The existential crisis of a man, a go go dancer and a cage. This Kafkaesque tale exists in a realm somewhere between the Twilight Zone and Shindig, a netherworld where angst goes where the action is.
The dancer is the legendary go go superstar Lada St. Edmund Jr. who had a thriving career frugging in cages on TV (Hullabaloo) and in the movies during the 1960s. She’s still alive, living in New Jersey and teaching dance is a fitness instructor and boxer.
I’ve tried to track down more info on Girl In A Cage but have come up snake eyes. A short clip from it has been used in a fan made Youtube video for the Sonics song “Psycho.” Other than that, I haven’t found anything on the Internet. But given a choice between sharing the rarely seen Girl In A Cage in its entirety with little back story or keeping it to myself, I opted to share.
Watch as a man is driven to the brink of insanity by a frenzied go go dancer in a basement apartment somewhere in pop culture hell.
PJ Harvey receives an award from Mick Jones and Don Letts and performs “The Words That Maketh Murder” at New Musical Express awards show in London, February 23.
In live performance, I prefer PJ in her rock and roll guitar-slinging goddess mode as opposed to the new autoharp-strumming hippie thing. But her new album, Let England Shake, is as satisfying as anything she’s ever recorded. It’s the rare collection of songs that rewards repeated listening.
Last week as I was reading Keep it together! Cosmic Boogie with The Deviants and The Pink Fairies Rich Deakin’s sprawling, exhaustively researched and extremely engaging biography of the ever shifting n’er do well personnel of the bands variously known as The Social Deviants, then just The Deviants, and eventually The Pink Fairies, I was annoyed to find that there was little video footage of the group—little? Try none! WTF?—on YouTube. What a difference a week makes because something amazing was posted there in the few days since I last looked.
After waiting more than an unbelievable forty years to see the light of day or be seen by anyone, glorious grainy black and white footage of The Deviants in Hyde Park in September 1969 has finally been posted on YouTube by a crew called VideoHeads out of Amsterdam, led by the legendary Jack Henry Moore. It makes me very happy for a number of reasons, not least of which – after taking so much shit at the time as the allegedly “worst band in the world” – we actually kicked ass in front an estimated audience of 80 thousand in a manner that would have been wholly acceptable and even lauded some six or seven years later. Russell and Sandy are a rock solid foundation. Paul Rudolph’s guitar is mighty, and, as for me, when did you see jackknife shaman dancing the like which closes the show? Okay, so Rudolph and I engage, at one point, in some the atonal freeform bellowing that we called “mouth music”, but no one seems to have a problem with it. And we always attracted Hells Angels and crazy naked psychedelic women.
What you have up on YouTube right now is two sections of around nine minutes each, which – believe it or not – make two halves of one song – what the Pink Fairies would title “Uncle Harry’s Last Freakout”. I guess that was the real difference between the 1960s and 1970s. We could make a thrash last 17 minutes where the Clash or the Pistols would cut it off after three. And, by way of explanation for the opening harangue, the London Street Commune were staging a protest against homelessness by occupying the mansion at 144 Piccadilly at the other end of Park Lane. I’d been warned by the ranking cop at the park concert that my feet wouldn’t touch if I got into any kind of rant about the squatters who were about to be evicted in a massive police action. I just had to test the limits.
But don’t take my word for it. Here are some reminiscences from ukrockfestivals.com
“The most memorable bit for me was when The Deviants were playing and a semi-nude young lady got up on stage and began to dance. As she started to remove the rest of her clothes there was a huge cheer from the crowd. Then a Hells Angel also got on stage and took his leather jacket off to another great cheer but then he put the jacket over the young lady’s shoulders and guided her off the stage, this time to a chorus of boos from the disappointed audience. It was though, another wonderful afternoon in Hyde Park with great music and relaxed atmosphere.” – Steve Trusler
“I remember Al Stewart sitting down on a chair on stage and playing a mellow set of bedsitter folk songs. Quite a few people seemed to like him, but I found him rather wishy-washy (yawn). I remember that the Deviants were absolutely not wishy-washy ~ very aggressive and angry. I’ve heard them described as being the first real punk band. Works for me. But most of all I remember being entranced by the sublime musicality of the Soft Machine. A brilliant band. So totally outside. Imprinted on my memory is the sight of Robert Wyatt singing, and playing amazingly complex drum patterns, wearing just a pair of Y-fronts.” – Jeremy S.
Reading Keep it together!, I was listening daily to the music that Mick Farren has made over the years, primarily Ptooff! and the best of selection, People Call You Crazy: The Story of Mick Farren. Some of it’s pretty amazing stuff, but sadly unheard by many of the music fans who would appreciate it the most. The Deviants’ sound was quite obviously influenced by early Mothers of Invention, The Fugs and The MC5. It could be menacing and leering (“I’m Coming Home”), proto-punk protest (“Garbage”) and sometimes they just wanted to rock out with a Bo Diddley beat. Although I do like the Pink Fairies and also some of Twink’s solo material, I’m really mostly interested in the era when Farren was providing the radical, intellectual lyrics and fronting the group. The Deviants were the first British band who were true anarchists. “Street Fighting Man” was just fashionable pose, these guys lived and snorted their politics. Agitprop bands like The Clash, Crass and the Manic Street Preachers would most definitely tread in their ideological footsteps, whether conscious of it or not.
I also returned to Mick Farren’s autobiography, Give The Anarchist A Cigarette and spent some time looking over the issues of The International Times that are online. When I was in my teens, maybe 15 or 16, I found a whole stack of old issues of IT magazines (which Farren wrote for) in a used bookstore where I’d normally buy old National Lampoons, comics, Rolling Stone and Creem. How they got there, I will never know, but Mick Farren’s political rants and commie/anarchist screeds really resonated with me. Finding these underground papers demonstrated for me the existence of a world outside my hometown—an underground—that I had to become a part of myself. It was an amazing score for a kid like me, as you might imagine and I would read then over and over again. I’m sure that stack of mags had a lot to do with me picking up and leaving home when I was 17 and moving to London, where I lived in a succession of squats for a couple of years. Reading Keep It Together, I became much more aware of what a big influence Mick Farren had on me politically during my formative years and that influence, I think was major. Extremely important to me, thinking back on it. (Whenever I see that one of my own political rants makes it to Mick’s Doc 40 blog, I always get a kick out of it).
About that same time, I was a subscriber to The Trouser Press magazine, which Mick wrote a lot of each issue. Via that publication—which I would wait by the mailbox for each month, willing it to show up—he was probably the rock writer second only to the great Lester Bangs in turning me on to good music.
If ever there was a figure of 20th century counterculture who should be lionized and treated as a respected and revered elder statesman whilst he is still with us, it is the one and only Mister Mick Farren. Farren left sunny Los Angles to return to the UK late last year. People of Great Britain, a legend drinks amongst you! Where the hell is Mick Farren’s Guardian column already? Come on let’s pick up the pace.
“This is British amphetamine psychosis music and if you don’t like it you can f*ck off and listen to your Iron Butterfly albums”—Mick Farren
As intense as the MC5 and The Stooges and as irreverent as The Fugs, here are The Deviants, LIVE:
Donald Cammell with Anita Pallenberg on the set of “Performance.”
Though he only directed two films that are truly extraordinary, Donald Cammell will always hold a special place on my list of the all-time great cinematic mindfuckers.
Dangerous Minds readers will undoubtedly be familiar with the hugely influence Performance, but Cammell’s last film, the darkly witty and perverse Wild Side, deserves to find a wider audience. It was butchered by its original production company and released in a bastardized form that so depressed the already mentally fragile Cammell it sent him over the edge and he killed himself in 1996.
Wild Side was re-released in 2000 in a version that comes close to Cammell’s original cut. Cammell’s close friend editor Frank Mazzola managed to gather together the “lost” footage from Wild Side and reconstruct it in a form that approximates Cammell’s vision. It is available here as an import DVD. For some unfathomable reason the director’s cut has never been released in any form in the USA. I did manage to see it years ago at a Cammell film fest in NYC. It features one of Christopher Walkens’ best and most bizarre performances in a career of bizarre performances. Trust me when I tell you, you’ve never seen Walken at his weirdest until you’ve seen him in a kimono and a long black wig.
Wild Side is cut from the same dark cloth as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. But I can’t stress enough the fact that the butchered version available on Amazon and elsewhere is worthless. Avoid it like a bad case of the clap.
Here’s a clip from Wild Side with Anne Heche, Steven Bauer and Walken to whet your appetite. “Off with the Calvins.”
Cammell got his professional start in the arts as a painter and photographer in the swinging London scene of the 1960s. He lived the life of a rock star, looked the part and was prone to the hedonistic excesses of the times as well. He worked with filmmaker Nic Roeg to create the greatest head movie of all time, Performance. Artistic recognition led to a series of disappointments in Hollywood and Cammell’s life quickly veered toward a sad end. His story is compelling and tragic and in this documentary his fascinating life unfolds like one of his movies.
Donald Sutherland is one of those rare actors who is not only wonderfully talented, but is gifted with a damn fine head of hair. It’s hard to think of any other actor who has made his follicles work so hard in every performance. I first became aware of this phenomenon, when in the mid-1970s Mr Sutherland opened the envelope at, I think it was, a BAFTA Award ceremony in London, where the tall, elegant Canadian, walked up to the podium and revealed a shaved hairline at odds with his long flowing locks. Sutherland was about to appear in the film Casanova, and remarked to audience’s gasps:
“When Fellini says get a haircut, you get a haircut.”
Though Sutherland started as a clean-cut co-star of Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (alongside Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee), and had appearances in The Saint and The Avengers (and even the voice of the computer in The Billion Dollar Brain), there was always this sense he was a geeky straight in a tight suit desperate to try some acid and, maybe if he liked it, wear beads and grow his hair long. Which is kind of what i thought when I saw him as Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H and of course, most memorably as Sgt. Oddball in Kelly’s Heroes.
More from Donald Sutherland’s hair after the jump…
Jiving nicely with my feedback-obsessed episode of the Dangerous Minds Radio Hour today is this marvelous and engaging sound art/performance piece entitled Diptych by Michelle Temple & Aiwen Wang-Huddleston. There’s a lot to love here but mainly it’s the sense of fun that recalls the best of the Fluxus artists and especially that it doesn’t involved any laptops, iPads or iPhones. It’s a really nice vocabulary of sounds in that combination of materials as well.
Kiss Kondoms are made from premium latex and meet all the highest international standards for testing and reliability. However, one look at these revolutionary rubbers and you’ll quickly see that using a KISS Kondom is the surest way to Rock and Roll All Nite long!”
You know women just love an erect penis emblazoned with the face of Gene Simmons. Kiss Kondoms available here.
This should be in some kind of sexist “hall of fame”! Honor House Products Corp. was responsible for Sea Monkeys, X-Ray Specs, Jet Rocket Space Ships, Polaris Nuclear Subs and apparently “stuffed” female heads… ugh.
In honor of this horrific vintage ad, here are The Animals performing “It’s My Life” with a stage set consisting of mounted female heads.
Daniel Craig as the international symbol of machismo, James Bond, goes through a dramatic transformation to help send a message about the inequalities that exist between men and women.
Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood and scripted by Jane Goldman, the video Equals was created for the Equals partnership, a coalition of charities brought together by Annie Lennox to celebrate the centenary of International Women’s Day on March 8th.
“Together we’re stepping up the call for an equal world. And we want you to join us.”
The voice-over is Dame Judi Dench reprising her role as “M.”
Why do I say this? Because for once I actually agreed with something that George Will wrote. And if it wasn’t a hacker, does this mean that I woke up this morning in Bizarro World?
Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon - Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.
So the Republican winnowing process is far advanced. But the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.
He’s right. Mike Huckabee is a genial idiot & admitted Creationist. He’s got exactly zero chance of carrying a single blue state and probably well aware of this himself.
Newt Gingrich? Why waste even a second contemplating this loud-mouthed, oafish grifter’s chances at the Presidency? He’s impossible to take seriously
Sarah Palin? Next
Haley Barbour? Barbour could win a few Republican primaries in the South, but that’s about it. Think he could take a single blue state or much of anything above the Mason-Dixon Line? Haley Barbour against Obama? Child, please!
Tim Pawlenty doesn’t have an ounce of charisma, he inspires no one and he’s a horse’s ass to boot. I doubt he could win a primary anywhere outside of his own state, except for the presence of all the even shorter midgets who might join in the race. (You can picture Pawlenty doing the electoral math in his head: “These guys (and Palin) suck, but I suck less!”)
Jon Huntsman? Well, Huntsman’s not an idiot and he’d be by far the Republican most Democrats and independent voters sour on Obama could vote for without holding their noses. It should go without saying that this salient fact makes Huntsman a certified no-hoper! He’d never get through a GOP primary season. Not worth serious contemplation for this reason alone. What’s the point, then? There is none. Look for Huntsman to drop out first, unless he thinks he can pull a John Anderson.
Mitch Daniels? Daniels is very, very popular in his home-state and has a competent record for the most part. He received more votes for a re-election than any candidate ever in the state of Indiana. His national profile is still too low to be able to say much about him this early in the game (a plus). Regarding Mitt Romney, the teabaggers and evangelical Christians will never, ever warm to the guy. The more he tries to court them, the more unelectable he will become. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
So did George Will sell his townhouse in Bizarro World or what? When even he can’t deny the obvious when it’s this… obviously obvious it doesn’t speak well to the GOP’s chances of taking the White House in 2012. It will be interesting to watch how other establishment Republicans and conservatives react to the anticipated field of such tepid GOP presidential candidates.
More forward thinking hip-hop, at last! This is the kind I really dig - addressing issues of sex and sexuality which (come on now, let’s be honest) hip-hop has never had a great track record for. Especially where women and gays are concerned.
Shunda K is one half of the out-spoken, lesbian, Christian rap group Yo Majesty. Hailing from Tampa, Florida, Y!M have developed a significant cult following throughout the world, signing to one of the UK biggest indie labels, Domino, and releasing their album Futuristically Speaking… Never Be Afraid in 2008. Their singles “Club Action”, “Don’t Let Go” and guest spot on Basement Jaxx’s “Twerk” have all proved big club hits, and taken the traditional Southern hip-hop sound into areas more electro-friendly and uptempo.
The band are currently on a temporary hiatus, but Shunda has been busy, with guest spots on Peaches’ “Billionaire” and DJ Flore’s Raw album under her belt. This January she released her debut solo album The Most Wanted, preceded by the singles “Here I Am (ft Scream Club’s Cindy Wonderful)” and “I’m Da Best (ft Yo Majesty’s Shon B)” on Fanatic Records.
Yet again defying the traditional notions of what “Southern hip-hop” means, The Most Wanted keeps the dancefloor pressure at an uptempo maximum, with production from UK garage and funky artists like Deekline and French electro producers like Les Gourmets. Shunda K matches them step for step with a breakneck flow that covers God, gays, love, sex, spirituality, enlightenment, education and pussy. Yeah, lots of pussy. The album’s first video “Im Da Best” has just dropped, and sets the scene perfectly:
Shunda K - “Here I Am (ft Scream Club’s Cindy Wonderful)”
Shunda K - My Light (ft Tan)
The Most Wanted has got great reviews already, with MTV Iggy declaring “This is an exciting, deep, and original work of hip hop. Get on it.” Shunda K now stands as the world’s best known and respected gay hip-hop artist. Could she be the first gay rapper to cross over into the mainstream?
This article was co-authored by Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA and Dan Cady, an assistant professor of history at California State University, Fresno. He publishes on the history of the American West, music, and religion. Since Huffington Post didn’t pay them for this, I hope they won’t mind if I post it here in full, it’s quite a good read and so eloquently put.
What is addressed here should be examined in every church in America:
Jesus unambiguously preached mercy and forgiveness. These are supposed to be cardinal virtues of the Christian faith. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of the death penalty, draconian sentencing, punitive punishment over rehabilitation, and the governmental use of torture. Jesus exhorted humans to be loving, peaceful, and non-violent. And yet Evangelicals are the group of Americans most supportive of easy-access weaponry, little-to-no regulation of handgun and semi-automatic gun ownership, not to mention the violent military invasion of various countries around the world. Jesus was very clear that the pursuit of wealth was inimical to the Kingdom of God, that the rich are to be condemned, and that to be a follower of Him means to give one’s money to the poor. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of corporate greed and capitalistic excess, and they are the most opposed to institutional help for the nation’s poor—especially poor children. They hate anything that smacks of “socialism,” even though that is essentially what their Savior preached. They despise food stamp programs, subsidies for schools, hospitals, job training—anything that might dare to help out those in need. Even though helping out those in need was exactly what Jesus urged humans to do. In short, Evangelicals are that segment of America which is the most pro-militaristic, pro-gun, and pro-corporate, while simultaneously claiming to be most ardent lovers of the Prince of Peace.
What’s the deal?
Before attempting an answer, allow a quick clarification. Evangelicals don’t exactly hate Jesus—as we’ve provocatively asserted in the title of this piece. They do love him dearly. But not because of what he tried to teach humanity. Rather, Evangelicals love Jesus for what he does for them. Through his magical grace, and by shedding his precious blood, Jesus saves Evangelicals from everlasting torture in hell, and guarantees them a premium, luxury villa in heaven. For this, and this only, they love him. They can’t stop thanking him. And yet, as for Jesus himself—his core values of peace, his core teachings of social justice, his core commandments of goodwill—most Evangelicals seem to have nothing but disdain.
And this is nothing new. At the end of World War I, the more rabid, and often less educated Evangelicals decried the influence of the Social Gospel amongst liberal churches. According to these self-proclaimed torch-bearers of a religion born in the Middle East, progressive church-goers had been infected by foreign ideas such as German Rationalism, Soviet-style Communism, and, of course, atheistic Darwinism. In the 1950s, the anti-Social Gospel message piggybacked the rhetoric of anti-communism, which slashed and burned its way through the Old South and onward through the Sunbelt, turning liberal churches into vacant lots along the way. It was here that the spirit and the body collided, leaving us with a prototypical Christian nationalist, hell-bent on prosperity. Charity was thus rebranded as collectivism and self-denial gave way to the gospel of accumulation. Church-to-church, sermon-to-sermon, evangelical preachers grew less comfortable with the fish and loaves Jesus who lived on earth, and more committed to the angry Jesus of the future. By the 1990s, this divine Terminator gained “most-favored Jesus status” among America’s mega churches; and with that, even the mention of the former “social justice” Messiah drove the socially conscious from their larger, meaner flock.
In addition to such historical developments, there may very well simply be an underlying, all-too-human social-psychological process at root, one that probably plays itself out among all religious individuals: they see in their religion what they want to see, and deny or despise the rest. That is, religion is one big Rorschach test. People look at the content of their religious tradition—its teachings, its creeds, its prophet’s proclamations—and they basically pick and choose what suits their own secular outlook. They see in their faith what they want to see as they live their daily lives, and simultaneously ignore the rest. And as is the case for most White Evangelical Christians, what they are ignoring is actually the very heart and soul of Jesus’s message—a message that emphasizes sharing, not greed. Peace-making, not war-mongering. Love, not violence.
Of course, conservative Americans have every right to support corporate greed, militarism, gun possession, and the death penalty, and to oppose welfare, food stamps, health care for those in need, etc.—it is just strange and contradictory when they claim these positions as somehow “Christian.” They aren’t.
