Hmm, I think the subtitles on this clip are not an accurate representation of the conversation taking place. But still, it made me laugh, and it combines two currently popular memes - Bin Laden dying and a look back at rave culture.
Edit - turns out this guy’s name is Dimitri - thanks Tara and Woody!
In all seriousness though, the reaction of the rave generation to the clamping down on personal freedoms since 9/11 is to me one of the greatest cultural disappointments of the last decade. Especially as the rave “scene” in the UK was born out of opposition to police and government harassment. I touch on this topic in my article “2001: All Eyes on New York”, part of a retrospective series on Noughties music for for the Weaponizer site. Contrast the reality of what has happened these last years to how the ravers themselves imagine they have changed society in the 2000 documentary “The Chemical Generation”, posted by Paul on this site only a few months ago. It’s grim.
Here’s something you don’t see everyday: For Sale, one Martin-Baker aircraft ejector seat.
One careful owner, no doubt. This James-Bond-like accessory is currently available on e-bay and is advertised as:
The ultimate in armchair flying !!!!
This is a Martin-Baker aircraft ejector seat mounted on a trolley with an attached control column.
I believe both the ejector seat and control column are from a Canberra bomber.
As well as being an unusual and interesting piece of furniture, the seat could be used as part of a
flight simulator or gaming set-up. It is certainly a talking point!
The seat is fitted with a complete harness and has a suede seat pad which contained a survival pack.
Overall, the seat, trolley and control column are a little scruffy and would benefit from a good clean up
and polish. The ejection rocket and parachute have been removed.
The trolley is fitted with small castors so the whole assembly can be moved around. The seat and
control column are easily removable for transportation and would fit into the back of a hatchback with
the seats down.
Cash on collection and I would be prepared to deliver up to a 50 - 60 mile radius of Bromley, Kent
for fuel cost.
For more information check here. Bids close on 11 May, 201122:19:18 BST.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In this 1978 newscast on movie piracy, we encounter the same wariness that greeted video cassette recorders three decades ago as we’ve seen in recent years with black boxes, CD and DVD recorders, Internet downloading and Youtube. E-books are next.
As art becomes increasingly inexpensive or free to own does it lose its value? Do we start to take it for granted? I know I do. I’m surrounded by CDs of music I’ve downloaded and burned and haven’t even listened to yet. I remember when buying a vinyl record was a big event.
Not only has music and movies become available at little or no cost, the devices we use to record and store them have become dirt cheap. In 1978, VCRs were selling for $1000. Videos, blank or pre-recorded, were ridiculously expensive. I remember buying Road Warrior back in the early 1980s on Betamax for $89.00. It wasn’t that long ago when blank CDs sold for $20, same with DVDs. Now you can pick up a dozen for less than the cost of the New York Times print edition…if you’re still buying newspapers. The cost of duplicating music and movies at home has gone from the absurdly expensive to the fatally cheap.
So now, with music, movies, and eventually books, available online for the cost of a 25 cent blank digital disc how does this work out for the creative community and the future of pop culture? Free everything is terrific for the consumer (as distinguished from buyer), but what happens to the people creating the music, movies and books? What happens to the people working in record stores, video stores and bookstores?
In my hometown of Austin, three Borders bookstores have closed in the past two months. People have lost jobs. Large buildings are now empty, impossible to lease. Publishing houses are quietly freaking out. There’s no place for them to ship their books, other than Amazon.com., and they’re still very much in the business of selling books you can hold in your hands made by printing machines operated by actual human beings. How many people does it take to make a Kindle versus the publishers, printers, graphic designers etc. involved in the publication of a book?
As indie record stores close, the big chains aren’t picking up the slack. Hell no. They’re devoting less and less retail space to CDs and DVDs and will sure as shit eliminate them entirely soon enough. More people laid off. Blockbuster is bankrupt (as much a victim of their shitty customer as changing technologies) and Movie Gallery is dead and buried. More jobs lost.
In the next few years, I predict we’ll see the death of Barnes and Noble and what’s left of the independent book, record and video stores. There will no longer be neighborhood gathering places for lovers of literature, film and music. The artsy oasis in the shopping mall, that little bit of Bohemia that exists in culturally starved suburbs across America will be a thing of the past. The kids you see hanging out at Borders talking about the latest vampire books will end up congregating in front of Hot Topics sniffing screen-print instead of book ink. And there is a fucking difference!
In the midst of the death throes of the brick and mortar store, artists creating the “product” are left with fewer and fewer outlets that SELL what they create.
I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before. But this shit is real. A society that fucks its artists, is a culture that is destroying its soul. Download to your little heart’s desire, but one day the source of all this goodness will have been sucked dry and there won’t be anybody left who can afford to replenish it. And I don’t believe for a moment that there’s a wave of new young bands, film makers and writers on the brink of creating world class art for the sheer beauty of it. Deep down everybody wants to make a living doing what they love.
As art gets cheaper, the cheaper the art. While everybody was busy celebrating the Internet for providing a free outlet for aspiring rockers to get their music out there, did anyone stop to notice just how much garbage was being created in the name of rock and roll? Far from being music’s savior, the Internet has become its sewage system.
Video killed the radio star. The Internet killed the rest of us. And yes, I’m part of the process.
Even the good old reliable adult video store is dying and “C.J., the video machine owner” (now in his 60s) is pulling his pud watching Youporn.
When did we collectively arrive at the point at which art was determined to be worthless?
Bootlegging, pirating, porn and the dawning of free art as reported on Cleveland TV in 1978:
Lizzy Mercier Descloux was a multi-talented French recording artist who made waves in the New York underground in the 1980s. Perhaps best known for her early 80s no wave-meets-funk output, she found more commercial success later in the decade with a world music inspired sound. The girlfriend and sometime business partner of the entrepreneur Michel Esteban, she was signed to his uber-hip ZE Records, also home to Was (Not Was), Kid Creole & The Coconuts, James White, Suicide and many more. She released three albums and a bunch of singles for the label, before moving on to CBS in 1984.
Unfortunately Lizzy Mercier Descloux passed away in 2004. Since then the re-established ZE Records have been doing a cracking job at re-releasing her older material. Her sound was distinctive - sometimes abrasive, sometimes energetic and always exciting. Now ZE are giving away a twelve track compilation of the best of Descloux’s work called From Heaven With Love, available for the next seven days only from the official ZE website. The only catch is that you sign up to the record label’s mailing list, but really you should consider doing that anyway as their catalog and roster of acts is immense. This is a taster of what is on the comp:
Lizzy Mercier Descloux - “Wawa”
Lizzy Mercier Descloux - “Hard-Boiled Babe” (what a beat!!)
Lizzy Mercier Descloux - “Slipped Disc”
To download the 12 track From Heaven With Love compilation, go here.
Described as the first documentary film on the creation of Techno Music, High Tech Soul is also an examination of the cultural history of Detroit, its birthplace.
From the race riots of 1967 to the underground party scene of the late 1980s, Detroit’s economic downturn didn’t stop the invention of a new kind of music that brought international attention to its producers and their hometown.
Featuring in-depth interviews with many of the world’s best exponents of the artform, High Tech Soul focuses on the creators of the genre—Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson—and looks at the relationships and personal struggles behind the music. Artists like Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, Eddie Fowlkes and a host of others explain why techno, with its abrasive tones and resonating basslines, could not have come from anywhere but Detroit.
With classic anthems such as Rhythim Is Rhythim’s “Strings of Life” and Inner City’s “Good Life,” High Tech Soul celebrates the pioneers, the promoters and the city that spawned a global phenomenon.
The film features: Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Eddie (Flashin) Fowlkes, Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills, John Acquaviva, Carl Cox, Carl Craig, Blake Baxter, Stacey Pullen, Thomas Barnett, Matthew Dear, Anthony “Shake” Shakir, Keith Tucker, Delano Smith, Mike Archer, Derrick Thompson, Mike Clark, Alan Oldham, Laura Gavoor, Himawari, Scan 7, Kenny Larkin, Stacey “Hotwax” Hale, Claus Bachor, Electrifying Mojo, Niko Marks, Barbara Deyo, Dan Sordyl, Sam Valenti, Ron Murphy, George Baker, and Kwame Kilpatrick.
The film’s soundtrack includes: Aux 88, Cybotron, Inner City, Juan Atkins, Mayday, Model 500, Plastikman, Rhythim Is Rhythim, and more.
“Bredow’s cast of alumni—the holy trinity of Atkins, May & Saunderson at the front—fill out this tale with passion, pride and, oddly for music of the future, nostalgia too.”
- Dazed and Confused
‘An enjoyable education into the music, the city and the main players past, present and future.’
-DJ Magazine
‘Defines the myths and the magic of Detroit techno from its beginnings right up to how it has evolved to become High Tech Soul.’
-Derrick May
“If you look at Doric Wilson’s work of the last fifty years, you will see that he knows more words than most people and knows how to use them, but there’s one word that he’s never heard, and this is “compromise.” Doric has always told it as it is. He has never believed in playing it safe and the word “sugar-coating” is not in his vocabulary either. His theater is tough, funny and right on target. No pussyfooting for Doric: he doesn’t write gay theater; he writes queer theater.’
- Edward Albee
Playwright, director, producer, critic and gay political activist, Doric Wilson, died over the weekend of undisclosed causes, at the age of 72.
Mr. Wilson was one of the first resident playwrights at the legendary Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village, where many fledgling Off-Off-Broadway playwrights cut their teeth. His comedy And He Made A Her opened there in 1961. Only two years in New York, and not wanting people to think the work was his first produced play, he attended performances in three-piece suits with a trench coat tossed over his shoulders. “I also drank brandy and soda,” he recalled.
The success of that play and the three that followed, including Pretty People, Babel Babel Little Tower and Now She Dances!— which dealt head on with the trail of Oscar Wilde—helped establish Joe Cino’s hole-in-the-wall cafe as an offbeat theatre mecca. Later in the 1960s, Mr. Wilson was one of the first playwrights invited to join the Barr/Wilder/Albee Playwright’s Unit and, with fellow Cino alum Lanford Wilson, Circle Repertory Theatre. His other plays included In Absence, Turnabout, The West Street Gang, A Perfect Relationship and Forever After.
Doric Wilson was present on June 28, 1969, when riots broke out at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. The rebellion of the bar’s gay denizens against harassing police is generally recognized as having signaled the beginning of the gay rights movement. Mr. Wilson had already been an active participant in the anti-war and civil rights fights of the 1960s. Following the riot, he became active in Gay Activist Alliance and, as a “star” bartender, helped open post-Stonewall gay bars like The Spike, TY’s and Brothers & Sisters Cabaret.
In 1974, Doric Wilson, along with Billy Blackwell, Peter del Valle and John McSpadden, formed TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), the first professional theatre company to deal openly and honestly with the gay experience. “I was involved with Circle Rep at the time,” he later recalled, “when it suddenly occurred to me that I could use the Cino experience to combine my talents with my politics. I could focus my life and abilities to promote a theatre dedicated ‘to an honest and open exploration of the GLBT life experience and cultural sensibility.’”
The company produced new plays and revivals by Noel Coward, Joe Orton, Terrence McNally and Lanford Wilson. In June 2001 Wilson and directors Mark Finley and Barry Childs resurrected the company as TOSOS II. “Wilson has devoted his life to the once-radical notion that gay lives deserved true representation,” observed playwright Craig Lucas.
In 2004 Doric Wilson was honored to be one of the Grand Marshals of the 35th Anniversary Pride Day Parade in New York City. He is featured in the documentary film “Stonewall Uprising” (2010).
Our friends at Mod Cinema have scored again with their latest release, Surprise Partie which was basically French television’s equivalent to New Year’s Rockin Eve” minus Dick Clark and chock full of fashionable Parisian pretty people:
This 3 1/2 hour New Years Eve party was broadcast on French television in 1968. Featuring fashionably dressed partygoers dancing, swinging, and casually sitting on every inch of space of a stylishly decorated set. However, the best thing about this party is the long guestlist of musical performers that show up. Featuring rarely seen footage of Davy Jones, Marie Laforet, The Troggs, Jacques Dutronc, Joe Cocker, Françoise Hardy, Aphrodite’s Child, Antoine, Johnny Hallyday, Fleetwood Mac, The Who, Hugues Auffray, The Small Faces, Herbert Leonard, P.P. Arnold, Booker T & The MGs, Eric Charden, Freddy, Nicoletta, The Irresistibles, Pink Floyd, The Equals, and Les Variations. In full color and ORTF “stereo technique” sound!
Buy a copy of the amazing 2-DVD set of Surprise Partie at Mod Cinema.
The insanely gorgeous P.P. Arnold doing one of her best known numbers. “If You Think You’re Groovy.”
Below, Pink Floyd do “Let There Be More Light”
And one more musical morsel from “Surprise Partie”—it’s The Equals (featuring a young Eddy Grant with blonde hair) performing “Softly, Softly.”
Time is running out to stop a Ugandan parliament from passing “a bill that would make being LGBT in Uganda a crime punishable by death.”
All Out are running an online petition to stop this horrific bill. Their petition asks Ugandan President Museveni to stop the human rights violations by publicly vowing to veto the “Kill the Gays” bill:
In the next 72 hours, conservative lawmakers could move a bill that would make being LGBT in Uganda a crime punishable by death.
This hateful bill is part of a pattern of the Ugandan government’s violent repression of pro-democracy forces within the country - and time is running out to stop it.
The All Out petition has an open-letter to President Yoweri Museveni, which states:
President Yoweri Museveni:
The world is united with human rights activists in Uganda, in asking that you publicly declare your intention to veto the “Anti-Homosexuality” bill.
Don’t let this law, and the worsening human rights situation in the country, make Uganda in to a pariah nation in the international community.
John Walker of The Walker Brothers has died. While the band’s success was limited to mostly a few years in the 1960s, their influence is heard in the music of many groups of the past three decades, including The National, Julian Cope, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Mark Eitzel and many more. They were huge stars in Europe and Japan, but sadly ignored in the country where they were born, the USA.
The Guardian UK reports:
John Walker, one of the founders of the Walker Brothers, has died at the age of 67.
The songwriter, vocalist and guitarist, who played a pivotal role in the band, which scored huge commercial success in the 1960s and 1970s with songs such as Make It Easy On Yourself and The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Any More), passed away at his Los Angeles home. He had liver cancer.
Born John Maus, he and the other two unrelated members of the group, Scott Engel and Gary Leeds, adopted the Walker Brothers name after their formation in 1964.
His spokeswoman said: “Sadly John passed away yesterday morning Californian time, after a six-month battle with liver cancer.”
In a mirror image of sorts to the British pop invasion of the US in 1960s, the band’s fame flourished after travelling to the UK during the same decade.
The official John Walker website said it was with “deepest sadness” that it had to report the musician passed away.
“He was a beloved husband, brother, father, grandfather, friend, and artiste,” it added.
On his own website, Gary Walker said in a statement that it was “a very sad day” for himself, John’s family and all of their many fans.
“John was the founder member of the group and lead singer in the early days,” he added.
“He was also a fantastic guitarist which a lot of people didn’t realize. He was a compassionate songwriter and a gentleman with lots of style.”
“The three of us had the most incredible adventure together, all the time not realising that we were part of pop history in the making. His music will live on, and therefore so will John.”
John Walker performs “Kentucky Woman” on German TV show The Beat Club.
The Walker Brothers perform ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”:
