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.

Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath

 
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…

 
Tara just asked me, “Who is Paul Crik?”

I told her that she’d “find out” and so will you. Then you, too, will be killin’ it.

Achievement is like a cell phone, your success depends upon your range. — Paul Crik

Belief is the acceptance that every one else knows as little as you. — Paul Crik

First you cry, then you fly, then you cry while flying. — Paul Crik

For me life is not like a box of chocolates, it’s like a train car full of dynamite. — Paul Crik

Gravity is your only true burden, the rest are inventions of esteem. — Paul Crik

If life is an empty cup. . . Fill it, Chill it, Swill it. . . Kill it. — Paul Crik

It’s not eating that’s a problem. It’s feeding. — Paul Crik

It’s not my way, it’s not the way, it’s your way. — Paul Crik

Sometimes you have to go down low to climb up high. — Paul Crik

Stay the course only works if you know what course you’re on. — Paul Crik

There’s a fine line between being poised and being poisoned. — Paul Crik

This is my hell. There are a lot like it, but this is mine. — Paul Crik

Thoughts are just outlines… actions color them in. — Paul Crik

Vigor is the assumption that you may be right on all accounts. — Paul Crik

When you can’t see what’s around you, try to see what’s within you. — Paul Crik

You need to brace yourself before you embrace yourself. — Paul Crik

“They” is an illusion created by “you” to protect “me.” — Paul Crik

 
 
KIllin’ It! with Paul Crik(there are a few dozen of these videos there)

Via Everything is Terrible and Cinefamily

 
It’s been a long hot one, this Summer of Hate, hasn’t it? Especially, here in Southern California, we could use a little rain… but since that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, what about this cool endless groove record of the sounds of falling rain drops? Zen out, baby. We could all use a little Zen this summer.

Via DesignBoom

 
This is so completely ridiculous I just had to share. I don’t know what kind of drugs they’re taking down at the farm, but I want some.

 
Behold the perplexing multi-media underground electropop darlings of Tokyo, Trippple Nippple. Their stage show sounds like a J-Pop version of out-there 70s performance artists, The Kipper Kids, and features stuff like eggs, glitter, milk, blood and rotting food. From an interview posted today at the Dazed and Confused blog:

Dazed Digital: Is there symbolism behind your costumes and performances?

Qrea Nippple: Last time we were doing some guillotine things, and we cut so many heads off balloons. The helium goes to the ceiling. Yuka was crying like, “Oh I feel so guilty for killing so many balloon heads, so I drew some really wicked, bad faces on the balloons, so she wouldn’t feel guilty for cutting their heads off. ”
Dazed Digital: What were some of your most memorable performances?

Yuka Nippple: We have a lot of stories about making a mess. We played club Asia in Tokyo and our costumes were mud, just that. And we put on some blonde hair ponytails. We were just mud and blonde hair ponytail. That was our costume. It was a lot of fun as always. But in the morning when the lights turned on, the whole club was covered in dry mud. And everyone went mad, and everyone had to clean up until about 9am in the morning. We made a lot of people really upset. We didn’t mean to of course, but my bad, but I’d like to announce that we can do “Not dirty one” too! People sometimes misunderstand what we are, but we are musicians!
Dazed Digital: So where did you acquire all this mud?

Yuka Nippple: Amazing, amazing store called Tokyu Hands in Shibuya. It’s a department store with 21 floors of DIY stuff. We get everything from there. You can spend a day just looking for things. We found rice-field mud in a packet.
 

 
Read the entire article at Dazed Digital: TOKYO’S TRIPPPLE NIPPPLES: Insane electro popstresses hailing from the fine land of Tokyo talk fake tits and their milky alcohol

 
Since we at Dangerous Minds have previously found ourselves marveling at his film Performance, it only makes sense to salute the wonderful English filmmaker Nicolas Roeg on this, his 81st birthday.

Check out Steve Rose’s great interview in the Guardian with the oft-aloof and prickly director (from which I paraphrase this post’s title), and for heaven’s sake check out the man’s films. He’s currently working on a screen adaptation of Martin Amis’s book Night Train.

Here’s a cool overview, with five themes spotlighted, by the excellent film video-essayist Hugo Redrose.
 

