Topics | Dangerous Minds (2024)

02.24.2017

09:06 am

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Someday I hope to see Luis Buñuel’s 1930 short film Menjant garotes (Eating Sea Urchins). Discovered in a biscuit tin that belonged to Salvador Dalí‘s sister, Ana Maria, after her death, it’s a home movie of Dalí‘s family gobbling echinoderms in Cadaqués, shot around the same time as L’Âge d’or.

Sea urchins were a favorite dish of Dalí‘s, and they figure in the initiatory path he lays out in his guide to becoming a painter, Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship. It’s not an easy path to follow; even if you manage to pull off the instructions he gives you, what about the ones for your valet and your maid? Secret Number Four, “the secret of the sea-urchin slumber,” is relatively practicable:

To begin with, you will eat three dozen sea urchins, gathered on one of the last two days that precede the full moon, choosing only those whose star is coral red and discarding the yellow ones. The collaboration of the moon in such cases is necessary, for otherwise not only do you risk that the sea urchins will be more empty but above all that they do not possess to the same degree the sedative and narcotic virtues so special and so propitious to your approaching slumber. For the same reason these sea urchins should be eaten preferably in the spring—May is a good month. But in choosing the time you must make the gathering of the sea urchins coincide with the precise moment when the first tender new beans are picked, and this varies according to the years. These tender beans, prepared in the manner called à la Catalane, are to be the second course of your meal, and I guarantee you that this is a dish worthy of the ancient gods and quite Homeric, for I am convinced that the Greeks of antiquity were acquainted with it and therefore that they were also familiar with chocolate—for, strange as this may seem, the tender beans à la Catalane are in fact prepared with chocolate as a base.

After washing this down “with a light, very young wine,” you are to take a four-and-a-half hour nap preliminary to staring at your blank canvas “for a long, long time.”

More after the jump…

02.23.2017

02:52 pm

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The so-called Wiccan “Rule of Three” (also called the “Three-fold Law” or “Law of Return”) is a moral code held by many witches. Karma is another word that (more or less) covers the same general territory. The energy that you “put out there”—whether good or ill—will return to you three times stronger. It’s not something that’s really a dogma among Pagans, but more of an admonition, or warning to neophytes, that there is a reward—or punishment—in harmony with the magic you work and the intent behind it.

Spit in the wind and it comes back to hit you in the face. What goes around, comes around. Treat others as you would like to be treated and someone is less likely to turn punching your f*cking Nazi face into a popular meme.

Tomorrow night, February 24th, starting at one minute to midnight and going on for six minutes until 12:05 AM, a group of witches will perform a binding spell on Donald Trump and those who enable him outside of Trump Tower, or wherever they happen to be:

Join the largest mass binding spell in history as participants around the world, individually and in groups, focus their consciousness to prevent Donald Trump from doing harm.

An unflattering picture of the babbling orange idiot who knows the nuclear codes and a candle are all it takes to participate. The event’s Facebook page is here. If you can’t be at Trump Tower at the appointed time, face east and let ‘er rip… Some helpful instructions can be found here. Facebook event page here.

f*ck it. Sometimes you just have to exorcise the Pentagon, folks…

02.23.2017

12:55 pm

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When MTV ran the world in the 1980s and a few years after, it was de rigueur for bands to release VHS video compilations. The Police had one, Duran Duran had one, ZZ Top had one, you know Madonna had one. Typically, They Might Be Giants decided to name theirs Video Compilation.

Talking Heads were unquestioned pioneers of the music video form, so it would be only proper for them to release such an item. The band’s last studio album was Naked in 1988, the same year that Storytelling Giant, their video comp, came out. The band would wait until 1991 until announcing that they had broken up, but it seems likely that everyone knew the writing was on the wall, so Storytelling Giant can be seen as a quasi-conscious capper to their career as music video artists.

Here’s the (slightly bizarre) writeup of the compilation from the back of the VHS box:

“Storytelling Giant” is a work composed of all ten Talking Heads videos made over the past decade. They are connected by random, unrehearsed, spontaneous footage of real people talking. None of the people are actors, and all of them are wearing their own clothes. Many of them know nothing of the Talking Heads, and sometimes they tell stories that have nothing to do with the band’s music. Yet, somehow, their stories bring the Talking Heads music into another place. A place of giant lizards. . . A place where little girls sit on clouds. A place where everyone has enough to eat. . . And the government provides hairdressers if you can’t afford one. A giant man walks into a bar. He begins to wrestle with three nuns. A man with a toupée stops them, and they begin to speak.

The compilation is very effective in that cerebral Talking Heads way—the interstitial spoken-word bits are interesting but generally short—most of the time you’re hearing a bit out of context and you’re never really supposed to know what they’re talking about, it’s all about generating arbitrary connections.



A few notes about the videos. I’d forgotten that John Goodman is in the video for “Wild Wild Life.” That song is off of True Stories, and Goodman’s rendition of “People Like Us” is probably the high point of that movie, so that makes sense. Interesting to see him here, before he became famous.

The most pleasant surprise on this compilation, for my money, is “And She Was,” which was directed by Jim Blashfield, who has mentioned Terry Gillam’s cutouts as an influence. That makes total sense—the video kind of a 1980s version of the “Eleanor Rigby” sequence from Yellow Submarine using moving cutouts, and it’s dated extremely well in my opinion. I didn’t realize that Jim Jarmusch had directed a Talking Heads video, but there’s a reason for that, “The Lady Don’t Mind” is one of the less interesting videos here.

More after the jump…....

02.23.2017

12:47 pm

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Here’s a short 37-second video clip of a young Danish woman who’s being interviewed by a reporter about why she’s traveling alone on foot. Apparently, a woman traveling alone in 1969 was considered unusual for those parts and she needed not only parental permission to do so, but official approval as well. She even procures “a document with a stamp from the local police chief, to verify her story.”

The reporter is worried about her safety and the potential for unwanted harassment, and wonders how she’ll protect herself and… well, the rest is history.

I do not know the provenance of this video. I’m assuming this was perhaps part of a local news segment. A very memorable local news segment…

via reddit

02.23.2017

11:04 am

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Kabukichō is the red light district in Shinjuku, a commercial and administrative ward in central Tokyo. Apparently Kabukichō took its name from plans to build a kabuki theater in the district sometime in 1940s. This never happened. Instead the area became a busy red light world of nightclubs, hostess clubs and love hotels. It’s estimated there are some 3,000 such enterprises operating in Kabukichō today. At night, the busy neon-lit streets thrive with the curious and the criminal—around a thousand yakuza are said to operate in the area. All this relentless activity gave Kabukichō its nickname as the “Sleepless Town” (眠らない街).

Among the curious drawn to Kabukichō was photographer Watanabe Katsumi (1941-2006). During the 1960s and 1970s, this seemingly quiet and unassuming character prowled the streets camera in hand offering to take pictures of the sharp-suited yakuza, the pimps, the prostitutes and the drag queens who lived and worked in and among this red light district’s narrow streets. Watanabe thought of Kabukichō as his theater and the men and women who posed for him as his actors.

He approached each of his subjects and offered to take their picture. He took the pictures quickly. But whatever he said to make each individual sufficiently relaxed worked. His photographs captured something unguarded and utterly spontaneous about his subjects. The next night he would return, deliver three prints of each photograph for 200 yen—roughly around a dollar back then. This was how he made his living.

In 1973, the first volume of Watanabe Katsumi’s photographs The Gangs of Kabukichō was published. This book was reissued in 2006, details here.





More after the jump…

02.23.2017

08:52 am

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It’s not like American politics could get weirder (he wrote, praying that American politics doesn’t overhear and respond with an “Oh yeah? Hold my beer”), but that kind of baffling episode last week when noted musician Moby asserted definite insider knowledge of Russians having blackmail material on President Godf*ckinghelpusall was, while far from a new and dizzying height of strangeness, certainly an amusing diversion. Here are his FB posts; I’d be loathe to accidentally misrepresent his words by paraphrasing:





It’s pretty hard to argue with much of that second post, and you can’t say he didn’t totally call it on Michael Flynn with a few hours to spare, though it may be a sign of encroaching Trump fatigue (if anything ever needed a long German portmanteau word, THAT’S IT) that my bigger takeaway from that was “How cool of a Dangerous Minds post would it be if Moby actually was into making balloon animals?” Moby, if that’s for real, please get in touch.

But still, this prompts, um, QUESTIONS. I don’t think it’s such a foregone conclusion that a pop musician couldn’t possibly know someone with such information and a willingness to gossip about it, but wouldn’t you think that someone possessing evidence of foreign blackmailers with a grip on the West Wing might find it more utile to share that with an investigative journalist or a prosecutor instead of, you know, MOBY?

But there’s news from the musician of a less cloak-and-dagger nature. That long-lived and celebrated unit TunnelmentalExperimental Assembly have done a new remix of Moby & The Void Pacific Choir’s “Don’t Leave Me,” that single from last fall’s These Systems are Failing with the incongruously animal-rightsy video to accompany the song’s plaintive breakup lyrics. Tunnelmental’s version is a good bit noisier and more aggressive than the already headstrong original, and the man himself seems to be pleased, telling DM “I love this Tunnelmental remix, and that I’m now in the Psychic TV, Killing Joke club of people who’ve received Tunnelmental remixes.” For Tunnelmental’s part, producer Nigel Mitchell’s comment was a good bit more verbose:

We all see things differently, so when Derek [Pippert, producer/beat doctor] and I work on a remix we use our experience as songwriters as well as our producer skills. We paint a “tunnelmental” picture from pieces of someone else’s painting, it’s like “collage” art where you get to add your own colours and shapes to form an alternative piece of art. We have the greatest respect for artists and it is an honour when they entrust us with their art. Remixing an artist like Moby’s music is a fun challenge, his work is already so good, you really have to channel that original and find an innovative way to make it your own without losing the original creative energy.

Listen after the jump…

02.23.2017

08:26 am

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A fake magazine designed by Sean Tejaratchi.

Many of you may be well acquainted with the brilliant work of graphic designer and writer Sean Tejaratchi—and as it had sadly been a while since I had visited his awesome Liar Town USA Tumblr. When I did I found it hard to stop clicking on his ludicrous faux books and other odd yet authentic looking magazines and found myself wishing that there was a website that featured photos of things that Marilyn Monroe kicked.

As couldn’t stop yucking it up over at Liar Town USA I thought I’d share a few of my favorite fictional magazines that Tejaratchi put together, most of which center around inappropriate knitwear and unexpected org*sms. Two things that when they appear in the same sentence sound like a great premise for a publication, don’t you think? Someone, please get on that immediately. That said many of the images that follow are NSFW.





More after the jump…

02.23.2017

07:46 am

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International superstars though they may have been, the members of ABBA were not, individually, all that fascinating. If you think the group identity that emerges during, say, their medley of “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” “On Top of Old Smokey,” and “Midnight Special” is less than exciting, check out what Agnetha, Björn, Benny, and Anni-Frid had to say when they met representatives of the press in their capacity as persons. I’m not just being snotty. As I understand it, the absence of personality is a key part of ABBA’s appeal, and I’m all for it. Zero subjectivity—let’s go! In the same way Kraftwerk audiences greet robotic simulacra of Ralf and Florian with ten times the enthusiasm they muster for the actual human beings in the group, I’m counting the days until I can buy tickets to hologram ABBA, even though I probably would not get out of my chair to see plain old meatbag ABBA reform. The collective, or in this case the brand, is everything.

But the ABBA brand itself could not talk to journalists, and compelling TV the meatbags’ interviews did not make. Into this void, BBC cast John Peel, duded up in smarter attire than wardrobe provided on other occasions. Enlivening the proceedings with Peel in this 1993 retrospective were Ray Davies, Elvis Costello, Roy Wood, and Ian McCulloch. Generous helpings of these and other interview subjects, plus clips of ABBA parodies from Not the Nine O’Clock News and French and Saunders, make A for ABBA (in homage to the 1985 TV special A for Agnetha?) the best encapsulation of the band’s story for those of us who are grouchy, impatient, and easily bored.



One thing we cultural anthropologists of the amazing future year 2017 know that contemporary viewers of this program did not: the lone ABBA LP in John Peel’s collection was their disco record, Voulez-Vous. An orthodox ABBA fan, Peel asserts in A for ABBA that Stig Anderson was the group’s fifth member, ignoring the heresy of the Tretowist deviation. Without discipline, the party of ABBA is nothing!

More ABBA after the jump…

02.22.2017

12:40 pm

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Lutes aren’t rock n’ roll, everybody knows that. Lutes are the stuff of medieval folkies. Lutes are for the Incredible String Band or Gentle Giant, not Black Sabbath or Van Halen. At least, that’s what I used to think… and then I heard Dawn Culbertson.

A reclusive but active member of Baltimore’s folk, baroque, and classical scenes for decades, Culbertson was a composer, performer, and radio personality, who hosted an overnight classical music program on John Hopkins University’s radio station for over a decade. She played bass in an avant-garde big band and played lute on the weekends at local restaurants in Baltimore. In 2004, at the still-tender age of 53, she died of a heart attack. She was twirling the night away at a waltz event at the time. If you’re gonna go at 53, you might as well go out dancing.

While she will be surely be fondly remembered in her native Baltimore for her tireless work promoting folk and classical music, to the rest of us, she will remain the undisputed master of what she liked to call “punk lute.” Shortly before she died, Culbertson began performing covers of popular punk and metal songs on her instrument. They are collected on a long out of print and highly sought-after 2011 cassette release, Return of the Evil Pappy Twin. “The Evil Pappy Twin” was her punk lute alter-ego. We all have one. Accompanied by her plaintive, unwavering vocals—a kind of bored monotone drone that really is punk-as-f*ck—these magical covers breathe new life into crusty old nuggets by DEVO, Van Halen, The Ramones, Black Sabbath, the Stooges, Sex Pistols and more, turning them into doomy outsider ballads from the outer edges of sanity.

I honestly like most of her covers way better than the originals!



Check out Culbertson’s desolate take on “Iron Man” below, and listen to the rest of Return of the Evil Pappy Twin here (I can’t embed it).

Further proof that punk is a state of mind, not a costume.

02.22.2017

12:08 pm

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One of the more startling musical transformations in our era was the one that Radiohead pulled off between their 1993 debut album Pablo Honey and their 1995 follow-up The Bends.

It wasn’t just Thom Yorke’s blond locks that cause quite a few critics to liken Pablo Honey to watered-down Nirvana. Pablo Honey got generally lukewarm-to-good reviews at the time—3 stars out of 5 from Rolling Stone, which is the same rating it currently receives at Allmusic.com (it must be admitted that Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s brief review is far more charitable than that rating suggests). And Radiohead’s later successes haven’t shielded the album from vitriol. At Pitchfork, notoriously one of Radiohead’s most unshakable defenders, Scott Plagenhoef gave it a piddling 5.4 out of 10 as late as 2009.

Even that tepid Rolling Stone review ended with the words “Radiohead warrant watching,” but if you had said in 1993 that in less than a decade, Radiohead would be doing arenas with a highly worshipful following and the most ironclad critical reputation in all of rock music, that possibility would have seemed remote indeed. The Bends and OK Computer in 1997 were the astounding one-two punch that few saw coming and set Radiohead up to be the top rock band of the 2000s.

So when I come across a piece of Radiohead press from 1993, I’m inclined to pay attention. I was at the Library and Archives of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland recently, thumbing through a stack of old copies of Ray Gun magazine from the 1990s, something you can only do at a place like that. One of the 1993 issues had a little piece on Radiohead that was inexplicably formatted in an actually readable typeface (rare for that magazine). Here it is (if you click on it, the image will get quite large):



The last bit of the piece reports Yorke’s feelings on whether Radiohead qualifies as “pop” thus:

“Yesss,” he says slowly. “My definition of pop is tapping into something…. my ideal pop song is one that says something people want to hear lyrically and that grabs them by the neck musically. And one that has some sort of depth that moves it beyond a happy tune that you whistle at work. Songs like ‘Under Pressure,’ something that makes you want to fall down on your knees. That to me is the perfect pop song.”

More after the jump…