Marius Rossillon who went by the pen name of O’Galop was a French cartoonist and early film animator. He’s best known for creating Bibendum, the Michelin man. In these short public service announcements made in 1912 and 1918, O’Galop warns of the hazards of alcohol and tuberculosis. The film on tuberculosis was commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation to inform the people of France on the spread and treatment of the disease. In both films, O’Galop uses some pretty bizarre imagery to get the point across.

I particularly dig the degenerate spawn of the alcoholic and the drunk clinging to the psychedelically swaying streetlights. His depiction of TB as a malicious skeleton makes for some amusing imagery.

Music by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Link Wray.
 

 
A conversation with director John Scheinfeld about his superb documentary, Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?).

If you’re under 45-years of age, you might have little idea of who the great singer/songwriter/hellraiser Harry Nilsson was, but surely almost everyone has heard his biggest hits “Everybody’s Talkin’” (from the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack), “Without You” (a Badfinger cover given its devastating emotional impact by Harry’s plaintiff three octave vocal range, later recorded by Mariah Carey) and “Coconut” which was used in dozens of movies (normally during a drinking scene) and in more than one 7UP advertising campaign.

Harry Nilsson was also responsible for co-creating the much-loved children’s TV movie, The Point, a Ringo Starr-narrated fable about a boy named Oblio, born with a round head in a land of pointy-headed people. (”Me and My Arrow” and “Are You Sleeping” are two of the best remembered songs from the project. Scratch someone in their 40s and trust me, they’ll be able to sing both from childhood memories of The Point)

Another important thing to know about Harry Nilsson is that he was the favorite American musician of both John Lennon and Paul McCartney, no small achievement, that! After Apple Corps press officer Derek Taylor heard Nilsson’s autobiographical “1941” (from his 1967 RCA debut Pandemonium Shadow Show) siting in the car waiting for his wife, he bought a box of the album and gave it away as presents, including to all four Beatles. The story goes that Lennon listened to the album for 36 straight hours before calling Nilsson in Los Angeles and telling him how much he loved his record. McCartney did the same soon after. Nilsson became a part of the Beatles inner circle, becoming close friends with both John (who would produce his 1974 Pussy Cats album) and Ringo (who was the best man at Nilsson’s second wedding).

The documentary features stellar interviewees such as Brian Wilson, Jimmy Webb, Van Dyke Parks, Yoko Ono, Paul Williams, Mickey Dolenz, Ringo Starr, The Smothers Brothers, and Pythons Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle,
 

 
Fascinating! This short film by Ivan Kral of the Patti Smith Group takes a look around a New Year’s Eve party at CBGBs. Viewing this now, it’s striking how many of these people went on to become generational icons.

New Year CBGB party filled with local bandmates like Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Lenny Kaye, JD Daugherty, Patti Smith manager Jane Friedman, Arista, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, Roberta Bayley, Lynette Bean, Tom Verlaine, Richard Robinson, Lisa Robinson, David Byrne, Television, Velvet Underground’s John Cale, many more—too many to mention. All us musicians were broke and dreamed of getting a record deal. Dreams came true.

I can’t embed it here, so you’ll have to click through to Ivan Kral’s YouTube channel to view it.

Via Planet Paul

 
Les Kiriki: Acrobates Japonais, directed by Segundo de Chomon in 1907, is a lovingly hand-tinted artifact from the early days of French cinema. Similar in technique to George Melies, Aragonese film maker Chomon was a pioneer of cinematic special effects. In Les Kiriki, Chomon creates the illusion of complex, gravity defying acrobatics by having dancers lay on a black floor and filming them from above. The feat, while not as miraculous as if they were actually standing upright performing the balancing act, is still imaginatively choreographed, requiring considerable skill. The use of absurd Japanese wigs, pulsing colors and the primitive set result in a witty and surreal little film. For the soundtrack I added The Ventures’ “Let There Be Drums.”

The second video is Chomon’s Le Spectre Rouge which was also made in 1907 but released in 1908. Music by Shpongle.

 
The Red Spectre after the jump…

 
Early David Bowie music video for “Ching-A-Ling” taken from the Love You till Tuesday promotional film. Made in 1969, but unreleased until 1984, this film also features Hermione Farthingale (Space Oddity’s painfully intimate love-song “Letter to Hermione” was for her, obviously) and his friend Jono “Hutch” Hutchinson. The trio performed under the name “The Feathers.” The filming for Love You till Tuesday would be the last time Bowie and Farthingdale would see ever each other.

Note that Bowie is wearing a wig: He’d had to cut his hair for a role in a film called The Virgin Soldiers. “Ching-A-Ling” was recorded on the sly at Trident Studios by famed producer Tony Visconti in 1968. The harmonies would be revisited on The Man Who Sold the World’s “Savior Machine.”
 

 
After the jump, another early Bowie video for “Sell Me a Coat.”

 
I’m going through one of my periodic Captain Beefheart obsessions, mostly due to being immersed in John “Drumbo” French’s harrowing memoir. It’s always been a point of pride for me as a life long denizen of the San Fernando Valley that much of Beefheart’s history took place here, so in planning a pilgrimage to the Woodland Hills house where the Trout Mask Replica LP came tortuously into being, I happened to notice the place is still on the market for a much reduced 325k. Mind you in 2006 it was going for 849k ! Hard to believe a Matt Groening or a Julian Schnabel hasn’t snatched it up yet !
 

 
Buy the Trout Mask Replica house
 
Obama endorses Beefheart
 
Beefheart: Through the eyes of magic
 
Banned Captain Beefheart TV commercial
 
Run Paint Run Run: The Painting of Don van Vliet AKA Captain Beefheart

 
Stefan Nadelman’s Terminal Bar is a document of the infamous New York City dive located across the street from the Port Authority bus terminal near Times Square. Stefan’s father, Sheldon, was a bartender at the Terminal from 1972 to 1982 and took thousands of photographs of the drunks, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes that hung out at what was considered to be the roughest bar in NYC.

Sheldon also photographed the bartenders, bouncers and porters that worked the joint. I can’t imagine a tougher gig. I used to poke my head into the Terminal back in the late 70s. Its notoriety drew artists and punks and the curious. But, it wasn’t welcoming to slumming hipsters or bush league Bukowskis. It was an enclosed society with it’s own brutal code, not easily cracked by the voyeuristic aesthete.

Stefan recalls what it was like to live among the images of the Terminal:

Our house [was] basically my father’s gallery, I grew up looking at these faces of the Terminal Bar. My father would also paint on the matte around the photos to further make his point. He used a lot of wordplay…like GRAPE/RAPE/APE (the effects of wine). Each picture had its lesson or story and I think they subconsciously warned me of the ramifications of heavy drinking. Looking back, I can see how odd it may have seemed to have your house’s walls filled with 16x20’s of drunken strangers.

Terminal Bar is a stunning achievement, an evocation of a period in New York City’s history when the streets were wild with life and filled with the stench of garbage, booze, sex and death. The city is cleaner now, domesticated, safe, but lacking that certain soulfulness that is at the heart of Sheldon Nadelman’s dark and deeply human photographs.
 
Here’s the trailer and a clip from Terminal Bar. The entire 23 minute film is available on DVD here. Stefan is working on new video vignettes using his father’s photographs and I’m looking forward to future installments.
 

 
More of The Terminal after the jump…

The director in a scene from Nice Bombs…
 
Chicago-based Iraqi director Usama Alshaibi seems to be one of the most prolific Arab filmmakers in the American independent film scene—and he’s almost certainly the most experimental. Working often in close collaboration with his wife Kristie, Alshaibi has jump-started the canon of what we might term transgressive Arab-American film.

In his over 50 short films, Alshaibi has updated the techniques of transgressors like William Burroughs and Kenneth Anger to transmit his obsessions with culture-clash, technology, religion, violence, sexuality and identity. He’s finished four features, two of which deal with porn and STDs, one with cross-cultural relationships and another with the personal reality of post-Saddam Iraq. He has three in production or post-production now, two of which—American Arab and Baghdad, Iowa—portray growing up Arab in the heartland in the in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and today, and the third, Profane, about a Muslim dominatrix in spiritual crisis.

As the news media shamelessly reduces the complex relationship between America and its Arab and Muslim communities into a dopey controversy over where to build a friggin’ cultural center or mosque, we need the perspective and imagination of Alshaibi’s work now more than ever.

Like most hard-working indie filmmakers, Alshaibi can always use financial help making his vision manifest. Click to donate to help him finish Profane or American Arab.
 

 
After the jump, check out a clip from American Arab…
 

 
At Folsom Prison with Dr. Timothy Leary is an extraordinary counterculture document, filmed during Leary’s incarceration there. Under 30 minutes in length, this 1973 film shows Leary at his most engaging and personable. It’s a testament to his considerable charm that he was able to pull off such a performance, considering that the prison warden and other officials were sitting across the room listening as this was filmed.

Leary discusses his jailbreak (intimating that the daughter of a United States senator he refuses to name helped him), the revolution in consciousness and drugs, Eldridge Cleaver and what it feels like to be an imprisoned philosopher.

At Folsom Prison with Dr. Timothy Leary was used to raise awareness of the reasons Leary was imprisoned in the first place and to raise money to fight his sentence. Joanna Leary, who was behind this film, also introduces it.
 

 
Via the Timothy Leary Archive

 
Square grouper is smuggler slang for bales of pot dropped from airplanes or thrown overboard from boats. It’s also the title of a new documentary that’s going to be released this fall.

I love true tales of dope smuggling. They’re full of cliffhanging adventure and intrigue. But as pot slowly becomes legalized, smuggling will become a lost art and smugglers a dying breed. Check out Square Grouper on Facebook.

Via The World’s Best Ever