Topics | Dangerous Minds (2024)

06.09.2024

03:12 pm

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John Peel’s oft-repeatedline about how the Fall’s music was “always different, always the same” could also be said about the output of English singer-songwriter Scott Lavene, although with just four albums under his belt, he’s got a long way to go before catching up to the Fall’s apparently infinite back catalog. And much like the late Mark E. Smith’s, Lavene’s music is so infusedwith his own idiosyncratic personality and lyrical preoccupations (custard, double denim, drinking, stealing roses from his racist neighbor’s garden) that no one would ever mistake one of his songs for anyone else’s. With his latestalbum, Disneyland in Dagenham, Lavene’s tunes are, in fact, largelythe same as heard on his previous two long players (2019’s Broke and 2021’s Milk City Sweethearts) which is not, I hasten to add, an indication of actual sameness, but more an indication of consistently high quality and great songwriting. That he delivers exactly what his audience expects from a Scott Lavene album—always different, always the same and always really f*cking good.

According to TIDAL, I’ve listened to Disneylandin Dagenham 186 times in the past month. I’ve already listened to it from start to finish twice today and it’s not even 9 am here. I think it’s safe for the reader to assume that I really love this album. It’s world-class. All killer, no filler. An instant classic. Every song is a 10 out of 10. I like every single song on it so much that it almost seems like a greatest hits album tomyears after only four weeks. I could say the same about his other albums, too. Another observation about Lavene’s music—this occurred to me while revisiting his previous albums—is how well they are sequenced and how satisfying they are as start-to-finish listens. That and his arrangements are really sophisticated. Yes indeed, Disneylandin Dagenham is exactly what I expected from a Scott Lavene album and after a three-year wait, I was not the slightest bit disappointed. I mean, who listens to the same album 186 times in one month?

Scott Lavene has been compared a lot to Ian Dury—I’ve done it myself—and that is a valid juxtaposition for quite a few reasons. First off, who’d mistake one of Ian Dury’s songs for anyone else’s? The same could be said of Lavene’s music. They both embrace narrative songwriting, wry portrayals of dodgy characters they’ve met along the way, wild nights out, working-class Britain, self-reflection, humor, Billericay, and wordplay, each capable of finding profound insights in life’s most mundane details. Additionally, the two men share a similar…let’s call it a “life force” that emanates from the grooves of their records.Were Ian Dury still alive, I suspect he’d see the commonality between their work himself.

Allow me to clarify further: Being compared to someone like Ian Dury as a songwriter would indicate an ineffably unique approach, would it not? It’s not that I think Lavene is all that influenced by Ian Dury. There might be some influence, sure, but if I can express this properly the thing that they probably have most in common as songwriters is that they are both, and cannot pretend to be otherwise, genuinely who they are. The music itself doesn’t sound evenremotely the same, it’s theapproach, and the strengthof the personality. You don’t hear that much true originality or individuality anymore and when you do it’s striking. It stands out. Just as Mark E. Smith could only sound like Mark E. Smith, and Ian Dury sound like Ian Dury, Scott Lavene can only sound like Scott Lavene.

Disneylandin Dagenham kicks off with “Paper Roses,” a wistful ballad of doomed love, a duet of sorts with The Hold Steady’s Craig Finnlending his distinctive gravelly voice as a cynical bookie who won’t accept a bet on the relationship lasting. “Custard” is about family life, walking the dog, and, you guessed it, custard. “Debbie,” one of the album’s singles, portrays the titular subject, a mad inventor on a mission forZeus, surrounded by her machinery and lots and lots and lots of fuses. (“Take the bread out of that, it’s not a toaster” goes the whispered chorus.)

“Horse and I” sounds like it started as a short story—I was reminded of both Bob Dylan’s Tarantula “novel” (which I HIGHLY recommend) as well as Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes—and tells the tale of Lavene and an equestrianpal busking across France performing Talking Heads and Cure covers. It’s a masterpiece in under four minutes. I f*cking love this one. The album’s title track is a bittersweet and delicate paean to life outside of London, then we get to “Sadly I’m Not Steve McQueen” a bouncy New Wave raver of a song namechecking the macho Hollywood legend and imagining that he’d be the sad one not to be Scott Lavene if he only knew what he was missing out on. It’s fantastic and is followed by another banger, “Julie Johnson”a song I usually play twice in a row, if not ten times in a row every time I listen to Disneylandin Dagenham (which, I will remind you has been quite often in recent weeks.) “Little Bird” is a sweet ballad about two lovers being viewed by a feathered friend. It could be a tear-jerker in a Broadway or West End musical. “Rats” finds Lavene asking if he “can just be America’s sweetheart” and the amusing “Keeping it Local” ably caps a very satisfying song cycle.

