Today is Gene Vincent’s birthday. And while the film I’m sharing to commemorate this date is hardly an uplifter, it is a touching testament to Gene Vincent’s devotion to his art and fans.
In 1957 Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula had sold two million copies and he was an International star. But his meteoric rise was followed by tragedy and tough times in the 1960s. While he continued to record and tour with some success, particularly in England, by the mid-60s his music career was as battered as his body.
Gene Vincent: The Rock And Roll Singer documents Vincent’s British tour of 1969. Working with a pickup band and playing dingy clubs and small halls at “the rough end of the music biz,” the film follows Vincent and his loyal crew as they struggle to make enough money to get from gig to gig. There’s a sad beauty in the whole mess.
In addition to the financial problems of the tour, Vincent was suffering debilitating pain from a 1955 motorcycle accident and the taxi cab collision that killed his fellow passenger and friend Eddie Cochran in 1960. As we watch Vincent perform in front of his adoring fans, you can practically feel his exhaustion and see the hurt behind his determined smile.
Less than two years after this documentary was filmed, Vincent was dead of a burst ulcer. He was only 36 years old.
A trippy alchemical potion of a movie, Space Is The Place inhabits an alternative reality that could only exist in the Afrodelic cosmology of Saturnian jazz priest Sun Ra.
Directed by John Coney in 1974, the movie is a hybrid of B-grade sci-fi, Blaxploitation flix (on shrooms), the films of Kenneth Anger and surrealist head trips like El Topo and the electric western Zachariah.
In the film, as in life, Sun Ra is the quintessential outsider and space is a metaphorical Eden for this much put upon black man. The plot is threadbare, involving villainous pimps and dealers, Black Panther avenger protagonists, local nightclubs, pool halls, cat houses, and, of course, an Outer Space Employment Agency that Sun Ra sets up after coming to Earth from a faraway planet. To recruit a new colony, he espouses racial freedom through Egyptian epigrams, Stockhausen-like jazz and a spirit filled Rocket Ship. Of course, Ra is challenged by establishment agents and a supreme villain, the Overseer (Ray Johnson), who lures impressionable black men away from Ra’s brand of truth with the vices of sex and money. Ra preaches against decadence and hits a nerve when showing the pimp and his followers that they are no different than the White Man (Nixon, here) they rage against. Ra promises a land of racial harmony and social justice lies within the Milky Way’s stars, and who are we to argue?” - Alfred Eaker
The cinematic equivalent of one of Sun Ra’s free jazz improvs, Space Is The Place is all over the cosmic map so it helps to find that Zen spot where you just lock into the frequency and go with the flow. As Sun Ray instructs, get in tune with the universe.
“The people have no music that is in coordination with their spirits. Because of this, they’re out of tune with the universe. Since they don’t have money, they don’t have anything. If the planet takes hold of an alter destiny, there’s hope for all of us. But otherwise the death sentence upon this planet still stands. Everyone must die.” - Sun Ra
After you watch Andrew Breitbart absolutely lose his goddamn shit, screaming his head off at Occupy protesters raising some hell at CPAC (telling them to “behave” and “stop raping people”) you will no longer wonder if he’s sane or not, because the answer is in his eyes. His crazy fucking eyes.
Can you imagine how he acts at home, in private?!?!? Yikes!
Some would say that Sir Jimmy Savile always had a whiff of the unsavory about him. Before his death in 2011, there were plenty of rumors doing the rounds of the olde jingle-jangle jewelry master’s sexual peccadilloes, of which the most vicious was the allegation our sainted Jim enjoyed sexual congress with corpses at a local hospital. I first heard that story when I was at school in the 1970s, so you can imagine how ingrained these rumors became over the years.
Another, was Sir Jimmy’s alleged sexual shenanigans at various hospital locations throughout the U.K., the only consistent here was that the location changed and the depravity deepened with every re-telling.
What was never clear was why if these rumors had even a soupcon of fact they were never investigated by some tabloid journalist or ambitious Lestarde, who planned to put the cuffs on Sir Jim. Which is what one would expect, considering such high profile cases involving Gary Glitter, Jonathan King and even The Who’s Pete Townshend, over his dubious internet activity.
Which is why this week, I was surprised to hear that an unlikely source had come forward with allegations that Sir Jimmy had sex with under age girls during the 1970s. The source was the over sixties magazine, The Oldie, edited by former Private Eye chief Richard Ingrams.
The Oldie is usually filled with the chattering of baby boomers sharing tips on pensions, retirement plans, holidays, reports of memorial services and memories of the 1940s to 1960s when everything was hunky-dory with the world. It is not the kind of publication one would expect to find serious child sex allegations about popular TV celebrities. However, this week, Miles Goslett has done just that in his article, “Savile row”.
