I saw this trailer for gross-out Mexploitation cinematic “classic” Night of the Bloody Apes at a drive-in movie in the 1970s with my parents and younger sister. I must have been all of 6 or 7 years old. We were watching a Hercules/Hercules Unchained double bill featuring Steve Reeves when between films this incredibly lurid trailer came on…

What an impression it left! Scared the crap out of me and I had vivid nightmares about “bloody apes” for some time afterward. Looking at it now, it just doesn’t seem quite as scary, but it sure is a lot funnier than I remember it being.
 

 
Bare breasts, internal organs, GUTS and, natch, female wrestling, this one has it all. You really have to wonder how many future serial killers this gory freakout inspired?!?!

Night of the Bloody Apes was a film directed by famous Mexican director René Cardona in 1968 (it’s a color remake of his pioneering blending of the lucha libre and horror genres.The Wrestling Women vs. the Murderous Doctor AKA Doctor of Doom from 1962) that was recut in the early 70s with extra nudity and insanely over the top gratuitous gore added (in the form of several minutes of footage shot during an actual open heart surgery). Etcetera, etcetera.

The English version of the film sports the most monotone, wooden, voice-over actors the world has ever known and the dialogue is a very literal and direct Spanish to English translation:

“I’ll say that’s absurd, the proofs are circumstantial, it’s more probable that of late more and more you’ve been watching on your television many of those pictures of terror,”

James Joyce himself could not have written that sentence! (And even if he could have, he didn’t.) The editing here is, unavoidably, so bad and amateurishly inept that it borders on the hallucinogenic, but that’s part of the charm and what makes Night of the Bloody Apes feel like it occupies its own sub-genre within a sub-genre within a sub-genre.

I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying there it is…
 

 
I’m not sure I’m totally sold on Aliso Viejo’s Dispense Labs’ Autospense medical marijuana vending machine. I suppose for convenience it wins, however cutting out the person behind the counter whose job it is to guide you in the right direction with the vast cannabis selections in states with dispensary cultures is like cutting out the pharmacist at your local pharmacy.

Different strains of marijuana have very different effects, and it really helps to have someone with a working (even anecdotal) knowledge of the strains to assist when making your choices. It’s also important to physically see and smell the cannabis before purchasing. With Autospense, you can’t do that and it seems like a gamble.

From Orange County Register:

To use, patients must swipe a registration card, then enter a PIN number. Payment may be made with cash, credit or debit, then a door opens to release the product.

 

 
From the Autospense website:

After providing the proper documentation, the patient will be issued a pre-approved registration/membership card and have the opportunity to register in an optional finger print scanner system, which enables around-the-clock access to the Autospense machine. The member is granted access and walks into a well secured and camera monitored showroom.

 
Via Laughing Squid

 
Long before there was “Love,” Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas spectacular set to a score of Beatles mash-ups, and even before there was Danger Mouse’s illegal Grey Album,—a meeting of the minds between The White Album and Jay-Z’s’s Black Album—an earlier and far more radical deconstruction of the Beatles’ oeuvre was done by the Residents.

This was not The Residents first stab at the skewering the Fab Four—their 1974 debut album, Meet The Residents, featured a demented pastiche of the first Beatles album cover that John Lennon was apparently quite fond of. Knowing of course, that they were foolishly risking an expensive lawsuit for copyright infringement this time out, The Residents released the song on a 7-inch record, in a limited edition of just 500 singles, as “The Beatles Play The Residents & The Residents Play The Beatles,” in 1977.

The A-side, “Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life,” contains about twenty Beatles samples, one from John Lennon and a line from one of their fan club only Christmas messages. The B-side was the Residents cover of “Flying” which they chose because it was one of the only Beatles songs (along with “Dig It”) attributed to all four members.

Folklore at the time imagined the Residents as the Beatles reformed undercover, making a mockery of their back catalog. The two songs were available at one point as CD extra tracks, but now it looks like they’ve been withdrawn.
 

