Blistering live version of Can’s Mother Sky on German television, 1970.  Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt, the human metronome Jaki Liebezeit, Michael Karoli and the most singular vocalist in all of rock history, Damo Suzuki. From the album, Soundtracks.
 

You know you want in on this.

(Related: Slayer Girls Gone Wild)

(Via Encyclopedia Dramatica)

(Previously on Dangerous Minds: Dark Carnival of the Soul)

 
I’ve been on a bit of a Marc Almond kick today and wanted to share this groovy lil’ number, called Sleaze. If I am not mistaken, this was originally a 1982 fan club only 12” (I have one, it looks like a bootleg) but that’s odd as it has a music video. Why would they have gone to the expense? It didn’t even get a proper release until 1997.

Nevertheless, here they are, Marc and the Mambas, in all of their druggyy sleazy, Warholian glory. Is he really singing what I think he’s singing? (“Someone blew a pony, someone threw a fit. Baby let me mambo with you a little bit”). Isn’t this a riff just begging to be sampled? Turn it up. You won’t get this song out of your head for a week.
 
Bonus: Marc and the Mambas preforming Throbbing Gristle’s Disciple
 

 
Here’s an awesome quote from the Christian-themed movie Second Glance.
 
(via Unique Daily)

 
Next week at the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami, it’s the second coming of Dangerous Minds pal Lenora Claire’s controversial—and hilariously funny—art world sensation, Golden Gals Gone Wild. This is an all new exhibit of all new sexy Golden Girls art. The first show, held at World of Wonder Gallery in Hollywood, completely sold out after being covered on TMZ, NPR, The Los Angeles Times and AOL News.

The show features art by Chris Zimmerman, Austin Young, Jason Mecier, Angus Oblong, Mironiuk, Sham, My Secret Life In Glass, Plastic God, Nouar, Darcy J. Watt, GiGi, Deluxe, Trevor Wayne and many more. All of the artwork will be on sale for under $1,000

World Erotic Art Museum, 1205 Washington Blvd., Miami. Opening night: Saturday, March 20th at 7p.m. The show runs until April 30th.

 
The Stuff is an eighties cult movie made by director Larry Cohen. It’s was a perennial grindhouse flick of the decade, although I personally saw it for the first time in the hallowed halls of Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, during a festival of Cohen’s films. The Stuff is the story of a tofutti-like substance that bubbles out from the ground, and tastes great. Everyone who tries The Stuff, can’t get enough… but are they eating The Stuff or is The Stuff eating them?
 

 
The Stuff was made on a low budget with several familiar faces like Garrett Morris (from the original cast of SNL), Paul Sorvino, Danny Aiello, Brooke Adams and Andrea Marcovicci. It has several fake commercials that looked quite real at the time cut in throughout the movie that up the camp value considerably.  The Stuff is as much an anti-consumerist rant as it is a horror film. That’s why it’s so much fun. Check it out, it’s one of the better, more entertaining cult movies out there.  It’s actually way smarter than the trailer below indicates.

Read more on The Stuff at the the House of Self-Indulgence blog. where The Stuff is described as: “A cautionary tale for all those who enjoy consuming dessert products on a regular basis, The Stuff is a hokey horror farce that manages to skewer everything from mindless consumerism to cold war paranoia, and yet, still be a movie about homicidal yogurt not from outer space.” Elsewhere on the web I saw the film describe as “yogurt product comes to life, causing devastation.”
 

Thanks to Soft Skull Press for sending me an advance paperback copy of Daniel Radosh’s “Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.” This book is righteously demented—true to the title, it’s a voyage through the bizarre world of Christian pop culture, in a time where it is essentially one more underground scene, a pocket pop universe just like juggalos or furries (though slightly bigger—as Radosh points out, this stuff totals up to a $7 billion a year industry). Radosh takes us on a voyage through the cult of Left Behind, Christian rock, and the rest of the American Christian scene. Along the way we get some serious gems like “BibleZine” (!!!), bumper stickers reading “Any Sex that can Put You in Hell ISN’T SAFE” and Jay Bakker (Jim and Tammy’s son), who runs his own punk rock church.

I mean, reading this, it’s like… this is the alternate universe version of Dangerous Minds’ readers, like we went into a wormhole and came out with goatees and freshly baptized.

There are some absolutely jaw-droppingly great snippets of “Christian” lore from the book. For instance, Radosh includes a depiction of the Rapture from one of the “Left Behind” books:

“[M]en and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin… Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.

Gloria in excelsis Deo, motherfucker.

