If you weren’t familiar with Peter Tscherkassky’s films and just happened to stumble into a theater screening one, you might mistakenly think you’ve discovered an old surrealist film by Bunuel or Cocteau - a lost sequel to An Andalusian Dog or Blood Of A Poet. But, you’d also have to presume that the film was being projected at the wrong speed, 96 frames per second. Tscherkassky’s reconstruction of existent films is the visual equivalent of a Brion Gysin cut-up, fragments of information that operate at the borderline between the conscious mind and dream.
 
Tscherkassky, an Austrian avant-gardist, manipulates found footage, which he edits using a moviola rather than computers. In the short film Outer Space, Tscherkassky deconstructs Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity, a cheesy knock-off of Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, and re-constructs it as a feverish, psychotic, mindfuck.  Filmmaker Guy Madden describes Outer Space thusly:

“shards of frightened eyes, trembling hands, and violent outbursts of self-defense, presented in multiple exposures too layered to count, too arresting to ignore. Each frame is further entangled with details revealed by a jittery effect (a primitive traveling matte?) which spills fluttering ectoplasmic lightpools from one cubist aspect of the woman to another. The filmmaker mimics the action of nightmares by condensing the original imagery of the feature and displacing it into a new narrative—as in dreams, a narrative not explicitly linked to actual events, but emotionally more true than any rational explanation. Tscherkassky’s shorts are actually considerably more terrifying than the original material.”

 
Note to B-movie fans: Barbara Hershey plays the woman under assault.
Outer Space is the second film in Tscherkassky’s Cinemascope trilogy.
 
Turn out the lights and watch.

 
Motown bass deity James Jamerson had more talent and soul in one finger than in any of his peers’ standard ten. Literally. He was known amongst his colleagues as “the hook” for his single digit yet fluid as a river plucking. He also never changed his strings or messed with the controls on his instrument. Everything simply turned up to ten. I mean to feature a few isolated tracks from some of his best known sessions which are new to me and as delightful to listen to as you might imagine but I had to lead off with this already widely seen but marvelous clip of our man backing Marvin Gaye in 1973:

 
And the studio version, Jamerson’s
 

 

 
Imagine José Mojica Marins directing Can’t Stop The Music after snorting the remains of Bob Fosse and Federico Fellini and you may conjure up the demented disco fever that is The Apple. Billed as a “funky fantasy that will rock your world”, this 1980 schlock fest is Xanadu for cokeheads, bouncing a deluge of dance scenes off the viewer’s retinas like a hailstorm of mirrorballs.

In an attempt to replicate the cult success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Apple takes every rock star as Messiah/Satan cliche and tosses them into a pot of boiling Spandex, gold Lurex, and black Lycra. Add a pinch of amyl nitrate, stir in a rusty cock ring, and some Manic Panic hair dye and you’ve got one of the most insanely inspired spectacles since John Travolta slathered on the KY in Staying Alive.
 

 
A sad day for American literature, writer Harvey Pekar has passed away at age 70. My first thought is that it’s great that he lived long enough to see his work embraced by a large audience due to the success of the American Splendor film but it’s hard to swallow the loss of another singular and utterly unique American voice. Bon Voyage, Harvey.

(Cleveland) - Famed Cleveland underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar has died at the age of 70.

Cuyahoga County Coroner’s spokesman Powell Caesar confirmed the news to WTAM 1100 Monday morning.

Pekar was found just before 1:00 am by his wife, Joyce Brabner, in their home in Cleveland Heights. The cause of death is not yet known.

Coroner: Harvey Pekar dies (WTAM Cleveland)
 
thx Ned Raggett

 
Dutch filmmaker Jan Kounen, primarily known for his ultra-violent gangster flick Doberman and El Topo-esque western Blueberry, spent several months in the Amazon with Shipibo Shamans experimenting with Ayahuasca, a psychoactive infusion prepared from vines and plants containing DMT (Dimethyltryptamine). Ayahuasca is a holy sacrament which the indigenous people and Shamans of the Amazon have known as a powerful holistic purgative medicine capable of great healing and transformation for thousands of years.

While in the Amazon, Kounen made the documentary Other Worlds. The film depicts the Shamanic culture and their underlying belief systems which stem from their knowledge of the Invisible. According to Kounen, the objective of the documentary “is to impress upon viewers that these little-known Indians developed veritable cognitive technology through their own sciences of the spirit, thousands of years ago. To me, these men are warriors in the battle to unlock the mysteries of consciousness. Shamans consider the greatest ally and the worst enemy of every individual to be one and the same… himself or herself.” In the film, Kounen primarily shows the therapeutic power of the Shamans and their plant teachers. This power is a type of ancestral psychoanalysis or human psychotherapy backed by 4,000 years of experience and practice.

Inexplicably, Other Worlds made in 2004 has never been released in the United States. It is only available on import DVD.

In this excerpt from the film, we see night vision shots of Kounen after he has ingested Ayahuasca followed by CGI images the director created to replicate his visual experiences during his “trip.”
 

 
In another excerpt from Other Worlds, Nobel Prize winner Kari Mullis, DMT cosmonaut Rick Strassman (author of The Spirit Molecule) and artist Alex Grey

 
My second post today about something from 1975 is a nice little audio documentary (wedded with just OK visuals, but it works fine) about a song that I’ve always been very intrigued with. I love that it’s both a rigorous formal experiment and a tremendously succesful pop tune, to say nothing of its dark and deeply melancholic atmosphere. It’s easily one of the best radio hits of the 70’s and I can’t imagine ever tiring of it.

 
Toshio Matsumoto’s early 1970’s feature length film Funeral Parade of Roses is widely cited as a big influence on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange but today we have a truly mad short subject by said director, a simple yet brain-frying (epileptics, beware !) infrared study of a lone, masked subject in a landscape, replete with a chaotic electronic score by Toshi Ichiyanagi. Dizzying and possibly bad for you !

A 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Walt Whitman’s voice reading four lines from the poem “America.” [MP3]

As the sky lights up over Hometown U.S.A. tonight, let’s remember that today’s also the anniversary of two literary masterpieces of proto-freak culture. In 1855, Walt Whitman had 800 copies of his Leaves of Grass pressed by the Scottish-born Rome brothers at their Fulton St. shop in Brooklyn.

The Wikipedia oracle notes that Walt was definitely considered an original dangerous mind:

When the book was first published, Whitman was fired from his job at the Department of the Interior after Secretary of the Interior James Harlan read it and said he found it very offensive. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was said to have thrown his 1855 edition into the fire. Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote, “It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote ‘Leaves of Grass,’ only that he did not burn it afterwards.” Critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold reviewed Leaves of Grass in the November 10, 1855, issue of The Criterion, calling it “a mass of stupid filth” and categorized its author as a filthy free lover. Griswold also suggested, in Latin, that Whitman was guilty of “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians”, one of the earliest public accusations of Whitman’s homosexuality. Griswold’s intensely negative review almost caused the publication of the second edition to be suspended.  Whitman included the full review, including the innuendo, in a later edition of Leaves of Grass.

Seven years later to the day, math teacher Charles Dodgson and a friend took the three young daughters of Henry Liddell (the Dean of the Christ Church College where Dodgson taught math) on a short rowboat trip. Dodgson published the surrealist story he aimed at Liddell’s middle daughter Alice as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the name Lewis Carroll on July 4 1865.

Without forgetting Robert Cauble’s fantastic depiction of Alice’s search for Guy Debord, below are some amazing film interpretations of Alice:

 
Like Pippin on steroids!

 
Why… here’s an item that was just screaming out for a blog post, don’tcha think? It seems that Amoeba Records in Hollywood accepted delivery on a most unusual item earlier this week when a box of bespoke records and CDs for the soundtrack to weirdo auteur Harmony Korine’s latest cinematic head-scratcher, Trash Humpers, arrived at the store. It’s just a pity the employee who opened the box wasn’t wearing a Hazmat suit….

First a little background: Trash Humpers, like most of Korine’s filmic oeuvre, defies description, but I’ll try: Trash Humpoers is about some freaks and genetic mutants who like to, well, hump trash and the wacky misadventures these zany characters get up to. How’s that?

But back to the made-by-hand records and CDs at Amoeba: Each of the 500 individually-numbered, limited edition 45 rpm records comes packaged with… you guessed it (or maybe you haven’t) TRASH! In fact, one of the ones Amoeba got in the post, like a bottle of Mezcal, even came with its’ own worm! The CDs are in fact computer burned CD-Rs, and each one comes with hand-labeled art by Sharpy.

If, like many folks reading this, you’re making an “Ewww” face at the moment, I’ll leave you with the pithy comment of my always witty Los Angeles Times colleague, Alie Ward: “Why couldn’t they just wipe some gonorrhea on them and be done with it?”

She’s right, you know. Worms. Sooooo 2007!