Wayne Cochran was the baddest motherfucker to sport a platinum blond pompadour in the history of rock and roll. He was the honky doppelganger to the hardest working Black man in show business. But, the booze, the pills, the nightsweats, the trembling heebeegeebees and soul twisting demonic machinations of the Devil’s music drove him into the cold stiff arms of suicidal despair. Some men cannot handle the Hermetic heaviness bestowed upon them, the alchemical fire scorches and blinds them.

Like so many tales of rock and roll redemption, Jesus appeared to Wayne and laid his hands upon that sinner’s radiant wighat and the Satanic sunglasses of sin fell from Wayne’s eyes and the light of salvation penetrated his supplicating optic nerve sending a bolt of Christ-like illumination into the pulsating pink folds of his frontal lobes. Wayne was a changed man and Jesus had a new brother in arms, but rock and roll had lost a sharkskin suited shaman who had sent the serpent power of sexual bliss up the spinal column of sweet soul music.

And the black angels wept.

As one who had seen Cochran perform in the early 70s, I can testify to the man’s powerful transformative mojo. I was struck down and raised up.

45 years after appearing on Jackie Gleason’s Miami-based TV show, Wayne is running a Christian ministry in the same city where he once dazzled an audience with his lime green threads and his Mephistophelian moves.

In many cases, the transformation from rock star to Christian minister is lateral and redundant. But, sometimes the lord moves in mysterious ways and He does the watusi. Wayne Cochran was a cosmic force before he found religion. Religion found him - a primal, wild, uncontrolled religion. Sometimes that’s more than a man can handle. So, he turns to the script, scripture, where the rules are neatly laid down - ‘Jesus For Dummies.’ Every man or woman needs to do what they have to do, but it saddens me to see great artists retreat from their work because they can’t mentally process it. Art is supposed to be scary, it takes you places where you’ve never been and that is knowledge.

Wayne Cochran’s pompadour was a crown, not of thorns, but that of the Magi.
 

 
It’s not so much wedding bells as ‘execution yells’ as a killer of 12 marries his ‘fried to be’ on the electric chair.  Barbara Wintergreen reports for CBN News.

 
Yes, talk on the white Right about “camps” and “guns” should send a shiver up my spine as a Jew (whose father spent time in an immigration camp in post-WWII Palestine). But I hope I’m not the only one who thinks that this type of thing represents the fascinating last gasp of mainstream hegemonic white-identity politics. I have trust in the rest of this country’s people. Maybe I’m hopelessly naive.

As seen in the video below, here’s Marg Baker, Tea Party Republican candidate for Florida House of Representatives, District 48, on immigration:

We can follow what happened back in the ‘40s and 50s. I was just a little girl in Miami, and they filled camps with the people that snuck into the country because they were illegal. They put them in the camps and shipped them back. We can do that.

Of course, those camps held Cuban refugees who fled the repressive Machado and Batista regimes, which leased virtually all of the country’s resources, land, financial system, electric power production, and industry to US monopolies. But, history shmistory.

On the Second Amendment:

We’ve gotta have guns!

 
John Lennon reading about Brian Jones death. 1969.

 
In 1967 Philco introduced a 3 7/8 inches in diameter vinyl disc they called ‘Hip Pocket Records.’ They had a ‘hit’ song on each side and sold for 69 cents. Is this not groovy?

How did I miss this back in the sixties? As a kid, I would have loved this. In fact, I want some now.
 

 
More photos after the jump…

 
Although it screams of rip-off in flashing letters each the size of a New York brownstone, James Cameron’s Avatar is being re-released with eight additional minutes. Eight measly minutes? Shouldn’t there be some kind of ten year rule before “Director’s Cuts” get to pick our pockets again? And then I saw these two words “Na’vi Sex.” From MTV:

“You mean the alien kink scene?” [Cameron] joked. “It’s been restored, every last frame of it. Seriously,” he said, adding that the scene in question won’t break any records — it lasts all of about 20 seconds. “I would say, just so that we correctly manage people’s expectations,” he explained carefully, “it does not change our rating at all. I would call it more of an alien foreplay scene. It’s not like they’re ripping their clothes off and going at it.”

 
Fan-f*cking-tastic!
 
There’s a bonus shot of a nude Matt Berry at the end. Blink and you’ll miss it!
 
(via Nerdcore)

 
In my opinion Negativland’s 1983 LP, A Big 10-8 Place is their masterpiece. Edited by hand with razor and tape, it’s a superb pre-digital sound collage homage to the weirdness of suburban living filtered through a love of C.B. radios and terminology. Have a listen to the entire first section below in excellent sound quality, though never mind the fan made visuals. This is truly a movie for your ears.

 
This glacial speed Reading Rainbow intro scares the living shit out of me. Quaalude, anyone?
 

 
(via HYST)

 
Atlanta, Georgia’s High Museum Of Art is showcasing an exhibit of Salvidor Dali’s later work. Included in the exhibit is a piece from 1973 called “First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper’s Brain” which…

[...] depicts a three-dimensional Alice Cooper wearing two million dollars worth of jewelry including a tiara and necklace while holding a statuette of Venus De Milo as if it were a microphone. A plaster sculpture of Alice’s brain, topped by a chocolate éclair covered in ants, another Dalí oeuvre, was placed behind the cross-legged rock star and the set-up was documented by Dalí using (then) cutting-edge hologram technology.

Dali was an Alice Cooper fan and it was after seeing the band perform live in 1973 that he invited Alice to sit for the hologram project. The Dali/Cooper connection certainly makes sense considering both men were ‘shock artists’ and each of them, in their era, were known for producing gruesome good fun, from Dali’s riot inducing An Andalusian Dog to Cooper’s decapitated baby dolls, dancing teeth and guillotine.

 
See footage of the Dali exhibit after the jump…

 
Très freaky! Not recommended for the squeamish.
 
(via Street Anatomy)