It’s been, what, two-three days since my last Bowie-related post? Well fear not, fans of the Dame, here’s another… 

The gorgeous Ava Cherry was David Bowie’s mistress and lover during the mid-70s. She was one of his back-up singers, the Astronettes, along with the late Luther Vandross.  In the clip below, you can see her steal the show when Bowie was performing “Footstompin’” (which later got reworked into “Fame” with John Lennon) on the Dick Cavett show in 1974. (Is it possible to be any hotter than this woman???) This is pretty much the moment where the Diamond Dogs tour gave way to his Young Americans phase:
 

 
In late 1973, an Ava Cherry album was planned and partially recorded with Bowie producing, but due to lawsuits with his-then manager Tony DeFries, the album was shelved for 22 years. The tapes that existed had some Bowie originals along with some oddly chosen covers from the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and Bruce Springsteen. What appears to be a semi-official release came out in 1996 as People From Bad Homes. The material was released again in 2009 as The Astronette Sessions.

In truth, it’s not that great. I wish I could tell you it was some undiscovered gem of what Bowie called “plastic soul” but it’s, at best, a curiosity for intense Bowie freaks. The most memorable track is probably “I Am A Laser” which was later re-worked into “Scream Like A Baby” on Bowie’s Scary Monsters album in 1980. In this rehearsal recording, you can hear Bowie in the background leading the band and calling chord changes. Note the rap and the line about her “golden showers.” (I wonder if “Golden Years” has a meaning that has hitherto escaped us?)

Listen to “I Am A Laser” after the jump…

 
Dan Savage is the fucking man.

In the wake of the suicide of bullied Greensburg, IN teen Billy Lucas—and the subsequent shameful defacement of his memorial Facebook page—gay media activist Savage and his husband Terry have launched a YouTube channel project called It Gets Better.

The idea is for adult LGBT community members to share stories on video about how much better life gets if you simply survive into adulthood. Savage’s announcement of the channel’s launch (scroll down) says it all:

We don’t dwell too much on the past. Instead, we talk mostly about all the meaningful things in our lives now—our families, our friends (gay and straight), the places we’ve gone and things we’ve experienced—that we would’ve missed out on if we’d killed ourselves then.

 
And here’s how: just create your video, post it to YouTube, and send the URL to mail (at) savagelove.net. Dan and Terry’ll review it and post to their FAVORITES section.

Please spread the word on this. Here’s Savage & Terry talking about their experiences surviving Christian schools and persevering into adulthood and happiness.

 
Dangerous Minds pal Taylor Jessen writes:

Do Blu-Ray players dream?... There are some truly haunting moments in this guy’s film - stick with it. You can bet George Lucas’ student films would have looked exactly like this if he’d had access to MPEG compression. I have no words for it except “fucking awesome”!

 

 
Star Wars, tripped out, glitched out.. this would look great on big outdoor screens: Here’s Mikrosopht’s Freedom to the Galaxy. There are also 27 audio files you can download here.
 

 
Here is a moment of pop culture history from Derek Jarman’s 1976, Latin romp Sebastiane. Blink and you will miss Patricia Quinn, Nell Campbell and Peter Hinwood from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Punk icon Jordan (in stockings and suspenders) as Mammea Morgana, sprawled between Hinwood and the multi-talented artist Duggie Fields.  Also, hovering around in this scene are sculptor, Andrew Logan, dancer and actor, Lindsay Kemp (who taught David Bowie mime), and designer, Christopher Hobbs.

Sebastiane was Jarman’s first film, co-directed with Paul Humfress, and caused considerable outrage with its exquisite scenes of gay love-making, images of an erect penis, and the fact the film’s dialogue was entirely in schoolboy Latin, where the word “Oedipus” was translated as “Motherfucker.”  The music for the film was composed by Brian Eno.
 

 
Public access television is a bottomless pit of undiscovered talent. This Jesus freak duo has tapped into some hidden channel of inspiration that sends them into a suburban version of the high lonesome sound. The Shaggs meet BJ Snowden.

“We’re sorry daddy.”

 
I like how this guy’s friends defend his honor against the pole. Some serious pole rage going on here.

 
I know you’ve all grown tired of the “Trololo” meme, but this version brings some new life to Edward Hill’s interweb sensation. Performed on the Moog Etherwave Pro Theremin by Jairo Moreno.

 
When someone whose opinion you respect—in this case Steve Silberman of Wired News—sends you a link and the note “I promise you, the weirdest story you’ll read today (mine)” you take it seriously in my line of work. In this article for his new Neurotribes blog, Tripping Cyborgs and Organ Farms: The Fictions of Cordwainer Smith, Steve tells the unusual tale of Paul Linebarger, psychological-warfare expert and spy for the U.S. government. Writing under the pen name Cordwainer Smith, Linebarger wrote some unusually prescient science fiction tales that depicted bizarre advances in science and predicting dystopian futures as disturbing as anything in Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre:

After Scanners, Linebarger’s most unnerving creation was “A Planet Named Shayol.” (Sh’eol or שְׁאוֹל — “the pit” or “the abyss” — was the ancient Hebrew name for the land of the dead.) The story is one of the most haunting visions of an utter hell outside of Dante, with plot points anticipating current developments in tissue engineering and the infamous Vacanti earmouse that caused a flap at M.I.T. in 1996.

Published in 1961, it’s even druggier than Scanners, with a hipster nurse who gets her patients stoned on the fictional equivalent of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and a cow-faced organ farmer proffering a synthetic opiate called super-condamine. Linebarger writes about strung-out states of mind so convincingly, it’s clear that his experiences in the hospital as a kid left an indelible impression. One might even say that these experiences — along with his perpetual dislocation as the son of a spy — made the body itself, and all of culture, seem like an elaborate prosthesis imposed on the essential man. Ich bin ein Scanners, waiting for the next cranch.

Read more of Tripping Cyborgs and Organ Farms: The Fictions of Cordwainer Smith (NeuroTribes)
 

 

 
Why is it so damn fun when western rawk is done so wrong? In this case, its Iron Man, or at the least the main riff thereof, as re-imagined by one Soreng Santi. The provenance of the original recording is a mystery. Sounds 70’s to me.

Jaw Dropping doppelganger Sab-Jam from Sukothai psych-rocker Sroeng Santi. Iron Man meets Yama Yama on this original composition by a musical all-rounder who produced a string of Thai hard rockers until his freakish death in 1982.

 
Thanks Tony Coulter !

 
Apparently this stuff really drives the ladies wild:

Unique among all the essences ever devised by man or created by nature, STASH emanates from a plant long recognized for its aphrodisiac qualities. Its romantic bouquet imparts an aura of closeness only dreamed of between man and woman.

Make every moment count. Enjoy the mystery and enchantment captured in the romantic bouquet of STASH… the secret one. A great gift idea for him that will turn you both on!

(via Nerdcore via copyranter)