Lana Turner Overdive

Michael Frost's Lana Turner on acid series gets it's deluxe 12 minute spotlight. Hold onto your sanity's last straw, read up on the Big Cube and let's go!

Monikaaaa-o-my-DARleeeng - Some great 60s Bollywood moments

The below video is from CARAVAN (1967) - music of course by R.D. Burman and sung by Asha Bhosle... these guys were an unbeatable team, maybe still are. I'm still so turned off by Hollywood's bourgeois embrace of 'Slumdog Millionare'--their little pat willingness to embrace a new setting and style provided it's filmed by a guy with a name like Danny Boyle instead of V.D. Rakeshyamadevanandi, a name I just made up, but you get my point... I hope. I mainly got into it all back in the days when I was a loungecore DJ (c. 1997-9). But that whole scene ended because a) swing dancing took over and suddenly instead of tuxedos and boas it was tacky black fedoras and suspenders over pressed white shirts, and b) The hub of the loungecore scene was Windows on the World on Wednesdays... which if you don't remember was on the tippy top of Tower A (or was it B?) in the World Trade Center.

 And also, I stopped going before then because I could no longer drink.

 Oh Monikaaaaaaaa





Note the chillingly nonchalant male-on-female physical abuse that begins the above number. There's some other disturbing moments elsewhere in CARAVAN, like when a gypsy king starts horsewhipping his wife for burning the dinner--though it turns out our heroine in the film is to blame! Once she confesses, the man stops whipping his wife, but doesn't apologize or anything and the matter is forgotten. Icky, but fascinating in its cruel nonchalance.

Much more cosmopolitan is JEWEL THIEF, also from 1967... this song below is very lyrical and lovely and I'm a sucker for studio-set 'outdoor' moonlit ponds.

They Call Him Dr. John, Known as the Night Tripper

Nowadays you think of Dr. John and you maybe think of a fun-loving fat guy with a beard and beret who sings like he just came down Sesame Street, his great raspy melodic voice a soothing balm to the soul, his piano playing a dazzling, creole courtbullion good times N'awlins style, but once upon a time, Dr. John was known as the Night Tripper, with a satchel of gris-gris in his hand.

And even if you knew nothing of all the hoodoo remedies and herbal potions, his crazy headdresses and Mardi Gras fortune teller tresses moved you like a warm bath ocean. Kicking back in my room in college, the incense making circular wisps along the walls, his "Night Tripper" album would fill my speakers like a secret door in my floor opened up with a magical basement herb shop below, peopled with miniature people dancing in fire and feathers. Now, where are we? Here, of course. This one's for you, Night Tripper! In his way, he and Screamin' Jay Hawkins laid the bedrock for future Americrazy shamen like Tom Waits and George Clinton. Here's a video from that era, or thereabouts, to mind meld with --just watch out for the tiny dancers and black cat hustlers weavin' through your tip toes if you smoke with the medicine man.

  "Where you at, Mule?
"

Curious Alice (1968)

This weird anti-drug educations short from 1968 was clearly meant to show to schoolchildren to keep them away from drugs, and it's actually pretty good, pretty spot-on in showing the pros and cons; the way certain drugs open you up to new sensations but eventually cut you off from even more.

It's honest about that, at least. Nothing's gained without something being lost - it's freewheeling psychedelic collage style is clearly the result of some artists who 'know' the deal so it's not just some bent load of conjecture like Go Ask Alice or Roger Sterling's experience' in this season of Mad Men. I think if you can see this film and still want to try it afterwards, knowing full well the dangers, then you're ready. Just like everyone who signs up to go whaling on the Pequod should first read The Perfect Storm. 

Fashionably Deranged: Best of the 00s.

(culled pith from old pre-meds live journal entries)

from 1/28:

What is worse: To not receive a return text message from the one you love, or to be tortured by the Catholic Inquisition?
To have the most beautiful creature turn their back on you after wooing you with their flowery lies,
or to be drawn and quartered in the public square?

The unrequited love is worse
because it's harder to pinpoint - no one else understands it.

Torture only hurts the body, and your screams are the signal your body exists==

love hurts the soul, and only poetry can give that pain voice,
and poetry takes unbroken fingers
while the heart
can never gauge its fractures,
until its pulled from its rib prison
and held, still pulsing,
before its horrified front-page mirror.

 -------------------
the best thoughts are the ones most easily lost.   -- (They Spoon fed me Ritalin - 1/3/08)
--------------

After visiting my 97 year-old grandmother in Chicago - 12/08:

....all through the long visits I felt death pull me like gravity, like time pulls the meat off a chicken bone, like it pulls the planets along behind it as it sucks and roars along, like stringed tin cans on a wedding-cum-funeral car, like Flash Gordon gradually fading into youtube and then all just raw conscious thoughtlessness - a dull roar of white static, in which you may at times think you hear the ocean, or vice versa... all voices that you hear are your own, you realize, in this 2001-Kubrick room of the self, and outside that, the serpent swimming through the blue veins of your aging relations, swimming both towards you and away, towards you and away...

I've been unable to leave the house, no matter where I go.

----------------------------------------

from "Nobody Feel as Bad as Good as Me" - May 6, 2007


Spring is fall's dark underbelly,
so much shinier,
so much more poisonous,
its dandy pollen separating me from the herd
to the fringe
where the wolves of lonesome wait
for the prey too sneezy
to see them.

I'll be up out of this mountain soon,
once again the stronger for all the climbing
and skin tougher from all the wolf bites,
my steely artistic persona warped from the forge's constant flame,
the God who shapes me as tireless
and dissatisfied
as Picasso
with nothing but sand and sea
for His clumsy canvas.

-----------------------------

" Suicide is like peeking at your presents before Xmas..." -- From Too Pissed to be Zen, to Zen to be Pissed 1/5/07)

Stuff I Liked in the 1970s. - Part 1

My earliest recollection of getting really into a toy was my Dr. Zauis doll, which was about 3/4 of the GI Joe size, but we in the Knapp Elementary ape society wouldn't play with ordinary Joes, and one kid tried to infiltrate with his pint-sized Six Million Dollar Man. Apes kicked his ass! Then Zaius lost a leg, but my wily babysitter tied a shoelace lasso to his little ape hand so he could lasso things and swing around. Those were some crazy adventures, climbing the stairs like it was Everest. Eventually he disappeared... at least I can't remember losing him or throwing him out or outgrowing him. And of course we had viewmasters (above), with which to see dinosaurs, Alice in Wonderland, the Planet of the Apes, and various geographical excursions in exciting 3-D!

The arrival of Aurora monster models changed everything. Dracula was always my favorite, so I got him first, and shunned Dr. Jekyll and Quasimodo, who looked to much like Bruce Glickis a kid I fought with a lot because I couldn't stand his fat dumb face. It wasn't bullying because he was actually bigger than me, and all our fights were bloody nose draws. Fuck Bruce Glickis!

Charlie's Angels was my first big introduction to the appeal of girls. I couldn't stay up to see the show, but I clipped pics from magazines, TV Guide and Time especially, then later Teen Beat and all that crap. Eventually I made a big scrapbook of it all and then sold the scrapbook to a kid down the street for $40, a fortune at the time. And I'd moved on by then.

And then - well, WW2, you can guess the rest. I was a boy! I joined forces in 6th grade with a kid named Alan Pyle -we started drawing and selling our own line of comics, and of course playing a lot of WW2 HO scale campaigns. Later we moved onto designing TI-994A computer games and D&D modules. I left my girl obsession in the dust until the Playboy years began. Next stop: punk rock, real girls, and the dawn of the VCR!

Wrap Your (Girl) Troubles in Drinks - a vidmix.

The divine Mary

Ah the 1990s - the last gasp for mopey depression- if you were in your 20s during this era, as I was then you know that it was a good time for music. Nirvana's explosion in 1992-93 had opened MTV up to all things even remotely grunge, so weird college acts that would normally never see the light of day got a chance to become fleeting stars. If you were a mopey feminist who liked to cry all night in his bourbon, it was your time to shine. It all ended with Napster killing small labels and Elliot Smith stabbing himself in the chest. Now. all we have are dusty CDs hidden far away in case books, and memories. Even the depression that spawned this music and made it listenable is largely gone thanks to SSRIs, and of course Britney Spears and MTV changing its tunes. But the music never dies!


Helium - "Wanna be a Vampire Too, Baby" - love the scrolling effect. Elegant.


Cat Power - "Bathysphere" (cool found footage video by AnititonyA)



L7 - "Pretend We're Dead" - Lesbian feminism in a grunge-angst setting..."Wake up and smell the coff-fee!"



Jennifer Trynin "Better than Nothing" - one of my favorites, since it mentions doing shots of whiskey!



Kittywinder - "Crazy Weed" - 1997 - a Boston / New Hampshire / NYC band that broke up only months before I started dating the bassist... crazy weed is right?




PJ Harvey - "Legs" - (live in 95) its host album "Dry" was released in 1993, but it's as forward leaning as ever. I love her more than a word could say, though her last few albums have left me... well, not dry, but not soaking like Dry or Stories from the Sea.



The unforgettable Space Team Electra - "Luminous Crush" 



The awesome Pixies -"Gigantic" in '88! BN (Before Nirvana)



Even farther before, one of my all-time favorite songs ever, "The English Roses" by my first rock crush, one that's shaped my destiny, Chrissie Hynde and her Pretenders. Half the band would be dead soon, and 30 years later, she's still rocking. I love you, CH!