If you grew up in the Bible Belt during the 70s, 80s and even well into the 90s, there is a very good chance that you have more than a passing familiarity with the hateful, frightening and just plain bizarre “Christian” comics produced by one Jack T. Chick.

Chick’s twisted message, infused with his peculiar style of fervent, the-end-is-near Fundamentalist Christian insanity, by virtue of appearing in what most parents considered to be innocuous “religious” comic books, enjoyed a long period of widespread cultural popularity. Chick tracts were distributed in Sunday schools, summer camps, motel lobbies and bus stations all across America. There have been over 750 million of them sold!

There can only be one reason such deranged literature was allowed in so many places: Adults never read them. If they had, they’d have been utterly horrified. (My own mother gave me dozens of these comics when I was a kid. I’m sure in her mind they were better for me than the Marvel of DC comics I was reading. LIttle did she know that she was actually providing me with!)

Chick’s scary, angry Fundie diatribes have given many a kid terrible nightmares. His favorite topics tend towards subject matter like “You’re going to Hell,” Halloween is evil, eternal damnation, abortion, the Vatican is evil and created Islam, demons walk amongst us, child molesters, the Antichrist will rise soon, New Age beliefs, Judaism, Mormonism and Islam are Satanic, witches are everywhere, homosexuality is an abomination (Chick’s solution? Fire-n-brimstone, baby!), Darwin’s theories are Satanic, Harry Potter is Satanic, feminists are Satanic, the Satanic plot behind rock music (The Beatles were Druids!), “You’re going to Hell,” the Commies are everywhere (Catholics are to blame for this, of course) and just about any other crazy, fucked up conspiracy theory you can think of. He’s kind of the Glenn Beck (or maybe better still Alex Jones) of paranoiac Christian comic books. Did I mention that a lot of his comics were about how YOU (that’s right you, the person reading this) are going to Hell? Chick’s God is a VENGEFUL God. The Old Testament Jehovah has got nothin’ on Chick’s version.
 

 
Not much beyond the basics are known about Chick, who is now 86-years-old. He’s an extremely private man and few photographs have been taken of him. So it’s not like anyone knows about the reclusive Jack T. Chick himself, but show almost anyone in America one of his Chick tracts and they’ll respond with an immediate recognition of the distinctively shaped and wildly deranged mini-comics. For Jack T. Chick, it’s all about saving YOUR soul from eternal damnation, not about being popular.

It wasn’t until 1998 that the first serious examination of the world’s best-read theologian (think about it) appeared and that was in the pages of The Imp a self-published journal of comics criticism from Daniel Raeburn, fashioned via the shape, design and a Daniel Clowes illustration to resemble a Chick tract. I’ve had a copy of this issue of The Imp since it came out, sitting in pride of place on my bookshelf, but it’s now long out of print. Happily Raeburn has put all four issues of his much admired publication online, also including his erudite takes on Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, and Mexican historietas.

Says Raeburn:

“People who dismiss hate literature offhand are going to miss the point of this tribute to Chick, which is that hate literature reveals not only its own corruption but the sick society that hatched it. Examine the historical and theological forebears of little Chick and you’ll find an awful, and I do mean awful, lot of mainstream beliefs. Like the Protestant zealots who colonized and raped this country, Chick tracts and the violence in them are as American as apple pie.”

 
Above, an episode of Boing Boing TV featuring Syd Garon and Rodney Ascher’s animated take on the Chick “classic” You Goofed.. This is Jack T. Chick in a nutshell. (Reportedly he’s seen this and liked it!)
 
This might be a recent photograph of Jack T. Chick

Huge online compendium of Chick racts

Thank you Taylor Jessen of Burbank, California!

 
It’s the 3rd episode of the fortnightly Dangerous Minds Radio Hour !  Join Brad and Richard as they settle in and follow their deep and abiding love for dusty old records, somehow finding heavy connections between each selection. From sublime melody to astringent noise, you needn’t believe in God to appreciate the catholic tastes of the amiable gents from Dangerous Minds.

Glen Campbell: “Guess I’m Dumb” (produced by Brian Wilson)
Spring: “Everybody” (produced by Brian Wilson)
Simon & Garfunkel: “My Little Town”
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band: “Touch Me” (with John Lennon and Ringo Starr)
Keith Levene: “Killer in the Crowd”
Public Image Ltd.: “The Cowboy Song”
The Slits: “Man Next Door”
Leo Graham/The Upsetters/King Tubby: “Three Blind Mice/Three Times Three”
Barry Adamson: “007, A Phantasy Bond Theme”
Bee Gees: “Red Chair Fade Away”
Cher: “A Woman’s Story” (produced by Phil Spector)
All Tiny Creatures: “An Iris” (with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver)
The Pentangle: “Light Flight”
Family: “Anyway”
Polly Brown: “(Up Up Up) In a Puff of Smoke”
Wha Ha Ha: “Akatere”

 
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I’ve written here before about how I used to go fanatically out of my way to collect memorabilia related to the movie Candy, in particular items emblazoned with photos of the film’s titular heroine, who was played by the comely Ewa Aulin, a one-time Miss Teen Sweden. Candy, which I didn’t actually see until much later was a “holy grail” movie for me, but when I saw it, my opinion was not favorable. (Nothing could have lived up to my high expectations to begin with, but Candy really sucked. But this isn’t about Candy, you can read what I wrote about that film here).

