Showing posts with label Devo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Devo. Show all posts
Monday, April 20, 2009
Friday, April 03, 2009
Link Proliferation: Intelligence can be eaten!
You Know What Will Do You Know What to Us
Here's a 1979 live telly performance of "Transmission" by Joy Division.
And here's their big one – you know the one – live in '79.
"Suicide is just what people do here because there is nothing else to do."
A strange and depressing tale from Wales.
Vanity Fair tackles "The Mystery Suicides in Bridgend County." For several years, the small Welsh town of Bridgend has suffered from an outbreak of suicides. All from a similar demographic and almost ever one of them using the exact same method. From the article:
Since January of 2007, 25 people between the ages of 15 and 28 have killed themselves within 10 miles of here, all by hanging, except for one 15-year-old, who lay down on the tracks before an oncoming train after he was teased for being gay.
The article discusses the phenomenon:
Outbreaks like this are rare but not new. Plutarch writes about an epidemic of suicide by young women in the Greek city of Miletus that was stopped by the threat that their naked corpses would be dragged through the streets. Sigmund Freud, who himself committed assisted suicide, held a conference in the 1920s on teen-suicide clusters. They have happened in Germany, Australia, Japan, the U.S., Canada, and Micronesia. Psychologists familiar with the phenomenon are saying that what’s going on in Wales is a classic case of the Werther effect, named for Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a young man who puts a gun to his head to end the agony of unrequited love and because he can't find his place in the provincial bourgeois society of the day. The novel's publication, in 1774, prompted young men all over Europe to dress like Werther and take their lives. It’s also called the contagion effect and copycat suicide: one person does it, and that lowers the threshold, making it easier and more permissible for the next. Like 10 people waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change, and one of them jaywalks. This gives the rest of them the go-ahead.
For a while, investigators suspected that wonderfully multipurpose villain, the Internet. Theories that the suicides were part of online community pact were bandied about.
The first known Internet suicide pact surfaced in Japan in 2000, and a new epidemic has been raging there since last April. About 1,000 Japanese have killed themselves by inhaling fumes created by mixing common household cleaning products. Police have asked Internet service providers to shut down suicide Web sites but have found it harder to keep people from posting the recipe for the mix or raving about how this method enables you to “die easily and beautifully.” Why these young people are so eager to die—what it is that their life in Japan isn’t giving them—is as much of a mystery as what is happening in Bridgend.
In Wales, however, the victims’ friends all say that the Internet has nothing to do with what is happening. “It’s nothing like that,” a girlfriend of Natasha Randall’s told a reporter. The victims acted on their own, she believes. “People get down, and they do it.” The Internet is just how young people communicate and, to a large extent, socialize these days. This certainly isn’t a suicide pact like the one made in 1997 by Heaven’s Gate, the cult in Rancho Santa Fe, California, 39 of whose members, dressed in matching black shirts and sweat pants and brand-new Nike sneakers, swallowed phenobarbital-laced applesauce with a vodka chaser, then put plastic bags over their heads to asphyxiate themselves.
Ryan's Song
Having a death sentence hanging above you (firing squad, if prosecutors get their way) might diminish the productivity of a less passionately creative person; but, from his prison cell, Indonesian serial killer Verry Idham Henyansyah, a.k.a. "Ryan" (pic above), is just hitting his stride. From the Australian edition of the Herald Sun:
The smooth-faced 31-year-old has already achieved national infamy with his confessions to a series of grisly murders - including a mother and her toddler - and details of his life as a gay man in Muslim-majority Indonesia.
Now Henyansyah, popularly known as Ryan, is chasing fame of a more orthodox kind - with a prison-penned autobiography published in February and a collection of pop songs due out next month.
Holding court in his jail cell recently, dressed in flowing white robes and a matching Muslim skullcap, Henyansyah trilled a sweet-voiced rendition of one of his songs for an appreciative crowd of court officers, local residents and reporters.
"Release me, forget me, release me from these shackles," Henyansyah sang.
"Enough for now. You can get my album soon," he said, as the applause and cheers for an encore turned to visible disappointment.
The serial killer has confessed to at least 10 murders. He claims that jealousy over the attention men gave his boyfriend and unwanted sexual advances directed towards himself were the cause of his many homicidal episodes.
