Anxiety is a mental and physical reaction to perceived threats. In small doses, anxiety is helpful. It protects us from danger, and focuses our attention...
This lady has an “Apfelpo”—that is, a butt like an apple These images require some clarification. Roughly a decade before the rise of the World Wide Web in 1995, citizens of Germany and Austria (I’m not sure where else) could access through their TV sets a digital mode of information dissemination known as Teletext, a system that had been developed in the U.K. during the 1970s. If you had the right kind of TV with the right kind of remote control—and they weren’t uncommon at all, loads of German speakers know about this—you could switch your TV into an interactive mode where you could dial up certain basic, updated information such as headlines, weather information, sports scores, traffic updates, and even flight departures and arrivals at airports. Many channels (ZDF, 3sat, etc.) have their own Teletext systems, and by punching in “100” you could get the homepage; other 3-digit numbers would be displayed on the screen for other forms of information, and if you typed in one of those numbers, you would get a page dedicated to this or that story or perhaps a list of cities and temperatures or the like. What was charming...
The late Lemmy Kilmister hanging out in bed. Photo by Ray Palmer. 2021 marks my seventh year here at Dangerous Minds. During my time here I’ve posted over 1200 articles on everything from satanic strippers, Axl Rose threatening to kill David Bowie, puppet porn, a fringe film featuring an adult baby, and on several occasions, the subject at hand today-Lemmy Kilmister. On September 12th, 1987, Motörhead released their eighth studio album, Rock ‘n’ Roll with Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor back behind the kit. Prior to the release of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Lemmy had played a meaty role in director Peter Richardson’s film Eat the Rich for which Motörhead configuration of Lemmy, Würzel, Phil Taylor, and Phil Campbell had written and recorded the film’s ripping theme tune (which also appears on Rock ‘n’ Roll), specifically for the film. The soundtrack itself is nearly exclusively comprised of Motörhead and if you’ve never seen it (a massive critical flop upon its release, it deserves the cult status it now holds), I highly recommend you add it to your “must view” queue. A still from ‘Eat the Rich’ featuring Lemmy and actor Ronald Shiner. Sadly, like...
The 1959 Voyageur yearbook of Freeport High School, Freeport, New York. Basketball? Girls?
Waldo, the cartoon protagonist of the famed Where’s Waldo? series, has more in common with Andy Warhol, the godfather of Pop art, than is immediately obvious.
A young Steven Morrissey contemplating the state of punk rock Recently, I spent some time collecting for you my dear Dangerous Minds readers, numerous amusing pieces of personal correspondence (adorable typos and all) from a young, pre-Smiths Morrissey. Even back then, Morrissey was busy cultivating the melancholy persona that we all know and love today. The home address of a teenage Morrissey Part of a letter from a young Morrissey to his pen pal, Robert Mackie, October 22nd, 1980 In addition to excerpts from many of his pen pal letters to Robert Mackie, I’ve included a few of Morrissey’s letters to various magazines and several of his reviews of bands like Depeche Mode and The Cramps that appeared in the weekly British newspaper, the Record Mirror from 1980. I’m especially fond of the then teenaged Morrissey’s review of a live gig in April of 1980 by The Cramps at Manchester Polytechnic (which you can read below) that he wrote for Record Mirror in which he muses “Is it true that guitarist Ivy Rorschach sets fires to orphanages when she’s bored?” If only. What follows makes for some fantastic reading, enjoy! A review of...
Spanish cartoonist Joan Cornellà combines black humor and extreme discomfort, most famously in his wordless, six-panel comics. Cornellà‘s work deals in mutilation and disfigurement, sadistic or oblivious violence, the alienation of modernity and a total disregard for human life. (I know. It doesn’t sound funny, but trust me.) Cornellà‘s aesthetic runs completely counterintuitive to his themes—his colors are lovely and soothing, and his human figures are glassy-eyed and friendly, as if they walked out of a children’s cartoon. Uncomfortable laughter aside, these beautiful little comics really bear the mark of Cornellà‘s fine arts training. His book Mox Nox is fantastic by the way, especially since the high-resolution images really let you see the texture of paper and pigment. It lets you really embrace the depth of that head-wound.
A young Steven Morrissey contemplating the state of punk rock Recently, I spent some time collecting for you my dear Dangerous Minds readers, numerous amusing pieces of personal correspondence (adorable typos and all) from a young, pre-Smiths Morrissey. Even back then, Morrissey was busy cultivating the melancholy persona that we all know and love today. The home address of a teenage Morrissey Part of a letter from a young Morrissey to his pen pal, Robert Mackie, October 22nd, 1980 In addition to excerpts from many of his pen pal letters to Robert Mackie, I’ve included a few of Morrissey’s letters to various magazines and several of his reviews of bands like Depeche Mode and The Cramps that appeared in the weekly British newspaper, the Record Mirror from 1980. I’m especially fond of the then teenaged Morrissey’s review of a live gig in April of 1980 by The Cramps at Manchester Polytechnic (which you can read below) that he wrote for Record Mirror in which he muses “Is it true that guitarist Ivy Rorschach sets fires to orphanages when she’s bored?” If only. What follows makes for some fantastic reading, enjoy! A review of...
George Harrison’s 1966 trip to India was a major catalyst in the development of the Beatles’ sound, and pop music was forever changed by his sitar tutelage under Ravi Shankar. However, all the talk about the musical, spiritual and yoga training tend to obfuscate the real historic legacy of Harrison’s journey—selfies!!! The quiet Beatle captured some really beautiful scenery (as well as his lovely face), using a fisheye lens to clever effect. Frankly, I’m a little surprised Instagram hasn’t pushed for a nostalgic fisheye comeback—who doesn’t like a little psychedelic bulge to their selfie? Via Shooting Film
Watch these sick videos of Slayer’s Tom Araya performing covers of Mötley Crüe, Scorpions, Judas Priest and Dio along with his brother John Araya on guitar. Al Messi plays Bass and Jake Alvarado is on drums. Dimitri Galeos, the uploader of these clips, plays second guitar. One of the clips dates these performances at November of 1983, which would have been a month before Slayer’s Show No Mercy dropped. Slayer themselves had included covers of bands like Priest and Iron Maiden in their sets, playing small clubs and parties around Southern California. It seems a bit odd, in retrospect, to see the singer of one of the quintessential American thrash bands performing songs that would be considered more “pop metal” by today’s standards. It should be noted that in the early ‘80s metal encompassed all of metal and metalheads often tended to embrace the full spectrum, much like punks in the early ‘80s tended to embrace anything under the banner “punk rock.” Once the mid ‘80s rolled around, you begin to see more splintering in both metal and punk scenes with offshoot genres springing up and fans gravitating toward their favored pigeon-holes. These...
The name of music writer Peter Guralnick may not resonate with rock music fans the way names like Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer do, likely because his work is informal, thoughtful, and restrained compared to that of many of his self-aggrandizingly, flamboyantly gonzo contemporaries from the early days of rock writing coming into its own. For example, his scholarly ‘90s Elvis Presley biographies Last Train to Memphis, Careless Love, and the mind-bogglingly granular Elvis Day by Day serve serious students of rock history as valuable counterpoints to the notoriously lurid sensationalism of Albert Goldman’s work on the subject. On November 4th, Guralnick will be releasing two of his works—Sweet Soul Music and Dream Boogie—as enhanced e-books. In addition to being optimized for e-readers, the e-books will include troves of supplemental A/V material, including audio of his original interviews with figures like Ray Charles, Bobby Womack, and Solomon Burke, and newly purpose-shot video interviews. I was watching one of those video interviews when something I thought interesting jumped out. Guralnick was talking about the legendary soul singer Sam Cooke with the great Stax songwriter, singer, and producer William Bell, and of the brilliant and tragic talent...
‘Taschenrechner’ (Pocket Calculator) (live) – I love Florian’s aside to camera near the end. One of the instruments they were playing was a Bee Gees Rhythm Machine painted black, another was a Stylophone and they sent a musical calculator out as a promo for the single.
1950 Here are some vintage photos ranging from the early 1940s to 1970s of women’s roller derby competitions. As you can see by the images, these women ain’t takin’ no shit while they’re on their skates. It’s hardcore stuff. I tried to add captions to photos I could find information on. I also included a movie trailer at the bottom of this post for the 1972 film Kansas City Bomber starring Raquel Welch. Because RAQUEL WELCH ON ROLLER SKATES! Honestly, what more could you want? Chicago, IL. 1948 Midge Brasuhn of the Brooklynites Ivy King Philly Rollergirls 1948 Women’s Roller Derby, Chicago, 1948 Below, a trailer for the 1972 film Kansas City Bomber starring Raquel Welch:
“Stunning Debut Album” 7-inch, 1991 If you’re into Stereolab, you’re almost certainly aware of the odd, grinning cartoon character who stared out accusatorially at the viewer on the cover art of many of Stereolab’s early releases. That weird little dude—gal?—was featured on Peng!, the groop’s first album, and the two important early compilations Switched On and Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On Volume 2) (Refried Ectoplasm is the best thing Stereolab ever put out, IMO) as well as a bunch of early singles. Indeed, if you were following Stereolab in their first couple of years, that character constituted almost all of the band’s visual image up until the 1993 release of The Groop Played “Space Age Batchelor Pad Music”, which cannily repurposed the cover design of a series of Vanguard releases of “stereophonic demonstration discs” featuring French conductor Vladimir Golschmann interpreting the works of Dvořák and Tchaikovsky, among others. The Stereolab gang apparently referred to the little fellow as “Cliff,” as was revealed in a super-early interview with the band that Chickfactor did in 1993: Chickfactor: where did you get the image of the guy with the gun? what made you give it up on space age...
