Last Minutes with Oden was voted best video at the Vimeo Festival + Awards over the weekend and boy did it deserve to win. The film is a six-minute long documentary about a former addict, Jason Wood, putting down his much loved pooch, Oden. Directed by Eliot Rausch, the short sensitively portrays what it’s like to go through something like this—is there anything more wrenching than having to put a dying pet down?—as well as expertly tying in Jason’s brutal backstory. The film is tightly and economically directed and to say it’s moving is a criminall understatement (I cried my eyes out—just sobbed like a baby—watching this earlier in the year and just now).
Dunno ‘bout you, but I love Deerhoof. It was the Apple O album that did it, back when. Since then they’ve been a reliably wonderful band sporting one of the finest, most elastic drummers around and dual guitars in the fine crocheted Magic Band tradition and always super interesting self-production. This song (and goofy-ass fan vid) is the first taste of the upcoming Deerhoof Vs. Evil LP. Love that awkward, heavily swingin’ groove and the male/female vocal trade off. Many great ideas crammed into 3:29.
In his new book, The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future, UCLA geologist Dr. Laurence C. Smith, a rising star in geoscience, distills cutting edge scientific research into four global forces (demographic trends, natural resource demand, climate change, and globalization) to offer a vivid prediction of what the world we leave to our children and grandchildren will be like.
This week in New York City, for three night only, Dangerous Minds pal, Ann Magnuson and Adam Dugas will be presenting their Duelling Harps show that knocked ‘em dead in Los Angeles:
A darkly elegant evening of gorgeous melodies with a theatrical flourish. Ann Magnuson and Adam Dugas face off on vocals as Alexander Rannie and Mia Theodoratus strum their harps in this twisted match of musical one-upmanship. The quartet thrusts and parries with an arsenal of tunes ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime: psychedelic calls to prayer, Henry Purcell’s Baroque art songs, Kraftwerk, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Lee Hazlewood, and Pink Floyd, as well as original songs by Magnuson and Dugas. Dueling Harps makes its New York premiere at the Abrons. The show premiered in Hollywood at the Steve Allen Theater and then ran at REDCAT in the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Harps marks Magnuson’s first New York theatrical appearance in nine years.
Dugas and Magnuson meet upon the stage to resolve a grudge; a duel ensues to settle their dispute that is fought using only music. Each singer brings a second to accompany them on the harp, the only other weapon allowed in the duel. Dugas and Theodoratus represent the East Coast, Magnuson and Rannie the West, as a battle rages - with much trickery and tomfoolery. Robin Walsh adds a dash of the surreal with her puppetry, and a special Halloween encore rounds out the night. There will be blood!
The performances are on October 15, 16, and 17 and take place at the Abrons Arts Center at 8pm. You can buy tickets here.
New Yorkers take note, Ann assures me that due to the difficultly, and expense, of staging something like this, that this may be her last performance like this for quite some time on the east coast. And speaking of the costs of mounting such a show, they’ve got an online fundraiser going on where supporters can score posters, CDs, original art, a pre-performance reception and one lucky patron of the arts will receive an onstage LAP DANCE, from either Ann or Adam, their choice!
Episode 6 of the Dangerous Minds Radio Hour finds my fellow blogger and friend since 4th grade Ron Nachmann taking the reins for an expert excursion to many mesmerizing worlds of bass, dub and other booty-shaking points of interest. Listen in to Ron’s expertly textured world-wise selections, sure to become a regular feature of the DM Radio Hour.