Let me conclude by inviting you to listen to Disneylandin Dagenham below and reminding you that once you’ve finished, you’ll want to check out the rest of Scott Lavene’s catalog. If you’ve never heard his wonderful music before, I envy you, because you’re in for a fantastic treat.

“Disneyland in Dagenham”

“Debbie”

“Sadly, I’m Not Steve McQueen”

Julie Johnson

05.23.2024

04:15 pm

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It’s too bad words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘epic’ have been so overused by excitable film critics, because Sion Sono’s Love Exposure is an actual epic masterpiece that is going to dominate the filmscape for decades.” - New York Asian Film Festival

“Japan’s eroto-theosophical answer to the allegorical journeys of Alejandro Jodorowsky”—Film Four

Japanese auteur Sion Sono’s extraordinary 2008 film Love Exposure (“Ai no mukidashi”) is the epic—yet still whimsical—story of Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima), the “king of the perverts.” Yu is the ninja master of the “up skirt” photograph. After his mother dies, Yu’s father becomes a Catholic priest. He insists that his son confess his sins to him. Yu, a good boy, has nothing really to confess so he just makes stuff up that his father doesn’t even believe. Eventually he falls in with a new crowd and soon his transgressions are a bit more… sinful. Still, Yu himself is not aroused by his own panty shots and lives an otherwise chaste life as he patiently awaits the arrival of his one true love. He’s only “sinning” for the sake of his relationship with his father.

Yu loses a bet and he is obliged to dress as a woman and kiss a girl he likes. As the boys are goofing off, they come across a young girl, Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), who is about to be attacked by a gang. Yu is instantly smitten with the beautiful Yoko and—still dressed as a woman—he jumps into the fight and together they kick the gang’s collective ass. To fulfill the conditions of the bet, Yu kisses Yoko who begins to think she is a lesbian and crushes hard on Yu’s disguise of “Miss Scorpion” (an obvious nod to the 70s Japanese women in prison Female Convict Scorpion film series) Yu believes he has finally met his one true love… and she thinks he’s a woman!



Yu then finds out that his father the priest has a new girlfriend and will be leaving the priesthood to marry her. Guess who his new step sister is going to be?

The entire first hour of the film—the title card appears 58 minutes in—is but a prologue, setting up what’s to come. The Aum Shinrikyo-like cult religion, the gory violence and the explosions all happen later…It’s a pretty epic love story as far as they go. Trust me, you have never seen THIS film before (or anything else even remotely like it). But you really need to.

I’d recommend Sono’s loopy masterpiece (and it is a masterpiece) to anyone with a taste for unusual world cinema, which is not to say it’s esoteric in any way, because it’s not. Love Exposure is a real crowd pleaser. It’s an event! It may run for four hours, true, but it felt like two, trust me, don’t be intimidated by the length.Even if someone doesn’t love it as much as I do, surely they would appreciate it. It’s such an unusual cinematic experience. And it’s great fun. When it was over, I was sad there wasn’t more. When’s the last time you felt that way about a four hour film? Feel that way about Ben Hur or The Irishman?

A trailer for Sino Sono’s ‘Love Exposure’ with English subtitles. I can’t say that it’s successful at getting the film’s point across, but that would just be impossible.

It didn’t take but a minute after the film had ended for me to jump online and try to buy the film’s soundtrack. It doesn’t exist as such, but aside from a bit of Beethoven’s “Symphony No.7 in A Major” and Ravel’s “Bolero” the entire four hour film’s soundtrack consists of three amazing songs by the long running Japanese psych rock band Yura Yura Teikoku (“The Wobbling Empire”). These same three songs are played over and over and over again. After four hours, they are drilled into your DNA for life.

Although I personally had never heard of them before, Yura Yura Teikoku were around from 1989 to 2010. They are one of the very few “underground” groups in Japan ever to become a major commercial act. They almost never played outside of Japan, and were, and still are, criminally obscure outside of their homeland. I’ll try to describe their sound, but it’s sort of pointless as Yura Yura Teikoku cover so much territory from song to song. They’re intense, but they’re melodic. At times the trio—who describe their own music simply as “psychedelic rock”—sound like Can crossed with Phish. Or early Flaming Lips doing a spaghetti western theme. Other times they remind me of a 60s garage rock band like The Sonics, but the next song will sound like Lloyd Cole. The one after that sounds like the lovechild of Neu! and the Grateful Dead. Or even the Ventures channeled through Ennio Morricone or a combination of Pink Floyd with The Blow Monkeys! Suffice to say, they are all over the map musically, from heavier riff-based guitar rock to prettier tunes that would make a great soundtrack for a picnic on a sunny day. From hard-rock workouts that will crush your head to things that you would whistle along with. Black Sabbath to Burt Bacharach on the same album, if not the same song.

