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Classic British nuclear attack drama ‘Threads’
02.02.2011
09:55 am
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If there’s one aspect of the 80’s that I am glad hasn’t been revived it’s that horribly real nuclear war paranoia. However, if you do fancy taking a trip back to the time when the world’s superpowers could have wiped out most of humanity at the flick of a switch, then Threads is the film for you. This one-off BBC made-for-television film from 1984 was mentioned in last week’s How TV Ruined Your Life episode about the power of fear in the media, and it’s a brilliant example (in ways both good and bad).

Threads is set in the Northern English industrial city of Sheffield, and concerns itself with the impact of a nuclear bomb blast on the community, and the effect it has on the whole country in the years that follow. Having a micro-level setting makes Threads more effective, particularly in the scenes that show how a blast would be dealt with by local government, and how some of the seemingly smallest losses are the most painful. The gray-skied Yorkshire moors backdrop adds hugely to the medieval-regression scenario that plays out after the horrific first attack. From BBC4:

Director Mick Jackson shoots the piece as if filming an actual disaster, using a documentary-maker’s dispassion that renders the grey, gruesome scenes unbearably compelling. The blend of personal tragedy and global catastrophe is deftly handled but it’s the attention to detail and stunning breadth of the work which most impresses.

Writer Barry Hines, best known for Kes, fashioned his script on evidence supplied by bodies as varied as the British Medical Association and the Home Office, with literally dozens of experts from varying fields - including Carl Sagan - consulted to guarantee authenticity. The cold exploration of such horrific events is frightening, from the awful build-up to war and the immediate impact of the bomb, to the viler, long-term consequences of a poisoned world.

I hadn’t seen it before yesterday, and I should mention that it’s not a viewing experience to be undertaken lightly. But it IS worth watching. I am just glad I never saw this film at the time, being only a child in the Eighties, as it is truly one of the most bleak (if brilliant) viewing experiences. Plenty of YouTube comments attest to the film’s powers to inspire nightmares in children, even in adults. I am guessing that it also led to a surge in the number of people joining CND.

Besides, you know you’ve hit a certain apex of harrowing brilliance when Portishead name a song after you.
 


 
‘Threads’ parts 2 -12 after the jump…

Thanks to Chris P. Daniels for the link.

READ ON
Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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02.02.2011
09:55 am
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Richard Brautigan: The voice at the heart of nowness
02.02.2011
05:19 am
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I was 15 when I first read a book by Richard Brautigan. It was called A Confederate General From Big Sur . I borrowed the book from my friend Joseph, a free spirited guy two years older than me who had a beard and rolled his own cigarettes. Though he looked like one, Joseph wasn’t a hippie. Hippies were part of a movement and Joseph wasn’t a joiner. In the small town in Virgina where we grew up, Joseph was completely his own man, a suburban teenage Zen monk who seemed ancient at the age of 17. It made perfect sense that he would be the guy to turn me on to Brautigan. They shared common traits: a clarity of mind, a sharp sense of humor and a deep love for language. Joseph kept a notebook with him at all times in which he wrote short stories, poems and haiku.

In this moment of recalling Joseph, I am convinced he was as close to being enlightened as any teenager could be in America in 1966. I wonder where he is today and what he’s reading.

Joseph, Brautigan, Jack Kerouac and The Doors were my saviors in the year of the Summer Of Love. I was stuck in the suburbs, surrounded by jocks and greasers, completely alone in my world of beatnik books and a meerschaum pipe full of banana peel. It was the year I read Brautigan’s second book Trout Fishing In America and the year that I left home for San Francisco. Joseph was there and I needed to make the connection with the Bodhisattva of the ‘burbs.
 
Those were the days when a book or a record album could change your life. If literature had a Beatles, its name was Richard Brautigan. It comes as no surprise that John Lennon was a Brautigan fan. They both had a whimsical point of view that started in the square inch field and expanded into the cosmos.

One of the things that was most compelling and inspiring for a young would-be writer like myself about Brautigan’s books was their covers. With every new book that Richard published there was always an attractive bohemian woman on the cover. It was as though Richard was sending a message to all the reclusive teenybopper poets in the world that said “write poetry and you will get laid.” And it was true. I would sit in the Mediterranean Cafe on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley with my journal unfolded before me and invariably a young flower child would approach and ask if I were a poet. A response of “yes” would often lead to a fuck fest in my attic apartment on Channing Way. In the sixties being an artist/intellectual had the same aphrodisiac qualities associated with cocaine and Rolex watches in the 80s. Being smart was sexy.

I’m not going to get into the biographical details of Brautigan’s life. In this Wiki world, his life story is easily accessible. In brief: he was married several times, managed the rare accomplishment of making money as a poet, became an alcoholic and killed himself at 49. Happy/sad, all of it. What really matters is what he wrote and he wrote a couple of dozen books that run the gamut from the sublime to the silly. Every word is worth reading. Even the sloppy stuff.

For many kids like myself Brautigan was a door into a consciousness that was liberating in its playfulness and here and nowness. Reading Brautigan is like taking a pure hit of oxygen. Things sparkle. There is a sense of boundless delight and eroticism in his prose and poetry - a promise of the unspeakable, where language transcends itself.

The following recordings of Brautigan reading were intended to be released on Zapple records, a spinoff of The Beatles Apple label. But the project was never fully realized. Harvest Records released them as Listening To Brautigan in 1973.

Brautigan, now more than ever.
 

 
Previously on DM: Richard Brautigan’s daughter Ianthe reads a poem on her father’s birthday.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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02.02.2011
05:19 am
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Jean-Claude Vannier makes wild music for Yves Saint-Laurent (1971)
02.01.2011
07:08 pm
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A tantalizingly brief clip of a collaboration between fashion giant Yves Saint-Laurent and composer/arranger/ key Serge Gainsbourg collaborator, Jean-Claude Vannier. A version of L’enfant la Mouche et les Allumettes from Vannier’s 1972 LP L’enfant Assassin des Mouches (pictured above) is performed as rather surreal accompaniment to the fashion goings-on from The Roland Petit Show in 1971. Wish it went on longer.
 

 
Bonus: A few songs from the wonderful aformentioned LP
 

Le Roi Des Mouches Et La Confiture De Rouse
 

Les Gardes Volent Au Secours Du Roi
 

L`enfant Au Royaume Des Mouches
 
With thanks to Justin Meldal-Johnsen !

Posted by Brad Laner
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02.01.2011
07:08 pm
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Scott Walker sings the title song of French spaghetti western ‘The Rope And The Colt’
02.01.2011
06:10 pm
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Directed by and starring Robert Hossein and written by Dario Argento, Une Corde, Un Colt (The Rope And The Colt) is a rarely seen 1969 French spaghetti western ( pâtes de l’ouest) with a dynamite score by the director’s father, André Hossein. The film’s title song is sung by none other than Scott Walker.

I swore a vow on my dyin’ breath
to ride a trail that ends in death
and death could strike with a frightening jolt of a lightning bolt in
the land where the rope and the colt are king

The Rope And The Colt was also released with the much more sinister and compelling title Cemetery Without Crosses. The DVD is available from CultCine Media.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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02.01.2011
06:10 pm
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Racist field trip
02.01.2011
04:24 pm
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“Way down south in the land of cotton…”

Outrageous! This guy squeezes a lot of comic mileage out of this story. Too funny.
 

 
(via reddit)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.01.2011
04:24 pm
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Judy Garland’s screen test for ‘Valley of the Dolls’
02.01.2011
03:50 pm
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Best-selling author Jacqueline Susann and Judy Garland at a 1967 press conference.
 
Judy Garland’s screen test for Valley of the Dolls. Re-blogging this from Billy Beyond, who writes:

After they fired her she took the costumes and performed in them at the Palladium in London. Go Judy.

The idea of casting Judy Garland as aging actress “Helen Lawson” in Valley of the Dools was pure genius, when you consider that Patty Duke’s “Neely O’ Hara” character was so obviously based on Garland herself. Not that Susan Hayward wasn’t great in the role, she was, but it would have been even better with Judy Garland.
 

 
After the jump, Patty Duke tells the story of Judy Garland getting fired from Valley of the Dolls... and her revenge!

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.01.2011
03:50 pm
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‘I eat pussy to survive’
02.01.2011
03:32 pm
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Don’t we all in some way or another?

Via Lady Bunny

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.01.2011
03:32 pm
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Brast Burn and Karuna Khyal: Mysterious and face-melting mid 70’s Japanese psych LPs
02.01.2011
03:27 pm
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Today I lay before you two LPs by possibly the same artist (nobody knows for sure who these people are !) from mid-70’s Japan that I’ve long felt represented some of the strongest home-made psychedelic music ever made. I give you my ever-effusive compatriot, Eric Lumbleau of the mighty Mutant Sounds blog to illuminate further:

These mid-‘70s releases - by interconnected musicians about whom nothing is known - represent two of the highest peaks of Japanese psych-prog weirdness. Brast Burn’s Debon is an intricate con catenation of cascading sleigh bells and hand drums, windswept Himalayan acid atmospherics, bottleneck acoustic-guitar twiddle and Damo Suzuki-like mantric babble. All of the above is held aloft by a synthesist with a terminal case of pitch wheel woozies and is strategically embellished with outbursts of tumbling bass drums, spiraling flutes and recorders, and some exquisitly hallucinogenic electric guitar. Coming on like an eternal cosmic caravan, the whole damn thing is soaked in a higher-key music of the spheres vibe. Yes, Brast Burn are indeed the real goods, and they will suck you into a hypnogogic reverie. Karuna Khyal are, by contrast, an altogether more psychotic proposition, quite capable of inducing frontal lobe fatigue in those lacking a hardy constitution. Great monolithic slabs of damaged, half speed Beefheartian swamp dirge, replete with squawking, overblown mouth harp, collide with undulating waves of Throbbing Gristle-esque electronic distortion, as the group stridently trudge across your neuroreceptors and eroding your sanity. Attempting to reconcile the contents of those disparate dispatches is a losing game. If there ia any thread connecting these excursions, it’s in the mantrically intoned vocals that wend their way through both of these outings; though the volatility of the vocal delivery on Alomoni 1985 renders even these ties tenuous. Suffice to say, both of these forays into the outer reaches of sound are perched near the zenith of radical innovation.

It’s true, rock ‘em loud !
 

Brast Burn - Debon SIde One
 

Brast Burn - Debon Side Two
 
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Karuna Khyal - Alomoni 1985 Side One
 

Karuna Khyal - Alomoni 1985 Side Two

Posted by Brad Laner
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02.01.2011
03:27 pm
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John Peel interviews Mick Farren about the underground press
02.01.2011
02:20 pm
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Fantastic! Vintage interview with Dangerous Minds pal Mick Farren (seen here with ex-wife Joy) conducted by John Peel!

Here the legendary Mr. Farren discusses how “the authorities” would pressure printers not to deal with the International Times or the underground press as a means of suppressing it. Towards the end, he sketches out how an underground economy would work. What a thrill to see this. Imagine if rock stars today were this smart!

When Mick gets back to me about this interview (not mentioned in his autobiography Give the Anarchist a Cigarette) I will update this post.
 

 
Via Blog to Comm

More Mick Farren on Dangerous Minds

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.01.2011
02:20 pm
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The Circle of Life: Part Two
02.01.2011
01:54 pm
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Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Circle of Life

(via The High Definite)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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02.01.2011
01:54 pm
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