Remorse for his crimes was the motivating force behind the album, which he recorded in prison, Hensyansyah said.
"I write the songs for people I love. Forgive Me Mother is for my mother. Another song, Sun, is about lovers missing each other because they are separated until they die,'' Henyansyah said.
Henyansyah has never denied the crimes that could earn him the death penalty.
Indeed, his autobiography, The Untold Story of Ryan, includes maps to the graves in his parents' backyard, as well as photographs that chart his progress from village boy to Koran recital teacher, to simpering, shirtless male model.
The Future's So Bright
PopMatters has posted not one, not two, but – count 'em! - three sample chapters from David Janssen and Edward Whitelock's new book Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music. Here's the two authors on the unlikely and short-lived musical career of Chuck Manson:
It is not necessary here to retread Manson's "philosophy" in detail, since that groundwork has already been well established by Vincent Bugliosi, John Gilmore, and Ed Sanders, among others. Suffice it to summarize that Manson's two central Family texts were the Revelation of St. John and the White Album. There are moments in the Manson narrative, though, that make one wonder if Sharon Tate might still be alive had Charlie been offered that record deal he had scammed and schemed so tenaciously to procure. Some of the anecdotes of Manson's musical development are almost romantic and fit the rock 'n' roll myth quite nicely. The world’s forgotten boy learned to play guitar in prison from Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, the last "Public Enemy #1" on Hoover’s list to be captured alive. Karpis was apparently quite the hot axeman as well, and he was impressed with his protégé’s natural abilities. In his exposé of the Manson Family, John Gilmore and Ron Kenner quote one “Wallie” Sallers, a contemporary hanger-on at Dennis Wilson’s place:
"Charlie cut an album," she remembers, "using the girls in the background, and it was really sort of an interesting album. Everybody thought he was a good musician, more or less, and he used to write a lot of songs ... Charlie had a very nice voice. He sounds something like the voice in, what was that record about Martin Luther, JFK and Bobby Kennedy all getting killed—Martin, John and Bobby—sounds just like the voice of Dion."
As grotesque as the Dion analogy might seem, it is not unreasonable to conclude that a man who could convince a young group of mostly young women that he was Christ, Satan, and the fifth Beatle would have a "nice voice." Certainly, Manson understood the power of rock as a persuasive medium, and on this point he is in close agreement with rock critics like Garlock and Larson. Manson’s following claims could have been argued just as plausibly by the latter two:
"The Beatles confuse you with what they say. They trick you with distraction, with the beat. You get programmed from the front or programmed from the back. Music doesn’t know time. Music is soul. And you can bring it in from the back. I can sing a song right now and when it’s over you forget the words, the music, but it stays in your infinite unconscious. And then a few months later you hear another song ... talking about a beer, Coors is great, Coors is great. Pretty soon you think of beer and you know that Coors is great. And this is what the Beatles do, they confuse you with cadence, and program you in the back, behind the beat, and this is what stays with you."
Manson understood and implemented the "programmable" potential of rock music, and he combined that force with the style, tone, and content of apocalypse.
The third section deals with everybody's favorite Spud Boys: Devo!
Here's a 1979 live telly performance of "Transmission" by Joy Division.
And here's their big one – you know the one – live in '79.
"Suicide is just what people do here because there is nothing else to do."
A strange and depressing tale from Wales.
Vanity Fair tackles "The Mystery Suicides in Bridgend County." For several years, the small Welsh town of Bridgend has suffered from an outbreak of suicides. All from a similar demographic and almost ever one of them using the exact same method. From the article:
Since January of 2007, 25 people between the ages of 15 and 28 have killed themselves within 10 miles of here, all by hanging, except for one 15-year-old, who lay down on the tracks before an oncoming train after he was teased for being gay.
