Holy Explosions of Ecstasy

This is some of the most amazing shit I have seen recently! I was shocked and awed!

Expertly mashing drum ´n bass with footage of holy rollers freaking out in church aisles is a marriage made in heaven (or hell).

The editing in these "Baptazia"-videos is brilliant and more unsettling than the Cunningham/Aphex Twin video "Come To Daddy".

After about 23 seconds you will start speaking in tongues:


File under Speedgospel and Jesuscore:


This one is amazing for the great editing of the two "MCs". Just make sure to watch the moment at around 1:40. Absolutely insane!


POSSESSED! This is probably the sickest of the bunch:

Now: REWIND!

There are many more clips and I must admit that the vids get quite addictive. I must also admit that I am just a little bit envious that the church experience in my part of the world is...well, different. At least it was twenty years ago, the last time when I was dragged into a service.

The Mouth of Madness: Kinski Jesus Christ Saviour

If you´re a German actor with an ambition to become notorious outside your homecountry, it helps to be (or act) blond, very evil and very, very mad. In short: It helps if you are Klaus Kinski.

The opening sequence of Werner Herzog´s obscene but funny "Mein liebster Feind/My best fiend" shows Kinski on stage in one of his most legendary and disastrous performances. Nicknamed "The Jesus Show", it was Kinski´s most ambitious project.

He planned to do a world tour with him telling the story of Jesus Christ according to Klaus Kinski. The brilliantly and fiendishly titled "Kinski Jesus Christus Erlöser" imploded in an explosion of rage and ended right there during the first perfomance.

In leaving out any punctuation the German title is a twisted moebius-strip of meanings. "Kinski Jesus Christ Saviour", who is who and who is saving whom?

A few weeks ago "Jesus Christus Erlöser" had its debut at the Berlinale and is now released theatrically. The film is a documentary by Peter Geyer, who painstakingly assembled most of the existing footage of this particular evening in 1971.

Kinski had rented the "Deutschlandhalle", a huge stadium/arena to do his one man performance. Dressed in blue, lit by a white spot on a gigantic empty stage, he tried to tell his story of Jesus Christ, the revolutionary. Not the Jesus of organised religion. He only came so far before hecklers in the audience started to piss him off. And he was very easy to piss of!

It´s here where the film gets really interesting as it shows a passionate, temperamental artist who has worked hard to gain a reputation of being a raging lunatic.

The hippie audience, oblivious to anything but their worldview, obviously paid to see the mad Kinski they saw in the talksshows (keep in mind that this was before the Herzog films). So they continued to interrupt him and wanted to "discuss" with Kinski even before his performance had actually started! Audience participation at its worst!

They evoked the madman and he delivered in spades! Here is an edited clip, which is actually the opening of "My best fiend". I decided to use it because it is subtitled.


"Jesus Christus Erlöser" is 84 minutes of time travel into a world that doesn´t exist anymore. For starters we don´t have any personalities like Kinski and any actor who would rent a large auditorium to tell his Jesus story would probably make millions as a TV-evangelist. Oh, and nobody had photo-mobiles back then.

This is actually the first docmentary about Kinski that makes you feel for him!
Let´s face it: Herzog´s "My best fiend" is a freak-show! It´s a cowardly, post-mortem exploitation of the Kinski cliche. It answers more un-asked questions about the director than his subject. Of course it´s hilarious and entertaining, but at the same time it is hardly more than pure spectacle.

In Beyer´s film we get to see a man with a vision who is misguided by his ego and unable to switch off his act. (Why did he play before thousands of people when he only wanted to speak to a few?)

It is also a very telling document of the interaction between audience and performer. The generation of ´68 who tries to come to terms with the fascism of their parents, rears its ugly head when it tries to shout down something they don´t care to understand. Instead they want to see the clown dance, because they paid for it.
And outside, around this time, the RAF (Red Army Fraction) released their manifesto "Das Konzept Stadtguerilla" ("The Cityguerilla Concept"). A call to arms for both sides...

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?