Ol’ Dirty Bastard (born Russell Tyrone Jones) wasn’t just the most colorful member of Wu-Tang Clan, on at least one occasion, he was the most heroic…
In February 1998, ODB was at work in the studio with his cousin, 12 O’Clock, when he looked out the window and witnessed a car accident on the street outside. A 1996 Ford Mustang had run into a four-year-girl, who had then gotten trapped underneath the car. ODB ran to the scene of the accident and organized a group of about a dozen onlookers to lift the car off of the little girl, who was then taken to the hospital with second- and third-degree burns.
For several days Ol’ Dirty Bastard visited the girl in the hospital using a false name until the media sussed out the secret. Here’s the MTV News report on the incident at the time.
It’s a good thing that ODB didn’t have to resort to his Plan B, which was to tell the girl to “Shimmy Shimmy Ya.”
Skaterdater, one of the best skateboarding films ever made, has finally popped up in a decent color version after years of bouncing around the Internet in terrible looking transfers.
This sweet little movie from 1965 chronicles the early days of skateboarding when kids rode tiny oval decks with steel wheels. Amazingly the film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1966 for short film. The first and only film about skateboarding to manage that kind of artistic feat. It’s got a groovy soundtrack that includes a tune by Davie Allan And The Arrows, “Skateboarder Rock.”
I owned a Hobie skateboard and we use to call what we did sidewalk surfing and we did it barefoot. On the East Coast, where I lived, sidewalk surfing was the closest we could get to the SoCal lifestyle and we bleached our hair to give us the appearance of being teenage beach bums. But the humidity and wooded suburbs of Virginia were about as close to Dogtown as The Four Seasons were to the Beach Boys.
The film tells a story with no dialogue. The surf rock-esque soundtrack was composed by Mike Curb and Nick Venet with Davie Allan and the Arrows playing “Skaterdater Rock” .
It was the first film on skateboarding. It was distributed theatrically, both domestically and internationally, by United Artists. It was reviewed extensively, including “Time Magazine”.
The skateboarders were members of the neighborhood Imperial Skateboard Club from Torrance, California. Their names are Gary Hill, Gregg Carrol, Mike Mel, Bill McKaig, Gary Jennings, Bruce McKaig and Rick Anderson. Most of the action shots were taken in Torrance, Redondo Beach, Palos Verdes Estates. The final shot was Averill Park in San Pedro.” Wikipedia.
These young dudes have some classy moves and an almost Zen-like grace. The roots of cool, California-style.
If you dig the soundtrack, you can stream all the tracks here.
Ronald Shannon Jackson, a drummer and composer who worked largely within the realms of free jazz, funk and fusion, died this morning, Oct. 19, in Ft. Worth, Tex. Jackson’s passing was confirmed by his cousin, Tobi Hero, on Jackson’s Facebook page. No cause of death was cited, however, Jackson was suffering from leukemia and had been living in a hospice. He was 73.
Jackson was a revolutionary in the avant-jazz scene taking cues from Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor. With his group The Decoding Society, Jackson shattered the walls between jazz and rock and in collaboration with musicians like James “Blood” Ulmer, Vernon Reid and Bill Frisell introduced a style of music uniquely its own.
Here’s some recent footage (2012) of Jackson performing at the Kessler Theater near his hometown of Fort Worth:
With Vernon Reid and Melvin Gibbs at the Knitting Factory in 1999:
Marianne Faithfull sings “Hier ou Demian” (“Yesterday or Tomorrow”) in a scene from the incredible 1967 French TV movie musical, Anna. Directed by Pierre Koralnik, and with songs written by Serge Gainsbourg (who also appears in the film). Anna starred Godard muse Anna Karina. The film is practically a musical pop art paean to her beauty. Suits me just fine.
A gorgeous young Faithfull, who never looked better (and that’s saying a lot), singing a Gainsbourg-penned tune. What more could you ask for? The entire film? Well you’re in luck, because you can purchase a copy of Anna (with English subtitles) from Mod Cinema.
This video of three smug dickheads destroying a 200 million-year-old rock formation in Goblin Valley, Utah is everywhere on the Internets today. The only reason I’m posting it to Dangerous Minds is so that their stupid faces can be seen by everyone who visits our site, too. These boys need to be shamed real bad.
Geologists estimate the rock formation was approximately 200 million years old, formed during the Triassic Period (Mesozoic Era).
This reminds me of the time when I was in the Bahamas and I witnessed two drunk frat-type idiots playing “baseball” with live starfish. I tried to stop them, but they just laughed me off as some type of hippie tree hugger. It was a very sad and ugly thing to watch.
I actually had to do a double-take on this one, but this lil’ lady—as seen in Richmond, Virginia—is downright endearing! Banksy’s all well and good, but who doesn’t love a winsome piece on “the curse.”
The blood flowing into the grate is a nice touch, too!
It’s 1987. You are confronted with a VHS tape of a movie called Crazy Fat Ethel (AKA Criminally Insane). With a title like that, a $3 price tag and a blurb that reads “300 pounds of maniacal fury!”—well, what do you do?
I’ll bet many of you would have done the same thing I did, buy it. But if you think is this the part where I tell you what an amazing, overlooked cinematic gem Crazy Fat Ethel is, you would be mistaken. It’s a pretty terrible film, although if you’re a fan of really, really bad movies it does have a few things to recommend it in an “Ed Wood” kind of way, i.e. cinematic ineptitude, bad writing and over the top performances. It compares to a particularly bloody Troma release.
DVD Drive-In had this to say about Crazy Fat Ethel:
Ethel Janowski, a 300-pound mental patient, is released to the care of her uptight grandmother, who lives in a vintage townhouse in San Francisco (yep, lots of great location footage in this one). Ethel bitches about the meager meals she was given at the asylum (“two softboiled eggs and dry toast for breakfast!”) and devours mammoth meals whenever she feels like it, at all hours of the day. When Granny locks all the food in the house in the pantry and hides the key, Ethel grabs a butcher knife and stabs it through her chest, then keeps stabbing the corpse’s hand to steal the key away! Immediately after she stabs a delivery boy to death with a broken bottle (“I don’t have $80! I’ve only got $4.50!”), her prostitute sister Rosalee arrives to stay for a while. In-between making out and snorting cocaine with her sleazy make-up wearing boyfriend John and turning tricks with desperate immigrants in the house, Rosalee begins to smell the rotting corpses Ethel has hid inside Granny’s room… It’s not long before Ethel has to use her trusty meat cleaver to ensure that no one discovers her secret!
The actress playing CFE, Priscilla Alden, eats so much food in this movie (pounds and pounds of bacon, entire cartons of eggs) that her prodigious gluttony almost makes CFE a profound, one-woman metaphor for late-stage Capitalism and the American way of life (although I seriously doubt that this is what the director had in mind, I hasten to add). Her performance is the best thing about the film. (Attention perverts: There are numerous long takes of her staring blankly into space eating massive bowls of ice cream, if you’re into that kinda thing…)
Crazy Fat Ethel was shot in 1973, but not released until 1975. Believe it or not, they actually made a sequel, Crazy Fat Ethel II (or Criminally Insane 2, if you prefer) in the late 1980s. The same crew, again with Alden, also made a related film called Death Nurse. Apparently someone intends to do a remake?
The absolutely terrific documentary MC5: A True Testimonial was made in 2002 but never had a theatrical run and has never been released on DVD. Other than screenings at film festivals, the movie has mostly gone unseen despite receiving stellar reviews. The reasons were legal entanglements that often cripple or doom rockumentaries to obscurity, the details of which I’m not going to get into because they involve friends I don’t want to piss off.
Here’s a rare chance to see MC5: A True Testimonial. It may not last long on YouTube so I suggest watching it now. A finer film on the Motor City 5 will doubtlessly never be made. Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!
Update: Yes, I know the film was booked briefly in NYC and a booking or two in Michigan. But, to me, that doesn’t constitute a “theatrical run.” For all intents and purposes, and I’m sure the film makers would agree, the film was never released in any significant way to theaters.
Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, the Temple of Set’s high priest Michael Aquino and H.R. Giger figure into The Occult Experience, a well-made, intelligent mid-80s Australian TV documentary, Of particular interest is the section, starting at 33 minutes in, focusing on “witchy” Australian painter Rosaleen Norton, where you can catch a glimpse of some of her fantastic—yet seldom seen—paintings.
Noted occult author Nevill Drury (who contributed two essays to my Book of Lies anthology) did the interviewing, research and co-wrote the narration script, so this one is a cut above the usual fare. Drury’s latest book, co-written with Lynne L. Hume is The Varieties of Magical Experience.
