Design by This Is My Name

Here’s a lovely video montage illustrating why Black Friday is so freakin’ disgusting awesome. Extreme hysteria at its finest.

What’s wrong with people?
 

 
(via TDW)

 
Presented here, for no other reason than I simply can’t get this song out of my head... Marvelous rocksteady classic from Marcia Griffiths, one of the standout cuts—indeed it is thee title track—on the essential Feel Like Jumping: Best of Studio One Women collection. “Studio One,” was considered the “Motown of Jamaica” and this cut shows why that’s an accurate description.

Griffiths, known as “the Queen of Reggae” was a member of the I-Threes, the female trio of backing vocalists who toured and recorded with Bob Marley and the Wailers. Her 1976 song “Electric Boogie” holds the record for the best-selling reggae song by a female vocalist and is the soundtrack to the popular late 80s line-dance craze, “The Electric Slide.”
 

 
Shaun Ryder - hard as fucking nails. As viewers to the UK’s reality show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here witnessed last night, when the Happy Monday’s frontman was repeatedly bitten by a snake.

Ryder wasn’t the only victim - former politician Lembit Opik was also on the menu.

This is the best quality version of the clip from You Tube, but ignore the link to some pop star wannabe.
 

 
I really like the part where it doesn’t do anything.

 
It didn’t take long after his death in 1997 for the indomitable spirt of Fela Kuti, Afrobeat legend, political revolutionary, musician, composer and performer, to rise again. His singular musical cross-pollination of African drumming, Bitches Brew-influenced jazz rock and James Brown-influenced guitar funk has gained cultural currency in the past decade far beyond what he achieved in his lifetime.

The wildly popular Broadway musical about him, Fela! (directed and choreographed by the great Bill T. Jones, and financed in part by Jay-Z, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith) has been nominated for 11 Tony Awards and was recently visited by First Lady Michelle Obama. The upcoming Beyonce Knowles album is said to be heavily influenced by Kuti’s Afrobeat sound.

Below, a fascinating documentary on Fela Kuti titled Music is the Weapon. This intimate 1982 film was directed by Stéphane Tchal-Gadjieff & Jean Jacques Flori.
 

 
Via Pathway to Unknown Worlds

 
Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson’s passing yesterday evoked many tributes to the man as a member of influential electronic acts Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and Coil. But we haven’t heard quite enough about one of his best solo projects, Threshold HouseBoys Choir.

Both live and on the guise’s single proper release, Form Grows Rampant, THBC basically comprised Sleazy backing his own video of various rituals at the Vegetarian Festival in southern Thailand’s Krabi Town (12 hours from his adopted home of Bangkok) with an abstract soundtrack that drew on the many field recordings he made in the city. Christopherson’s infamous fascination with the young active male body is clear in this work. But many of the problematics surrounding the European gaze that typifies exotica seem mitigated somehow by the late composer’s intimate audio-visual treatment. 

Overall, Christopherson’s work helped create a literary, psychotropic aesthetic that synthesized aspects of outside sexuality, technology, and ritual magick, bound by a wry sense of humor. THBC brought that angle to a highly personal level, and will stand as an evocative late moment in the man’s prolific career.
 

 
More from Form Grows Rampant after the jump…

 
At the time this video was shot in 1977,  Ollie and Rowland were playing together in The Young Charlatans. Rowland later joined The Birthday Party. Ollie went on to work with many bands and eventually became a composer and producer of trance music. But here they are in their teens energized by punk and ready to detonate a punk rock explsosion Down Under. Such innocent faces, such deadly intent.
 

 
Two leading members of Russia’s radical art group Voina (“War”), Oleg Vorotnikov, 32, and Leonid Nikolaev, 27, have been charged with “criminal mischief”, after turning over police cars in St. Petersburg as a protest against police corruption, last September.

Nikolayev and Vorotnikov were arrested at a Moscow apartment on 15 November, and brought to St. Petersburg the next day, where they have since been held in custody at a pretrial detention center.

According to witnesses, the pair were handcuffed and had bags put over their heads when arrested. The police searched the apartment and confiscated computers, hard drives, USB flash drives, cell phones and various papers.

The police said that the damage inflicted on the police cars totaled 98,000 rubles ($3,146).

If convicted, the two artists could face up to five years in prison. The charges have surprised members of Voina, as the arrests come two months after the car-flipping incident and the police targeted only two of the seven individuals involved. The St. Petersburg Times reports:

Nikolayev and Vorotnikov’s lawyers appealed the artists’ pretrial detention Tuesday, according to the web site Free Voina, which is campaigning for the release of the artists.

