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‘There’s Nothing Out There’: Did this low budget 1990 horror-comedy influence Wes Craven’s ‘Scream’?
01.01.2024
08:00 am
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There's Nothing Out There Blu-ray cover
 
If you’re a horror movie fan, I think you’ll agree with the assessment that Scream (1996) is a top-notch meta horror-comedy. But did you know that it’s been accused of being a rip-off of an earlier film? It’s a motion picture that came out years before, written and directed by a creative filmmaker barely out of his teens. A movie that’s a love letter to horror films, but also plays with the genre’s clichés. Even the film’s title is a reference to a line of dialogue typically said in the run-up to bloodshed in horror pictures.

In the late 1980s, after making a number of short films, writer/director Rolfe Kanefsky penned the screenplay for his first full-length movie—an ambitious meta horror-comedy—in just five days. Soon he was recruiting investors, the final two being his parents, who mortgage their house. In the summer of 1989, with a relatively limited budget of $100,000, the filming of There’s Nothing Out There took place. Kanefsky was 20 years-old.

The film follows a group of high schoolers on spring break who travel to a remote house in the woods. After arriving at their destination, an extraterrestrial monster starts killing off the teens, one by one.
 
Wendy
 
There’s Nothing Out There is a smart and self-aware film, using horror movie tropes and archetypal characters, and then spinning these elements in clever ways that act as commentary on the genre and advance the story. Kanefsky’s writing is impressive, and his direction is solid, as well. I was particularly impressed by a couple of inspired scene transitions.

At times the film is ridiculously silly, which is especially effective when embracing its low budget. Take the slimy alien, a being that resembles something you might see in a cheap sci-fi flick from the ‘50s. A mix of horseshoe crab, frog, and alligator, the creature also evokes the titular monsters in Alien (1979) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), plus a little of Belial from Basket Case (1982).
 
Creature
 
Every so often, the inanimate alien is thrown in front of the camera. In other moments, actors are obviously tussling with it to make it move, like you’d see in an Ed Wood movie. Fun stuff!
 
Claudia
 
The most noteworthy character in the film is Mike, the horror film fanatic. A kind of stand-in for Kanefsky himself, Mike uses his knowledge to help save himself and others. He knows he’s in a horror movie.
 
Craig and Bonnie
Craig Peck (Mike) and Bonnie Bowers (Stacy) in a production still.

Released in 1990, There’s Nothing Out There was dead on arrival. Horror films had fallen out of favor with audiences, who also weren’t interested in a post-modern horror movie—yet.

Fast-forward a couple of years later: Kanefsky gave a copy of There’s Nothing Out There to a producer, who watched it and dug it. Over a lunch meeting, this producer told Kanefsky that he liked the film so much he was going to show it to his father. The producer’s name is Jonathan Craven; his father is Wes Craven. A few years later, the director’s Scream was released, a critical success that also did gang-busters at the box office.

Intriguingly, there are several similarities between these two meta horror movies. The one most cited is that the character Randy in Scream, who understands all the slasher film rules and uses them to protect himself and others, is very much like Mike in There’s Nothing Out There. The films explore horror movie tropes and archetypes in like-minded ways. Both are a balancing act between scares and laughs.
 
Bonnie
 
Is there any proof that the makers of Scream “borrowed” from There’s Nothing Out There? In a word: No. It’s possible that Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson was simply riffing on the same tropes that Kanefsky was. Williamson’s script was written on spec, with Dimension Films buying the rights. It took a while to find a director, and Craven only accepted after Dimension made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Williamson has said Craven had no interest in changing the script, so the director had no input there.

Scream often gets the credit for being the first motion picture of its type, but as far back as 1981, during the height of the slasher craze, Student Bodies parodied the subgenre. There’s also Return to Horror High (1987), and like There’s Nothing Out There, it’s a smart and funny meta horror-comedy, though I give the edge to Kanefsky’s subsequent work.

Scream has become a lucrative franchise—the 1996 original alone has grossed more than $170 million worldwide—with several sequels and a remake of the first film.

Rolfe Kanefsky, like many fans of his debut feature, has wondered if Scream was based off of his movie, but I see no signs of sour grapes.
 
Rolfe
 
Kanefsky’s a prolific writer/director with many credits under his belt, and he’s still at it (check out his IMDb). He’s written a book about his experience making There’s Nothing Out There, entitled Making Nothing at the Age of 20.

Ronin Flix has recently put out a fresh 2K restoration of There’s Nothing Out There on Blu-ray. The package has several commentary tracks, including a new one with Kanefsky and two of the film’s stars. The two-disc set also contains ten Kanefsky shorts from the early 1980s, including Just Listen, which is seen playing in the opening video store sequence in There’s Nothing Out There. Get all the deets and order the release through the MVD Shop; it’s also on Amazon.
 
Blu-ray shot
 
A look at the 2K restoration:
 

 
The original trailer:
 

Posted by Bart Bealmear
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01.01.2024
08:00 am
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‘Messiah of Evil’: The remarkable 1974 horror film you probably haven’t seen—but should
11.30.2023
10:00 am
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Poster
 
Messiah of Evil is an extraordinary, underseen horror movie from 1974. It’s a film that, despite its low budget and production issues, succeeded artistically. Blending gothic horror with H.P. Lovecraft, Messiah of Evil is, among other things, surreal, creepy, disturbing, terrifying, poetic, and most of all, mysterious. Though it does have a cult following and has received some praise, now, with its recent restoration, there’s hope that this art horror film will finally be discovered by a wider audience and receive the broader recognition it merits.

In 1971, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz wrote the script for Messiah of Evil in six weeks; the husband-and-wife team had recently completed a treatment for American Graffiti (1973). Messiah of Evil was budgeted for $100,000, and investors agreed to pony up that dough, but in the end, only $85,000 arrived. So, they had to make do. Huyck and Katz later learned the missing $15,000 was taken by a couple of folks as an investors “finder’s fee” and used to put new roofs on their houses.

Messiah of Evil was shot in Southern California in September 1971, with Huyck and Katz co-directing, though Huyck received sole credit. Once principal photography was complete, the filmmakers were shut out of the production. After various delays, Messiah of Evil was finally given a limited release in December 1974.
 
Arletty 1
 
In Messiah of Evil, a young woman named Arletty comes to a seaside town to visit her artist father. But when she arrives she discovers he’s left, leaving behind words of warning about the community. Soon Arletty meets a trio of outsiders, led by Thom, a suave aristocrat with guru tendencies. Thom’s curious about the town’s folklore, which involves the pending return, after 100 years, of a “dark stranger”—a messiah of evil.

Shot in Techniscope, essentially a more economical version of Technicolor, Messiah of Evil is beautifully lit and photographed. The colors blue and red are prominent, and are often used together. This sort of use of color would be on display in a later, more famous horror film, Suspiria (1977).

The filmmakers were influenced by fine and pop art, the latter apparent in the wall paintings in Arletty’s father’s house.
 
Arletty and mural 1
 
Messiah of Evil brings to mind other meagerly budgeted horror movies from the 1960s and early 1970s that are also accomplished works: Carnival of Souls (1962), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (1973). It shares the most similarities with Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971). In both films, the story is told from the protagonist’s perspective following traumatic experiences, and after being committed to a mental institution. Thus, the viewer is forced to question the realities being presented. Knowing this, the unsettling dream logic present in these films is enhanced. But in Messiah of Evil, is Arletty really an unreliable narrator? At the end of the film, we get a clue.

There’s no shortage of weird characters in Messiah of Evil, but the albino trucker, strikingly played by Bernie Robinson—in his only screen role—takes the cake.
 
trucker and attendant
 
A post-1960s malaise permeates the proceedings, personified in the undefined relationship between Thom, Laura, and Toni. Seemingly an allegory for the end of the hippie era, this apparent throuple (we never learn exactly what their deal is) symbolizes the death of the free love ‘60s—and now what?

The two most stunning segments, both involving deaths, are ripe for analysis. The first takes place in a supermarket, the second in a movie theater. The former is where we get our first look at the town “ghouls” in action, feasting on raw meat. The scene is surely meant to be a critique of consumerism, and this was years before Dawn of the Dead (1978).
 
Supermarket
 
In the theater scene, violent images are watched coldly by the ghouls. Is this a commentary on Americans passively watching footage of the Vietnam War on television?  Like many aspects of this film, it is open to interpretation. This is, in part, because the intentions of those who finished the film are unknown.
 
Theater
 
Supermarkets and cinemas are places of comfort and safety, making the scenes all the more unnerving. Both characters are murdered and devoured by the ghouls with the lights on, which is certainly unusual in horror films. This is especially noteworthy in the supermarket, which is bathed in bright light.
 
Supermarket run
 
Both segments have a great rhythm to them. The credited editor, Scott Conrad, had no relation to the original production, but it’s hard to argue with the choices he made for Messiah of Evil. Conrad would soon be editing Rocky (1976), and win an Academy Award for his efforts.

These scenes are astonishing, deserving of recognition as hallmarks in horror cinema.
 
Ghouls
 
What are these flesh eating ghouls? Zombies? Are they Possessed? Diseased? Members of a murderous cult? Do they have anything to do with the pending return of the dark stranger? They look like they are from another era, specifically the 1950s, a time in America typically viewed with rose-colored glasses. One of the possible themes of the film is that, beneath the veneer of small-town normalcy lies unspeakable horror that infects everyone, eventually.

Admittedly, the conclusion of the film is a bit of a letdown, specifically the dark stranger storyline, which is wrapped up very quickly; a more substantial scene was planned by Huyck and Katz but never shot, due to budget restraints. In the final minutes, we see that Arletty now has a facial scar. Curiously, its partially obscured by strands of her hair, and is often missed by audiences, rendered even less visible on the subpar print transfers that have circulated for decades on home video. But what does the scar indicate? Is it a sign that everything we’ve just seen, as told by Arletty, did happen? Like much of Messiah of Evil, this element is a mystery.
 
Glass ceiling
 
There are quite a few exceptional and interesting independently produced horror movies from the 1970s that are still waiting for genre fans to discover, and Messiah of Evil is certainly one of the best. It has its share of fans—those who know, know—a base that will surely grow by virtue of its fabulous new reissue.
 
Radiance cover
 
In October, Messiah of Evil was put out on Blu-ray by Radiance Films. The film has been given the 4K treatment—and looks fantastic. Initially offered in a limited edition of 3,000 copies, it quickly sold out. But have no fear, another edition dropped this week. Get all details and pick it up via the MVD Shop; it’s also on Amazon.
 

Posted by Bart Bealmear
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11.30.2023
10:00 am
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‘Saturation 70’: Story of the long lost Gram Parsons sci fi movie told in new book
09.30.2023
06:03 am
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Six years before Alejandro Jodorowsky’s extraordinary but ill-fated 1975 attempt to film Frank Herbert’s Dune—the story of which was compellingly told in the recent documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune—there was another similarly ambitious and ground-breaking film project that, until recently, was largely unknown.

Saturation 70 was a special effects-laden science fiction movie starring Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and Julian Jones, the five-year-old son of Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Unlike Dune, Saturation 70 did actually make it into production and was shot, but never completed, then was forgotten and undocumented for over forty years.

The film was written and directed by Tony Foutz, who crops up in several music histories, usually described as a ‘Stones insider’, but was actually much more than that. His father, Moray Foutz, was an early executive at Walt Disney. The younger Foutz had his own equally fascinating career path, working in the mid-sixties as a first assistant director in Italy for Gille Pontecorvo, Orson Welles and Marco Ferreri – for whom he later wrote Tales of Ordinary Madness, the first film adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s work. His connection to the Stones came via Anita Pallenberg, who he met in Rome during the filming of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella at Cinecitta Studios in the summer of 1967. Through her, he also befriended Keith Richards.

In 1968, while staying at Richards’ Redlands estate, Foutz wrote a script entitled Maxagasm in collaboration with Sam Shepard, for himself to direct as a vehicle for the Rolling Stones, who were to star in the movie and produce an original soundtrack album for it. During pre-production for Maxagasm in Los Angeles, Foutz was tipped off about Integratron designer and space devotee George Van Tassel’s ‘Spaceship Convention’ at Giant Rock, near Joshua Tree, an annual gathering of UFO abductees and alien enthusiasts. Foutz gathered up some friends to go and film documentary footage there, intending to use it as a way of testing out special effects he was planning for Maxagasm.
 

Gram Parsons at the piano in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, 1970. Still from the ‘Saturation 70’ promo reel (Anthony Foutz Archive).

On that trip were Gram Parsons (Foutz’s roommate at the Chateau Marmont), Michelle Phillips, Julian Jones and his mother, Linda Lawrence (Parsons’ then-girlfriend), rock photographer Andee Cohen, Flying Burrito Brothers roadie Phil Kaufman, and western character actor Ted Markland—known as ‘the Mayor of Joshua Tree’ for his role in popularizing the location as a retreat for the hip Hollywood set. (It was Markland who first took Lenny Bruce, then the Stones, Parsons and Foutz to the desert to imbibe psychedelics and sit under the stars, scanning the sky for UFOs.) Also along for the ride were cinematographer Bruce Logan and special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull, both fresh off working on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.

Fired up his experience at Giant Rock, Foutz decided to incorporate the footage they’d shot into another feature film project, that came together as a kind of counter culture version of the Wizard of Oz, about a lost star child (Julian Jones) who falls through a wormhole into present day Los Angeles and tries to find his way back home, assisted by four alien beings—the Kosmic Kiddies—who wear clean suits to protect them from the pollution. (The title of the film referenced the level at which carbon monoxide in human blood becomes lethal.)
 

The Kosmic Kiddies, from R to L: Tony Foutz, Michelle Phillips, Gram Parsons, Phil Kaufman and Andee Cohen. Photo: Tom Wilkes

Saturation ’70 was shot in and around Los Angeles from October 1969 through spring of 1970 and included several spectacular set pieces: a surreal shootout between a Viet Cong soldier and an American G.I. in the aisles of Gelson’s supermarket in Century City (noted gun fan, Phil Spector, visited the set that day and stood on the sidelines to watch); a cowboy picnic on the Avenue of the Stars featuring country music couturier Nudie Cohn and a bevy of cowgirl cheerleaders; and a parade of Ford Edsel cars roaring through the City of Industry in a flying V-formation. He also filmed the Kosmic Kiddies roaming around the city in their clean suits and masks—inside them, Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips, Stash Klossowski de Rola (the son of painter Balthus) and Andee Cohen.

Seeing an opportunity for cross promotion with his music career, Parsons had the Flying Burrito Brothers wear the same suits on the cover of their second album, Burrito Deluxe (also named in honor of the working title for Foutz’s script, “Rutabaga Deluxe”). Parsons and Roger McGuinn were brought together to write songs for and score the soundtrack. Rolling Stone would report that McGuinn intended to use the Moog synthesizer he had acquired at the Monterey Pop Festival two years earlier.
 

Julian Jones and his fairy godmother

Once principal photography was complete, Foutz started working on the special effects sequences at Doug Trumbull’s Canoga Park facility, incorporating computer-processed visual effects Trumbull was developing there that allowed for graphic and textual overlays on pre-existing film images—a revolutionary idea at the time. Among the effects Foutz and Trumbull were working to create were propagandistic data clouds that floated in the sky (akin to the dirigibles later seen in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner), towering skyscrapers made of television screens and dinosaurs roaming among the derricks in the Inglewood Oil Field near La Cienega Boulevard.
 

Skid Row Los Angeles, 1970. Not much has changed. Look closely at the signs.

However, before they could complete their work, funding for the film fell through, the producers abandoned the project and the entire project collapsed. All of the footage was subsequently lost apart from one five minute showreel cut to the Flying Burrito Brothers version of the Jagger/Richards song, “Wild Horses,” which Parsons had contributed to the writing of a few months earlier.

For years, existence of the film was little more than a rumour among Gram Parsons fans—a strange anomalous event in his short, gloried career—but now all the existing production photos have been dusted off for an upcoming book that recreates the film shoot, and the story of Saturation 70 can finally be told.

Preorder Saturation 70: A Vision Past of the Future Foretold HERE.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.30.2023
06:03 am
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Kenneth Anger RIP: The Magus of American Cinema dead at 96
05.24.2023
10:39 am
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Sad news to report, Kenneth Anger, the Magus of American cinema has died, aged 96. He’d been living for some time in an assisted living facility in Southern California. 

His art representatives at the Sprüth Magers gallery sent out the following press release:

With deep sadness, Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, along with the entire gallery team, mourn the passing of the visionary filmmaker, artist, and author Kenneth Anger (1927–2023).

Through his kaleidoscopic films, which combine sumptuous visuals, popular music soundtracks, and a focus on queer themes and narratives, Anger laid the groundwork for the avant-garde art scenes of the later twentieth century, as well as for the visual languages of contemporary queer and youth culture. His earliest works, such as the 1947 black-and-white ecstatic short, Fireworks, established Anger as an enfant terrible of the filmmaking underground. In his works of the 1950s and 1960s, he pushed the camera apparatus to its limits, incorporating double exposure, found footage, and manipulations of the celluloid itself. Anger’s personal occultism, explored most deeply in his masterpieces Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969), and Lucifer Rising (1972), was a constant in his practice, with the act of transgression—from sacred to profane, from culture into counterculture, from old to new cinematic forms—becoming his defining mode of creation.

Kenneth was a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.

Kenneth Anger (1927–2023) was a pioneer of avant-garde film and video art. His iconic short films are characterized by a mystical-symbolic visual language and phantasmagorical-sensual opulence that underscores the medium’s transgressive potential. Anger’s work fundamentally shaped the aesthetics of 1960s and 1970s subcultures, the visual lexicon of pop and music videos and queer iconography. The artist considered his life an artwork in its own right and frequently wove elements of myth, fact and fiction into his biography. His works can be understood as an integrative part of this life-as-artwork.

Anger’s keen perfectionism led him to assume all the usual filmmaking roles himself from the very beginning: In an unusual synthesis he handled all of the camera work, set design, costume design, film development and editing and acts as director, producer and actor in one. Even his earliest productions show the themes and artistic strategies that define his oeuvre. His experimental montage technique eschews spoken dialogue. Though possessed of certain narrative traits, its real power lies in a specific kind of suggestion. Anger’s first work, the 14-minute Fireworks (1947), was so provocative that the young artist was hauled to court on obscenity charges. Subject matter in the short film includes homosexual cruising, sailor fetish, sexual violence and gore. Its black-and-white images appear governed by an archetypal dream logic: phallic fireworks explode, the protagonist’s guts are crudely cut open to reveal a compass in his viscera and a sailor walks through a shot with a Christmas tree on his head. His 38-minute Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) sees this dream logic tip completely into a surreal Technicolor color frenzy. The result is a sexually charged, orgiastic mixture of myth and ecstasy somewhere between period film set, opera stage, Kabuki theater and nightclub.

Later films including Scorpio Rising (1963), Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and Lucifer Rising (1972–80) develop this exuberant visual language further and also involve an expansion of their film-technique repertoire. Cine-sculptural strategies including double exposure or physical manipulation of the celluloid, the striking contrast of superficial pop music and disturbing images, the integration of found documentary footage and the use of subliminally-charged religious and mythological symbols enhance the films’ completely hypnotic effect. Influenced by the theories of the British writer Aleister Crowley, these works are also distinguished by a clear affinity for the occult and the enactment of an explicitly “perverse” imagination. Images of motorcycle gangs, orgies of violence, Egyptian deities, archetypal volcanic and desert landscapes and satanic rituals produce highly atmospheric, psychedelic psychodramas rife with breaches of taboo, sexual neuroses and voyeuristic fantasies.

Anger is also the author of Hollywood Babylon (1959), a book that anticipates the highs and lows of celebrity journalism. Mainstream Hollywood cinema is both the matrix of Anger’s work and its antipode. The visual lexicon of his films refers again and again to its dominant images while simultaneously subverting them in a radical way. At the heart of his practice was the fundamental, mind-expanding power of the film medium, a power absent in the genres of mainstream cinema practices. Anger considered cinematographic projection a psychosocial ritual capable of unleashing physical and emotional energies. The artist saw film as nothing less than a spiritual medium, a conveyer of spectacular alchemy that transforms the viewer.

I last saw Kenneth myself in September of 2022 when I interviewed him for an upcoming TV docu series I’m making on modern occultism. He was in good spirits that day, but obviously very, very frail.

I think it goes without saying that “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore” but Anger was always a one-off. The world became a lot less interesting today. RIP Kenneth Anger.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.24.2023
10:39 am
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Listen to John Carpenter’s very 80s synth-rock band the Coupe de Villes


The cover of one of only 150 known copies of ‘Waiting Out The Eighties,’ the sole album from The Coupe de Villes—a trio featuring director John Carpenter, Nick Castle, and Tommy Lee Wallace.

Horror fanatics, especially those dedicated to the films of director John Carpenter, are likely familiar with this image taken from Halloween‘s wrap party in 1978. In it we see three performers all wearing Michale Meyers’ aka The Shape masks. The trio would then lose the masks and reveal themselves to be John Carpenter, Nick Castle, and Tommy Lee Wallace or The Coupe de Villes. The long-time friends would start making music for films in college at USC Cinema in mid-1971 where Carpenter had become a bit of a go-to for USC students when it came to providing the music they used in their films. According to Wallace, they wrote music together with Carpenter and Castle contributing most of the content which Wallace describes as “kind of satirical, nostalgic send up songs,” that also happened to be “solid musically.’ Carpenter even snuck some of The Coupe de Villes’ original music into Halloween during a scene featuring Jamie Lee Curtis (Laurie Strode) and Nancy Kyes (Annie Brackett) smoking a joint in Annie’s car with the radio blasting a 1950s sounding jam and the lyrics “Let’s Go! Sha-na-na-ha, Sha-na-na-na,” before the music in the scene flips back to film’s unnerving main theme. Carpenter mused about this Easter egg in an interview from 2016 where he also spoke about some of his early musical inspirations:

“I was into the British Invasion, The Byrds, The Doors and 50’s stuff big time. Dark Star (1974) was my first synth score. I started hearing synth music back in the 60’s and I realized you could sound big with only a keyboard. Claudio Simonetti was a huge influence to me, especially the soundtrack to Suspiria (1977) and Deep Red (1975).”

