FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Jim Carroll reading ‘The Basketball Diaries’
10.23.2010
02:14 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
This is the first of four audio clips I’ll be posting of Jim reading ‘The Basketball Diaries’ in its entirety.

Stay tuned for the rest.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
10.23.2010
02:14 am
|
The true story behind classic gangster movie ‘Get Carter’
10.03.2010
07:20 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 

“You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape. With me it’s a full time job. Now behave yourself.”

It’s Michael Caine as Jack Carter, intimidating a small-town gangster, Cliff Brumby, in the 1971 film, Get Carter. Within seconds Carter has shown Brumby, played by future TV soap star Bryan Mosley, who’s boss - a quick karate chop and Brumby’s on his knees. That’s what Carter does. He’s a hardened criminal, a killer, and now he’s back home to find out who murdered his brother.

Taken from the novel Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis, Get Carter changed modern crime fiction. Firstly, it created a new genre British Noir; secondly, it kicked in the French windows at St. Mary Mead, and replaced the anaemic Miss Marple with the harsh reality of professional criminals, and the brutality of their lives, from which every succeeding British crime writer has taken their cue.

Lewis was born in Manchester in 1940, and raised on Humberside. He showed skill as an artist and as a writer, and attended Hull Art School. In 1965, his first novel All The Way Home, and All Through The Night was published. Lewis then worked as animator on The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, before writing Jack’s Return Home. He wrote a further seven books, including two more Jack Carter novels, and the classics Plender, Billy Rags and GBH. He died too soon, too young, almost forgotten in 1982. What a fickle fucking world we live in.

Jack’s Return Home was in part inspired by a real-life killing that took place during the height of the swinging sixties.

In August 1967, criminal Angus Sibbett bullet-riddled body was found in his Mark Ten Jaguar under Pesspool Bridge, County Durham. Sibbett was a bag man involved in extortion and collecting slot machine money.

Sibbett was employed by notorious, North-East gangster Vincent Landa, a man considered “more important than the Prime Minister”. Sibbett worked with London criminal Dennis Stafford and Landa’s brother, Michael Luvaglio.  Luvaglio had no previous convictions but Stafford, who went under an alias, had served a seven year sentence for possession of a firearm and had notoriously escaped from Dartmoor and Wandsworth prisons eventually fleeing to Newcastle, where he set up a company which was a front for fraudulent activities.

When Sibbett was discovered creaming off Landa’s takings - pocketing £1,000 a week - he was killed.

It seemed an open-and-shut case.  The police came after the gang. Landa fled the country, while Stafford and Luvaglio were arrested for Sibbett’s murder. But both men claimed their innocence, however, they were tried, found guilty and sentenced to gaol.

Stafford believed he was charged because of his previous activities whilst on the run in Newcastle, and has since stated, “If it had not been for me, Michael would never have been charged.”

While Luvaglio has said: “When I was arrested, the police told me that I only had to say that Stafford had left me for a while that night and I would go free.”

In hindsight, the whole case seemed like a fit-up as the evidence against both men was flimsy to non-existent. Importantly eye-witness statements and forensic evidence, which could have cleared both men, was ignored.

On that fateful night, Sibbett was to meet Stafford and Luvaglio in The Birdcage nightclub in Newcastle. Eyewitnesses vouched for both men, apart from a period of 45-minutes around midnight - the time Sibbett was murdered.  This 45-minute window proved crucial, as the police claimed Stafford and Luvaglio had left the nightclub, driven 16 miles, pushed Sibbett’s vehicle off the road, then pumped 3 bullets into him, before returning to the club.

In 1967, even in a souped-up cop car, traveling at full-speed, lights flashing, it wasn’t possible to do what was claimed. But it didn’t matter. Luvaglio and Stafford were set for punishment. It was a warning to any other London criminals (most notably London’s notorious Kray twins) against moving their operations north.

Stafford served 12 years but always insisted his innocence, claiming a Scottish shooter committed the crime. This was confirmed in a TV documentary by John Tumblety, who said on camera that he in fact had driven the real murderer back from Pesspool Bridge to the Birdcage club and that man was neither Luvaglio nor Stafford.

In May 2002 Sibbett’s slaying (now renamed The Get Carter Murder) made news when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British Home Secretary had kept Dennis Stafford in jail longer than was necessary and ordered £28,000 compensation to be paid.

To this day, both men continue to campaign to clear their names of the crime they didn’t commit

In Get Carter the film’s slot machine king was played by playwright, John Osborne, whose character Cyril Kinnear, lives in Dryerdale Hall, Durham, the very building Landa used as his gangland HQ.

In 2002 Landa said :

“The two (Stafford & Luvaglio) men were wrongly convicted and the evidence was incorrect. If they were tried today they would never have been found guilty. It was a political trial. The Home Office had suffered at the hands of gangs like the Krays and the Richardsons and they stepped in to smash what they thought was an organised crime ring.”

These aren’t the only characters Lewis adapted for his novel, and later the film. Property developer Cliff Brumby was a hybrid of Newcastle City councillor, T. Dan Smith and architect John Poulson. Both men were notorious in the sixties, and were later found guilty of bribery, corruption and giving backhanders to MPs and councillors in order to have shoddy building plans passed.

The pair destroyed most of Newcastle and built cheap concrete housing and offices. At the trial, the judge said that the scandal “now couples corruption with the north east.” So far reaching were their underhand activities that Conservative Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling resigned over the scandal.

Smith was accused of infiltrating councils across the North of England and corruptly forcing them to give business to architect John Poulson. Smith used £500,000 of Poulson’s money as bribes. Smith ruled with an iron hand and was described as a “demagogue”. He ended his life championing pensioners’ rights from the 14th floor council flat in a block he had built.

Incredibly Get Carter was not a box office hit on its first release. This was in large part down to the stupidity of the critics who described the movie as “soulless and nastily erotic…virtuoso viciousness”, a “sado-masochistic fantasy”, that “one would rather wash one’s mouth out with soap than recommend it.” Of course, since then Get Carter has been rightly reappraised by a younger generation who have hailed Michael Caine’s chilling and utterly compelling performance as Carter, which has led to the movie being described as a classic of modern cinema and arguably the greatest British crime film ever made.   
   

Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
10.03.2010
07:20 pm
|
‘A Day In The Afterlife’: Philip K. Dick documentary, watch it now
09.19.2010
03:13 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
A Day In The Afterlife: BBC documentary on Philip K. Dick in its entirety (57 minutes).

A Day in the Afterlife  focuses on the man himself, in all his crazy, drug-addled, paranoid glory. The mind behind some of my favorite books is fascinated by the constant bombardment of advertising, the effects of giant media conglomerates, and the overwhelming feeling that the world in which we live exists only in the glowing vacuum tubes of countless television sets. It is an ode to one of the most creative minds in science fiction, and another step in the crusade for a wider recognition of his accomplishments.” Ross Rosenberg

 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
09.19.2010
03:13 am
|
Drinking wine with Henry Miller: a glimpse into the mind of one of life’s great provocateurs
09.18.2010
12:09 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Dinner With Henry is exactly what the title suggests. Over a plate of food and glass of wine, the 87 year old Buddha of Brooklyn enthusiastically riffs on his hero Blaise Cendrars, D.H. Lawrence, Rimbaud and the surrealists. Shot by Richard Young and John Chesko in 1979, this “lost’ documentary has recently surfaced and it’s a wonderful peek into the life of one literature’s great provocateurs.

Henry Miller, along with Charles Bukowski, Rimbaud and Richard Brautigan, inspired me to buy a typewriter and attempt the life of a writer. Oh, what I would have done to have had a glass of wine with the great man.

Brenda Venus, the last great love Miller’s life, wrote about the filming of this dinner in her 1986 book Dear, Dear Brenda: The Love Letters of Henry Miller;

Two filmmakers had requested to film Henry speaking freely about wine. When they arrived at Henry’s home, he was in “an ill temper” explains Venus, who guessed that he’d had a bad sleep. When dinner time arrived, Henry was asked to “speak frankly and spontaneously.”  At first, his comments seemed negatively focused on the meal. It’s unclear who prepared the meal, but Henry does not spare anyone’s feelings by calling it “pitiful” and refusing to eat certain things, or complaining about the order of courses. With some coaxing from Brenda, Henry is finally set on track to various personal commentaries. Although he does offer some comparison between French and American wines, he doesn’t offering any real opinion of the wines set before him, which had been the whole point of the film. “I kept encouraging Henry to say something about the various wines he was sipping,” write Venus, “but he pointedly ignored me while regaling the camera with his powers as a raconteur”

 
Henry Miller reads from Black Spring  and is interviewed on French TV after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
|
09.18.2010
12:09 am
|
A discussion with William Gibson
09.13.2010
01:10 pm
Topics:
Tags:

In a wide-ranging talk, novelist William Gibson discusses his affection for Twitter, wonders if there is still a mainstream media, reveals about how he views America as an ex-pat living in Canada and gives some insight into where his ideas come from. William Gibson is currently in the midst of a 36-city promotional tour for his latest novel, Zero History.

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.13.2010
01:10 pm
|
‘Ah Pook is Here’: Fantagraphics publishing William S. Burroughs graphic novel from the 1970s
09.13.2010
10:52 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
During my guest blogging stint at Boing Boing in Spring of 2009, when I posted about the traveling exhibit of the unseen and unpublished William S. Burroughs/Malcolm McNeil graphic novel, collaboration Ah Pook is Here, I suspected that a publication of the work would be announced shortly thereafter. It’s taken a while, but Fantagraphics will finally be putting it out in 2011, as Carolyn Kellog reports at the Los Angeles Times:

The project began with a Burroughs-and-McNeil collaboration in the 1970s on the comic strip “The Unspeakable Mister Hart,” which appeared in the British magazine “Cyclops.” The magazine folded, and the two decided they wanted to turn their work into a full-length project—at the time, Burroughs was 56 and McNeil was 23. What they conceived was so new that they weren’t sure what to call the form, and settled on “a Word/Image novel.” They worked for seven years but never found a publisher.

Fantagraphics, which included some spectacular images from the book in its announcement, describes the story of “Ah Pook Is Here”:

John Stanley Hart is the “Ugly American” or “Instrument of Control”—a billionaire newspaper tycoon obsessed with discovering the means for achieving immortality. Based on the formulae contained in rediscovered Mayan books he attempts to create a Media Control Machine using the images of Fear and Death. By increasing Control, however, he devalues time and invokes an implacable enemy: Ah Pook, the Mayan Death God. Young mutant heroes using the same Mayan formulae travel through time bringing biologic plagues from the remote past to destroy Hart and his Judeo/Christian temporal reality.

McNeil’s story of working with Burroughs on the project is sure to be interesting. “Fictional events in the text would materialize in real life. Very specific correspondences, not just similarities,” he told the website Big Bridge in 2008. “Such events might suggest that things are already in place and that with the right combination of words they can be made to reveal themselves ahead of time. That’s what Bill’s ‘Cut ups’ were about: ‘Cut the word lines and the future leaks out.’”

William S. Burroughs’ lost graphic novel coming in 2011 (Jacket Copy/LA Times)

Ah Pook is Here website (with samples of the artwork)
 
Below, Ah Pook Was Here in the form of a quite amazing short film made in 1994 by Philip Hunt, with Burroughs’ narration.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.13.2010
10:52 am
|
What will become of the unfinished work of Harvey Pekar?
09.02.2010
03:33 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Fascinating article from The New York Times about the travails of finishing up the work of the late Harvey Pekar, in particularly the innovative digital stories told online at Smith magazine’s Pekar Project. Sadly, it looks like some all-too-human jealously is threatening to derail completion of the work. What’s transpired after the writer’s death seems like, well, one of his own autobiographical tales. In fact, it’s pretty much classic Pekar:

As the Pekar Project continued, it became apparent that Ms. Brabner was displeased with one contributor in particular: Ms. Seibel, the only female artist involved, and the only one who worked face to face with Mr. Pekar.

Ms. Seibel, whose husband and three children also became acquainted with Mr. Pekar, said that Ms. Brabner would abruptly pull Mr. Pekar out of their telephone conversations, and that she tried to interfere with a Brooklyn book-signing event at which Ms. Seibel appeared with Mr. Pekar in November. Ms. Seibel said Mr. Pekar told her these conflicts were “for him to worry about,” not her. “He put it under his business,” she said. (Ms. Brabner declined to comment on these matters.)

No one in their artistic circle believes the relationship between Mr. Pekar and Ms. Seibel crossed professional boundaries, but some could see how it strained Mr. Pekar’s marriage.

“A part of him was enjoying the attention he was getting from this very good-looking young woman,” said Mr. Parker, one of the Pekar Project artists. “And, naturally, Joyce, how could she enjoy that? You don’t have to be a psychologist to see that one’s not going to be good.”

Not even Mr. Pekar’s death quelled the tensions between Ms. Seibel, who has said she spent part of his last day alive with him, and Ms. Brabner.

 
The Unfinished Tale of an Unlikely Hero (The New York Times)

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.02.2010
03:33 pm
|
Kristin Hersh: Rat Girl
08.26.2010
03:36 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
When it was released in 1986 the first self-titled LP by Throwing Muses was, for me, a huge breath of fresh air. I loved that their songs were episodic with multiple and contradicting sections. It really was quite unusual to hear so-called indie bands do such complex and interesting music back then, so it was love at first listen for me and I’d go see them any time they came through Los Angeles. I tell you this because main muse Kristen Hersh is just publishing Rat Girl: A Memoir which is a look at the period in which the first Throwing Muses LP came together. My copy’s on its way, can’t wait !
 
Here’s the first song from said LP :

 
Kristin Hersh: The Powells.com Interview
 
Thanks Ned Raggett !

Posted by Brad Laner
|
08.26.2010
03:36 pm
|
Prof. Michael Lebowitz: The Socialist Alternative
08.25.2010
12:27 pm
Topics:
Tags:

Due to increasing competition for scarce natural resources, a barbarism haunts the planet. In the drive for expansion and profits, the endgame of the capitalist system promises imperialism, domination of impoverished peoples and an ecological nightmare. The capitalist path is a death trap, but there is a just, people-based alternative: Socialism. In this wide-ranging interview, Prof. Michael Lebowitz discusses his latest book, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development.

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
08.25.2010
12:27 pm
|
Snap shot: Ray Bradbury’s reaction to watching F*CK ME RAY BRADBURY
08.22.2010
11:24 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Is it too good to be true? I hope this is real! From Ain’t It Cool:

Ok - giggle… I love that somebody did this. Here’s Ray Bradbury’s reaction to watching FUCK ME RAY BRADBURY and Susan Gerbic-Forsyth, her friend Matt Edward showed it to him. This has serious ruleage in tow!

Previously on Dangerous Minds: ‘Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury’

Update: Ray Bradbury turns 90 today. Happy Birthday!

(via Nerdcore)

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
08.22.2010
11:24 am
|
Page 78 of 88 ‹ First  < 76 77 78 79 80 >  Last ›