This video “wake” for Kelley started last night at 9pm and will continue until 9pm tonight at the Farley Building, 1669 Colorado Blvd., in Eagle Rock. A spontaneous tribute to Kelley has appeared on Tipton Way in Highland Park featuring a Kelley-esque assemblage of stuffed animals and quilts.

Below, a “commercial” for Kelly’s limited edition “Little Friend” multiple. I have one of these. It’s got a “talk box” that says odd things when you squeeze it, managing to make this piece both ridiculous and slightly sinister at the same time, like a lot of Mike Kelley’s work.
 

Only 1 has won - Kathryn Bigelow in 2011.

Should we be surprised by this when:

The voting population of the Academy is 94% White, 77% Male and 62 is the average age.

Here then, for your consideration are some of the Women Directors Missing from this year’s Oscars.
 

 
With thanks to Kate Muir
 

Despite all of this, it remains unreleased on DVD and Blu Ray, with only a long out of print VHS and Laserdisc release, not to mention the occasional TV airing, to its credit. So why is a film this stellar still semi-obscure? Other than the lack of creative justice that has plagued the arts since the dawn of man, a lot of it could have something to do with the unrelenting grittiness that permeates the screen. This film reeks of the sweaty seediness of a warm New York evening in the late ‘60’s, with our two main anti-heroes, Joe (Tony Musante) and Artie (Martin Sheen), heading towards Times Square after an evening of pool playing and low rent thuggery. The stark black and white cinematography, courtesy of Gerald Hirschfield, who went on to work on Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, gives the film a documentary meets violent pulp novel feel. Everything looks beautiful in the ugliest of ways. In fact, the beauty of The Incident is its complete surrender to the ugliness of the human condition.

All of this is conveyed with our cast of characters, most of whom rank very high on the dysfunctional scale. There’s a working class married couple with child, trying to get to their home in Flushing, with the husband (played by Ed McMahon, in his best role ever, and yes, that includes his turn as a pimp in Slaughter’s Big Rip Off) constantly bitching about money and how he doesn’t want any more kids. Continuing the couple theme, there’s a young pair on a date, with the amorous mook badgering his pretty and hesitant date (a young and unrecognizable Donna Mills) into basically putting out. He’s borderline rapey and she ends up being insecure enough to put up with this horny bastard. (Note to our readers: remember that being alone is always preferable to being in the company of assholes. Always.) There’s another married couple, this time an older, Jewish one, made up of Sam (the legendary Jack Gilford) and Bertha (the equally legendary Thelma Ritter) Beckerman, who are constantly bickering over whether or not their son is a good boy or no-good-nik. Then there’s Harry (Mike Kellin) and Muriel (Jan Sterling) Purvis, a schoolteacher and his status hungry ice queen wife. Our last married couple to board is a young, attractive African American pair, including Joan (Ruby Dee), a peaceful activist and social worker and her boneheaded and overly aggressive husband, Arnold (Brock Peters), who tries to pick a fight with the ticket taker before getting on the subway.

The last pair is two young soldiers, Philip Carmatti (Robert Bannard) and our catalyst hailing from Oklahoma, Felix Teflinger (Beau Bridges). In addition to our pairs and families, there is also a recovering alcoholic trying to get his life back on track, a wino passed out on the subway and a lonely, repressed gay man. All of these people are about to have their lives changed forever when Joe and Artie get on board, making their grand entrance by being as loud and obnoxious as possible.

But what initially seems like two drunken clowns quickly turns sinister, when Joe and Artie start to systematically go to each person and break them down psychologically. They start off messing with the bum, threatening to give him a hot foot, when our recovering alcoholic, Douglas (Gary Merrill) steps in, making himself a target, leaving Joe to retort, “Is he a friend of yours, Mister?” It’s all downhill from there, with the two standouts being the scene where Joe sidles up next to Donna Mills and starts asking her date, ‘Hey Mack, what’s she like in the sack?” The guy, Tony (Victor Arnold), once full of dumb testosterone bravado, is now nervous and shaky, weakly defending her, stating that “she’s a good girl.” Musante, not missing one inch of a beat, eyes him up and down, asking, “If she’s a good girl, what’s she doing with youuuuu?” This culminates with Joe toying with her hair, while she looks frightened and her pussy boyfriend looks away, leading to the line, “Well honey, if you change your mind, look me up. Name’s Joe Ferrone. I’ll know what to do with you. I’LL KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH YOU.” This leaves Artie to respond, all wide eyed and brimming with sarcasm, “Woaaaah Joe!,” resulting with both of them laughing as another relationship is obliterated in the wake.

 
The second one and arguably the most harrowing is Joe’s confrontation with Arnold, whom up to that point, has been enjoying the ugly spectacle, almost drooling with the possibility of violence, while his poor wife looks on, horrified. When he engages Joe, saying “I’m with you guys,” the look on Musante’s face can only be described as shark like, with his dark eyes black and pinpoint predatory. You know this is not going to be pretty and indeed when Joe tells him that, “I wouldn’t be friends with you if you were the last man…..you want to know why? Cause I don’t like black.” It only gets worse from there with Arnold being internally ripped into two, especially once Artie starts harassing Joan, with her crying and pleading with her husband that it’s not worth it. The interesting thing is that it never gets directly physical. In fact, up until the very end, Joe and Artie are never overtly violent. Sure, they are not opposed to using their body language and borderline touching (slight shoving, small grabs, etc), but the biggest damage done is more emotional and mental.

The whole dynamic between Joe and Artie is very fascinating, bringing to mind another villainous and predatory pair from fiction, Dracula and Renfield. Musante is sinister and handsome, roaming around in a pair of stylish and wrinkled dress slacks, matching suit jacket and his dress shirt completely unbuttoned throughout the whole movie. Even though his character is one savvy sociopath, he is charismatic to the extent that you can’t take your eyes off of him anytime he is on screen. Artie, played perfectly by a very young Martin Sheen in his feature film debut, is manic eyed and following Joe’s lead like a crazed magnet. He might not be eating flies but he is the sidekick to Joe in every way. They both are looking for sick thrills, with the difference being that Artie, at his core, is goony while Joe is truly dangerous because he is intellectually on the ball. It is telling that when Felix finally gets fed up enough to actually take a stand, resulting with him beating the crap out of Joe, Artie doesn’t know what to do. It’s almost like he is frozen without his master. Of course, that leaves him with a slightly better excuse than the rest of the car, whom all just sit there, slack-jawed and powerless. As Felix slumps down, bleeding as his buddy finally goes over to check on him, there is the tangible disappointment in his eyes. With Felix, it was not necessarily Joe or Artie themselves that changed him for the worse, but the fact that a car full of people were too apathetic and weak to stand up for their fellow human. Losing faith is painful enough but when it is humanity itself that has let you down, there is no full recovery for that. Some scars never totally heal.

The Incident is one of the most perfect and certainly most cynical, bordering on nihilistic movies ever. The film is unwavering in its mirror to society, revealing the many cracks, pockmarks and bruises within the human condition. It also begs the question of not only why isn’t this film better known and out with a spiffy Criterion-type release, but why isn’t Tony Musante a bigger name? Because that man is absolute dynamite.

The b&w version of the promo has been taken down (boo hiss) so, here it is in color, directed by Bill Gill,
 

 
Via reddit

Featuring The “most host” Michael Holman, Run D.M.C., Shannon, The New York City Breakers, DJ Jimmie Jazz, Kool Moe Dee, Special K of the Treacherous Three and The New York City Breakers, among others, Graffiti Rock is a sweet piece of hip-hop history. The show was way too cool for TV. But perfect for the Internet. Dig it.

On the fashion tip, it’s all here:  Kangols, shelltoe Addidas, name plate chains and belt buckles, Cazals, windbreakers, air-brushed T’s and fedoras.

25 minutes of bliss.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:  Graffiti Rock: Hip-hop storms America’s living rooms in 1984.

Among the many strange rites that exist on our mysterious continent is the age-old tradition among our Black inhabitants of eating dirt. Along with more common place dishes like ham, chicken and potatoes, apparently Black people consider dirt a delicacy that rivals the highly sought after epicurean delight the truffle. But unlike the truffle, dirt is dirt cheap.

This particular clip is from a Japanese bootleg of America Exposed. Imagine the shock among our Asian friends when encountering American’s dirt eating proclivities. Is it no wonder they approach us with awe and suspicion? But are we really so different? After all, both dirt and sushi are eaten raw.
 

Steven Yaeger’s documentary on Waters, Divine Trash, is one of those films that ends up on everyone’s wish list at some point or another, it’s an ‘O, I’d love to see that’ kind-of-a-film, and is as good as you hope. This is especially true if you’re a fan of Mr Waters, and want to see behind the scenes and find out all about his early days as a film-maker, in particular the making of Pink Flamingoes. Director Yaeger more than deserved his Film-Makers’ Trophy for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival for Divine Trash in 1998, as he gets the best out of Waters and knows how to tell a damned good tale. With contributions from Divine, Hal Hartley, Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch, Waters and of course those fabulous Dreamlanders.
 

For fans of krautrock, drone, ambient, and electronic music, Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution is a fascinating history of how some of the most influential music of our times emerged from the boredom and hopelessness of 1960s Germany. The filmmakers take the subtitle of their movie very seriously, and they want to crawl back to find the Big Bang of cultural influences that would make something as innovative as Kraftwerk possible. It’s not an unimportant question, since the ideas the electronic musical collective would establish in their 1970s output would influence everyone from glam rockers like David Bowie and Brian Eno to early hip-hop pioneers and New Wave bands like Duran Duran, and on into today, where techno and arty experimentalists like Radiohead still borrow from the German group’s bag of tricks. Even wuss-rockers Coldplay lifted the hooks for their song “Talk” from “Computer Love,” somehow achieving the impossible and proving one could actually be bigger nerds than the pasty originals, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter. And that Kraftwerk core duo likes to dress up as robots, so you know they’re plenty nerdy.

Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution traces the rise of German music back to the influx of British bands that went to the European country to ply their trade in the early 1960s. (The Beatles most famously cut their teeth in Hamburg nightclubs.) At that point, German youth were looking to establish a new identity that embraced the freedom of the West and finally unshackled them from the shame of their country’s past—much in the same way Pete Townshend has argued that British rock stood in direct defiance of an older generation in England who were always rubbing past glories in the faces of their children. Though German musicians initially copied their British idols, who themselves were copying African American blues musicians, eventually they would want something that was more in tune with their own experience. As Karl Bartos, one of two former Kraftwerk members to participate in this unauthorized film, put it, they knew they weren’t from the Mississippi Delta, so why pretend they were?” - James S. Rich

Comprehensive, informative, and occasionally a tad tedious, Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution is a worthwhile addition to the growing appreciation of Kraftwerk and krautrock in general.
 

Photographer Larry Jandro took these shots of billboards back in the 1970s. This was an era in which record companies had silly money to spend and signs like these could be seen up and down Sunset Boulevard in L.A.

Pop culture at its poppiest.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Voices Of East Anglia