A bunch of goofy holy roller-types confront some Hooters waitresses about their sins. Incredible. FF to 1:30 when the action begins.
Holy Preachers preach to Hooter girls who want to confront the righteousness. In this video, the Hooters girls actually come out to meet the preachers. Listen as one of them claims that her dad is a “pastor” and that she is not going to Hell because she asked Jesus into her heart! Her dad is leading her straight to Hell! What a dad and pastor he is!
Scenes from Road to the Stars and 2001, side-by-side.
Film-maker Alessandro Cima has posted some fascinating clips from Pavel Klushantsev’s classic 1957 Russian science-fiction film The Road to the Stars, over at Candlelight Stories. Forget Kubrick’s 2001 for as Cima explains, Klushantsev’s masterpiece was the first and arguably the better of the two films.
Pavel Klushantsev’s 1957 film, Road to the Stars, features astoundingly realistic special effects that were an inspiration and obvious blueprint for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ten years later. The film is an extended form of science education, building upon existing 1950s technology to predict space exploration of the future. The sequences with astronauts in zero gravity are incredibly realistic. The second excerpt from the film features the construction of and life aboard a space station in earth orbit that is not only convincing but also beautiful. There are several scenes with space station dwellers using videophones that anticipate the famous Kubrick videophone scene.
Watching these short clips now, it is no surprise that The Road to the Stars has been described as:
...one of the most amazing special effects accomplishments in film history.
However, Klushantsev faced considerable difficulties in making such an effects-heavy film, at one point being asked by one Communist Party bureaucrat why he didn’t make a film about factory manufacturing or beetroot production, but as Klushantsev explained:
The Road to the Stars proved to me I did the right thing thing, one must envisage the future. People should be able to see life can be changed radically.
Klushantsev started work on the film in 1954, and liaised thru-out with Russia’s leading space program scientists, Mikhail Tikhonravov and Sergey Korolyov, to achieve accuracy with his own designs - from space suits, to cabin temperature and rocket design. Indeed, everything in Klushantsev’s film had to at least have an element of possiblity and it is this factual core that gave Klushantsev’s film a documentary-like feel. The film coincided with the launch of Russia’s robotic spacecraft, Sputnik, and led the previously antagonistic Russian bureaucrats to “foam at the mouth” and demand The Road to the Stars include shots of of the satellite in the film.
Bonus clips, plus short making-of documentary, after the jump…
Miniature riots in jam jars titled “Small World Re-enactments” by British artist and KLF member, James Cauty. Saddly, It appears all the mini-riot sculptures are sold.
Soul singer and percussionist Vin Cardinal left his home in Trinidad and moved to Sweden where he became a pop star in the 1960s. With his band The Queens, Cardinal toured throughout Europe and recorded several albums which were regional hits. In the early 1970s, he moved to the States and signed with Motown but never attained the popularity Stateside that he enjoyed in Sweden.
Vin is still alive and playing the club circuit.
This beautifully shot 1967 video of Vin and The Queens performing at the Bilzen Jazz And Rock Festival in Belgium is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in awhile. The Queens are divine and Vin is a knockout of a singer. Man, would I love to see a re-union gig.
The video credit gets Vin’s name wrong. It’s Cardinal, not “Cardinale.”
Seattle music emporium Jive Time Records has created an online gallery of “defaced, defiled, degraded, and some downright deranged, altered album covers.” It’s called Deface Value and you can visit it here.
Vintage LP’s provide the canvas; ball point pens, pencils, sharpies, fingernail polish, stickers, and scissors provide the medium. In the case of the many covers discovered second hand, we’ll never know what provided the inspiration, adding to the artwork’s mystique. This gallery features covers from my personal collection as well as others found or altered by readers.”
Blashemy or art? You be the judge. As for me, nothing is sacred… but album covers come close.
Peter Haskett and Raymond Huffman, the screaming, swearing borderline insane duo of San Francisco drunks who had their violent and idiotic arguments immortalized in multimedia as “Shut Up Little Man!” have now had a documentary film made about them called Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure which premieres at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend.
If you are, as yet, unaware, of the (perhaps dubious, but I’d say sublime) pleasures of the Shut Up Little Man!, er… legend, here is how the recordings came to be, described by “Eddie Lee Sausage,” who along with his roommate, “Mitchell D,” made the tapes of their belligerent, violent neighbors, eventually releasing them into the world, first on cassette and later CD:
We were introduced to the saga of Peter and Raymond when we moved next door to them in the fall of 1987. As neighbors, we lived in the same Pepto-Bismol-colored apartment building in San Francisco’s Lower Haight. The building was designed like a cheap motel, so that the apartments were sardined alongside one another and separated by thin walls.
Within a week of our arrival, we were exposed to what would become a dependable routine from our next door neighbors: evenings charged with belligerent rants, hateful harangues, drunken soliloquies, death threats, and the sound of wrestling bodies thumping against the wall that separated our apartments. Peter and Raymond fought with a raging abandon and total disregard for everyone in the building. Initially, we were angered by the volume and recurrence of the arguments, but equally we were intimidated by the threatening content. Whenever we got angry enough to go next door, confront them and ask them to keep the noise down, we were forced to give the idea a second thought. Perched in their front window, facing the walkway greeting all who dared pass, was a human skull; what horror would greet us? However, one can be meek and tolerant for only so long. Unnerved by sleepless nights and Peter’s incessant refrain, “Shut Up Little Man” one of us banged on their door, only to receive the first of many murderous death threaths from Ray. “I’m perfectly willing to kill anyone that thinks they’re tough. I was a killer before you were born, I’ll be a killer after you’re dead.” Soon thereafter the notion of recording their threats — in case of the need for criminal proof of an assault — was born.
Shut Up Little Man! has been made into stage plays, an indie film, a number of CD recordings and Peter and Raymond (who are both long dead) have been drawn by Daniel Clowes and seen some of their best lines woven into dialogue in SpongeBob SquarePants cartoons. And now there is a documentary about them. Not bad for a “fuckin’ piece of shit” and a “queer cocksucker” (both deceased) now is it?
Here is an excerpt from the first Shut Up Little Man! CD. Sounding like Sartre’s No Exit if it had been written by Samuel Beckett collaborating with Charles Bukowsi and El Duce, as all three chugged bottles of Night Train, this is how most people were first introduced to Raymond and Peter:
The awesome short by renowned animation director Kevin Peaty (The Lion King, The Little Mermaid):“Shut Up, Little Man!”
“I will stand against you and so will millions of others. We believe in something. You in the media and most in Washington don’t. The radicals that you and Washington have co-opted and brought in wearing sheep’s clothing — change the pose. You will get the ends.
You’ve been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You’re going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.”
How much longer is America prepared to put up with this asshole? How can ANY company want their product associated with him and this kind of message! The man is literally advocating treason and yet he’s rewarded with millions of dollars a year and the adoration of Fox News watching nitwits?
Moral to the story: If you piss in the wind, don’t be surprised when it comes back to hit you in the face…
In the last article I set-up the parameters of what I have coined the “Haunted Retro” sound, and looked at Ariel Pink and his friends John Maus and Gary War. But that was all very phallocentric really, so this time I am covering the female-led bands in this imaginary “scene”.
Nite Jewel
Well, it’s not so imaginary, as a lot of these artists have worked together and definitely share some aesthetic and musical qualities. For instance L.A.‘s Nite Jewel have worked with John Maus and Haunted Graffiti member Cole MGN in the past. It’s not hard to see or hear why. They both record to 8 track tape using analogue and classic FM synths (like Roland Junos) and both have a slightly surreal, daydreamy vibe. But while Maus could very roughly be described as “synth-pop”, Nite Jewel make something that is more like “white-girl-soul”. They have recorded a cover of MOR-period Roxy Music and have a definite Fleetwood Mac-on-more-downers vibe. Being largely the work of one woman (Ramona Gonzales) Nite Jewel recently released the Am I Real? EP on the American Gloriette label, whose lead track “We Want Our Things” is a good snapshot of their sound.
