Due to increasing competition for scarce natural resources, a barbarism haunts the planet. In the drive for expansion and profits, the endgame of the capitalist system promises imperialism, domination of impoverished peoples and an ecological nightmare. The capitalist path is a death trap, but there is a just, people-based alternative: Socialism. In this wide-ranging interview, Prof. Michael Lebowitz discusses his latest book, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development.
Meet Desire Dubounet (formerly Bill Nelson), who created the term “Quantum medicine.” Desire has “truly changed the world of movie making, music, medicine, science, and more. For nobody has changed the world as much as Desire.”
Khameleon808 created this stunning mix of music and film in what will invariably be one of my top 10 videos of 2010. Music by TV On The Radio, Evil Nine, Nalepa and edIT. The film clips are waaay too numerous to list. The edits are tighter than a mosquito’s asshole. Watch and be amazed.
If you grew up in the Bible Belt during the 70s, 80s and even well into the 90s, there is a very good chance that you have more than a passing familiarity with the hateful, frightening and just plain bizarre “Christian” comics produced by one Jack T. Chick.
Chick’s twisted message, infused with his peculiar style of fervent, the-end-is-near Fundamentalist Christian insanity, by virtue of appearing in what most parents considered to be innocuous “religious” comic books, enjoyed a long period of widespread cultural popularity. Chick tracts were distributed in Sunday schools, summer camps, motel lobbies and bus stations all across America. There have been over 750 million of them sold!
There can only be one reason such deranged literature was allowed in so many places: Adults never read them. If they had, they’d have been utterly horrified. (My own mother gave me dozens of these comics when I was a kid. I’m sure in her mind they were better for me than the Marvel of DC comics I was reading. LIttle did she know that she was actually providing me with!)
Chick’s scary, angry Fundie diatribes have given many a kid terrible nightmares. His favorite topics tend towards subject matter like “You’re going to Hell,” Halloween is evil, eternal damnation, abortion, the Vatican is evil and created Islam, demons walk amongst us, child molesters, the Antichrist will rise soon, New Age beliefs, Judaism, Mormonism and Islam are Satanic, witches are everywhere, homosexuality is an abomination (Chick’s solution? Fire-n-brimstone, baby!), Darwin’s theories are Satanic, Harry Potter is Satanic, feminists are Satanic, the Satanic plot behind rock music (The Beatles were Druids!), “You’re going to Hell,” the Commies are everywhere (Catholics are to blame for this, of course) and just about any other crazy, fucked up conspiracy theory you can think of. He’s kind of the Glenn Beck (or maybe better still Alex Jones) of paranoiac Christian comic books. Did I mention that a lot of his comics were about how YOU (that’s right you, the person reading this) are going to Hell? Chick’s God is a VENGEFUL God. The Old Testament Jehovah has got nothin’ on Chick’s version.
Not much beyond the basics are known about Chick, who is now 86-years-old. He’s an extremely private man and few photographs have been taken of him. So it’s not like anyone knows about the reclusive Jack T. Chick himself, but show almost anyone in America one of his Chick tracts and they’ll respond with an immediate recognition of the distinctively shaped and wildly deranged mini-comics. For Jack T. Chick, it’s all about saving YOUR soul from eternal damnation, not about being popular.
“People who dismiss hate literature offhand are going to miss the point of this tribute to Chick, which is that hate literature reveals not only its own corruption but the sick society that hatched it. Examine the historical and theological forebears of little Chick and you’ll find an awful, and I do mean awful, lot of mainstream beliefs. Like the Protestant zealots who colonized and raped this country, Chick tracts and the violence in them are as American as apple pie.”
Above, an episode of Boing Boing TV featuring Syd Garon and Rodney Ascher’s animated take on the Chick “classic” You Goofed.. This is Jack T. Chick in a nutshell. (Reportedly he’s seen this and liked it!)
Marianne Faithfull and David Bowie performing ‘I Got You Babe’ at London’s Marquee in 1973. This was filmed for American TV show The Midnight Special and was Bowie’s last appearance as Ziggy Stardust.
Faithfull’s nun habit created a bit of a scandal when the show was aired. Her other habit, heroin, may explain her somewhat disengaged performance that night.
From the Ziggy Stardust Companion:
The last song - “I Got You Babe” was a duet sung with Marianne Faithful and was filmed at about 10pm at night. Bowie warned the audience - “This isn’t anything very serious. Its just a bit of fun - we’ve hardly even rehearsed it.” Bowie’s costume for this song was the bright red PVC corset, PVC thigh-length stiletto boots and two black chest-hugging feathers (he was The Angel of Death), while Marianne Faithful was dressed as a decadent nun with cowl and a black backless cape, which left her bottom exposed to the audience as she quickly ran off stage at the end of the performance.
In the outtake footage that appears in the second half of the following clip, you can see, for a brief moment, that Marianne indeed was wearing nothing underneath her costume.
Let it not be said that Vincent Gallo doesn’t have eclectic tastes in movie roles…
Captured by the US military in Afghanistan, Mohammed is transported to a secret military black site somewhere in the Eastern Europe. When the armed convoy he is riding in plummets off a steep hill, Mohammed finds himself suddenly free and on the run behind the enemy lines, among a hostile, snow blanketed forest. Relentlessly pursued by an army that officially does not exist, Mohammed must constantly confront the need to kill in order to survive.
This’ll do well in the Red states! Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski starring Gallo and Emmanuelle Seigner.
Baal and trained Relationships Counsellor Wendy Beardman give the benefit of their advice to celebrities: In this show, Cheryl Cole, Brad PItt and Tiger Woods.
Calling all rock snobs! In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve started to make podcasts of The Dangerous Minds Radio Hour available on the blog. Every couple of weeks, Brad Laner and I will get together and do our best to entertain you with fun, obscure, and often wacky avant garde music, hit singles and… more.!
Have a listen. You don’t know what you’ve been missing, so how will you know if your life is complete without The Dangerous Minds Radio Hour in it? Listen to show #3 here.
To download episodes or subscribe to the podcast please go to our Internet radio partner Alterati.com
The Bubble Baba challenge is the world’s only blow-up doll rafting race. It takes place every year in Russia. Here’s some footage from this year’s event. I love the point of view shot from the contestant’s perspective; the doll straining to achieve victory.
From the looks of the photograph it’s a unisexual blow-up doll event. I wonder what kind of problems a fully inflated plastic cock could cause in a situation like this? Position must be very important.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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…
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sound like some lost 
opera excerpt? Deeply disturbing.
