Just what the headline says, people. Grant Morrison performed this song during a recent event at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles, thanks to the urging of My Chemical Romance frontman (and Umbrella Academy writer) Gerard Way. As Way explained, Morrison was given this song by the spirit of John Lennon, which Morrison communed with in a magic ritual while writing The Invisibles.
I think it says a lot about the wonderfully enigmatic Grant Morrison that the only reason this surprised me at all was that I didn’t know he played guitar. It actually sounds a great deal like a Beatles song…
Recorded at “An Evening with Grant Morrison” at Meltdown Comics in LA on 7/28/11. I’ve had two private performances of this tune, it’s quite something! Enjoy!
OK, so this is getting serious - very serious. The riots in London have now spread across an area roughly 40km by 30km. To see the actual Google map page, click here.
Thanks to Paul Shetler.
UPDATE: 5:06 PM PST
Scrap that - the rioting has now spread beyond the confines of the city, past the N406 ring road and into suburbs like Ealing, Romford and Croydon. And that’s not to mention riots breaking out in Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds. Keep looking at the Google Map for updates (zoom out if you want to see the chaos spreading around the country). This is going to be one interesting night…
Here is a rare and rather wonderful piece of Kenneth Williams’ archive: his brilliant interpretation of Nikolai Gogol’s farcical short story Diary of a Madman .
In 1963, Kenneth Williams agreed to narrate an animated version of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman for film-maker Richard Williams. The pair had previously worked together on the short cartoon Love Me Love Me. According to the splendid biography Born Brilliant: The Life of Kenneth Williams by Christopher Stevens:
Gogol’s story gave lunatic scope to [Kenneth] Williams’s voices. It told of a lonely clerk, who is driven out of his wits by unrequited love until he succumbs to delusions that, as the uncrowned king of Spain, he is spied upon by talking dogs.
In a recording session that stretched for more than six hours without a break, Williams read from the clerk’s diary in a halting voice, like a man on a window-ledge who cannot will himself to suicide. Other personalities pierced the reading - the sadism of the office supervisor, the contempt of the boss’s daughter, the shrill proclamations of King Ferdinand VIII. ‘I was pretty hard on him, and made him read passages again and again to get the right effect. It freaked him out,’ Richard Williams recalled. ‘At one point he walked out of the studio and I had to run after him. It was a block and a half before I caught up and persuaded him to come back.’ Full of repetition and bitter nonsense, the piece is almost nauseating as the clerk slops and flounders towards insanity. While no recordings exist of Williams in his most unsettling stage roles, Diary of a Madman is proof of his merciless gift for sustained, upsetting performance.
Sadly the animation was never completed, but this incredible recording was later re-edited by the BBC and broadcast on Radio 4 in 1991.
Dramatization by James Burke
Music by Peter Shade
Directed by Richard Williams
Produced by Ned Chaillet
Re-mixed for radio by John Whitehall
The Your Name Here Story produced by the Calvin Company in 1960, longtime makers of “industrial films,” is the ultimate generic 16mm industrial film, built around every script and visual cliche in the Calvin arsenal. It’s wonderfully droll commentary on the process of making industrial films and of working with “budget conscious” (read “cheap”) clients. The Calvin Company made hundreds of industrial films from the 1930s until the early 1980s when they closed after more than four decades. Famed director Robert Altman got his start as a Calvin Company director in the 1950s.
The by-now legendary satire, The Your Name Here Story was apparently made for a yearly company workshop seminar to humorously instruct new employees on Calvin production tropes and poke fun at what they were doing. Read more about the Calvin Company at Archive.org.
Thank you Taylor Jessen of beautiful downtown Burbank!
In a few short minutes, the narrator slathers this documentary of Frederick’s Of Hollywood with a sticky patina of sleaze. Frederick Mellinger’s decadent department store may be to Victoria’s Secret what Depends are to crotchless panties, but it’s still a great place to visit and has been since 1947.
Actually, it’s much hipper than Victoria’s Secret. I just had to slip that Depends thing in.
David Bowie admirably keeps his cool in the face of TV host Russell Harty’s idiotic questions (asked via satellite) in a nearly futile effort to promote his then-upcoming 1976 “Isolar” world tour. In marked contrast to other TV appearances around this time, the thin white duke doesn’t seem to have snorted a pound of cocaine before the interview started…
Each time Bowie appeared on Russell Harty Plus in the 1970s, he was subjected to goading and borderline insults from the supercilious, patronizing Harty, who comes off here like a right prat. You have to wonder why he bothered. Bowie had then just finished his role in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, briefly touched on here.
I’m fascinated by the films of British documentarian Nick Broomfield. One of the pioneers of the “You get a documentary plus ME!” school in films like Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, Kurt and Courtney and Biggie & Tupac, the button-pushing Broomfield’s almost libelous directing techniques are both hilarious and riveting. I would never miss one of his films, which can be good sleazy fun (there is of course, another side of Broomfield’s work in socially-conscious films like Ghosts, Behind the Rent Strike and Battle for Haditha which I’m not addressing here).
One of Broomfield’s oft-used narrative tropes that I enjoy the most is when he knocks on the door of a subject’s home and when they aren’t there or refuse to talk to him, this is seen as evidence that they are hiding something. But he never comes right out and says that (libel laws being what they are) he usually just asks some form of this question pointedly right after we’ve seen a door slammed in his face or a security guard leading him away, “But what is ____ trying to hide?”
Nick Broomfield can be a gleefully immoral documentarian, which is why I was so tremendously pleased to find that the latest target of Broomfield’s patented style of hit and run filmmaking is none other than that snowbilly grifter herself, Sarah Palin! Broomfield’s Sarah Palin—You Betcha! is set to join Werner Herzog, Jessica Yu and Morgan Spurlock’s new films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
The film is supposed to examine Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, AK in detail and promises interviews with Palin’s parents, political associates and former brother-in-law. Broomfield told the Daily Mail:
“People are frightened to talk. Wasilla makes Twin Peaks look like a walk in the park. It’s a devout evangelical community – 76 churches with a population of only six thousand.”
And how many meth labs?
I’m just sorry that Broomfield wasn’t able to get El Duce on camera talking about Sarah Palin. (On a side note, about 20 years ago at a party for the Beastie Boys in Los Angeles, El Duce cheerfully told me that he had raped a friend of mine’s dog).
Below, in a clip released on YouTube, Nick Broomfield confronts Sarah Palin in public, in his signature Nick Broomfield style:
