Meet The Jongettes: North Korea’s First Girl Band
Can they compete with our own Supremes? No word on where to download their hit song ‘We Will Defend General Kim Jong Un at the Risk of Our Lives’. The Daily Mail reports on the debut of North Korea’s first girl pop act, who sang, played, and engaged in synchronized swimming:
Meet North Korea’s first girl band. Decked out in military uniform and close to tears, [they] played live in capital Pyongyang to celebrate the 70th birthday of Kim Jong il, who died two months ago.
Vintage Ads Warning Against Recorded Music
After Hollywood began producing films with soundtrack music, a publicity campaign foretold that recorded (”canned”) music, symbolized by hostile robots, would choke the art, color, and humanity out of society. Scoff if you will…but there’s something magical about a live band accompanying a film. Via Paleofuture:
After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, thanks to synchronized sound, the use of live musicians was unnecessary. In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound.
Nothing Happens Unless White Folks Say So
James Mcbride, co-writer of Spike Lee’s ‘Red Hook Summer,’ has penned a pull-no-punches open letter to Hollywood, detailing some serious issues on race and representation in cinema, and what it means to be a storyteller in an overtly commercial studio system. Via Colorlines.
The reviews for Spike Lee’s film “Red Hook Summer” that premiered at Sundance earlier this week have not been good. His comments made after the premiere about Hollywood studios knowing “nothing about black people” made more headlines than the actual film.
An open letter published yesterday by “Red Hook” co-writer, James McBride, is sure to make even more headlines because he takes the film community to task and says “nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens.”
Below is an excerpt from McBride’s open letter on the 40 Acres and a Mule website:
Three days ago, at the premiere of “Red Hook Summer” at The Sundance Film Festival, Spike, usually…
‘Soul Train’ Moments: Young Al Sharpton (Video)
In the news because Soul Train creator Don Cornelius died today. This nineteen-year-old would run for president (see Al after Mr. James Brown, around the 2:30 mark into this clip):
Did Lady Gaga Perform A Satanic Ritual in a London Hotel Room?
So this earlier Disinfo.com post ain’t so nuts after all? This story has been removed from the Independent’s website (cached version in link):
Lady Gaga allegedly left “large amounts of blood” in a hotel bath. The eccentric singer reportedly shocked staff when she checked out of London’s lavish Intercontinental Hotel last summer and they discovered a pool of red liquid in the tub of her suite.
One housekeeper claimed the pop superstar was “bathing in blood as part of a Satanic ritual”.
She told website Truthquake: “Lady Gaga left large amounts of blood in the suite during a stay this summer. The incident was reported to the concierge, who was told to put it out of her mind.”
Other sources believe Gaga could have been using the red liquid as part of a “weird” stage costume or prop.
Eighties New Wave From The Children Of God Cult
The apocalyptic, kidnapping and brainwashing California-based cult known at various times as Children of God, Family International, Family of Love, and the Family apparently stumbled upon a knack for catchy power pop melodies for a brief period in the 1980s. The result was a string of music videos concerning subject matter such as the impending arrival of the Antichrist, and “Cathy Don’t Go (To The Supermarket Today)”, which breezily delves into being implanted with RFID chips, barcodes, and the mark of the beast:
Do You Hate New Music?
Chuck Berry. Photo: Roland Godefroy (CC)
You do? Well in that case you must be a Gee-Bee. Jim Fusilli explains for the Wall Street Journal:
It’s 1955 and you’re in a record shop. The proprietor puts on “Maybellene” by a newcomer named Chuck Berry. You’re enjoying it, but a fellow customer saunters over: “That’s nothing more than Roy Acuff’s ‘Ida Red’ with different words,” he says, pointing out that Acuff cut his track in 1939. “I wouldn’t call that original.”
Or it’s 1963 and you’re listening to “Girl From the North Country” from “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Someone says, “Dylan didn’t write that. That’s ‘Scarborough Fair.’ It’s on Shirley Collins’s ‘False True Lovers,’” he adds, referring to the 1959 recording. “Dylan put new words to Martin Carthy’s arrangement, that’s all.”
Or it’s 2012 and there is a multitude of young singers, songwriters and musicians trying to develop their own sound. They’re not quite there…
Psychopathy: A Misunderstood Personality Disorder
Via ScienceDaily:
Psychopathic personalities are some of the most memorable characters portrayed in popular media today. These characters, like Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, Frank Abagnale Jr. from Catch Me If You Can and Alex from A Clockwork Orange, are typically depicted as charming, intriguing, dishonest, guiltless, and in some cases, downright terrifying.