The one area of commonality that nearly ALL of Yura Yura Teikoku’s music has—trust me, because I’ve been positively gorging myself on it lately—is that their songs posses a quality that make them sound uncannily familiar. The three songs featured so prominently in Love Exposure are especially adept earworms. Have a listen to my new favorite band, Yura Yura Teikoku. Chances are that they might become your new favorite new band, too.

“Kudo desu (Hollow Me)”

More after the jump…

04.24.2024

02:36 pm

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Sorry, but this is not going to be one of those analog vs. digital rants that goofball audiophile types like to indulge in at the drop of a hat. In fact I probably should have just called it something like “Why you should never buy new vinyl versions of classic albums.”

Actually I like digital audio just fine. In fact, until four years ago, I’d have told you that I preferred it. SACDs, HDCDs, High Fidelity Pure Audio Blu-Rays, 24-bit HD master audio files, 5.1 surround sound, DSD files—I have a large amount of this kind of material, both on physical media and with another ten terabytes on a computer drive. I like streaming audio very much. Roon is the bomb! Let me be clear, I’ve got no problem with digital audio. Even if I did, 99.9% of all music made these days is produced on a computer, so there’s really no practical way to avoid it. Analog and digital audio are two very separate things and each has its own pluses and minuses. I like them both for different reasons.

Please allow me to state the obvious right here at the outset: Most people WILL NOT GIVE A sh*t about what follows. One out of a hundred maybe, no, make that one out of a thousand. Almost none of you who have read this far will care about this stuff. If you are that one in a thousand person, read on, this was written especially for you.

Everyone else, I won’t blame you a bit if you want to bail.

Continues after the jump…

03.29.2024

09:22 am

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Bud Lee (1940-2016) is a great American photographer whose work has somehow been overlooked. A prolific contributor to Esquire, Life, Rolling Stone, and other magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who regularly ran extensive portfolios of his work, he took iconic photos of figures as varied as Warhol’s Factory and its superstars, Tennessee Williams, Al Green, James Brown, ZZ Top and Norman Rockwell. Lee covered the Newark riots, and the funerals of Robert Kennedy Jr and Martin Luther King Jr for Life, trailed transgender performance troupe the co*ckettes from San Francisco to New York for their ill-fated off-Broadway debut, and shot production stills on the set of Fellini’s Satyricon, Alice’s Restaurant, and Fiddler on the Roof.

Lee ‘retired’ from magazine work in the early ‘70s and and moved to Iowa, where he founded the Iowa Photographers’ Workshop, as a companion program to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He later moved to Tampa, Florida, where he married art teacher Peggy Howard and started a family. He became very active in the local arts scene around Tampa, Ybor City and Plant City, helping to stage a number of outrageous happenings, as the Artists and Writers Ball, an annual themed costumed ball that harnessed the same freaky anything-goes energy had had experienced in the company of the co*ckettes and on Fellini’s movie sets. An aspiring filmmaker, Lee also shot a no-budget remake of Gone With The Wind with a cast entirely made up of children from local schools.

In August 1970, Lee turned his lens on Iggy Pop while attending one of the Stooges’ legendary shows at Ungano’s in New York, which was recorded by Stooges A&R, Danny Fields, heavily-bootlegged, and reported on extensively by underground rock magazines like CREEM. During the show, backstage, and even at Iggy’s digs in the Chelsea Hotel, Lee took a series of incredible, candid photos of the Stooges frontman at the very height of his ‘Ig’-ness. A few were published in a short-lived underground magazine entitled Earth (as seen here). Most have never been seen.
















Cover of the short-lived Earth magazine.

03.27.2024

02:56 pm

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Six years before Alejandro Jodorowsky’s extraordinary but ill-fated 1975 attempt to film Frank Herbert’s Dune—the story of which was compellingly told in the recent documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune—there was another similarly ambitious and ground-breaking film project that, until recently, was largely unknown.

Saturation 70 was a special effects-laden science fiction movie starring Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and Julian Jones, the five-year-old son of Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Unlike Dune, Saturation 70 did actually make it into production and was shot, but never completed, then was forgotten and undocumented for over forty years.

The film was written and directed by Tony Foutz, who crops up in several music histories, usually described as a ‘Stones insider’, but was actually much more than that. His father, Moray Foutz, was an early executive at Walt Disney. The younger Foutz had his own equally fascinating career path, working in the mid-sixties as a first assistant director in Italy for Gille Pontecorvo, Orson Welles and Marco Ferreri – for whom he later wrote Tales of Ordinary Madness, the first film adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s work. His connection to the Stones came via Anita Pallenberg, who he met in Rome during the filming of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella at Cinecitta Studios in the summer of 1967. Through her, he also befriended Keith Richards.