Awesome. Or try this one, from a Christian joke book Radosh finds:

One women’s libber started out a speech: “Where would you men be without us women?” A guy in the back shouted, “In the Garden of Eden!”

I gotta remember that one to impress the ladies with.

Anyway, excellent, hilarious, disturbing, sobering book. I imagine it would make a great read alongside Jeff Sharlet’s “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power” for a look at where the Christian right is, both in politics and in culture at large, at this moment. (Interview with author below!)

(Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture)

(Via Digg)

 
Before finding fame as Clark Griswald, a 24 year-old Chevy Chase was living his rock n’ roll dream as the keyboardist/drummer for Boston psychedelic band Chamaeleon Church.  Their sole album appeared on the MGM label in 1968 and was marketed as part of the Bosstown Sound that included other lysergic warriors from the area Ultimate Spinach, Orpheus, Beacon Street Union, Phulph, Eden’s Children, and Puff. 

Although the marketing plan back-fired, as the press deemed the whole scene as nothing more than record label hype, the albums made by the Bosstown groups contain many gems including this harmony-laden winner Camillia is Changing.  Produced by the ultra-prolific Alan Lorber, who also master-minded the whole Bosstown gimmick, the song has the usual 1968 flourishes and some killer harmonies, which I am sure Chase’s perfect pitch lent to extensively.

Before playing with the Church, Chase jammed with school friends Walter Becker and Donald Fagan in The Leather Canaries, who of course would find fame sans Chevy as Steely Dan.  Although his music career didn’t quite pan out, Chase simultaneously worked with an underground comedian gang called Channel One that would lead to his eventual TV and comedy career.
 

 
There are American icons and then there are American icons. And Bruce Springsteen is surely one of them. The kind you don’t mess with if you know what’s good for you. He’s the Boss and… you’re not, OK? Get it? Got it? Good.

Apparently Glenn Beck never got that memo because on his radio show Thursday, the Joseph McCarthy-loving, blubbering Fox News personality decided to read the lyrics to “Born in the U.S.A.” in a monotone voice similar to how William Shatner infamously declaimed Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” This is a tune Ronald Reagan tried to commandeer for his 1984 reelection campaign, a move rebuffed by Springsteen, the son of a union member.

According to Beck, the song is un-American.

“Born down in a dead man’s town,” read Beck to the listeners of his March 11 radio program. “The first kick I took was when I hit the ground. You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much. ‘Til you spend half your life just covering up.”

Here’s what Beck had to say about the famous song afterward:

That’s what it’s all about.That’s what America’s all about, according to Springsteen…. It’s time for us to wake, wake up, out of our, um, dream state. Wake up out of the propaganda. The, you know, this is the thing that, people who come from the Soviet-bloc or Cuba, they’re all saying, “How do you guys not hear this? How do you not see this?” Well, that’s ‘cause we don’t ever expect it.

The Boss… un-American? Bruce Springsteen? Is that what Beck is trying to say? Now I could offer some snarky commentary—that’s my job, I’m a blogger after all—but it’s totally pointless when discussing Beck, someone I could call “nuts” and the copy desk at the Los Angeles Times will probably let it sail right past because it’s not like it’s an opinion!

And that’s not all. In January, Beck “analyzed” the Utopian lyrics of the Beatles’ “Revolution” and concluded that the song illustrated Liberal plans to slowly bring Marxism to America.

Glenn, wouldn’t that have been, uh, Lennonism? And I hate to remind you that Charles Manson saw hidden messages in Beatle songs too.

Cross posting this from Brand X

(Via Megomuseum)

(Thanks, Howard Hallis!)

Tim Weiner on the dark history of the CIA, including the recent revelation of CIA suicide agents.

(Via Fora.tv)

(Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion)

 
Who doesn’t want a fuck-shit-stack? I do! Obviously NSFW.
 
Thank you Taylor Jessen!

 
Edin Velez‘s “Butoh: Dance of Darkness” is a mind-altering must-see film about the modern Japanese dance form. I can’t in any way profess to understand
exactly what’s happening here, but I do know that it hits me on a visceral level like no other form of dance I’ve ever encountered. It certainly works as a wonderful antidote to the ennui caused by viewing the contrived, over-cooked bullshit spectacle of that new Lady Gaga vid (gee Brad, how do you really feel about that?). See the whole film here.
 

 
via Max Hattler

1925 (aka Hell) is one of two animation loops directed by Max Hattler, inspired by the work of French outsider artist Augustin Lesage. 1925 is based on Lesage’s painting ‘A symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World’ from 1925.
The second loop, 1923 (aka Heaven), is based on Lesage’s painting ‘A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World’ from 1923 and can be found here