Anyone who has seen Ridley Scott’s monumental movie Blade Runner probably remembers the character of Gaff, played by Edward James Olmos. Gaff serves as a kind of street-smart chorus in the movie, kind of like the scarcely delineated character who tells private detective J.J. Gittes to “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown” in Roman Polanski’s movie of that name. Blade Runner being Blade Runner, however, the character of Gaff is highly ethereal and elusive. Throughout the movie he strews his little origami figures everywhere he goes, as an incessant mocking reminder to Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) that he’ll never be one step ahead. I had forgotten, but it turns out that in the movie Gaff makes three different creatures—an origami unicorn, an origami chicken, and a little man made from a matchstick. I know this because of the website run by a man named Kenneth Thompson, owner of a construction and flooring company in Michigan, that is dedicated to producing and selling actual origami recreations of Gaff’s Unicorn as well as providing tutorials about how to make all three of Gaff’s figures on your own. Noticing that there was not a place...
The concept behind Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, a set of 115 cards with elliptical imperatives designed to spark in the user creative connections unobtainable through regular modes of work, is now a commonplace. Every Barnes & Noble sells kits for breaking writer’s block—hell, you can even buy them in the form of playing dice with questionably useful words like “REDEEM” and “TRAP” on them. In 1974, when the original Oblique Strategies set was developed, it was a more radical intervention with roots in Eastern philosophy. In his college years Eno was fascinated by the Fluxus movement. Oblique Strategies was almost certainly inspired by George Brecht’s 1962 Fluxus work “Drip Music”: George Brecht produced this thing called “Watermelon” or “Yam Box” or something like that. It was a big box of cards of all different sizes and shapes, and each cards had instructions for a piece on … All of the cards had cryptic things on them, like one said, “Egg event—at least one egg.” Another said, “Two chairs. One umbrella. One chair.” They were all like that, but the drip event one said, “Erect containers such that water from other containers drips into...
Vincent Van Gogh Some years ago the inventive German photographer Matthias Schaller who specializes in what he calls the “indirect portrait” was in the studio of Cy Twombly and happened to glance at the painter’s palette, smeared with pigments of various hues, but mainly a shade of red fairly close to the color of blood. It occurred to Schaller that the palette is arguably as identifiable to an artist as the artist’s work itself, even if created purely by accident. As he puts it, “The palette is an abstract landscape of the painter’s artistic production.” Schaller has created a series of marvelous photographs of the palettes of famous artists, each of which measures at roughly 190 x 150 cm. The collection, called “Das Meisterstück” (The Masterpiece), has appeared as an exhibition and is available in book form as well—for more information write an email to [email protected]. These are all utterly fascinating to gaze at; my favorites are those of Bacon and Kokoschka. They’re all pretty wonderful. Pablo Picasso Claude Monet Salvador Dalí Henri Matisse Piet Mondrian Marc Chagall Max Ludwig Kirchner Edvard Munch J...
“Common People” by Pulp is probably the consensus pick for best British pop single of the 1990s, and there’s little doubt that not many songs share its exultant and biting qualities. Brimming with intelligence and anger, “Common People” has become the definitive Britpop anthem, securing Jarvis’ status as a rock and roll dandy of the first order forevermore. Pulp had four albums before Different Class, and two after, but even if you were to pay close attention to “The Story of ‘Common People,’” a 2006 BBC documentary about the song, you might be forgiven for not noticing. The documentary, directed by Paul Grant and Colin Stone, ratchets up the world-historical importance of the single, portentously giving credit to keyboardist Candida Doyle for identifying the seeds of greatness in the tinkly melody around which the song was built, even as drummer Nick Banks and bassist Steve Mackey rather thought that it was “rubbish.” The program probably inflates the significance of the song, but has the sense to pad out its hour with home footage of Jarvis as a teenager and snippets from a 1994 episode on the U.K. show Pop Quiz on which Cocker made a memorable impression....
