A lot of work and play went into this one folks. Hope you dig it.
01. Bostich - Yello
02. Love Song - The Cure
03. Don’t Stop The Rock - Freestyle Project
04. Planet Rock - Afrika Bambaata and Soulsonic Force
05. Don’t Go - yazoo
06. When I Hear Music - Debbie Deb
07. Leggo The Herbman Dub - Small Axe vs. Terminal Head
08. O Darcy - Gaiola Das Popozudas
09. The Mexican - Jelly Bean Benitez
10. Love Bump - The Lone Ranger
11. Cookie Jar - Clarence “Scuzzy” Hoskins
12. I’m Your Puppet - Jimmy London
13. Bag A Wire - King Tubby
14. I Can’t Stand The Rain - Eruption
15. Dirty Talk - Klein and MBO
16. Hurricane - DJ Nasty
This is a guest post by Nick Abrahams, co-director of the new documentary film, The Bruce Lacey Experience:
Bruce Lacey is the invisible man of British art. “Many people who know me in one of my activities think there are in fact several different people called Bruce Lacey” he wrote in 1975. Lacey’s constantly inquiring mind has meant that he has evolved too quickly to maintain a level of success, constantly moving from one form of expression to another, and leaving a trail of confusion in his wake. If you are British, and of a certain age, you probably remember him from his appearances on kids TV shows like Blue Peter. He made cameos in the Beatles’ movie Help and swinging London feature films including Smashing Time and The Knack…and How to Get It. Bruce and The Alberts, the band he regularly shared an anarchic stage with, performed at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club, helping kickstart the nascent satire boom in Britain. It was there that Bruce encountered comedian Lenny Bruce, who consequently offered to manage them. Unfortunately by the time Bruce and the band had crossed to the USA by boat (performing on board, no doubt to the bemusement of their fellow passengers), their American mentor was under arrest, and he was unable to follow through on his offer. Safely back in the UK, Bruce went on to record a live album with George Martin at Abbey Road (By Jingo, It’s British Rubbish), but its cover of a torn and defaced Union Jack was rejected by EMI and the record was never released. This was in 1963…. The Alberts were the first performers on BBC2 when it was launched in 1964, and were offered a showcase TV series which failed to materialize when the producers discovered Bruce’s aversion to rehearsals.
Bruce made props for many different television shows, including gadgets for Michael Bentine’s Potty Time. Within his own work these gadgets evolved into full scale robots and automatons. He claims he hated working with actors so much that he felt compelled to invent robots to take their place, the most famous of which was ROSA BOSOM, who in 1985 won Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World pagent- a subversive counter culture institution in England, beating style icon Leigh Bowery and future potter Grayson Perry to the prize. Fairport Convention wrote a song, “Mr Lacey,” about him, and he has brought his robots on stage with them.
Although Bruce’s work has influenced artists as disperate as David Bowie and Genesis P. Orridge, success on a wider commercial scale has eluded him. Some of this seems to be down to the way in which Bruce has had an amazing ability to grasp failure from the jaws of victory. He is very vocal about embracing mistakes, accidents and deliberately sabotaging his own work. It is not enough to do a magic trick, it must be a magic trick that goes wrong. I sat through an amazing magic lantern show that Bruce gave in his local village of Wymondham last Christmas. Slides were upside down, often in the wrong order…total chaos! Bruce was obviously loving it, and the audience tittered nervously, not quite sure if it was funny or not, or how intentional any of this was. It seems to be what keeps him interested, these moments of total spontaneity. Is it performance art? Music hall gone awry? Or is he just, as he sometimes claims, simply “playing silly buggers”?
Over the last three years Jeremy Deller and myself have spent hours in the company of Bruce, who, at the age of 85 is very much still an active artist. Very little of the above information made it into our film. Hopefully you get a taste of what Bruce is like today, as he let us document some of his private rituals and public performance art pieces. I hope that what comes across in our film The Bruce Lacey Experience is a man who is unable to stop creating, someone constantly following his dreams, worlds away from the careerism of the Tracey Emins and Damien Hirsts of this world. The film is an attempt to get inside Bruce Lacey’s head - a document of England’s greatest surviving bohemian in his own words. There are no talking heads, no academics ‘explaining’ Lacey’s work, no celebrity endorsements, just a man at work, and a partial tour through the back catalog of his life so far. One other stray voice, from an interview with his son Keith, enters into the film, but otherwise it’s just a strong dose of extremely concentrated Bruce Lacey.
It seems perhaps that the world has come around to Bruce again at last, with a major retrospective exhibition at London’s Camden’s Art Centre opening on July 7th, and for those unable to get to London, the British Film Insitute are releasing a double DVD of some of film works on July 23rd, mainly by Bruce but also including films that Bruce appeared in (including rareities by Harrison Marks, better known for his nudie cutie reels, and films by Beatle collaborator Dick Lester and cult animator Bob Godfrey), as well as The Bruce Lacey Experience. We are hoping to screen the film in the USA later in the year.
Below, the trailer for Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams’ The Bruce Lacey Experience:
After the jump, the trailer for BFI’s The Lacey Rituals DVD release…
K-11 is a new film directed by Jules (mother of Kristen) Stewart, about a prison complex in LA for homosexuals and transgender inmates. It looks brutal, exploitative, and I can’t wait to see it.
The trailer is pretty self-explanatory: a record producer ends up in jail, charged with killing a cop, after he blacks out. The prison is the titular K-11, and there he must navigate a murky world of mixed genders and shifting loyalties in order to survive. (Hmm, maybe I should go into b-movie copy writing?)
Yeah, it sounds corny, but it looks pretty well shot and the cast is decent (though some actual trans actors wouldn’t have gone amiss, and I would love to have seen Kristen Stewart in this, as was originally cast - perhaps she was slated to play Mousey, the prison’s tough bitch queen?) But you know what really surprises me about this? For a subject that looms so large in the American subconscious, it’s surprising that there haven’t been more films about homosexuality in jail.
Even HBO’s mighty Oz was disappointing in that respect (if pretty much perfect in any other.) Sure, two of the main male characters fell in love (or did they?) but the show failed to explore the prison’s gay subculture, in the way it did the Nazis, Nation of Islam, Latinos, etc. Gay characters were only shown flitting away campy in the background, or as facilitators for other characters’ story lines.
K-11 is hardly going to be perfect, but for films about gay life behind bars, it’s a start:
Pardon my ignorance, but are US prisons really segregated by sexual orientation and transgender identity?
German TV program Durch die Nacht mit (into the night with) puts together a couple of artists/celebrities and lets the cameras roll as they hang out together and shoot the shit. It’s all rather loosey goosey.
In this show, Asia Argento visits Joe Coleman’s home in New York City and together they take a trip to Coney Island, visit magician David Blaine and eat at Keen’s Steakhouse. The show includes a clip of Coleman in Scarlet Diva which starred and was directed by Argento.
This episode was directed by Berlin’s infamous Jörg Buttgereit, known for his early experimental films and splatter fests like Necromantik. Argento, Coleman and Buttgereit constitute a triad of some the art world’s most fascinating provocateurs.
Andy Griffith will mostly be remembered for his weekly TV series where many of us who were growing up in the 1960s found refuge from the harsh realities of a decade in turmoil. Mayberry was a safe haven from the Vietnam war footage we watched on the Six O’Clock News and the yammering of parents whose tongues were attracting lies like flypaper, the result of licking too many S&H Green Stamps and the asshole of unquestioned authority.
Griffith’s show was hopelessly square but it served its function as a kind of cathode-ray Valium, a chill-out tent for the young and restless, a detour into normalcy for budding freaks suffering from the weight of our personal suburban apocalypse. We cooled our heels in Mayberry until we could get the fuck out of there, leaving the hopelessly clueless Opie, hapless Barney Fife and brain-addled Floyd The Barber eating our hippie dust. We’d stay in touch with Aunt Bee for dope money.
Yes, Andy was the dad we all wanted, a hayseed Buddhist with a southern drawl, dressed in Peace Officer drag, tending a drunk tank that had the serene vibe of a Zen monastery. But there was another side of Andy Griffith, the actor, that presented itself in the darkly prophetic character of Lonesome Rhodes (dig that Kerouacian name) in Elia Kazan’s A Face In The Crowd. Rhodes was a bum and a loser hurled into the role of evangelical huckster and pop star - a deviant Johnny Cash hopped up on some kind of fucked-up moonshine pumped out of backwoods stills, yielding a devil’s brew of fallacious firewater, jugged and labelled with the mugs of L. Ron Hubbard, Mitt Romney and Scott Walker.
Kazan’s film foresees a future, much like the one we have today, in which heroes are villains and shit-kicking rabble-rousers like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh rule the media roost as a clueless populace feeds at the trough of religion, political propaganda and celebrity worship with the blind allegiance of dumbstruck teenage girls at a Justin Bieber concert.
Here are two clips from A Face In The Crowd in which we encounter the shadow side of the patriarch of Mayberry.
In the future every home will come equipped with its own conga drummer.
The Year 1999 A.D. made in 1967 by the Philco-Ford company imagines what the world of the future had in store for Earthlings. It got quite a bit right, including flat screen computer monitors, microwave ovens and buying stuff Online (“fingertip shopping”). It also predicted a future in which Wink Martindale would be an astrophysicist instead of a game show host.
The first microwave ovens (the Radarange) were introduced to the home market the year The Year 1999 A.D. was made. But they were very expensive - about $3500 in today’s dollars. So the idea of your average home having one required some predictive vision in 1967.
Here’s something from the Dangerous Minds’ archives. The original article contained a link to Charlie Is My Darling in its entirety. Unfortunately, it was removed from the web. I did manage to find this compilation of clips featuring Brian Jones excerpted from the movie. I thought you might appreciate them on the anniversary of his untimely death.
Produced by the The Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham and directed by Peter Whitehead Charlie Is My Darling documents the band’s 1965 two city tour of Ireland. A somewhat haphazard affair, the film is none-the-less a fascinating glimpse into the life of The Stones on the road, backstage, performing and getting drunk. It also includes some footage of fans rioting at London’s Royal Albert Hall which was later inserted at Oldham’s behest to make the movie more commercial.
Whitehead directed one of the seminal films about the swinging sixties, Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London, and the exhilarating documentary of the infamous beat poet gathering at Royal Albert Hall, Wholly Communion. After seeing Wholly Communion, Oldham picked Whitehead to direct a freewheeling film that would compete with the success of the Beatle movies. The result was something a bit darker and rougher than anything produced by the Beatles at the time.
Charlie Is My Darling was given its premiere at the Mannheim Film Festival in 1966 when Joseph von Sternberg was Director of the Festival. He said - “When all the other films at this festival are long forgotten, this film will still be watched - as a unique document of its times.”
Filmed over three days in Dublin and Belfast, the film captures the boys in all their pristine and unspoilt pagan energy and satanic glory - soon after the release of their first big single in America - the record which established them there - “I can’t get no satisfaction.”
The passionate stage performances are finally wrecked by fans getting on the stage - the boys have to flee for their lives over railway lines when they arrive in Belfast. Scenes in the dressing room are highlighted by Keith playing acoustic Blues guitar - showing what a master he was on the guitar, and how serious he had always been about Blues music. Interviews with Charlie and Bill are very revealing - but most poignant of all is the interview with Brian Jones in which he discusses his threatened future as a Rolling Stone. Speaking only of ‘time’ and ‘insecurity of his future as a Rolling Stone’, he seemed already unconsciously aware of his fate. Did he not deliberately bring it upon himself?
The film ends with the legendary scenes of Keith and Mick drunk in the hotel ballroom - Keith playing the piano (extremely well!) and Mick doing an accurate and subversive impersonation of Elvis.”
The rights to Charlie Is My Darling and its soundtrack became entangled in legal problems when Allen Klein took over management of The Stones. Klein had a rep for being difficult (which is putting it kindly) when it came to controlling the band’s assets. So the original cut of the film was never released on video. A DVD version was released in England with a soundtrack of generic instrumental pop as background music and is basically unwatchable.
I’m a huge fan of Bollywood and Om Shanti Om is one of my favorites. It stars mega-star Shah Rukh Khan and is written and directed by famed Bollywood choreographer Farah Khan.
Like many Indian films, Om Shanti Om draws from and pays homage to Hollywood. In this clip choreographed to the song “Dhoom Taana” we see something a little rarer, not only is Hollywood celebrated but so is old Bollywood. So not only do we see scenes inspired by Vincente Minnelli’s The Pirate and the candy-colored Bye Bye Birdie, there is the wonderful recreation of elements from Bollywood classic Gumnaam and at one point legendary Indian actor Sunil Dutt is digitally inserted into the film. Fans of Om Shanti Om have recognized dozens upon dozens of references to old school Bollywood in the movie. My knowledge of Indian cinema is pretty good for a westerner, but in an industry that produces thousands of films a year, there’s no way I can possibly identify all the movies that Om Shanti Om pays tribute to.
Click on the 720p option to enjoy the video in all of its visual glory.
Jim Morrison died 41 years ago. today. Here’s a fine documentary on The Doors to commemorate this sad day in rock history.
People fear death even more than pain. It’s strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.” Jim Morrison
Tom DiCillo’s When You’re Strange narrated by Johnny Depp.
Probably the single best trailer for a grindhouse biker nunsploitation flick that I’ve ever seen.
Here’s what IMDB has to say about The Jesus Trip:
When the police discover that their motorcycles are concealing heroin, Waco (Robert Porter) and his motorcycle gang hides out in a desert convent. A highway patrolman (Billy ‘Green’ Bush) hunts down the gang after they kidnap a nun, Sister Anna (Tippy Walker) and flee the convent. Soon Waco and the young nun fall in love and she is forced to decide whether or not to leave the church for him.
The alternate title was Under Hot Leather! The Jesus and Mary Chain used some images from the film in their “Reverence” music video.