 
Jump into a time machine and watch the Smiths performing “Handsome Devil,” “Still Ill,” “This Charming Man,” “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” “Reel Around The Fountain,” “What Difference Does It Make,” “Miserable Lie,” “This Night Has Opened My Eyes,” “Hand In Glove,” “These Things Take Time” and “You’ve Got Everything Now” during a pro-shot show at the Assembly Rooms, Derby, December 6, 1983. This was before their first album was released.

From Passions Just Like Mine:

This concert is usually misdated as having taken place on the 7th of December. Tickets were free, John Peel announced
the ticket giveaway on his show. It was a very wild gig, the crowd was very energetic and constantly shouting requests.
It all ended in chaos (read further). “Back To The Old House” was also on the setlist but it seems like it was not played .

After shushing the audience, “Pretty Girls Make Graves” was introduced by Morrissey with the words “A little quirk…
a little quirk friends… pretty girls make!” During “Reel Around The Fountain” he handed one of the bead necklaces he was
wearing to someone in the crowd. He changed a line in “What Difference Does It Make?” to “I think i can rely on me.”

At some point during “Miserable Lie” Morrissey was hit in the eye by a flower, dropped his microphone to the floor and left
the stage. The band finished the song mostly as an instrumental. Morrissey returned to the stage on time for the ending of
“I need advice, I need advice”, adding at the end “and so do you!” for the rowdy audience. He remained playful following
this, but Johnny Marr later said in an interview that this was his most embarrassing moment. Actually in the 1985 programme
for the Meat Is Murder tour, he said this concert was his ‘greatest embarrassment’.

Following the latter number, song requests were shouted by fans and Morrissey shushed them again and shouted “No! This!”
He changed a few lines in “This Night Has Opened My Eyes” to “this night has opened my eyes and I will never see again”,
“The dream has gone, the crying is real” and “And I’m never happy and I’m never sad”. “Hand In Glove” was introduced by
Morrissey with a high pitched shout of “Hand In Glove!!!” During that song someone made it on stage and hugged Morrissey,
making him miss a few lines. After “These Things Take Time”, Morrissey just shouted “Goodbye! Stay handsome… goodbye…”
and the band left.

The band was soon welcomed back with a big collective cheer. They launched into “You’ve Got Everything Now” but it wasn’t
long before the stage became crowded with fans. Band members disappeared from view and Morrissey could barely sing his lines.
He tried as best he could but made strangling noises as he was pulled left and right and tried not to get drowned in a sea
of dancing people. The stage got filled with as many fans as was physically possible. It was one of the Smiths’ first major
stage invasions (including a small child!).

This concert was recorded for The Old Grey Whistle Test and first broadcast the following Friday and Saturday. Some later
rebroadcasts were shortened to seven songs, leaving out amongst others the near-instrumental “Miserable Lie”.

As one of the YouTubers commented:

“They should make a hologram of THESE guys”

If you want to see The Smiths in their prime, absolutely killing it in front of an adoring audience, press play now. Easy to find in DVD quality via the various torrent trackers.
 

 

 
Film-maker Jules Nurrish filmed and edited this homage to Gilbert and George’s dance sculpture Bend It. With Los Angeles-based performance artist and body builder, Heather Cassils and London-based performance artist and musician, Anat Ben David, who together perform their own version of the famous dance. Neat.
 

 
L7 on MTV interviewing The Breeders, Green Day, The Beastie Boys, George Clinton, Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, A Tribe Called Quest and more at Lollapalooza 1994. Poet Maggie Estep is also featured.

This was when MTV still had a connection to music.

The bit with George Clinton is ridiculously cool.
 

 
Part two and some awesome live footage of LZ after the jump…

The birthday boy is also this year’s Record Store Day Ambassador. Fulfilling his diplomatic duties, Iggy visited Sweat Records in Miami.

“As Record Store Day Ambassador for 2012, I feel like a representative from some exotic jungle full of life and death and sex and anger, called upon to wear a leopard skin and translate joy to the world of the dead.