The article discusses the phenomenon:
Outbreaks like this are rare but not new. Plutarch writes about an epidemic of suicide by young women in the Greek city of Miletus that was stopped by the threat that their naked corpses would be dragged through the streets. Sigmund Freud, who himself committed assisted suicide, held a conference in the 1920s on teen-suicide clusters. They have happened in Germany, Australia, Japan, the U.S., Canada, and Micronesia. Psychologists familiar with the phenomenon are saying that what’s going on in Wales is a classic case of the Werther effect, named for Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a young man who puts a gun to his head to end the agony of unrequited love and because he can't find his place in the provincial bourgeois society of the day. The novel's publication, in 1774, prompted young men all over Europe to dress like Werther and take their lives. It’s also called the contagion effect and copycat suicide: one person does it, and that lowers the threshold, making it easier and more permissible for the next. Like 10 people waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change, and one of them jaywalks. This gives the rest of them the go-ahead.
For a while, investigators suspected that wonderfully multipurpose villain, the Internet. Theories that the suicides were part of online community pact were bandied about.
The first known Internet suicide pact surfaced in Japan in 2000, and a new epidemic has been raging there since last April. About 1,000 Japanese have killed themselves by inhaling fumes created by mixing common household cleaning products. Police have asked Internet service providers to shut down suicide Web sites but have found it harder to keep people from posting the recipe for the mix or raving about how this method enables you to “die easily and beautifully.” Why these young people are so eager to die—what it is that their life in Japan isn’t giving them—is as much of a mystery as what is happening in Bridgend.
In Wales, however, the victims’ friends all say that the Internet has nothing to do with what is happening. “It’s nothing like that,” a girlfriend of Natasha Randall’s told a reporter. The victims acted on their own, she believes. “People get down, and they do it.” The Internet is just how young people communicate and, to a large extent, socialize these days. This certainly isn’t a suicide pact like the one made in 1997 by Heaven’s Gate, the cult in Rancho Santa Fe, California, 39 of whose members, dressed in matching black shirts and sweat pants and brand-new Nike sneakers, swallowed phenobarbital-laced applesauce with a vodka chaser, then put plastic bags over their heads to asphyxiate themselves.
Ryan's Song
Having a death sentence hanging above you (firing squad, if prosecutors get their way) might diminish the productivity of a less passionately creative person; but, from his prison cell, Indonesian serial killer Verry Idham Henyansyah, a.k.a. "Ryan" (pic above), is just hitting his stride. From the Australian edition of the Herald Sun:
The smooth-faced 31-year-old has already achieved national infamy with his confessions to a series of grisly murders - including a mother and her toddler - and details of his life as a gay man in Muslim-majority Indonesia.
Now Henyansyah, popularly known as Ryan, is chasing fame of a more orthodox kind - with a prison-penned autobiography published in February and a collection of pop songs due out next month.
Holding court in his jail cell recently, dressed in flowing white robes and a matching Muslim skullcap, Henyansyah trilled a sweet-voiced rendition of one of his songs for an appreciative crowd of court officers, local residents and reporters.
"Release me, forget me, release me from these shackles," Henyansyah sang.
"Enough for now. You can get my album soon," he said, as the applause and cheers for an encore turned to visible disappointment.
The serial killer has confessed to at least 10 murders. He claims that jealousy over the attention men gave his boyfriend and unwanted sexual advances directed towards himself were the cause of his many homicidal episodes.
Remorse for his crimes was the motivating force behind the album, which he recorded in prison, Hensyansyah said.
"I write the songs for people I love. Forgive Me Mother is for my mother. Another song, Sun, is about lovers missing each other because they are separated until they die,'' Henyansyah said.
Henyansyah has never denied the crimes that could earn him the death penalty.
Indeed, his autobiography, The Untold Story of Ryan, includes maps to the graves in his parents' backyard, as well as photographs that chart his progress from village boy to Koran recital teacher, to simpering, shirtless male model.