Goslett investigates why the BBC allegedly dropped a news report (for their current affairs show Newsnight), “investigating allegations of sexual abuse made against its long-serving employee Jimmy Savile?” Goslett explains that before Christmas the BBC broadcast two tribute programmes (one on TV, one on radio) that celebrated Savile’s life and career.
...No mention was made of the unsavoury rumours about Savile’s private life which had persisted throughout his career.
Before the BBC’s tributes were aired, however, journalists on the BBC2 programme Newsnight had been investigating the datk side of the apparently saintly entertainer. Their enquiries centred around Savile’s regular visits during the 1970s to Duncroft, an approved local authority school for emotional disturbed girls aged between 13 and 18 in Staines, Surrey, which closed in 1980. It emerged that in 2007 Surrey Police and the Crown Prosecution Service had investigated a historic complaint that Savile had abused girls at the school but no action had been take.
Newsnight tracked down several ex-Duncroft pupils, now middle-aged women, who confirmed that Savile had molested them when they were aged 14 or 15. At least one woman gave an on-camera, on-the-record interview to Newsnight about the abuse she had suffered.
As Goslett goes on to say, this was a coup by any standard. However, prior to the story being broadcast the story was dropped.
More on the allegations against Savile and the whole of Miles Goslett’s article, after the jump…
An all-out, 15-minute-long aural assault by Can on Ege Bamyasi’s “Spoon,” here turned into an epic jam ala “Sister Ray” during the Can Free Concert at the Cologne Sporthalle on February 3, 1972 (Available on DVD).
Fun fact: “Spoon” was the theme tune to a popular German crime drama titled Das Messer (“The Knife”).
Frank Zappa makes a 1978 appearance on Make Me Laugh, an awful looking game show hosted by Bobby Van. Zappa nearly wordlessly promotes his then new Sheik Yerbouti album and wins a member of the studio audience a lot of consumer items by not laughing at Gallagher and another completely unfunny comic.
You can clearly tell that he hated every second of this.
Lifestyle pet photographer, Seth Casteel, captured these amazing images of dogs fetching their toys underwater. I can’t get over how the water transforms, what is probably a sweet pooch’s face, into something so ferocious and shark-like.
Seth should photograph our dog, Tong Tong in a parody of the Nirvana album cover…
Get a whiff of the action at yesterday’s CPAC event in Washington, DC where Brad Stine, truly one of the worst comics I’ve ever had the misfortune to listen to, speaks openly about “natural selection” to a bunch of wild and crazy Republicans. I do hope that some of them take his advice about not wearing seat-belts, I must say. It’s the patriotic duty of every conservative to protest having to wear seat-belts and use baby seats! Don’t do what that Obama tells you to do! Boycott motorcycle helmets, too, conservatives!
Stine, who looks like Gérard Depardieu’s less pretty younger brother, isn’t even a shitty version of Denis Leary and, of course, Denis Leary totally sucks. Even this audience seems rather chilly to Stine’s “talents.” If you are a glutton for punishment, you can watch his entire set here. You won’t laugh with Stine, but you will laugh at him..
If you think this is bad—and trust me, you will—then you have to see the Conservative dating advice seminar that took place at CPAC. Look at those guys! What misfortune in their lives made them such monumental plonkers? They all look like they were birthed in the same lab, then issued blue blazers, grey slacks and Bass Weejuns along with a lifetime subscription to the National Review and raised in Plato’s Cave with a TV that only got Fox News!
A soldier stands guard in front of “chemical reactors” used in the manufacturing of the meth confiscated in yesterday’s bust. Tlajomulco de Zuniga, Mexico.
15 tons of pure methamphetamine worth $4 billion were seized yesterday at a ranch outside of Guadalajara in the Mexican state of Jalisco.
The superlabs in Mexico are operating on a scale that is mindboggling. This haul alone was enough meth to get 13 million people wired to the gills.
The size of the Jalisco bust stunned Steve Preisler, an industrial chemist who wrote the book “Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture” and is sometimes called the father of modern meth-making.
“I have never seen quantity in that range,” Preisler wrote. But he added: “The amounts of precursors they were importing would produce multi-tons of product.”
Preisler was referring to the dramatic increase in seizures in Mexico of chemicals used to make methamphetamine, usually imported from countries such as China.
In December alone, Mexican authorities seized 675 tons of a key precursor chemical, methylamine, that can yield its weight in uncut meth. All of the shipments were headed for Guatemala, where the Sinaloa cartel is also active. Officials in Guatemala, meanwhile, seized 7,847 barrels of precursors in 2011, equivalent to about 1,600 tons.”
