The man who spawned modern comedy, Lenny Bruce was born today in 1925. Instead of a selection of his well-known monologues from stage and TV appearances, here is Dance Hall Racket, a low budget exploitation movie, which Bruce wrote and starred in, alongside his wife Honey Harlow, and Timothy Farrell as Umberto Scialli.
Produced by George Weiss (best known as the producer of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda?), Dance Hall Racket was the third of the Umberto Scialli films, following on from Devil’s Sleep and Racket Girls, in which Scialli was killed. Dance Hall Racket is a quirky, trashy, Z-movie, and leaves no clue to the Lenny Bruce who would, within the decade, start a revolution in comedy.
Bonus clips, Lenny sings and on-stage, after the jump…
From the Occupy Wall Street website. Please help get the word out. If you’ve got friends in the New York area, guilt them into going if you have to. If you live in New York, are you really going to sit at home and watch this happen on NY1??? That’s so lame!
Prevent the forcible closure of OWS
Tell Bloomberg: Don’t Foreclose the Occupation.
NEED MASS TURN-OUT: 6AM FRIDAY EVICTION DEFENSE
**SHOW UP AT MIDNIGHT**
This is an emergency situation. Please take a minute to read this, and please take action and spread the word far and wide.
Occupy Wall Street is gaining momentum, with occupation actions now happening in cities across the world.
But last night Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD notified Occupy Wall Street participants about plans to “clean the park”—the site of the Wall Street protests—tomorrow starting at 7am. “Cleaning” was used as a pretext to shut down “Bloombergville” a few months back, and to shut down peaceful occupations elsewhere.
This is it—this is their attempt to shut down #OWS for good.
PLEASE TAKE ACTION
1) Call 311 (or +1 (212) NEW-YORK if you’re out of town) and tell Bloomberg to support our right to assemble and to not interfere with #OWS.
2) Come to #OWS TONIGHT AT MIDNIGHT to defend the occupation from eviction.
For those of you who plan to help us hold our ground—which we hope will be all of you—make sure you understand the possible consequences. Be prepared to not get much sleep. Be prepared for possible arrest. Make sure your items are together and ready to go (or already out of the park.) We are pursuing all possible strategies; this is a message of solidarity.
Occupy Wall Street is committed to keeping the park clean and safe—we even have a Sanitation Working Group whose purpose this is. We are organizing major cleaning operations today and will do so regularly.
If Bloomberg truly cares about sanitation here he should support the installation of portopans and dumpsters. #OWS allies have been working to secure these things to support our efforts.
We know where the real dirt is: on Wall Street. Billionaire Bloomberg is beholden to bankers.
We won’t allow Bloomberg and the NYPD to foreclose our occupation. This is an occupation, not a permitted picnic.
You can also add your name to this petition from Bold Progressives that is going to be delivered to Mayor Bloomberg tonight. Over 100,000 have signed it in the past few hours.
Activist group Bankster USA are pushing for a common-sense financial transaction tax on Wall Street transactions. The proposed rates are low—0.25 percent on a stock purchase or sale and 0.02 percent on the sale or purchase of a future, option, or credit default swap—and are proportional to transactional costs in the financial industry. It is projected that this tax would more than $100 billion in revenue annually while dampening speculation.
I personally don’t think this is nearly enough, but these kinds of things tend to happen incrementally in a democracy like ours, so I’m supporting this and you should consider signing it yourself. It’s time to start leaning on the financial sector quite heavily and this kind of tax would be a step in the right direction of reining these bastards in and confiscating some of their ill-gotten gains…
Tell Congress there’s a sensible tax on Wall Street that would help solve our budget problems.
When reckless trading on Wall Street crashed the global economy, American taxpayers bailed out the big banks to the tune of $4.7 trillion. That is trillion with a “T”.
Today, Wall Street is booming. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo executives are earning just as much as they did before the financial crisis. In 2010, the CEOs of these three banks made $52 million dollars combined.
Yet on Main Street family incomes are tanking, job creation has stalled, and 42 million people are living in poverty, more than at any other time in the last 50 years.
We have done our part, now it’s time for Wall Street to do more – through a tiny sales tax on each Wall Street trade called a financial transaction tax.
Right now Congress is considering huge cuts to Medicare and Social Security as well as other important programs in health, education and housing.
Enough is enough! We know where the money is. A tiny tax on financial services can generate billions of dollars.
Join the Americans for Financial Reform, the AFL-CIO, SEIU, Demos, Public Citizen, Jobs with Justice, the National Nurses United, National People’s Action and the other groups saying:
It’s time for Wall Street to start Paying US Back!
It’s about time that the Tea party dumbshits start to realize their commonality with Occupy Wall Street and who their REAL enemy is!
Hint: The smug millionaire 20 or 30-something Wall Street traders who got as rich as hell while your pension fund tanked? Where the fuck do you think your money went, chuckes? They didn’t burn it!
These two were arrested in Millersburg, Ohio in connection with a series of break-ins.
But these weren’t just any break-ins. Nope, these events involved some Amish beard scalping! . As reported in my hometown newspaper The Wheeling News Register and Intelligncer:
[Sheriff’s Timothy] Zimmerly has said men entered a home Oct. 3 and used scissors and battery-powered clippers to cut the beards of the 74-year-old bishop of a mainstream Amish community and his son.
Zimmerly said the men told them, “We’re here for Sam Mullet to get revenge,” and held them down. He said the men then went to a nearby county, where a similar attack happened.
The Amish, known for their simple, modest lifestyle, are a deeply religious group, and their beards carry spiritual significance. Amish men typically grow beards as adults and stop trimming them when they marry. The beards, and women’s long hair, are held in high esteem.
Sam Mullet has said beard-cuttings are in response to criticism from other Amish religious leaders about his leadership practices. He denies ordering beard-cuttings but says he wouldn’t stop them.
Hair-cutting attacks against several people have occurred in recent weeks in the area.
Mustard Mag has delightful and downloadable PDFs of DIY papercraft dolls featuring all your favorite Britcom celebrities, including this week’s talkshow guests Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher from Snuff Box.
I love the Stewart Lee doll. Captures him well, I think. Not that he’s a blockhead or anything…
One of the many outtakes from the Lodger sessions of 1979, with a prominent Eno synthesizer accompanied by George Murray on bass guitar and drummer Dennis Davis. Written by Bowie.
This track was included on the long out-of-print Rykodisc reissue of Lodger from 1991.
If you agree with a woman “You get bashed over the head and if you don’t agree you’re still going to get in an argument.” There are so many zingers in this video I couldn’t possibly type them all out. Just watch.
Celebrated British photographer David Bailey is swapping his camera for a paintbrush. Known since the swinging Sixties for his iconic black and white portraits of The Beatles, Peter Sellers, Michael Caine, Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger and London gangsters, the Kray Brothers; and his decades of fashion work, Bailey’s new show of his paintings, his first ever, is titled “Hitler Killed The Duck.”
Can you tell us the story behind the great title, ‘Hitler killed the Duck’?
David Bailey: The Germans bombed the cinema that I went to see Bambi and cartoons in with a V2 rocket in 1944, so I thought Hitler had killed all the Disney characters.
People tend to be drawn to religion during those times, but you’re not religious are you?
David Bailey: Of course not. God’s just a daisy on the sidewalk. There are many good religions; I like Taoism because it’s more a philosophy. The Carthars were interesting. They were Christians who didn’t believe in killing and that nonsense and were wiped out by the Catholics. I’m completely against capital punishment, because you could get it wrong and that’s enough not to do it.
More than half this country will bring it back because they don’t think; they watch football and get drunk every other night. There’s not a chance many times they’ve made a mistake and the state’s part of you so in a way, you become the killer. Similarly, we’re responsible for Blair, because we - I didn’t, but I’m still part of society - voted him in. So we have to live with that arsehole.
Any final words with regards to the exhibition?
David Bailey: Whether you like or not, there’s nothing I can do. There might be people, whose collection or view on the world I dislike, that end up buying something. That would be sad. Imagine if Hitler or Bush or General Mao or Stalin came along and bought one. All the arseholes in history are famous, weird, isn’t it?
You can see a gallery of some of Bailey’s new paintings on Dazed Digital. I’m a big David Bailey fan (a first edition of his 1969 book Goodbye Baby and Amen that wasn’t cheap sits behind me as I type this) but from what I have seen of it, I must say this new work doesn’t do much for me. Bailey claims he was influenced by Francis Bacon, but all I can see is the influence of German weirdo painter Blalla W. Hallmann, who did this same sort of thing much better. Bailey should probably stick to his Rolleiflex.
“Hitler killed the Duck” from October 7th to November 12, 2011 at Scream, 34 Bruton Street, London W1J 6QX
Below, a delightful David Bailey interview from 2010:
