| Dangerous Minds (2025)

02.01.2016

11:52 am

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When you watch Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, which is set in 16th-century Japan, you are not exactly inundated with the stunning power of female warriors brandishing katanas—it’s a bit of a ソーセージ-fest, but such women did exist.

These warriors, known as onna bugeisha, find their earliest precursor in Empress Jingū, who in 200 A.D. led an invasion of Korea after her husband Emperor Chūai, the fourteenth emperor of Japan, perished in battle. Legend has it that she accomplished this feat without shedding a drop of blood. She used her position to bring about economic and social change and in the late 19th century became the first woman to be featured on a Japanese banknote.

Onna bugeisha generally eschewed the katana swords used by their male counterparts. instead opting for the naginata, a versatile polearm with a curved blade at the tip, a longer weapon that permitted the female warriors to remain effective against larger and heavier opponents. In addition, onna-bugeishas also used ranged weaponry such as bows and arrows.

Tomoe Gozen, Nakano Takeko, and Hōjō Masako are famous examples of onna bugeisha, although some of their exploits may belong more to lore than to history. Tomoe was active in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. She fought in the Battle of Awazu, in which she beheaded Honda no Moroshige of Musashi and killed Uchida Ieyoshi and for escaping capture by Hatakeyama Shigetada.

In The Tale of the Heike, it is written that

Tomoe was especially beautiful, with white skin, long hair, and charming features. She was also a remarkably strong archer, and as a swordswoman she was a warrior worth a thousand, ready to confront a demon or a god, mounted or on foot. She handled unbroken horses with superb skill; she rode unscathed down perilous descents.

Nakano Takeko lived in the 19th century. While she was leading a charge against Imperial Japanese Army troops of the Ōgaki Domain in south-central Japan, she was shot in the chest. Knowing her remaining time on earth to be short, Takeko asked her sister, Yūko, to cut her head off and have it buried rather than permit the enemy to seize it as a trophy. It was taken to Hōkai Temple and buried underneath a pine tree.





More impressive onna bugeisha after the jump…...

02.01.2016

10:24 am

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I didn’t know the majority of The Neverending Story was shot in Germany (except for a few scenes which were shot in Vancouver, Canada and in Almerín, Spain). Apparently it was the most expensive German film ever made until then.

The reason I’m bringing up where the film was shot is because there’s a tourist attraction in Munich, Germany that has all of the props and models from The Neverending Story. It’s called Bavaria Films—similar to Universal Studios’s themeparks—where folks can ride Falkor or the snail and see all the stuff used in film. I’ve found a few photos to give you an idea of what the attraction is like. Kind of cool, right?

If you find yourself in Munich, Germany, you may want to check this out.

More after the jump…

02.01.2016

10:17 am

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An early photo of The Star Club

Since getting their start back in Nagoya, Japan in the spring of 1977, Japanese punk band, The Star Club, has put out more than 30 records (their most recent Max Breakers was released in December of 2015), and despite numerous lineup changes over the decades, the band continues to tour and perform with original vocalist, Hikage.


Hikage, the long-running vocalist for The Star Club, 1978

There were no shortage of punk bands in Japan during the late 70s and early 80s such the influential Blue Hearts, Anarchy, The Stalin, Crack the Marian, noise-punks Outo and hardcore punks, Gauze. Obviously, most of these groups got their inspiration from the punk that was happening thousands of miles away in the UK and New York, as the title of this post alludes to. Over the years, the rotating members of The Star Club even have even used mashups of the names of members of the Sex Pistols and Clash as their own. At one time back in the day, the bass player was known as “Paul Vicious,” the drummer called himself “Topper Cook,” and the guitarist became “Steve Cat Jones.”



From heavy metal to art, I’m a huge fan of the creative forces that emanate to my ears and eyes by way of Japan. And watching videos of The Star Club performing not only their own music back in the 80s, but the music of their punk idols, pioneers like Sham 69, The Clash and the Ramones, pretty much made my day. I found it especially enjoyable to watch the 80s version of Star Club vocalist Hikage swirling around while spewing out “Bodies” in a shirt not unlike Johnny Lydon’s straight-jacket-looking muslin “Destroy” shirt.


The Star Club “Aggressive Teens/Bodies” Australian release, 1986

If you dig what follows, I have some good news for you as many of The Star Club’s recordings can be found on Ebay and Discogs. I’ve also posted videos of the Star Club covering “Borstal Breakout” by Sham 69, The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Bodies,” by the Sex Pistols, and “I Fought the Law” as famously covered by The Clash (which is a part of the performance in first video below). The first video also includes a short amusing interview with the band, which was recorded at a show The Star Club did under the alias of “Anarchy in the J.A.P” in support of their fifteenth anniversary and cover album of the same name in 1992.

The Star Club performing as “Anarchy in the J.A.P” in the early 90s. A brief interview with the band pops up just before their cover of Sham 69’s 1979 single, “If the Kids are United”

More from the Star Club, after the jump…

02.01.2016

08:44 am

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‘80s punk band, The Dicks, are the subject of a documentary being released this month titled The Dicks From Texas, as well as a related compilation tribute album. I recently had the opportunity to screen the documentary, which can be pre-ordered here, and it rekindled my love affair with The Dicks—who, in my opinion, are a top shelf American punk act, worthy of as much attention and admiration as Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, or Minor Threat.


Head Dick, Gary Floyd

Hailing from Austin, Texas at a time when the town wasn’t quite the bastion of liberal hipsterocity it is today, the self-proclaimed “commie faggot band” featured singer Gary Floyd, a flamboyantly queer, communist behemoth who often performed early gigs in drag. Floyd’s larger-than-life stage presence wasn’t mere shock value, he had the pipes to back it up. His, please forgive this played-out term, soulful vocals lent an impassioned urgency to the band’s sharp trebly guitar attack. In my opinion, no other singer from the “hardcore” era can touch him. Bad Brains’ HR and Fear’s Lee Ving may sit in his court, but Gary Floyd is the king.

The band began humbly as not even a band, but as a “poster band”—a fake name put on posters as sort of an “art piece.”

The Dicks from Texas producer, Cindy Marabito:

The Dicks started when singer Gary Floyd returned to Austin, TX after seeing the Sex Pistols in San Francisco. He started claiming he had a band called the Dicks. This was known as a “poster band.” Fliers were made with fake shows and non-existent groups.

Gary Floyd would go around town putting up posters advertising The Dicks with crazy ass pictures and promises that the ‘first ten people with guns drink for free.’ It was a wild and crazy time in Austin, back when ‘keeping Austin weird’ got you thrown in jail.

The title cut from The Dicks’ first single, “Hate the Police,” released in 1980 is one of their most well-known songs, but everything they recorded in their original incarnation from 1980 to 1986 is gold. The Peace? EP, the split live LP with the Big Boys, the Kill From the Heart LP, and the These People LP are all monsters and I’d be torn on trying to recommend any one of those over another. Alternative Tentacles put out a compilation titled Dicks: 1980-1986—that’s a good “greatest hits” type starting place.



If you’re among the Dangerous Minds readership that has somehow never been exposed to the glory of The Dicks, I have a few favorites I’d like to share that have been mixtape staples of mine for decades, after the jump…

01.30.2016

03:18 pm

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Fifty years ago—in the perfect pop culture year of 1966—Woody Allen did his first film project for American International Pictures, home to Roger Corman, monsters, bikers, acid heads and futuristic Death Races looking way forward to the year 2000. I say film project as he didn’t make his first film, he sort of stole it! Legally.

Basically Allen took the Japanese action film International Secret Police: Key of Keys and re-dubbed the dialogue, changing the plot to make it revolve around a secret egg salad recipe being fought over by rival James Bond-type spy characters. The film became What’s Up Tiger Lily? and was quite well received. The idea had been done before of course, on a smaller scale by Rocky and Bullwinkle creator Jay Ward for his Fractured Flickers TV series in 1963, and surely others had toyed with the concept, but not in a feature length film. The opportunities for juvenile, MAD Magazine humor were endless and very funny.

What’s Up Tiger Lily? created a model that has been followed by some of the funniest people in history. Here is the trailer in which Allen explains to an unsuspecting public what it is that he has done. (The entire film can also be found on YouTube.)