The Future's So Bright
PopMatters has posted not one, not two, but – count 'em! - three sample chapters from David Janssen and Edward Whitelock's new book Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music. Here's the two authors on the unlikely and short-lived musical career of Chuck Manson:
It is not necessary here to retread Manson's "philosophy" in detail, since that groundwork has already been well established by Vincent Bugliosi, John Gilmore, and Ed Sanders, among others. Suffice it to summarize that Manson's two central Family texts were the Revelation of St. John and the White Album. There are moments in the Manson narrative, though, that make one wonder if Sharon Tate might still be alive had Charlie been offered that record deal he had scammed and schemed so tenaciously to procure. Some of the anecdotes of Manson's musical development are almost romantic and fit the rock 'n' roll myth quite nicely. The world’s forgotten boy learned to play guitar in prison from Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, the last "Public Enemy #1" on Hoover’s list to be captured alive. Karpis was apparently quite the hot axeman as well, and he was impressed with his protégé’s natural abilities. In his exposé of the Manson Family, John Gilmore and Ron Kenner quote one “Wallie” Sallers, a contemporary hanger-on at Dennis Wilson’s place:
"Charlie cut an album," she remembers, "using the girls in the background, and it was really sort of an interesting album. Everybody thought he was a good musician, more or less, and he used to write a lot of songs ... Charlie had a very nice voice. He sounds something like the voice in, what was that record about Martin Luther, JFK and Bobby Kennedy all getting killed—Martin, John and Bobby—sounds just like the voice of Dion."
As grotesque as the Dion analogy might seem, it is not unreasonable to conclude that a man who could convince a young group of mostly young women that he was Christ, Satan, and the fifth Beatle would have a "nice voice." Certainly, Manson understood the power of rock as a persuasive medium, and on this point he is in close agreement with rock critics like Garlock and Larson. Manson’s following claims could have been argued just as plausibly by the latter two:
"The Beatles confuse you with what they say. They trick you with distraction, with the beat. You get programmed from the front or programmed from the back. Music doesn’t know time. Music is soul. And you can bring it in from the back. I can sing a song right now and when it’s over you forget the words, the music, but it stays in your infinite unconscious. And then a few months later you hear another song ... talking about a beer, Coors is great, Coors is great. Pretty soon you think of beer and you know that Coors is great. And this is what the Beatles do, they confuse you with cadence, and program you in the back, behind the beat, and this is what stays with you."
Manson understood and implemented the "programmable" potential of rock music, and he combined that force with the style, tone, and content of apocalypse.
The third section deals with everybody's favorite Spud Boys: Devo!
Friday, February 20, 2009
Link proliferation: "Killinger: The Case of the Curse of John Wilkes Booth's Mummy"
Sic semper mummyus
R. J. Brown has a article on the bizarre posthumous career of actor and presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth. Brown gives a quick overview of the once popular "Booth's not dead" subgenre of conspiracy theory and the delves into the story of David E. George:
On January 13, 1903 a man in Enid, Oklahoma, by the name of David E. George died. in his last dying statement, the man confessed to his landlord, Mrs. Harper, that he was in fact John Wilkes Booth.
Though few believed the story, enough saw truth (or profit) in it to have George's remains mummified and put on display. And, in true mummy fashion, the mummy of "John Wilkes Booth" carried with it a curse:
The postmortem career of John Wilkes Booth, whether it belongs to true history or folklore, none-the-less provides a fascinating story. The mummy scattered ill-luck around almost as freely as Tutankhamen is alleged to have done. Nearly every showman who exhibited the mummy was subsequently ruined financially. Eight people were killed in the wreck of a circus train in 1902 on which the mummy was traveling. Bill Evans, a wealthy carnival king, who bought the exhibit in later years was financially ruined by continual strokes of bad luck after the purchase. Finis L. Bates, the original owner, wrote a book in 1908 entitled "The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth" which attempted to prove that the mummy was in fact John Wilkes Booth. he suffered much ridicule because of that book and died penniless in 1923. Perhaps the only person to sponsor the mummy and not suffer strokes of financial bad luck was Reverend True Wilson. It must be pointed out that Wilson was largely responsible for originally getting the prohibition law passed. However, shortly after Wilson bought the mummy, the repeal of the prohibition law was made official. (Let each reader make their own determination as to whether this was a cause-effect in this case or not.)
It was that or "Bonnie and Died"
From Dustin via the blog of McNally Jackson, SoHo's finest purveyor of vendible books: "More exciting than James Bond, Mike Hammer, Travis McGee and then some!" Alan Scherstuhl, the man behind the Crap Studies column of Kansas City's The Pitch, presents the pulp-trash overload that is Killinger: The Rainbow/Seagreen Case.