Goran Bregovic – “In The Deathcar” (feat. Iggy Pop) Arizona Dreams OST (Wrasse Jamaica)
Junior Murvin & The Upsetters – “Roots Train Number Two” Sound System Scratch (Pressure Sounds)
The Upsetters – “Jucky Skank” Sound System Scratch (Pressure Sounds) pressure.co.uk
dubLoner & Isaac Haile Selassie – “Wicked Man [Kush Arora remix]” (Def’child Recordings)
Sub Swara – “Bend You” Triggers (Low Motion Records)
Commix – “Be True” [Burial remix] (Metalheadz)
I.D. - “Fashionist” (Voltage Music)
Shockman – “Shockout” (Voltage Music)
Mista Chatman – “Sidewinda” (more info)
A.J. Holmes and The Hackney Empire – “Fraudian Slip (feat. Kastro) [Uproot Andy Remix]” (Ghetto Bassquake)
Ibrahim Dicko - “Sida” DJ Spider remix Frikywa Vol. 1 (Six Degrees Records)
Tshetsha Boys – “Nwampfundla” Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa (Honest Jon’s)
Last Step – “Soda”You’re a Nice Girl EP (Planet Mu)
“I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.” - Byron Williams
Chilling, must-read article from Media Matters about the toxic influence paranoid wingnuts like Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck have on gullible, unstable—and potentially violent—people:
Byron Williams, a 45-year-old ex-felon, exploded onto the national stage in the early morning hours of July 18.
According to a police investigation, Williams opened fire on California Highway Patrol officers who had stopped him on an Oakland freeway for driving erratically. For 12 frantic minutes, Williams traded shots with the police, employing three firearms and a small arsenal of ammunition, including armor-piercing rounds fired from a .308-caliber rifle.
When the smoke cleared, Williams surrendered; the ballistic body armor he was wearing had saved his life. Miraculously, only two of the 10 CHP officers involved in the shootout were injured.
In an affidavit, an Oakland police investigator reported that during an interview at the hospital, Williams “stated that his intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.”
Fifteen years after militia-movement-inspired bombers killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City federal building, right-wing domestic terror plots are a fact of life in America. Since 2008, violent extremists—many of whom subscribe to the hate speech and conspiratorial fantasies of the conservative media—have murdered churchgoers in Knoxville, police officers in Pittsburgh, and an abortion provider in Wichita.
Conspiracy theory-fueled extremism has long been a reaction to progressive government in the United States. Half a century ago, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that right-wing thought had come to be dominated by the belief that Communist agents had infiltrated all levels of American government and society. The right, he explained, had identified a “sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.”
Just last month, Gregory Giusti pleaded guilty to repeatedly threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—including threatening to destroy her California home—because he was “upset with her passing the health care law.” His mother told a local news station that he “frequently gets in with a group of people that have really radical ideas,” adding, “I’d say Fox News or all of those that are really radical, and he—that’s where he comes from.”
Read “Progressive Hunter”: Jailhouse Confession: How the right-wing media and Glenn Beck’s chalkboard drove Byron Williams to plot assassination (Media Matters)
In this fascinating article, written for Crawdaddy magazine in 1977, William Burroughs explores the music of Led Zeppelin and discusses Crowley, infra-sound, magic, Moroccan trance music and rock and roll with Jimmy Page.
The essential ingredient for any successful rock group is energy–the ability to give out energy, to receive energy from the audience and to give it back to the audience. A rock concert is in fact a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy. Rock stars may be compared to priests, a theme that was treated in Peter Watkins’ film ‘Privilege’. In that film a rock star was manipulated by reactionary forces to set up a state religion; this scenario seems unlikely, I think a rock group singing political slogans would leave its audience at the door.
The Led Zeppelin show depends heavily on volume, repetition and drums. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose–that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco, musicians are also magicians. Gnaoua music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Joujouka evokes the God Pan, Pan God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts–music, painting and writing–is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.”
Here are some freakin’ amazing one-of-a-kind Vans WE Sk8 Hi’s designed by super-talented artist, Ian Johnson. I totally think Vans and Ian need to make more of these fine shoes.
On 31st October 1992, the BBC aired a drama that terrorized the nation. Recorded two weeks before transmission, Stephen Volk’s GhostWatch was broadcast as a live on-air investigation into alleged poltergeist activity in a house in Northolt, London. Presented by journalist and chat-show host, Michael Parkinson, the program had live link-ups with reporters Sarah Greene and Mike Smith, on location at the haunted house. The documentary form of the show and its use of journalists, caused the majority of the British public to believe the televised events were in fact real.
Viewers watched as a series of cleverly constructed interviews, with the family who lived at the house and their neighbors, revealed details of the poltergeist, nicknamed Pipes, so-called from its habit of knocking on the house’s plumbing. The reporters discovered Pipes was the ghost of a psychologically damaged man called Raymond Tunstall, who was believed to have been troubled by the spirit of Mother Seddons – a baby farmer turned child killer from the 19th century. As the show developed, it was revealed (in Quatermass fashion) that the broadcast was acting as a “national seance,” giving Tuntsall’s ghost horrific powers. It ended with host Parkinson possessed by the evil spirit, and reporter Greene seemingly killed.
Like Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast, a mass panic ensued. Over 30,000 telephone calls were made to the BBC switchboard in 1 hour, with some people claiming poltergeist activity in their own homes. One man, 18-year-old Martin Denham, was so disturbed by the drama that he committed suicide 5 days after its broadcast. The central heating in his home had broken down and caused the pipes to knock, as in the show. Denham left a suicide note that said, “if there are ghosts I will be ... with you always as a ghost.”
In February 1994, a report in the British Medical Journal described cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in two 10-year-old boys. It was the first recorded occasion that a TV show had caused PTSD.
After its screening, GhostWatch was banned by the BBC for a decade. Since then it has only ever been shown once on Canada’s digital channel Scream and the Belgian channel Canvas
Stephen Volk, author of the screenplay, recalled in a BBC interview the effect GhostWatch had:
What surprised me was the avalanche of ‘IT SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED’, ‘HEADS MUST ROLL’ and ‘HOW DARE THEY INSULT OUR INTELLIGENCE!’ The anger at being, as certain members of the viewing public saw it, duped and hoaxed by trusted Auntie Beeb.
I think the only [serious] review I read about it as a piece of drama was in Sight and Sound where Kim Newman, bless his cotton socks, referred to Quatermass and obviously got ‘it’.
We were doing a piece of drama with a theme and nobody discussed that. It was all ‘SHOCK, HORROR, SICK’ tabloid stuff.
I must say in all honesty that in all the meetings I had with the Drama Dept at the BBC, I never heard anyone at any time use the word ‘hoax’. We were just doing a drama in a particular style (as The Blair Witch Project has done more recently) to give a modicum of authenticity. The idea that we wanted to make fools of people is absurd and just wrong.
Subsequently Ghostwatch has become a staple subject for Media Studies projects: one University lecturer told me that somebody chooses it virtually every year!
In 2002 the British Film Institute released a DVD of GhostWatch.
Bonus clips of ‘GhostWatch’ including TV response after the jump…
The Los Angeles premiere of director Frank Henenlotter’s new documentary, Hershell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore takes place at Cinefamily in Hollywood, CA on October 12th on a double feature bill with the gore classic, Two Thousand Maniacs. Henenlotter and producer Mike Vraney will be here in person for a Q&A in-between the films.
Frank Henenlotter, one of our favorite HFS directors and the man behind classics like Basket Case and Brain Damage, is back with the definitive portrait of Herschell Gordon Lewis, one of the godfathers of exploitation movies! Featuring John Waters, drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, Lewis’s legendary early producer David F. Friedman, Herschell himself, and testimony from the people who were actually there! You’ll witness Lewis’s beginnings in the bare-naked innocent era of “nudie cuties,” just before he shocked the world with Blood Feast, the first ever gore film—and then you’ll be treated to a madcap whirl of his notorious, controversial career, featuring Two Thousand Maniacs!, She-Devils On Wheels, Blast-Off Girls, Just For The Hell Of It and the incredible The Wizard Of Gore! Experience a decade of motion picture madness, with tons of film clips, rare outtakes, and unintentional hilarity, as The Godfather of Gore leaves you laughing and screaming at some of the most amazing movies to ever play American theaters!
[True story: When I met future “Club Kid Murderer” Michael Alig (when both of us were still teenagers) he was the first person I knew who had a VCR, but he only had three videotapes: Hershell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs and Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer. Coincidence? You decide!]
Below, the trailer for Lewis’s hicksploitation “masterpiece” Two Thousand Maniacs. I’ve only seen this film twice, and yet I can still remember most of the lyrics to the insanely catchy theme song.
