Roving Buddha of the 177th Astral Highway explains… something to you. Message lost due to lack of subtitles, enlightenment deferred.
The Vice Guide to Film uploaded this video guide to Mexican narco cinema. The genre focuses on “cocaine, guns, girls and trucks.” Vice went to Mexico to explore the budding new genre. Fun stuff, inspired by Mexico’s current drug cartel mayhem.
(Pictured above: Jesus Malverde, the patron saint of drug trafficking!)
I’m afraid this will haunt my dreams for weeks to come. Vader Abraham (!) makes me imagine a hippified Dr. Gene Scott. My deepest apologies to all who view this.
thx? Ned Raggett
From today’s Fishbowl LA newsletter comes this utterly stupefying clip of the “mad skillz” of right-wing Christian rapper, Polatik. Is this guy for (sur)real? Look at him! He must really think he’s helping the cause. What a tool! He makes even Michael Steele look like he’s got good instincts for expanding the Republican base! He raps about as well as Orrin Hatch! And man are his backing dancers FLY or what?!?! Look at the booty on those babes!
We were just watching the CSPAN feed from this weekend’s “Tea Party” hootinany in Nevada when we caught arguably the greatest (and by greatest we mean the absolute WORST) hip-hop performance of all time—from reactionary MC “Polatik.” Seriously, we can’t even figure out how to describe what we just saw. Like if someone shoved the love child of Chuck D and Mussolini onstage after it had spent the majority of its adult life sniffing glue…but funnier.
Can’t seem to find the Nevada clip anywhere online, but here’s an older performance from Waco, Texas. Almost as good.
Ya gotta love shit like this. Every single time these Tea baggers show up, they bring the stupid by the mega-tonnage. No younger voters are gonna look at something like this and be “inspired” to do anything… other than to register as Democrats! I say bring it on! Go Polatik go!
Nice. Is the audience silent throughout because they can’t believe what they’re seeing? Nary a titter until the very end. Seriously odd. The world is yours.
thx Ron Nachmann !
Update: This is indeed a hoax directed by Marc Klasfeld. Bravo !
Reality Sandwich excerpts “Autobiography of a Sadhu” by Rampuri. Balls-to-the-wall crazy like only India can offer.
As he repeated a mantra, Amar Puri Baba slipped the rudraksha bead on the janeu string, over my head.
“My brother, your guru, has given you the gift of rudraksha. This bead, which as you can see, is a seed from a tree, contains the power of discipleship. It is the manifestation of the covenant between humans and the Great God Shiva that the Path of Knowledge would be passed down through the tradition of discipleship. Shiva’s most uncompassionate manifestation, Rudra, shed a tear of compassion for mankind, and this became the Rudraksha tree. It pulls the pranas upward, and can be worn anywhere on the upper body to focus energy, but the one the guru gives you is worn over the heart, where your connection with the guru is established.”
Mangal Bharti concluded the giving of the five gifts by wrapping me in the ochre dhoti, creating little sleeves for my arms as he folded and tied the cloth in the traditional sannyasi way. “This final gift of the five is your protection and sheltering of Mother Earth. You see, it is the color of her soil, ochre, her life-blood. You see how long this fine cloth is when unfolded? It is a flag marking that you are in her hands, and that you are on the Path.”
Excellent, excellent article on Cary Grant’s love affair with acid. This is rather heart-warming… how come we never hear THIS side of history?
It was 1943. Cary Grant was starring in the motion picture Destination Tokyo; an action-filled wartime drama co-starring John Garfield and a deluge of racial slurs. While America was embroiled in the intense fighting of World War Two, Axis powers had surrounded the neutral country of Switzerland. Deep within Nazi surrounded boundaries, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman was busy toiling away in a dimly lit laboratory, about to study the properties of a synthesis he had abandoned five years earlier. Hoffman was trying to devise a chemical agent that could act as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant when he accidentally absorbed lysergic acid through his fingers. While Americans sat in darkened theaters enjoying Cary Grant’s portrayal of a submarine captain, Hoffman was experiencing accelerated thought patterns, polychromatic visions and an unbearable onslaught of intense emotion. This was the world’s first acid trip. The discovery was soon to transform the life of one of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars.
Cary Grant was the first mainstream celebrity to espouse the virtues of psychedelic drugs. Whereas novelist Aldous Huxley’s famous 1954 treatise The Doors of Perception recounted his remarkable experiences with mescaline, Huxley was hardly mainstream - a darling of intellectual circles to be sure, but a far cry from a matinee idol. Grant was one of the biggest stars Hollywood had to offer when he jumped headlong into Huxley’s Heaven and Hell. His endorsement of subconscious exploration, arguably, created more interest in LSD than Dr. Timothy Leary who was largely preaching to the converted.1 Grant on the other hand was the fantasy of countless Midwestern women. He convinced wholesome movie starlets like Esther Williams and Dyan Cannon to blow their minds. When Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping interviewed him, the topic of conversation wasn’t Cary’s favorite recipe or “the problem with youth today.” Instead, Cary Grant was telling happy homemakers that LSD was the greatest thing in the world.
This is kind of insane.
Civilization, a video mural created for the new Standard hotel in New York City, depicts a journey from hell to heaven interpreted through modern film language using computer-enhanced found footage. This epic video mural contains over 300 individual channels of looped video blended into a multi-layered seamless tableau of interconnecting images that illustrate a contemporary, satirical take on the concepts of Heaven and Hell.
Watch it in hi-res below (worth it).
I’m a non-practicing Atheist type of Jew with a specific distaste for this particular holiday but even I cannot resist a Passover mix that includes Joy Division, The Velvet Underground and other non-trad delights. Don’t forget to smear lamb’s blood on your doorway and watch out for falling frogs and locusts ! I’ll find the Afikoman before you do !
Richard Tucker, “The Kiddush”
Darondo, “Let My People Go”
Socalled, “The Four Questions”
Moe Jaffe & Henry Tobias, “Passover Time on the Range”
G-d Is My Co-Pilot, “Dayenu”
Steven Bernstein, “Manishtana” (vs. The Wonder Kids)
Bas Sheva, “Caravan”
Joy Division, “Passover”
Rabbi Kahn, “Your Passover Seder” vs. Flying Lotus
Harold Stern, “Jewish Cowboy”
The Carter Family, “On My Way To Canaan’s Land”
Charles Mingus, “Freedom”
Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free”
Gershon Kingsley, “What Does It Take (The Ten Plagues)”
Socalled, “Dayenu”
Egyptian Lover, “Egypt, Egypt” vs. The Malavsky Family
Ray Barretto, “Exodus”
Benjamin Lapidus, “Las Cuatro Preguntas”
Ray Charles, “Where Can I Go?”
James Harman Band, “The Four Questions”
The Velvet Underground, “I’m Set Free”
Roosevelt Charles, “Let My People Go”
Exodus 2.0: Idelsohn Society Passover Mix 2010 by The Idelsohn Society
via The Idelsohn Society
A brilliant (and terribly droll) commentary on consumer culture, “Logograma” is an Academy award-winning short film directed by the French animation collective H5 (François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain). First shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, “Logorama” also opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. I especially like the scene where Ronald McDonald holds a gun to the head of the Bob’s Big Boy mascot.
