If you have a spare dollar or two and you fancy something to splash about on the water, then you still have time to put in a bid for the British naval aircraft carrier H.M.S. Ark Royal, as the deadline for bidding has been extended until July 6.
Vessel ARK ROYAL R07
Light Aircraft Carrier
Length: 210m
Beam: 36m
Draught: 5.8m
Current Displacement: 19000 tonnes
Estimated Metal Weight: 10000 tonnes inc. machinery
Estimated metal %: 95% steel
The Ark Royal is the 5th Royal Navy vessel to have the name of the original 1587 flagship that defeated the Spanish Armada. Though this Ark Royal was originally to be called the Indomitable, but as its 4th and more famous predecessor had just been decommissioned, public protest ensured the new aircraft carrier was re-named the Ark Royal.
Suggested plans for the vessel’s future use include: a nightclub, a school, an hotel, a prison and a heli-pad. I’m sure we can come up with something far more useful.
The Butthole Surfers live in concert, Mesa Arizona, July 1, 1996.
Tracks:
“Birds”
“Cough Syrup”
“Thermador”
“Pepper”
“Ulcer Breakout”
“Jingle of a Dog’s Collar”
“TV Star”
“Ah Ha”
“1401”
“Cherub”
“Cowby Bob”
“X-Ray”
“Out of Vogue”
“Hey”
“Space”
“L.A.”
“The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave”
“Creep in the Cellar”
“Let’s Talk about Cars”
“Goofy’s Concern”
“Watlo”
“Who Was in My Room Last Night”
Hacktivisit collective Anonymous uploaded a new video message yesterday to YouTube. Among other demands, Anonymous is calling for the chairman of the Federal Reserve board, Ben Bernanke to resign:
“Democrats have failed us, Republicans have failed us… It is time for us to stand up for ourselves… We must fight back against the organized criminal class.”
The action is being called “Operation Empire State Rebellion” but it has also been referred to as, “CTRL+ALT_BERNANKE.”
Anonymous has called for public protests beginning on June 14th, continuing “until Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke steps down.”
Mid-century, 5,000-square-foot home currently for sale in Beverly Hills, CA for the asking price of $3.95 million. The ranch-style home’s decor looks like it has been virtually untouched by time since the mid-60s. I can’t figure out if this home was “staged’ by a professional (who really wanted this place to stand out, or appeal to a certain kind of person) or if this how the current owners left it for the past 40 years? Whatever the case, I dig it
Drift is a short film by Max Hattler, a film-maker and artist who is:
“interested in the space between abstraction and figuration in the moving image, where storytelling is freed from the constraints of traditional narrative.”
Max works across film, video installation and live audiovisual performance, and has collaborated with music acts including Basement Jaxx, Jovanotti, Jemapur, The Egg, Ladyscraper, and his dad’s outfit Hattler. Drift is a beautiful and mesmeric film, which examines the human epidermis in close-up, re-imagining our skin, its hair and pores, as landscape - growing, changing, living.
When their father was killed by the North Koreans during the war, their mother had Sook-ja, Mi-a and Ai-ja (then 11, 12 and 13-years old) form a vocal trio to entertain the U.S. troops and to help support the rest of the family. Speaking no English at the time, the girls sang phonetically and were given gifts of beer and chocolate bars which they could then trade on the black market for real food. The G.I.s would also gift the girls with American pop records that they would learn to perform.
When news of the singing Kim Sisters reached America after the war, the girls were invited to become a part of the “China Doll Review” at the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas. Eventually the Kim Sisters became accomplished musicians playing a dizzying array of instruments in their glitzy stage show. They were the act on The Ed Sullivan Show more than any other performer, a total of 22 times. Sullivan made the Kim Sisters a nationally known act and soon they were making $13,000 a week. When Sullivan became aware that their mother was still in Korea, he generously intervened and helped her get a visa, the catch being that she had to perform on his program.
During the 70s, all of the Kim sisters got married and the act ended. Ai-ja Kim died of lung cancer 1987, but Sook-ja and Mi-a are still alive and living in America. They are rumored to be working on a documentary about their lives. I hope that’s true.
You can read a fascinating oral history of the Kim Sisters here.
None of the Ed Sullivan clips have made it to YouTube, sadly. Below is a clip of The Kim Sisters on the Hollywood Palace television show. Stay with it for when they all three start playing the xylophone together (or go directly to about 3:22 in). It’s pretty cool:
Dan Savage is one of the wisest, sanest people in America today. Watch this short clip where he makes the case for Christian people who are pro-gay rights to stand up for what they believe in to “right-wing fundamentalist bat-shit crazy douchebag Christians” like Tony Perkins and Bryan Fischer, and in their own churches and communities.
Proud to share a county with an evolved fellow like Dan Savage. He’s a good citizen and I really admire him. Bravo, sir!
There was a terrific, moving documentary last week on BBC Radio 4, “The Twilight World of Syd Barrett.” Featuring Barrett’s caretaker/sister Rosemary, original Floyd manager Peter Jenner, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and one of the last interviews with Rick Wright:
Five years after his death, Syd Barrett lives on freeze framed, still young and a striking lost soul of the sixties whose brief moment of creativity outshines those long years of solitude shut away in a terraced house in his home town of Cambridge.
This revealing programme hears how his band Pink Floyd (and family) coped with Barrett’s mental breakdown and explores the hurriedly arranged holiday to the Spanish island of Formentera - where the star unravelled. In the programme we also hear about Barrett’s pioneering brand of English psychedelic pop typified on early Pink Floyd recordings ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘See Emily Play’ and the strange songs on Pink Floyd’s impressive debut album ‘The Piper At the Gates of Dawn’.
Undoubtedly Barrett’s experimentation with the drug LSD affected him mentally and the band members reveal how concerned they were when he began to go catatonic on-stage, playing music that had little to do with their material, or not playing at all. By Spring 1968 Barrett was out of the group and after a brief period of hibernation, he re-emerged in 1970 with a pair of albums, ‘The Madcap Laughs’ and ‘Barrett’, but they failed to chart and Barrett retired to a hermit life existence under the watchful gaze of his caring sister Rosemary (featured in the programme)
Below, “Rhamadan,” a sprawling, 20-minute-long instrumental jam recorded during The Madcap Laughs sessions with Tyrannosaurus Rex bongo player Steve Peregrine Took. This comes only as a free download for people who bought An Introduction to Syd Barrett on iTunes or the physical CD. As someon\e who owns more Syd Barrett bootlegs than is perhaps necessary, it’s great to be able to finally hear this quasi-legendary track.
It’s worth noting that the new stereo remixes done by David Gilmour are especially nice-sounding. I thought they were a huge improvement myself. If you have any doubts, have a quick listen to “Octopus.” Not an insignificant upgrade in the audio fidelity department, I think you’ll agree:
One question for EMI, though: Where are “Scream Thy Last Scream” and “Vegetable Man” anyway??? WHEN will these tracks be given a proper release?
Nice homage to iconic female rockers with these cool skateboard decks, “Girls Girls Girls” from Girl’s 2010 Summer collection. Sadly, it appears they are no longer available on Girl’s website, but with a lil’ investigating, you’ll be able to find them. Ebay, perhaps?
Film-maker Thorsten Fleisch‘s short film Kosmos, from 2004, examines the mystery of crystals in close-up.
The mystery of the crystals under closer examination. What is it that makes them possess magic powers as claimed by mystics of all ages? Through growing crystals directly on film their mystical qualities shine straight to the screen. Unfiltered, only aided by light which gracefully breaks its rays into rich visual textures.
The film consists of three home movies: Warhol at the Whitney, May 1, 1971, George’s Dumpling Party, June 29 1971 and Warhol revisited, May 1971 which show scenes from the opening of a Warhol retrospective, followed by footage of Warhol, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, and founder of the Fluxus movement, George Maciunas at what looks like a fondue party in 80 Wooster St., Soho, before returning back to the Whitney.
The narration is by Mekas, who talks about the relationship between Warhol and Maciunas, Pop Art and Fluxus, which he says are the same, as both dealt with nothingness - “both took life as a game and laughed at it.” Warhol standing on the side, never a part of it, with George “laughing, laughing all the time.”
These beautiful short films are like water-colored moments from pop history, which as Cima points out:
It started when producer Barry Hanson asked writer Barrie Keeffe, one night, what film he’d like to see? Keeffe said he wanted to see an American gangster film set in the East End of London. There was nothing like it on at the cinema, so Hanson told Keeffe to write it. The result was The Long Good Friday, a movie regularly voted the greatest British gangster film, and one of the best British films, of all time. High praise for a movie that was nearly re-cut, dubbed and pumped out onto TV by its original parent company, ITC, who hated it.
I was lucky enough to see The Long Good Friday, when it was screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1980 as the highlight to a mini-retrospective of director John MacKenzie’s work. It had an indelible effect.
MacKenzie was established as a major talent, having made the films Unman, Wittering and Zigo with David Hemmings in 1969, and Made with Carol White and Roy Harper in 1972. He had also achieved further success directing Peter MacDougall’s brilliant dramas Just Another Saturday, which won the Prix Italia, Just A Boys’ Game, which starred rock singer Frankie Miller, and MacDougall’s adaptation of notorious hardman, Jimmy Boyle’s biography, A Sense of Freedom. Now he had just completed a film that captured the essence of 1980’s Britain under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Written by Barrie Keeffe, a former journalist who made his name writing political drams for TV and theater, Scribes (1976), about newspaper workers during a strike, .Gimme Shelter (1975–7), a powerful trilogy that dealt with deprivation, frustration and anger of working-class youth, and the tremendous BBC drama Waterloo Sunset, starring the legendary Queenie Watts.
Keeffe wrote The Long Good Friday in three days, over an Easter weekend. Originally called The Paddy Factor, the story dealt with East End gangster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) who plans to go into partnership with the Mafia to redevelop London, only to fall foul of the IRA. The film co-starred Helen Mirren, (who battled to make her character, Victoria, stronger), a young Pierce Brosnan, and Eddie Consantine, as the Mafia don.
The script came from all the stories Keeffe heard growing-up and working as a reporter on the Stratford Express, as he told the Arts Desk last year:
The seeds were planted then; it was a very fertile time, just before the end of the Krays’ empire, and a lot of my plays, and some of the incidents in The Long Good Friday, came from my experiences. For instance, one of the gangland punishments, if you strayed into someone else’s territory, was to crucify you to the warehouse floor. As a very innocent junior reporter, a young 18, I was sent to interview a guy in hospital. He was covered in bandages and I asked him what had happened. He said, with that wonderful East End humour, “Do you understand English, son? Well, put it down to a do-it-yourself accident.”
Filmed the same year as Thatcher’s election, The Long Good Friday predicted much of the change Conservative rule would bring to London and the British isles.
The Long Good Friday was obviously about the transformation of the East End. The Bob Hoskins character was talking about the end of the Docks and mile after mile of territory for “profitable progress” - I think that was his phrase. I saw the film again about five years ago and it has a scene showing this model of how the area would look under the developers. It underestimated it completely - it ought to have shown Canary Wharf looking like Manhattan. Looking at it, I was taken by the fact that none of us had foreseen the enormous scale of change.
The Long Good Friday was a film “raging” at what was about to happen to the country, the story of gangsterism / Thatcherism / Captialism coming face-to-face with terrorism / idealism.
Cast and Crew: The Long Good Friday brings together John MacKenzie, Barrie Keeffe, Barry Hanson, actor Derek Thompson, casting director Simone Reynolds to discuss the film, its making and its legacy. There are also interviews from Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. Watching Keeffe and MacKenzie around a table together, there is still the crackle of creative tension, as writer and director both lay claim to the film’s success.
Porn actress Bree Olson, the star of “Deep Throat This #37,” “Deep Throat This #43” and “Eat My Black Meat 4”—but who is perhaps best known as one of Charlie Sheen’s “angels”—tweeted this TwitPic earlier today of herself at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 “Readymade” Fountain in the background.
“Art museum in Philly last week. They had some creepy shit!”
