| Dangerous Minds (2025)

10.06.2009

11:41 am

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Radley Metzger (no relation, although I wish he was!) made super slick “European art house” softcore erotica in the Sixties and early Seventies. His high class skin flicks, he said, were philosophically inspired by Orson Welles and Jorge Luis Borges. Decadent feasts for the eyes, visually they seemed influenced by the camera of Michelangelo Antonioni and featured sumptuous soundtracks by composers like Piero Piccioni, Georges Auric and Oscar-winner Georges Delerue. Never before or since has softcore porn been given such a glossy, lustrous, quality art-directed look and feel.



The Lickerish Quartet (“an erotic duet in four players”) from 1970 is one of Metzger’s best. Visually dazzling and sophisticated, it looks like something straight out of a Vogue layout. No less of an expert than Andy Warhol called it “an outrageously kinky masterpiece.”



Beautiful people and beautiful surroundings were key elements in Metzger’s films. The Lickerish Quartet mostly takes place in a lush castle owned by a rich, bored couple. The watch a stag film. Later they go to a carnival and one of the drivers (Silvana Venturelli) in a speed race turns out to be the woman in the movie. They decide to invite her back to their Baroque castle for a party, then humiliate her with the film, except that when they watch it again, she’s not in it. One by one she seduces the father, mother and son. Things are not what they seem.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

The Tenth Victim: Kitsch Klassic

Vampire Lesbians of Hammer

10.06.2009

12:42 am

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10.05.2009

05:14 pm

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For centuries, various controversies (carbon dating, image creation) have dogged the Shroud of Turin. But Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, chimed in today with what he thinks is the final word.

An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ’s burial cloth is a medieval fake.

The shroud, measuring 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man some believers say is Christ.

Carbon dating tests by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona in 1988 caused a sensation by dating it from between 1260 and 1390. Skeptics said it was a hoax, possibly made to attract the profitable medieval pilgrimage business. But scientists have thus far been at a loss to explain how the image was left on the cloth.

Garlaschelli reproduced the full-sized shroud using materials and techniques that were available in the middle ages. They placed a linen sheet flat over a volunteer and then rubbed it with a pigment containing traces of acid. A mask was used for the face.

The pigment was then artificially aged by heating the cloth in an oven and washing it, a process which removed it from the surface but left a fuzzy, half-tone image similar to that on the Shroud. He believes the pigment on the original Shroud faded naturally over the centuries. They then added blood stains, burn holes, scorches and water stains to achieve the final effect.

Images (above and below) from Garlaschelli’s recreated shroud are on the right.

In Reuters: Italian Scientist Reproduces The Shroud Of Turin

10.05.2009

04:53 pm

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As the school’s website touts, it’s not for the fainthearted, but sex-club bouncers might find the admissions process particularly breezy!

The Rogue Film School will be in the form of weekend seminars held by Werner Herzog in person at varying locations and at infrequent intervals.

The number of participants will be limited.

Locations and dates will be announced on this website and Werner Herzog’s website: www.wernerherzog.com approximately 12 weeks in advance.

The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.

The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature.

The focus of the seminars will be a dialogue with Werner Herzog, in which the participants will have their voice with their projects, their questions, their aspirations.

Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; they may be shown and discussed as well. Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?

Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self-reliance.

Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list: if possible, read Virgil’s “Georgics,” read “Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber,” The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular the Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo “True History of the Conquest of New Spain”.

Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.

For more information on becoming a student, see: Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School

10.05.2009

03:38 pm

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It’s commonly known that Frank Lloyd Wright served as inspiration for the Howard Roark character in Ayn Rand‘s The Fountainhead. Last weekend, though, the LA Times made note of the lesser-known correspondence between the two that preceded that book’s publication.

Wright, it seems, wasn’t initially eager to meet with Rand (maybe he sensed, even then, their ideological differences?), but their letter-writing “evolved into a robust exchange of ideas as well as this: a preliminary rendering of a ‘cottage studio,’ in colored pencil on paper, that the legendary architect crafted for Rand.” The rendering (above) apparently left quite an impression on her:

The house you designed for me is magnificent. I gasped when I saw it. It is the particular kind of sculpture in space which I love and which nobody but you has ever been able to achieve. I was not very coherent when I told you what kind of house I wanted—and I had the impression that you did not approve of what I said. Yet you designed exactly the house I hoped to have. The next time somebody accuses you of cruelty and inconsideration toward clients, refer them to me.

My views on Rand’s Objectivism aside, it’s too bad the cottage studio was never constructed. While preparing for the filming of King Vidor’s The Fountainhead, Rand flirted with moving out to Los Angeles, but ultimately decided she was better off in Manhattan.

One of Rand’s early letters went to great lengths to assure Wright that her Roark was not about him per se, “My hero is not you. I do not intend to follow in the novel the events of your life and career.”

Well, if Rand had followed Wright’s career, it would certainly have been interesting to see how her novel might have accommodated the below ‘56 clip from What’s My Line. In it, the master architect plays the game show’s “mystery guest.” (That’s Rat Packer and JFK brother-in-law Peter Lawford blindfolded on the right.)