In 1968, while staying at Richards’ Redlands estate, Foutz wrote a script entitled Maxagasm in collaboration with Sam Shepard, for himself to direct as a vehicle for the Rolling Stones, who were to star in the movie and produce an original soundtrack album for it. During pre-production for Maxagasm in Los Angeles, Foutz was tipped off about Integratron designer and space devotee George Van Tassel’s ‘Spaceship Convention’ at Giant Rock, near Joshua Tree, an annual gathering of UFO abductees and alien enthusiasts. Foutz gathered up some friends to go and film documentary footage there, intending to use it as a way of testing out special effects he was planning for Maxagasm.


Gram Parsons at the piano in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, 1970. Still from the ‘Saturation 70’ promo reel (Anthony Foutz Archive).

On that trip were Gram Parsons (Foutz’s roommate at the Chateau Marmont), Michelle Phillips, Julian Jones and his mother, Linda Lawrence (Parsons’ then-girlfriend), rock photographer Andee Cohen, Flying Burrito Brothers roadie Phil Kaufman, and western character actor Ted Markland—known as ‘the Mayor of Joshua Tree’ for his role in popularizing the location as a retreat for the hip Hollywood set. (It was Markland who first took Lenny Bruce, then the Stones, Parsons and Foutz to the desert to imbibe psychedelics and sit under the stars, scanning the sky for UFOs.) Also along for the ride were cinematographer Bruce Logan and special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull, both fresh off working on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.

Fired up his experience at Giant Rock, Foutz decided to incorporate the footage they’d shot into another feature film project, that came together as a kind of counter culture version of the Wizard of Oz, about a lost star child (Julian Jones) who falls through a wormhole into present day Los Angeles and tries to find his way back home, assisted by four alien beings—the Kosmic Kiddies—who wear clean suits to protect them from the pollution. (The title of the film referenced the level at which carbon monoxide in human blood becomes lethal.)


The Kosmic Kiddies, from R to L: Tony Foutz, Michelle Phillips, Gram Parsons, Phil Kaufman and Andee Cohen. Photo: Tom Wilkes

Saturation ’70 was shot in and around Los Angeles from October 1969 through spring of 1970 and included several spectacular set pieces: a surreal shootout between a Viet Cong soldier and an American G.I. in the aisles of Gelson’s supermarket in Century City (noted gun fan, Phil Spector, visited the set that day and stood on the sidelines to watch); a cowboy picnic on the Avenue of the Stars featuring country music couturier Nudie Cohn and a bevy of cowgirl cheerleaders; and a parade of Ford Edsel cars roaring through the City of Industry in a flying V-formation. He also filmed the Kosmic Kiddies roaming around the city in their clean suits and masks—inside them, Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips, Stash Klossowski de Rola (the son of painter Balthus) and Andee Cohen.

Seeing an opportunity for cross promotion with his music career, Parsons had the Flying Burrito Brothers wear the same suits on the cover of their second album, Burrito Deluxe (also named in honor of the working title for Foutz’s script, “Rutabaga Deluxe”). Parsons and Roger McGuinn were brought together to write songs for and score the soundtrack. Rolling Stone would report that McGuinn intended to use the Moog synthesizer he had acquired at the Monterey Pop Festival two years earlier.


Julian Jones and his fairy godmother

Once principal photography was complete, Foutz started working on the special effects sequences at Doug Trumbull’s Canoga Park facility, incorporating computer-processed visual effects Trumbull was developing there that allowed for graphic and textual overlays on pre-existing film images—a revolutionary idea at the time. Among the effects Foutz and Trumbull were working to create were propagandistic data clouds that floated in the sky (akin to the dirigibles later seen in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner), towering skyscrapers made of television screens and dinosaurs roaming among the derricks in the Inglewood Oil Field near La Cienega Boulevard.


Skid Row Los Angeles, 1970. Not much has changed. Look closely at the signs.

However, before they could complete their work, funding for the film fell through, the producers abandoned the project and the entire project collapsed. All of the footage was subsequently lost apart from one five minute showreel cut to the Flying Burrito Brothers version of the Jagger/Richards song, “Wild Horses,” which Parsons had contributed to the writing of a few months earlier.

For years, existence of the film was little more than a rumour among Gram Parsons fans—a strange anomalous event in his short, gloried career—but now all the existing production photos have been dusted off for an upcoming book that recreates the film shoot, and the story of Saturation 70 can finally be told.

Preorder Saturation 70: A Vision Past of the Future Foretold HERE.

03.24.2024

04:42 pm

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Sherman Hemsley, the actor who played George Jefferson, was known to be a huge fan of prog rock, especially Gentle Giant, Nektar and Gong.

Hemsley collaborated with Yes’s Jon Anderson on a funk-rock opera about the “spiritual qualities of the number 7” (never produced). Hemsley also did an interpretive dance tothe Gentle Giant song “Proclamation” onDinah Shore’s 70s talkshow, that was apparently somewhat confusing for her.

But the best story, I mean the best story of all time, is the one told by Gong’s Daevid Allen about his encounter with the beloved 70’s sitcom star.Here is Allen’s verbatim tale as related toMitch Myers (and originally published in Magnet magazine):

“It was 1978 or 1979, and Sherman Hemsley kept ringing me up. I didn’t know him from a bar of soap because we didn’t have television in Spain (where I was living). He called me from Hollywood saying, ‘I’m one of your biggest fans and I’m going to fly you here and put flying teapots all up and down the Sunset Strip.’ I thought, ‘This guy is a lunatic.’ He kept it up so I said, ‘Listen, can you get us tickets to L.A. via Jamaica? I want to go there to make a reggae track and have a honeymoon with my new girlfriend.’ He said, ‘Sure! I’ll get you two tickets.’

I thought, ‘Well, even if he’s a nut case at least he’s coming up with the goodies.’ The tickets arrived and we had this great honeymoon in Jamaica. Then we caught the plane across to L.A. We had heard Sherman was a big star, but we didn’t know the details. Coming down the corridor from the plane, I see this black guy with a whole bunch of people running after him trying to get autographs. Anyway, we get into this stretch limousine with Sherman and immediately there’s a big joint being passed around. I say, ‘Sorry man, I don’t smoke.’ Sherman says, ‘You don’t smoke and you’re from Gong?’

Inside the front door of Sherman’s house was a sign saying, ‘Don’t answer the door because it might be the man.’ There were two Puerto Ricans that had a LSD laboratory in his basem*nt, so they were really paranoid. They also had little crack/freebase depots on every floor.Then Sherman says, ‘Come on upstairs and I’ll show you the Flying Teapot room.’ Sherman was very sweet but was surrounded by these really crazy people.

We went up to the top floor and there was this big room with darkened windows and “Flying Teapot” is playing on a tape loop over and over again. There were also three really dumb-looking, very voluptuous Southern gals stoned and wobbling around naked. They were obviously there for the guys to play around with.

[My girlfriend] Maggie and I were really tired and went to our room to go to bed. The room had one mattress with an electric blanket and that was it. No bed covering, no pillow, nothing. The next day we came down and Sherman showed us a couple of [The Jeffersons] episodes.

One of our fans came and rescued us, but not before Sherman took us to see these Hollywood PR people. They said, ‘Well, Mr. Hemsley wants us to get the information we need in order to do these Flying Teapot billboards on Sunset Strip.’ I looked at them and thought they were the cheesiest, most nasty people that I had ever seen in my life and I gave them the runaround. I just wanted out of there. I liked Sherman a lot. He was a very personable, charming guy. I just had a lot of trouble with the people around him.”

Oi, if Daevid Allen thinks you’re weird, you must be a stone freak! (Like our pal, opera singer/actor Jesse Merlin. He met Daevid Allen in San Francisco and Allen said “Just look at him. He’s a perfect example of himself!” Coming from Daevid Allen, that’s the best compliment in the history of the world, isn’t it?)

Below, Sherman Hemsley as “George Jefferson,” dancing up a storm to Nektar’s “Show Me the Way”!

After the jump, Gong on French TV, 1973.

03.21.2024

08:12 am

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“I’m veryinterested in murder.”—Nico, 1970

Via an intense David Bowie fandom, and also from being an avid reader of CREEM magazine, I discovered the work of the Velvet Underground at a very young age, like ten or eleven. I bought one of their albums without ever hearing it, because I just knew it was going to be good. I had no trouble figuring out what the songs were about, the subject matter of “Venus in Furs” or “Waiting for the Man” was well understood by me. (I was not in the least an innocent child.) In the mid-1970s Velvet Underground albums were not difficult to come by in my backwater West Virginia hometown—unlike Iggy, whose albums had to be mail ordered—and post VU solo efforts from Lou Reed, Nico and John Cale could easily be found in the cut-out bins of white trash department stores,usually in the form of 8-track tapes. These sold for 99 cents!

One of these 99 cent 8-tracks that I picked up—which I still own—was Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. This inscrutable album presented me with a puzzle that I had to solve: Why do people like this? (Little did I know then that almost everyone hated it.) I played it endlessly AND ON HEADPHONES in an effort to figure out what it was. Eventually—I think—I did. The same could not be said of Nico’s The Marble Index. No matter how hard I tried—and I did try hard I promise you, I must’ve played it a hundred times at least—I simply could not wrap my brain around that album. In other words, ‘Metal Machine Music? Hey, no problem,’ but The Marble Index was just a bridge too far for my pre-teen mind. Obviously it’s not an album for everyone to begin with but especially not for a little kid who only the year before was listening to James Bond soundtracks and “Little Willy.” I finally gave up trying and never didget to the bottom of it.

TheMarble Index flew completely over my head.



HOWEVER, when The Marble Index came out on CD in 1991, my fulsome familiarity with it some fifteen years earlier allowed me to “get it” instantly as an adult and from that moment on, I stand in utter awe at what I think, echoing both John Cale and Lester Bangs, is perhaps the greatest work of European avant garde classical music of the latter half of the 20th century. It’s a staggering, absolutely unprecedented work of genius. It’s a visionary masterpiece. It comes out of precisely nowhere. (The bowels of Hell?) It is of no musical tradition or recognizable genre. It doesn’t seem to have been influenced by anything and there’s nothing else that it can be likened to. The Marble Index is a singular artistic achievement. The best way to describe it to the reader who has not heard the album is to compare it to someone creating a ghostly new language from scratch. It really is that individual. A desolate psychic territorywhere no one else has ever ventured, before or since. And frankly why would anyone want to?

Nico’s music can be too weird, even for weird people.

*****

There’s only one way to listen to Nico’s music and this is at an absolutely ear-splitting volume so that it sounds like you’re in a Gothic cathedral in Hell and she’s a strident, fifty-foot-tall Valkyrie, her voice declaiming right into your face like stormwinds. This is musicthat absolutely demands your attention. It is decidedly not something to put on in the background, it really needs to overpower you for a full appreciation of what’s on offer. Nico’s music will never click for most people, but when it does, as The Marble Index‘s producer Frazier Mohawk put it, it’s “a hole you fall into.”I fell in pretty deep.

Recently, for weeks on end, months even, I was playing Nico all day, every day—my wife is a good sport—and although I’m not doing that quite as much asI type this, her albums are still close at hand in my speed rack. During my Nico fever, I reread Songs They Never Play on the Radio, James Young’s archly drawn memoir about the distinctly unglamorous side of touring with the junkie diva during the final years of her life, Richard Witt’s excellent biography Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, rewatched Susanne Ofteringer’s engrossing Nico:Icon documentary for the tenth time (at least) and then I boughtYou Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico, a new book byJennifer Otter Bickerdike.



A commonality of all these books, and this is true of the movie as well, is that there is scant information about her songwriting or the actual recording of her albums. Very little about where her music came from or what inspiredit. How it seemed to have beenborn fully formed very soon after her acquisition of a harmonium. The vast distance between the chamber folk of Chelsea Girl and everything that came after it. Nowhere can one read in depth about her creative process. What we do know almost always comes from John Cale, but even his accounts mostly dwell on the mechanics of making the recordings and of how he had to work around a wheezing, frequently out of tune harmonium (you can often hear Nico pumping its foot pedals) and her unconventional vocals. (Note the difference in her singing style from Chelsea Girl to The Marble Index which came out the following year. When Nico is singing her own songs, and not those written by others, only then do we hear how absolutely astounding her voice was. She had to be the one writing for that most idiosyncratic of vocal instruments, as no one else was capable of doing it for her.)

It’s known that Nico was an avid reader of the classics, with Nietzsche, Wordsworth—The Marble Index‘s title comes from a line in Wordsworth’s poem “Memories of Cambridge’’ where he describes a statue of Newton—and Tennyson being her favorites. Tennyson’s verse was perhaps her biggest lyrical influence with his pronounced melancolia and subject matter of kings and queens,medieval legends, and mythology. Nico’s cryptic lyrics evadeelucidation, and her committed performance makes them seem even more mysterious. The entire package—including, of course, John Cale’s absolutely apocalyptic arrangements—has a remarkable purity. There is nothing else, nothing in all theworld of music, that sounds like Nico’s so-called Marble Index trilogy (which includes 1970’s Desertshore and 1974’s The End…, both also with Cale.)

*****



The Inner Scar, or by its French title,La Cicatrice Intérieure, is an obscure art film from 1972 that Nico made in collaboration with her lover, film director Philippe Garrel, who was then considereda sort of cinematic Rimbaud. It was released in 1972. Although Garrel is credited as the director (the film itself has no credits) he has gone on record as saying it was entirely co-authored with Nico. In fact, she wrote all of the dialogue, much of it in two languages—she speaks French, German and English in the film—that Garrel himself couldn’t even understand. The soundtrack is all hermusic and she is on screen for almost the entire time. (No other film directed by Garrel, either before or since, looks, or is anything even remotely likeThe Inner Scar.)