Here's a little taste of the unique literary stylings of Killinger author P. K. Palmer:
"Killinger turned to face her. There was a definite interruption in the pattern of his white shorts."
"Killinger feinted with the start of a kinkeri, a genital knee-kick designed to castrate without use of a knife."
"The man looked at the long splendid legs before him. He looked up past them and past the glorious rounds of the breasts at a wondrous face and long tawny hair. He rose to introduce himself. 'My name is Jeddediah Killinger the Third.'"
Are we not Neil Young?
This may cause a feeling of dread and horror or it might make your day.
In 1982, Neil Young (under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey) co-directed – along w/ bud Dean Stockwell – an apocalyptic comedy about a dorky garage mechanic who refuses to let the fact that an impending nuclear war is about to end all life on Earth diminish his dreams of rock and roll stardom.
What? Not weird enough you say?
Okay, the flick – made for $3 million over the course of 4 years - features Dennis Hopper at a time when his daily intake of sundry bad substances had reached a heroic three grams of coke a day, 30 beers, an unknown amount of marijuana, and numerous Cuba libres. Plus, it has Russ Tamblyn, best known as Riff, the leader of the Jets from West Side Story.
What? Still not weird enough?
Alright, because I like you – I wouldn't do this for any other crowd – I'll throw in, as the stars of the flick, Devo.
Here's Neil Young and Devo performing "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)."
Neil Young & Devo
But she would have killed in the extemporaneous speaking portion of the program
Welcome to the inaugural installment of "What horror movie are we today?" Today, we're Audition. From the folks at CNN:
A married Chinese businessman who could no longer afford five mistresses held a competition to decide which one to keep.
But the contest took a fatal turn when one of the women, eliminated for her looks, drove the man and the four other competitors off a cliff, Chinese media reported.
The spurned mistress died and the other passengers were injured, the reports said.
In a way, they were all victims of the ailing global economy:
When the economy soured, the businessman apparently decided to let go of all but one mistress.
He staged a private talent show in May, without telling the women his intentions. An instructor from a local modeling agency judged the women on the way they looked, how they sang and how much alcohol they could hold, the Shanghai Daily said.
The judge knocked out Yu in the first round of the competition based on her looks. Angry, she decided to exact revenge by telling her lover and the four other women to accompany her on a sightseeing trip before she returned to her home province, the media reports said.
It was during the trip that Yu reportedly drove the car off the cliff.
Fan shut down his company after the crash and paid Yu's parents 580,000 yuan ($84,744) as compensation for her death.
R. J. Brown has a article on the bizarre posthumous career of actor and presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth. Brown gives a quick overview of the once popular "Booth's not dead" subgenre of conspiracy theory and the delves into the story of David E. George:
On January 13, 1903 a man in Enid, Oklahoma, by the name of David E. George died. in his last dying statement, the man confessed to his landlord, Mrs. Harper, that he was in fact John Wilkes Booth.
Though few believed the story, enough saw truth (or profit) in it to have George's remains mummified and put on display. And, in true mummy fashion, the mummy of "John Wilkes Booth" carried with it a curse:
The postmortem career of John Wilkes Booth, whether it belongs to true history or folklore, none-the-less provides a fascinating story. The mummy scattered ill-luck around almost as freely as Tutankhamen is alleged to have done. Nearly every showman who exhibited the mummy was subsequently ruined financially. Eight people were killed in the wreck of a circus train in 1902 on which the mummy was traveling. Bill Evans, a wealthy carnival king, who bought the exhibit in later years was financially ruined by continual strokes of bad luck after the purchase. Finis L. Bates, the original owner, wrote a book in 1908 entitled "The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth" which attempted to prove that the mummy was in fact John Wilkes Booth. he suffered much ridicule because of that book and died penniless in 1923. Perhaps the only person to sponsor the mummy and not suffer strokes of financial bad luck was Reverend True Wilson. It must be pointed out that Wilson was largely responsible for originally getting the prohibition law passed. However, shortly after Wilson bought the mummy, the repeal of the prohibition law was made official. (Let each reader make their own determination as to whether this was a cause-effect in this case or not.)
