While shooting Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in 1963, Peter Sellers, in full Merkin Muffley makeup, treated an American telephone interviewer to a rapid-fire tour of British accents, including Cockney, two Scots accents (Edinburgh and Glasgow), the accent of “slightly pimply individuals” living outside of London, and so forth. Thank god the cameras were rolling—it’s priceless footage.
Sellers was and is revered for his ability to disappear into roles—obviously he played three wildly different characters in Dr. Strangelove—but this brief demonstration of mimickry is simply a tour de force. Enjoy.
I normally can’t stand child actors, but the trio of kiwi kiddies assembled for this anti-drugs and driving PSA are comedic geniuses. They’re like Trailer Park Boys level funny… Perfect timing.
I guarantee these kids are going to get their own TV show.
In 1964 Great Britain celebrated the 400th birthday of William Shakespeare. In 1964 one subject on everybody’s mind was The Beatles, who had become a nationwide sensation the previous year. It was obvious: Why not combine the two?
That’s exactly what happened on a show called Around The Beatles, which seems to have been a variety show with many musical segments. For the Shakespeare bit, the concept was to peform the rude mechanicals’ performance of the “play within a play” about Pyramus and Thisbe from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Paul plays Bottom/Pyramus, John plays Flute/Thisbe, George plays Starveling/Moonshine, and Ringo plays Snug/the Lion. The show was taped and aired the same week as Shakespeare’s birthday—and, as it happens, his death day (they’re the same: April 23).
Mad Magazine uses Shakespeare to twit the Beatles, 1965
Following days of rehearsal, Around the Beatles (at least, the portions requiring the Beatles’ presence) was apparently filmed in just over an hour this evening.
-snip-
[Then comes] the Beatles’ Shakespearean debut, performing the “play within a play” from act V, scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Paul and John take the roles of doomed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe, hamming up their parts enjoyably. Ringo plays the fierce lion, while George is Moonshine, complete with “lanthorn,” thorn-bush, and dog.
They stick to the general outline of the Bard’s text, altering the dialogue when necessary. ‘Then know that I, one Snug the joiner, am/A lion-fell, nor else no lion’s dam; For, if I should as lion come in strife/Into this place, ‘twere pity on my life” becomes “Then know that I, one Ringo the drummer, am; For, if I was really a lion, I wouldn’t be making all the money I am today, would I?” Members of [the backing band] Sounds Incorporated fill in for Theseus, Demetrius, and Hipployta, interrupting the “play” with heckling comments, such as “Roll over, Shakespeare!” and “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
Eventually, their constant interruptions ad the scereams of the audience become distracting, but seeing a golden-wigged and deep-voiced John tell Paul “My love thou art, I think” makes it all worhwhile. The “lovers” conclude with “Thus Thisbe ends: Adieu, adieu, adieu,” segueing into “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside.”
Paul does a very serviceable job as Pyramus; the same is true of George as “the Moon”—and the atmosphere in the room could hardly be better, with tons of playful, even collegiate call and response between the performers and the audience, who seem to be in a very intimate space. John, as Thisbe, wore a ridiculous blond wig and had blackened out one of his front teeth. Ringo as the lion is simply hilarious.
Did you know that the use, ownership, and sale of skateboards was banned in Norway from 1978 to 1989? With hooligans like these constituting the public face of skateboarding, it’s easy to see why.
I’m pretty sure Kate Hepburn is about to do a kickflip there.
Surfpunks, a 1981 Dutch made-for-TV documentary vacillates wildly from rapturous to heartbreaking. Aside from footage of well-known bands like (a very young) Suicidal Tendencies, there’s deeper cuts, like a bit on little-known experimental family band, Unit 3 with Venus (their shrieking eight-year-old daughter on vocals). It’s also a really personal look at the tragedy and destitution of the scene.
The main reason for watching, however, is a brutally naked interview with Casey “Cola” Hopkins, who offers extensive details of her suicide pact gone awry with Darby Crash. Hopkins, of course, survived, only to be maligned by her peers and bounced in and out of mental institutions over the next few years. Accounts of Hopkins vary, but it’s fairly agreed upon that the primarily female, fanatical Germs’ followers, known as “Circle One,” disliked and mistrusted her. It’s difficult to figure out who’s reliable in a cultish environment of young drug addicts, but from the footage, one thing seems certain: Casey’s a depressed, lonely young woman, and it’s hard not to have some sympathy for her.
On a lighter note, you can see footage of the self-described “all-American Jewish Lesbian folk singer,” Phranc, performing startlingly earnest protest songs. Taking (understandable) issue with the petulant punk trend of sporting (supposedly de-signified) swastikas, she manages to make her legitimate anger stand out from a scene hallmarked by chaos and screaming, with sincere, literal lyrics and an acoustic guitar. Phranc even plays us out, with a sly but optimistic anti-suicide song.
The whole thing is great, and aside from a few spots of Dutch narration, you get to hear the snotty California accents of the young early 1980s punks.
I have searched high and low for any more context on this photo, but the only thing I can glean from the Internets is that there were Woman of the Year Awards, and for one glorious moment, these ladies shared a room.
My only theory is that this is a magical dream I once had that I have somehow manifested into reality. I demand to see this reenacted by drag queens!
The harmless notion that good nutrition could aid the human body in fighting illnesses was so threatening in the late ‘60s that the FBI was willing to confiscate and burn books to suppress it.
Two major early champions of natural foods – and indomitable entrepreneurs—were two American brothers, Gregory and Craig Sams. Craig (who now owns Green & Black’s organic chocolate with his wife Josephine Fairley) was the cook who prepared food in his home for the short-lived UFO Club in London. He also imported books and pamphlets on the macrobiotic lifestyle from the Ohsawa Foundation in Los Angeles and sold them through the Indica Bookshop.
Craig was in New York the day the FBI raided a macrobiotic bookshop in the East Village. He wrote in 2005:
I visited [the macrobiotic restaurant Paradox] the same day I visited the macrobiotic bookshop – the day it was investigated by the FBI and told not to sell any books until they had reviewed their content (they contained illegal statements such as that poor diet could cause cancer and healthy diet could help cure cancer). Eventually all the books were taken away and burned.
The macrobiotic diet is not the countercultural revolution it once was, and some of its once radical tenets are now rather mainstream, such as sticking to unrefined, whole, natural food, grown locally and eaten in season. But in the late ‘60s, it was still underground.
The Sams brothers opened the first macrobiotic restaurant in London, Seed, in early 1968. The laid-back, Bedouin tent atmosphere of Seed was described by a visitor as feeling like somewhere he “might get stabbed or something.” Not at all what a typical vegan or raw food restaurant looks like today!
Craig recalled the layout of the restaurant and some of its more famous customers:
Seed had two rooms, in a big rambling basement of the [Gloucester] hotel. One had cushions on the floor set around tables made out of the 4-5 ft diameter reels that mains electrical cable was wound around, so customers met one another as there were no reservations and no exclusivity of tables in that room. In the other room there was a tent style hanging from the ceiling and normal square wooden tables with bentwood chairs. —snip—
Marc Bolan of Tyrannosaurus Rex walked to Seed to get the free meal and it was at Seed that he met Mickey Finn, an event that rock historians cited when calling for a blue plaque for historical buildings to be put up on the site many years later. Regular visitors included John and Yoko, Terence Stamp, most of the Stones as well as vegetarian/macrobiotic activists and enthusiasts and most of the denizens of the Underground alternative culture that was springing up all over the country.
In his memoir, Jazz Christmas, Al Gromer Khan called Seed “restaurant, Zen monastery and doctor´s practice all in one, a subterranean place where guests sat cross-legged, setting standards for legions of psycho-analysts who came thirty or so years later, for us to get in touch with our inner selves.”
The Sams also started Ceres grain shops (that was how hard it was to find whole grains back then), the U.K.‘s first organic food shop, Ceres Bakery, the U.K.‘s first 100% wholemeal and sugar-free bakery, Ceres Bookshop, Green Genes Café (a “macrobiotic workingman’s café”), Harmony Foods (now Whole Earth Foods), and the original VegeBurger.
They also ambitiously catered the first Glastonbury and Isle of Wight festivals. Craig described the Glastonbury fare from 1970:
We were the only food suppliers at Glastonbury and all the festivalgoers either ate our food (muesli, brown rice, red bean stew, porridge, unleavened bread with tahini/miso spread) or brought their own. We also supplied some food to Sid Rawles, who led the Diggers, who gave out free food from the cowshed near the farmhouse up on the hill.
On the Sunday afternoon the local hot dog and ice cream vendors discovered there was a crowd at the farm and drove down to the site. They were met by the festivalgoers who blocked their route and rocked their vans, shouting ‘Out, Out Out’ until they turned around and disappeared.
Gregory Sams self-published three issues the exhaustively informative newsletter, Harmony, with recipes, vegetarian resources, articles about health, eco-consciousness, and nutrition. It was an ongoing counterdebate to the kinds of alarmist anti-vegetarian articles being published at the time, most notably Harvard professor Frederick Stare’s infamous Reader’s Digest article “The Hippie Diet That’s Killing Our Kids” (which, incidentally, if anyone has a link to the text of that article, please pass it along). John Lennon, a regular at Seed, contributed a cartoon to Harmony extolling the macrobiotic diet and Gregory’s evangelizing. Later the Sams brothers and their father published Seed: The Journal of Organic Living, which ran from 1971 to 1977.
John and Yoko and Chuck Berry assist at a macrobiotic cooking demonstration on The Mike Douglas Show, below:
My teenage ambition was to have a novel published by Penguin Books, the company responsible for publishing my favorite authors. My bedroom shelves were lined with orange and blue and green and silver-spined Penguin books—the only books whose quality is guaranteed by their cover.
I was, therefore, delighted to find A Penguin a week, where Karyn Reeves has blogs about her collection of Penguin books. Ms Reeves is collecting all of the Penguin books published before 1970, the year when the company’s founder Allen Lane died. So, far, Ms. Reeves has amassed 2,000 of the approximately 3,000 titles—“they look great in the book shelves en masse,” she says.
Karyn also reads and reviews one Penguin book a week (hence the title), and is currently reading “Penguin no. 1736:” At the Villa Rose by A.E.W. Mason. Once the book is read, a review is posted, and there are plenty of wonderful titles to browse through—from “Penguin no. 1:” Ariel by Andre Maurois, to “Penguin no. 2999:” Bullitt (Mute Witness) by Robert L. Pike.
However, there are quite a few titles still missing, and this is where you the reader might be able to help.
If you love reading, and you love books (particularly Penguin Books), then you’ll find plenty to enjoy at Ms. Reeves fabulous site.
Uschi Obermaier, like fellow model and rock star girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, is famous for the men in her life. But she is also remembered for her radical political associations, particularly the left-wing student movement in West Berlin in the late ‘60s, the milieu that produced the Baader-Meinhof gang/Red Army Faction, the shooting of young college student Benno Ohnesorg by police during a demonstration, and attempted assassination of leftist student leader Rudi Dutschke.
Uschi was briefly a member of Amon Düül (she played maracas on their albums Collapsing and Disaster) and lived with them in their Munich commune before moving to Kommune 1 in West Berlin with her new boyfriend, shaggy leftist political activist and communard Rainer Langhans in September 1968. Ironically she had no real interest in politics at the time, despite becoming the poster girl for the Left, being seen at numerous political rallies and demonstrations, and only moved to Kommune 1, West Germany’s first political commune, with hardcore Marxist values, drugs, and free love, just to be with Langhans. The couple met at the International Song Days music festival in Essen.
Free sex, agit-prop political stunts, drugs and endless political discussion dominated life in Commune 1, where the inmates slept on mattresses on the floor. To rid the commune of bourgeois tendencies, all available cash was shared, the doors were torn off the lavatories and phone calls were piped through a loud speaker. Even inmates’ letters home to their parents were read out in full to the assembled communards.
Uschi was outspoken about sex and drugs, and cavalier about posing node, appearing on the covers of Stern and Playboy, and also posing at age 60, wearing only a pirate hat, in 2007. She recalled her youth in an interview with Bijan Tehrani in 2008:
I just wanted to be free. I didn’t think I wanted to be a rebel; I just wanted to be free and do the things I wanted to do, without anyone hindering me. I wanted to live the experiences in my own skin, it wasn’t enough for me to be told what it was, I had to experience it down to my own bones, to make a judgment for what I liked and didn’t like.
Among her lovers were Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards (who wrote about their relationship affectionately in his 2010 autobiography, Life and is still on friendly terms with her), and Mick Jagger. She met Dieter Bockhorn, a Hamburg club owner and former pimp, in 1973. She and Bockhorn were together for ten years, eventually marrying in India and travelling all over the world in a customized bus. After Bockhorn’s sudden death Uschi moved to the U.S. A film based on her autobiography, Eight Miles High, was released in 2007.
Uschi now lives quietly in Topanga Canyon near Los Angeles, where she works as a jewelry designer.
Uschi in the film Red Sun (Rote Sonne), 1969, below:
