I’m having an “I did not know this” moment right now. Apparently Iggy Pop guest-starred on an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 1998 as a Vorta overseer named “Yelgrun” from the planet Kurill Prime.
Again, I shall repeat, “I did not know this.”
Below, a video montage of Iggy’s most memorable scenes as “Yelgrun” from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “The Magnificent Ferengi.”
With thanks to Dee Rollins for this gem!
I suppose it was while idling to the sound of John Peel that I first heard Blancmange—the vastly under-rated synth pop duo of Neil Arthur and Stephen Luscombe. This must have been spring 1982 or thereabouts. No doubt I’d have been lying on my bed listening to Peel on the radio, smoking and reading Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler or the latest Spider-man rather than studying or writing essays or prepping for tutorials—you know the lark. Life was young and there were adventures to be gained.
This was part of the great attraction to Blancmange. Firstly they had a strange name which Luscombe explains as a kick back against the earnest sincerity of the great coat wearing youth who dominated music at that time and looked like they modeled their lives on the gritty black and white imagery of Anton Corbjin.
The name Blancmange was cheery - as was Arthur & Luscombe’s nickname the Maiden Aunts.
Blancmange was a comforting yet slightly bizarre name. It conjured up the image of a food that is neither jelly nor mousse but actually from the cake family and was originally made from chicken as a remedy for illness. But now best known as some kind of white or pink wobbly gooey dessert made with milk and gelatin. This strangeness fitted perfectly.
So the name appealed and the accompanying music only increased my pleasure. The first two singles—the double A-side “God’s Kitchen”/”I’ve Seen the Word” and “Feel Me,” a twelve-bar dance record, were fresh and exciting. But it was their third single “Living on the Ceiling” that informed the nation and invited Blancmange into the sitting room.
Their music was quirky, original, and fun. The best songs had lyrics that connected with a mood or a feeling that guaranteed a rerun on some subliminal soundtrack.
Luscombe and Arthur were knowingly arty without being pretentious. You knew they enjoyed films with subtitles, had read Camus but probably liked Night of the Living Dead, Derek Jarman, Edith Sitwell, The Crazies and who knows—Knut Hamsun? They also had an album cover that referenced Louis Wain. They were suburban, smart, sophisticated yet somehow quite edgy.
More from Stephen Luscombe plus promos, after he jump…
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In the early 1960s, Alejandro Jodorowsky, in collaboration with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, produced theatrical happenings that were part Grand Guignol, part Theater Of Cruelty and, in the case of splatterfests like Melodrama Sacramental, something like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre on peyote. Calling themselves the Panic Movement, the three provocateurs attempted to shatter the fourth wall with more than just words and gestures - they were going for something more visceral: blood and guts - anything to close the distance between spectacle and spectator and to wake and alert the audience to the suffering, inequality and untruths engulfing them in this modern world gone mad. Yes, life stinks and so should art. The Panic Movement put the “fart” in artsy fartsy - a steaming turd in the cosmic punchbowl.
Jodorowsky and company’s sacramental melodrama was staged in Paris, May of 1965, the same month and year that the largest Vietnam teach-in was held (May 21–23, 1965) at UC Berkeley, one of the seminal events in the history of the American anti-war movement, the first rumblings of a protest movement against the Vietnam war that would grow to a deafening roar. Was Jodorowsky’s “happening” also a a mirroring of the savagery of war and a metaphor for the lives being sacrificed in Vietnam? Were the prophets of peace in synch and sending signals to each other from two epicenters of radical change?
In Melodrama Sacramental we see images that would be repeated in Jodorowsky’s epic mindfucker El Topo, another nightmare ode to man’s inhumanity to man.
On the soundtrack we hear Allen Ginsberg reading from his poem “Lysergic Acid,” written in San Francisco in 1959.
The King remixed in a reggae style.
01. Return To Sender
02. In The Ghetto
03. Blue Moon
04. Fever
05. It’s Now Or Never
06. Baby I Don’t Care
07. Suspicious Minds
08. I’ll Remember You
09. Are You Lonesome Tonight?
10. Crying In The Chapel
Video contains some nudity.
Immortalize your happy little seedling forever with a 3D-printed replica of your fetus encased in white resin. Japanese engineering company Fasotec are behind this “Shape of an Angel”—that’s what they called it—product.
According to Geekosystem the “process of making the 3D-printed replica is fairly simple as far as 3D printing goes. The fetus is photographed using an MRI, then run through 3D imaging software and sent to the 3D printer.”
I’m not necessarily sure how one is supposed to display the “Shape of an Angel,” but it sure looks like it would make an interesting paperweight.
Years before the Runaways or the Go-Gos, there was pioneering “chick rock” band, Fanny. Fanny was formed in 1969 by teenaged guitarist-singer June Millington, with her sister Jean and drummer Alice de Buhr, as “Wild Honey.” When Nickey Barclay, a keyboard player who toured with Joe Cocker’s infamous Mad Dogs and Englishmen group joined them, the group was renamed “Fanny.” (In the UK, where the word means “vagina” and not “butt” like it does in the USA, they were thought to be quite outrageous by radio programmers.)
Fanny was the first real female rock group signed to a major label (Reprise Records, the artists first label started by Frank Sinatra, who was the “Chairman of the Board”). They worked with famed producer Richard Perry (Carly Simon, Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, etc) and later Todd Rundgren. They recorded at the Beatles’ Apple Studios and backed Barbara Streisand on her first “rock” album, Stoney End. They toured opening up for huge 70s acts like Slade, Jethro Tull and Humble Pie, but sadly, they are little more than a gender pioneer footnote today.
Fanny were nothing short of incredible, as you will hear, but they never made it as big as they should have.
David Bowie, in a 1999 Rolling Stone interview, said of the group:
“One of the most important female bands in American rock has been buried without a trace. And that is Fanny. They were one of the finest… rock bands of their time, in about 1973. They were extraordinary: They wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful. They’re as important as anybody else who’s ever been, ever; it just wasn’t their time. Revivify Fanny. And I will feel that my work is done”
Their biggest hits were “Charity Ball” and “Butter Boy.” Fanny broke up in 1975. Fanny bassist Jean MIllington later recorded and performed live with David Bowie. She is married to Bowie’s longtime guitarist, Earl Slick.
In 2002, Rhino Handmade released the excellent Fanny Rocks.
Above, performing “Charity Ball” on The Sonny & Cher Show in 1971.
More Fanny after the jump…
Topper Headon does a version of Gene Krupa’s “Drumming Man” with Didi Sketcher on vocals.
“Drumming Man” was released as a 7 inch single in 1985.
The short answer appears to be “Yes.”
Via the horrifyingly lowbrow Daily Caller:
“It’s very interesting because I had been a Democrat — and I’d actually worked on Jimmy Carter’s campaign. And I was reading a novel by Gore Vidal, and when I was reading it he was mocking the Founding Fathers. And all of a sudden it just occurred to me: I set the book down on my lap, I looked out the window of a train I was riding in, and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t think I’m a Democrat. I think I really am a Republican.’ Because the Founding Fathers were not the characters that I saw Gore Vidal portraying in his novel.
“And that snotty, mocking attitude, to me didn’t reflect in any way who we are as a nation. And I just thought that’s a completely different philosophical view of the United States. And I know that Gore Vidal has passed away today, I understood he was 86 years old. And it’s interesting how his work — while he intended I think one particular way — it was used actually to help me see a completely different way, which is the conservative way. And I started then examining the conservative position, and realized at heart I really am a conservative. And that’s far more reflective of American values, than the values that Gore Vidal was espousing.”
Probably falls a bit short of the intellectual legacy Gore Vidal would have wanted…
Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision AKA Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood, is a 1978 film produced by BBC Omnibus and directed by Nigel Finch.
Here’s how Documentary Heaven described the film:
A fascinating, 30 year old BBC documentary on the Good Doctor and Ralph Steadman, five years after Nixon’s resignation, and on a road trip to Hollywood (to work on what would become Where the Buffalo Roam).
Includes an interesting scene of John Dean chatting with Hunter about his Watergate testimony (at about 32 minutes), the birth of the “Re-Elect Nixon Campaign” (with a Bill Murray cameo), and a remarkably eerie scene with Hunter and Ralph planning Hunter’s final monument and his ashes being shot into the air, long before the actual fact.
Sifting through Foxtongue‘s Flickr sets—which are a goldmine, btw—I came across this rather peculiar undated vintage photo which has a “Come and play with us, Danny …for ever, and ever, and ever” vibe going on, doesn’t?
Foxtongue on Flickr (NSFW-ish).
