Chouthi Bai from a village in Rajasthan breastfeeds a three day old calf whose mother recently died. Bai feeds the calf 3 or 4 times a day. “The gods will be pleased if I raise her.”
What an extraordinary way to acquire good karma.
Supremely groovy. Link Wray plays ‘Ace Of Spades’ while Maria does her dance from Metropolis.
I lived in Northern New Mexico during the late 1960’s and from 2003 to 2008, right at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo (blood of Christ) mountain range. This is an area that has drawn artists, outlaws, visionaries and lost souls for decades, from D.H. Lawrence to Dennis Hopper to the New Buffalo Commune and the Rainbow Tribe. The mountains are thought to have mystical powers, both good and bad. It is said they can mess with a man’s mind. I lived in Taos, which a friend once called “the world’s largest open air mental institution”, and I saw the flow of neo-hippies coming into town blending with the old guard who had been living there for decades. It was a wild mix of 1960’s Aquarian Age values and a kind of longhair punk nihilism - a fascinating blend turning a bit moldy at the edges and slightly rotten at the core.
Dennis Hopper was busted in the mid-1960’S in Taos for walking into a town council meeting brandishing a shotgun.
Shot in New Mexico, the “fat Jew on shrooms” video (Rob Tyner, is that you?) is a comically surreal version of the kind of madness you’ll find in the high desert, on the mesas and in the bloody mountains. The altitude can turn a simple psychedelic trip into something straight out of a Castaneda book and, in this dude’s case, something gonzo from Hunter Thompson. I don’t know how ‘real’ it is, but at 10,000 feet above sea level shit happens. Whether shroom boy is having a bonafide mystical experience or just going apeshit for the camera doesn’t matter. It’s the vibe, man. And the vibe is spooky.
In New Mexico, guns, pot and longhair are totems of some new bizarre breed of hippie outlaw.
The other video included here is from a film called “Off The Grid” and is the real deal. I knew these folks in the video. I had a store not far from where they lived on the mesa and they were my customers. Many were Vietnam vets, a few were clinically insane, others were social outcasts or folks just looking to live the simple hippie life. I liked most of them. But a few had feral children that saddened me. Dirty and hungry, these little kids were living in poverty and squalor, not by their own design, but by the choices their parents, mostly quite young themselves, had made in deciding to live outside of society.
The directors of “Off The Grid” were told by the folks depicted in the film never to screen the movie in Taos. If they did, they’d regret it.
A little comedy followed by something a bit more serious. The connection between these videos is kind of tenuous; longhairs with guns. That’s something I never imagined during the Summer Of Love.
Life off the grid after the jump…
The Godfather of Go-Go Chuck Brown, with his Soul Searchers
Background information on David N. Rubin’s 1990 documentary Go-Go Swing is pretty hard to come by. But that hardly takes away from how deep a snapshot it is of the highly regional Washington D.C. brand of funk called go-go.
Developed first by jazz guitarist and singer Chuck Brown (whose group the Soul Searchers were at the top of D.C.’s scene), go-go is characterized by its laidback but dynamic funk rhythms accented with heavy conga beats, freaky keyboards, blasting horns and call-and response vocals. And its been a staple of the mid-Atlantic scene for the past 35 years.
Go-go reached a crest during the 1980s, as bands like Trouble Funk, E.U., Rare Essence, Redds and the Boys, Hot Cold Sweat, the Junk Yard Band and others got signed and discarded by various majors and independents. E.U.’s performance of “Da Butt” on Spike Lee’s School Daze was a coup as far as national exposure for the music.
Go-go has retained its shine to this day, as plenty of R&B artists dabble in its rhythms to this day, and D.C. troupe Beat Ya Feet Kings bringing next-generation go-go dance style to a range of tempos and genres.
Rubin’s doc goes deep into the context of the go-go scene, dealing with the trials, tribulations, mournings and celebrations that are all part of living in D.C. Check out the whole thing—it’s really worth it.
Part II || Part III || Part IV || Part V || Part VI
Bonus clip after the jump: footage of the excellent go-go rhymer D.C. Scorpio performing “Stone Cold Hustler” at the Capital Center, backed by the Soul Searchers…
Square grouper is smuggler slang for bales of pot dropped from airplanes or thrown overboard from boats. It’s also the title of a new documentary that’s going to be released this fall.
I love true tales of dope smuggling. They’re full of cliffhanging adventure and intrigue. But as pot slowly becomes legalized, smuggling will become a lost art and smugglers a dying breed. Check out Square Grouper on Facebook.
“Are you angry that I would make a video such as this to expose racism for what it is?” so asks a man who has just exposed himself to himself. This must be the dumbest thing I’ve seen… all afternoon.
Mind-numbing, cognition destroying, soul-sapping video from Pastor Terry Jones & his Dove World Outreach Center congregation. Depressing to watch. I can’t even get a hard on to mock them, as much as they deserve it.
Jones and his “church” are the folks making plans for “International Burn a Koran Day” on September 11, so more of the same should come as no surprise.
A least he’s being honest, right? I’d give him buck!
Also, bonus cameo from small child in white tuxedo. Inexplicable and mesmerizing.
I will admit to being somewhat crestfallen at the lack of loony-toons wingnuts on parade in all the reporting on the Glenn Beck event over the weekend. Somewhat crestfallen? Who am I kidding? I waited all week long to see a bunch of crazy, ignorant white people with low IQs spouting off on television about things they know nothing of and regurgitating, parrot-style, the predictable tropes and catchphrases that they’d been fed by Fox News, World Net Daily and Rush Limbaugh.
But there was so little of it. What a letdown! The reporting—and what transpired onstage with Beck, Palin, et al—was too bland to even hold my attention. I wanted to see foaming at the mouth nutcases, zany racist signs, people dressed as giant tea bags, in Confederate flag jumpsuits, etc, etc. Perhaps because signs were discouraged, the visuals were lacking, but it sure took all the fun out of the cable new coverage of the event.
But now Chase Whiteside and New Left Media have posted their take on the “Restoring Honor” event and well, it looks to me as if the job the major news channels did has been bested by the “indie” coverage of some students from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. It’s not like you couldn’t throw a rock the distance of, oh, about 12 inches without hitting an idiot, so how did the mainstream media miss these kooks and ignoramuses?
The story that’s not being examined—but should be—is is how fucking DUMB about a quarter of this country is. It’s not Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin or Ted Nugent or any of the rest of them, who are the story, they’re merely symptoms of the greater problem: 20-25% of the American population are abject idiots. That’s the story I want to see the media tackle.
Via The Daily What
Enjoy the vacuum tube-y goodness of the Ondioline as demonstrated by its best known ambassador and salesman, the legendary Jean-Jacques Perrey under the guise of his rather sinister looking alter ego Mr. Ondioline from this 1960 French E.P.
This promo created by Randy Randall for Everything In Between, the new album from No Age, is everything an ad should be…attention getting.
Joe Meek was a brilliant, innovative and influential British record producer whose short life was filled with bizarre and ultimately tragic drama.
Meek produced several hit records in the 1960s and was often referred to as the English Phil Spector. His experimentation with electronic effects, including reverb, echo, distortion, compression, close-up miking, filters and multi-tracking, resulted in the distinctive “Meek sound.” Telestar Telstar, a spacy instrumental by The Tornadoes was his biggest hit and still sounds as excitingly fresh as it did 50 years ago. His other big international smash (and a personal favorite of mine) was the hard driving, percussive Have I The Right by The Honeycombs. The rhythm track of the song was augmented by Meek using a bunch of microphones clipped to banisters while the band stomped it’s feet on the recording studio stairs and beat a tambourine directly into a microphone.
Sadly, like Spector, Meek’s life became a tabloid nightmare that has to a great degree overshadowed his musical legacy.
Meek was gay at a time when being gay was illegal in the United Kingdom. His sexuality was the source of extreme mental conflict for Meek, he actually thought he could be cured of his homosexuality. Fear of incrimination pushed him into an increasing sense of isolation. Perhaps in an effort to seek some kind of cosmic sexual healing, he became obsessed with magic, the occult, extraterrestrials, and conspiracies of all sorts. He claimed to communicate with the ghost of Buddy Holly via ouija board and in seances. He reputedly placed microphones in graveyards to record the voices of the dead.
After a series of devastating personal and financial catastophes, Meek eventually became a paranoid recluse. His life ended at the young age of 37 in murder and suicide.
Joe Meek’s brief ascension into the heavens of pop stardom and crushing descent into a hell of circumstance and social pressure, as well as one of his own making, is a story as compelling and offbeat as any in the annals of rock and roll’s dark side. This hour long documentary tells that story in riveting fashion while also providing fascinating insight to his particular musical genius. The Very Strange Story of The Legendary Joe Meek.
For seven years I had an apartment on Christopher St. and Bleecker in New York’s West Village just one and a half blocks from the historic Stonewall Inn, site of the first riots for gay rights and birthplace of the Gay Liberation Front. Although there was a pretty good drama (Stonewall) that came out 15-years ago, it’s great that a proper documentary finally got these stories on tape to set the record straight. I really look forward to seeing this film.
“It was the Rosa Parks moment,” says one man. June 28, 1969: NYC police raid a Greenwich Village Mafia-run gay bar, The Stonewall Inn. For the first time, patrons refuse to be led into paddy wagons, setting off a 3-day riot that launches the Gay Rights Movement.
Told by Stonewall patrons, reporters and the cop who led the raid, Stonewall Uprising recalls the bad old days when psychoanalysts equated homosexuality with mental illness and advised aversion therapy, and even lobotomies; public service announcements warned youngsters against predatory homosexuals; and police entrapment was rampant. At the height of this oppression, the cops raid Stonewall, triggering nights of pandemonium with tear gas, billy clubs and a small army of tactical police. The rest is history.
—Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum
The Stonewall Uprising website
Last week, thanks to the efforts of the Internet’s “collective id”—otherwise known as the 4chan BBS—Mary Bale, the evil woman from Coventry, England who was caught on tape mistreating a cat, was brought to justice (or at least a public shaming she is unlikely to ever fully recover from in this lifetime).
Well boys… here’s another job for you: If you think the CC video footage that caused Bale’s epic feline fail was bad, this is ten times worse and it involves an accomplice! That’s right, this footage—which you should not watch if you are easily upset (or a normal human being) because it is THAT BAD—was not captured by a passive CC camera, but by a human being who not only DIDN’T STOP IT FROM HAPPENING, but who thought it would be funny to videotape it and post it on the Internet? Yuck.
Mary Bale currently is under police protection, but if this woman can be identified, she should be taken into police custody. How could someone do something like this to tiny, crying, helpless newborn puppies?!?! As I type this, there is a tiny 5-month-old puppy playing happily beside me who I am madly in love with. It’s hard to conceive of someone doing this kind of thing. This woman who can kill a bunch of puppies so cruelly should be shamed, do some jail time and spend the rest of her sad shitty life with this videotape following her dumb ass around anytime a prospective employer (or boyfriend) would like some more information about her and types her name into a Google search.
People of 4chan, you know what to do!
Via Doobybrain