 
Ultra-creepy flesh furniture sculptures by Jessica Harrison. Jessica, was this really necessary? Ack!
 
See more fleshy-furniture-madness after the jump…

 
Sorry, folks! The auction is over! Some lucky soul paid $115 for this blood-sucking reborn doll. Here’s the description below:

GORGEOUS TWILIGHT BABY

HIS FANGS ARE SECURED INTO HIS MOUTH BUT CARE SHOULD BE TAKEN WHEN USING HIS MODIFIED PACIFIER AND BOTTLE OF FAKE ANIMAL BLOOD.

IF YOU CHOOSE TO CHANGE HIS NAME LET ME KNOW AT TIME OF ADOPTION AND IT CAN BE PUT ON HIS ADOPTION PAPERS.

My gawd.

Click here to see the original eBay listing and more delightful ohmygodgorunandhide photos.

(via Regretsy )

 
John Callahan, known for his dark, crude and morbidly funny cartoons has died.

Considering the shitty hand that life dealt him and the shit he brought upon himself, it’s a miracle that Callahan found anything funny. He never knew his birth parents and as a child was sexually molested by a female teacher. He turned to alcohol at the age of 14 to deal with the pain of having been abused. A full-blown alcoholic by the age of 21, he was involved in a car accident when the driver, a friend, ran the vehicle into a lightpole at 90mph. The crash severed Callahan’s spine, leaving him a quadriplegic.

What was a potentially hopeless situation became a profound turning point in Callahan’s life. He gave up booze and became an artist.  After a long period of physical therapy he was able to hold a pen in his hand. He started creating the cartoons that brought him notoriety and fans like Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Bill Plympton and Gary Larson. His autobiography ‘Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot’ became a bestseller.

Callahan was 59 when he died on July 24th. The causes were complications of quadriplegia and respiratory problems. His politically incorrect slaps at the status quo and unflinching honesty will be missed.  John was the kind of turd in the punchbowl that keeps us from drinking the Koolaid.

‘I Think I was An Alcoholic’ was animated by Callahan and ‘Touch Me Some Place I Can Feel’ is a clip from a documentary of the same name about Callahan.
 
see ‘Touch Me Some Place I Can Feel’  after the jump…

 
And speaking of the Beatles, Lennon and McCartney are the most covered songwriters of all time (Yesterday is supposed to be the #1 most covered song in history). I used to make a sport of finding great Beatle covers to make mixed tapes with, and let me tell you, there are some really groovy ones and then again there are some crappy ones, too.

Frank Sinatra and Shirley Bassey both do boffo version of George Harrison’s Something, but Desmond Dekker’s take on Come Together is the best one of all. There’s also the Tokyo Beatles, but more on them at a later date…

When it comes to the bad Beatle covers, none are so awful as the absolutely shit Beatle Barkers novelty album, where the songs of the Beatles are… uh, barked (and it doesn’t even include Hey Bulldog! What gives?).

Eagle-eared Dangerous Minds readers who used to watch my Infinity Factory talkshow back in the day, might recall that the show’s producer, Vanessa Weinberg, used what (kinda) sounds like dogs singing/barking (croaking?) a version of We Can Work It Out during the breaks and at the end of the show. This is where that came from.

It’s painful to listen to, as you might imagine, but there is a level of “so wrong it’s right” to the proceedings as well. It’s not even real fucking dogs, it’s human beings doing the barking! You can listen to the entire thing at the WFMU blog... if you, uh, really want to…
 

 
For most of us, our jobs are shitty only in the figurative, but not literal sense. That’s not true for Julio Cou Cámara, who literally spends his workday swimming in excrement, urine and other waste products in the sewers of Mexico City. Because of a odd way the city’s sewage system was constructed, if a blockage occurs, it can cause flooding immediately—or worse—so the government employs two full time divers who jump into the stinky muck and then grope—blindly, of course—to find the obstuctions and remove them before any damage is done. Yucky, yes, but fascinating!

From a long and interesting article on Edible Geography:

People often ask me what I see down there. Do I find money or jewellery?  No, you can’t really see any of those things. Montezuma’s treasure may be down there, but I will most likely never find it, because you can’t see anything—all you can do is feel blockages.

In terms of things we come across: we find lots of cigarette butts. I’ve had blockages caused by pieces of carpets, pieces of cars, or even body parts. Removing these kinds of things from the sewage is part of our work. People who work nearby or are walking past think, “Look at that crazy guy, he’s getting into the sewage.” But yeah, of course—that’s just what we do.

A normal day for me… well, what can I tell you? I go into the office, and if there are no emergencies then we work on maintaining the equipment. This equipment has to be in one hundred percent perfect condition—it mustn’t fail. My other colleague and I have our gear ready at all times. We work during the night as well as during the day. It’s not as though day or night makes a difference for us, because we can’t see anything down there anyway.

Julio the Sewer Diver (Edible Geography)

Deep-Slime Divers Keep Vast and Smelly Sewers Flowing (Washington Post)

Thank you Paul Gallagher!

 
My esteemed associate Mike Paradinas (a.k.a. µ-Ziq) brings us this very interesting mix of what he tags as Juke/Ghettotech /Footwork /Ghetto House /Chicago House. Basically what the kids are dancing to in Chicago and other points in the midwest. Sez the man himself:

Here’s what I’m excited about right now. A mix of Footworking tracks from Chicago. Footwork has hyper syncopated rhythms, sub-bass, offbeat tom fills, triplets and pitch manipulated pop samples; it takes a while to reprogram your brain, but it’s worth it. This sound has evolved over the decades from Chicago House, Ghetto House, and is part of Juke.

Leave it to a Brit to pluck the best of an American phenom (again) ! I often think that rock music has utterly failed for at least the last 20 years to be any kind of irritant for the older folks, but here... well that’s a different story all together. I’d like to believe that this music would likely drive most people over 30 completely batshit. And that’s an excellent thing !
 

 
Richard sez : “That music is the precise intersection between Steve Reich and Larry’s Theme by Grandmaster Flash!” Sounds about right to me…

 
Today marks the half-century anniversary of the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which—along with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita opening earlier the same year—used the artform of cinema to hold up the cracked mirror of compulsive desire to Western civilization.

Movies, of course, would never be the same. Who better to drive the point home than our friendly neighborhood Lacanian critical theorist from Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek, from his excellent 2006 documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema?

 
Get: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema Pt. 1-3 [DVD]

 
You could call Charles Fort (1874 – 1932) the “first Ufologist”—and many do—but that’s already, um, damning the quirky author of The Book of the Damned with feint praise. Fort was more of a scientist (or scientific researcher), but not in any sort of traditional sense most people would recognize as science. A better description of his interests would be to say that what fascinated Fort were the things which were intellectually excluded by science. Rains of frogs, alien spacecraft, meat falling from the sky and spontaneous human combustion were the grist for his mill and this is what he spent his life meticulously cataloging.

Fort was also a bit of a comedian, a Swiftian satirist of science. He hated the idea of experts and thumbed his nose at scientific authority. Fort was a sworn enemy of orthodox rationality. His prose is a delight and is a part of his strong attraction for many readers. His style is “circular,” I guess you might say. Repetitive, but this is kind of the point, to be bludgeoned by the sheer force of the number of examples he’d throw at readers, into accepting the simple fact that something awfully strange is going on here.

Fort, who invented words like “teleporter” kept his notes, his Forteana, if you will, on notecards. Although from time to time, the eccentric author would burn his research, tens of thousands of his cards survive and can be viewed at the New York Library’s Rare Book Room (I’ve looked at some of them myself). In his day, Fort had his share of detracters (his friend H.L. Mencken said his head was filled with “Bohemian mush”!) but also many prominent admirers such as Ben Hecht, Theodore Drieser and Oliver Wendell Homes.

The influence of Charles Fort’s work is subtle but pervasive throughout popular culture. No Fort, no X-Files, for instance. No Art Bell or George Noory, either. Although Fort was in life and after his death, a relatively obscure writer, his work still holds a strong fascination for many people who consider him an intellectual giant. And of course there is a magazine, The Fortean Times, which keeps the flame alive as well as regional organizations of Fortean enthusiasts and a yearly convention.

Dangerous Minds pal Skylaire Alfvegren organizes The League of Western Fortean Intermediatists (or L.O.W.F.I) and she’s got a great short biographical essay of Charles Fort at the Fortean West website:

There is a man, largely undiscovered by the modern world, whom I, and many others, believe made one of the most significant contributions to the world of science. Had it not been that he vehemently opposed modern scientists and their methods, his work might be enjoying a greater popularity than it does. Had this man decided to write about completely different topics, he would be hailed as a fabulous literary character. Here was a peculiar fellow. Charles Fort devoted 26 years of his life to compiling documented reports of scientific anomalies from journals and newspapers from all around the world. He lived in dire poverty so that truth could prevail. His life’s work may one day be of great scientific worth, should the established scientific community ever muster the courage to approach it.

Anomalies. This is what Fort trafficked in. Reports of prehistoric beasts frolicking in the world’s oceans. (Loch Ness, Champ, Storsjon Animal). Ancient artifacts found in improbable places (Roman coins in the deserts of Arizona, Chinese seals found buried deep in the forests of Ireland, small statues of horses discovered in pre-Columbian Venezuela). Falls of things other than rain from the sky (red rains in 1571 England, 1744 Genoa; a rain of “73 organic formations, particular to South America” in France in 1846). Unidentified aerial phenomena (excluding Ezekiel’s Biblical description. Fort’s list contains the first known report of a so-called “UFO”, dating from 1779). These are but a few of the subjects Fort spent his lifetime collecting reports of. This anomalous data are roped together under the banner of “Forteana”, a term which probably does not exist in any dictionary, because that which it pertains to isn’t supposed to exist at all.

He who championed underdogs, has been and will likely continue to be, one of the greatest underdogs of all time. For he has not a baseball team or brooding thespians to compete with, but the entire history of the scientific world. His work spat in the face of conventional scientists. There is much going on around us that defies explanation. Fort amassed reports of events seen by humans around the world countless times, which, none the less, have been dismissed. The data he collected were excommunicated by science, which acts like a religion. “The monks of science” he wrote, “dwell on smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles- Science has done its utmost to prevent whatever science has done” (the Book of the Damned, p. 245). His legacy, his collection of data lies before us. It is indisputable, and yet still ignored. The reports he gathered could make any enemy of science acquire a renewed enthusiasm for the subject. In his four published works, the Book of the Damned (1919). New Lands (1923) Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932) we find over 1,200 documented reports of occurrences which orthodox science refuses to attempt to explain. Explanation was not Fort’s purpose. He merely presented the data, sometimes with his own speculations, sometimes with tongue in cheek. While anomalies can be entertaining, they can also be deeply disturbing, for they undermine the foundations of science, the idea that every thing in this world is rational and under control. Articles like those collected in Fortean Times and the INFO Journal (International Fortean Organization), two publications which continue Fort’s work, prove that things are not under our control, nor will they ever be. Many people, including scientists, find this discomforting and so ignore that which they cannot explain.

The Life, Work and Influence of Charles Fort (Fortean West)

Photo from Dr. Sketchy’s
 
How could you blame him? From Times Live:

An 18-year-old man on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali claimed he was seduced by a cow after being caught having sex with the animal.

A neighbour caught Gusti Ngurah Alit in the act on Sunday and immediately reported him to local authorities, village chief Embang Ida Bagus Legawa said.

“He was caught by one of the residents standing naked while holding the back of the cow,” Legawa said.

On Friday, Alit underwent a cleansing ritual in which he was bathed and the cow was drowned in the sea to rid the village of bad luck.

Alit said he did not see a cow but a beautiful young woman. “She called my name and seduced me, so I had sex with her,” he said.

He had to pay 2,000 old coins as a traditional punishment while the village chief paid the owner of the cow 5 million rupiah (545 dollars) in compensation.

The village idiot rapes a cow and they kill the cow? How is that fair!?

Via Paul Gallagher

Following up on Brad’s post on butoh, my gifted illustrator friend Michael Wertz notes that Antony Hegarty (of the Johnsons) has written the obituary for Kazuo Ohno—one of the stark dance/performance form’s originators—who died on June 1 at the age of 103.

Ohno and fellow choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata created butoh in the ‘50s as Japan roiled in young, tortured energy, and the proliferation of butoh groups throughout America and Europe since the late ‘70s speaks to their legacy. Check out Edin Velez‘s excellent film Butoh: Dance of Darkness here.

You can see butoh’s influence on Western avant-garde pop on both the Virgin Prunes live clip and the excerpt from ½ Mensch, Ishii Sogo’s 1986 film of Einsturzende Neubauten, below.

(above: Heita, daughter, aokubi daikon)
 
Surely the key to ultimate happiness must be in the creating of wind instruments out of a variety of vegetables, because this gentlemen, known simply as Heita, is just preternaturally happy. Just look at his magical wares ! It’s nice that he’s not trying too hard to present it as “serious” music so much, more that it’s just so delightful that musical sound is coming out of this produce ! Can you believe it ?
 

 
Many more homemade vegetable instruments : Heita 3’s Youtube channel
 
Allee Willis’ Blog – Plastic Fruit & Vegetable People and The Most Talented Man You’ve Ever Seen Playing Music On Vegetables
 
thx Richard !

 
So begins R.U. Sirius’s history of Mondo 2000 magazine and its circle of fellow travelers. I approve of how it starts with this wonderful personal anecdote about his first exposure to the underground press as a teen, in the form of the San Francisco Oracle. Many people will tell you of an “Oh wow! This exists! And there must be more of it!” epiphany like this—I had a similar experience discovering David Bowie and reading Lester Bangs in Creem magazine eight years later—and it’s a highly enjoyable essay. Worth pointing out that kids today and forevermore will be unable to have an experience like this due to the always on mediascape we inhabit today. Discovering something rare used to require luck, a knack for ferreting out weird stuff or a hip relative. Not saying it would be preferable to go back to this earlier era, of course, I’m just saying that back then it took work:

Let the story beginning in the Spring of 1967. I am 14 years old and in 9th grade. It’s early evening and the doorbell rings at the suburban house in Binghamton, New York where I live with my mom and dad. It’s a group of my friends and they’re each carrying a plastic bag and looking mighty pleased. They come in, we shuffle into the guest room (where the record player is kept) and they show off their gatherings — buttons (“Frodo Lives!” “Mary Poppins is a Junkie” “Flower Power”), beads, posters (hallucinatory), incense with a Buddha incense burner, and kazoos. A lonely looking newspaper lays at the bottom of the pile, as though shameful, the only item unremarked.

Without realizing the implications, I happen to throw side one of Between The Buttons on the player. Eventually, the song “Cool Calm and Collected” plays and a kazoo sounds through the speakers. In an instant, newly purchased kazoos are wielded and The Rolling Stones only-ever kazoo solo is joined by three wailing teenagers, bringing sudden shouts of objection from my famously liberal and tolerant Dad in the living room. It’s quickly determined that it’s late, Dad’s tired, and it’s time to send all kazoo-wielding teens packing. As each of the friends moves to retrieve his items, I grab the newspaper to see what it is. There are, I now see, two of them — two editions of something called “The Oracle.” It has hallucinatory visuals on the cover and boasts an interview with a member of The Byrds (David Crosby). Vinnie, who had bought it — but who, despite writing poetry — avoids any signifiers of intellectual curiosity as the teen status crushers that they are, feigns disinterest and gives the copies to me.

And that’s where it begins, this strange love affair with the periodical, particularly the periodical that has flair and style… where you can almost feel the energy and fun emanating off the pages.

I remember only one thing from the content inside those two Oracles and that’s David Crosby denying that he was “some kind of weird freak who fucks ten chicks a day.” That stuck in my mind. I didn’t know it was possible even to think that, much less print it, much less be in a position to find it necessary to deny being it!

How great is that last sentence?

Read the entire essay—and support the project—here.

 
Holy, WTF!  I’m not sure what’s more disturbing about the above clip: the 23-year-old woman’s screams, or the tattoo artist’s lack of any response whatsoever?  Oh, and the saga continues: here’s the Part II of sorts.