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The dream songs of T.V. John
01.27.2011
11:43 am
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When my friend and label-mate Michael Kentoff of the fine D.C. area band, The Caribbean posted some clips of local public-access phenomenon T.V. John Langworthy to his FB wall I wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. I liked that the line between knowingly funny and genuinely disturbed was truly blurry. So I asked Michael to try to provide some regional context and personal testimony about this hitherto unknown (to me and probably anyone else not living in the greater D.C. area) outsider artiste.
 

Well, you asked for it.

To the long-time local, there’s something very suburban DC about TV John Langworthy: proudly small-town yahoo just miles from the power center of the universe. It’s difficult to explain, but there he is: TV John (who is a twin!) flaunting his big-headed goofiness involuntarily and in defiance.  Suburban DC or not, his similarity to other people ends there.  In truth, he’s from a suburban DC on another planet. Television host, songwriter, open mic night organizer, singer, and whatever he does for a living, TV John is both obscure and conspicuous in any place at any time because he is completely and functionally in his own world – and we’re all invited!

Like his legion of fans (the number is anywhere from 17 to 17,000, I’d imagine), I stumbled across the TV John Show, which played to countless carpet-scraping jaws in the early 1990s, on local cable access.  His show immediately followed The Music Shoppe, a survey of local music that was morbidly fascinating on a whole different level.  Over the course of 30 cable minutes, the TV John Show usually featured two here-today-gone-later-today local performers and, the real pay-off, two lip-synced originals by the towering, flailing, smiling, gyrating host himself.  He called them and still calls them “dream songs,” which, he reports, literally wake him up at night and demand to be captured on the nearest magnetic tape tout suite.  Sort of like McCartney with “Yesterday” if McCartney woke up restrained by straps and safety pins to a hospital bed.  Or if he awoke in a ranch-style house in Montgomery County, Maryland.

I taped a few TV John Shows and would subject unprepared friends to the late-80s video graphics, the parade of oddly matched bands, and, most importantly, to TV John himself – the dream songs and, if we were lucky, a solo comedy sketch that could only be funny somewhere deep inside the cedar closet of John’s brain.  Some friendships ended – as if we were laughing at a disturbed asylum escapee, but most people cringed with delight.  I, for one, always figured John was in on the joke.  He both meant it for real and meant it as a gag.  That was his genre (my theory).

Years later, Dave Jones and I went to see him perform with his band at the venerable Galaxy Hut in Arlington.  At first sight, John was just a big, dorky guy in his 50s, smiling, chatting, drinking a beer.  The most conspicuous thing about him was his giant overly-colorful silk shirt that looked like something a clown might pull endlessly from his left sleeve.  Then the music started and TV John emerged – hurling around and singing in poses that almost seemed right out of pro wrestling.  The normal big dork did not appear the rest of the night – TV John held sway.  It was pretty magical.  Definitely entertaining to the extreme.  Dave and I chatted him up and showed him some video Dave shot of his set.  The three of us laughed.  Dave said, “Hilarious, man!”  TV John, enormous face, raised two large craggly eyebrows over a giant, toothy smile and nodded, “Sure is!”  Knew it.

 

 
Many more inscrutable TV John clips after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Brad Laner
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01.27.2011
11:43 am
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Rich Fulcher: Loose in Los Angeles
01.25.2011
04:06 pm
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Rich Fulcher (The Mighty Boosh, Snuff Box) explains the ritualized degradation exercise practiced here in Hollywood known as “pilot season”; Rich also discusses the upcoming Mighty Boosh album recorded in NYC last year and his lead role in the recent Jackal Films short My Old Baby, a “tragic true story of a baby afflicted with a rare degenerative condition, with horrific irreversible symptoms.”


Visit Rich Fulcher’s website here.

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.25.2011
04:06 pm
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Colorspace: Explore the world of ‘mod cinema’
01.24.2011
11:11 am
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The kind folks over at ModCinema recently sent me a fantastic 2-hour compilation culled from the ranks of the many incredible—and long out of print, or never released in versions with English subtitles—films that they carry. It’s titled Colorspace Vol.1 and covers the “mod” cultural territory of 60s/70s film and television. Interspersed with trailers from films like Barbarella, I Love You Alice B. Toklas and dozens more (many that I’d never even heard of before) you’ll find wonderful vintage TV ads and musical performances from Los Bravos(!), Tommy Roe, Brigitte Bardot, Nancy Sinatra and Colorspace Vol. 1 is especially well art-directed. Professional graphic designers and design snobs will love it.

Order your copy of Colorspace Vol. 1 from Mod Cinema.

The below clip, from 1968’s Erotissimo, is a fine exemplar of the ModCinema esthetic:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.24.2011
11:11 am
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‘The Chemical Generation’ - Boy George’s documentary on British Rave Culture
01.22.2011
03:59 pm
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Will George O’Dowd still be Boy George when he hits his half-century later this year? Man George doesn’t have the same hook to it - sounding like something a porn star would use; and we can never think of him as Middle-Aged George, even though that’s closer to the truth. For the wonderfully soulful-voiced O’Dowd has been a fixture of pop culture for thirty years, and he is now as lovable a character as the Queen Mum was to London cab drivers. Add to this his back catalog of hits and a shelf-full of notable tales - from his own fair share of ups and downs as internationally successful pop star, actor, writer, ex-druggie, ex-convict and DJ - and you’ll see why Boy George is a modern pop culture hero.

In 2000, George presented The Chemical Generation a fascinating documentary examining “the Acid House, rave and club culture revolution and also the generations favourite chemical - ecstasy.” This gem was first broadcast in the UK on Channel 4, on the 27 May 2000, and it is:

...the story of British club and drug culture from the early days of acid house. The documentary includes interviews with promoters, bouncers, drug dealers and the clubbers themselves, shot in clubs and bars around London and club footage from across the country. Interviewees include (DJs) Danny Rampling, Judge Jules, Nicky Holloway, Pete Tong, Lisa Loud, Mike Pickering, Dave Haslan, along with Ken Tappenden (former Divisional Commander of Kent Police) and writer (Trainspotting) Irvine Welsh.

The background to rave in the UK goes something like this:

In 1987 four working class males, Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway and Johnny Walker found themselves in clubs across Ibiza, listening to the music which was to make them legends in the dance scene and transform the face of youth subculture in Britain. Not only did they discover the musical genre of Acid House, played by legendary house DJ’s Alredo Fiorillio and Jose Padilla in clubs such as Amnesia and Pacha, they were also crucially introduced to the drug MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy. Johnny Walker describes the experience:
“It was almost like a religious experience; a combination of taking ecstasy and going to a warm, open-air club full of beautiful people - you’re on holiday, you feel great and you’re suddenly being exposed to entirely different music to what you were used to in London. This strange mixture was completely fresh and new to us, and very inspiring”

The Chemical Generation covers their story and more, and giving an excellent history of Rave Culture, its drugs, its stars, and its music.
 

 
Bonus clip, Boy George sings ‘The Crying Game’, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.22.2011
03:59 pm
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Television Under The Swastika: FOX News forerunners in 1935?
01.21.2011
06:32 pm
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Of course Howard Stern got it right when he re-dubbed The History Channel as “The Hitler Channel” back in the early 1990s, but did you know that there actually was Nazis television programing going out three nights a week during the Third Reich? That’s correct, the German television industry was, in many respects, far, far ahead of the medium’s fortunes in either Britain or America. Most people think of television as “starting” in the 1950s, but this is simply not true. Before I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone or Your Show of Shows, there was Deutscher Fernseh-Runfunk (AKA “TV Station Paul Nipkow”), which began broadcasting from Berlin in March of 1935. The story of the little-known history of Nazis television, including some downright bizarre examples of the programming, long thought to be lost, was told in Michael Kloft’s 1999 German documentary, Television Under The Swastika:

Legend has it that the triumphal march of television began in the United States in the ‘fifties. But in reality its origins hark back much further. As early as the ‘thirties, a bitter rivalry raged for the world’s first television broadcast. Nazi Germany wanted to beat the competition from Great Britain and the U.S. - at all costs. Reich Broadcast Director Hadamovsky christened the new-born “Greater German Television” in March 1935. And it was only in September 1944 that the last program flickered across the TV screens. For a long time the belief persisted that only very few Nazi programs had survived, but SPIEGEL TV has now succeeded in tracking down a stock of television films and reports which have remained intact since the end of the Third Reich. These include extensive coverage of the 1936 National Socialist Party Convention in Nuremberg which recalls today’s live broadcasts, and of a 1937 visit Benito Mussolini paid to Berlin. Interviews with high-ranking Nazis such as Albert Speer, Robert Ley and the actor Heinrich George are among the finds, along with numerous special reports (i.e. on the Reich Labor Service), a cooking show and the lottery drawing. Television anchorwomen greet their tiny audiences in specially installed television parlors in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg with “Heil Hitler.” The entertainment programs are particularly curious. Cabaret artists are featured - alongside singers extolling the virtues of the “brown columns of the SA and SS.” This documentary by Michael Kloft will reveal a rare and intriguing view of the Third Reich, one far removed from the propagandistic presentations of Leni Riefenstahl & Co. and the weekly cinema newsreel, yet no less ideologically slanted. This is Nazi Germany expressed in an aesthetic medium that we ourselves have only really known since the ‘fifties.

Check out the hottie/haughty blonde Aryan newsreaders! And don’t you love the way the Nazis elites show the little people how they should think and live their lives!?? Looks like the Nazis beat Rupert Murdoch to the punch on the FOX News formula he and Roger Ailes later perfected….

Originally produced for SPIEGEL TV in Germany, this English version of Television Under the Swastika was aired as part of Channel 4’s Secret History series in 2001.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.21.2011
06:32 pm
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RIP: Don Kirshner has gone to the big rock concert in the sky
01.18.2011
10:18 pm
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Rock impresario, record producer with the Midas touch and the unquestionably the most boring and wooden TV presenter of all time, Don Kirshner, known to millions as the host of late-night 70s TV show, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert has died at the age of 76 of heart failure.

In the 1950s, Don Kirshner was co-owner of Aldon Music, a New York-based music publishing company that employed or had under contract, many of the most important songwriters of the “Brill Building” school, including Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Neil Sedaka, Howard Greenfield and Jack Keller. Throughout his long career Kirshner was most closely associated with Bobby Darin, Neil Diamond, Carole King, Kansas and of course, The Monkees and “The Archies.”

In 1973, he produced and hosted Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, a 90-minute syndicated show that featured bands that you never would have seen on American television otherwise. On Rock Concert, America first saw acts like Sparks, Queen, Marc Bolan and T-Rex, Kiss, Cheap Trick, The New York Dolls and many, many, many others. It ran until 1981. Kirshner’s notoriously uncharismatic stage presence was mercilessly lampooned on Saturday Night Live by Paul Shaffer.

Below, the Ramones on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert in 1977. Where ELSE would you have seen this on American TV at the time?
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.18.2011
10:18 pm
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John Wayne Gacy has nothin’ on Mr. Rogers
01.18.2011
02:02 pm
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I’m pretty sure most people have seen this incredibly creepy John Wayne Gacy-esque Mr. Rogers clip before. However, I had no idea how many “evil’ Mr. Rogers videos existed on YouTube! If you’re curious to see more (sure you are), I’ve compiled a few for your viewing pleasure below:

Mr. Rogers is an Evil Man
Mr. Rogers: Private swimming lessons with an underage minor
Slug: Crawl (aka Here and Now)
Scary Mister Rogers
Mr. Rogers: Hugs From Hell
Mr. Rogers’ Satanic Neighborhood
Mr. Rogers LOL
Howard Stern on Mr. Rogers Quotes

(via Certified Bullshit Technician )

Posted by Tara McGinley
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01.18.2011
02:02 pm
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Surfer Guru: The Teachings of the Popcorn Way
01.16.2011
10:10 pm
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Is this Jeff Spicoli all grown up and born again?

I found this uncredited video clip from a compilation of public access weirdness. Anybody know who surfer guru is? And where can I find more of his teachings?
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.16.2011
10:10 pm
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Classic documentary on William Burroughs
01.15.2011
02:01 pm
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Last year, Dangerous MInd writer, Bradley Novicoff posted a link to this excellent BBC documentary on William S. Burroughs. At the time it wasn’t possible to embed Arena: Burroughs onto our site, but now it is.

Burroughs was originally made in 1983 by Howard Brookner and Alan Yentob, as part of the BBC’s art strand Arena, and repeated after Burrough’s death in 1997. It is an exceptional documentary, one that gives an intimate and revealing portrait of Burroughs, as he revisits his childhood home; discusses his up-bringing with his brother, Mortimer; his friendship with Jack Kerouac, Allen Gisnberg, and Brion Gysin; and has a reunion with artist Francis Bacon, who Burroughs knew in Tangier. Other contributors include Terry Southern, Patti Smith, and James Grauerholz.

 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.15.2011
02:01 pm
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Divine performing ‘Born To Be Cheap’ live on TV
01.15.2011
01:39 am
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Divine performing her single “Born To Be Cheap” (1979, Wax Trax Records) on a 1984 episode of The Alan Thicke Show.

The Planters Snacks commercial adds the perfect outro for this punky performance by the immortal Divine.

David Johansen eat your heart out.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.15.2011
01:39 am
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