The next one of these dubbed comedies that comes to mind was in fact done by two of the funniest people to ever grace this planet, Phillip Proctor and the late Peter Bergman of Firesign Theatre fame. In 1979 Proctor and Bergman took clips from 1940s Republic Serials and overdubbed and rewrote an extremely stoned cliffhanger entitled J-Men Forever, starring themselves in newly filmed black and white bits that were inserted into the insane mess of rearranged reality. To top this off they used modern loud rock n roll music for the soundtrack.

To quote the blurb under the YouTube clip:

J-Men Forever became the signature for Night Flight’s stoned comedy audience in the 1980’s. This ultimate late night chronic high comedy was the most demanded rerun for the entire 8 years Night Flight was on the USA Network.

After the jump, experience the inspired insanity of ‘The Rusty James Show’...

01.30.2016

12:44 pm

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The Black Klansman

Forty years before Chappelle’s Show made the joke, a black man spends his nights in a most curious manner…

This is a sampling from a private collection of rare, massive 40” x 60” posters that were printed on cardstock for drive-In movie theaters. More posters and related merchandise are online at hautecampe.com (“Archeaologists of the Strange”). All are for sale at auction until February 8, when the bidding closes.

Haute Campe offers a collection of original rare, vintage film posters from the 1940s-1970s originating mostly from drive-ins and grindhouse theaters. Most of the posters went through a single distributor called National Screen Service, hence the “property of N.S.S.” at the bottom of 99% of the movie posters printed in the 20th century! While many posters were destroyed by the elements and others were pulled off the wall by collectors, a great many returned to the distributor’s archives and piled up for many many years.

We were fortunate enough to be able to acquire a large part of the archives and the treasures were fantastic, including rarely-seen posters that were for small run promotions and exceedingly impossible to find sizes like the gorgeous and massive 40” x 60” silkscreens created for drive-in movie theaters.

This is just a selection from the first part of the alphabet…


Blood and Black Lace

Mario Bava directed this 1964 film that created the template for the “body count” slasher films of the 1980s.


Blood Bath

A 1966 stinker that started out in Yugoslavia as a spy film and—being judged unreleasable—had extra sequences filmed in Venice, California and was re-edited as a horror movie.

Many, many more movie posters, after the jump…

01.29.2016

05:22 pm

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This marvelous bit of playful fetish art comes from the skillful hand of Dirk Vermin, who tossed off this comic book in 1992 in a limited run of 1,000 copies. Vermin is a tattoo artist who works out of Las Vegas and I can think of no better endorsement of his work than this comic. Today he is probably best known for the A&E reality series Bad Ink.

Over the course of 20-odd pages, Bettie (whose name is rendered as “Betty” throughout) flirts with, is spanked by, threatens to whip, and generally cavorts with many of the highly recognizable figures from 20th-century pop culture, including James Bond, Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock, Norman Bates, Marvin the Martian, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, King Kong, Adam West’s Batman, and so forth.

All I can say is “Wholly not safe for work, Batman!”





More Bettie and friends after the jump…

01.29.2016

11:51 am

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A 23-year-old Peter Gabriel of Genesis in costume as “The Watcher in the Skies,” 1973

During the tour for their cosmic 1974 double record, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (the subject of an excellent book by the same name by Kevin Holm-Hudson), Peter Gabriel and his many different theatrical personalities took center stage. But that wasn’t the first time Peter Gabriel tripped his bandmates out with his on-stage personas.

In an 2012 interview, Gabriel recounted how the audience reacted the first time he appeared on stage in his wife’s dress, and a custom made fox head back in 1972 during Genesis’ tour for their album Foxtrot.

With the costumes, I started wearing bat wings and stuff, and getting a little more outlandish, and then on Foxtrot I wore the fox head and the red dress. My wife, Jill, had a red Ossie Clark dress which I could just about get into, and we had a fox head made. The first time we tried it was in a former boxing ring in Dublin, and there was just a shocked silence.

Peter Gabriel as “The Fox” during the tour for the 1972 album, ‘Foxtrot’ with his wife’s red dress and a custom made fox head

When it comes to how the other members of Genesis felt about Gabriel’s getups, he said that “some of them hated it” (I’m looking at you Phil Collins). According to Gabriel, none of the members of Genesis knew what “clothing” he had packed in his suitcase for the six-month Lamb tour, until he arrived to rehearsals. After the last performance of the tour, Gabriel left the band.