The Inner Scaris a truly weird and remarkable film but what strikes me the most about it is the sheer bloody mindedness of it all. The willpower it would have taken to make something like it happen on a low budget. The film, which has only 20 shots for the entire length of it, was shot in some seriously remote locations in Death Valley, Sinai, and Iceland. The tracking shots are LONG and in the days beforeSteadicam was invented this meant laying dolly track and in this case that meant laying track—and lots of it—in f*cking Death Valley where it can get to be 120 degrees! Or on icy, freezing cold tundras. There is one spectacular—and obviously Godard-inspired—tracking shot where the unnamed sheep herder (Garrel) starts walking, and walking, and walking until he eventually arrives right back at his starting place. Imagine how much circular track and how large of an area it would have taken to create that sequence, seen in the below clip. All of the equipment, the crew, the trucks were on the inside of the track. It’s absolutely ingenious. How two junkies organized such a globe-spanning and logistically complex production is a miracle to begin with, but wherever did they score dope in Death Valley?

Much more after the jump…

03.01.2024

07:07 pm

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National Lampoon editor Tony Hendra—probably best-known as Ian Faith, the irritable, incompetent manager of Spinal Tap—created the f*cking funniest John Lennon parody of all time.

Technically “Magical Misery Tour (Bootleg Record)” isn’t a parody so much as it’s a pointedly vicious satire. Hendra used direct quotes from John Lennon’s infamous 1970 Rolling Stone magazine interview with Jann Wenner (later published in book form as Lennon Remembers) for this hysterical bit.

At the time of Lennon’s Rolling Stone sitting he was undergoing Primal Scream therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov and he really let it rip, sh*tting on his own fans, Mick Jagger, Paul and Linda McCartney and several others. All Hendra and Michael O’Donoghue did was handpick the best parts and arrange them into lyrics. Still as funny today as when it was released on the classic National Lampoon Radio Dinner LP in 1972.

Hendra does an absolutely boffo Lennon impersonation here, razzing the former Beatle’s very public bitching and moaning. The music’s by Christopher Cerf, it was arranged by Christopher Guest and that’s Melissa Manchester making a cameo appearance as Yoko Ono at the very end.

In his 1987 memoir Going Too Far, Hendra tells the tale of an FM radio disc jockey playing “Magical Misery Tour” for a visiting John and Yoko. Allegedly the color drained from Lennon’s face and he just got up and left.

RIP Tony Hendra (1941-2021).

01.01.2024

11:39 am

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I was trying to describe this thing last night to some friends over dinner, but I think you just have to see it… I posted this here a long time ago, but I think this merits posting again for those who missed it the first time around…

Behold the flyer for “The Mary Tyler Moore Masturbation Society” (Click here and here for larger, easier-to-read versions). Apparently this “society” was founded by a fellow named James J. Kagel of Cleveland, Ohio. Mr. Kagel is (or was) attempting to connect to others who share his fetish for, in his words, “jacking off” to photographs of beloved actress and comedienne, Mary Tyler Moore’s “beautifully curved, ever so shapely, silken, creamy smooth, seductive, velvety soft, long, lean, graceful, tantilizing [sic], erotic, sinuously sexy LEGS [...] (not to mention her lickable feet)!” End quote.

Kagel goes on to totally over-share about his fetish for MTM’s legs developed as a boy watching her on The Dick Van Dyke Show and her own eponymously-titled, long-running TV series. He mentions that he is “proud” to admit to masturbating to Moore’s gams—I, for one, believe him—and that his wife bears a “slight resemblance” in the face and legs department to the actress. He even asks members of The Mary Tyler Moore Masturbation Society to send him their own MTM leg fantasies! (I wonder how many people joined?!?! Furthermore, what would be the pleasure of sharing such fantasies with James in particular? He won’t judge you?)

You can pretty much tell that it was made with a type-writer, scissors and glue stick. I won’t describe any more of it, you’ll have to read it for yourself, but this truly had us ON THE FLOOR gasping for breath, laughing. This flyer is all kinds of wrong, but my god is it hilarious. Even the oblivious, kooky sincerity of it is mind-bending in the extreme.

And then you have to wonder what Mary Tyler Moore herself thought about this when she saw it, because you just know that at some point, someone had to have shown this to her.

