Hard-charging San Francisco quintet Hank IV’s “Garbage Star” from their album III (Siltbreeze)

Directed by Staci DeGagne & Heather MacLean Produced by Clean White Lines

Thank you Syd Garon!

 
Fabled Silver Lake indie rock venue, Spaceland has announced on their website that they’ll be closing their doors soon. Then again, having said that, it looks like other than a change of name things won’t be all that noticeable to the joint’s hipster clientele when it reopens as The Satellite. As reported in the LA Weekly: The “new” management (i.e. one half of the old management, Jeff Wolfram, the guy who owns the real estate) at the 1717 Silver Lake Blvd. space are bringing back Jennifer Teftt, the longtime booker at Spaceland who left last year. There will be no changes in shows already scheduled at the venue, including the upcoming Melvins residency in January 2011.

Spaceland Productions’ Liz Garo confirmed to the LA Weekly that Spaceland Productions plan to open another live music venue within a “few months.” So, in the end, the place isn’t really closing, the promoters are just moving on and keep the name.

So the more things change, the more they… something something.

We just hope they keep booking Neil Hambuger. He’s the dour, non-singing “Marty and Elayne” of Spaceland, a venerable LA institution! Where else else would I take my parents when they’re in town?
 

 
The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibbard writes:

Parents TV Council claims profanity is up a shocking percentage in primetime. (In fact, they say it’s up 69% ... snicker). While I don’t think the PTC would intentionally cook their numbers, they’re not exactly an unbiased organization about this stuff, so you have to be a tad skeptical when any activist group presents in-house research. Most interesting is the PTC’s list of words they’re objecting to (their chart, below), which expands mightily on George Carlin’s famous list of seven words you can never say on TV. Wondering: Does the Bible-based “hell” and “damn” really seem like profanity? What about “suck” and “screw”? Is bleeped profanity the same as profanity that you actually hear? (Perhaps ... you do sort of get the point). And is anybody else curious what the euphemisms were for “fuck”? And what does “other breasts” mean, exactly?

Read the article and see the full graph here.

Via Warming Glow

 
Pop artist Ron English has come up with some witty new products in anticipation of the eventual legalization of pot.

See more at Ron’s site Popaganda. “English coined the term Popaganda to describe his signature mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones.”
 


Via CB

 
Eddie Ruscha aka Secret Circuit is an old pal of mine who happens to be a bit of a Renaissance man about town. He’s been posting some fantastically synth-centric mixes as of late and I thought I’d share the latest offering here as well.

Digitized mix from ‘05.
Straight from the cassette….
Contains strong doses of: Schultz, Eddy Grant, Dury, Yello, Earth Wind and Fire, Soft Rocks, J.P. Massiera, Sly Dunbar, Joe Thomas, Roland Boquet, Emperor Machine, Clouds, Funkadelic, McCartney, Cloud One, Tom Tom Club, Can, Space, YMO, Bohannon, Vicious Pink, and a brain crushing cast of other artists that will make you sick with confusion!

 
It’s only Tuesday. I want this week to be over already!

(via Nerdcore)

 
Dutch ersatz Merseybeat gone psych band Zipps grapple with the irksome Marie Juana with the aid of gratuitous harpsichord and quaint European xenophobia. Marie Juana, architect of the gods of my mind…. Huh ?
 

Thanks again, Clint Simonson!

 
“What do you call brunch and lunch, when they’re combined?”  

I’ll admit to having a bit of a love/hate relationship with Steve Coogan. Of course, he’s an brilliant comic talent, don’t get me wrong, but Coogan’s hit to miss ratio is so bad that many lesser talents never would have gotten the second, third, forth, fifth, etc, chances that he’s had, career-wise. When Steve Coogan is great, like, say, whenever he plays Alan Partridge, in 24 Hour Party People or in the first series of Saxondale, he’s truly great. But when he’s doing almost anything else, it’s probably more likely to be shit than not (For instance, his current Michael Winterbottom-directed series, The Trip: sans the always likable presence of Rob Bryden and the beauty of the English countryside, well, that show would totally and utterly unwatchable.)

But I do come here to praise Steve Coogan, really, I do, because he’s returned once again to the character that’s brought him his greatest comedy success, inept talkshow host Alan Partridge, for a new web series and the results, as expected, are solid. And very, very funny. Fans of Alan Partridge you will not be disappointed, I can assure you. If the first two episodes are anything to go by, the standards are up to the original series.

The thirteen 11-minute shorts were written by Coogan and his long-time collaborator Armando Iannucci, along with Rob and Neil Gibbons. Alan Partridge’s career is now even further in the dumper. He hosts a radio show called Mid-Morning Matters on North Norfolk Digital (“Music and chat for the North Norfolk generation”). Alan’s co-host, Sidekick Simon is played by Tim Key, winner of the Edinburgh Comedy award in 2009.

The unforced podcast-conceit (the viewers see what someone tuning into the fictional radio station’s webcam would find) lends a seemingly improvisational looseness to the material, which Mid-Morning Matters with Alan Partridge uses to its full advantage. Truly this production also doesn’t feel like “low budget” Alan Partridge, it just feels like we’ve got Coogan firing creatively with all pistons once again. Put this man in a cardigan sweater and he’s a comic genius. Driving around LA in a sports car in a romcom with Rebecca Romijn, not so good. The key to a great Coogan performance seems to lie in the fact that he’s very good at playing comically repellent characters—he’s got anti-charisma down pat—but when he’s actually trying to be charming, he falls desperately flat. Awkward and inept he does well, but a Hollywood leading man, he will never be, Coogan’s best when working with his prodigious talents, not against them. Aha!

The Mid-Morning Matters with Alan Partridge web series is produced by Foster’s and can be viewed at Foster’s Funny.com, but the material isn’t licensed for American audiences, so look for it posted on Daily Motion, YouTube and elsewhere.
 

Alan Partridge's Mid Morning Matters - Episode 1
Uploaded by daghammarskjoldfan. - Watch more comedy videos and sitcoms.

In London this week, the Wellcome Trust opens an exhibition called High Society exploring “the role of mind-altering drugs in history and culture,” which challenges “the perception that drugs are a disease of modern life.”

From ancient Egyptian poppy tinctures to Victorian cocaine eye drops, Native American peyote rites to the salons of the French Romantics, mind-altering drugs have a rich history. ‘High Society’ will explore the paths by which these drugs were first discovered - from apothecaries’ workshops to state-of-the-art laboratories - and how they came to be simultaneously fetishised and demonised in today’s culture.
Mind-altering drugs have been used in many ways throughout history - as medicines, sacraments and status symbols, to investigate the brain, inspire works of art or encounter the divine, or simply as an escape from the experience.

Exhibits will include: Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ manuscript, said to have been written after an opium dream; a hand-written manuscript by Captain Thomas Bowrey describing his crew’s experiments with Bhang - a cannabis drink - in 17th-century Bengal; a bottle of cocaine eye drops; and a hallucinogenic snuff set collected in the Amazon by the Victorian explorer Richard Spruce. The exhibition will also feature contemporary art pieces exploring drug use and culture, including Tracy Moffat’s Laudanum portrait series and a recreation of the Joshua Light Show by Joshua White and Seth Kirby.

Today’s Daily Telegraph reports:

Last week, the news took on a decidedly trippy tinge. First, Professor David Nutt, sacked as an adviser to the Labour government for criticising its policy on drugs, sparked controversy when he published research suggesting that heroin was less damaging than alcohol. The following day, Californians went to the polls to vote on a proposal to legalise cannabis. In a dramatic move, President Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, threatened to intervene if the outcome was a “yes” (it wasn’t).

It is timely, then, that this Thursday, the Wellcome Trust will open the doors on High Society, an exhibition exploring the history of mind-altering drugs. In keeping with the Wellcome ethos, the exhibition blends a scientific and cultural approach, with curiosities such as a 20 metre opium pipe – an installation by the Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping – sitting alongside more scientific (if no less bizarre) exhibits, such as a Nasa experiment that studied the strange webs spiders spin after they are given different types of drugs.

Amid the debate about drugs, one thing is often ignored: their surprising potential in medicine. Most people are familiar with the idea that cannabis can be used therapeutically, chiefly in relieving pain or the nausea caused by chemotherapy, but also to moderate autoimmune and neurological disorders. But according to Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and director of the Beckley Foundation – a charity that promotes research into drugs and consciousness – we have not fully harnessed its potential. “The prohibition of the past 50 years has dramatically slowed the advancement of knowledge in the area,” she says. “In combating the recreational use of cannabis, the baby has been thrown out with the bath water.”

More surprising is the fact that harder drugs may also have therapeutic potential. Class A substances such as LSD and ecstasy, Feilding claims, may have a wealth of health benefits. “We need to wash these substances of their taboo by using the best science,” she says. “Opium and heroin are already widely used in hospitals. Hallucinogenic drugs, however, are victims of a prohibition that came into place in the Sixties.”

“The potential of Class A hallucinogens for clinical use is tantalising,” says Mike Jay, curator of the exhibition. “Psychedelic drugs have been subjected to the most stringent legislation. Yet when administered clinically, they are non-addictive, non-toxic and effective in the smallest quantities.”...

...“Every society is a high society,” he says. “The question is, what are we going to do about it? If illegal drugs can be used as effective medical treatments, it would be wrong not to research that rigorously.”

High Society runs from11 November 2010 - 27 February 2011 at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, Admission Free
 

 
Some of the highlights of this year’s Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin. Performances by MGMT, Big Freedia, Mastodon, The Hold Steady, The Dwarves, Gwar, The Casualties, Nortec Collective, Suicidal Tendencies and The Gories.

I shot the video with a Sony HDR-XR500.

There’s some audio distortion in a few spots, but I don’t think it’s too distracting. Enjoy.
 

 
Previously on DM: the Descendents at Fun Fun Fun Fest.

 
G.L.S.-United, German TV entertainers Thomas Gottschalk, Frank Laufenberg & Manfred Sexauer,  released ‘Rapper’s Deutsch’ in 1980. Their take on Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’  has undergone a radical lyrical change in which rock bands and singers are name checked. You don’t need to speak German to get the drift.
 

 
Via WFMU

 
Dimensions of Dialogue is a short animated film, made in 1982 by Czech Surrealist artist and film-maker, Jan Švankmajer. The film is split into three sections, ‘Exhaustive Discussion’, where Arcimboldo-like heads reduce each other into bland copies; ‘Passionate Discourse’ a clay couple merge and dissolve in love-making, only to eventually disown and destroy each other; and ‘Factual Conversation’ two heads fail to communicate with each, presenting various objects with their tongues, none of which match.

Švankmajer has been making animations for over forty years, and his work has been a major influence on Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, Tim Burton, and others. Gilliam listed Dimensions of Dialogue as one of “10 best animations of all time”, stating:

Jan Svankmajer’s stop-motion work uses familiar, unremarkable objects in a way which is deeply disturbing. The first film of his that I saw was Alice, and I was extremely unsettled by the image of an animated rabbit which had real fur and real eyes. His films always leave me with mixed feelings, but they all have moments that really get to me; moments that evoke the nightmarish spectre of seeing commonplace things coming unexpectedly to life.

While Sense of Cinema described Dimensions of Dialogue as:

...instructional that it is everyday objects that are confronted, devoured, spat out and homogenised, through a series of metaphors of colonisation, to an endless repetition of cloning operations. This is our digital world laid out in 1982.

Perhaps. But it strikes me that Svankmajer is doing more than this and he is confronting the failings of human existence, in a darkly humorous and disturbing way, to fully connect with one other.

This month sees the release of Svankmajer’s latest and, what he has announced maybe his, last film, Surviving Life:

Eugene leads a double life - one real life, and another life in his dreams. In real life, he is married to Milada; in his dreams, he has a young lover called Eugenia. Sensing that these dreams have a deeper meaning, he goes to see a psychoanalyst, who interprets his dreams for him. Gradually we learn that Eugene lost his parents in early childhood and was brought up in an orphanage.

In the meantime, Eugenia is expecting Eugene’s child - to the dismay of a psychoanalyst, who believes Eugenia is in fact his anima. And getting your anima pregnant is worse than incest. Meanwhile Milada suspects Eugene is having an affair. She spies on Eugene’s ritual in his studio, and enter his dream-world. French Romantic poet, Gerard de Nerval, said: “Our dreams are a second life.” This films wants to prove his words.

 
Via Tara McGinley
 
Part 2 of ‘Dimensions of Dialogue’ plus bonus clips and trailer for ‘Surviving Life’ after the jump…
 

 
Excellent news for Pulp fans: The band will be reforming for some live festival dates next summer, as reported on the Guardian website, including shows at London’s wireless festival and Spain’s Primavera Sound:

A press release distributed this morning said: “Pulp have decided to get together and play some concerts next summer. The shows will involve all the original members of the band (Nick Banks, Jarvis Cocker, Candida Doyle, Steve MacKey, Russell Senior and Mark Webber) and they will play songs from all periods of their career. Yes, that means they’ll be playing your favourites.”

Pulp formed in Sheffield in 1978, establishing a cult fanbase before breaking into the mainstream with their 1995 single Common People. They released seven albums, before going on hiatus in 2002. Their forthcoming shows will be the first time the classic Pulp lineup has played together since 1996.

Below, the video for “Something’s Changed,” probably the best love song of the 1990s not written by Nick Cave.
 

 
Artist/prankster Matt Cornell’s supplement to the “What Has Obama Done So Far?” meme.

What in the fuck has Obama done so far?

 
Of all the attempts to analyze the post-election “now what?” question, by far, the clearest-headed effort has come from Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He composed his thoughts in an email that he sent to friends, family and colleagues, and now this email is going viral. Here’s an excerpt:

Amazingly, as Harold Meyerson notes in today’s Washington Post, Americans who blamed Wall Street for the nation’s economic problems favored Republicans over Democrats by a 14% margin!! It is time to reframe the debate over which party is in Wall Street’s pocket!

In his column Tuesday, Robert Reich reminds us that during FDR’s first term, almost every major business organization and leader, as well as almost every daily newspaper in America, attacked his New Deal ideas — such as Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act — as unwarranted “big government” and even “socialism.” During his re-election campaign in 1936, FDR mobilized public opinion against his political enemies. “Never before have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he thundered. “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” FDR won re-election in a landslide. Reich suggests that Obama and progressives should follow FDR’s example.

Obama’s biggest victory (which the Republicans now hope to repeal) was the passage of the historic health care reform. As I wrote last May in the American Prospect, that victory happened because progressive groups — unions, consumer groups, community organizing groups, and others — mounted a grassroots protest campaign that saved the health care bill from defeat. The activists focused public attention on the influence and greed of the insurance industry, and gave wavering Democrats, including the President, the support they needed to push for a reform bill. Progressives and liberals need to sustain an permanent protest campaign focusing on the outrageous greed, irresponsible practices, and political influence-peddling of big business. It would help if the President and the Democratic leaders were partners in this “inside/outside” strategy.

In an op-ed in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, Marshall Ganz, who helped design Obama’s grassroots organizing effort in 2008, argues that Obama needs to find his voice as an inspiring “transformational” leader, and, in doing so, help unleash the potential power of his 2008 supporters.

We need to constantly reframe the public debate to remind Americans that the Republicans, like Cong. John Boehner (the likely next Speaker of the House) and Sen. Mitchell McConnell, are wholly-owned subsidies of corporate America. That’s where they get their money. That’s their agenda. In case you’ve forgotten already, here it is again.

Boehner, McConnell, and their corporate sponsors have already declared war on Obama, the Democrats, and any attempt to tame corporate abuses, or reduce income inequality and poverty. McConnell today repeated that his top priority in Congress is to make Obama a one-term President. As Ganz, Reich, and others have written, this is no time for Obama and the Democrats to compromise principles for the sake of an illusionary bi-partisan consensus. Boehner, McConnell, DeMint and the other Republican leaders have absolutely no interest in bipartisan compromises.

Read more: Thinking Through and Beyond the Election

Thanks for the heads up, James McCardle!