I’ve just been discovering all of these gloriously rough old 45s by mysterious Jamaican singer Nora Dean. I just love the production on these sides . Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be a higher than average amount of really eccentric, even psychedelic production tricks on these songs, not to mention the mostly sexual lyrical subject matter. I could play these all day ! To that end here’s a whole bunch of them lined up and ready to lively up your day and/or warm up your night.
Vice online has a terrific piece on ‘Redsploitation’ movies.
Somewhere in the grey area between the noble savage and the savage-savage lies the Redsploitation film. These gems of schlock cinema feature Natives getting off their knees and kicking white ass all over the West.
For the whole scoop on really pissed off Indians in the movies check out the Vice website.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for this November release. Burlesque looks like a delirious mashup of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, Flash Dance, Coyote Ugly and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. Who could ask for anything more?
In what is sure to be a doublewide’s worth of celluloid delight, Cher, her face in the last stages of rigor mortis, plays an aging exotic dancer who owns a down-on-its luck joint called The Burlesque Lounge. Into her life walks bright-eyed, Ali, a small-town gal from Iowa with big dreams and a set of thighs that could crack open coconuts. Hired as a waitress, Ali quickly works her way up to the stage, knocks the socks off everyone with her funky moves and soulful warbling, and becomes the star attraction at the lounge, the diva of the dive. Sounds great, right? And to add just the right amount of campy sweetness to the whole mix, Christina Aguilera plays Ali. Man, I’m choking up Jujubes just thinkin’ about it.
As added insurance that this glitzy, camp classic in the making, has street cred, Burlesque is directed by a former stunt boy from 80’s breakdance classic Beat Street, Steve Antin.
Oh, shit, I’m frothing at the mouth. I need a moist towelette. Quick.
Wow !, Much thanks to DM reader Ryan who in his comment on Marc’s Beefheart post yesterday hepped me to this book: Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic by the Magic Band’s long suffering drummer, John “Drumbo” French. My copy is flying toward me in the mail as I type but I already know to expect tales of tyrannical cruelty (bunch of dudes living in a run down house in Woodland Hills, practicing 12 hours a day, eating only a handful of soybeans per day) and sublime inspiration. In anticipation, here’s a miraculous clip of the Lick My Decals Off,Baby era Magic Band (including Drumbo) playing a suite of tunes live on Detroit TV in 1971.
In the mid-1980s Grace Jones’s body became the flesh canvas upon which Keith Haring created some of his most striking images. In the process, Haring contributed to Jones’s reputation as an innovator of cutting edge style and fashion. She wore Haring’s body paint in the video for her song I’m Not Perfect and in live performance at New York City’s Paradise Garage.
Body painting was a natural extension of the ephemeral nature of Haring’s art. Like subway graffiti and street art, it isn’t intended to last.
I remember the days before Haring became famous, when his “Radiant Baby” graffiti was as ubiquitous on the streets of New York as the smell of urine and the sound of ghetto blasters. For awhile, Haring was New York.
In the above photo we see Haring preparing Jones for her role in the 1986 movie Vamp, in which she portrays Katrina the Queen of The Vampires.
The music in this clip from Vamp is by Jonathan Elias who produced Jones’s Bulletproof Heart album.
Mark Hartley—the man who brought you Not Quite Hollywood, the documentary on ‘70s and ‘80s Australian action, suspense and horror b-movies—is back to lay the same treatment on the Philippines. Machete Maidens Unleashed shows how that country became the shooting locale for tons of American-funded monster movies, jungle prison movies, blaxploitation and kung fu hybrids—along with better known shoots like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which apparently left the land strewn with sets that got repeatedly reused.
Adding to the genre-crazy atmosphere was Prime Minister Ferdinand Marcos’s harsh and corrupt Bagong Lipunan (“New Society”) program of martial law, during which he and his family ruled with the kind of impunity that eventually led to his downfall in the mid-‘80s.
Check the trailer—it’s quite wild—and look for this ‘un soon at yr local movie establishment.
“…Disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities including graphic nudity.” These are the elements cited by the Motion Picture Association of America in giving an R-rating to Israeli director Yael Hersonski’s intense-looking documentary, A Film Unfinished, which opens widely this month.
Produced and distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories, A Film Unfinished centers around the making of the unearthed last reel of Ghetto, a Nazi propaganda film shot in the Warsaw Ghetto and proffered as a document of life there. The reel contains multiple takes of staged, exoticized footage of Jewish life, including a fictionalized depiction of the contrast between “rich” and poor ghetto dwellers.
The R-rating ensures that the film can’t be shown in public school classrooms, a situation ludicrous enough to be called out by Oscilloscope owner and Beastie Boy Adam Yauch a.k.a. MCA. From what I understand, the “graphic nudity” that the MPAA cites refers to female ghetto dwellers entering a mikvah, or Jewish ritual bath. As for the atrocities, well, kids seem to be exposed to plenty of gratuitous and stupid violence on TV, movies and video games. Maybe it would be worth whatever trauma they may go through watching and discussing A Film Unfinished to not only viscerally understand genocide, but also get a classic lesson in media manipulation.
Nice work, MPAA.
Oscilloscope Laboratories will also release the Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl and the doc William S. Burroughs: A Man Within this fall.
Tying together a couple of DM memes, here is notorious chanteuse Claudine Longet doing an interesting thing by combining two John Lennon tunes to a predictably charming outcome. Rather chilling lyrically considering her conviction a few years later for misdemeanor negligent homicide. She didn’t mean to hurt you!