“I know a lamb that’s a fucking asshole. Could I eat that lamb?”
Morrissey sits for a rudely/hilariously probing interview with the “Ringleader of the Tormentors” on The Colbert Report. Topics: Royalty (both British and American), the Royal wedding and vegetarianism
Actresses today don’t have half as much fun as we did, Dame Sybil Thorndike tells her interviewer in this short news report from 1969.
Dame Sybil was starring in There Was An Old Woman at the Thorndike Theater in Leatherhead, sixty-five years after she had first appeared as the Green Fairy in a production in Cambridge of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The reason Dame Sybil thought younger actresses were missing out on fun was because of television.
‘They have do television all the time, which is such a bore after the theater. Excuse me, but it is. After theater, to do television, which is that size compared to life. It’s tiny, much smaller than life. The theater’s bigger than life.’
Dame Sybil was a socialist, and an active member of the Labour Party. During the Second World War she was a pacifist, and raised money for the Peace Pledge Union by giving theatrical readings across the UK. Together with her husband, the actor Lewis Casson, she brought Shakespeare to workers’ groups and factories. George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan for her, and her performance in the title role is still considered the best. Thorndike also appeared in Major Barbara, MacBeth, Uncla Vanya and the revival of Arsenic and Old Lace. She also famously worked with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson at the Old Vic.
With thanks to Nellym.
Proud papa Frank, along with offspring Moon Unit and Dweezil on the CBS News Nightwatch program in October of 1983. Topics include pumpkins, why Zappa loved Halloween and how they’re a normal family (Moon: “We watch a lot of TV… and everything.”).
And then the conversation turns to “swearing”—a topic that seldom seems to come up anymore in a post cable TV world—and how “Valley Girl” was misunderstood by teenage girls who actually aspired to be “Valley girls” themselves. (Frank: “Ignorance is its own reward!”)
The entire Frank Zappa catalog is getting sonically refurbished and remastered by the Universal Music Group. Everything from 1966’s Freak Out
This is a delightful little interview with Terry-Thomas, that original screen cad, the gap-toothed bounder, the celluloid Dick Dastardly, who comes across as self-effacing, modest, and really rather sweet. Thomas was a hard-working comic actor, a very funny man, and spell-binding raconteur, who had a taste for the good things in life. However, his years of great success were cut short by Parkinson’s Disease, which cruelly robbed him of everything and left him “a crippled, crushed shadow.”
Thomas had already been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease when he gave this interview to Sue Lawley in 1973. He kept his illness a secret, until a year before his death, when a benefit concert was organized for him. Most touchingly, when Lawley asked whether he is rich, Thomas replied:
“I should say that I really am, because I’ve got all I want…I have a wife, two children - a boy of 9, a boy of 5. A jolly nice house in Ibiza, and a delightful little cottage here in London. I don’t want anymore. (pause) I’m sure I do, but I can’t think what it is at the present moment.”
The film clip is Vault of Horror, a rather good compendium horror film with 5 different tales of terror. Thomas starred as the obsessively neat Arthur Critchit, who marries the laid-back Eleanor, played by the wonderful Glynis Johns, to disastrous results.
Bonus - ‘Vault of Horror’, after the jump…
Since Mitt Romney’s predictable pathetic pandering to Fox News-watching idiots about doing away with PBS in the presidential debate last week, an extraordinary clip of Fred Rogers passionately defending the mission of PBS before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications in 1969 has gone viral. Rogers was there hoping to protect Public Broadcasting from draconian spending cuts proposed by Richard Nixon.
From the reaction he got, I think he succeeded in his mission.
I first saw Kim Bartley and Donnacha Ó Briain’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised about six years back, the day after a very late night, “heroically” hauling myself out of bed and dragging myself up the road to the local cinema before sinking deep into a generously cushioned chair for the afternoon screening. If my viewing neighbors were delighted to be watching a film alongside what must have smelled something like a six-foot tall bottle of booze, their joy can only have redoubled when – approximately thirty-five seconds into the screening – this rancid alcohol-human hybrid (talking about myself, here) burst into tequila tinged sobs that rang out for the entire film…
Transpires, of course, that my extravagant and half-cut sentimentality was in aid of one of the most controversial documentaries of all time, one that has since even inspired a dedicated effort at debunkery, X-Ray of a Lie, which takes the unmistakable partiality of the filmmakers to task and accuses them of all sorts of questionable editing and bias.
What seems ultimately incontestable, however, is that the film captures – and from the eye of the storm – the attempted military overthrow of a democratically elected government, and its reversal by a popular uprising. And it is this – a familiar story with a less-familiar ending – that gives The Revolution Will Not Be Televised its awesome emotional pull, late night or not.
Whatever can be said against him, give me Hugo Chavez’s backslapping humanity (he appears to cuddle about a third of Venezuela in the course of this documentary alone) over the baby-kissing misanthropy of our own political class any day. Congratulations to him on winning another six year term. I hope he survives it.
Attention all you groovy little fuckers lucky enough to live in the city of Los Angeles… (I just love saying that).
This Friday night, as part of the First Friday Film series at The Dilettante, downtown in Little Tokyo’s warehouse district, I will be presenting “The Monkey Dust Tasting Party,” a screening/party with the evening’s centerpiece being an approximately 75-minute-long highlight reel that I put together (with editor Alex Nicolaou) from nine hours of the demented, outrageous and utterly brilliant BBC Three animated omnibus, Monkey Dust.
Think MTV’s old Liquid Television series or Adult Swim’s edgy cartoon fare, but kicked up a few notches and ultra BLEAK. The Observer called Monkey Dust “the most subversive show on television. The topical animated series is dark and unafraid to tackle taboo subjects such as paedophilia, taking us to Cruel Britannia, a creepy place where the public are hoodwinked by arrogant politicians and celebrities.” Monkey Dust also features n’er do well jihadis, chat-room perverts, kidnappers, drug addicts, sleazy sex, Nazi grandfathers and murder. The soundtrack includes music by Goldfrapp, Boards of Canada, Pulp, Black Box Recorder and Eels.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that the majority of Americans have never been exposed to Harry Thompson and Shaun Pye’s animated TV masterpiece, which is why I am so excited to get to present it on Friday night. In the past, the guest curators at the First Friday Film series have pulled out gems like Belladonna of Sadness and The Apple, but I don’t think anyone is going to be let down by the mind-blowing mayhem that is Monkey Dust. The series originally aired in Britain starting in 2003. Three series of six half-hour episodes were made before the tragic death of series co-creator Thompson from lung cancer in 2005. Only series one was ever released on DVD, although the other two have long been traded on torrent sites.
Now here’s the thing: the Monkey Dust screening will actually start at 9:30, but I strongly recommend getting there early (doors will open at 8:30) because of a “special surprise” (call it “entertainment insurance”) that will await early arrivals. You can chose to ignore my advice and arrive just before the show starts, but you’ll regret it, trust me, when you realize what you have missed…
The Diletantte, 120 North Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles CA 90012
The inimitable Bernard Falk’s quirky tale of a lost Beatles’ tape, and the men who hoped to make some money from its discovery.
The tape was recorded by Beat musician Teddy Taylor in Hamburg, on Christmas Eve, 1962. Taylor was the lead singer with Kingsize Taylor and The Dominoes, one of the dozens of Merseyside bands formed in the late 1950s, that hoped to match The Beatles’ 60’s success. Kingsize sold one million records on the continent, but had lacked any success back home. This sadly led to the band splitting-up in 1964. Taylor went onto the ordinary life as a butcher in Southport, where Falk interviewed him about the mysterious discovery of a “lost Beatles’ tape”.
Falk died in 1990, and is sadly now remembered for his hosting the ill-conceived late-night, interview series, Sin on Saturday, which was famously pulled after only 3 episodes. Clips from Sin on Saturday regularly make top 10 worst program lists, mainly for the legendary appearance of a drunk Oliver Reed, which is a shame, as Falk was a talented journalist, who made quirky, intelligent, entertaining and memorable TV reports. A hint of Falk’s skill can be seen here, when he catches up with likely lads, Teddy Taylor and The Beatles first manager Allan Williams - who famously gave the band away to Brian Epstein. Both are memorable characters and the footage of seventies disco dancing is fabulous.
First broadcast on BBC’s Nationwide, September 17th, 1973.
With thanks to Nellym
When you work on a blog, you have to deal with the occupational hazard of Internet trolls on a daily, even hourly, basis. Being told how fat, old, ugly, ignorant, that you’re “on Obama’s payroll” and stupid shit like that throughout the day gets old really fast. Moderating the Disqus thread in the morning means you take your coffee with a nice slice of invective, even for the most innocuous things (like the idiot I banned who reacted to me posting a Neil Sedaka video—Neil fucking Sedaka!—as if I was the biggest fool on the planet, that my shitty taste in music had made me the goat boy laughingstock of the entire Internet, etc., etc. Why all the hate for Neil Sedaka, buddy? Forget your meds that day?).
In any case, this morning, I happened upon an especially inane string of LOL moments courtesy of a YouTube comment thread supposedly about the nearly forgotten early 70s British prog band Atomic Rooster (former members of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown).
What do any of these comments have to do Atomic Rooster? Nothing, not a blessed thing:
These comments reminded me of Brit wit Adam Buxton’s recent series on Sky HD in the UK, Adam Buxton’s Bug. Bug is ostensibly a show about music videos, but the music videos themselves are really just an excuse to give Buxton a reason to do his hilariously droll comic readings of YouTube comment threads. Here he is reading the thread for Die Antwoord’s “Enter the Ninja” video:
After the jump, the Atomic Rooster clip for “Devil’s Answer” that begat all this silliness…
Colbert on the “Thrilla Between Chocolate and Vanilla”:
“On day one, our new president must be able to face Iran’s leader and ask him if the place where he bought that shirt also has a men’s department.”