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Bruce Haack meets Seventies Hungarian sci-fi
01.13.2011
06:22 pm
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A mashup of imagery from 1970s Hungarian Sci-fi TV series Tales of Pirx the Pilot (based on Stanislaw Lem’s book) and soundscapes from electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack, this video pays tribute to the roots of digital pop culture. 

Stones Throw Records has released “Farad, The Electric Voice” which…

[...] specifically focuses on tracks using Haack’s self-made vocoder, which he named “Farad.” This was the one of the first truly musical vocoders, and first to be used on a pop album, pre-dating Kraftwerk’s Autobahn by several years.

In his music and lyrics, Haack explored the interface between humans and machines in the beginning decades of cybernetics. Releasing groundbreaking experimental records as early as 1962 using synthesizers, early proto-types of the vocoder, rhythm machines and the touch sensitive Dermatron, Haack’s visionary sound still seems fresh.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.13.2011
06:22 pm
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Little boy gets wish to drive around in Gary Numan’s car (1982)
01.12.2011
07:17 pm
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Last night Richard and I watched the Awfully Good TV special hosted by Little Britain’s David Walliams. It’s one of those clip shows of “so bad that it’s good” TV moments that normally aren’t that great, but this one actually was hilarious. I nearly peed myself when this clip came on. A kid named Matthew wrote in to the Jim’ll Fix It TV show and asked the host (Jimmy Saville) if he could “fix it” so that Matthew could drive around in Gary Numan’s “Down in the Park” car. And Jim came through! Watch as young Matthew, in crap shades, takes a little ride as Numan croons “Music for Chameleons.”

Matthew actually chimed in on the YouTube comments, writing:

All I can say is…HAHAHAHAHA…can’t stop laughing because that miserable kid is me! Blame the BBC for making me put those stupid glasses on just before filming…I hated them but they thought they looked futuristic. *ahem*

Apart from that had an ace day.

They wanted me to look spooky…but my grumpy face was just me being mardy and also scared. The jacket is too small for me these days, not that I’d ever wear it out for fear of damaging it.

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The clip of Boy George on The A-Team was also from that program to give credit there, too.

Read the letter from Matthew and watch the hysterical video from Jim’ll Fix it below:
 
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Posted by Tara McGinley
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01.12.2011
07:17 pm
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‘Don’t want no English glitter prince’: Boy George guest stars on The A-Team
01.12.2011
01:36 pm
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Could this be the worst celebrity guest star appearance in television history? Methinks so. Watch the cringe-worthy trailer below. Also, take note on how Boy George delivers his line “Totally awesome, Hannibal.” It’s sheer brilliance.

You can watch the entire episode titled “Cowboy George” over at Hulu. Thank God!
 

Posted by Tara McGinley
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01.12.2011
01:36 pm
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‘Fat Man on a Beach’: The Dying Words of Brilliant Novelist B. S. Johnson
01.10.2011
09:19 pm
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The ending to B. S. Johnson’s film Fat Man on a Beach proved rather prophetic, as the author walked fully clothed into the sea, until he disappeared. It was the last sequence filmed for his documentary, and recalls the opening scene to the BBC comedy The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, and, more significantly, Stevie Smith’s poem “Not Waving but Drowning”. Three weeks after filming this scene, in 1973, B. S. Johnson killed himself.

I’ve liked Johnson since I first read him as a teenager, and he is one of the many authors whose books I still return to all these years later. Although I like his work there is something about Johnson that reminds me of the well-kent story of Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman during the making of Marathon Man, where each actor approached their role through their own discipline. Olivier had learnt his technique from treading the boards and performing Shakespeare alongside John Gielgud; Hoffman was a different breed, his muse was Method Acting, where motivation is key. When Hoffman’s character was supposed to have been without sleep, Hoffman decided to stay up all night in order to perform the scene. When Olivier heard the length to which Hoffman had gone to interpret his role, the aging Lord, said, “Have you tried acting, dear boy?”

There was something of the Hoffman in Johnson, or at least, in the shared need to have the experience before creating from it. What Johnson did not do was write fiction - or so he claimed. He saw stories as lies, citing the term “telling stories” as a childish euphemism for telling lies. Johnson did not believe in telling lies, he believed in telling the truth. And it was this that would ultimately destroy him. For once one has abandoned imagination, there is no possibility of escape, or creative freedom.

In 1965, Johnson wrote a play called You’re Human Like the Rest of Them - a grim, unrelenting drama, later made into an award-winning short film in 1967. In it, the central character Haakon realizes his own mortality and the inevitability of death.

We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that? / You just can’t ignore these things, you just can’t!

For Haakon, and so for Johnson, from “the moment of birth we decay and die.” An obvious proposition, as Jonathan Coe, pointed out in his excellent biography on Johnson Like a Fiery Elephant, one which any audience would have understood before watching. Not so for Johnson the realist - death is the final answer to life’s question, and once realized nothing else is of significance. You can see where this is heading, and how Johnson started to unravel. Though he did go on to write three of his greatest novels after this: Trawl, about life on a fishing vessel; The Unfortunates the episodic tale of a friend’s death from cancer; and the brutally comic Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, in which the titular hero becomes a mass murderer and succumbs to a sudden death form cancer; you can see the pattern, all three were shadowed with death. However, each is so brilliantly and engagingly written their dark heart is often overlooked.

There is a key moment in Fat Man on a Beach, when Johnson described a motorcycle accident in which the cyclist was diced by a barbed-wire fence, like “a cheese-cutter through cheese.” He explained the story as a “metaphor for the way the human condition seems to treat humankind,” then digressed and said, life is:

“...really all chaos…I cannot prove it as chaos any more than anyone else can prove there is a pattern, or there is some sort of deity, but even if it is all chaos, then let’s celebrate chaos. Let’s celebrate the accidental. Does that make us any the worse off? Are we any the worse off? There is still love; there is still humor.”

This in essence is what is so marvelous about Johnson and Fat Man on a Beach, as Jonathan Coe later wrote as an introduction to the film:

One evening late in 1974, the TV listings announced that a documentary about Porth Ceiriad was to be broadcast. It was being shown past my bedtime (I was 13), but was clearly not to be missed. After News at Ten, we settled down to watch en famille.

Instead of a tourist’s-eye view of local beauty spots, what we saw that evening was baffling. A corpulent yet athletic-looking man, bearing some resemblance to an overweight Max Bygraves, ran up and down the beach for 40 minutes gesticulating, expostulating, reciting strange poetry and chattering away about the randomness of human life, his quasi-mystical feelings about the area and, most passionately, the dishonesty of most modern fiction and film-making. With disarming bluntness, the programme was called Fat Man on a Beach. We could not make head or tail of it.

And yet memories of this film, so unlike anything seen on television before or since, stayed with me, and 10 years later, when I was a post-graduate student, I stumbled upon a reissued paperback novel by someone called B. S. Johnson and realised that this was the same person. Amazingly, it came with a puff from Samuel Beckett, someone not known as a regular provider of jacket quotations. Encouraged by this, I bought the novel, which was called Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, devoured it in a matter of hours (it’s less than 30,000 words long) and realised that I had found a new hero.

When I thought about the film that we had watched in a daze of collective bewilderment all those years before, I remembered the sense of fierce engagement, combined with a spirit of childish fun, that had characterised BS Johnson’s virtuoso monologue to camera. I remembered his strange, unwieldy grace - the sort of fleet-footed grace you find unexpectedly in a bulky comedian such as John Goodman or Oliver Hardy. And I remembered the wounded eyes that stared at you almost aggressively, as if in silent accusation of some nameless hurt. It was impossible not to recognise the pain behind those eyes. Even so, I had not realised at the time that I had been looking at a dead man.

The writer David Quantick has uploaded this and some other excellent films by Johnson onto You Tube, which I hope will provide a stimulus to reading his exceptional books.
 

 
Previously on DM

B. S. Johnson: ‘The Unfortunates’


 
More form ‘Fat on a Beach’ after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.10.2011
09:19 pm
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Banned TV commercial for Romanian SUV
01.10.2011
04:22 pm
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Dacia Duster (not actual size).

Dutch production company Artcore created this hugely politically incorrect commercial for the Romanian automobile manufacturer Dacia to promote the Duster SUV which Dacia describes as being “simple, robust and functional.”

I can’t imaging this ad running on television in any country in the world. Perhaps that was the intention. If it goes viral on the internet, it could potentially be seen by far more people than had it aired on TV. Welcome to new era of advertising: creating campaigns with the purpose of being banned.
 

 
Via copyranter

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.10.2011
04:22 pm
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Iggy Pop: Striptease on French TV, 1977
01.10.2011
02:48 am
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French TV host and provocateur Yves Mourousi interviews Iggy Pop in 1977.

The exceedingly hip Mourousi and Mr. Osterberg seem to be on the same wavelength in this totally charming clip.

Mousousi abandoned the constraints of television when he quit his TV gig and opened up “Look,” a Parisian nightclub where he was able to actualize his own rock and roll dreams.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.10.2011
02:48 am
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David Bowie sings ‘Drive-in Saturday’ live on TV, 1973
01.08.2011
07:14 pm
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David Bowie sings “Drive-in Saturday” and is interviewed by British TV host, Russell Harty, from 1973.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.08.2011
07:14 pm
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‘Stella Street’ - The Comic Lives of Hollywood’s Rich and Famous in Suburban England
01.06.2011
06:19 pm
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You may think some of your favorite celebrities live the high life in the hills of Hollywood, the townhouses of New York or the chateaux of Switzerland, but you’d be wrong. For most them live in a quiet suburban street in Surbiton, England.

Yes, this is where you’ll find the likes of Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, David Bowie, Dirk Bogarde, The Beatles, Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Savile and many others. Well, that’s what writers and performers, John Sessions and Phil Cornwall would have us believe with their cult comedy series Stella Street.

Pitched as a “suburban soap”, Stella Street combined what we all think we know about the stars with soap opera conventions, to produce such memorable characters as ultra-violent gangster Joe Pesci, effete snob Dirk Bogarde and mind-numbing [soccer] bore Jimmy Hill.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to see Al Pacino and Roger Moore playing Monopoly in Michael Caine’s front room to celebrate Zulu’s 33rd anniversary, or what would happen if a lobotomised Joe Pesci and drunk Jimmy Hill tried to cook a turkey “the way Delia Smith likes it”, Stella Street was the place to find out.

Stella Street was screened on the BBC between 1998 and 2001, with a special in 2004, and was directed by Comic Strip Presents… mastermind, Peter Richardson. If you’ve never been, I’d suggest a visit, for you’re bound to see someone you know. Oh, and Mick and Keith run the local convenience store.
 

 
Part 2 of ‘Stella Street’ plus bonus episodes, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.06.2011
06:19 pm
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How ‘Network 7’ televised a revolution
01.06.2011
02:56 pm
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Network 7 was a love it or loathe it British TV series from the 1980s that changed television for good. Launched in 1987, it ran for two series, until 1988, and was aired on Sundays between 12 and 2pm, on Channel 4. There had been nothing like it, but there have been plenty of copies since.

Devised by Janet Street-Porter and Jane Hewland, Network 7 gave a voice to British teenagers and twenty-somethings, sowed the seed of Reality TV, and put “yoof culture” at the heart of the TV schedules.

Strange to think now, but back then youth TV was limited to roughly three shows: the educational Blue Peter, which was a cross between homework, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides; Top of the Pops, the legendary chart run-down show, hosted by Jimmy Saville and “Hairy Monster” Dave Lee Travis; and The Tube an anarchic live music series from Newcastle. And that was that.

Set in a ramshackle warehouse in London’s Limehouse, Network 7 changed all this by taking its audience seriously and offering feature items, news stories, music and interviews on issues that were topical, relevant and often ground-breaking: from exposes on bank card fraud, to Third World debt, AIDs, bulimia, bullying and gangs. Network 7 was also radical in that it was presented by “yoof”, and made stars of Sebastian Scott, Magenta Devine, Sankha Guha, Jaswinder Bancil and Trevor Ward.

It was easy to see why Ward was the best of the bunch, for he didn’t try and be a traditional presenter, something all the others did (and often badly). No, he was himself, and tackled each story with his own clever and original take. Trevor Ward was the main reason for watching Network 7, it was like having a young Hunter S. Thompson presenting a TV show - for Ward brought a steely journalistic edge to what was basically a day-time series presented by young things.

I contacted Trevor to find out how he got started:

I was working for Mercury Press agency in Liverpool in 1987 under the brilliant and inspirational Roger Blyth when I was 26.  Network 7 was a brand new Sunday morning show, like a thinking-man’s Tiswas.  About halfway through their first series, they said they were looking for a reporter. The following week, they repeated their appeal, but this time they said the applicants had to be Northern.  So I sent in my CV and was invited down to an interview on the set – a load of reconditioned caravans in the middle of a big warehouse in East London.  Janet Street Porter and Jane Hewland gave me a merciless grilling and I drove home convinced I hadn’t got the job.

The next day, a researcher rang me and said I was on the final short list of three, and that we would be expected to come down to London the next Sunday to do a live audition on that day’s show.  The viewers would vote in a live telephone poll for who got the job.

I thought it was a brilliant idea, even though there was a one in three chance it could end in nationally-televised humiliation for me.

That week’s show was coming live from a Rock against Racism festival in Finsbury Park, and we each had to find a story during the programme’s two-hour running time to present to camera in under a couple of minutes about half an hour before the end.

I thought it was pretty obvious that it would have to be a PTC rather than an interview if we were to successfully sell ourselves to the viewers in such a short timespan, so I harvested a load of juicy anecdotes from a bunch of bouncers and turned those into a script which ended with about six of them carrying me off camera. I was unaware of what the other two were upto, and later found out they’d chosen to interview people from worthy causes represented at the festival.

Anyway, I got almost half the votes, so was declared the winner at the end of the show.

 

You can gather from this why Ward was the show’s highlight - he approached stories in an interesting and intelligent way. Every fuckwit would have gone all hang-wringing and worthy, but not clever Trevor, and that’s why he is so good.

My first live story on Network 7 was on its Death Penalty programme.  Network 7 was brilliant for pioneering viewer interaction, and viewers were regularly asked to vote on a range of issues.  That week it was the death penalty and whether a particular Death Row inmate –whom we had a live satellite link with – should die.  I was handed the London, studio-end of things.  It was incredibly nerve-racking.  My first piece -to-camera (PTC)– at the top of the two-hour programme – was a two—and-a-half-minute walking/talking shot – an eternity in TV time - referring to various modes of capital punishment – all without autocue.

That was the other thing about Network 7 it engaged with its audience, it was like a social network for news stories, features and information. And by god did they pump that screen full of information - from what was coming up, to the temperature in the studio. Even so, for a generation it was compulsive viewing, and opened the gates to more accessible, more informative, more entertaining TV.

Janet Street-Porter went onto to win a BAFTA for Network 7 and was then appointed head of “yoof” TV at the BBC, before, more recently, returning to journalism. Trevor Ward continued as a journalist (writing for Loaded, The Guardian, and working as an editor on the Daily Record) and presenter, and is now a highly respected writer, producer and documentary-maker.

There aren’t many clips of Network 7 out there, and sadly none with Ward, but the few that are do give a hint of what the show was like. This selection ranges from opening titles, an item on gay youth and “coming out” (which was highly controversial subject back then), Madonna in concert, and an interview with The Beastie Boys.
 

 
More clips of ‘Network 7’, plus bonus French & Saunders spoof and Trevor Ward documentary, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.06.2011
02:56 pm
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Anima Sound: Europa Tournee Mit 20km/h
01.05.2011
04:58 pm
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A tantalizing teaser for a truly rare (as in I can’t find the complete thing on the innerweb) 1971 doc about husband and wife free-improv duo Paul and Limpe Fuchs (and their two small children) d.b.a Anima Sound. The Fuchs’ toured greater Europa in a most odd fashion: in a caravan pulled by a tractor going 20 kilometers an hour with the purpose of bringing their primitive musical expressionism to remote, uncultured public places. Looks utterly fascinating. Evidently this film did a tour of college film festivals last year. Won’t some kind soul in possession of a copy put the whole thing for us all (OK, a handful of weirdos) to view ?
 

Anima Sound: Europa Tournee Mit 20km/h TRAILER from naomi no umi on Vimeo.

 
More Limpe Fuchs after the jump…

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Posted by Brad Laner
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01.05.2011
04:58 pm
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