John Barry has died at the age of 77 of a heart attack. His James Bond movie themes were an indelible part of International pop culture. But even without Agent 007, Barry had a long and varied career. His IMDB listing for his composing work since 1960 lists over 110 titles.

Although Barry is best known for his James Bond scores — 11 in all, including Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, and Diamonds Are Forever — he composed music for a wide variety of films, from James Hill’s Born Free (1966), the Free Willy of the 1960s, to Dino De Laurentiis’ megabudgeted King Kong (1976).

Barry was nominated for seven Oscars; he took home five statuettes: two for Born Free (Best Original Score and Best Original Song, with lyrics by Don Black), in addition to The Lion in Winter (1968), Out of Africa (1985), and Dances with Wolves (1990). His Oscar nominations were for Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) and Chaplin (1992).

Among Barry’s other notable scores are those for Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), The Knack … and How to Get It (1965), Petulia (1968), Midnight Cowboy, the George Cukor-directed television movie Love Among the Ruins (1975), Somewhere in Time (1980), and Mike’s Murder (1984).

Barry’s last film score was for Michael Apted’s 2001 thriller Enigma.

Upon hearing of John Barry’s death, songwriter, producer and composer Richard Citroen said:

A lot of people have been described at the time of their passing as “one of the greats”, but John Barry really was. For many of us, John Barry was as influential as Keith Richards is to others. His Bond themes are practically a genre unto themselves. Jane Birkin once said that even Serge Gainsbourg was amazed by some of Barry’s arrangements, and I guess she’d know, having been married to both of them.”

While Barry’s fame is inextricably entwined with the Bond movies, he first came to the attention of the British public in the late 1950s as the singer, composer and arranger for The John Barry Seven.
 

 
As Barry was linked to Bond, Shirley Bassey was linked to Barry. Here she is in all her seductive glory evoking the sinister sexuality of Mr. Goooooldfinguh!

 
Fully Flared, a 2007 skateboard video directed by Ty Evans, Spike Jonze and Cory Weincheque, has been remastered in Hi Def and it’s stunning. The video was produced as a promo for Lakai Footwear and features Brandon Biebel, Danny Brady and Mike Mo Capaldi, among other pro skateboarders.

Fully Flared was amazing looking before the re-master, now it’s simply awesome. Shot with Sony DCR-VX1000 and Panasonic HVX200 cameras. Here’s the intro. Jaw will drop.

Music: M83 - “Lower Your Eyelids to Die With the Sun.”
 

 
Via Death Stare

 
In 1979, Gary Weis, known for his short films on Saturday Night Live, directed a documentary about South Bronx street gangs called 80 Blocks From Tiffany’s . Weis came up with idea of doing the film after reading an article in Esquire magazine by Jon Bradshaw. The article, like the film, focused on two gangs: the Savage Nomads and the Savage Skulls.

Despite its role as an important and unflinching portrait of a profoundly interesting time in New York and, as pointed out by The New York Times, hip hop’s cultural history, 80 Blocks was, for many years, impossible to find, only briefly available as an educational VHS release in 1985.

In the time since its initial release, the documentary has gained an overwhelming cult status. With little to no news coverage over the decades since its release dedicated fans continue to buzz about the film, especially now that the internet has provided fans common ground to fondly look back not only the documentary itself, but the era that it captured so vividly.

Here’s 80 Blocks From Tiffany’s in its entirety. If you dig the film and want to own a copy, you can purchase the DVD here. It comes with alot of extras, including interviews with the director, cinematographer, and a forty page book.
 

 
Composer Milton Babbitt died yesterday at the ripe old age of 94. I have always adored his piece Ensembles For Synthesizer, composed from 1962-64 on the guargantuan RCA Mark II synthesizer for which he was an official composer/consultant. I include that piece here from the 1967 album New Electronic Music from Leaders of the Avant-Garde which is a toweringly great slab of classic experimental music. Seek it out !
 

Part One
 

Part Two
 

 
And because it’s so totally great, here is the John Cage piece from the same LP: Variations 2 as performed with brutal precision on amplified piano by the great David Tudor.
 

Part One
 

Part Two
 

Part Three

Hynde and Kent wearing Vivienne Westwood.
 
Journalist Nick Kent not only wrote about rock and roll, he lived it. And it almost killed him. In his new memoir Apathy For The Devil: A Seventies Memoir, Kent describes his crash and burn lifestyle among London’s rock royalty and some of punk’s royal assholes during the 1970s. Like Lester Bangs and Hunter S. Thompson, Kent was not content to merely observe the action, he had to become a part of it.

From snorting massive amounts of blow and heroin with Keith Richards and witnessing David Bowie screw a groupie in full view of Bowie’s wife Angie to being revived from a drug overdose by Rod Stewart and almost dying in Iggy Pop’s arms, Kent seemed to have a knack for infiltrating scenes few journalist could get close to and few would have had the guts to.  Perhaps it was his own rock star good looks, mod fashion sense and druggy excess that made him appear as glamorous and dangerous as some of the rockers he wrote about. While Bangs was mastering the slob aesthetic, Kent was wearing threads from boutiques like Sex.

Kent also managed to piss alot of people off. After writing a tell-all piece for NME in which he quoted some less than flattering remarks Page made about film maker Kenneth Anger, Kent was confronted by Anger who lived up to his name by shouting “I just have to crook this little finger and Jimmy Page will automatically be transformed into a toad!”

Even though Kent was an early member of The Sex Pistols and introduced them to American punk, his relationship with Malcolm McClaren and the band took a very nasty turn.

Kent ended up playing guitar for two months in an early line-up of the Sex Pistols, whom he taught the songs of Iggy Pop’s proto-punk band the Stooges. Distrustful of Kent’s growing influence over the Pistols’ main guitarist Steve Jones, McLaren got the group’s bassist Glen Matlock to fire him, a departure Kent didn’t mourn at the time — because “I was a middle-class druggie fop and they were working-class spivs who would steal the gold out of their mothers’ teeth” — but which had murderous consequences. A year later while attending a Sex Pistols gig at the 100 Club, Kent was the victim of an unprovoked bicycle chain attack by Sid Vicious, sustaining a terrible head wound that he was too stoned to feel at the time but that, he later realized, nearly killed him.”

In 1973 Kent fell in love with Chrissie Hynde, who had yet to find her rock and roll muse and was working in a boutique on King’s Road. The relationship ended badly in 1974.

While she was working at Malcolm McLaren and Viviene Westwood’s Sex Shop, Hynde later told Jon Savage - in his essential history of British punk, England’s Dreaming - a jealous Kent came into the shop looking to whip her with his belt, causing her to flee to Paris.

Nick takes some credit for inspiring Hynde to pick up a guitar and form a band. He claims to mentoring Hynde, which sounds arrogant or possibly delusional until you listen to Kent’s musical output.

In 1975 Kent formed a band called The Subterraneans with Rat Scabies and Bryan James, who both later moved on to spearhead The Damned. In 1980, The Subterraneans (with Scabies on drums) recorded “My Flamingo” and “Veiled Women.” It was the same year that Chrissie’s band The Pretenders released their debut album and there’s a remarkable similarity in feel, attitude and sound between Kent and Hynde’s music. Is this the result of two lovers absorbing each other’s style? Or mentoring? Whatever the case, Nick’s tunes are every bit as good as most of the music coming out in the late 70s/early 80s. You can hear both tracks in the video below.

A new edition of Apathy For The Devil: A Seventies Memoir is being released in February. You can snag a copy here.
 

 
Thanks to Exile On Moan Street for the turn on and the photo.
 
Nick Kent talks about Apathy For The Devil after the jump…

 
Marc Campbell previously drew our attention to Mondo Balordo, with his post on Franz Drago: 27 inches of swingin’ dynamite. Though not a classic of the shockumentary genre, Mondo Balordo (1964) continued the trend of exploitation documentary devised by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, with Mondo Cane (1962) and La Donna nel Mondo (aka Women of the World).

Directed by Roberto Bianchi Montero and Albert T Viola, Mondo Balordo has some classic bizarre moments, and a commentary by none other than horror legend, Boris Karloff. 

Our World…What a wild and fascinating place it is! Filled with love, hate, lust and all the hungers and driving passions by which the strange creature called man is possessed.

Karloff’s association with the film, and billing, gave it a certain amount of respectability. However, the sixties was an odd decade for Karloff as the great septuagenarian actor continued to churn out a volume of films enviable in a man half his age. Though he made some excellent films during that decade, Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, Roger Corman’s The Raven and The Comedy of Terrors, and Michael Reeves The Sorcerers, he did make some of his worst Cauldron of Blood, The Incredible Invasion, La muerte viviente.

Mondo Balordo is a novelty for Karloff fans, a distracting piece of bizarro movie-making, tasteless in places, though not necessarily for the reasons the film-makers originally intended. The whole film is available below, and here’s how the producers sold it:

Horror icon Boris Karloff wittily narrates Mondo Balordo, a shocking and depraved mondo movie that chronicles perversions and abnormalities from around the globe. You will be unable to look away as your eyes fill with shocking images that will burn scars into your retina and render you paralyzed in your seat. Grotesque and exploitive, but also riveting and defiant of taboo, Mondo Balordo seeks out the most twisted and surprising images. Subjects explored in graphic detail are dwarf love, white female sex slavery, Eastern brothels, black-market smuggling, marijuana, lesbianism, needless dog surgery and the phenomenon of raincoat-clad peeping toms. Experience Mondo Balordo if you dare!

 
Previously on DM

Franz Drago: 27 inches of swingin’ dynamite

Witchfinder General: The Life and Death of Michael Reeves

 
“Hey, stop by for a smoke some time!”

(via KFMW)

 
Crazy Christian teenagers pray for Obama (a secret Muslim, or so they heard via an ALL CAPS EMAIL, no doubt) to convert to Christianity by a laying of hands on a life-size Obama cardboard stand-up! Extraordinary! The most stunning display of superstition and ignorance I’ve seen in quite some time (not that this is any sort of accomplishment).
 

 
Via On Knees for Jesus

 
As bewildered analysts on the sidelines wring their hands over “what’s next in Egypt,” Al Jazeera continues to very simply shame the American news media with regards reporting on the region’s issues.

Jane Dutton, the host of the network’s “Inside Story” show, does what we used to call actual insightful reporting by bringing into AJ’s Cairo studio Egyptian activists Gigi Ibrahim, Amr Wakd and Wael Khalil and, remotely, Tunisian graduate student activist Fidi Al Hammami. And while these kids may represent a somewhat elite and educated part of the thousands on the streets, Al Jazeera goes a long way here beyond the usual news formula of interviewing either excited guys in the middle of a protest yelling at the camera or annoyingly hedging news “contributors.”

At around the 18-minute mark, Khalil makes the crucial remark that puts the American punditry’s narcissistic agonizing into perspective: “We don’t need the US.” In short, Uncle Sam, the EU and the international community are rather irrelevant to this struggle. The paradigm’s changed, and the old powers need to get over themselves.
 

 
They left out “pro ignorance.”

Via Christian Nightmares