Georgia megapastor Jim Swilley has come out as a gay man to help turn the tide against the recent spate of tragic gay teen “bullycides.” What a wonderful and incredible thing for this man to do. Via Queerty:

Swilley, who created the Church In The Now some 25 years ago, is a divorced father of four. But he’s known he’s gay since he was a boy, says the Rockdale County man of the cloth, and even his wife Debye — whom he divorced earlier this year — knew when they got married (!). The couple kept it a secret for more than two decades, but Jim says Debye recently pushed him to share his story.

The pastor made the announcement to his congregation two weeks ago (yes, it takes time for some stories to trickle), with his family in the audience and decided to come out now after witnessing the rash of gay youths killing themselves. One Internet forum poster says that unlike Atlanta’s Long (whom Swilley won’t speak about), Swilley has not used the pulpit to denigrate gays: “For those of you familiar with Church In the Now, while never discussing his own sexuality, you know that Swilley has always preached a message of inclusion, love and abundance for all God’s children. Bishop Swilley has been asked to step down as Bishop, but will remain as Pastor.” (That last part we haven’t confirmed.)

If there’s a mass exodus from his church, Swilley says he wouldn’t be able to survive it, but would certainly pick up and start again. “God has always spoken through me,” he tells his followers, saying the calling has been with him since birth. His parents tell him stories of him preaching as a toddler in diapers; he doesn’t remember that time.

“Those of you who are people of color. How do you like it when a white person says, ‘What is the deal? What are you so unhappy about? You’ve got a black president already, isn’t racism over?’ Doesn’t that make you want to say, ‘Thank you but you really have no idea what you’re talking about.’ … It’s very easy for people who have never experienced something … to have opinions about it.”

Below, video of the recent sermon where Pastor Twilley tells his congregation that he is a gay.
 

 
Rob Spence, a Toronto based film-maker lost his eye in a shooting accident when he was a teenager.  Nearly twenty years later, Spence has replaced his eye with a miniature camera that records all that he sees.

The protoype eye was named by Time magazine as one of the best inventions of 2009.  Spence calls himself Eyeborg and blogs about his experiences. 

Spence uses the electronic eye not for sight, but to record and document what he sees.

This brings to mind Bertrand Tavernier‘s superior, 1980 film Death Watch (La Mort en Direct) based on the novel The Unsleeping Eye by David G Compton.

In the film, Harvey Keitel plays Roddy, a man who has a camera implanted in his eye, in order that he may film a documentary about a terminally ill woman, Romy Schneider, who he follows, for a top rated TV show called Death Watch, in her day-to-day existence as she prepares to die.

Shot on location in a grim and foreboding Glasgow, Death Watch has withstood its initial poor reviews to remain a highly relevant and important film for our age. Long before Ob Docs and Reality TV, this darkly moving and disturbing movie, has proved itself far more prescient in its criticism of media intrusion into our lives than most contemporary films.

Death Watch appears now and again on-line, but only a few fleeting shots are available on You Tube. There is, however, a French TV interview with Tavernier, which can be viewed here
 

 
Bonus clip of Eyeborg plus pix from ‘Death Watch’ after the jump…
 

 
This was posted at the Throbbing Gristle website. TG were always a volatile proposition, but this is still somewhat shocking, and terribly disappointing, news.

In the evening 27th October TG members and their associated managements
received two emails from Genesis P-Orridge stating he was no longer willing to perform in Throbbing Gristle and returned to his home in New York.

Cosey, Sleazy & Chris have concluded that once more, and for the time being, Throbbing Gristle has Ceased to Exist, at least as a live entity.

Therefore, and with deepest apologies, TG must cancel their scheduled performance at Archa Theatre, in Prague, Czech Republic on 30th October.
It being too short notice to offer an alternative set.

In order not to disappoint fans of the old quartet, Cosey, Peter & Chris have offered to perform live under the name X-TG at Arena Del Sole, Bologna, Italy
on 2nd November & at Casa Musica, Porto, Portugal on 5th November.

We hope fans will appreciate and enjoy this new project and the trio is looking forward to performing exciting new and radical electronic musics together.

Below, an interview conducted by Xeni Jardin and myself on Boing Boing Video, shot in April of 2009.
 

 
The Finnish artist M. A. Numminen has been a pioneer of avant-garde, underground and electronic music for almost fifty years. He first came to prominence at the Jyväskylä Summer Festival, in 1966, when he performed a series of provocative songs including Nuoren aviomiehen on syytä muistaa (“What a Young Husband Should Remember”), which used lyrics taken directly from guides to newly-married couples and legislative texts concerning the distribution of pornography.

Numminen followed this with his controversial interpretations of Franz Schubert’s lieds, before moving on to writing a series of musical compositions based on the philosophical writings of Wittgenstein.  During this time he also devised a singing machine, and became a pioneer of electronic music - something he returned to with his Techno album in the 1990s. 

Numminen is currently touring Finland, and to get an idea of his work, here’s his interpretation of Baccara’s No. 1 Euro hit ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’.
 

 
With thanks to Paul Darling
 
More from M. A. Numminen and the original Euro hit by Baccara after the jump…
 

 
Brilliant! My favorite line: “Words have actual meanings.”

Thank you Syd Garon!

 
The English upper class are notoriously barmy, and it is surprising that they have not featured more as villains in the realms of B-movie horror. Italian schlock masterpiece The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave has a rather whacky upper class killer in the form of Lord Alan Cunningham (played by Anthony Steffen), a man obsessed with the fidelity of his dead wife, which leads to murderous results.

For fans of Euro-Horror, this film has everything in it - murder, madness, torture, seances, and sex, and is a psychedelic slasher, in need of more drugs not less. One for Halloween - if you can find the uncut version.
 

 
Via Timothy Paxton
 

 
You’ve really got to hand it to Dave Davies: neither a stroke, nor advanced age, has seemed to mellow the former Kinks guitarist’s… intense hatred for his older brother, Ray. If this new interview from the Daily Mail is anything to go by (!) don’t expect the famously feuding Muswell hillbillies to reform the Kinks anytime soon, if ever. This is classic!

“The last time we were all together was at my 50th birthday party.

Ray had the money and I didn’t, so he offered to throw it for me.

‘Just as I was about to cut the cake, Ray jumped on the table and made a speech about how wonderful he was. He then stamped on the cake.”

A Kinks reunion? Never! Not since my brother Ray stamped on my 50th birthday cake (Daily Mail)

Below, a clip of Dave Davies performing “Death of a Clown,” a song about the great Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy fame. From the Kinks LP, Something Else.
 

 
Thank you Chris Campion of Berlin, Germany!

 
While most garage bands are out making thrash music about alienation, hairstyles, drugs, vampires and a lack of sex, The French garage produces, The Limiñanas who are making cool, chic, perfect pop, that sounds like a cross between Francoise Hardy, The Velvet Underground and Nico via Serge Gainsbourg. The band consists of Lionel and Marie Limiñana, with guest vocalists, Mu and Nadege, and here is The Limiñanas’ fabulous first promo Je ne suis pas très drogue, from their self-titled debut album, which can be found at Trouble in Mind Records.
 

 
With thanks to Lou Reid
 

 
Musical tastes are important when it comes to relationships, something I realized the night Alex Harvey died, in 1982. The radio was playing a loop of tracks in memory of the great man, when my then girlfriend asked why I liked The Sensational Alex Harvey Band? I explained, and she replied, ‘But he looked so dirty, like a bad workman that would come to your house and drink Dad’s booze and fuck Mom.’ She had a point, and some imagination, but that was the moment I knew we wouldn’t last.

If you lived in Glasgow in the 1970s, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were bigger than Jesus. Well, Alex was at least, for he was one of the city’s three religions - the other two being soccer and alcohol. While soccer could disappoint, and drink left you hungover, SAHB never let you down.

As Charles Shaar Murray wrote, after Alex Harvey’s death in the NME:

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were one of the craziest, most honest, most creative and most courageous bands of their time, and also the most public and best-known phase of the career of Alex Harvey, the man who won a Tommy Steele rock-alike contest in Glasgow in the mid-fifties and thereafter dubbed himself The Last Of The Teenage Idols.

Alex Harvey was a genuine working-class hero, born in Plantation, the harbor district of Glasgow in 1935, he grew up with a love of Billie Holliday, Big Bill Broozny, Charlie Parker, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. In 1959, he formed his first band, Alex Harvey’s Soul Band, which established his great, cigarette and alcohol voice that didn’t mimic American inflection, but delivered songs in his native Glaswegian. The band toured the U.K. and Europe, and for one gig had the embryonic Beatles as support.

But Harvey was more than just a Blues singer and he moved on to performing in the musical Hair, which inspired the theatrical style he used with his most successful group, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

SAHB were unique as they mixed genres and styles - Weimar cabaret, film, Blues, rock and torch song, with which, as Murray writes, “they achieved their impact simply because Alex Harvey had the insight to locate the central core of the song and the passion to get him to that core.”

What showed most about Alex Harvey the performer was his very real devotion to his audiences. He would go to any length to enlighten and to entertain, and - as his notion of theatrical presentation developed from a few simple costume changes and bits of business to complex arrangements of props and gadgets - his work was never bombastic and never attempted to substitute extravagance for genuine communication. Time after time, he would exhort his audiences to avoid both private and institutionalized violence - “don’t make any bullets, don’t buy any bullets and don’t shoot any fucken bullets” - and to behave responsibly towards each other and their environment - “don’t pish in the water supply.”

During the period of Alex’s greatest popularity, he did not just provide an escape from everyday existence through dem ol’ rock and roll fantasies, but he depicted and celebrated that existence and the process of that escape, and the relationship of one to the other.

Vambo still rules.
 

 
Bonus clips of SAHB plus an interview with Alex Harvey after the jump…
 

 
Thank god it turned out to be a beany baby.

 
A collection of videos and commercials from the 1970’s promoting PF’s ‘Cosmic Slop’, ‘Dr. Funkenstein’, ‘The Motor Booty Affair’, ‘Funkentelechy’.

“Dr. Funkenstein unveils his bop-gun.”

Climb aboard the mothership.
 

 
More promos after the jump…

 
The truth is uglier than you imagined.

Dispatches, Channel 4’s flagship current affairs strand, exposes the full and unreported horror of the Iraqi conflict and its aftermath, revealing the true scale of civilian casualties and allegations that even after the scandal of Abu Ghraib, American soldiers continued to abuse prisoners; and that US forces did not systematically intervene in the torture and murder of detainees by the Iraqi security services. The programme also features previously unreported material of insurgents being killed while trying to surrender.

 
Parts 3, 4 and 5 after the jump…

 
While hippies enjoyed “three days of peace and love” in Woodstock, another equally important music festival was staged in Harlem. What’s become known as Black Woodstock was a series of concerts, held at 3pm on Sundays, at Mount Morris Park, between 29 June and the 24 August, 1969. The Festival was headlined by B.B. King, The Staples Singers, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, Sly & the Family Stone and attended by over 100,000 concert-goers.

The concerts came soon after the Watts Riots, and the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.  At the time, the local NAACP chairman likened Harlem at the time to the vigilante Old West. The NYPD refused to provide security for the Festival, which was provided instead by the Black Panthers, some of whom had been indicted of a bombing campaign across Manhattan.

Black Woodstock was a mix of religious gathering, rock concert and civil rights rally, as the black community was encouraged to take power into its own hands, most notably when Reverend Roebuck Staples, of the Staple Singers, injected a sermon into his performance:

“You’d go for a job and you wouldn’t get it. And you know the reason why. But now you’ve got an education. We can demand what we want. Isn’t that right? So go to school, children, and learn all you can. And who knows? There’s been a change and you may be President of the United States one day.”

The Harlem Festival was filmed by television producer, Hal Tulchin, who hoped to sell the footage to the networks. None of the networks were interested, which says much about the politics of the time, and the fifty hours of filmed material has since been kept under lock and key. The odd snippet has been sneaked on to You Tube, and Nina Simone licensed film of her performance for a DVD release, but why the whole concert has never been released or even shown on TV is a damning indictment on America’s media. As Alan McGee asked last year

Why is Black Woodstock still sitting in the vaults? For me, this is not just a concert, but a valid historical document capturing the height of the black power movement, positivism and the tension within their community. I remember a poignant Simone quote from 1997 when asked why she left the US: “I left because I didn’t feel that black people were going to get their due, and I still don’t.” It’s hard to disagree with her when a cultural event as significant as Black Woodstock has been gathering dust in a vault for over forty years.

 
We totally had one of these. Always good when it threw the last few records out of the slots due to momentum once it got going. Good times.
 

 
Bonus 8 track selector after the jump…

 
Comrade Vladimir Putin has proven himself to be more than just Ruler of All Russia (surely Prime Minster? - Ed.) - a dab hand at judo, a master of swimming, an ace shot, a singer, and excellent at going topless in public. It is, therefore, no surprise that some wag (surely Right Wing Capitalist Lackey? - Ed.) has a comic strip, poking fun at VP and his idiosyncratic ways. The strip comes at an interesting time, as Putin, who has had the highest approval rating of any world leader, may stand for re-election as President in Russia’s 2012 elections.
 

 
Bonus strip and Putin sings video after the jump…