Za Bakdaz (the back days?) was a space-age operetta that Klaus Nomi was working on with collaborators George Elliott and Page Wood during 1979. It was unfinished at the time of his death in 1983. Working from old tapes, notes and past discussions with Klaus, Elliot and Wood completed the project and released it as an album in 2008. You can purchase it here.
In this video clips from 1960 German sci-fi film First Spaceship On Venus are wedded to the overture and song “Cre Spoda” from Za Bakdaz. It’s eerily effective.
This Burger King commercial from 1980 falls into the “what the fuck were they thinking?” category. Sir Shake-A-Lot shimmies like a speedfreak after snorting a line of crystal meth the length of John Holmes’ blue-veined-blood-bomber. Sir Shake needs some Thorazine, quick! The dude is fried.
Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, “the Elvis of cultural theory,” discuss the revolution in Egypt with insight, wisdom, humor and clarity. What a refreshing alternative to the blowhards on American television.
I love Zizek’s “Tom and Jerry” analogy (though I think he means Wile E. Coyote). At the point President Hosni Mubarak looks down he will see there is no ground beneath his feet and he’s in free fall. But he keeps staring straight ahead.
Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher has already done a fitting tribute to Tura Satana, but I thought I’d share this interview that Tura gave for Kevin Sean Michaels’ 2008 documentary The Wild World Of Ted V. Mikels. Tura starred in Mikel’s The Astro-Zombies and The Doll Squad. In the interview she discusses working with Mikels and Russ Meyer.
Tura Satana does a striptease in “The Doll Squad” and is interviewed by Sandra Bernhard after the jump…
Tura Satana died yesterday of heart failure, in Reno, Nevada. Satana had a brief but iconic career during which she was an exotic dancer, starred in the ground-breaking cult film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, dated Elvis Presley and became a cinematic icon.
Satana began her career as a dancer at 14, and was a victim of the brutality and sexism endemic at the time, as she explained in 2008:
“At the age of 15 I became an exotic dancer in the clubs of Calumet City, Illinois, because I had left home due to a bad situation stemming from when I was raped. Instead of the guys who raped me going to jail, I was sent to reform school because they paid the judge one thousand dollars to get off. So I went instead, supposedly because I enticed them to rape me.”
Satana went onto appear in numerous TV shows and films, including The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce, but it be for iconic role in Russ Meyer’s classic 1965 film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! for which she will always be remembered. In the film, Satana played Varla, a sexy, voluptuous anti-hero, who proved:
“A woman, like my character, was able to show the male species that we’re not helpless and not entirely dependent on them. People picked up on the fact that women could be gorgeous and sexy and still kick ass.”
Satana also said:
“There are a great many similarities between Varla and myself. Varla was an outlet for some of the anger I felt growing up. She was also a statement to women all over the world that you can be a take-charge person and still be sexy. She also showed the women world-wide that women don’t have to be weak, simpering females. They just go after what they want and usually get it.”
John Waters once described Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! as:
”The best movie ever made, and possibly better than any movie that will ever be made.”
Born in Japan in either 1935 or 1938 (dates vary), Satana worked her way though a variety of minor TV roles, including appearing with Dean Martin in Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed?, before being chosen by Meyer for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. Filmed in the desert outside Los Angeles, in temperatures often over hundred degrees, Meyer claimed that “She and I made the movie…” and that Satana was “very capable”:
“She knew how to handle herself. Don’t fuck with her! And if you fuck with her, do it well! She might turn on you!”
Satana went on to make The Astro Zombies (1969) and Ted V. Mikels’ The Doll Squad (1973), after which she was shot by a former lover. Satana then worked as a nurse, until her cult celebrity led to her return to acting this century with Sugar Boxx, Rob Zombie’s animation The Haunted World of El Superbeasto and Astro Zombies: M3 Cloned.
My dear, dear friend, you have no idea how much you will be missed…
In 2008, Satana talked to Zuri Zone about her cult status:
“I’m thrilled with the status Faster Pussycat has received when it was first released and at all the additional releases. I think the popularity that it has is because we gave them something that they really wanted to see. I also hope that it is because it shows that women don’t have to be weak and helpless to be sexy. We can be in control and still be feminine. I think that I remain a cult figure even after 40 years because the public like what they see on the screen. At least on the film, I will be forever ageless.”
Bonus clip from ‘Faster, Pussycat!’ after the jump…
Happy Birthday William Burroughs, born today in 1914, one of the most “culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century.”
Here’s Burroughs in the “informal documentary” The Commissioner of Sewers from 1991, where he discusses his writing, his life, his thoughts on art, literature, and the use of language as a weapon, his world view, as well as space and time travel, mummification, and politics.
For the next two weeks, Paul Slansky will be guest-blogging at Dangerous Minds about life during the Reagan era.
To provide an antidote to the poisonous bath of Reagan Love that the nation is currently drowning in, I’ve revised my 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor – which Wonkette just called “the only honest history of the Ronald Reagan 1980s” (italics theirs) – and re-issued it as an eBook, available here on a name-your price basis.
This is the first in a series of excerpts to remind those who lived through it – and inform those who didn’t – that, contrary to the current hagiography that the media is so inappropriately cheerleading, Reagan was actually a nasty, lazy ignoramus whose singular ability was to seem unthreatening by waggling his head while sporting a misleading grin.
JANUARY 20, 1985: With the next day’s re-inauguration apparently not providing enough exposure for him, President Reagan injects himself into the Super Bowl, performing the important presidential duty of tossing the coin to determine which team gets the ball. The live feed linking him to the broadcast from Stanford is open ten minutes before he goes on the air, enabling satellite dish owners to spy on the leader of the free world as he:
*Practices the coin flip three times – “It is heads ... It is tails” – so he’s prepared for all possibilities
*Reveals a really neat idea a friend of his had: “Frank Sinatra had a recommendation, instead of tossing the coin, what would have been a lot better. You’d have had me outdoors throwing out the ball. I would have thrown it – a little art work of maybe a ball going across a map – and out there, one of them catching a ball, as if it’s gone all the way across the United States. How about that?”
*Stands immobile, almost deflated, as the minutes tick by, as if he doesn’t quite exist when the camera’s not on.
Finally, he gets his cue and – suddenly animated – he flips the coin. “It is tails!” he announces, adding some banality about how all the players should do their best. The network cuts away and, somewhat forlornly, he resumes the less satisfying non‑televised portion of his life.
Harry Shearer captured the satellite feed, and he’s finally made it available for everyone to see. It’s the only ten minutes – out of the entire eight years of his presidency – that Reagan was observable without knowing that he was being watched. It’s the realest he’s ever been in front of the cameras.
We’ve lost two art film goddesses this week. First Maria Schneider and now Lena Nyman.
Nyman starred in the controversial I Am Curious (Yellow) and it’s sequel I Am Curious (Blue). These were iconic films for anyone growing up in the 1960s. As curious teenagers we all tried to sneak into theaters screening these Swedish soft-core films that combined free love with a radical political viewpoint.
When the film arrived in the United States, it was seized by customs as pornographic material, which, if allowed into the country would lead to more race riots and political assassinations, not to mention another Vietnam War elsewhere in Asia or perhaps Africa.
Following an anti-censorship battle in US courts, I Am Curious (Yellow) was finally allowed to be shown on American screens in 1969. Thanks to all the free publicity provided by various branches of the US government, it became the biggest foreign-language box-office hit ever in the United States, grossing $20.23m (or about $113.3m today). If inflation is taken into account, I Am Curious (Yellow) remains the record holder among non-English-language releases in the US.
More importantly, I Am Curious (Yellow) set a legal precedent that changed the meaning of the word “obscene,” thus allowing other sexually provocative motion pictures to enter the United States, among them Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Decameron (1971) and Tales of Canterbury (1973), and the aforementioned Last Tango in Paris.”
Lena Nyman starred in over 50 films in her lifetime, including Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. She died after suffering from a longterm illness. She was 66.
Here’s a scene that was cut from the final version of I am Curious (Blue).
will be guest-blogging at Dangerous Minds about life during the Reagan era.