Guadalajara is the capital of the western state of Jalisco and has until recently been spared the horrible violence that plague other areas of Mexico. But in the past few years drug-related murders in Jalisco are an epidemic, with more than half of them in Guadalajara. Six gangs are fighting for control of Jalisco: the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (CJNG, for its initials in Spanish), the Resistance, the Caballeros Templarios, the Familia Michoacana, and the Beltran Leyva Organization.
Guadalajara, the vibrant cultural and economic heart of Mexico, is under assault and the “Pearl of the West” could literally be destroyed in the drug turf wars. With an economy built on the tech industry, Guadalajara is rapidly losing ground to China in the tech wars while China is the source for most of the methylamine that is used in the Mexican meth labs. As above ground industry falters and fades, business goes underground. This is what happens when crime does pay. Diabolical.
My gums are receding and turning black just looking at this photo. This is to Breaking Bad what the Titanic is to the rubber ducky in my bathtub.
As is pointed out in the video below, the drug cartels are ramping up the production of meth because of the crackdown on marijuana farming in Mexico, which is another strong argument for the decriminalization of marijuana. What’s healthier, an economy built on primitive and toxic forms of meth production or one built on the ecologically sound and scientific cultivation of marijuana? And unlike computer chips and hard drives, China won’t be competitive in the ganja trade. Let China have the silicon, we’ll take the sativa.
The best way to get the motherfucking gangsters out of the picture is to legalize all drugs, including methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine. Make it pure, make it available like alcohol and make it affordable. I know the notion of providing legal over-the-counter pharmaceutical quality meth for adults sounds potentially dicey but could things really get any worse? By making methamphetamine legal, we eliminate the gangster trade. By making it clinically pure, we eliminate the toxic bathtub variety flooding the drug marketplace and significantly minimize the health risks. What do you think? Can society handle a culture of meth heads who buy pure crystal at the Tweak Boutique at Walgreens?
Like every blog, Dangerous Minds has had our fair share of trolls, and I’ve always been curious as to what these anonymous dickheads look like, where they live, what sort of abuse they suffered in childhood and all that…
But did the BBC take it too far by tracking down this disagreeable gentleman and publicly outing him? You guys weigh in the comments.
Ramarley Graham, an 18-year-old teenager, was killed in his home on East 229th Street in the Bronx last week by plainclothes narcotics cops. Graham, who was unarmed, was shot in the chest as he was trying to flush a small amount of weed down the toilet, as his terrified grandmother and 6-year-old brother watched from a few feet away.
While details of the tragedy are still unfolding, it appears that the teen had a small amount of marijuana on him, so walked home to get away from the cops because he didn’t want to be arrested. The cops followed him, broke into his home and killed him in his bathroom while he was trying to flush a small amount of marijuana down the toilet. The police officer who shot Graham said he believed the young man had a gun. He did not – no weapons were found.
The bottom line is that an 18-year-old is dead because of the insane marijuana arrest crusade by the NYPD.
Graham’s family and the community are righteously demanding justice. There was a passionate protest of hundreds of people outside the 47th Precinct station in the Bronx Monday night, where they condemned police violence and the almost-routine killings of unarmed men like Mr. Graham. Graham’s sister is quoted in yesterday’s New York Times, saying “This is not just about Ramarley. This is about all young black men.”
Incidentally, just the day before the tragic killing, the New York City media was buzzing about the 2011 marijuana arrest numbers. There were more than 50,000 marijuana arrests in 2011, the second-most in NYC history and the most in more than a decade. The NYPD bust more people for small amounts of marijuana than any other crime in the city. And these 50,000 arrests are overwhelmingly young black and Latino men – even though, according to the government’s own data, they are no more likely to use or sell marijuana than young whites.
Those figures are nothing to brag about. It’s time for Mayor Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly to pull their heads out of their asses. This happened on their watch because of their policies.
At a community council meeting at the Holy Rosary Church on Adee Avenue last night—the first since the incident—the Mayor’s appalling absence was certainly noticed. From DNA Local News:
“Where’s Bloomberg?” asked Graham’s mother, Constance Malcolm, who said she hasn’t heard from the mayor. She later criticized the NYPD for not immediately firing [Officer Richard] Haste. “The police officer is still working,” she told reporters. “He should be charged.”
When Bronx Commander Carlos Gomez tried to give an account of what happened on Wednesday night, those in attendance—many who knew Ramarley Graham since he was baby—made it clear they didn’t believe a single word he was saying:
“That’s a lie!” yelled a woman in the audience. “Don’t cover it up!”
