Tripping Round The Acid House

Here is a very interesting British TV feature, "A Trip Round Acid House" that mainly focusses on the media reaction (from demonization to exploitation) towards the exploding youth culture of the late 1980´s.


Part two and part three.

The Annual Brit Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Pop-Excellence Goes To The Pet Shop Boys

A ten-minute medley (or potpourri as we used to say before the war) spawning the 25 year lasting career of the Pet Shop Boys was performed by the band at yesterdays BRIT AWARDS. PSB received an "Outstanding Contribution To Music Award" which justified this career mash-up.

In true PSB-fashion the show was a slightly odd and brittle performance of random imagery, unnecessary ballet, wacky wigs and Lady GaGa. All in all: A great success (minus the GaGa)

Sushi Assembly Line

Make sure to watch in high-resolution


This is exactly the kind of late night programming that some German TV-programs would use to air: webcam movies from all over the world, vintage NASA space programs or station to station train rides through Siberia. Usually this would be better than the day time programming.

These guys here have put a video camera on a sushi conveyor and added some fragile music. This could go on for hours and I would only wish that the "creators" would have stayed out of it. Their presence is a bit annoying as is their "creative reasoning" why they did this. For once Youtube comments are bringing some focus to the table: "It´s just a camera on a conveyor belt in a sushi bar!"

Eye on Springfield

Eye on Springfield posts still shots of The Simpsons, a funny reminder of how good the show once was. The selections are exclusively chosen from seasons 1-9 which are widely regarded as the golden age of the series.

Montalbania

Ricardo Montalban (1920-2009)

...And it cuts your life like a broken knife

"Thieves like us" is probably the best song New Order ever recorded. It´s a perfect mix of a band playing with each other and the sequencer.


This clip is from the brilliant German music-show "Musik Convoy" which aired weekly from 1984 to 1985.

New Order: "Thieves Like Us"

The idea behind "Musik Convoy" was to send a broadcasting unit with a truck that would be used as a stage into provincial areas, small towns or villages where "music" and "TV" would normally not have happened.

Due to the low budget and the experimental nature of the show "Musik Convoy" would feature the creme de la creme of national and international independent and off-beat artists who all had to play live. Here, the show-host is even starting the band´s drum-computer!

Some of the artists that appeared were 10.000 Maniacs, Alphaville, Chris Rea, Billy Idol, Depeche Mode, The Chameleons, Fad Gadget, The Cure, The Go-Betweens, Style Council, Ramones, R.E.M, Nick Cave, Marc Almond, Spear of Destiny, OMD, Grandmaster Flash, Johnny Thunders, Bon Jovi, etc.

It seems that the bands really enjoyed performing on some square in the middle of nowhere to an audience that was cheering for the weirdest band they had never heard of before.


Even New Order appeared to have a good time, they are actually smiling! Sadly it was always the fate of the best act to perform at the end of the show and so we never got to see their whole performance before the show was faded out.

Dick Docu

I tried to do without any lame dick-references in the title, but who am I kidding?!

Anyway, this is a great and long documentary about the amazing Philip K. Dick which the BBC produced and aired in 1994 as a part of its "Arena"-program.

The ill-fated Dick was one of the most prolific and visionary sci-fi authors, whose vision and impact was only beginning to be felt shortly after his death, when "Blade Runner" made him a household name.


In a way PKD is the American counterpart to J.G. Ballard. Whereas JGBs characters tend to embrace global catastrophy and social decline as a chance to find a sort of inner freedom, Dicks protagonists wander through dystopian landscapes with a piercing objectivity that offers the reader a look at the present as if seeing it through a one-way mirror.

Both authors refrain from moralizing and at times they thrill us with the idea that they actually do enjoy the situations they dreamed up for their protagonists.
While Ballard was seen as burning more bridges behind and in front of him with the release of "Crash", Dick was more or less ignored as a pessimistic sci-fi author by the American public.

The docu features has many "guest appearances" by BBC regulars such as Terry Gilliam and Elvis Costello, but there are also some acidic remarks in interviews by colleagues, such as fellow sci-fi author Thomas M. Dish, who recently decided to end his life.

The whole thing consists of six parts which you can see here:
2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6

Charade

I actually planned to stay away from posting anything concerning the upcoming American election. After all, I am not a voter, not an American and absolutely nothing of intelligence on the subject remains to be said or unsaid.

I have to admit that I thought about posting a link to the mindboggling Mexican midget playing Sarah Palin (or Sharia Plan, as somebody has anagrammed her name).
I also liked the vintage Batobama-Poster with Biden as Robin and McCain-Palin as Joker and Catwoman. But I thought that this was only fleeting internet fodder, and there was no need for me to distribute it any further.

Today I saw this amazingly re-dubbed Golden Girls sketch and I couldn´t stop giggling. I also wondered that only 32.000 people had seen it during the last five weeks and so I decided that it could easily have two more views generated by me.
Watch it, it is a very creative and well done media manipulation. I dare to call it genius.

Twiste et Chante

I was never a big fan of Sylvie Vartan - I am more of a Francoise Hardy Person myself.

Sylvie was always a bit too "Roque" for me. You know, this typical French interpretation of ROCK, which eternally resonates between Iggy Pop and Johnny Halliday (Sylvie´s husband).

Of course Sylvie did also some covers of contemporary hits in the sixties. I dare say that she didn´t know when to say "no" at times. Her versions of "Twist and Shout" and "Money" she did on Shindig! are pretty exotic.

But she did hit the nail on the head with a French version of "I can´t help myself. The Four Tops hit becomes "Garde moi dans ta poche" and La Vartan almost invents a new style of twist-dancing in this "Scopitone"-clip. Check also the other dancers! It´s great fun.




Here is "Twist and Shout".

Blast of Silence, Hazard of Camp

This fantastic 1961 noir-noir movie by Allan Baron was just given a Criterion Collection-release. Finally!

Director, author and main actor Allan Baron was immediately hailed as a new Wunderkind - but probably by the wrong people. From the rough, gritty and riveting "Blast of Silence" he quickly went on to direct numerous episodes for tv-consumption.

A decade later he would sit on the director´s chair with "The Brady Bunch"! Next stop: Spelling-Land. "Love Boat", "Fantasy Island" and "Charlies Angels" were at one time all directed by Baron. This is artistically all fine and dandy, but how can he justify being responsible for "The Dukes of Hazzard"?

I dig "Shindig!"

On the air from late 1964 to early 1966 "Shindig!" was ABCs high-speed version of "American Bandstand". A fast-paced rock´n roll show which featured back-to-back appearances by British and American artists.









In the mid-sixties the show was setting new standards in its non-stop presenatation (only interrupted by commercials, which were mostly self-made and a part of the show) and its appearance to be a "live"-show.
In fact most of the performances were specially pre-recorded live or alternative versions, which were then "mimed" by the performers.

Another novelty must have been the co-existence of black and white artists in the same show, and I guess that the combination of Go-Go Dancers and Rock´n Roll artists must have been as exotic back then as it seems now.

Here are three "Shindig!"-clips which I edited with Omnisio. It features great perfomances by otherwise slightly obiquitous artists like James Brown and Tina Turner. Check a smashing duet between Tina and Marvin Gaye, doing a mash-up of "Money" and "Doggone". Then of course there is the hilarious milk-commercial which has the kids digging the white juice as if it was...well, something different.



"Shindig!" was apparantly quite trendsetting as other broadcasters quickly threw similar shows on the air. It was probably this abundance of Rock´n Roll programming that caused the ratings to wane.

In January 1966 "Shindig!" was over. It was replaced by "Batman"!

More info on "Shindig!" at Shindi-pedia

I enjoyed to be a boy (had I seen the Banana Splits before)

Today I saw and heard The Banana Splits for the first time and now I feel officially betrayed of my childhood!

O.K. I have seen pictures of four costumed characters in small buggy-cars but I have never seen part of the show, which originally aired from 1968 to 1970 in the USA.

I guess that North American readers of this blog will see this as just another nostalgia post, but since I never saw this Hanna-Barbera production, I felt like I had opened a door to another dimension.

Who said that M-TV spoilt us with split-second cuts and non-sequitor-editing? This show is so frantic and fast-paced like nothing you would have expected to be shown fourty years ago in a children´s program.

I mean, I felt drugged out of my mind just watching a few minutes of it! It´s a bit like watching the Marx Brothers on LSD, in colour, while flying through an amusement park.

Back then some critics and politicians in Germany saw the end of western civilisation in programmes like Sesame Street (they predicted that "normal" kids would be corrupted by the "glorification" of the "ghetto-life")! Of course I love Sesame Street and they had their fair share of "tripping" too, but compared with the Splits, the Henson troupe came across like a bunch of nuns on a sunday.

So, as a novice I picked up the wonderfully shoegazing anthem "I enjoy to be a boy (in love with you), which was apparantly available as a flexi-disc in Kellogs Cornflakes only, and some other stuff which slipped my burned out mind.






If some of you have seen it back in the day, please share your memories.
I am especially interested how it was received by the target audience (whoever that was: tripping teenagers or actual kids?) did it cause a fuzz with the parents? Why is not available on DVD?

Triple Teenage Jodie Foster

In 1977 Belgian Variety Show Clo Clo somehow managed to invite 15 year old Jodie Foster to sing a french chanson to herself.

Thanks to the wizardry of chroma-key, gender bending fashion and the icy charm of three floating teenage Jodies, her rendition of "Je t'attends depuis la nuit des temps" is wonderfully strange, unexpected and beautiful.