Another 60s goddess who I have a ridiculous amount of photos, movie posters, picture sleeve records, sheet music and even fine art photographic prints of, is Marianne Faithfull. Of all of my pantheon of 60s goddesses (Ursula Andress, Paula Prentiss, Francoise Hardy, Racquel Welch, Jane Birkin, Sandie Shaw, Joni Mitchell, P.P. Arnold, Claudine Longet) I’d have to say that Faithfull is, by quite a wide margin, my #1 favorite. Quite simply, there was no female anywhere on the planet as cool and as sexy as she was during the 60s. She was born with one of the most classically beautiful faces of all time and she just had that look which embodied the era as no other woman’s look or style could. A goddess, she was and still is.

A film titled Girl on a Motorcycle, alternatively known as Naked Under Leather, was made in 1968 to capitalize on Faithfull’s libertine reputation, acquired as the result of her having only a fur rug wrapped around her otherwise naked body during a drug bust at Keith Richard’s home the year before. In the film, Faithfull famously wears a black-leather catsuit with fur lining. Meow.
 

 
There’s not a whole lot of dialogue and even less plot in Girl on a Motorcycle. In a nutshell, Faithfull plays a young woman bored in her marriage who decides to escape, riding through the European on a motorcycle to meet her lover (Alain Delon). The audience hears her thoughts and existential musings. There are some spicy sex scenes with Delon that earned the tame-by-today’s-standards film, an X rating. It’s a little hard to follow and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but who cares? That’s not why you’re watching it anyway.

What we basically have in Girl on a Motorcycle is one of the quintessential Swinging 60s time capsule relics of psychedelic sexploitation. Is it a “good movie”? No. Is it a feast for the eyes. YES, indeed it is, and not just because of the gorgeous Ms. Faithfull, either. The European scenery is also brilliantly captured by director Jack Cardiff, a well-respected cinematographer who also shot classic films like The African Queen, The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus (Not to mention Rambo: First Blood II). There’s also the psychedelic jazz score from Les Reed to recommend the film.

In summation: Girl on a Motorcycle, it’s 90 minutes of great shot after shot of one of the hottest women ever born riding a motorcycle in a leather catsuit or else having that same catsuit removed by a Frenchman’s teeth. With great music and some solarized psychedelic stuff thrown in for good measure (and to foil censors). The end.

This is the trailer for Girl on a Motorcycle. Picture this going on for about 90 minutes and… you’ll get the idea:
 

 
Here’s a page with lots of photos and scans of the many, many different movie posters that were made for this film. I have owned many of these myself. Note, in particular, the Czech and Japanese ones mid-way down the page. This is the kind of thing that I set up Ebay alerts for. (Cinebeats)

 
Slim Gaillard was a wonderful jazz performer and inventor of his own groovy dialect he called Vout. He was notably immortalized in the following passage from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road:

‘... one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who’s always saying ‘Right-orooni’ and ‘How ‘bout a little bourbon-arooni.’ In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He’ll sing ‘Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti’ and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he’ll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can’t hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, ‘Great-orooni ... fine-ovauti ... hello-orooni ... bourbon-orooni ... all-orooni ... how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni ... orooni ... vauti ... oroonirooni ...” He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can’t hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience.

Dean stands in the back, saying, ‘God! Yes!’—and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. ‘Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.’ Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two C’s, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverie and realizes Slim is playing ‘C-Jam Blues’ and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages. Finally the set is over; each set takes two hours. Slim Gaillard goes and stands against a post, looking sadly over everybody’s head as people come to talk to him. A bourbon is slipped into his hand. ‘Bourbon-orooni—thank-you-ovauti ...’ Nobody knows where Slim Gaillard is. Dean once had a dream that he was having a baby and his belly was all bloated up blue as he lay on the grass of a California hospital. Under a tree, with a group of colored men, sat Slim Gaillard. Dean turned despairing eyes of a mother to him. Slim said, ‘There you go-orooni.’ Now Dean approached him, he approached his God; he thought Slim was God; he shuffled and bowed in front of him and asked him to join us. ‘Right-orooni,’ says Slim; he’ll join anybody but won’t guarantee to be there with you in spirit. Dean got a table, bought drinks, and sat stiffly in front of Slim. Slim dreamed over his head. Every time Slim said, ‘Orooni,’ Dean said ‘Yes!’ I sat there with these two madmen. Nothing happened. To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni.’

 
So with that in mind here are a handful of clips. He has so many great songs, it was hard to narrow them down !
First a few live clips from his mid-40’s heyday. A young Scatman Crothers on drums:

 
More Slim after the jump…

 
It lives! Richard and I have taken the leap and are aiming to post a new episode of Dangerous Minds Radio Hour every two weeks. It’s serious fun for us to sit around and play records and chat about them, so listen in and know the pleasant feeling of being in a small room in Granada Hills with a couple of total music nerds for an hour or so.
 
Sir George Martin: “Theme One” (BBC Radio One theme)
The Fall: “Fit and Working Again”
Material w/ Nona Hendryx: “Take a Chance”
Nervous Gender: “People Like You”
The Turtles:“Somewhere Friday Night” (produced by Ray Davies of The Kinks)
Lilys: “And One (On One)”
Meredith Monk (with Don Preston): “Candy Bullets and Moon”
Love: “Willow Willow”
Firesign Theater: “Station Break”
Tyrannosaurus Rex: “Fist Heart Mighty Dawn Dart”
Marsha Hunt: “(Oh No! Not) The Beast Day”
Klaus Nomi: “Za Bak Daz”
Talk Talk: “It’s Getting Late in the Evening”
The Goon Show:“The Ying Tong Song” (Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan & Harry Secombe. Produced by Sir George Martin)
Orchid Spangiafora: “Dime Operation”
 

 
To download this episode or subscribe to the podcast please go to our internet radio partner Alterati.com
 
Listen to Dangerous Minds Radio Hour episode 1

 
Since posting about Rick Meyerowitz’s up coming book on the National Lampoon, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great the other day, I’ve had the Lampoon on the brain a bit. Last night I was adding things to the Netflix queue, when I noticed, to my surprise and delight, that there was a video document of the 1973 Off Broadway production of National Lampoon’s Lemmings, starring a very young John Belushi (23 or 24 at the time), Christopher Guest (25), Chevy Chase (30 and with long hair) as well as Rhonda Coullet (who does a wicked Joni Mitchell) and Alice Playten (who nearly steals the show with her outrageous Joan Baez parody). The show was written by Tony Hendra (the manager in This Is Spinal Tap, who also co-directed Lemmings), Doug Kenney (National Lampoon co-founder and co-writer of Animal House. He also played “Stork”) and P.J. O’Rourke.

The first surprise is that this even exists in the first place. I’ve known the record since I was a kid, but who knew there was a video of this? Well, there is and it’s fascinating, if not exactly all that funny. It’s interesting because it’s got these three great funnymen seen before they would achieve fame a few years later with SNL and also it’s a wild period piece. If this sounds even remotely like something you’d be interested in, by all means get over to Netflix and watch it, but if you don’t expect it to be the best thing you’ve ever seen and don’t expect belly laughs (there are a few) then you’ll be able to appreciate this more on its own, slightly rumpled terms. Comedy doesn’t tend to age well, but that’s not why you want to watch this. One strong disclaimer, though, for younger viewers, most of the references are going to be totally incomprehensible unless they’ve seen the Woodstock documentary.

Although the cheesy titles don’t tell you this, Lemmings was videotaped for HBO as The National Lampoon Television Show. We didn’t know that when we were watching it and wondered what possible outlet there would have been for something with so much swearing in it in 1973? Turns out HBO started the year before, so we had our answer, but still, how odd that they kept something like this out of the public eye for so long.
 

 
The “plot” of Lemmings, as such, is that the audience is supposed to be present for a Thanos-celebrating rock festival: “Woodshuck: Three Days of Peace, Music & Death.”  A Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young spoof (“Freud, Pavlov, Adler, and Jung”) sees the group singing a parody of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” (and their own “LongTime Gone”) but the lyrics have been changed to “We are lemmings”—instead of stardust—and Belushi, as the MC makes constant references and updates about members of the audience killing themselves and snuffing it (“The brown strychnine has been cut with acid.”). Near the end, as the heavy metal group “Megadeath” are playing, Alice Playton (as a groupie) asks “Did you know that pure rock sound can kill? Isn’t that far out? So the thing to do is go over to the amp and put your head there.”