There also used to be a Yahoo Group called “MTM Legs” that’s “for your jacking pleasure.” It’s just gotta be the same guy. What the odds of two such insanely ardent Mary Tyler Moore leg fetishist jack-*fficers existing in this space-time continuum? Well, while it was going It had 155 members!

01.01.2024

08:00 am

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If you’re a horror movie fan, I think you’ll agree with the assessment that Scream (1996) is a top-notch meta horror-comedy. But did you know that it’s been accused of being a rip-off of an earlier film? It’s a motion picture that came out years before, written and directed by a creative filmmaker barely out of his teens. A movie that’s a love letter to horror films, but also plays with the genre’s clichés. Even the film’s title is a reference to a line of dialogue typically said in the run-up to bloodshed in horror pictures.

In the late 1980s, after making a number of short films, writer/director Rolfe Kanefsky penned the screenplay for his first full-length movie—an ambitious meta horror-comedy—in just five days. Soon he was recruiting investors, the final two being his parents, who mortgage their house. In the summer of 1989, with a relatively limited budget of $100,000, the filming of There’s Nothing Out There took place. Kanefsky was 20 years-old.

The film follows a group of high schoolers on spring break who travel to a remote house in the woods. After arriving at their destination, an extraterrestrial monster starts killing off the teens, one by one.



There’s Nothing Out There is a smart and self-aware film, using horror movie tropes and archetypal characters, and then spinning these elements in clever ways that act as commentary on the genre and advance the story. Kanefsky’s writing is impressive, and his direction is solid, as well. I was particularly impressed by a couple of inspired scene transitions.

At times the film is ridiculously silly, which is especially effective when embracing its low budget. Take the slimy alien, a being that resembles something you might see in a cheap sci-fi flick from the ‘50s. A mix of horseshoe crab, frog, and alligator, the creature also evokes the titular monsters in Alien (1979) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), plus a little of Belial from Basket Case (1982).



Every so often, the inanimate alien is thrown in front of the camera. In other moments, actors are obviously tussling with it to make it move, like you’d see in an Ed Wood movie. Fun stuff!



The most noteworthy character in the film is Mike, the horror film fanatic. A kind of stand-in for Kanefsky himself, Mike uses his knowledge to help save himself and others. He knows he’s in a horror movie.


Craig Peck (Mike) and Bonnie Bowers (Stacy) in a production still.

Released in 1990, There’s Nothing Out There was dead on arrival. Horror films had fallen out of favor with audiences, who also weren’t interested in a post-modern horror movie—yet.

Fast-forward a couple of years later: Kanefsky gave a copy of There’s Nothing Out There to a producer, who watched it and dug it. Over a lunch meeting, this producer told Kanefsky that he liked the film so much he was going to show it to his father. The producer’s name is Jonathan Craven; his father is Wes Craven. A few years later, the director’s Scream was released, a critical success that also did gang-busters at the box office.

Intriguingly, there are several similarities between these two meta horror movies. The one most cited is that the character Randy in Scream, who understands all the slasher film rules and uses them to protect himself and others, is very much like Mike in There’s Nothing Out There. The films explore horror movie tropes and archetypes in like-minded ways. Both are a balancing act between scares and laughs.



Is there any proof that the makers of Scream “borrowed” from There’s Nothing Out There? In a word: No. It’s possible that Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson was simply riffing on the same tropes that Kanefsky was. Williamson’s script was written on spec, with Dimension Films buying the rights. It took a while to find a director, and Craven only accepted after Dimension made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Williamson has said Craven had no interest in changing the script, so the director had no input there.

Scream often gets the credit for being the first motion picture of its type, but as far back as 1981, during the height of the slasher craze, Student Bodies parodied the subgenre. There’s also Return to Horror High (1987), and like There’s Nothing Out There, it’s a smart and funny meta horror-comedy, though I give the edge to Kanefsky’s subsequent work.

Scream has become a lucrative franchise—the 1996 original alone has grossed more than $170 million worldwide—with several sequels and a remake of the first film.

Rolfe Kanefsky, like many fans of his debut feature, has wondered if Scream was based off of his movie, but I see no signs of sour grapes.



Kanefsky’s a prolific writer/director with many credits under his belt, and he’s still at it (check out his IMDb). He’s written a book about his experience making There’s Nothing Out There, entitled Making Nothing at the Age of 20.

Ronin Flix has recently put out a fresh 2K restoration of There’s Nothing Out There on Blu-ray. The package has several commentary tracks, including a new one with Kanefsky and two of the film’s stars. The two-disc set also contains ten Kanefsky shorts from the early 1980s, including Just Listen, which is seen playing in the opening video store sequence in There’s Nothing Out There. Get all the deets and order the release through the MVD Shop; it’s also on Amazon.



A look at the 2K restoration:

The original trailer: