There’s a short film coming out that stars two legends of Texas punk. David Yow (of Scratch Acid, the Jesus Lizard and lately—have mercy!—Flipper) and Gibby Haynes (of the Butthole Surfers, blessèd be their name) have top billing in this good-looking black-and-white picture. This could be my generation’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and I hope I don’t have to wait too long to see it.

Directed by Peter Bolte, who previously cast Yow in his 2013 feature All Roads Lead, Walden Pink appears to be a tale of existential dread. Here’s the synopsis from the Victoria TX Indie Film Fest, where the movie will premiere on March 20:

Walden Pink sits disheveled on a park bench as the world drifts by him. The rest of his day is met with one unfortunate confrontation after another by the likes of religious proselytizers, process servers, angry bartenders and abrasive barflies. These conversations only distract him from finding a peace and clarity to this repetitive and draining existence. Just as Walden’s day began, his day ends seated on a park bench in a state of bitterness and self-loathing.

In the trailer below, Haynes’ character first tries to rouse Walden (Yow) from his catatonia by singing a visionary interpretation of Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song).” Why does Gibby not have a podcast, a SiriusXM channel, or a sheaf of optical fiber cables wired directly into my brain? And where is David Yow’s Oscar® or Golden Globe®, Hollywood? Just whom exactly is one supposed to blow to get things done during the Kali Yuga?
 

 
We all owe the University of Wollongong a great debt, because they are hosting the only repository on the internet that features every single page of OZ, the influential psychedelic underground newspaper that was published in London between 1967 and 1973 after several years of an Australian version that was equally mind-blowing.

The newspaper featured an impressive roster of contributors, including Germaine Greer, Lillian Roxon, Barney Bubbles, David Widgery, Clive James, Edward de Bono, Richard Meltzer, Clay Wilson, Colin MacInnes, Anthony Haden-Guest, and Raymond Durgnat. Interview subjects included Pete Townshend, Timothy Leary, Jimmy Page, and Andy Warhol.

OZ magazine was edited by Richard Neville. Both in Australia and in the UK, OZ had to weather several serious legal challenges over obscenity. The May 1970 issue was called the “Schoolkids” issue; it featured a filthy comic strip in which Vivian Berger adapted a R. Crumb cartoon to place the beloved Rupert Bear cartoon character in an explicitly sexual situation (PDF link here). They were defended in court by John Mortimer, later the author of the highly successful “Rumpole” series of British legal novels. A few years earlier Mortimer had defended Hubert Selby for the Last Exit in Brooklyn trial, and in 1977 Mortimer also successfully defended the right of the Sex Pistols to use the word “bollocks” in an advertising display. However, Mortimer’s luck with OZ was not quite as good, and Neville, along with editors Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson, were sentenced to up to 15 months imprisonment, although the ruling was later overturned on appeal.
 

Issue No. 28, the “Schoolkids” issue
 
The art director of OZ was Martin Sharp, who was one of the true artistic geniuses of the psychedelic movement. He had been with the publication since its Australian period, and his many meticulously wrought, daring, and colorful covers and internal illustrations guaranteed that OZ would stand out from a visual perspective. Sharp also did the cover art for Cream’s albums Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire, if you’re wondering why his style looks so familiar.

OZ used to do this thing where they would transcribe the lyrics of new songs, so for instance, the September 1968 issue features the lyrics to “Street Fighting Man” and “Jigsaw Puzzle” which were credited as being “from the unreleased album Beggars Banquet.” The album was released in December of the same year.
 

 
Note: The first version of this post neglected to thank the Exile on Moan Street blog for the tip.

 
Photographer Robert Benson takes a us through RealDoll’s factory and gives us a brief glimpse of how these pricey, lifelike sex dolls are manufactured. If you don’t know exactly what RealDoll is—it’s 2016, of course you do—look it up.

“Everyone was super passionate about what they’re doing, and they take the work seriously,” Benson said. “I guess the fascination wears off after a week and it becomes like any other job.”

For a team of nine, it takes over 80 hours to complete one doll. 300 to 400 dolls are produced in a year.

The standard RealDoll comes in 18 female body styles and two male styles with five skin tones and 39 available faces. The standard line also includes transgender bodies with male or female anatomy.

The average price for a RealDoll is around $12,000 depending on your customization requirements and… imagination. (Things like tails and two heads cost extra)

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
During the 1990s and early 2000s Joe Strummer, former lead singer for the Clash, did a radio show for the BBC World Service using the name of the band’s galvanizing third album, London Calling.

Anyone who’s heard the Clash or Strummer’s later work with the Mescaleros won’t be surprised at his tastes as reflected in these shows, a mix of good old-fashioned rock and roll, punk rock, reggae, world music….. Strummer’s expansive, politically engaged, and generous spirit encompassed artists as varied as Bob Dylan, the Ramones, Cornershop, Thu Zahina, Afel Bocoum, Amaswazi Emvelo and Mahlathini, and Los Corraleros de Majagual. 

The first track on the first show (not available here) is, fittingly, Rachid Taha’s cover of “Rock the Casbah.” The first song in these embeds is Trini Lopez’ cover of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which works just as well.
 

 
In this post we’ve embedded six episodes of “London Calling” that were broadcast in 1998 and 2000; the show stretched into 2001 as well (you can hear these episodes plus another handful on iTunes).

You just know that any radio program Strummer would have consented to be involved with is going to be a ray of diverse, exultant sunlight, so dig in and improve your day.
 
Series 1, Episode 1: August 31, 1998

 
5 more delightful programs, after the jump….....
 

 
In October 1999, David Bowie guested on the Channel 4 music show TFI Friday. It was a coup for the programme to hook Bowie in for an interview and two live performances—but probably not too unexpected as Channel 4 owned Friday night British TV during during the eighties, nineties and noughties.

This was the channel that served up such original, controversial and utterly unforgettable music shows as The Tube—the benchmark for this kinda thing with a roster of bands that read like a who’s who of the eighties’ greatest acts; The Word—which often seemed like some mad for it ravers got their paws on some TV cameras for an evening; and The Girlie Show which unfortunately was never quite as outrageous or as good as it thought it was. TFI Friday followed in a similar fashion with a mix of music, interviews, pranks and alike, all expertly managed by host Chris Evans.

All of these shows were broadcast live and were often very chaotic. Understandably therefore, each had its own memorable moments—just the quality of live bands on The Tube is ‘nuff said;  Iggy Pop’s see-thru pants, a pissed-up Oliver Reed or the grungy L7 dropping jeans and enjoying a guitar solo on The Word; and er, well, I can’t honestly think of anything too memorable from The Girlie Show other than it made #80 on Channel 4’s 100 Greatest TV Moments from Hell, which kinda tells you all you need to know…

Anyhow…back to Chris Evans who truly excelled as a host on TFI Friday. He skilfully mixed cheeky banter with a self-deprecating bonhomie. Evans was like a well-trained party host who kept the chat flowing, the music up and the beers nicely chilled. His show featured some of the stand-out live performances of the 1990s—enough to mention Pulp, Suede, Black Grape, Napalm Death, Slipknot, etc. etc… (There’s a lot more to be written about this show and its predecessors, but for now it’s back to David Bowie…)

I watched Bowie’s appearance on TFI Friday as was broadcast and thought (in my best Derek & Clive), “Hello, he’s either jet-lagged or has been dabbling in the sherbets...” Bowie arrived for his interview with Evans in a retina-scalding combination of neon pink shirt and fluorescent yellow T-shirt. From the off, he was buzzing with adrenaline—at least I think that’s what it was—and began telling various stories which by turn were funny, surreal and utterly bizarre. His opener was the “helluva time” he had getting to the studio because of traffic congestion on Hammersmith bridge, before segueing into a long tale about a one-legged man and his donkey from Indonesia and a recent debilitating bout of gastroenteritis after eating “monkey breast and parrot beak.”

More after the jump…

 
This isn’t “dangerous” per se, it’s just a really clever way to use Face Swap Live. That’s why I’m posting it. When it’s Cindy Lauper’s turn, the result is pretty funny.

Of course folks in the YouTube comments are none too pleased with the “vertical video syndrome” going on. Here’s what the uploader had to say:

I recorded this way because I find the face swap app works better with the mask feature vertically rather than landscape. Only reason, no big deal. I have nearly one million views on Facebook with this video so who cares if it vertical.

So there you have it. Who cares if it vertical?

 
via Nerdcore

 
Back in 1992, someone over at the Japanese video game giant Konami decided that the world had waited long enough for a video game version of one of the cheesiest movies ever made, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space.
 

Vampira (played by Finnish-born actress, Maila Nurmi), in a digitized scene from the ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ video game
 

Tor Johnson as seen in the 1992 video game
 
The point-and-click style game was released for Commodore’s Amiga personal computer and the Atari ST in both Europe and the US. Hard-to-find copies of the original game also came with a bonus—a VHS tape of Wood’s film inside. Like the film itself, gameplay was pretty tedious. As the player, you are a private investigator who must travel to locations in and around Los Angeles in search of missing film reels that were stolen by Bela Lugosi’s movie double. To spice things up a little, Konami used digitized footage (pictured above) from Plan 9 From Outer Space in their game design, which was actually pretty slick for the time (believe it or not, kids).
 

Screenshots from the “Plan 9 from Outer Space” video game by Konami, 1992
 
Continues after the jump…

 
If you’re not watching Better Call Saul, then you’ve probably found the number of people posting “#squatcobbler” on their Facebook walls and Twitter feeds for the past couple of days to be a bit confusing.

I’m not giving away anything by posting this bust-a-gut funny clip from the second episode of the 2016 season of the Breaking Bad prequel. This is not a spoiler and involves a minor character who we’re unlikely to see again. It’s also one of the funniest fucking things I have seen in… ages.

The set-up is simple. Even if you’re not watching the show—and you should be—it’s easy to explain:

Jimmy McGill AKA “Saul Goodman” (Bob Odenkirk)  gets a call from “private investigator” Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) asking if he’s still “morally flexible”? Obviously he still is because we then cut to the inside of a police station where Jimmy/Saul is representing Mike’s idiot former client (Mark Proksch), an amateur drug dealer in way over his head in a messy situation who stupidly called the police to report a robbery and then acted all nervous and shifty, arousing their suspicions and potentially compromising Mike. The cops have also found an obvious stash hole in his house and so have called the man in for further questioning.
 

Mark Proksch will probably be remembered for the rest of his career as the “Squat Cobbler.” There are far worse things to be known for, obviously.

When we join the scene, Jimmy has asked his client to give him a moment alone with the detectives. That’s all you really need to know.

If this doesn’t become one of the most famous comedy scenes since something from This is Spinal Tap, I don’t know what ever would… It’s an instant classic.

The scene following this one has another character—Jimmy’s lawyer girlfriend—telling him that if she’d have had a million years to come up with the whopper he laid on the cops—and which they seemed to believe without much trouble—she couldn’t have done it.

To my mind, this scene is almost like one of those things that you couldn’t make up (as Jimmy himself explains, convincingly, to the detectives). My suspicion is that this is based on something that actually happened, a real-life anecdote. It’s got what you might call “the ring of truth” to it—almost too funny to make up, if you take my point.

Watch these three minutes of absolute comic perfection. When the officers turned around to look at the “Cobbler” I lost it. No liquids before hitting “play” or your laptop or keyboard will be a goner.

“Squat cobbler. You know what Squat cobbler is…”

 
Before their American pop chart success in the mid-80s and their subsequent close generational association with the teenage rom coms of John Hughes, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, or OMD, were seen as quite a credible, even “intellectual” musical unit, comparing favorably to other serious English groups of the New Wave and post punk era like Japan, Ultravox, Psychedelic Furs or Soft Cell. But like the Furs, OMD would ultimately heed the siren song of Molly Ringwald and Hollywood soundtrack paychecks and then… well I don’t know—or really care that much either, to be honest—what happens after that. I’m not going to stick up for anything they recorded after Dazzle Ships, no “Tesla Girls” for me, thank you very much… But hey for a while there, I absolutely loved ‘em, I’m not gonna lie. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark used to be a really fucking good band, even if it’s their doofier, wimpier sugar-coated MTV hits that most people, at least in America, remember them by.

OMD’s founders, Andy McCluskey (vocals, bass guitar) and Paul Humphreys (keyboards, vocals) met in grade school in Liverpool in the 1960s and were in and out of various local bands together before forming OMD in 1978. Influenced by Krautrock groups like Neu! and Kraftwerk as well as Brian Eno’s solo albums and Joy Division, they wanted to wed a pure pop sensibility to something edgy, electronic and futuristic. McCluskey later told Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley: “We wanted to be ABBA and Stockhausen. The machinery, bones and humanity were juxtaposed.” Although now viewed, perhaps not unfairly, as having a “totally 80s” cliched synthpop sound, for their early years at least, McCluskey and Humphreys made good on their avant garde meets Top of the Pops goals.
 

 
Those of you reading this who were buying records when OMD first hit the US, probably discovered them, as I did, via a lemon yellow flexi disc that came free with a copy of the Trouser Press, the absolutely essential music magazine of the time for rock snobs. In a pre-Internet era, Trouser Press was—probably even more than college radio, which I personally had no access to—where people found out about groups like Lords of the New Church, REM, Magazine, Split Enz, Wall of Voodoo, Squeeze and so forth. It seems quaint, even ridiculous, to think about it today, but in 1982, I used to stare out the window of my parents’ house willing the mailman to show up with my monthly copy of the Trouser Press. Trouser Press was a very big deal to me. It’s how I would decide what albums to buy: It wasn’t like you could hear something like “New Stone Age” on normal radio stations, you’d have to almost take a leap of faith that a record reviewer knew what they were talking about. Or that you would agree with their verdict. Records were expensive—$5.98—so if you bought a stinker, you were stuck with it. Today when you get a free CD in a magazine, it’s more likely than not that you would probably just toss it out rather than actually play it—even the good ones from MOJO—but in the early 80s, the Trouser Press flexis were where I first heard Japan, John Hiatt, REM, Human Switchboard and a host of other up and coming bands.

Their discordant, existential and angsty song “The New Stone Age,” was the very first flexi sent with the magazine (in issue 69 with Adam Ant on the cover) and was something that really grabbed my teenaged attention. Put yourself in the mind of a music crazy kid slapping this on the turntable who has no idea what to expect and having his mind completely blown to bits, because that’s the way I first experienced this number:
 

 
Plenty more OMD after the jump…

 
Pamela Des Barres was the original rock and roll groupie, a founding member of the GTOs (which, as Stanley Booth wrote, could stand for “Girls Together Outrageously or Orally or anything else starting with O”), and lover to Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, Gram Parsons, Waylon Jennings, and many others.

The woman can obviously spin a tale, what with several books to her name; her 1987 memoir I’m with the Band is essential reading for anyone interested in the sex lives of major 1960s and 1970s rock stars. (Kirkus called it “a classic account of rampant narcissism among guitar egomaniacs,” which seems about right.)

In this amusing short animated by Evan York, Des Barres tells stories of her sexual adventures as a groupie, including encountering a naked Mick Jagger (she was still a virgin at the time), coaxing Waylon Jennings into his long-haired outlaw phase, and watching as Keith Moon perpetrated an epic prank on a major hotel.