It was that or "Bonnie and Died"
From Dustin via the blog of McNally Jackson, SoHo's finest purveyor of vendible books: "More exciting than James Bond, Mike Hammer, Travis McGee and then some!" Alan Scherstuhl, the man behind the Crap Studies column of Kansas City's The Pitch, presents the pulp-trash overload that is Killinger: The Rainbow/Seagreen Case.
Here's a little taste of the unique literary stylings of Killinger author P. K. Palmer:
"Killinger turned to face her. There was a definite interruption in the pattern of his white shorts."
"Killinger feinted with the start of a kinkeri, a genital knee-kick designed to castrate without use of a knife."
"The man looked at the long splendid legs before him. He looked up past them and past the glorious rounds of the breasts at a wondrous face and long tawny hair. He rose to introduce himself. 'My name is Jeddediah Killinger the Third.'"
Are we not Neil Young?
This may cause a feeling of dread and horror or it might make your day.
In 1982, Neil Young (under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey) co-directed – along w/ bud Dean Stockwell – an apocalyptic comedy about a dorky garage mechanic who refuses to let the fact that an impending nuclear war is about to end all life on Earth diminish his dreams of rock and roll stardom.
What? Not weird enough you say?
Okay, the flick – made for $3 million over the course of 4 years - features Dennis Hopper at a time when his daily intake of sundry bad substances had reached a heroic three grams of coke a day, 30 beers, an unknown amount of marijuana, and numerous Cuba libres. Plus, it has Russ Tamblyn, best known as Riff, the leader of the Jets from West Side Story.
What? Still not weird enough?
Alright, because I like you – I wouldn't do this for any other crowd – I'll throw in, as the stars of the flick, Devo.
Here's Neil Young and Devo performing "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)."
Neil Young & Devo
But she would have killed in the extemporaneous speaking portion of the program
Welcome to the inaugural installment of "What horror movie are we today?" Today, we're Audition. From the folks at CNN:
A married Chinese businessman who could no longer afford five mistresses held a competition to decide which one to keep.
But the contest took a fatal turn when one of the women, eliminated for her looks, drove the man and the four other competitors off a cliff, Chinese media reported.
The spurned mistress died and the other passengers were injured, the reports said.
In a way, they were all victims of the ailing global economy:
When the economy soured, the businessman apparently decided to let go of all but one mistress.
He staged a private talent show in May, without telling the women his intentions. An instructor from a local modeling agency judged the women on the way they looked, how they sang and how much alcohol they could hold, the Shanghai Daily said.
The judge knocked out Yu in the first round of the competition based on her looks. Angry, she decided to exact revenge by telling her lover and the four other women to accompany her on a sightseeing trip before she returned to her home province, the media reports said.
It was during the trip that Yu reportedly drove the car off the cliff.
Fan shut down his company after the crash and paid Yu's parents 580,000 yuan ($84,744) as compensation for her death.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Music: Keepin' it under wraps with The Mummies.
Formed in '88 for the purpose of playing loud, trashy, grade-A garage rock, The Mummies delivered their retro-rock meets noise-assault tunes with the help of an instantly recognizable shtick: they played in full-body suits that made them look like they were wrapped from head-to-toe in bandages. Check out this clip of The Mummies in action below.
Sadly, the boys in bandages threw in the towel back in '92. They've come out of retirement twice before, but the best way to check out the band is on their handful of albums. Mercifully, for the new fan, The Mummies, who played on vintage instruments and recorded only on vinyl when they were a group, have gotten over their legendary loathing of digital technology. You can now get their last album Never Been Caught and their singles collection Death by Unga Bunga!! on CD.
Special Mummified Bonus: here's a clip of the The Mummies rocking away on Devo's "Uncontrollable Urge."
Sadly, the boys in bandages threw in the towel back in '92. They've come out of retirement twice before, but the best way to check out the band is on their handful of albums. Mercifully, for the new fan, The Mummies, who played on vintage instruments and recorded only on vinyl when they were a group, have gotten over their legendary loathing of digital technology. You can now get their last album Never Been Caught and their singles collection Death by Unga Bunga!! on CD.
Special Mummified Bonus: here's a clip of the The Mummies rocking away on Devo's "Uncontrollable Urge."
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