Peter Gabriel as “Old Man Henry” during a performance of “The Musical Box” from the album ‘Nursery Cryme’

If for some reason you’re not acquainted with this era of Genesis (which is perfectly understandable if you are of a certain age), the following images of a young Peter Gabriel, will probably blow your mind (man). Even if you are long-running fan of the band, it’s nearly impossible to not admire Gabriel’s pioneering weirdness, and chameleon-like ability to look like anyone but himself.


Peter Gabriel as the deformed “Slipperman” (Phil Collins’ most hated costume of the ‘Lamb Lies Down’ tour)


Peter Gabriel as “Britannia” 1973

More after the jump…

01.29.2016

11:35 am

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Even among the very strange artists who pioneered industrial music, Foetus was an outlier. While that project—the nom de noise of J.G. Thirlwell, a/k/a Clint Ruin a/k/a about a zillion other names—indulged deeply in that movement’s difficult, grating sounds and nihilism that approached absurdity, Thirlwell never bound himself to the genre like industrial’s grimly serious noise explorers or its goth-crossover synth mopers. Foetus, while expressing a self-loathing impossible in any organism with an intact survival instinct, also expressed a wicked and wry sense of humor, not only in the one-man-band’s name, which varied from release to release (You’ve Got Foetus on Your Breath, Foetus Interruptus, Scraping Foetus off the Wheel, Foetus All-Nude Revue… this list could go on for awhile), but in the music itself, which cheekily incorporated elements from classical music, showtunes, film noir and spaghetti western incidental music, even doo-wop.

Check out the incredible and representative “Enter the Exterminator,” from the 1985 album Nail (Thirlwell beat the Jesus Lizard to the punch on the all-LP-titles-will-be-four-letters-long schtick), chosen because it blew my mind when I was a kid, and it got me started on exploring the industrial program as much as anything off of Micro-Phonies or Twitch. The at-once growled and whispered lyrics snared me, but it was the music that compelled me to the record store. NSFW for bad words, jobber.

Not one to sit still, in the later half of the ‘80s Thirlwell formed the duo Wiseblood with Swans drummer Roli Mossimann, which was about as bludgeoning a project as you’re imagining, and The Flesh Volcano with Soft Cell’s Mark Almond. In 1988 he released the absolute must-have Stinkfist, a collaborative EP with no-wave heroine Lydia Lunch. That EP features two tracks of tribal-drumming insanity plus the ten minute “Meltdown Oratorio,” an admirable nightmare of Neubauten-esque slow-burn menace spiked with still more manic tribal percussion. Even if Lydia Lunch monologues aren’t your thing, this is really fucking great. (If I even need to tell you that a Lydia Lunch piece is NSFW for profanity, um, hi, welcome to Dangerous Minds, we hope you like what you find here.)

More mayhem from Clint Ruin, after the jump…

01.29.2016

11:15 am

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Gee Vaucher was a founding member of the anarcho-punk collective that produced Crass. She was responsible for most of the arresting cover art for their albums, although she wasn’t the one who came up with the band’s ingenious logo; Penny Rimbaud’s friend Dave King came up with that one.

Crass was one of the first bands to use bewildering back-projected films and video collages to enhance their stage performances. Vaucher was the woman responsible for those, and watching them today, it’s startling how little they’ve dated since their creation. The anger and the need to fuck with people, that seems very late 1970s, but the fast-cutting use of grainy archival footage seems perfectly contemporary today and indeed would seem vital and relevant at really any point between then and now.

Vaucher’s Crass-related imagery is collected in the volume Crass Art and Other Pre Post-Modernist Monsters.



Semi Detached collects all of Vaucher’s Crass-related videos for the the first seven years of Crass’ output. The full title is Semi Detached: CRASS performance videos 1977-1984.

The first third or so of the hour-long video features “Reality Whitewash,” “Shaved Women: 1979,” “Mother Earth,” “Mother Love” (the opening credits have it as “Smother Love”), and “Bomb Plus Tape (Well Forked—But Not Dead).” Then the rest is dedicated to videos for the entirety of Crass’ 1983 album Yes Sir, I Will.

As we head into the last days of campaigning before the Iowa caucus, enjoy this very different political message…

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Our Wedding’: Crass’s magnificent romance-mag prank
Pranksters make a Crass logo crop circle, oblivious ‘astronomologer’ attempts to interpret it