More on National Lampoon’s Lemmings after the jump…

 
Although a famous Vogue cover shot by Patrick Lichfield of Marsha Hunt, naked, with a huge Afro, as a London cast member of Hair is an indisputably and quintessentially iconic image of the 1960s, Hunt remains under the radar of most music fans. For one (quite good) reason, there are exactly zero CDs of her music on the market currently and there is nothing on iTunes either. This is too bad, because she made some worthwhile music during her career. However, some pretty great clips of her live on European TV have been popping up on YouTube and many of her better known singles have made it to some audio blogs, as well, so there’s plenty for me to illustrate here what still makes Hunt the object of cult fascination. Eventually, I have no doubt, she’ll be rediscovered by music nerds.

Hunt, an insanely gorgeous, highly intellectual 19-year-old model, originally from Philly, who went to Berkeley (and marched with Jerry Rubin!), moved to swinging London in 1966. She married Mike Ratledge of the Soft Machine so she could stay in the country (and is still married to him to this day, although they have not been together for decades) and sang back-up vocals for blues great Alexis Korner. She became a cast member of Hair, having but two lines as “Dionne” in the West End production.

Below, a clip of Marsha Hunt performing her cover version of Dr. John’s Walk on Gilded Splinters:
 

 
Next up, my favorite Marsha Hunt track (Oh No! Not) The Beast Day. To my ears this sounds way, way, way ahead if its time, reminding me (a lot) of Demon Days by the Gorillaz or mid-career Talking Heads. Turn this up LOUD, you’ll be really glad you did:

More Marsha Hunt after the jump…

 
Wow !, Much thanks to DM reader Ryan who in his comment on Marc’s Beefheart post yesterday hepped me to this book: Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic by the Magic Band’s long suffering drummer, John “Drumbo” French. My copy is flying toward me in the mail as I type but I already know to expect tales of tyrannical cruelty (bunch of dudes living in a run down house in Woodland Hills, practicing 12 hours a day, eating only a handful of soybeans per day) and sublime inspiration. In anticipation, here’s a miraculous clip of the Lick My Decals Off,Baby era Magic Band (including Drumbo) playing a suite of tunes live on Detroit TV in 1971.
 

 
Back in May Richard, myself and Elvin Estela (aka DJ Nobody) had the notion to make a pilot episode for a possible Dangerous Minds radio show. The format is a round robin wherein we three music nerds each take turns presenting tunes we think the others (and hopefully the listening audience) would enjoy hearing along with some bits of information and personal anecdotes. In short, a radio/podcast version of what we do every day on the blog. So after some hemming and hawing, as you do, here’s what we came up with. We’re thinking of making this a regular feature for the site. Let us know what you think !
 
Alan Hawkshaw - Blarney’s Stoned
Armando Trovaioli -Sesso Matto
Keith West- On A Saturday
Alex Oriental Experience - Derule
? - My Name Is John (seriously, we don’t know who this is, help !)
Alison Gross - Naturally
The Oimels - A Day in the Life
Desmond Dekker - Come Together
Leon Russell - I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry
Marcos Valle - Mi Hermosa
P.J. Proby - The Day Lorraine Came Down
Baths - ♥
Monitor - Beak
Scotty - Clean Race
Focus - House of the King
 

 
To download this episode or subscribe to the podcast please go to our internet radio partner Alterati.com
 
Listen to Dangerous Minds Radio Hour episode 2

 
Soon after his high profile 1980 drug bust, Papa John Phillips reformed the Mamas and the Papas with daughter Mackenzie, Denny Doherty and Spanky McFarlane (from Spanky & Our Gang). Both Phillips’ were still in rehab, at the time, where they were working as drug counsellors. John and Mackenzie made this appearance on Canadian magazine program, That’s Life, during their 1983 tour, to talk about rebuilding their lives after drugs in an interview seems that seems remarkably candid compared to the execrable confessional talk show culture we have today.
 

 
The new Mamas and the Papas toured and recorded for eight years. Initially, their band included Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson and keyboard player Arthur Stead, who’s next gig was playing with Public Image Limited! A new collection of unreleased songs from that period, Many Mamas Many Papas has just been released as part of the “Papa John Presents” series of archival releases, and proves that Phillips was still capable of churning out catchy songs with a sting in the tail long after his 60s heyday. Among them is Kokomo, almost unrecognisable in its original form from the later Beach Boys version – rewritten by Mike Love as a boozy paean to Spring break.

In light of recent revelations, Fairy Tale Girl is a poignant (even, prescient) song about daughter Mackenzie, written in the early 70s around the time she starred in American Graffiti. But then, Papa John has been a magnet for outrageous claims for years. Here, he tells Larry King about the night Roman Polanski accused him of murdering Sharon Tate!
 

