well, in this document he calls her a slut and says she tried to seduce him. It’s completely at odds with the impression most people have of him,” says the historian Laura Trombley, who this year published a book about Lyon called Mark Twain’s Other Woman.
“There is a perception that Twain spent his final years basking in the adoration of fans. The autobiography will perhaps show that it wasn’t such a happy time. He spent six months of the last year of his life writing a manuscript full of vitriol, saying things that he’d never said about anyone in print before. It really is 400 pages of bile.”
After keeping us waiting for a century, Mark Twain will finally reveal all (The Independent)
It’s been fascinating—and fun—watching Republican Tea party favorite, Rand Paul implode this past week. In my never so humble opinion he’s a straight up nut job—no wonder the teabaggers love him so much—who’s a card carrying member of the tin foil hat brigade. Did you see the stuff about him warning against the “NAFTA Superhighway” and the “Amero” on TPM? When someone starts talking about the fucking Amero, trust me, it’s time to get off the bus and wait for the next one! (He even warned of a Hitler-style dictatorship coming to America at a speech at a “machine gun shoot” last year)
But aside from the culturally unsophisticated Paul bringing the funny, which as I say, I enjoyed very much, one of the commenters about him on YouTube got me noticing how ready the media is to rip this guy apart. The poster wrote some typical “They’re just trying to tear a brave man down” BS. Well, brave or not—I think Rand Paul is an absolute moron—the guy did have a point: The media IS trying to tear Rand Paul down. This is not a conspiracy, it’s an easily observable fact. It’s not just about him saying some dumb shit and then it dies down, the members of the media actively want his blood. Look at the video below from Meet the Press. The sharks are circling Rand Paul.
I’d argue that this is an entirely appropriate reaction to a guy who espouses the brand of dangerous horseshit Paul does. This is a case, right before our very eyes, where the media—and I remind you that the media is made of human beings with opinions and feelings, I work at the LA Times myself—is acting like white blood cells trying to rid the body politic of a cancer.
A cancer named Rand Paul. Fuck this guy!
So begins R.U. Sirius’s history of Mondo 2000 magazine and its circle of fellow travelers. I approve of how it starts with this wonderful personal anecdote about his first exposure to the underground press as a teen, in the form of the San Francisco Oracle. Many people will tell you of an “Oh wow! This exists! And there must be more of it!” epiphany like this—I had a similar experience discovering David Bowie and reading Lester Bangs in Creem magazine eight years later—and it’s a highly enjoyable essay. Worth pointing out that kids today and forevermore will be unable to have an experience like this due to the always on mediascape we inhabit today. Discovering something rare used to require luck, a knack for ferreting out weird stuff or a hip relative. Not saying it would be preferable to go back to this earlier era, of course, I’m just saying that back then it took work:
Let the story beginning in the Spring of 1967. I am 14 years old and in 9th grade. It’s early evening and the doorbell rings at the suburban house in Binghamton, New York where I live with my mom and dad. It’s a group of my friends and they’re each carrying a plastic bag and looking mighty pleased. They come in, we shuffle into the guest room (where the record player is kept) and they show off their gatherings — buttons (“Frodo Lives!” “Mary Poppins is a Junkie” “Flower Power”), beads, posters (hallucinatory), incense with a Buddha incense burner, and kazoos. A lonely looking newspaper lays at the bottom of the pile, as though shameful, the only item unremarked.
Without realizing the implications, I happen to throw side one of Between The Buttons on the player. Eventually, the song “Cool Calm and Collected” plays and a kazoo sounds through the speakers. In an instant, newly purchased kazoos are wielded and The Rolling Stones only-ever kazoo solo is joined by three wailing teenagers, bringing sudden shouts of objection from my famously liberal and tolerant Dad in the living room. It’s quickly determined that it’s late, Dad’s tired, and it’s time to send all kazoo-wielding teens packing. As each of the friends moves to retrieve his items, I grab the newspaper to see what it is. There are, I now see, two of them — two editions of something called “The Oracle.” It has hallucinatory visuals on the cover and boasts an interview with a member of The Byrds (David Crosby). Vinnie, who had bought it — but who, despite writing poetry — avoids any signifiers of intellectual curiosity as the teen status crushers that they are, feigns disinterest and gives the copies to me.
And that’s where it begins, this strange love affair with the periodical, particularly the periodical that has flair and style… where you can almost feel the energy and fun emanating off the pages.
I remember only one thing from the content inside those two Oracles and that’s David Crosby denying that he was “some kind of weird freak who fucks ten chicks a day.” That stuck in my mind. I didn’t know it was possible even to think that, much less print it, much less be in a position to find it necessary to deny being it!
How great is that last sentence?
Read the entire essay—and support the project—here.
I think they might have glossed over some of the subtleties—just slightly—but in the main, it’s right on!
I had no earthly idea about this until just this moment. From the rare movie Umano non Umano by Mario Schifano. Shot in ‘69, released in ‘72.
thx Matt Devine !
It’s more babytalk than Edward Albee, but still… She really gets under his skin doesn’t she?
Thanks, Khara Alii!
Mobile, Alabama-based traveling evangelist, Anthony Hopkins, who authorities say terrorized his family while preaching the gospel was sentenced to life in prison, plus 51 years after being convicted of killing his wife and hiding her body in a home freezer for three years. Circuit Judge John Lockett imposed the sentence Thursday on Anthony Hopkins in Mobile. Assistant District Attorney Ashley Rich called Hopkins “evil of the worst kind.”
Prosecutor told jurors that Anthony Hopkins terrorized his wife and young children, isolated them and used the Bible to manipulate them. “He was the supreme commander of his own little army,” said Assistant District Attorney Jill Phillips.
After 90 ,minutes of deliberation, the jury in Mobile also found Hopkins guilty of sodomy, rape, incest and sexual abuse of a child between the ages of 12 and 16.
From an April 6th, 2010 article on the Black Christian News website, prior to the trial’s conclusion:
People who heard traveling evangelist Anthony Hopkins deliver sermons in the rural Southern towns where he preached sometimes called him a psychic or even a prophet.
But prosecutors say the former soldier kept dark secrets while spreading God’s word. They accuse him of killing his wife, storing her body in a freezer for years and raping and molesting a young female relative.
Opening statements in his trial were expected to start Tuesday.
Hopkins, 39, was arrested in 2008 while preaching a rural revival in Clarke County. A teenage relative allegedly pregnant with his baby led police to the body of 36-year-old Arletha Hopkins, a mother of eight ranging in age from an infant to late teens.
Investigators say Hopkins killed his wife in 2004 after she caught him having sex with a female relative, then stuffed her body into a freezer at the Mobile home he shared with her, six children and two stepchildren.
Nicholas L. Jackson Sr., pastor of a small church in Jackson where Hopkins sometimes preached, told a local newspaper in 2008 that many who heard him considered him a prophet with psychic abilities.
“When he told you something was going to happen, you could pretty much count on it,” he said.
Then Hopkins should have seen his own sordid fate. May he rot in hell.
There’s one slightly amusing note to this tragic story: When asked if ministers should be held to a higher standard than laymen, one of the potential jurors is said to have replied “Yeah, they should practice what they preach!” Amen, brother.
Via my dear old friend, the brilliant microtonal composer/instrument builder Kraig Grady, comes this clip about the amazing yodel singing of the Central African pygmies. After getting all excited by this moving and beautiful music I hunted down the other couple of clips for my and your further aesthetic excitement. Incredibly lovely stuff.
Bayaka: The Extraordinary Music of the Babenzele Pygmies and Sounds of Their Forest Home
What follows below are a pair of newly uploaded Rock Music Exposed clips from YouTube channeler, Triplexity, and were apparently culled from the two-part ‘89 documentary, Hell’s Bells (which, to my knowledge, remains in VHS-only exile).
The intro, clip 1 of 36 (!) and found here, lays out the Hell’s Bells agenda, “to help people understand the big picture, peel back the veneer of pop culture, and gaze into the bedrock of truth that lies beneath.”
Since it also hopes to serve as, “a wake-up call, an alarm warning of the fire raging just down the hall,” you can bet your salvation its earnest-but-porny-looking narrator means a “Christian truth.” I know, sounds like a snooze. We’ve seen—and smirked—at this kind of crap on numerous occasions.
But readers of Dangers Minds might find far more compelling the below clips, 12 and 13. In them, Hell’s Bells puts under the Christian magnifying glass Kenneth Anger, Mick Jagger, Timothy Leary and The Beatles.
I must say I certainly found this article to be a bit of a show stopper as I drank my morning coffee… Best sentence: “Our parents recognized what we actually do, and it was not good.” From Salon :
Based on their YouTube channel, Elijah and Milo Peters just seem like your average, slightly awkward Czech teenage twins. They enjoy role-playing games and steak. They like frolicking around on the beach in their elaborately patterned underwear and taunting each other while bodybuilding. (“Hey you lazy-ee boy! Put some weight on eet!”) But the Peters twins aren’t quite as innocent as their goofy grins and adorable accents suggest.
Over the past few months, they have become two of the most controversial performers to hit the gay porn world in a very long time. That’s because they’re willing to break a taboo that, even in an industry that thrives on extremes, is too extreme for many: twin incest (or, more succinctly, twincest). While the concept of twin performers is not new to the gay porn world, the Peters twins are notable both because of the extent of their popularity and the things they are willing to do with each other on camera. They French kiss; they perform oral sex on each other; they have anal sex; and most shockingly of all, they do it in a tender and romantic way.
“My brother is my boyfriend, and I am his boyfriend,” says one of the twins during a phone call from Prague (Elijah and Milo sound so much alike on the phone it is impossible to tell which one is speaking). “He is my lifeblood, and he is my only love.”
The twins’ astonishing lack of shame—and their willingness to do anything with each other on camera—has helped turn them into a gay porn phenomenon. Since they first began appearing on Czech porn studio Bel Ami’s website in 2009, the company’s traffic has doubled to 1.5 million users per month, and Milo and Elijah have become the subject of breathless coverage on adult blogging sites like Fleshbot and The Sword. They’ve even been flown from Prague to the United States for a whirlwind tour of Florida gay nightspots. But their surprising popularity raises some disturbing questions: Who are these twins? What keeps so many people watching them? And what, exactly, are viewers getting off on?
Read more: Gay porn’s most shocking taboo (Salon)
It’s been a lifelong struggle with manic depression for Adam Ant, and, sadly, the 80’s pop icon seems to have lost the latest round. After a series of increasingly erratic public appearances, Ant, nee Stuart Goddard, showed up at a charity event to raise money for starving children in the Phillipines.
While performing a cover of Sympathy For The Devil, Ant asked if there were any “Christians in the room” before telling them to “fuck off.” According to The Daily Mail, he was then “sectioned under the mental health act,” and is now in recovery.
You can see footage of the charity event here. But speaking, I think, for many of us here at Dangerous Minds, it might be best to simply wish Ant the best of luck and watch him in a more bouyant mood in the video below: