Folks might remember a post I did last year on Nujabes’ “Luv (Sic) Pt. 2” slow motion video shot in Japan and directed by Sou Otsukis. Well, Otsukis’ slowmo madness is back, and this time “Luv (Sic) Pt. 2” takes place in Cambodia. It’s really worth a watch.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Goofy People Running in Slow Motion
(via Nerdcore)
Above, Pat Toomey says it’s not the size…
Senator Pat Toomey, that rotten shit who is the new Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, tells the CPAC attendees his political philosophy in a form that they can all understand, that of a simple children’s story. Amazing. How does a scoundrel like this get elected to the Senate in a state so full of poor and working class people??? The man clearly hates the poor, they’re just “useless eaters” to him and his GOP buddies. Toomey even puts Rick Santorum in perspective! The sight of Toomey turns my stomach. He’s anti-gay, anti-poor, anti-healthcare reform, pro-gun, says global warming is nonsense, was against the Bush expansion of Medicare prescription benefits when he was a congressman and thinks that the economic meltdown should have been allowed to continue to the bitter end! (Oddly, Toomey supported DADT repeal. Go figure).
If teabagger Toomey—who should immediately stop dying his hair—had his druthers he would deregulate Wall Street and put a doctor who performs a legal abortion in prison, but when it comes to politics, he’s all for baby-talking to his base of buffoons. CPAC is going to be quite a show this year. These fucks are just tuning up the orchestra before unleashing a full-on symphony of hate. Non-haters need not apply to speak at CPAC. Her reasons are her reasons, but I have to say that Sarah Palin looks especially canny by avoiding this cavalcade of asshats.
Bonus: If you really want to make yourself retch, check out the video of Newt Gingrich’s CPAC entrance to the sounds of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” What a tacky little man. You have to appreciate the brain-dead embrace of this guy by Christian conservatives. Newt Gingrich, a man who left his wife while she was battling cancer for a much hotter, younger woman, treated like a rock star by these people and not a moral pariah, which would be appropriate (the way John Edwards was shunned by Democrats). Extraordinary stuff.
There’s currently a lot of buzz around the electronic artist James Blake in the UK. In January he came runner up in the BBC’s Sound of 2011 poll, and last week he released his self-titled debut album on Atlas records. Having made a name for himself with his forward-thinking dubstep productions on the labels Hessle Audio and R&S, he has gone in a very different direction on James Blake.
Though some of the dub-style production tropes remain, the sound is much more folk influenced, with some of the tracks featuring just Blake on vocals with spare piano accompaniment. This is most definitely not a dancefloor record, it’s much more of a post-club album, with shades of Anthony Hegarty, John Martyn and even Laurie Anderson. It’s a definite shoe-in for a Mercury Music Prize nomination, and it’s the kind of worthy project the judges love to reward. But is it any good?
Some of the production on James Blake is stunning, but unfortunately this over shadows the actual songs, that to these ears could have done with a lot of refining and a lot less meandering. For a dubstep producer to make a move away from instrumental bin-shakers it would be useful to have a few more songs of the standard of “Limit To Your Love” or “The Wilhelm Scream” - I find what I am drawn to more is the intricate production of “I Never Learned To Share” or “To Care (Like You)”, which are hugely impressive without being particularly engaging. There is a sense that this is mood music rather than pop, and as such it easily begins to fade into the background.
A lot of the press buzz around Blake’s album is about dubstep “growing up”, which is misleading. Dubstep may be a cornerstone of his career, but on this album it sounds more like a footnote, or a production flavor used to shade a very different palate. Where this record seems more aimed at is the gap left in the market by Radiohead being on hiatus or, dare I say it, the coffee table. The album is definitely interesting, but it’s something I want to like more than I actually like. One day when I am in a particular mood I am sure it will hit the perfect spot, but til then, I will continue to listen to “CMYK” instead.
You can hear James Blake in full here, streaming on the Dutch website 3VOOR12.
James Blake is currently available on import in the States via Amazon.
Thanks to Kelvin Brown for the link.
To celebrate Bertolt Brecht’s birthday, here is David Bowie in the BBC production of Brecht’s play Baal, from 1982. It was directed by Alan Clarke, the talent behind such controversial TV dramas as Scum with a young Ray Winstone, Made in Britain, with Tim Roth, and Elephant.
Baal was Brecht’s first full-length play, written in 1918, and it tells the story of a traveling musician / poet, who seduces and destroys with callous indifference.
Bowie is excellent as Baal and the five songs he sings in this production were co-produced with Tony Visconti, and later released as the EP David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht’s Baal.
More of ‘Baal’ starring David Bowie, after the jump…
The first exploitation flick to get an X rating for violence, I Drink Your Blood is a low budget gore classic that blows chunks and your mind at the same time. It hit the drive-ins in 1970, one year after the Manson family murders, and was clearly concocted to cash in on the anti-hippie hysteria of the time. But how do you come up with something more shocking than the Manson massacre? Well, I Drink Your Blood answers that question.
A cult of LSD eating, Satan worshiping hippies, led by Horace Bones, looking and sounding alot like Tommy Wiseau, wreak havoc on a small town and end up getting a dose of their own medicine when after eating meat pies infected with the blood of a rabid dog are transformed into flesh-crazed cannibals.
Like a sheet of high-grade blotter, I Drink Your Blood packs enough bizarre entertainment value to last for hours and hours. We can only repeat the demonic invocation of Horace Bones (Bhaskar), who tells his followers in the movie’s opening scene: “Satan was an acid-head. Drink from his cup. Pledge yourselves, and together we’ll all freak out!”
Released by Box Office Spectaculars, co-owned by Blood Feast auteur Herschell Gordon Lewis, I Drink Your Blood was directed by David Durston who also helmed the first 35mm gay porno film Manhole.
A sad footnote: Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury who plays Horace Bones was a professional dancer who seven years after starring in I Drink Your Blood was crippled in a stage fall during a rehearsal and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He died in an old folks home in 2003.
Here’s I Drink Your Blood in all its uncut glory.
Thanks See Of Sound
Six years after he graduated high school, and four years after the LSD experiences that he’s called “one of the two or three most important things I’ve done in my life,” and less than two years after he co-founded a company named after a fruit, the biological son of graduate students Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Simpson prepped nervously for his first TV interview.
Ya gotta figure most game-changers have found themselves “deathly ill and ready to throw up at any moment,” right?
Thanks, Cameron Macdonald!
More stories about ignorance and food stamps.
2/27/82 The Congressional Budget Office finds that taxpayers earning under $10,000 lost an average $240 from last year’s tax cuts, while those earning over $80,000 gained an average of $15,130.
3/1/82 Sen. Bob Packwood (R‑OR) reveals that President Reagan frequently offers up transparently fictional anecdotes as if they were real. “We’ve got a $120 billion deficit coming,” says Packwood, “and the President says, ‘You know, a young man, went into a grocery store and he had an orange in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other, and he paid for the orange with food stamps and he took the change and paid for the vodka. That’s what’s wrong.’ And we just shake our heads.”
3/1/82 In a speech to the Civil Defense Association, Ed Meese describes nuclear war as “something that may not be desirable.”
3/24/82 Agriculture official Mary C. Jarratt tells Congress her department has been unable to document President Reagan’s horror stories of food stamp abuse, pointing out that the change from a food stamp purchase is limited to 99 cents. “It’s not possible to buy a bottle of vodka with 99 cents,” she says. Deputy White House press secretary Peter Roussel says Reagan wouldn’t tell these stories “unless he thought they were accurate.”
4/15/82 Citing a favorite example of British jurisprudence, President Reagan says, “England was always very proud of the fact that the English police did not have to carry guns ... In England, if a criminal carried a gun, even though he didn’t use it, he was not tried for burglary or theft or whatever he was doing. He was tried for first‑degree murder and hung if he was found guilty.” White House spokesman Larry Speakes, on being informed that this fable is totally untrue, responds, “Well, it’s a good story, though. It made the point, didn’t it?”
4/30/82 President Reagan describes the Falkland Islands war as a “dispute over the sovereignty of that little ice‑cold bunch of land down there.”
5/10/82 Taking questions from students at a Chicago high school, President Reagan explains why his revised tax exemption policy could not possibly have been intended to benefit segregated schools. “I didn’t know there were any,” he says. “Maybe I should have, but I didn’t.”
5/21/82 Discussing Soviet weaponry at a National Security Council meeting, President Reagan asks CIA deputy director Bobby Inman, “Isn’t the SS‑19 their biggest missile?” No, Inman replies, “that’s the SS‑18.” “So,” says the President, “they’ve even switched the numbers on their missiles in order to confuse us!” Inman explains that the numbers are assigned by US intelligence.
6/17/82 Interior Secretary James Watt – one of whose semantic rules is, “I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It’s liberals and Americans” – warns the Israeli ambassador that if “liberals of the Jewish community” oppose his plans for off‑shore drilling, “they will weaken our ability to be a good friend of Israel.”
6/20/82 Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger explains the Pentagon’s position on a “protracted” nuclear war: “We don’t believe a nuclear war can be won,” but “we are planning to prevail if we are attacked.” The difference between winning and prevailing is not explored.
All entries are excerpted from the “Reagan Centennial Edition” of my 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor, available here as an enhanced eBook. Much more to come.
I can never get enough of the obscure, psychedelic sounds of Rubble, the twenty-volume Nuggets-inspired “freakbeat” and “pop sike” compilations from Bam Caruso Records and Phil Lloyd-Smee. If you like Nuggets or the British Nuggets II, there’s not a lot of overlap. I love all the Nuggets comps, too, but I’d give the Rubble collections the edge just because they required even more dedicated crate-digging. I think the effort was worth it.
One group I discovered on a Rubble comp is The Mirror, a British beat group who apparently reached the lower rungs of the German pop market as they made the scene on The Beat Club TV show with their song, “Gingerbread Man.”
It appears redditors are having a good time poking fun at Bill O’Reilly in the Pics section on reddit today. Here are a few gems I found.
More after the jump…
I’ve been re-reading Kurt Vonnegut recently, which has been a blast, and led me back to this peach of an interview Mr. Vonnegut gave shortly before his death. Listening to it now only makes the great man all the more missed.
In August 2006, the national, weekly public radio program, The Infinite Mind, made broadcast history as it aired a four-part special taped inside the 3-D virtual on-line community Second Life. Among those interviewed in front of a live, virtual audience was author Kurt Vonnegut. The 40-minute conversation with Vonnegut was the author’s last face-to-face, sit-down interview. The host was The Infinite Mind‘s John Hockenberry, who was with Vonnegut in the studio where the program was created. This is a machinima video of Vonnegut’s interview, taped at the 16-acre virtual broadcast center in Second Life built by Lichtenstein Creative Media, which produces The Infinite Mind.
Previously on DM
Portrait of the Artist as Young Man: Unpublished Kurt Vonnegut Short Stories
Here’s a look at a homemade Nick Cave doll by Flickr users Rick & Mindy. And what would a Nick Cave doll post be without Bongwater’s “Nick Cave Dolls”?
“Wow! They have Nick Cave Dolls now… I waaaant ooone!”
The other night I was watching an old VHS compilation of about an hours worth of wild movie trailers from Audubon Films, the New York-based distribution company of stylish, high class erotic filmmaker Radley Metzger (no relation) in the 60s and 70s. Metzger had an especially good eye for well-made softcore erotica and even the Audubon films that he didn’t direct, but merely released, had the same fantastic art direction, groovy soundtracks, lush cinematography and smokin’ hot Eurobabes his own films were known for. It occurred to me that since that VHS had come out in the early 1990s, probably most of the Audubon Films catalog had been released by enterprising DVD companies specializing in “underground” cult movie fare. (Hell, the widely seen Audubon trailers video probably inspired many young fans of mondo cinema to grow up and start these very same companies in order to release the films they themselves wanted to get their hands on so badly).
It’s interesting to note that although Japan most certainly did produce some outlandishly weird and sick films then (and now) Metzger’s company picked up few of them for American audiences. Perhaps US filmgoers, even the most jaded, weren’t ready for films like The Weird Love Makers and Madame O.
The Weird Love Makers is a violence for the sake of violence tale of two thugs and a hooker who get out of jail and then do horrible things to the people who put them in the pokey. It’s unimaginable that this film, made in 1960, could have gotten very far when Audobon Films released it in America in 1963!
And then there is Madame O (AKA Zoku akutokui: Joi-hen (or, roughly, “Vicious Female Doctor Part 2”—a sequel to “Vice Doctor – Maternity and Gynecology Department Dairy,” a film now thought lost). A young girl is raped by three boys. She gets pregnant and contracts a venereal disease. She later becomes a respected gynecologist, but has twisted impulses, a homicidal rage towards men and a penchant for violent sex ending in her unconscious victims being given her syphilis via a cotton swab!
WWHD?
Here’s an amusing sticker spotted by StickerGiant.com. Its origin is unknown.
Update: The sticker comes with the book Hüsker Dü: The Story of the Noise-Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock.
(via Laughing Squid)
Actually, this was a promotion for the television series Weeds. What a fantastic idea, tho!
Bouquets of hemp plants (the kind without the THC) were sent out like a flower gram to press and media agencies to promote the premiere of the TV series Weeds.
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)
Let’s continue our delightful stroll down Memory Lane with a look at the Reagans’ dysfunctional relationship with the truth.
12/5/81 New York Times: REAGAN WIDENS INTELLIGENCE ROLE; GIVES C.I.A. DOMESTIC SPY POWER
12/20/81 New York Times: REAGAN OFFICIALS SEEK TO EASE RULES ON NURSING HOMES / PROPOSALS INCLUDE REPEAL OF REGULATIONS ON SANITATION, SAFETY AND CONTAGION
12/22/81 As Christmas approaches, President Reagan authorizes the distribution of 30 million pounds of surplus cheese to the poor. According to a government official, the cheese is well over a year old and has reached “critical inventory situation.” Translation: it’s moldy.
1/8/82 The White House announces that President Reagan – who often wonders why people think he’s anti‑civil rights – has signed off on Ed Meese’s plan to grant tax‑exempt status to South Carolina’s Bob Jones University and other schools that practice racial discrimination.
1/12/82 President Reagan explains that there must have been some kind of “misunderstanding” regarding his efforts to grant tax exemptions to segregated schools, since he is “unalterably opposed to racial discrimination in any form.”
1/15/82 President Reagan phones The Washington Post to explain that when his new policy toward segregated schools was announced, he “didn’t know at the time that there was a legal case pending.” CBS quickly obtains a memo in which intervention in the Bob Jones University case was specifically requested, and on which Reagan had written, “I think we should.”
1/15/82 Press secretary Sheila Tate says that Nancy Reagan “has derived no personal benefit” from her acceptance of thousands of dollars worth of clothing from American designers, explaining that the First Lady’s sole motive is to help the national fashion industry. So, getting fabulous clothes for free should not be considered a “personal benefit.”
1/19/82 President Reagan holds his seventh press conference, where he claims there are “a million people more working than there were in 1980” (though statistics show that 100,000 fewer people are employed); contends that his attempt to grant tax‑exempt status to segregated schools was meant to correct “a procedure that we thought had no basis in law” (though the Supreme Court had clearly upheld a ruling barring such exemptions a decade earlier); claims that he has received a letter from Pope John Paul II in which he “approves what we’ve done so far” regarding US sanctions against the USSR (though no such approval was mentioned in the papal message); responds to a question about the 17% black unemployment rate by pointing out that “in this time of great unemployment,” Sunday’s paper had “24 full pages of ... employers looking for employees” (though most of the jobs available – computer operator, for example, or cellular immunologist – require special training, for which Reagan cut funds by over 30%); and responds to a question about private charity by observing, “I also happen to be someone who believes in tithing – the giving of a tenth” (though his latest tax returns show charitable contributions amounting to a parsimonious 1.4%).
2/16/82 The public is informed by an aide to Nancy Reagan that the First Lady will no longer accept free clothing “on loan” from top designers because “she really just got tired of people misinterpreting what she was doing.” In October 1988, her spokesperson, Elaine Crispen, confirms that, despite her pledge not to do it anymore, she has continued to receive free designer clothing throughout her husband’s presidency. “She made a promise not to do this again and she broke her little promise,” says Crispen, who points out – as Reagan aides so often seem to do – that no actual laws were broken.
2/24/82 Addressing the Voice of America’s 40th birthday celebration, President Reagan reminisces about making up exciting details while announcing baseball games from wire copy. “Now, I submit to you that I told the truth,” he says of his enhanced version of a routine shortstop‑to‑first ground out. “I don’t know whether he really ran over toward second base and made a one‑hand stab or whether he just squatted down and took the ball when it came to him. But the truth got there and, in other words, it can be attractively packaged.” No one questions his premise that embellishing the truth does not compromise it.
All entries are excerpted from the “Reagan Centennial Edition” of my 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor, available here as an eBook. Much more to come.