But scientific research suggests that psychopathy is a personality disorder that is widely misunderstood.”Psychopathy tends to be used as a label for people we do not like, cannot understand, or construe as evil,” notes Jennifer Skeem, Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. Skeem, Devon Polaschek of Victoria University of Wellington, Christopher Patrick of Florida State University, and Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University are the authors of a new monograph focused on understanding the psychopathic personality that will appear in the December issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association…
Subliminal Messages Explored in Mass Media (Video)
Infowars reporter Darrin McBreen reports on subliminal messaging in television, movies and magazines:
Giant Godzilla-Shaped Christmas Tree in Shopping Mall
John Farrier writes on Neatorama:
Allegedly, this is a picture of a Godzilla-shaped Christmas tree that appeared in the Aqua City Odaiba shopping mall.
Within minutes, it destroyed the mall.
So, in retrospect, it was a really bad idea …
The Lesbian Vampire Story That Inspired “Dracula”
In composing his novel Dracula, Bram Stoker drew heavily upon an earlier, more seedy story in which a young woman succumbs to the attractions of an undead countess. Victorian Gothic reviews J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla:
First published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was destined to become the universally-acknowledged masterwork of vampire fiction, but it was not, by any means, the first of its kind. Stokers genius consisted not in having invented the modern vampire monster, but in the imaginative way he synthesized and expanded upon the ideas that prior authors had already been exploring.
One of these was J. Sheridan Le Fanu, whose 1872 tale Carmilla provided a template for many of Dracula’s best-remembered characters and motifs, including the occult doctor (Dr. Hesselius), and the lonely Gothic castle set in a barbarous region of Europe. Many of the proper names in Dracula, in fact, are direct allusions to Carmilla’s characters and settings: “Karnstein” became “Carfax,” “Reinfeldt” became “Renfield,” and so on. Le Fanu’s protagonist,…
Cosmic Cycles of Violence: John Lennon and Dimebag Darrell Gunned Down on December 8
Courtesy of Brandt Hardin
From RockStarMartyr.net:
Pantera’s furious music was propelled by guitarist Darrell Abbott’s maniacal claws ripping across a Washburn fretboard. The music was aggression distilled, warfare on vinyl, the hellish harmonics of testosterone-pumped teenagers smashing beer bottles and crucifixes, the pentatonic expression of sociopathic sexual impulse turned loose on loose pussy, power chords and possession, amplifiers and alcohol, whammy bars and whimsical youth. Pantera was pissed. And yet, no one remembers the jolly Dimebag Darrell being particularly pissed in day-to-day life. Not nearly as pissed as John Lennon was, anyway.
Behind the lead Beatle’s circular granny glasses and tireless promotion of peace burned a fury unmatched by most metal enthusiasts. Lennon was pissed at his parents, pissed at his bandmates, pissed at his stay-at-home wife, pissed at Her Majesty the Queen, pissed at America’s war machine, pissed at the world for not giving peace a chance. Lennon was fucking hostile. But…
Is Lisbeth Salander a Cyberpunk Hero?
Author Sasha Mitchell compares how cyberpunk is defined by Stieg Larsson, by Hollywood, and by Google. Mitchell compares Lisbeth Salander to William Gibson’s heroines (arguing that she’s a combination of Gibson’s female and male protagonists), but saying the ultimate message of her archetype is “screw labels”. (”Does she really need to be sexualized to the extent … Hollywood illustrators would have her be?”)
In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth “spreads resistant messages despite powerful mechanisms of top-down control,” which is ultimately a more empowering message than what you get from searching “cyberpunk” on Google Images. (”Note, if you will, how many topless, pantsless, or pigtailed schoolgirls you see here.”) But even Gibson himself once argued the cutting-edge of cyberpunk is too unfamiliar to be defined.
Six Fictional Drugs With Unintended Side Effects
Substance D, Soma, Melange – they’ve all been part of our culture for decades. Gabe Habash looks at the side effects for Publishers Weekly:
In fiction and in reality, medicine is designed and set up to operate with the best of intentions, to eliminate pain and disease and the things that push us toward mortality. In theory. In practice, we know that there are holes in this theory. But for all the problems in the reality of medicine, at least we don’t have to worry about these 6 fictional drugs, which were designed to make the world a better place, but failed in all types of spectacular ways.
1. Altruizine from “Altruizine” by Stanislaw Lem
Unintended Side Effect: It makes people too altruistic.
Lem, one of the most widely-read sci-fi writers in the world, wrote a short story within his collection The Cyberiad about Altruizine, a metapsychotropic drug that causes the user to feel the pains and…