 
After making one remarkable self-titled psych-pop album in the ‘60s that’s been a collector’s staple for years, Jamme are one of those bands that somehow slipped through the net. Their debut has just been reissued for the first time, 40 years later (via Now Sounds), and has a fantastic story attached to it.

In 1968, Jamme—a four-piece made up of two Brits and two Americans—were just another young group of musicians trying to make it on the Sunset Strip when they were handed the opportunity of a lifetime after John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas offered to produce an album for them, thinking he had found the new Beatles.

So far, so good. However, not everything went quite to plan. The band came into Phillips’ life in the summer of 1968, just as the Mamas and the Papas were breaking up, his marriage to Michelle Phillips was on the rocks and he was having an affair with Mia Farrow (right under the nose of Frank Sinatra!).

All of that contributed to a rather bizarre recording experience, all of which took place in the studio Phillips had installed in the roof of his Bel Air mansion—the same studio Sly Stone later used to make “There’s A Riot Goin’ On”—the entrance to which, incidentally, was hidden (James Bond-style) behind a secret panel on the first floor of the house.

The whole amazing story of the Jamme is detailed in the pretty lengthy liner notes that come with the reissue. For now, listen to their groovy signature tune, “Strawberry Jam Man”, which sounds it like it should be the theme to some whacked-out Saturday morning kids TV show, and enjoy this little nugget from the notes:
———-
One night, Michelle Phillips, Mia Farrow and Jamme drummer Terry Rae all dropped acid together in the lounge below the studio, while John was upstairs leading a session with the band. When the panel that lead out to the main house was closed, the room was cast into pitch blackness. They all laid underneath a table with their heads pressed together, legs sticking out like the spokes of a wheel, all giggly and loose.

“Wouldn’t it be great to go to France,” squealed Mia. “Just jump on a plane right now and go.”

“Let’s go to France, then,” added Michelle. “Let’s just go!”

Rae’s 18-year old acid-fried mind was having trouble taking all this in. He was sitting under a table in the dark with Michelle Phillips and Mia Farrow as they were discussing taking him with them halfway across the world on a Lear jet. When the talk turned to more intimate matters, Rae began to get feel uncomfortable.

“What would the sleeping arrangements be,” Mia asked out loud.

“What if John was here? You wouldn’t be talking like this,” Rae stammered.

But no sooner had he said it then the panel opened up, the room was flooded with bright white light and John Phillips’ voice boomed out: “I am here.”

He had been there all along, standing silently at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the studio, listening to every word. Rae was mortified. “Being on acid, it blew the whole thing up in my mind. I was just totally blown away that he might have thought I was doing anything. But he took the opinion that I was a threat and had all the intentions of going to France with them to get laid. It was just a crazy fantasy. A joke, basically. We were having fun. But it turned out to be my demise.”

Shortly afterwards, John pushed the other members of the Jamme into firing Rae. As he was not only acting as their producer but also bankrolling the sessions, they had little choice but to comply.

“Funny enough,” Rae reflects, “both Mia and Michelle were in love with John. There were obviously problems with Michelle, but I don’t think she would have ever frivolously just gone off with some guy to get laid.”

A month after he was fired from the band, Rae was bemused to get a call from Mia Farrow. She invited him to the house on Copa De Oro Road that afternoon on the pretext of showing him some candid photographs of her with the Beatles in India.

“Nobody had photos, you know, actual 4x4 photos of the Beatles. You never saw stuff like that,” he says, even while acknowledging that he again found the situation alone with Mia Farrow in Frank Sinatra’s house“really weird”.

After a fashion, Mia sighed. “I have a problem,” she said, gingerly. “My best friend is Michelle, but I’m in love with John. What should I do?”

“Stick with Michelle and don’t mess with John,” Rae offered, his advice colored by his own recent experience at the hands of John Phillips.
 

 
Buy Jamme at Amazon

 
Tara and I watched Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story this weekend (it’s on the Netflix VOD currently) and I absolutely loved it. It’s a truly great film, one that I have no doubt will be looked at and revered by future generations trying to understand what the hell happened in our backwards era. I recommend it to everyone who reads this blog and cares about my opinion. It was absolutely spellbinding to me. I felt as if I wanted to cheer several times to see someone say these things and say them so powerfully. Capitalism: A Love Story, or a film just like it, needed to be made. but there is only one guy who could have pulled off something like this, gotten it funded, herded through the distribution system and gotten a message this radical the deep penetration in the culture that it deserves, and it’s Michael Moore.

Surprisingly, Capitalism: A Love Story is perhaps the least polemic of all of Moore’s films, even if it does, at root, articulately advocate the necessity of class warfare, at least at the ballot box.  Most of what Moore, or his protagonists, have to say in the film would be damed difficult to refute, perhaps this is why it doesn’t seem as confrontational as Moore’s films often are. You’d have to have a very closed mind to deny the reality of what you see on display here. Even Sean Hannity would have a hard time arguing with any of it (although I doubt he watched or will ever watch Moore’s film)

To say what Michael Moore says in Capitalism: A Love Story took balls and it also took amazing skill as a storyteller, underscoring his Mark Twain-like role in American society. After a mind-numbing section where the audience is introduced to the concept of the so-called “Dead Peasant” life insurance policies some major companies take out on their non-essential employees—unbeknownst to them—where they make more money if the employee dies, he cuts to an interview with Father Dick Preston, the Flint, Michigan-based priest who married Moore and his wife Kathleen Glynn (who interviewed me for a job once, she’s super cool).

He quietly asks the priest if capitalism is evil and what Jesus would think about free enterprise and his answer is devastating. This isn’t some left-wing loony he had to search out, this is the man who married him, the local priest who, like Moore, has witnessed the tragedy and destruction the loss of the auto industry in Flint, Michigan did to their hometown. Both of these men knows what greed does and how and who it harmed. People with first and last names.

And let me tell you, this priest fucking nails it. It’s a powerful, powerful cinematic moment.

Speaking as someone who took ten people on my own 24th birthday to see Roger and Me when it was in theaters—I also released This Divided State on DVD when I was at Disinformation—maybe I’m biased, but do yourself a favor and see this film. Better still, if you watch it and you like it, consider having a screening party at your house and invite 5 or 6 friends over to watch it and discuss it afterwards. It takes two hours to watch and could open the eyes of even a devout redneck Fox News watcher (well, some redneck Fox News watchers) to what’s really going on in this country. It’s not like Glenn Beck is ever going to tell them.

Below is one of the most powerful moments in a film full of them: rare footage taken right after FDR’s final State of the Union address where he lays out the concept of a Second Bill of Rights that would have guaranteed that all Americans have “a useful job, a decent home, adequate health care, and a good education.”

God bless Michael Moore. He’s a great American.
 

 
The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove it (Yahoo! Finance)

The U.S. Economy Is A Dead Horse And The American People Are Starting To Get Really Pissed Off And Frustrated (Economic Collapse)

 
Some claim the 1963 hit single Sally Go Round The Roses by The Jaynetts is the first recorded psychedelic pop tune. While this may or may not be true, it’s certainly a beautifully hypnotic, circular number with mysterious and whimsical lyrical imagery. It’s also, I’ve discovered, one of the most covered songs ever so I’ve decided to line up most of the versions I’ve found. Play ‘em one after the other or mix and match to make your own trance-inducing rose parade. Let’s begin with the original. I have no proof, but it’s claimed that the drummer on this session was Buddy Miles, later of Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies.

 
Many more roses after the jump…

 
I think that those of us who are old enough to remember hearing actual Muzak in public places were in fact hearing one of these diabolical devices: The Seeburg 1000 background music system. Essentially a stackable spindle record player that played Seeburg’s specially produced 16rpm, big hole in the middle LPs chock full of motivating background music, sure to bring out the productivity in your employees and the wallets from your customers. I was delighted to find literally hundreds of clips of these records, alas mostly being played on conventional players, on the youtubes. For the pupose of this post I’m concentrating on a few examples from Seeburg’s long running Industrial library:

Average tempo: medium fast. Predominantly instrumental,with a light seasoning of great vocals. An occasional polka or march. Emphasis on popular music. Minimum of stringed instruments. Unusually rhythmical. Over-all lively character but never a rock ‘n’ roll. Designed for Industrial plants only.

 
Much more after the jump…

 
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

 
Word from a Fab Five Freddy tweet and a post on his own MySpace blog is that New York hip-hop futurist Rammellzee has passed away at age 50 from as-yet-unrevealed causes. (@149st features a great, fact-filled interview with the man.) Emerging as a teen graffiti artist in the mid-‘70s, bombing the A-train from its last stop in his Far Rockaway, Queens hometown, Rammell ended up like many of his talented peers—a multidisciplinary creative icon submerged in the nascent metropolitan hip-hop scene.  He first surfaced as a persona to the world in amazing fashion, dressed in trenchcoat and wielding a sawed-off shotgun as he MC’ed for the Rock Steady Crew in the Amphitheatre scene of hip-hop’s famous first film, 1982’s Wild Style.
 

 
Behold the rarely seen music video for Bongwater’s feminist indie rock anthem, The Power of Pussy, from the album of the same title.

When The Power of Pussy came out, in 1991, I became obsessed with doing a music video for this song. I was, and still am, a huge, huge Bongwater fan. Luckily, at the time,  I was working at the studio where Ann Magnuson’s Cinemax special Vandemonium had been produced and one of the partners knew Ann and introduced me to her. Ann and I have been great friends ever since. (Bongwater’s Kramer and I went on to author a screenplay together, a conspiracy theory comedy about homicidal mailmen, called Mailman, which we’re going to adapt into a graphic novel one day).

Partnering with a friend of mine named Alan Henderson, I had been working on various low budget music videos for a couple of years—-mostly for “underground” and indie acts from New York’s East Village. We’d shoot and edit them in the Manhattan-based Windsor Digital Video post production house where we both worked, off hours and on the weekends. The highest budget we ever got was, I think, $3000. (This Bongwater video had a budget of $1000 and $600 of that went to Ann’s hair and make-up, with the remainder going to pizza and videotape stock.). We did videos for John Sex, two for Larry Tee, one for an absolutely brilliant band called The Beme Seed, whose lead singer was Kathleen Lynch, the naked, gyrating go-go dancer from deep within the bowels of Hell who made the live Butthole Surfers experience so deeply berserk in the mid-80s. I’m going to post them all here in the coming week.

I had just left this job at the post house and had taken a new gig downtown at this production studio when this was in the planning stages. One of the principal animators in the studio, Glen Claybrook (who had projects like Pee-wee’s Playhouse and the opening credits for Madonna’s Who’s That Girl film under his belt) came up to me one day and said “Hey, I hear you are going to do a video for Bongwater’s Power of Pussy and I have had a vision….”

That, as you will see from the animation Glen produced, was a coy understatement! A vision, indeed! The best thing was, we didn’t pay a single cent cent for any of the animation costs because it was all shot on 35mm short ends and was processed, transfered and charged off to a huge advertising agency’s budget. We probably buried about two grand of the costs in that way. Sometimes you have to be a little creative, right? It never would have happened otherwise.

And speaking of getting creative, we also needed, to be able to pull off the title, as seen above, a woman who wasn’t shy about getting naked. I’ve read on the Internet that she is supposed to be Christina Martinez from Boss Hog (and wife of Jon Spencer) but this is inaccurate. It’s a good guess, it’s just not true. We found the performer for this, a woman with the first name Gina, at the New York Dolls topless bar near Wall Street. As you can see from the video, she was staggeringly beautiful. When she would change stages, as dancers tend to do, the entire gravity of the room would shift as every guy in the house moved across the floor, clamoring to get a better look. She was Megan Fox hot. Probably made $5000 a day in tips, which she spent on putting herself through medical school as I recall.

The feral felines were shot on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy. An eccentric old lady fed dozens of stray cats and someone I knew suggested that I just needed to show up with a few soup bones to see them totally go nuts. And they did indeed (see video). I shot that part on Super 8.

In the end, as will come as no surprise to anyone, this video got played very, very, very few times in public: twice on Playboy’s Hot Rocks (a music video show hosted by Jenny McCarthy and produced by my old friend Eric Mittleman) and once on Al Goldstein’s Midnight Blue cable access program when Bongwater’s Kramer was a guest on the show). It’s in the permanent collection of 17 museums around the world (mostly in former Soviet client states, believe it or not, but one is in California).

Ann threw a big party to premiere the video and it was the first time I was ever in Los Angeles. There were tons of TV and movie stars there (Albert Brooks, Richard Lewis), rockstars (members of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fishbone) Russ Meyer actress Kitten Natividad and even Simpson’s creator Matt Groening, who asked me for a copy for his personal collection, which was a thrill. (When his wife arrived at the party he even made me play it a second time). The party was written up in the LA Weekly. It was my first evening in Los Angeles and that night I decided I wanted to move here and did, six months later.

I haven’t seen this video in years, but today Eric made a digital copy for me from the sole tape I have of this piece—a 3/4” tape, I might add—and I laughed my ass off watching it. Now it’s your turn… Enjoy!

Credits, as I recall them after 19 years… Directed by Alan Henderson and Richard Metzger. Animation directed by Glen Claybrook. Produced by me, and shot and edited by Alan. Billy Beyond did Ann’s make-up and Danilo did that ‘leaning tower of wig’ that Ann’s wearing (she had worn this same wig the week before in London, giving an award to ZZ Top(!) with Justin Hayward and John Lodge of Moody Blues on the Brit Awards program). Thanks would be appropriate also to Peter Rosenthal who helped shepherd this through the production process as cheaply as possible via his former production company.
 

 
After Rebel Without a Cause, my next exposure to director Nicholas Ray probably came through Lightning Over Water, Wim Wenders’ incredibly moving documentary on Ray’s last days before succumbing to lung cancer.

Then came Johnny Guitar, On Dangerous Ground, and, most recently, Criterion‘s bang-up resissuing of 1956’s Bigger Than Life.  James Mason plays a milquetoast school teacher, who, thanks to the “miracle drug” Cortisone, releases with near-tragic consequences his inner Übermensch.  You can watch a great, Mason-hosted trailer for the film here.

If you haven’t seen Bigger Than Life, please do—it remains one of the more scathing critiques of the “American Dream” ever committed to film.

After dying 31 years ago this month, Nicholas Ray popped up again in yesterday’s NYT.  During the years preceding his death, Ray devoted himself to his experimental film, We Can’t Go Home Again.

Made in collaboration with his college students at the time, segments of the film pop up in Lightning Over Water, but now Ray’s widow, Susan, in honor of what would have been her husband’s 100 birthday, is assembling a full print of We Can’t Go Home Again for next year’s Venice Film Festival:

“It was an experimental film, a difficult film and I think a visionary film that is particularly important today,” Ms. Ray said from her home in Saugerties, N.Y., where she has also been organizing the storehouse of original scripts, notes and movie storyboards for a sale.  Ray worked on the project from 1972 to 1976 with students he taught at Harpur College at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  An early version was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray continued to revise, reshoot and re-edit it until his death.  The film employs what Ray called “mimage” (short for multiple image), in which a number of camera images are simultaneously projected on the screen.

In certain respects his ideas were ahead of their time. On screen Ray and the students play versions of themselves, a conceit that smoothly fits into this era of reality television. Today’s digital techniques would also make it easy to create the effects Ray painstakingly tried to achieve on a shoestring budget.  Ray and his students, for example, used Super 8 millimeter and 16 millimeter formats and early video technology, projected the images onto a screen and then refilmed these multiple images using a 35 millimeter camera.

Jean-Luc Godard famously called Ray, “the camera,” and for a man whose conflicts—bisexuality, drug and alcohol abuse—always seemed on the verge of overwhelming his talents, it’s not surprising the director’s life was the subject of more than one documentary.

What follows is another look at Ray, ‘74’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself.  Directed by David Helpern Jr. and James C. Gutman, the doc covers Ray’s Harpur College teaching years, and features several sequences of Ray working on We Can’t Go Home Again.  Remaining parts follow at the bottom.

In light of Dennis Hopper’s recent passing, it’s also definitely worthwhile checking out Wenders’ The American Friend.  Hopper plays Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, and Ray, in the opening scene, contributes a small but impactful cameo as a painter who’s faked his own death.  That scene, restaged with a frail and sickly Ray, opens Lightning Over Water.

 
I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Part II, III, IV, V, VI

Reclaiming Causes of a Filmmaking Rebel

 
Clip from a mockumentary about how Africans view white culture in Austria, a land where “no black man has ever stepped foot.” Does anyone know what this is from? It reminds me of the brilliant retro comedy series, Look Around You created by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz. I’d love to see the entire thing, this clip is but a cruel tease! (Reminds me of Martin Mull’s mid-80s HBO series, The History of White People in America. I will never forget the scene with Fred Willard as a clueless white man (his forte, obviously) barbecuing in his backyard wearing an apron with a cartoon hot dog asking “What Do You Want on Yours?”)

 
What with John Waters seemingly everywhere these days (Salon, the NYT, Fresh Air) as he promotes his new book, Role Models, I thought it’d be a fine time to revisit one of his former film muses, Edith Massey.

Along with Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce, Massey was a stock player in the Dreamlander universe, and a key contributer to that trilogy of Waters films I and many others consider particularly essential: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living.

Watching those three films growing up (and watching them, and watching them), Massey always struck me as being infinitely stranger than larger-than-life drag queen, Divine.  Maybe it was because I somehow grasped that “drag” was, by definition, “performative,” and thus safer than the whacked-out maternalism that Massey so artlessly channeled.  In fact, whereas Divine’s acting method might be described as quotation-marks-within-quotation-marks, Massey seemingly acted without the cushion of any marks whatsoever—quotation or otherwise.

Massey’s life after Waters was perhaps no odder than her life before it, and its trajectory has an arc straight out of Dickens: from orphanage to reform school, from freight train rider to brothel madam, and then, as these things sometimes go, to Hollywood.

Some of this ground is covered in the ‘74 documentary on her life: Love Letter To Edie (you can watch a clip from that film here).  The below interview from the early 80’s is also amusing:

 
Of course, no Massey entry would be complete without the infamous “Egg Man” moment from Pink Flamingos.  That follows below:

 
After a battle with cancer and diabetes, Massey passed away in Venice, California, in 1984.  That was 2 years after Massey and her band, called, naturally, Edie and the Eggs, released the below Rodney on the Roq staple, Punks, Get Off The Grass: