Raggamuffin legend Daddy Freddy breaks his own record for rapping the most syllables in one minute on BBC TV’s Record Breakers in 1989.
Eventually Freddy broke the record four times taking it from 346 to 598 syllables a minute. First and second time in UK (in Covent Garden and at BBCs Record Breakers on BBC Record Breakers show where he appeared with the great Roy Castle) and two times in America (New York Empire State Building and in Washington).”
Freddy’s record has been broken over the years, most recently by Spanish rapper El Chojin, but Daddy still ranks number one in the world of raggamuffin.
According to the Porsche website, the hookah “made out of TecFlex material,” will be available at the end of July. I wonder how much this sucker is going to cost?
The extraordinary Porsche Design Shisha combines high-quality materials such as aluminium, stainless steel and glass with the timeless and unique design approach of the luxury brand. Puristic and stylish at the same time. The Porsche Design Shisha is made in Germany and stands at a height of 55 centimetres. It only shows a discreet branding on the aluminium top of the Shisha and comes with a long flexible tube made out of TecFlex material, which is also used for the classic Porsche Design TecFlex writing tools.
Acid house - the sound of a Roland TB 303 getting turned up too far that can send the most loved up dancer wild with convulsions of ecstasy . A unique sound accidentally discovered by DJ Pierre and friends in Chicago 25 years ago and that can still wreck dancefloors to this very day. A type of music which for a period of time in the late 80s infested the upper reaches of the UK’s charts and spawned a youth culture all of its own. Let me hear you say ACIEEED!
I was way too young to have any first hand experience of clubbing during the acid house years, but the music and imagery still had a huge effect on my childhood brain . Who couldn’t resist the acid-washed day-glo colours, the oversized clothes, the nods back to hippie culture and the first summer of love, and chart topping tracks from the likes of D-Mob, S’Express, M/A/R/R/S, Yazz, Farley Jackmaster Funk, 808 State, Bomb The Bass and Stakker Humanoid? When I had a chance to buy my own clothes it would be Joe Bloggs, and I had quite the collection of smiley face badges for a kid not yet a teenager. My own pet theory is that disco never had the impact in the UK that it had in the States, but house music and raving had the same effect of democratising the dancefloor ten years later. A large piece of the puzzle was of course the arrival of a new drug called “ecstasy” (actually only made illegal in the UK in 1985), which when combined with the powerful filter sweeps of a TB303 can give the user incredible head rushes. It was this new drug and its implications that seemed to worry the authorities the most.
This great documentary from the BBC’s World in Action strand is like a full blown acid house flashback. Broadcast in 1988 at height of acid house fever, it follows the typical weekend rituals of a group of very young fans, tracks the working life of an illegal party promoter, speaks to some of the producers of the music and charts the the then-growing moral panic which surrounded the scene and its copious drug taking. Raving, and acid house, had a huge (if subtle) effect on British culture, bringing people together in new, democratised contexts free of class and social boundaries, opening people’s ears up to a new world of music and opening their minds to new ideas.
A Trip Round Acid House makes for very interesting viewing at a time when Murdoch Inc and News International stand accused of distorting facts to suit their own means. The program gives a fairly detailed description of how The Sun newspaper did an about face on acid house, going from being supporters of this new youth culture (even selling their own acid house branded t-shirts to decrying it as an outrage that needed to be banned (and as such sold more papers). Some of the other footage here is priceless too, and has popped up on the internet in other forms, such as the classic reaction of two old cockney dears to the description of a typical “rave”. Blimey!
While musician and rock archivist Jim Laspesa is putting together his own website, which will feature music and pop culture related clips from the past 30+ years, he’s been uploading a few gems to Youtube. Here’s a little something that is new to the Interweb: a 1980 appearance by Debbie Harry on ABC’s Sunday morning children’s show Kids Are People Too. Sassy.
For a teenager, Mike Mitchell had a great eye and skill with a camera. His secret stash of stunning black and white photos of The Beatles hit the auction floor tonight at Christie’s and sold for $360,000, considerably more than what was expected.
On July 20, Christie’s is pleased to present The Beatles Illuminated: The Discovered Works of Mike Mitchell, a sale comprised of nearly 50 lots of unpublished and never-before-seen photographs of the Beatles’ first hysteria-inducing visits to America in 1964. Shot in black and white by photographer Mike Mitchell when he was just 18 years old, the images have been filed away for nearly fifty years. The complete rediscovered collection is expected to realize in the region of $100,000.’
Yesterday, when I posted that great Jonathan Winters interview, I found another episode from the archives of the Day for Night public television series that made me want to jump for joy: A 30-minute interview with the great American humorist S.J. Perelman from 1974. I’ve already watched it twice.
Although he is by now, some thirty-odd years after his death, almost completely forgotten, S.J. Perelman was once considered a very big deal man of letters, up there with greats like George S. Kaufman, James Thurber and E.B. White. Today he is best remembered for something that pained him to be associated with during his lifetime: his screenwriting for the Marx Brothers. (Perelman co-wrote two of their greatest comedies, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, but famously said of his tenure with the Marx Brothers: “I did two films with them, which in its way is perhaps my greatest distinction in life, because anybody who ever worked on any picture for the Marx Brothers said he would rather be chained to a galley oar and lashed at ten-minute intervals until the blood spurted from his frame than ever work for those sons of bitches again.”)
An admirer of both Ring Lardner and James Joyce, Perelman’s deliriously complicated prose—written mostly for The New Yorker from 1934 until the end of his life—was densely constructed with puns, literary and historical allusions, ridiculous names, foreign phrases and double and triple entendres. For an American, Perelman was a particularly well-traveled and erudite man. He went to the Far East several times in his life and many of his most famous essays are travelogues. Perelman usually wrote in the first person, portraying himself as a snobby ur-sophisticate beset by his own (unobserved) comic ineptitude. He was a master of the English language with a massive vocabulary that would send readers to their dictionaries several times per page. All of the various idiosyncrasies and uniquely Perelman-esque tropes and over-excessive wordsmithery combined to form a literary style no less distinctive than Shakespeare’s.
It’s next to impossible to accurately describe the S. J. Perelman gestalt, so here are a few choice quotes and passages:
“And you were cruel,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” added Quigley.
“Why did you add Quigley?” I begged him. He apologized and subtracted Quigley, then divided Hogan. We hastily dipped the slices of Hogan into Karo, poured sugar over them, and ate them with relish.
—- From “The Love Decoy”
“Have a bit of the wing, darling?” queried Diana solicitously, indicating the roast Long Island airplane with applesauce. I tried to turn our conversation from the personal note, but Diana would have none of it. Soon we were exchanging gay banter over the mellow Vouvray, laughing as we dipped fastidious fingers into the Crisco parfait for which Diana was famous. Our meal finished, we sauntered into the play-room and Diana turned on the radio. With a savage snarl the radio turned on her and we slid over the waxed floor in the intricate maze of the jackdaw strut.
—- From “Strictly from Hunger”
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin, it’s the triumphant twang of a bedspring.
Woody Allen absolutely revered Perelman and Allen’s early New Yorker pieces often read like he was trying to ape the humorist’s distinctive prose style. Through the rediscovery of the Marx Brothers that occurred in the late1960s on college campuses and Allen’s constant championing of Perelman’s work, his star rose again towards the end of his life. When I was a kid, his books were readily stocked in every library and bookstore. His name and fame were widely known. Today there is but a single book of his in print, the anthology The Most of S.J. Perelman (with an introduction by Steve Martin) although all of his books can be easily found used online.
This interview with S.J. Perelman is a gem. It’s always fascinating to hear a writer’s voice you admire for the first time and I must admit that Perelman’s heavy New York accent is not what I expected (I suppose I always heard his voice as having a British accent in my mind’s ear.)
Below the famous passport scene from Monkey Business:
I’ve always been a fan of John Boorman’s Zardoz, no matter how camp, cheesy, or even ridiculous it may seem. Therefore, I do wish this brief 8-bit animation by nickcriscuolo was a real game.
Okay, it’s only an opening sequence, but just think of the potential Boorman’s and Bill Stair’s original story offers: as the Exterminator Zed (Sean Connery) crosses from the land of the Brutals (where “the gun is good and the penis is evil”), to a world of the Eternals, Apathetics, Renegades and the lovely Charlotte Rampling, where Zed finds himself the subject of the Eternals’ experiments and games, and uncovers the dark secret at the heart of their Vortex and its Tabernacle. O, yes this could work.
And of course, Connery and Rampling would voice it, and there’d be optional thigh-length boots. How bloody marvelous.
Bonus clip of original ‘Zardoz’ film trailer, after the jump…
In November 1964, Pinter appeared at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center, New York, where he read a selection of his poetry and short stories. This audio recording is the full program of Pinter’s reading and includes:
“Tea Party”
“New Year in the Midlands”
“A Glass at Midnight”
“You in the Night”
“The Drama in April”
“The Anesthetist’s Pen”
“Jig”
“Episode”
“Afternoon”
“The Error of Alarm”
“The Table”
“The Black and White Selection”
“The Examination”
This is followed by a Q&A where Pinter:
...talks about literary influences, point of view, his opinion of Edward Albee’s Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the classic Beatles vs. Rolling Stones debate.
Israeli mashup artist Kutiman has taken bits of 80 YouTube clips of amateur musicians covering Led Zeppelins ‘Black Dog” and put them together into one seamless version of the song. Imagine the work that went into this project and the amount of sonic shit Kutiman had to endure to make it happen. The result is simply amazing.
51 stuffed dogs is the big draw at Castle Bitov in the Czech Republic. Canine lover Baron Georg Haas preserved his pets for eternity and now tourists from all over the planet can enjoy his bizarre collection of dead doggies.
Read more about the K9 crazy Baron at the The Daily Mail’s website
Yep, there’s an Eazy-E skirt available for ladies who strut down the street singin’ “Gimmie That Nutt.” This utterly inexplicable skirt is by Manhattan-based clothing label IdilVice and retails for $89.00. Order it here.
The 1960 Plymouth Fury had the option of a dashboard record player: the RCA Victor “Highway Hi-Fi”. It could play up to fourteen “45” records consecutively.
To avoid records skipping this set of wheels had to have been a very smooth ride.
Idiot redneck “preacher” Damon Thompson is ignorant, bigoted and proud of it. He makes his living spewing mono-syllabic hatred towards a group of people (gays) who he personally, has probably never had any direct experience with (unless, of course, what they say about the most vocal homophobes is true. I hadn’t considered that).
Thompson’s “flock” are the people for whom the Tea Party movement—or the Ku Klux Klan—is a step beyond them intellectually. As one YouTube commenter quipped “This is Christianity for meth-heads!”
Well put. If advanced beings from the future ever arrive on Earth, you can bet Damon Thompson would be the first one to want to burn them at the stake. What this hillbilly ignoramous doesn’t realize is that when “the queers” are re-broadcasting his message to hundreds of thousands of people across the Internet, the people watching are just laughing at him. Pointing and laughing at the dumb hick.
To the average person watching his YouTube clips, Damon Thompson just appears to be a brainless hillbilly moron. No more, no less. He’s as compelling as a drunk racist and possessing half the charisma. There is nothing, not one thing, that is even remotely interesting about him. His “message” is trite and inconsequential. People are just laughing at him. Eventually we’ll never hear his name again and no one will even remember him. He doesn’t even distinguish himself as a decent enough gay-basher to achieve any real prominence in the field. Not with the likes of Bryan Fischer around. Thompson is an inarticulate dud by comparison.
(A note to Damon: You look like a smelly hobo, dude. I could have sworn I saw flies buzzing around your head in the video clip. Have you ever considered going on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? I think they could really help you. I know they could. Your personal grooming and hygiene is deplorable, m’fren…)
Not satisfied being probably the only native English-speaking comedian ever to perform in French (as he did recently in Paris), conquering Hollywood, Broadway, the West End and US TV, tonight the wonderfully witty and inventive Eddie Izzard is about to make showbiz history as the first stand-up comic to perform at the Hollywood Bowl in a solo act (Monty Python were a troupe/theatrical experience. The Bowl apparently never books comedy).
Izzard told Gustavo Turner at the LA Weekly that to “play the Hollywood Bowl is like the American dream”:
“I’ve been to the Bowl a couple of times and it’s the Greek amphitheater. Once I play Hollywood Bowl, I’ll feel I’m allowed to play actual Greek amphitheaters here in Europe,” he says. Given his steady progress since his breakthrough in the 1990s — when he first became noticed as an enormously witty improviser after years of hungry obscurity — he’s most likely not kidding. Izzard doing his History Channel–style material about the classical civilizations at the Acropolis? Eddie Izzard Live at the Colosseum (the original one in Rome)? Why not? All Izzard apparently has to do to accomplish something is set his mind to it.
Izzard’s Twitter bio says “I’m a British European, I think like an American and I was born in an Arabic country.” The ambitious, cosmopolitan actor/comedian told the LA Weekly that around 2020, he plans to enter politics, perhaps as a British delegate to the European Union. I’d love to see that happen.
Below, a young Eddie Izzard wows the crowd at the Terrence Higgins Trust benefit show organized in 1991 by Stephen Fry, with his tale of escaping Nazi Germany and being raised by wolves.