Many actors are superstitious. Some like Peter Bull kept a collection of Teddy bears to bring him good luck; others like Jack Lemmon said the words, “It’s magic time,” before filming each scene. But few have ever been quite as obsessed with superstitions and the occult as comedy genius, Peter Sellers.
Sellers’ introduction to the Occult came via fellow Goon, Michael Bentine, the “Watford-born Peruvian,” who had grown-up in a household where seances and table-turning were regularly practiced. Not long after they first met, Bentine told Sellers of his psychic abilities - how during the Second World War, when Bentine served in the Royal Air Force, he had been able to tell which of his comrades would die before a bombing mission. Bentine claimed if he saw a skull instead of his colleague’s features, then he knew this person would be killed. How often Bentine was correct in these predictions is not known. No matter, Sellers was greatly impressed by the shock-haired comic and was soon obsessed with all things paranormal.
From then on, Sellers collected superstitions, as easily as others collect stamps. He refused to wear green or act with anyone dressed in the color. If anyone gave him something sharp, he gave them a penny. He read his horoscopes every day so he would always know what he should do.
Sellers often said he had no idea who he was: “If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.” This was his way of renouncing any responsibility for his actions. He claimed he found comfort and stability in consulting clairvoyants and fortune tellers, which again only underlines the fact he did know who he was - a control freak, who wanted power over his future. It was inevitable, therefore, that once under the spell of sooth-sayers and psychics, Sellers was open to fraudsters, tricksters and con-men.
The clairvoyant who had most influence over his life was Maurice Woodruff, the famed TV and newspaper astrologer, whose syndicated column reached over fifty million people at the height of his career. Woodruff received over 5,000 letters a week, asking for advice and had a Who’s Who of of celebrity clients, including composer Lionel Bart and actor Diana Dors. Woodruff had famously predicted the death of President John F. Kennedy and the end of the Vietnam War. Sellers was devoted to Woodruff, consulting him before he accepted any film roles, and regularly had tarot readings performed over the telephone. But Woodruff was heavily in debt and open to the persuasion of earning a little cash when film studios asked him to suggest film scripts to Sellers.
One famous tale, recounts how Woodruff was asked to suggest the initials of director Blake Edwards as being very important to Sellers. Unfortunately, Sellers failed to connect ‘B.E.’ with the famous Hollywood director. On return to the Dorchetser Hotel, his usual residence when in London, Sellers was smitten by the sight of a beautiful, young blonde-haired woman at reception. When he enquired who was this vision of loveliness, he was told Britt Ekland. Sellers recalled Woodruff’s prediction and married Ekland within weeks.
More on the paranormal Peter Sellers plus bonus clip after the jump…
Above, Iott and pals indulging in some good clean Third Reich fun!
Rich Iott, the Tea party favored Republican candidate for Ohio’s 9th Congressional district, found himself in the unenvious position yesterday of having to defend himself against The Atlantic’s revelation that he—get this—donned a NAZI UNIFORM to play act in WWII recreations a few years back. Not to fear, Iott’s got a whole mess of rightwing blowhards blogging in his defense, because, as Charles Johnson writes at Little Green Footballs, “this kind of thing really isn’t a problem for them.”
No, but it might be a problem for, I dunno, Jewish voters in his district and, let’s face it, anyone WITH HALF A BRAIN who MIGHT BE UNCOMFORTABLE voting for a politician whose judgement is so incredibly poor that he CHOSE to wear, and be photographed in, a Nazi uniform, for any reason whatsoever (professional actors aside).
It’s simply amazing to me how many skeletons (and now Nazi uniforms) are falling out of the Tea party candidate’s closets as we get closer to election day. To me, this idiot Iott and his NAZI UNIFORM are a STRIKING REMINDER OF WHAT WE ARE DEALING WITH IN THIS COUNTRY.
Tea baggers, I ask you: Do you see yourself in the below clip (taken from UK sketch comedy series That Mitchell and Webb Look)? And if so, which character do you most identify with?
Above, Iott and pals indulging in some good clean Third Reich fun!