“Come Fly With Me” by Larry Tee and the Love Machine, is yet another of the low budget music videos I co-directed with Alan Henderson in the 80s. The video for this club kid anthem featured RuPaul, Lady Bunny, Lahoma Van Zandt, “Party Monster” Michael Alig, Vanity Fair‘s George Wayne, Justine Cooper, Amy Mellon, DJ Keoki, and many more people whose names I can’t recall. The brunette with the great eyes later played Jerry Seinfeld’s girlfriend in a few episodes of Seinfeld. I think this was made in 1989.

The “Kaleidoscope” digital effects device was new on the market then and we used the crap out of it, here. This was made and mastered on analog tape. It’s not impressive now, but before you had After Effects, you had to be a maniac to attempt something like this. Larry Tee was later responsible for RuPaul’s “Supermodel” song and is an in-demand DJ and remixer who has recently worked with Lady Gaga. The infectious bassline sample is from “Reach Out in the Darkness” by Friend & Lover.
 

This weekend is the big Everything Is Festival here in Los Angeles. Cinefamily’s Hadrian Belove and Dimitri Simakis of Everything is Terrible preview the five day fest, which will feature Mark Hosler of Negativland, Neil Hamburger dipping into his personal collection of obscure TV specials made by a 70-year-old grandmother, Andrew W.K. with a motivational lecture, a Firesign Theatre tribute, TV Carnage and others who’ll appear amidst the cinematic mayhem they plan to hurl at the audience. Full schedule here. Get a festival pass before it’s too late!

 
If you caught the new Adam Curtis BBC documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, you may have noticed the lovely opening theme. “Baby Love Child” is from Japan’s Pizzicato Five. I thought it was a weird choice, although I love the song. In 1994 I made a music video for “Baby Love Child.”  The video mostly consists of already existing footage of Maki Nomiya, P5’s beautiful lead singer, taken from outtakes from other shoots and bits of a documentary. I shot the in-studio lip-sync, and once back in LA, I did the (primitive) art and the animated Nam June Paik-wanna be segments where I was working at the time. The budget was pretty much a free trip to Tokyo and a $1000. I haven’t seen this in years but I think it came out pretty good. If you want to hear the song I recorded with Pizzicato Five in Japan, I played it in one of the Dangerous Minds Radio Hour shows.
 

 
James Williamson of the Stooges discusses the newly remixed, remastered version of 1977’s Kill City, a little-known album in the Iggy canon, but one that is ripe for rediscovery 34-years after it was first released. James also talks about what it was like to stand on-stage with people throwing beer bottles at the band the night that Metallic K.O. was recorded, his career as a rocker turned SONY executive turned rocker again and the current Stooges tour.

Read Beyond the Law: Brilliant reissue of 1977 Iggy Pop & James Williamson album ‘Kill City’
 

A conversation with the brilliant Michael Backes, a Hollywood special effects consultant (films from Jurassic Park to Spider-Man 2) who also happens to be one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject of medical cannabis. If this is a topic that is of interest to you, you can be assured of finding what he says in this interview fascinating (or your money back!).

Fun fact: Several characters in Michael Crichton’s novels are named “Michael Backes.”