Both have refused to speak to investigators, referring to the Constitution, which guarantees the right of accused people not to give evidence against themselves, the site reported.

According to the web site, investigators have expressed their intention to re-arrest another Voina artist, Natalya Sokol, who was briefly detained on 15 November but was released because she has a young son.

In emailed comments to The St. Petersburg Times, Voina’s spokesman Alexei Plutser-Sarno described the charges as “illegal.”

“The criminal case was filed for the artistic stunt ‘Palace Revolution,’ when the artists demanded, metaphorically, the reform of the Interior Ministry and an end to police arbitrariness,” he wrote.

“In response to this demand, the Interior Minister is insisting that prosecutors demand [five] years in prison. Effectively, the artists are charged with ideological hatred against the social group ‘corrupt authorities.’

“Previously, the Interior Ministry’s official representative was talking about 500 rubles ($16) of damage — one broken mirror and a flashing light. Now the cost of the used mirror of the police Lada has increased up to $3,000 and continues to grow. Apparently, the mirror was set with diamonds; it’s a pity that the artists didn’t notice that.”

Earlier this week, a campaign demanding the release of the imprisoned artists and raising funds for them was launched.

Voina is a highly controversial conceptual art group, of up to sixty different members, including poets, artists, journalists and students. The group was founded in 2007 by philosophy students at Lomonosov Moscow State University, under the leadership of Petr Verzilov and Oleg Vorotnikov.

Voina has achieved considerable notoriety in their homeland since their first event on 1st May 2007, when a group of activists threw dead cats inside a McDonalds restaurant in Moscow. 

In 2008, they made international news with their performance piece Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear, in which five couples (including a heavily pregnant woman) had sex in the State Museum of Biology. The event was staged the day before the election of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, whose last name is derived from the word medved, “bear” in Russian.

More recently, Voina staged In Memory of the Decemberists - A Present to Yuri Luzhkov, which presented the hanging of two gay men and three Central Asian guest workers, as a direct attack against Moscow Mayor Luzhkov, whose policies have been denounced as racist and homophobic, and the frequent murders of guest workers in the city.

Also, as Dangerous Minds’ Marc Campbell recently reported:

Russian performance artists and political activists, Voina, demonstrate how to liberate food from the supermarket using a woman’s vagina. Perhaps inspired by Divine in Pink Flamingos, these chicken snatchers have developed a simple but effective way to provide their collective with free nourishment.

A more subdued act took place earlier this year, when the group painted a giant phallus on a drawbridge leading to the headquarters of the Federal Security Service in Saint Petersburg.

The news of the arrests has shocked certain parts of Russia’s art community, but it is yet to be seen what affect the possible loss of one of the group’s leaders will have.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
More work by Voina after the jump…
 

 
I have nothing profound to say about this video, no startling insight. I just love the fucking thing.

The Bar-Kays doing an awesomely funky version of ‘Son Of Shaft’ at the Wattstax festival in 1972. The original performance was 10 minutes long but cut to 4 minutes for the Wattstax documentary from which this clip was taken. Boo.

Vocalist Larry Dodson’s entrance is epic. “I am Spartacus.”
 

 
Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, founding member of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Coil, died in his sleep yesterday, 24 November, at his home in Thailand, he was 55.

The initial announcement was made by Throbbing Gristle members Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter who tweeted the same message:

Our dearest beautiful Sleazy left this mortal coil as he slept in peace last night.words cannot express our grief.

Throbbing Gristle’s official website has been updated with the message

We are saddened to announce the death of Peter Christopherson.

Sleazy passed away peacefully in his sleep on the

24th November 2010 at his home in Bankok.

Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson

1955 - 2010

 
10 minutes of a dog in a suit laughing maniacally. That’s it.

I play this loop late at night just moments before I make love.

I run the audio thru 16 inch kicker subwoofers and point them in the direction of my scrotal sack. When the the beasty dog starts cackling the vibrations convert my scrotum to a tweeter resonating at a supersonic level. My lover resonates and cums immediately while HORNY fur-bearing creatures in our neighborhood converge in a chorus of frenzied squealing recalling the mystical utterances of Lord Shiva and his slut Shakti spun through the cosmic vortex where God is trying desperately to pinch off a cosmic loaf. Life is a shitty deal. Dogs know this. Therefore they laugh.

If you are of the right mind this video will send you into realms of ecstasy rarely experienced by the comman man or woman. Consider this loop a prayer wheel of sorts. Make no judgment. Relax, breath. Let the waves of canine laughter flow over you. Within moments you too will enter the realm of the Laughing Dog, where anything is possible.

God is Dog spelled backwards and dogs don’t know how to spell. Om mani padme hum.
 

 
A 1964 appearance on I’ve Got A Secret by Pete Best, the hapless fellow unfortunate enough to have left the Beatles just two years before.

Pete Best turns 69 today!
 

Crowley self-portrait, 1920
 
‘The Man We Want To Hang’ is a film shot by Kenneth Anger documenting an exhibit of Aleister Crowley’s paintings at London’s October Gallery in April 1998. The score is by Liadov.

I was amazed when I found this video. I thought I’d seen all of Anger’s films, but I was wrong. While it’s neither the trippy spectacle or erotic fetishism one expects of Anger, it still has moments where you sense the Anger ‘touch’. But mostly Kenneth steps out of the way and let’s Crowley’s paintings take center stage.

‘The Man We Want To Hang’, the title of the film also the title of the notorious Sunday Express article which had denounced A.C. as the “Wickedest Man In The World.” The title is also a pun on art being hung on gallery walls, and a possible reference to The Hanged Man of the Tarot—who appears in the film a few times—although nothing jumped out at me as I looked over that entry in The Book of Thoth to back up that line of thought (but I’m sure those with well wore copies of 777 and The Book of Thoth and a knack for undoing and uncovering occult puzzles may have better luck that I did ...)

The art works themselves—drawn of the collections of Keith Richmond, Jimmy Page and the Ordo Templi Orientis International—depict a variety of subjects. Simple landscapes of mountains, volcanoes and sea, serpents and malevolent beings from some daemonic reality, portraits of individuals familiar to those versed in A.C.‘s biography—such as Gerald Yorke and various Scarlet Women—and self-portraits of A.C., some evoking grey aliens or Lam.

If this was the only output of an artist they would have at most been a curious and obscure art historical footnote, if even that. But when put into the context of A.C.‘s life they have more value.

Throughout his life A.C. expressed his higher nature in a multitude of ways. Poetry, painting, ritual magick, sexual athleticism, writing, mountaineering, exploring higher consciousness. While he was middling in such expressions as painting and poetry, his non-fictional magickal texts are genius, a Joyce or Fassbinder of occult and esoteric philosophy, and most of us would be extremely lucky to create a single work of genius over a lifetime, let alone a multi-volumed network of texts like A.C.‘s.

Aside from his texts of magickal philosophy and ritual his other great work of art was his life, which encompassed the lowliest degradations and the highest and holiest exalted states. The art works provide a visual accompaniment to it—the settings, the personalities, the extraordinary experiences.

They also provide a reminder of A.C.‘s role as a prototype of the type of current creative spirit, with his multiple means of expression (poetry, art, journalism, adept, etc.) a forerunner of the of the typical artist of today, who is just as likely to write a novel, play in a band, star in a porn, run a small business, blog, than lock themselves in one monolithic way of expressing creative currents.

He ran a preview of this social reality movie like all successful intelligence agents do.” Jason Lubyk

 
Update: resident Crowley expert R. Metzger has informed me that The Man We Want To Hang is available as part of the Anger boxsets that were released a few years back. Available here.
Metzger also directed me to a film that Anger did on Crowley’s paintings called The Brush Of Baphomet, which you can watch after the jump…

 
Nope, Frank Zappa, has got nothing to do with this one… You may or may not be aware of ten-year-old Wendy Cerveza, the little Peruvian girl who took Latin America by storm with her (ironic? un-ironic?) song “La Tetita” (The Tit). I was vaguely aware of this (it’s had around 4 million YouTube views) but not speaking Spanish, I didn’t investigate further. Now the fine folks at Bad Ass Digest have translated the lyrics into English and they are mind-boggling.

But how do you follow up a paean to titty?

What about a ditty about… beer?
 

Via Bad Ass Digest

 
A painting of Dee Dee Ramone and a two-page note were placed in a stairwell of the Chelsea Hotel by a fan named Tara. In her note, Tara writes that she fears she may have offended Dee Dee by calling her portrait of Dee Dee ‘crap’ and his spirit responded by turning off her cell phone.

The portrait is rather…um…impressionistic.

The Hotel Chelsea blog reports:

It seems that Tara’s dark pilgrimage was rewarded with a message from beyond. This is the first Dee Dee spirit story that has come our way, but we’re sure there will be many more to follow.