Members of the community also made it known that they wanted serious reforms of policing in their neighborhood.
“I want local police in our community who know our children growing up, who don’t feel threatened by them,” said Sheron Pearson, whose daughter knew Graham.
Other people expressed the raw emotion they were still feeling.
“I’m so disgusted. I’m angry,” said Denise Omenih, 52. “I feel violated. It could have been my child.”
Damn straight! If this case isn’t the very last straw before a change comes in the NYPD’s policies, then there’s no justice to be had for Ramarley Graham or anyone else who just wants to just be left alone to smoke a little pot! Jesus, they killed a KID over pot. If there’s ever been a situation for the pro-legalization crowd to rally around, IT IS THIS ONE. If Governor Cuomo fancies himself a leader, now would be the moment to lead the way to medical cannabis in New York State.
What a difference a coast makes: I live in sunny, liberal Los Angeles. Within just a few blocks of where I am currently typing this sentence, there must be twelve to fifteen medical cannabis dispensaries. Not one is a crime magnet. They coexist peacefully with other legit businesses like restaurants, appliance stores, furniture stores, opticians, sporting goods stores and bakeries. It’s worth noting as the Obama administration ramps up their pointless war on medical cannabis, that when the President appeared last October for a campaign stop at the popular Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles soul food restaurant, he was surrounded on all sides by law-abiding medical cannabis dispensaries mere hundreds of feet away! Did the Secret Service know this? Of course they did!
There are, I have read, 3X as many medical marijuana collectives in Los Angeles as there are all of the Starbucks and McDonald’s in this city, combined! In some precincts in Los Angeles, crime stats were found to fall significantly lower after the dispensaries opened their doors (they almost always have security guards). Cops in LA simply don’t give a shit about pot anymore. They don’t want you to blow pot smoke in their faces, but it’s a non-issue here, as it should be everywhere. They know, from years of experience at this point, that it’s not a problem, or certainly less of one than alcohol is.
In marked contrast to a dead young man in New York City, I can legally buy extremely high grade marijuana easier and faster than I can refill a regular prescription. I could leave my home, cross the street, buy a quarter pound of weed and be back home within five-ten minutes, legally twisting a spliff.
Across the country someone lost his life, gunned down in front of his kid brother and grandmother for a small amount of the same PLANT? There’s something wrong with our drug laws in this country. I hope some good comes out of this this incident because it’s really, really sad what happened to Ramarley Graham.
Below, watch as the probable-violators of Ramarley’s Fourth Amendment rights kick his grandmother’s door down:
Badly shot footage supposedly showing a mammoth lumbering across a river in Siberia, has been posted on that renowned comic The Sun, which reports:
A BEAST lurches through icy waters in a sighting a paranormal investigator thinks could prove woolly mammoths are not extinct after all.
The animal—thought to have mostly died out roughly 4,000 years ago—was apparently filmed wading through a river in the freezing wilds of Siberia.
The jaw-dropping footage was caught by a government-employed engineer last summer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia, it is claimed.
He filmed the elephant-sized creature as it struggled against the racing water.
Its hair matches samples recovered from mammoth remains regularly dug up from the permafrost in frozen Russia.
The official was reportedly in the area surveying for a planned road.
Paranormal writer Michael Cohen said: “Rumours of a handful of mammoths still kicking around in the vast wilderness of Siberia have been circulating for decades and occasionally sightings by locals have occurred.
“Siberia is an enormous territory and much of it remains completely unexplored and untouched by humans.”
Woolly mammoths roamed the Earth 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age.
A small pocket remained on and around Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, and these did not die out until 3,500 years ago.
Mr Cohen, 41, added: “It is highly possible that a number of species, extinct elsewhere, survive in the area.
“If surviving woolly mammoths were found in Siberia, it could run against Russia’s plans to further develop and exploit the area’s considerable resources.
“It would be potentially one of the greatest discoveries ever.”
Question: Who are these “paranormal investigators, and what are their scientific qualifications for identifying living animals?
Question: Why are these videos always so fucking crap? A drunk jakey with a cell phone could take better footage than these muppets.
Question: Why didn’t the “government-employed engineer” get any closer? Why didn’t he approach the lumbering beast to ensure he had indeed photographed a mammoth?
Question: Is Siberian Mammoth versus “Russia’s plans to further develop and exploit the area’s considerable resources” a possible Steven Seagal movie?
Question: Mammoth or elephant or Steven Seagal or, who gives a fuck?
The footage examined by someone or other, after the jump…
