I can’t tell if this vintage ad is from the 70s or early-80s. Either way it is “Superbly sculptured by a European artist, it’s a masterpiece of lightweight, micro-processor technology.” I’m sold.
Nipples and lady bits not included.
(via Uncle Sid)
VHS 2005 Foam
Humorous artistic tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s inscrutable cinematic masterpiece created in 2005 by David Herbert. What I’m more interested in is seeing the VCR that can handle this gargantuan tape.
(via Booooooom!)
Dangerous Minds pal Chris Campion wrote this morning to alert me to something going on right outside his own apartment window today: More than 2500 German police officers are evicting the tenants of a former (now legal) squat in the Liebig 14 tenement block in the east Berlin district of Friedrichshain.
So there are 2500 cops. Guess how many residents there are? 25! Still, about a thousand protestors turned up to support the (legal) tenants. The most amazing thing about this is that the German police are apparently being used to enforce the will of a private landlord. Just imagine the cost of that little operation!
From The Guardian:
Demonstrations and publicity stunts are planned across Berlin throughout the day. Already, protesters claim to have paintballed the famous department store KaDeWe, Berlin’s answer to Harrod’s, along with the town hall in the district of Schöneberg, where John F Kennedy gave his"Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963.
The building, which has 25 bedrooms, four kitchens and five bathrooms, was first squatted in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. After Berlin’s housing board took ownership of the house in 1992, the squatters signed a lease making them the legal residents.
After it was sold to private developers, the lease was passed on to the current occupiers, who range from 19 to 40 years old and hail from around the world. One British resident, a 24-year-old PhD student, gave her name as Sarah.
“We were told we have to leave because the landlord wants to renovate the house and divide it up into expensive flats, which is what has already happened to other alternative housing projects like ours,” she said.
“People with not much money are being forced out of Berlin city centre. This is not just about 25 people losing their home, it’s a protest against the gentrification of the city and ordinary people all over being priced out of their local housing market.”
Sarah refused to say how much rent she paid, but it is widely believed to be a token amount. German media has reported that the rent is still set at 1992 levels, which equates to just €1 (85p) per square metre per month.
The district mayor, Franz Schulz, criticised the eviction. “It is not a good day. We’re losing an important alternative project,” he told Inforadio.
Most of today’s protesters were in their 20s or 30s, but standing by the police line on the south side of Liebigstrasse were an older couple from Munster, who looked on with concern.
“Our daughter is one of the residents,” said the 60-year-old university professor, who did not want to be named.
“She has lived there for 10 years now. We come and visit every month or two. It’s almost like our second home. I know many of her housemates and they are nice, peaceful people. It’s crazy that the city of Berlin is allowing this to happen.”
Crazy and tragic.
If there’s one aspect of the 80’s that I am glad hasn’t been revived it’s that horribly real nuclear war paranoia. However, if you do fancy taking a trip back to the time when the world’s superpowers could have wiped out most of humanity at the flick of a switch, then Threads is the film for you. This one-off BBC made-for-television film from 1984 was mentioned in last week’s How TV Ruined Your Life episode about the power of fear in the media, and it’s a brilliant example (in ways both good and bad).
Threads is set in the Northern English industrial city of Sheffield, and concerns itself with the impact of a nuclear bomb blast on the community, and the effect it has on the whole country in the years that follow. Having a micro-level setting makes Threads more effective, particularly in the scenes that show how a blast would be dealt with by local government, and how some of the seemingly smallest losses are the most painful. The gray-skied Yorkshire moors backdrop adds hugely to the medieval-regression scenario that plays out after the horrific first attack. From BBC4:
Director Mick Jackson shoots the piece as if filming an actual disaster, using a documentary-maker’s dispassion that renders the grey, gruesome scenes unbearably compelling. The blend of personal tragedy and global catastrophe is deftly handled but it’s the attention to detail and stunning breadth of the work which most impresses.
Writer Barry Hines, best known for Kes, fashioned his script on evidence supplied by bodies as varied as the British Medical Association and the Home Office, with literally dozens of experts from varying fields - including Carl Sagan - consulted to guarantee authenticity. The cold exploration of such horrific events is frightening, from the awful build-up to war and the immediate impact of the bomb, to the viler, long-term consequences of a poisoned world.
I hadn’t seen it before yesterday, and I should mention that it’s not a viewing experience to be undertaken lightly. But it IS worth watching. I am just glad I never saw this film at the time, being only a child in the Eighties, as it is truly one of the most bleak (if brilliant) viewing experiences. Plenty of YouTube comments attest to the film’s powers to inspire nightmares in children, even in adults. I am guessing that it also led to a surge in the number of people joining CND.
Besides, you know you’ve hit a certain apex of harrowing brilliance when Portishead name a song after you.
‘Threads’ parts 2 -12 after the jump…
Thanks to Chris P. Daniels for the link.
I was 15 when I first read a book by Richard Brautigan. It was called A Confederate General From Big Sur . I borrowed the book from my friend Joseph, a free spirited guy two years older than me who had a beard and rolled his own cigarettes. Though he looked like one, Joseph wasn’t a hippie. Hippies were part of a movement and Joseph wasn’t a joiner. In the small town in Virgina where we grew up, Joseph was completely his own man, a suburban teenage Zen monk who seemed ancient at the age of 17. It made perfect sense that he would be the guy to turn me on to Brautigan. They shared common traits: a clarity of mind, a sharp sense of humor and a deep love for language. Joseph kept a notebook with him at all times in which he wrote short stories, poems and haiku.
In this moment of recalling Joseph, I am convinced he was as close to being enlightened as any teenager could be in America in 1966. I wonder where he is today and what he’s reading.
Joseph, Brautigan, Jack Kerouac and The Doors were my saviors in the year of the Summer Of Love. I was stuck in the suburbs, surrounded by jocks and greasers, completely alone in my world of beatnik books and a meerschaum pipe full of banana peel. It was the year I read Brautigan’s second book Trout Fishing In America and the year that I left home for San Francisco. Joseph was there and I needed to make the connection with the Bodhisattva of the ‘burbs.
Those were the days when a book or a record album could change your life. If literature had a Beatles, its name was Richard Brautigan. It comes as no surprise that John Lennon was a Brautigan fan. They both had a whimsical point of view that started in the square inch field and expanded into the cosmos.
One of the things that was most compelling and inspiring for a young would-be writer like myself about Brautigan’s books was their covers. With every new book that Richard published there was always an attractive bohemian woman on the cover. It was as though Richard was sending a message to all the reclusive teenybopper poets in the world that said “write poetry and you will get laid.” And it was true. I would sit in the Mediterranean Cafe on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley with my journal unfolded before me and invariably a young flower child would approach and ask if I were a poet. A response of “yes” would often lead to a fuck fest in my attic apartment on Channing Way. In the sixties being an artist/intellectual had the same aphrodisiac qualities associated with cocaine and Rolex watches in the 80s. Being smart was sexy.
I’m not going to get into the biographical details of Brautigan’s life. In this Wiki world, his life story is easily accessible. In brief: he was married several times, managed the rare accomplishment of making money as a poet, became an alcoholic and killed himself at 49. Happy/sad, all of it. What really matters is what he wrote and he wrote a couple of dozen books that run the gamut from the sublime to the silly. Every word is worth reading. Even the sloppy stuff.
For many kids like myself Brautigan was a door into a consciousness that was liberating in its playfulness and here and nowness. Reading Brautigan is like taking a pure hit of oxygen. Things sparkle. There is a sense of boundless delight and eroticism in his prose and poetry - a promise of the unspeakable, where language transcends itself.
The following recordings of Brautigan reading were intended to be released on Zapple records, a spinoff of The Beatles Apple label. But the project was never fully realized. Harvest Records released them as Listening To Brautigan in 1973.
Brautigan, now more than ever.
Previously on DM: Richard Brautigan’s daughter Ianthe reads a poem on her father’s birthday.
A tantalizingly brief clip of a collaboration between fashion giant Yves Saint-Laurent and composer/arranger/ key Serge Gainsbourg collaborator, Jean-Claude Vannier. A version of L’enfant la Mouche et les Allumettes from Vannier’s 1972 LP L’enfant Assassin des Mouches (pictured above) is performed as rather surreal accompaniment to the fashion goings-on from The Roland Petit Show in 1971. Wish it went on longer.
Bonus: A few songs from the wonderful aformentioned LP
Le Roi Des Mouches Et La Confiture De Rouse
Les Gardes Volent Au Secours Du Roi
L`enfant Au Royaume Des Mouches
With thanks to Justin Meldal-Johnsen !
Directed by and starring Robert Hossein and written by Dario Argento, Une Corde, Un Colt (The Rope And The Colt) is a rarely seen 1969 French spaghetti western ( pâtes de l’ouest) with a dynamite score by the director’s father, André Hossein. The film’s title song is sung by none other than Scott Walker.
I swore a vow on my dyin’ breath
to ride a trail that ends in death
and death could strike with a frightening jolt of a lightning bolt in
the land where the rope and the colt are king
The Rope And The Colt was also released with the much more sinister and compelling title Cemetery Without Crosses. The DVD is available from CultCine Media.
“Way down south in the land of cotton…”
Outrageous! This guy squeezes a lot of comic mileage out of this story. Too funny.
(via reddit)