In the LAT: Frank Lloyd Wright Sketch On Exhibit

10.05.2009

11:27 am

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Rich Fulcher, the cheerful madman you’ve laughed yourself senseless at in Snuff Box and The Mighty Boosh flips off Los Angeles (its trees, its pay phones, its landmarks) in this promo video for his new book Tiny Acts of Rebellion coming soon to a bookstore near you!

Next join him in London to fuck off Big Ben!

(Photo of Rich Fulcher and Richard Metzger taken by Xeni Jardin at the shoot for an upcoming Boing Boing Video feature on Fulcher. The video was shot by longtime Dangerous Minds pal Eric Mittleman)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

10.04.2009

10:30 pm

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American Gothic Parodies says, “A collection of parodies of the 1930 Grant Wood painting, American Gothic, based on my grandmother’s collection. She used to tape them up in her basement and asked me to share them with the world.”

American Gothic Parodies

10.04.2009

02:58 pm

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In the past year, I’ve been starting to delve into the quirky jazz sub-genre of Afrofuturism. One of the first posts I made on this blog when we launched was about organist Larry Young’s insane 1973 jazzspacerock monolith Lawrence of Newark. I’ve also told you of my love for Parliament-Funkadelic. The whole idea of outer space “Black Power” style sci-fi theorizings—especially if there are costumes and polemic involved—is something I give a big thumbs up to. After searching out more of Young’s music (look out for the bootleg of him jamming with Jimi Hendrix and the Love, Cry, Want album, recorded live at the Washington Mall during a concert that Nixon had the plug pulled on) and listening to his work obsessively in the car for months, I began to make tentative (and not for the first time) inroads to the unbelievably vast—over 1000 songs—catalog of the great Sun Ra.

It’s not easy to find an entry point into Sun Ra’s sprawling oeuvre. Every Sun Ra fan has a strong opinion and no one agrees on where to start. I’ve digested Jazz in Silhouette, Space is the Place, Secrets of the Sun, The Singles, The Nubians of Plutonia and the Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra—the ones you are “supposed” to start off with—but I find that the Transparency label’s Lost Reel Collection of rare Sun Ra recordings contain some of the most astonishing material I’ve heard thus far. I’m one of those people who likes the really “difficult” Miles Davis material (circa 1970 to 1975) so the futher out, usually, the better as far as I am concerned to jazz. According to a rock snob friend of mine who would know, the cache of tapes Transparency has access to are like no other material found in the official released Sun Ra canon. If you read the reviews, Sun Ra fanatics are going nuts over these discs, but always with the caveat that they’re for advanced Sun Ra listeners only. I’m not so sure that’s true because I’m really only now getting deeper into his music and these albums simply blew me away.

The first one I listened to was the fourth disc in the series, Dance of the Living Image. The tape it was mastered from was found in a box marked “Mexico City, 1/26/74” but instead it’s probably a rehearsal tape from San Francisco. The tape gets turned on and off abruptly, off when the things start to fall apart, then on again when inspiration flows and the musicians start to gel again. Hypnotic, syncopated, lumbering—almost dark—when the members of the group lock in, they seem to go through a psychic mind meld, especially during the final 17-minute long jam on disc one.

The Creator of the Universe, volume one in the series, I listened to next. The first CD (many of the Lost Reel Collections are two disc sets) is a live recording at a San Francisco warehouse with a long impassioned black power speech, with a blaring call and response from the horn section. It’s totally wild and eccentric. Sun Ra improvises brilliantly on a Moog synthesizer. Some of it sounds like PiL’s Metal Box or Krautrock. The second disc is a recording of a lecture given by Sun Ra at UC Berkeley in 1971. It’s out of the ballpark amazing. In one part of the speech, Sun Ra explains how the different races have different vibrations and different innate born talents and things they can each do better than the other races and why we should all respect one another, because of our differences as much as our commonality. It’s sweet, cosmic, funny, deep and everything you would hope a lecture by Sun Ra would be.

I could go on about this further, but why not sample a little Sun Ra yourself? Here’s an audio blog with links to a lot of Sun Ra material. And here are a couple of fantastic Sun Ra clips found on YouTube:

10.03.2009

08:57 pm

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Rock archaeologists take note of this gallery of 21 never before seen photographs of the Beatles and Rolling Stones:

The behind-the-scenes, intimate and unguarded shots, have been unearthed after spending 45 years in a duffel bag of The Beatles and Rolling Stone’s former tour manager.

The collection of more than 50 pictures, which are being revealed to the public for the first time are part of 3,500 taken by Bob Bonis, the US tour manager who helped organise the so-called British invasion of America in the Swinging Sixties.

Beatles and Rolling Stones photographs: New shots of John Lennon and Mick Jagger found

10.03.2009

02:42 am

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About Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, ” Born in England in 1962 and raised in Nigeria, Yinka Shonibare currently lives and works in London, where he has gained international attention by exploring issues of race and class through a range of media that includes sculpture, painting, photography, and installation art. Adopting a richly complex, unconventional approach, Shonibare lampoons the concept of achieving status through what might be called cultural authenticity. His works, simultaneously innocent and subversive, address a range of cultural and historical issues and, in the process, blur the boundaries of design, ethnography, and contemporary art.”