The band would later appear as The Coupe de Villes in Carpenter’s film Big Trouble in Little China (1985) performing the film’s namesake song. The thing is this—that same year The Couple de Villes recorded a seven-song album Waiting Out the Eighties at the Electric Melody Studios in Glendale, California. Electric Melody is run and operated by Carpenter musical cohort, composer Alan Howarth who has collaborated with Carpenter on his film soundtracks since 1981.
 

A shot of John Carpenter’s band featuring Nick Castle (a college pal of Carpenter’s who portrayed Michael Meyers/The Shape in 1978’s Halloween), and Tommy Lee Wallace (a teenage friend of Carpenter’s who, among many other things, created the infamous Michael Meyers mask), The Coupe de Villes and their appearance in Carpenter’s film ‘Big Trouble in Little China.’

If you’re hoping to score yourself a copy of this ultra-rare record, forget it. Only 150 copies were ever pressed. Financed by Carpenter’s wife at the time, actress Adrienne Barbeau, all copies were then divided evenly between the three members of The Coupe de Villes. The album was mastered by Bernie Grundman, a rather legendary Hollywood-based mastering engineer with over 5000 credits to his name. Many fans have wondered if Grundman still has the master tapes for Waiting Out The Eighties, hoping the coveted album might someday see a re-press. At the time of this writing, I found one Mint/Near Mint copy of the elusive record for $3500 plus another five and a half bucks for shipping. Now that we all have yet another reason to dig the work of John Carpenter, let’s check out a few tracks from Waiting Out the Eighties while wishing him a very happy 75th birthday today.
 
Have a listen, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
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01.16.2023
02:34 pm
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Across the Bowieverse: Brett Morgen’s ‘Moonage Daydream’
12.17.2022
02:33 pm
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This is a guest post by Spencer Kansa, author of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Zoning and Out There: The Transcendent Life and Art of Burt Shonberg. Perfect gifts for the festive season!

In the welter of pre-publicity for Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream, Bowie fans were baited with the promise that the filmmaker had been granted enviable access to the Bowie archive, an Aladdin’s cave of five million audio-visual treasures which, for the hardcore devotees amongst us, sounded like a mouthwatering prospect. That was until Morgen subsequently claimed to have stumbled upon the “Holy Grail” of lost Bowie booty: an unseen travelogue of the ever-elegant Englishman sauntering around the streets of Bangkok and Singapore, filmed during the final Asian leg of his all-conquering Serious Moonlight Tour of 1983.

Problem was, as any fan would know, this was simply not true: Richochet, as the documentary is titled, has been in wide circulation amongst the Bowie faithful for decades. The BBC had already borrowed far too heavily from it for Five Years, the first in what became their own Bowie trilogy of documentaries, and, sadly, like far too much of the content in Morgen’s film, it already exists on YouTube.
 

 
Similarly, Morgen’s much-trumpeted inclusion of the ‘Jean Genie’/‘Love Me Do’ rock-out with Jeff Beck, during the encore of the final Ziggy Stardust show, has been in the possession of fans, in grainier bootlegged form, for decades, ever since it was first broadcast on ABC-TV in 1974 and, at a later date, by the Rai network on Italian television. So, even before viewing this eagerly anticipated movie, alarm bells were ringing in some quarters.

Aside from the color correction and sound restoration that has been done, Morgen’s film is essentially an editing job pieced together in a collage fashion from the embarrassment of riches placed at his disposal; but based on the results, it would’ve been a wise move if he’d consulted more widely with Bowie connoisseurs before launching and landing the project.

While there has been some unfair criticism for what the film is not – a traditional, chronologically-paced documentary replete with exposition and talking heads – many of the rave reviews for Moonage Daydream appear to have been penned by casual fans, whereas for those in the know, the reaction has been decidedly more muted. And the reasons are manifold. Firstly, the fast cutting that Morgen periodically employs is often unnecessary and distracting, especially when your focus is the most supra-charismatic and aesthetically pleasing subject ever to appear in front of a camera. (During the ‘90s ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ section, a shot of an Earthling-era Bowie confabbing backstage at the Phoenix Festival with the Prodigy’s Keith Flint, which I’m sure both sets of fans would like to have savoured, flashes by in the blink of an eye.)

While the interpolation of classic films – from Bowie favs like Metropolis and Un Chien Andalou to clips culled from Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle, B-movie sci-fi schlockers and even The Matrix – is an act of supererogation, and the abstract visuals that animate several of the musical interludes are equally superfluous. 

In its favour, the film offers some welcome behind-the-scenes antics and alternate camera angles from the Ziggy farewell concert at Hammersmith Odeon, including risqué upskirt shots of the Leper Messiah that clearly made the filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker blanch when he saw them as they never made it into his final cut. (Bear in mind, given the time it was filmed, Pennebaker even overdubs the words “well-hung” when Ziggy recites his resume.)

Bowie’s felt-tip pen storyboards for the proposed Diamond Dogs movie are neatly brought to life. There are some on and off-camera extras from his chin-wags with Russell Harty, and private glimpses of his mid-70s video-television art experiments that prompted John Lennon to nickname him “Video Dave.” Another gem is the previously unseen footage of Bowie live on stage in ‘Gouster’ mode, grooving while decked out in beret and fatigues and crooning a coke-hoarse rendition of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me’, taken from Philly Dogs shows, the seldom-seen soul revue that cannibalized the abandoned Diamond Dogs Tour to air cuts from his new but then-unreleased album, Young Americans.

Excerpts from the hotly coveted Earls Court concert from 1978, originally filmed by the actor/director David Hemmings, that Bowie shelved for undisclosed reasons, include tantalising teases of ‘Warszawa’, ‘Sound and Vision’ and ‘Heroes’, although this abridged version of the latter lacks the mesmeric power of the one captured in its entirety by London Weekend Television on the second night of this Earls Court run for their Bowie special.

And there are eye-catching rushes from the suspenseful ‘Jump They Say’ music video, featuring the Duke at his most dashing, as well as arresting bonus scenes from the bewitching collaboration between Bowie and La La Human Steps siren, Louise Lecavalier, extricated from the ‘Fame ‘90’ promo and the scrim projections of the accompanying Sound and Vision Tour for which they were originally conceived.

But despite such enticements, Moonage Daydream is a frustrating watch at times, especially those moments when Morgen maddeningly muffs the money shot. The sublime segue from ‘Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ into ‘All the Young Dudes’ is one of the key moments of the entire Ziggy Stardust concert film, but instead of letting it play out to cast its spell, as the original footage does, Morgen cuts away to solar flares and ruins the effect.

When Bowie’s Lincoln Town Car arrives backstage for his concert at Earls Court, Morgen switches to fans filing into the arena, at precisely the wrong moment, so we don’t actually get to see the star of the show and his entourage emerge. (It’s hard to imagine that David Hemmings, who shot the actual footage, would have pulled away at that precise moment.)

While a montage, set to ‘Let’s Dance’, to showcase what a tasty little mover the Dame was, features his impressive tap dancing sequence from Absolute Beginners, but leaves out the crucial climax from the musical’s big production number (‘That’s Motivation’), where he out-Sinatra’s Sinatra and is winched into the air, Flying by Foy, to hand jive on top of a rotating globe. Morgen even excises the ending of the famous quote uttered by the bubbly moon-eyed fangirl outside the Diamond Dogs concert: “I’m just a space cadet – he’s the commander!”

I’m also surprised the filmmaker hasn’t received a litigious letter from the BBC, as he replays, in expanded form, pertinent Ziggy-era interviews about the rising importance of individualism and the rock star as false prophet that have already aired on their own Bowie documentaries. And he recycles two set pieces from their celebrated Cracked Actor doc. Firstly, by sampling the scene where a life mask is made of Bowie’s face, which Morgen marries to the very same song, ‘Quicksand’, albeit an alternative, non-album version. And although the ‘Cracked Actor’ live performance from the same programme is enhanced with some new footage, rather than cutting away, as the BBC does, to a waxwork of Elizabeth Taylor and other mannequins from the Golden Age of Hollywood, to help illustrate the theme of the song, Morgen merely superimposes stills from the famous photo session of Bowie with the movie queen instead.

And it’s not only major media corporations that Morgen’s recycled ideas from. The section dedicated to Bowie’s definitive film role, as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, is scored with ‘Subterraneans’, an idea already realised, far more effectively, by Bowie superfan/film restorer, Nacho.
 

 
Furthermore, the insertion of Ziggy declaiming ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’, inartfully juxtaposed with the Pepsi TV advert Bowie shot in exchange for their sponsorship of his highly ambitious but expensive to run Glass Spider Tour, that a couple of critics have taken as a rebuke to his, quite literal, ‘80s commercialism, doesn’t appear that mercenary at all if you already know that the money generated from it was used to pay for another stage – which took three days to assemble and pack down – so that Bowie could leapfrog shows and keep up a gruelling schedule.

The inclusion of late 60s deep cuts ‘Cygnet Committee’ and ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ (Bowie’s denunciation and celebration of hippiedom), which somewhat bookend the film, is another curious and unwelcome choice considering both are lower-tier tracks in his canon, and neither are indicative of the major themes that forged his legend during his Imperial Period that began when he left that decade for dead and relaunched himself into 70s rock superstardom.

And there are other strange anomalies. There’s a close-up of a widely seen schoolboy shot of the young master Jones, only his head has been transplanted from an even earlier school picture – for no reason whatsoever – so it makes him look like the younger brother of his classmates. And the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ promo, which was the life-changing moment for many second-generation Bowie fans, and remains one of his most magical moments, is marred by the oversaturation of colour that renders it a blur.

We expected so much more. Where’s the Ziggy rehearsal footage filmed at Haddon Hall? The recovered but still under-wraps performance of ‘Starman’ on Lift Off With Ayshea? The long-rumoured existence of Bowie’s full performance in The Elephant Man play? The Good Morning America interview with Rona Barrett? The unexpurgated footage of the Duke’s hero’s welcome at Victoria Train Station? The never-released concert footage of Bowie headlining the final night of the US Festival, in 1983, in front of an estimated 300,000 peoploids. Or Bowie being stalked and attacked by his alter-egos, in sinister puppet form, from the mothballed ‘The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell’ promo?

Inexplicably, the final chapter of the film, sees Morgen rerunning previously shown clips of Bowie riding the Escheresque escalators in the Singapore shopping plaza, and miming a flower blooming from an earlier seen outtake from ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’ promo, for no apparent purpose. In fact, it seems like a shoddy oversight. And you can’t shake the nagging suspicion that, by now, Morgen has been so overwhelmed by his project that he’s resorted to just throwing stuff at the screen, and only makes you lament the other unseen material that could and should’ve been used in its place.

In this regard, Moonage Daydream has been rivalled for the Bowie highlight of the year by this recently shared pro-shot footage of a Serious Moonlight concert held at the Sydney Showground, which has lain unseen for nearly forty years.
 

 
Despite my misgivings, the film has struck big with cinema audiences, raking in millions at the regular box office and from special IMAX screenings, as well as via streaming services, where not only votaries but those uninitiated or new to the Bowieverse await. For the cognoscenti, the Earls Court concert footage is worth the price of admittance alone, although your appetite may be whetted, it won’t be satiated until the Bowie estate finally releases the full show. And how much longer are they going to wait? First-generation Bowie fans are now in their dotage, and us second-generation fans are getting up there in years, too. If the estate doesn’t start sharing some of the untapped jewels in the archive soon, many will no longer be around to see and appreciate them. And yet, the estate seems far more concerned with squeezing every last shekel from the fanbase – from licensing his name on Barbie dolls, NFTs, Stylophones and pop-up stores – to care.

Moonage Daydream is screening in select cinemas, and on streaming services, and is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.17.2022
02:33 pm
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DEVO’s Gerald V. Casale talks about going mano a mano with ‘The Invisible Man’!
12.06.2022
07:26 pm
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Illustration from ‘The Invisible Man’ by TOMO77

The poster that came with DEVO’s 1981 New Traditionalists album depicts the band sheltering an ethnically diverse triad of babies from the worst elements in American society: a horde of pirates, pushers, concert promoters, and Puritans looking to instrumentalize these newborns for their own unspeakable ends. Arrayed against this mob in matching JFK pompadours and Nutra work outfits, the men of DEVO face the challenge with poise and sangfroid, ready to open a cold can of whup-ass on these would-be baby-wreckers.

In the background, the uncredited artist represents the USA as a rolling lawn ornamented with a few topiary trees, their branches shaped into stacked orbs that taper like the steps of the DEVO energy dome, three leafy cocktail onions of descending size impaled on toothpicks stuck in the horizon. This is the landscape on which DEVO’s Gerald V. Casale stretches his legs in the music video for his latest solo release, “The Invisible Man.”

Once again, it’s “morning in America,” except for the glans-pated dweeb who dogs Jerry’s steps on the yellow brick road, subjecting him to sexual harassment, humiliation, and abuse. But as the story plays out, Jerry begins to suspect—his opponent’s neck tattoo of the D.R.I. logo notwithstanding—he’s once again doing battle with The Mark Inside, old Number One from The Prisoner.

Dangerous Minds caught up with Jerry by 21st-century videophone on November 22, 2022.
 

 
Before I ask you about “The Invisible Man,” it’s November 22. I’ve read a lot of DEVO interviews and I don’t know if you’ve spoken about this very much, so I thought it would be interesting to ask what you remember about the Kennedy assassination, and how you think that event affected your young minds.

Yeah! Probably, that was like the opening salvo in a barrage of timed traumas that just continued the next seven years, that pretty much twisted up everything in my life and set me on a fork in the road, kind of like the proverbial red pill in The Matrix.

I remember everything. I was in French class in my high school. We had a particularly sexy French teacher who was a graduate student, so she was probably, I don’t know, six or seven years older than us, and wore more trendy clothing, like herringbone-print skirts that were above the knee, and black boots, and little blouses that got the boys going. Anyway, suddenly the principal walked in, middle of class, and said, “Class, I have to tell you that the president of the United States has been killed today.” And [laughs] you know, you’re just, like, almost unable to process what you’re hearing, like it’s kind of real, but not really real? And then some of the girls start bursting out crying, and he goes, “And as a result of that, we decided to suspend all classes for the day and send you home.”

And it was interesting, ‘cause [laughs] a girl that I was really interested in, in this kind of puppy way where I didn’t even understand what I was doing, she was crying, and something in me, despite the fact that I was really freaked by what I’d just heard, and kind of understood how serious that was, or how frightening that was, to the United States, I of course used it to offer to walk her home [laughs]. So, you know, the little budding man in me started taking over, and I felt all, like, you know, it was a real, I don’t know, what was it, Stand By Me moment, like these coming-of-age comedies. And I walked her home, and I had my arm around her, and had her holding my hand, and I felt so, like, brave and excited, and scared at the same time.
 

Detail from the ‘Village of the Damned’ poster
 
And then I didn’t go home right away. I thought I’m not going home, I’m not going home to my parents, ‘cause I was already at odds with them. ‘Cause they were blue collar and authoritarian, they didn’t understand me, they were policing my reading list and always criticizing me, and I felt like they didn’t understand how smart I was. So I decided to freak them out by just doing something I never did, which is I walked downtown and I went to the movie theater. I forget what was playing now; it was a black-and-white film, of course. It might have been Village of the Damned, English, great film.

And then, you know, when I got out of the theater it was already dark, ‘cause it was November in Ohio and it got dark at like five o’clock. And the moment I walked home, of course, I got attacked and talked to and screamed at. But then the television was on, and it was wall-to-wall coverage of the assassination. And, believe it or not, and I don’t know if other people have told you this, but you know the famous Zapruder film, where this guy was shooting, innocently, the arrival of the president in Dallas in his motorcade with a Super 8 camera, and it became the primary evidence of what the Warren Commission kind of bastardized. We saw it unedited, played over and over on TV. There were only three channels, they were all national, so the news—there was real news then, guys like Walter Cronkite just presenting things—would show it. I guess the country wasn’t centralized enough into some kind of CIA disinformation clampdown where you could see the impact, over and over and over! You could see the shots and her crawling on the trunk, Jackie Kennedy. You’d never see the Zapruder film that way again, because once the Warren Commission got ahold of it, they edited it, and what you saw afterwards in history, after that weekend, is never really the film.

And Ι saw the assassination then on Sunday, you know, we were Catholics and forced to go to church, so Sunday morning, television’s on, we’re watching [them] taking Lee Harvey Oswald from the Dallas police station to his court hearing, and we saw live the assassination of Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald, right there, with my parents [laughs] while we’re waiting to go to church! I was fifteen.
 

 
So it sorta blew a hole in everything, it sounds like.

Yeah! And then soon on the heels of that came the assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the assassination of Malcolm X, as I was coming of age and reading and getting politicized and protesting against the Vietnam War. And it just all jelled. And it ended then with, you know, the National Guard killing four students and wounding nine on May 4, 1970, right in front of me.

There’s a kind of a straight line between those events, for you? Do you see it that way?

Yeah, it’s pretty much a three-stage rocket [laughs] right to supreme rage. Where you consciously put it all together, and you make a decision, and you’re on a path that sets you against all illegitimate authority forever. You’re a “difficult person,” resistive to authority. And that’s really what made me who I was, and really, I don’t think without it DEVO would exist.

I’m a big fan of the EZ listening stuff. There’s some EZ listening stuff on the new EP—

With vocals! With vocals, for the first time.

It reminds me a little bit of the Last Poets.

[Laughs] Well, I am one of the last poets now.

You are, Jerry. But as I look back at that stuff now, I wonder if there was a kind of idealism—there seems to be a real nostalgia underneath, maybe, for that New Frontier, early Sixties…

Yeah. And that’s understandable; we were fed a big heap of fantasy. And it was presented using science. When they showed you the future, it was based on innovation and technology and science. So the flying cars, the domed cities, the end of labor, it was a pretty fine middle-class fantasy of leisure and prosperity! It was a complete brainwash job.
 

Promotional photo from 1981 by Robert Matheu (via Club DEVO)

I keep waiting for that World’s Fair vision to materialize myself.

Yeah, well, forget it.
 
Read more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.06.2022
07:26 pm
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‘Massacre at Central High’: Did this film concerning teen-on-teen violence influence ‘Heathers’?
09.13.2022
06:00 am
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Massacre at Central High
 
The brilliant black comedy Heathers (1988) has frequently been compared to another gem of a cult movie, Massacre at Central High (1976). This lesser-known film is considered by many to have been an influence on Heathers—but was it really? The truth is probably not what you think.

In the mid 1970s, Dutch filmmaker Renee (a/k/a Rene) Daalder was approached by a couple of film producers about making a movie, for which they had a couple of stipulations: nine high school kids had to be killed, and the picture had to be called Massacre at Central High. Daalder accepted and went about penning the script, imagining it as a political parable. He would also direct. 

In Massacre at Central High, a new student, David, arrives at the high school and discovers it’s run by a band of bullies, a unit that includes Mark, who David knew previously and had once defended against similar tormentors. David is appalled by their actions, and that Mark is running with them. Once David makes his opinions known to the junior fascists, he becomes yet another target of their wrath. After David is hospitalized following an accident instigated by the rulers of the school, they begin to drop.
 
David outside of school
 
The cast includes Robert Carradine, best remembered today as Lewis from the Revenge of the Nerds series, and Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith, who appeared in many other notable B-movies throughout the ‘70s and early ‘80s, including Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and alongside Carradine in The Pom Pom Girls, released the same year as Massacre.
 
Cast members
L-R: Robert Carradine, Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith, and Lani O’Grady.

For nearly all its running time, no authority figures of any kind—teachers, parents, police—are seen on screen, giving the proceedings a lawless, uneasy quality. Another interesting element are the murders of the bullies, which are executed with a slasher-like level of creativity, as they all involve gravity.
 
First death
 
Massacre at Central High is a thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining B-movie. Given Daalder was tasked with writing and directing nothing more than a low budget exploitation picture with a sordid title and specific body count, it’s remarkable that he created such a substantial film. It’s certainly better than it needed to be.

There are several similarities between Massacre at Central High and Heathers. Both involve a loner who’s transferred to a new school and goes about knocking off the popular kids. The ruling cliques in both films are factions of four—male in Massacre, female in Heathers—with one being a somewhat reluctant member of the group, who has a close relationship with the killer. Both movies address the power vacuum that takes place when the domineering students at a high school are murdered. In addition, the intense finales of Massacre and Heathers, which concern a plot by the killer to blow up the school, are remarkably similar.
 
Explosion 
Heathers screenwriter Daniel Waters has been quoted as saying that although he didn’t see Massacre at Central High prior to writing Heathers, he had read about it in one of Danny Peary’s Cult Movies books (specifically Cult Movies 2), which were treasured by fans of obscure, wonderfully weird flicks looking for guidance in the in the pre-web ‘80s. Here’s Waters:

I most definitely had not seen the movie, but I do remember reading about it in the beloved book Cult Movies by Danny Peary . . . so I guess it was rattling around somewhere in my subconscious. (from Heathers by John Ross Bowie, 2010)

Intriguing, eh?

While Heathers is a comedy, albeit a dark one, Massacre at Central High takes its subjects of teen violence and hierarchy seriously. But that’s not to say it’s without depictions of less heady subjects found in similar teensploitation films of the day.
 
Beach sex
 
In 1976, the movie came and went without much notice. Well after its release, noted film critic Roger Ebert went out of his way to praise Massacre on Sneak Previews, calling it “an intelligent and uncompromising allegory about the psychology of violence.”

One of the common criticisms of Massacre is its use of a maudlin song that airs a couple of times, including over the opening credits. “Crossroads of Your Life” sounds like a lame TV show theme, but it’s not Daalder’s fault; it was forced on him by the producers. Daalder, who was also a composer, had written a theme that Derrel Maury, who played David, heard at the time and has said was an incredible, haunting piece of avant-garde jazz.
 
Outside
 
On the international front, the Italian release was edited to include—if you can believe it—depictions of hardcore sex (not of the original actors) and retitled, Sexy Jeans.

For decades, Daalder wanted nothing to do with Massacre, believing it had been taken from him, but he did embrace the film in his later years. He died in 2019.

In 2020, Synapse Films gave Massacre at Central High it’s Blu-ray debut, issuing a fantastic, restored version of the film—supervised by Renee Daalder—as a limited edition SteelBook. A standard version of the Blu-ray has just come out. Among the bonus features are interviews with Daalder and cast members, along with a making of documentary entitled, Hell in the Hallways. Get the Blu-ray via the MVD Shop
or on Amazon
 

Posted by Bart Bealmear
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09.13.2022
06:00 am
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Watch teaser for ‘Lost Futures: A Film About Mark Fisher’ with music by Mark Stewart
07.26.2022
05:44 am
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Photo of Mark Stewart by Chiara Meattelli and Dominic Lee

Mark Stewart on Mark Fisher:
“HE CAME FROM THE PRESENT TO SAVE THE FUTURE AND CHANGE THE PAST.”

The question Mark, is this: Where to begin the discussion of the great free-thinker and theorist that was Mark Fisher – when the object was somebody who dealt with the ambiguity of time itself?

Can I outdo the last intellectual missive on the matter? I very much doubt it. Should I want to? If I learnt anything about Mark, I can wholeheartedly say no, I shouldn’t.  He would much rather I invest my time reaching the audiences, who as yet, are entirely unaware of both him and his work.  Or, better still, devising methods of my own, capable of derailing the deluge of despair, that dictates your cyclical resignation to “whatever will be, will be”, as Doris once sang.  Mark’s switching of the baton to me, is not a position of privilege that I, and I alone hold, you understand? Mark made the case for all to seize it – and in turn pass it on – if we are to achieve what is required to tack through the ill-wind that blows. And that is poignant. For it was Raymond Briggs, who, with his graphic novel When The Wind Blows (pub. 1982), made his much needed anti-nuclear narrative, accessible to children.  Briggs, like Fisher and other great writers, recognised that in order to avert what is seen by some as the inevitable future – one must reach the youngest of audiences.  Far too many of those – now in their 40s and 50s – are fully accepting of all that their political ‘leaders’ feed them. 

Mark’s work, as well as being a call to arms, is an open invitation to be challenged in order to instil agency, and ignite – with a ferociousness like I have never seen before – an anarchical phenomenon that has reached even the eye of Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric. Therefore, proving itself capable of playing an entirely different game, and winning. Which, in itself, brings me to my penning this and contributing to Niall McCann’s forthcoming film about Mark Fisher’s life & work – Lost Futures.  Niall is committed to making Mark accessible to as many and varied an audience as possible. Let’s assist. For every person who’s aware of Mark Fisher’s work, there are infinite others who aren’t.  If his unparalleled discourse is to hold the status of his ‘lasting legacy’, which we, his devotees rightly bestow upon him, then it is us – those already well-versed in his vision – who carry the honour of the arduous task of spreading his word. And yes, it will be arduous, but that’s the least we, who claim to admire Fisher, should be prepared to shoulder, if we are worthy of declaring ourselves to be forever changed and inspired by his work. It’s worth remembering the integral role that the blessing and a curse – that is the internet – has to play, in facilitating these necessary connections.  When Fisher cast his critique of the net, so ably identifying all its holes, he did so in the hope that it would all be stitched up with better solutions. After all, there is no catch to be had, without the means to captivate what lies beneath. He plunged us to the depths in helping us to understand the effects of social media, so as to provide us with the determination to surface, with all manner of attached material coming up for air with us.

Mark wanted everyone to be in on the act.  He was more than capable of disproving his most ardent ‘academic’ critics, but he’d sooner awaken the opposition than rebuke them. He never favoured wallowing in one-upmanship over the wonderment of a new inductee to the cause.  Mark knew full well that the most vital respondents to his cries, were not those with enviable résumés they’d had the privilege of designing themselves, but instead those that had theirs dictated to them. The people who’ve spent a life being underestimated for all manner of reasons beyond their control, but most of all, their lack of access to a formal licence to question EVERYTHING. We need them. 

Mark talked much about his belief of the links between mental health and circumstance, so if little blue pills that help get it up, or surgeries that leave patients feeling fuller, less flat, are made readily available on the NHS prescriptions list, then shouldn’t Fisher’s back catalogue be on it too? He stabs right at the heart of the mental health plague. No amount of therapy slugs or anti-depressants can better arm the depressed with the tools they need to understand their plight, than Mark Fisher, surely?  And where better to reach the afflicted, than the environments that see very little material that speaks to our contemporary natural condition.

I spoke to Niall McCann (director of ‘Lost Futures’) about my writing this piece and he made reference to a quote that Fisher had once said of prisons: “Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty year long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone.” No greater truth. And right there, lies one of our biggest opportunities, staring us in the face.  For as well as the need to reach the youngest of audiences with thought provoking material to avoid the continuation of the status quo, is it not equally important to reach all – who, by definition of their circumstances – are a ‘captive audience’? Prisoners; long-term hospital patients, mental health ward patients; ATU admissions; care home residents? After all, it is they, who tend to have unrivalled lived experience of the effects of privatisation. None of the settings in which these potential audiences reside are considered hip so get overlooked – and so too does the opportunity to learn from those within. 

Surely this has to change?  How to achieve that? Answers on a postcard to the usual address please, or perhaps better still, a deleted one. See it as a random act of kindness. Remember those? It’s time for retiring ‘radicals’ everywhere, to cast aside the copies of Keep Calm And Colour In Unicorns and instead inundate the mail boxes of anybody and everybody you would ordinarily deem to ‘have nothing in common with’. What’s the alternative? That you continue with a life of blinkered, onanistic self-assurance, immune to the truth of the surrounding landscape? Is this who you want to be? Only satisfied when you’ve fulfilled your own needs, regardless of who or what it denies in the process? It’s time to diversify and digress from the barely tolerated diet, and instead force yourself to swallow your most unpalatable hypocrisies. Break them down with a good glug of acid and permit your imagination to transform them into first class fertile matter, to enable new life to flourish in pastures new. 

I asked Bobby Gillespie and Obsolete Capitalism to summarise what they believe to be the essence of Mark Fisher’s work for inclusion in this piece.

Bobby Gillespie:

“The beauty of Mark Fisher’s laser sharp critique of the destructive effects of life under Neoliberalism, was that it spoke to ordinary people in plain language that went beyond the often-hermetic intellectual world of academia.  He is greatly missed. We need more voices like Mark’s, more than ever.”

So, let’s assist in courting the audience Mark craved to reach the most. In another conversation with a friend I’ve recently introduced to Mark’s work, they said: “It feels to me like there is a feast of fawning over Mark’s theories and a famine of practice out there.” A valid point.  There are people pushing themselves to continue his praxis – one such example that comes to mind is Oneohtrix Point Never. There are numerous others, but why stop there?  What can be gained by knowing much of what is wrong and how it occurred, if we just hoard the horrors in the hope that somebody else will pick up the slack in remedying them? It ain’t gonna happen. Meanwhile, the tendency to promote oneself as one of Fisher’s dedicated disciples to the already switched on, on social media, prevails.  Perhaps a sin we are all guilty of to a greater or lesser degree I expect, but as the expression goes: about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike.  If you’re already familiar with Mark Fisher’s work, by now, you might be vexed that I’ve made little or no reference to Capitalist Realism, or Hauntology…etc. Maybe that’s because primarily Mark was my mate. I miss him. And for me, promoting the generosity of Mark Fisher the person, will always come first before his works. Mark gave you those. They are all available to be devoured and shared. Please do. The last word goes to Obsolete Capitalism, proving that although Mark wanted to appeal to everyone, he had a habit of impressing upon some of us an acuity that felt special, and unique to our innermost thoughts and experiences.

Obsolete Capitalism, June 2022:

“Like other great thinkers of the past – Nietzsche and Deleuze among others – Mark Fisher is a writer with “no mediation”. What is left when he tears away with a simple and definitive gesture, the enveloping screen on which the great epic fable of ‘capitalist realism’ is projected?  Only emptiness.  Instead of living in an age ‘saturated with history’ as Nietzsche wrote, Fisher has clearly and capably described our age as ‘saturated with emptiness’.  While this “emptiness” expands into every corner of capitalism, it also discharges the supposed systemic alternatives opposing it.  Helping us in liberation from ‘horror vacui’ and recognising the emptiness in the false fullness of the Real, is his most generous and enduring intellectual legacy.”

A statement about film-in-progress Lost Futures from director Niall McCann:

The video we have produced for “Storm Crow” is an attempt to visualise Mark Fisher’s ideas and combine them with music which comes from a similar place. An experiment in matching his ideas to Mark Stewart’s music in a playful way, recontextualizing old TV advertisements—which both Marks would have grown up watching—zombie movies, along with pivotal social and political moments which helped bring us to what Fisher called “Capitalist Realism” which is the idea that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism.

The vast body of work Fisher left behind explores capitalism’s unassailable role in our lives, the closing off of any sense of a future different from the present, and the effects of this on us as individuals. His writings lifted up the veil and showed the world afresh to his readers, and that’s the core idea in the music video.

The film itself revolves around something which is central to Mark Fisher’s work: the future. When I was young the future was everywhere. It could be anything, it seemed rife with possibilities, for something better. Now, it’s only talked about as a more terrifying version of the present. This is a film about the futures we have lost and how we might start imagining new ones again.

We will use Mark Fisher’s life and his brilliant ideas as a guide through some of the most urgent questions of our time.

 

 
‘Storm Crow’ by Mark Stewart also features on On-U Sound’s Pay It All Back Vol 8 compilation. Listen / Order Pay It All Back Vol 8.
For more information about Lost Futures, a film about Mark Fisher currently in development, head here.
Niall McCann (Redemption Films)
Mark Stewart Official Website
Repeater Books
Obsolete Capitalism

Words by Mark Stewart, June 2022 ©

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.26.2022
05:44 am
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‘23rd Century Giants,’ the incredible true story of Renaldo & The Loaf!


 
Since much of Renaldo & The Loaf’s work experiments with time, it makes a funny kind of sense that, on 2017’s Gurdy Hurding, the duo picked up right about where they left off with 1987’s The Elbow Is Taboo. Perhaps, like all the tapes they’ve run backwards over the years, their music really does borrow from the future. In the early days especially, they liked to play songs unsinging themselves, the sound of speech sucking itself back up through the lungs to its point of origin in the brain. And wouldn’t it be wonderful, inhaling song and speech out of the environment into your nervous system?

You would be unlikely to mistake Renaldo & The Loaf’s music for someone else’s. The sound, an emergent property of Renaldo Malpractice and Ted the Loaf’s decades-long musical friendship, is entirely homemade, but ingeniously fitted together and sturdily constructed—each song a miniature feat of engineering, built to last. “Primitive modernism,” Ralph Records called it in 1981, announcing the release of Songs for Swinging Larvae.

So while the timbres and harmonies can be bracingly unfamiliar, Renaldo & The Loaf’s songs teem with earworms, and probably brain- and spineworms, too. In fact, let me take this opportunity to recommend that the songs themselves be classified and studied as new zoological discoveries. (These days, when I listen to Klanggalerie‘s pristine and greatly enlarged editions of the Renaldo & The Loaf catalog, I often picture the menagerie of intergalactic pilgrims in Clark Ashton Smith’s “The City of the Singing Flame.”)

Alex Wroten’s excellent new documentary 23rd Century Giants, out March 8 on Blu-ray and streaming platforms, tells how two teenage Tyrannosaurus Rex fans from Portsmouth became the weirdest band on Ralph. Along with Renaldo Malpractice and Ted the Loaf themselves, the documentary collects testimony from the Cryptic Corporation’s Homer Flynn, Jay Clem, and the late Hardy Fox; the visionary director behind Renaldo & The Loaf’s Songs for Swinging Larvae video, Graeme Whifler; veterans of the Ralph and T.E.C. Tones labels, and patient recipients of my adolescent correspondence, Tom Timony and Sheenah Spece; album illustrators Poxodd and Steven Cerio; and DEVO archivist Michael Pilmer, among others.

Some highlights follow from my recent conversation with director Alex Wroten and the two learned rotcods.


Renaldo & The Loaf, 1982 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)

Under the Lights

 
Is this the first time the two of you have been in front of the camera very much, Brian and David? The “Backwards Film Study” that’s in there seems to come from the early Eighties—

Brian Poole (Renaldo Malpractice): Oh, you’ve seen that, have you? [Laughs]

Well, I’ve just seen the little bit that’s in the documentary. I’m looking forward to seeing the full thing on the Blu-ray.

David Janssen (Ted the Loaf): That’s it. It’s only very short, that’s all there is.

Brian: Basically, yeah. Three minutes, that’s it!

David: And no, we’re not really used to being in front of the camera much. There’s that three-minute thing; there’s, I suppose, the filming we did for the “A Convivial Ode” video…

Brian: And that’s it, really, isn’t it?

David: I mean, unintentionally, the stuff that was filmed live. I mean, that was just, someone happened to film it, so we weren’t really conscious of being in front of a camera.

This is the Vienna show you’re talking about?

David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I suppose Alex’s documentary is kind of the longest we’ve ever been under the lights of movie cameras.

Brian: Yeah, that’s right. But of course, we didn’t have to do makeup or anything like that, or costumes. [Laughs]

Alex Wroten (director, 23rd Century Giants): Well, not totally true, ‘cause there’s the part where you’re wearing the glasses [designed by Poxodd], so you did a little costumes.

David: And the masks.

Brian: In answer to your question, no. We’re really not used to being the center of attention, if you like. There have been stills done. Up in the Eighties and that, we did sort of go into a studio and have some photos done of us, but apart from that, no. In fact, the material that Alex asked for—I mean, obviously, as the documentary was coming to fruition and that, he wanted to say “What visual material do you have?” And it was a very, very useful thing looking through the archive, which, fortunately, I’ve got it here, our stuff, because I haven’t moved house, and it’s just here. So I was able to find quite a lot of stuff, but, you know, there’s some creative stuff that Alex had to do in the film to illustrate certain things, let’s say.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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02.11.2022
09:06 am
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