Hormone control is a complex process, but some simple parts of the process are understood. The “command center” […]
It’s an oversimplification to say that Pulp hit the big time in 1995, but it will always seem to be so because of the international success of the album Different Class and especially the single “Common People,” frequently cited as one of the decade’s best songs (in 2010, for instance, Pitchfork somewhat perversely placed it at #2 behind Pavement’s “Gold Soundz”). But by that time Jarvis and Co. had been slugging it out for in excess of 15 years, with four albums and who knows how many gigs on its ledger. Just a year earlier, His ‘n’ Hers made a significant splash, reaching #9 on the U.K. charts and narrowly failing to outpace Elegant Slumming by M People (right, them) for the 1994 Mercury Music Prize (weirdly, Different Class wasn’t even nominated for 1995). In other words, if Different Class was Pulp’s Thriller, then His ‘n’ Hers was its Off the Wall. Now Pulp has never been quick to bless the United States with a surplus of live dates, but they did support His ‘n’ Hers with eight North American dates in 1994 opening for Blur, who were in the middle of a genre-defining apotheosis all their own, although still a...
I adore these images of cassette tape spines lovingly labeled and decorated from the caveman days. I don’t miss cassette tapes at all, but the bespoke folk art aspect of these is kind of funky fresh, you have to admit… Via Boing Boing
Fun fact: The title of Love’s Forever Changes album, according to Arthur Lee himself is actually Love Forever Changes, inspired by a story that Lee had heard about some guy who had broken up with his girlfriend. She told him “You said you would love me forever!” and he apparently replied, “Well, forever changes, baby, forever changes.” As anyone lucky enough to have seen Arthur Lee live in concert can tell you, it was a very special experience. I saw Arthur in performance three times myself, including an early 90s gig at the fabled Palomino Club in North Hollywood with Baby Lemonade where the electricity went out and he did an intimate candle-lit (literally) “unplugged” set without the group. Pure magic. The entire audience was grinning from ear to ear. To this day it remains one of the very best shows I’ve ever seen. The second time I saw Arthur Lee play was even more memorable. After spending 5-1/2 years in a federal prison as a result of California’s harsh “three strikes, you’re out” sentencing guidelines, Arthur was released and in 2003 he began a tentative series of performances around Los Angeles playing Love’s classic 1967...
Judging by their web site, The Match Group seems a fairly run-of-the-mill custom matches concern. Need your logo on a matchbook? They’ve got you covered. You want match boxes instead, you say? Relax, Mr. Connoisseur, it’s all good. Here’s a great excerpt from their About page: With over 25 years in the industry, company founder, Joe Danon began his career as the North East Regional Sales Manager at the prestigious Universal Match Corporation. He then went on to become the National Sales Manager at Maryland Match Corp. for 13 years. His passion and devotion to the historic importance, whimsy and efficacy of match advertising is unrivaled. His devoted and loyal clientele have long benefited from his “Love of Light,” graphic design expertise and unparalleled product knowledge. Notice the bit about “historic importance?” The Match Group not only offers over 25 years of hard-won experience in the world of matches, they keep an informative blog full of historical information and trivia about matches and matchbook design, and they’ve maintained an exhaustive Pinboard to assemble an impressively massive trove of design samples from all across the web. It’s broken down into 65 categories. That’s not a typo. But what...
Nick Cave This morning, my husband sent me the above baby Nick Cave photos for a chuckle (talk about a “bad seed” wonk wonk). For whatever reason, it became my mission, dear Dangerous Minds readers to find even more photos of rock starts (that was a typo, but I’m leaving it) as children. So, yeah, this what I’ve spent my morning doing. YOU’RE WELCOME. We were all babies once, you know! Debbie Harry (who turns 70 on July 1!) David Bowie Dolly Parton Brian Eno Kathleen Hanna John Lennon with his mother Kelley and Kim Deal Lydia Lunch Marc Bolan Joey Ramone with his father. A one year old Diana Ross with her older sister Barbara Jean “Bobbi” in 1945. GG Allin Sid Vicious Brian Jones Boy George Patti Smith Lemmy Kilmister Jimi Hendrix and dad Janis Joplin Freddie Mercury Nina Simone John Lydon Ian Curtis Syd Barrett Genesis P-Orridge, then known as Neil Megson Björk
I adore these images of cassette tape spines lovingly labeled and decorated from the caveman days. I don’t miss cassette tapes at all, but the bespoke folk art aspect of these is kind of funky fresh, you have to admit… Via Boing Boing
