Dangerous Minds couldn’t think of a better 111th birthday salute to the Hitch than to review his far-too-short dream-sequence collaboration in Spellbound with the clown-prince of surrealism, Salvador Dali.
Rachel Campbell-Johnson wrote in detail about the team-up for the Times Online, and Joel Gunz at Alfred Hitchcock Geek went into Hitch’s affinity with surrealism.
Get: Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound [DVD]
Soothe me with your caress
Sweet marijuana… marijuana…
Help me in my distress
Sweet marijuana… please do…You alone can bring my lover back to me
Even though I know it’s all a fantasyAnd then put me to sleep
Sweet marijuana… marijuana…
Sweet Marijuana from the 1934 film ‘Murder At The Vanites’, pre-Hays code.
70 years before Lady Gaga, there was Carmen Miranda. In this wild and wonderful clip form The Gangs All Here, Carmen sings her signature tune ‘The Lady In The Tutti Frutti Hat’.
The Gangs All Here was made in 1943 and was Busby Berkeley’s first color film and, like in all of his films, he held nothing back. The colors, choreography and Carmen Miranda all come together in a surreal spectacle. Wow!
The seemingly borderless nature of our digital age renders bizarre the idea of nationalized walls separating people. Current items like the Israeli West Bank “security” barrier and the demand for a wall on the entire Mexican border just seem absurd and brutal.
Those were walls that kept people out. Today marks the 49th anniversary of a wall that kept people in and fired the imaginations of artists like Pink Floyd, David Bowie and the Sex Pistols.
In an effort to stave off “fascist” influence from the West, German Democratic Republic General Secretary Walter Ulbricht closed the border between the Western and Soviet sectors with barbed wire and fences, on order from Nikita Khrushchev. It soon became the symbol of national alienation.
Below are two of the most fascinating pieces of media about the Berlin Wall that I’ve found. Walter de Hoog’s The Wall was produced by the United States Information Agency, the global propaganda arm started by the Eisenhower administration in 1953. Strangely, the USIA was prohibited to screen their films to the American public, so this stark, immediate and emotive piece wasn’t released here until 1990.
After the jump: Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker’s remarkable narrated slide show of his 40 years covering the Wall…
Attention good people of Los Angeles, this weekend marks the opening of David Yow’s solo art exhibit. Yow, best known as the front man for confrontational noise-meisters, The Jesus Lizard (and before that, Scratch Acid) will be showing at the DIY Gallery, 1549 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026. You can see an online selection of his paintings and digital work at his website. I love this one.
Ultra-creepy flesh furniture sculptures by Jessica Harrison. Jessica, was this really necessary? Ack!
See more fleshy-furniture-madness after the jump…
1981 was a dark time. Lennon had just been murdered and Reagan was freshly inaugurated. Thinking people all around the world were horrified that this clownish ignoramus had come to power and generations to come will be dealing with the ramifications of “Reaganomics”. I do remember this LP, released in the early 80’s, as being a therapeutic slice of gallows humor, though. Released by the wonderful Stiff Records label offshoot Magic Records,The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan is a blank record. It also sold 30,000 copies !
Wayne Cochran was the baddest motherfucker to sport a platinum blond pompadour in the history of rock and roll. He was the honky doppelganger to the hardest working Black man in show business. But, the booze, the pills, the nightsweats, the trembling heebeegeebees and soul twisting demonic machinations of the Devil’s music drove him into the cold stiff arms of suicidal despair. Some men cannot handle the Hermetic heaviness bestowed upon them, the alchemical fire scorches and blinds them.
Like so many tales of rock and roll redemption, Jesus appeared to Wayne and laid his hands upon that sinner’s radiant wighat and the Satanic sunglasses of sin fell from Wayne’s eyes and the light of salvation penetrated his supplicating optic nerve sending a bolt of Christ-like illumination into the pulsating pink folds of his frontal lobes. Wayne was a changed man and Jesus had a new brother in arms, but rock and roll had lost a sharkskin suited shaman who had sent the serpent power of sexual bliss up the spinal column of sweet soul music.
And the black angels wept.
As one who had seen Cochran perform in the early 70s, I can testify to the man’s powerful transformative mojo. I was struck down and raised up.
45 years after appearing on Jackie Gleason’s Miami-based TV show, Wayne is running a Christian ministry in the same city where he once dazzled an audience with his lime green threads and his Mephistophelian moves.
In many cases, the transformation from rock star to Christian minister is lateral and redundant. But, sometimes the lord moves in mysterious ways and He does the watusi. Wayne Cochran was a cosmic force before he found religion. Religion found him - a primal, wild, uncontrolled religion. Sometimes that’s more than a man can handle. So, he turns to the script, scripture, where the rules are neatly laid down - ‘Jesus For Dummies.’ Every man or woman needs to do what they have to do, but it saddens me to see great artists retreat from their work because they can’t mentally process it. Art is supposed to be scary, it takes you places where you’ve never been and that is knowledge.
Wayne Cochran’s pompadour was a crown, not of thorns, but that of the Magi.
