The combination of ultra-cheesy blue-screen effects, a motorcycle that looks like it’s made of Styrofoam and garbage can lids, gold lamé jumpsuit and the actors’ goofy reaction shots make this scene from Megaforce a classic of ‘so bad it’s good’ cinema. A cult favorite - Matt Stone and Trey Parker paid homage to Megaforce in Team America: World Police and an episode of South Park - it’s inexplicably never been released on DVD. I’d love to hear director Hal Needham’s commentary.
“Megaforce, a phantom Army of super elite fighting men whose weapons are the most powerful science can devise”
The appropriately goofy theme song was written by Jerrold Immel.
An old pal, the writer Tommy Udo, alerted me to 1970’s Soviet Jazz Funk, which led me to check up on how Jazz developed in the USSR from the 1920s-70s.
Since its beginning in the 1920s, Russian Jazz has been in constant flux between prohibition, censorship and state sponsorship - dependent on who was leader and their domestic, foreign, economic and political policies. Jazz came to Russia via Valentin Parnakh, a musician who caught the jazz bug when he saw the Louis Mitchel Jazz Kings, while in exile in Paris in 1921.
On 1st October, Parnakh returned to Moscow and performed his own October Revolution with his newly formed jazz band, Pervyj v RSFSR Kscentričeskij Orkestr džaz-band Valentina Parnakha. Their first gig was slated, but that didn’t count for much as Parnakh had imported Jazz into Russia at just the right time, as the State’s New Economic Policy (NEP) encouraged “private initiatives into Soviet economic policies,” which meant a sharing of both cultural ideas and finance. This openess led to a Russian Jazz boom through the 1920s, which the government attempted to regulate and “professionalize,” even sending a cultural delegation to America.
This incredibly fluid cultural exchange ceased when Stalin (prior to his radical Five Year Plan) enforced a Proletarian view of the Arts and Culture, that was “anti-modern, anti-Western, anti-jazz and often also anti-classical.” Stalin feared outside influence, in particular music, which he believed could undermine the revolution. For a time, Jazz was tolerated, and became a focus for heated debate; but when Maxim Gorky returned from Fascist Italy, at Stalin’s invitation, the writer penned a controversial essay that “equated jazz with homosexuality, drugs and eroticism,” and the music was slowly forced underground.
Jazz and other forms of popular music became the signature tune for the dissident and liberal intelligentsia. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jazz was making its reappearance, with recordings made in secret, usually at night amongst like-minded musicians, keen to adopt and experiment with other musical forms and influences, especially Funk and Soul from America. Few of these Soviet Jazz-Funk recordings remain from the vast number of recorded, but a selection of great tracks can be found here.
Coppafeel is a website founded by breast cancer survivor Kristen Hallenga.
We are hitting home the importance of boob examination in younger women, to reduce the incidence of late detection or misdiagnosed breast cancer. It’s simple, get to know your boobs; the sooner you do, the sooner you’ll notice any changes. Doing so could save your life; as early detection is the key to successfully beating this disease.
Coppafeel’s breast cancer campaign is naughty, fun and very effective.
Keith Richards’ raunchy and thoroughly entertaining autobiography ‘Life’ is the best rock memoir I’ve read since Dylan’s ‘Chronicles’. Shambling and shameless, ‘Life’ stumbles along like an elegant drunk, feet in the gutter and head in the stars. Lock the doors and hide the children.
I came across this video from 1985 of Keith sitting in with David Johansen (Buster Poindexter) at NYC bar Tramps. For many years Tramps was my second home. Its owner Terry Dunne is a dear friend and former manager of my band The Nails. Back in the 80’s, Tramps was one of the hippest joints in Manhattan and arguably the best blues club in the country. Legends like Big Joe Turner, Lightening Hopkins and Esquerita played its hallowed stage. I played the Joker Poker machine, wired to the gills.
In this truly rare video, Delbert McClinton joins David and Keith. Joe Delia is on keyboards.
The person who uploaded this to Youtube goes by the moniker fxpope. I’m wondering if that’s the same F.X. Pope that directed new wave porn film Nightdreams and The Nails’ first video. Mr. Pope is also known by his birth name Francis Delia, Joe’s brother. Francis, is that you?
Georgia megapastor Jim Swilley has come out as a gay man to help turn the tide against the recent spate of tragic gay teen “bullycides.” What a wonderful and incredible thing for this man to do. Via Queerty:
Swilley, who created the Church In The Now some 25 years ago, is a divorced father of four. But he’s known he’s gay since he was a boy, says the Rockdale County man of the cloth, and even his wife Debye — whom he divorced earlier this year — knew when they got married (!). The couple kept it a secret for more than two decades, but Jim says Debye recently pushed him to share his story.
The pastor made the announcement to his congregation two weeks ago (yes, it takes time for some stories to trickle), with his family in the audience and decided to come out now after witnessing the rash of gay youths killing themselves. One Internet forum poster says that unlike Atlanta’s Long (whom Swilley won’t speak about), Swilley has not used the pulpit to denigrate gays: “For those of you familiar with Church In the Now, while never discussing his own sexuality, you know that Swilley has always preached a message of inclusion, love and abundance for all God’s children. Bishop Swilley has been asked to step down as Bishop, but will remain as Pastor.” (That last part we haven’t confirmed.)
If there’s a mass exodus from his church, Swilley says he wouldn’t be able to survive it, but would certainly pick up and start again. “God has always spoken through me,” he tells his followers, saying the calling has been with him since birth. His parents tell him stories of him preaching as a toddler in diapers; he doesn’t remember that time.
“Those of you who are people of color. How do you like it when a white person says, ‘What is the deal? What are you so unhappy about? You’ve got a black president already, isn’t racism over?’ Doesn’t that make you want to say, ‘Thank you but you really have no idea what you’re talking about.’ … It’s very easy for people who have never experienced something … to have opinions about it.”
Below, video of the recent sermon where Pastor Twilley tells his congregation that he is a gay.
Rob Spence, a Toronto based film-maker lost his eye in a shooting accident when he was a teenager. Nearly twenty years later, Spence has replaced his eye with a miniature camera that records all that he sees.
The protoype eye was named by Time magazine as one of the best inventions of 2009. Spence calls himself Eyeborg and blogs about his experiences.
Spence uses the electronic eye not for sight, but to record and document what he sees.
This brings to mind Bertrand Tavernier‘s superior, 1980 film Death Watch (La Mort en Direct) based on the novel The Unsleeping Eye by David G Compton.
In the film, Harvey Keitel plays Roddy, a man who has a camera implanted in his eye, in order that he may film a documentary about a terminally ill woman, Romy Schneider, who he follows, for a top rated TV show called Death Watch, in her day-to-day existence as she prepares to die.
Shot on location in a grim and foreboding Glasgow, Death Watch has withstood its initial poor reviews to remain a highly relevant and important film for our age. Long before Ob Docs and Reality TV, this darkly moving and disturbing movie, has proved itself far more prescient in its criticism of media intrusion into our lives than most contemporary films.
Death Watch appears now and again on-line, but only a few fleeting shots are available on You Tube. There is, however, a French TV interview with Tavernier, which can be viewed here
Bonus clip of Eyeborg plus pix from ‘Death Watch’ after the jump…
This was posted at the Throbbing Gristle website. TG were always a volatile proposition, but this is still somewhat shocking, and terribly disappointing, news.
In the evening 27th October TG members and their associated managements
received two emails from Genesis P-Orridge stating he was no longer willing to perform in Throbbing Gristle and returned to his home in New York.
Cosey, Sleazy & Chris have concluded that once more, and for the time being, Throbbing Gristle has Ceased to Exist, at least as a live entity.
Therefore, and with deepest apologies, TG must cancel their scheduled performance at Archa Theatre, in Prague, Czech Republic on 30th October.
It being too short notice to offer an alternative set.
In order not to disappoint fans of the old quartet, Cosey, Peter & Chris have offered to perform live under the name X-TG at Arena Del Sole, Bologna, Italy
on 2nd November & at Casa Musica, Porto, Portugal on 5th November.
We hope fans will appreciate and enjoy this new project and the trio is looking forward to performing exciting new and radical electronic musics together.
Below, an interview conducted by Xeni Jardin and myself on Boing Boing Video, shot in April of 2009.
The Finnish artist M. A. Numminen has been a pioneer of avant-garde, underground and electronic music for almost fifty years. He first came to prominence at the Jyväskylä Summer Festival, in 1966, when he performed a series of provocative songs including Nuoren aviomiehen on syytä muistaa (“What a Young Husband Should Remember”), which used lyrics taken directly from guides to newly-married couples and legislative texts concerning the distribution of pornography.
Numminen followed this with his controversial interpretations of Franz Schubert’s lieds, before moving on to writing a series of musical compositions based on the philosophical writings of Wittgenstein. During this time he also devised a singing machine, and became a pioneer of electronic music - something he returned to with his Techno album in the 1990s.
Numminen is currently touring Finland, and to get an idea of his work, here’s his interpretation of Baccara’s No. 1 Euro hit ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’.
With thanks to Paul Darling
More from M. A. Numminen and the original Euro hit by Baccara after the jump…