A person should have a personality. You won’t get one dicking around on a computer. It helps to go somewhere where there are other persons. Persons who are interested in something you are. That’s how a record store or any shop that’s got some life to it should work. It’s not about selling shit.

I got my name, my musical education and my personality all from working at a record store during my tender years. Small indie shops have always been a mix of theatre and laboratory. In the 50s and 60s, the teen kids used to gather after school at these places to listen free to the latest singles and see if they liked the beat. You could buy the disc you liked for 79 cents and if you were lucky meet a chick. Clerks in these places became managers, (like Brian Epstein), label heads, (Jac Holzman) and Faces on album covers (like me).”

I spent part of Record Store Day at Waterloo Records where I met and had a chat with Garbage. Shirley Manson looked absolutely stunning. I bought the Grinderman Remix album and a compilation of rare gospel music. With the exception of running into Garbage, it was a day like any other in that everyday for me is Record Store Day. I tremble at the thought of not having Waterloo to visit and hang out in. There’s nothing like the smell of vinyl in the morning. And you can’t shake Shirley Manson’s hand at Amazon.com.
 

 
Legendary actress, Fenella Fielding takes on John Lydon’s “Rise” and wins.

This is one of the many brilliant tracks from the recently re-released Savoy Sessions, a fabulous collaboration between Ms. Fielding and David Britton, owner of Savoy Books, author of the banned comic (and novel) Lord Horror and “the last man in the country to be jailed under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act”.

Britton approached Fielding in 2002 to record extracts from J. G. Ballrd’s novel Crash. At first, Ms. Fielding demurred, but Britton’s persistence paid-off and a thrilling creative partnership began.

Fielding recorded Britton’s La Squab, as well T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and selection of work by Collette - which Ms. Fielding had originally performed on stage in 1970.

Ms. Fielding is perhaps best known for her role as Valeria, the delightful, kooky vamp to Kenneth Williams’ Dr. Orlando Watt in Carry on Screaming, which tends to greatly over-shadow her legendary career in theater and revue. She was hailed by Noel Coward and Kenneth Tynan as one of theater’s greatest actresses, her performance as Hedda Gabler was described by The Times as “one of the experiences of a lifetime”. She was a versatile comedy actress and had performed in a series of successful comedy revues, including Pieces of Eight (co-starring Kenneth Williams, written by Peter Cook and Harold Pinter), and her celebrated one-woman show at Cook’s Establishment Club. Ms. Fielding also provided the announcer’s voice for The Village, in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. And if this weren’t enough, she was adored by Frederico Fellini.

In 2006, Britton invited Fenella to a studio in Rochdale, where she recorded a selection of popular hits - including PiL’s “Rise”, New Order’s “Blue Monday”, Kylie Minogue’s “I Can’t get You Out Of My Head”, and even Robbie Williams’ “Angels” - re-interpreting them through her own unique and distinct style, which Kim Fowley described in 2009:

Her Succulent/Velvet-Blue-Saloon vocal tones made me believe I was having Naked Lunch in a Berlin bubble-bath, next to Marlene Dietrich… Somewhere in Berlin, circa 1928–1932.
Hence, we have a message in an aural bottle, from a 21st Century, Axis Sally/Tokyo Rose: Fenella Fielding.

Bring on the smelling salts! Then give me the Silver-Spoon and Golden Needle, so I can blend into the Wonder-Word Void, where Ms Fielding must surely reside.

Fenella’s delivery of the following titles places me squarely at the foot of her bed, on my knees, in a position of worship!

Find your copy of Fenella Fielding’s The Savoy Sessions here.

Here then, for your delectation and delight is the beautiful Ms. Fenella Fielding and “Rise”.
 

 
Bonus video clip of Fenella in the Studio, plus taster clips, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Robert Conroy
 

 
Happy 65th birthday Jim Osterberg.

One of my all-time favorite rock n’ roll experiences was seeing Iggy at The Ritz in New York City in 1986. Iggy had started to clean up his act, in no small part thanks to his wife Suchi, and was in fine form. And the band was badass.

Bass – Phil Butcher
Drums – Gavin Harrison
Guitar – Kevin Armstrong
Keyboards, Guitar – Shamus Beghan

It’s amazing that some rockers like Iggy and Keith Richards that you didn’t think would last might outlast us all. Rock and roll: what doesn’t kill just makes you stronger.
 

 
Established by James East in the 1950s, Burgess Hill School (aka the Beat School) in Hertfordshire, England, allowed its pupils to do what they wanted, in the belief this was the best way for youngsters to learn. Rules were frowned upon, and “Tradition,” it was claimed, “was clinging to the dead past.” Even smoking in class was tolerated, for as Headmaster East explained to Time Magazine in 1962:

“Kids always smoke, and I’d rather know about it than have it done in secret.”

Such openness encouraged the young uns to fulfill their potential, and find happiness in doing so, which is how it should be.

Like the best of the British Pathe clips, this short clip on Burgess Hill Beat School leaves you wanting to know more. What happened to the school? Did the experiment of a Beat School work? What did these children grow up to do? Where are they now? It would make for an interesting documentary on BBC 4, and one hopes a dozen researchers are penning such a proposal right now.

A longer 4 minutes clip is viewable here.
 

Iggy talks about lessons learned from David Bowie: “No,you’re not coming to the dinner table on heroin.”

Jérôme de Missolz’s documentary Wild Thing (2010) was made for French television and it’s a pretty good look at rock n’ roll outlaws from the 1960s thru to the present day.

Here are some excerpts featuring Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch, Iggy Pop and Jello Biafra. Lunch’s anecdote about The Dead Boys is a jaw-dropper. The Boys ate Lydia’s Lunch.
 

 
To watch the entire film (much of which is in French) click here. There’s some fascinating interviews (in English) with Eric Burdon, Genesis P-Orridge, Kevin Ayers and many more.

 
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate 4/20 day than with this Afro Futuristic video of Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Cosmo Arkestra performing onstage at the Montreux Jazz Festival, July 9th, 1976. The set features a silver-clad June Tyson and some dancers.

Regarding this performance, Mrdangerbird7 (who must be named Tony Bunn owing to the clues he leaves) writes on YouTube:

“This video brings back good memories; I played bass (guitar) on this performance. I was wondering if a video would ever surface. This performance was but the 2nd performance of a 3-month tour for the band. Perhaps needless to say, it was a mind-boggling experience for me. No doubt, I would not be the musician nor the person that I am today, had I been anywhere other than there, at the point in time.

From one moment to the next, one never quite knew where things were gonna go, in Ra’s band. “Scripted” would be much too strong a term to use… What happened was more like one having to remain awake and to respond to stimuli from various directions, as they occurred. I guess you could call that improv; although it was different from anything I’d done before (or since).

Actually Sun Ra pretty much delivered as advertised; albeit, he was an incredibly eccentric individual. No doubt, his music was a direct reflection of what was going on inside of him and inside of the members of the ensemble. Life on the most raw terms…”

 
Leonard Cohen’s former manager and lover Kelley Lynch was sentenced on April 17 to 18 months in prison for breaching restraining orders by sending scores of nasty e-mails and making harassing phone calls to Cohen. Lynch had a history of predatory behavior in her dealings with Cohen. In 2005 she was found guilty of stealing millions of dollars from Cohen and was ordered by a judge to pay the singer $9.5 million.

At the sentencing, Cohen read a statement that only confirms his standing as a world-class poet, Buddhist and a man with an incredible sense of style:

It gives me no pleasure to see my onetime friend shackled to a chair in a court of law, her considerable gifts bent to the service of darkness, deceit and revenge, [But] I want to thank the defendant Ms. Kelley Lynch for insisting on a jury trial, thus exposing to the light of day her massive depletion of my retirement savings and yearly earnings, and allowing the court to observe her profoundly unwholesome, obscene and relentless strategies to escape the consequences of her wrongdoing… It is my prayer that Ms Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion. That a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform.”

Yes, Cohen briefly turned a courtroom into a Tower Of Song.

So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll
I’m very sorry, baby, doesn’t look like me at all
I’m standing by the window where the light is strong
Ah they don’t let a woman kill you not in the tower of song

 
This seems like a good time to enjoy this concert footage from Leonard’s 2008/09 world tour.
 

 
A mock trailer for a “Dogme 95” film Donald Duck movie from Icelandic television’s Mid-Island show. The pretentious checklist of the Danish avant-garde cinematic movement seems to be followed to the letter here.

From the YouTube description:

Donald leads a tormented life on the unforgiving streets of Duckburg, where sometimes he must betray his own conscience to make ends meet.

Donald has to raise his 3 nephews, deal with a cheating girlfriend and put up with working for his stingy uncle; the richest duck in down. This is a tale everyone can relate to.

Wait for Goofy’s appearance, you’ll be glad you did.
 

 
Thank you Edward Ludvigsen!

 
The AFL-CIO ‘s Executive Paywatch website has been updated with 2011 data and easy to digest graphics that you can share easily with others.  One stand-out fact: The average CEO of an S&P 500 Index company earned a staggering 380 times the average American worker’s wage. Those same CEOs saw their compensation packages increase 13.9% in 2011.

By comparison, as you can see above, the average corporate CEO made “just” 42 times what American workers made during the “golden years” of the Reagan administration.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure these corporate CEOs, these god-men, are worth every penny they make, but this is getting to be rather untenable, don’t you think? Keep in mind that many (most) of these guys are paid in stock options that are only subject to a 15% capital gains tax when they cash out!

Via Daily Kos Labor:

The highest-paid CEO in the country was Apple’s Timothy Cook, whose total compensation was nearly $378 million. That’s more than 11,000 times the average worker’s income of $34,053. The 100th highest-paid CEO, Heinz’s W.R. Johnson, had total compensation of more than $18 million, 543 times the average worker’s income.

What we can’t know is how much CEOs make compared with the workers in their own companies; however, that’s something the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill will soon require companies to disclose. And it turns out it might well be good for companies if transparency pushed them to bring CEO pay a little more in line with average worker pay.

The cream always rises to the top, right? It might be time to update that saying, but not with metaphorical crème fraiche, more like royal jelly made by the rank and file worker bees who then have the privilege of watching a Mr. Creosote-sized queen bee ravenously devour the fruits of their labor!

It’s always fun to use Huey Long’s famous barbecue example from his Depression-era “Share the Wealth” speech in a situation like this:

Imagine that Timothy Cook was seated at one banquet table, teaming with gourmet food. A feast that would cause Caligula to blush, obviously, and one that would represent his executive pay relative to the 11,000 other people (not Apple’s mistreated Chinese factory workers who make $450 a MONTH, but average Americans making $34k a year) seated beside him at a table that is exactly the same size, but, with, relatively speaking, more meagre portions of food compared to the gentleman from Cupertino.

To be clear, I don’t have anything against Apple’s CEO, but for fuck’s sake, in the abstract, does Timothy Cook himself not see something inherently obscene about the shitty working conditions in their Chinese factories and ONE guy at the top making nearly half a billion a year? Apple Inc. has the highest value of any corporation in the history of man, but the people who are actually making the products receive a pittance for renting their lives out 12 hours a day, seven days a week while he has a take-home pay packet like that?

It goes to show, AGAIN, how absolutely correct Karl Marx was. That $400 million isn’t getting re-invested back into the factories and improving conditions for the workers in any way. It’s going to ONE GUY. ONE GUY!

Imagine how many AMERICAN JOBS Apple Inc. could afford to create—they could open computer factories with great paying jobs all across America—if the fellow at the top of the food chain there was making, oh, say only $10 million a year and the rest of it “trickled down”?

Who reading this would pity him?

The reason the rank and file workers in this country are taking home so little is because the CEOs and the stockholders are taking so much! DUH. The system is rigged. It’s not that fucking difficult to understand!