Category Archives: American culture

RIP Bill Landis (1959 – 2008)

Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square (2002) – Bill Landis, Michelle Clifford [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Via Tim Lucas comes the news that Bill Landis is dead.

Bill Landis (1959 – 2008) created the Xeroxed fanzine Sleazoid Express in 1980. It featured reviews of the exploitation films playing New York City’s Times Square’s 42nd Street grindhouse and reports on the local scene. The later issues also featured reviews from acclaimed Jimmy McDonough.

Sleazoid Express (1980-1983, and later editions) was the house journal of the grindhouse movie scene in New York circa 1964-1984. Edited by Bill Landis, a projectionist and devotee of the crime-ridden sleaze houses, the magazine not only captured the genre affections but the whole Times Square milieu of drugs, violence and prostitution. Typical films shown in the movie houses, which centred around the city’s 42nd Street, included Bamboo House of Dolls, Blood Sucking Freaks, The Corpse Grinders, Mad Monkey Kung Fu, Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In and The Ultimate Degenerate.

Far from representing a marginal off-shoot of the movie business, the grindhouse films would be later plundered for ideas and imagery by mainstream cinema, while the trash ethic and aesthetic of the magazine itself would be effortlessly copied by many others.

Bill Landis co-wrote with his wife for 22 years Michelle Clifford, who is the principal author of Metasex.

Footnote: Bill Landis was fond of Alice Arno and Karin Schubert

RIP Ray Dennis Steckler (1938 – 2009)

RIP Ray Dennis Steckler, iconic director of Incredibly Strange Films.

Incredibly Strange Films (1986) – V. Vale , Andrea Juno [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPnIsifeE70&]

If Al Adamson was the poor man’s Roger Corman, then Ray Dennis Steckler was the poor man’s Al Adamson.

Ray Dennis Steckler (January 25, 1938 – January 7, 2009) was an American film director, born in Pennsylvania.

When he was reportedly fired for almost knocking an A-frame onto Alfred Hitchcock, Steckler turned to the then fledgling B-movie circuit. Steckler made his directorial debut in the Hall vehicle Wild Guitar and co-starred under his on-screen name Cash Flagg.

In 1963 he co-produced his first solo film, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, co-starring his then-wife, Carolyn Brandt. Reportedly filmed for a budget of $38,000, the film was photographed by then newcomers László Kovács and Vilmos Zsigmond, a fact that both men acknowledged as their first big break.

Steckler’s next film was his answer to Psycho, entitled The Thrill Killers, released in 1964.

Steckler continued to produce a number of low-budget but fanciful films which soon attained cult status, including Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (a spoof of Batman) and Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters (an homage to the East Side Kids films). By the late 1960s, he also directed the video for Jefferson Airplane‘s “White Rabbit.”

With the decline of drive-in horror films of the nature Steckler was producing in the 1960s, and following his divorce from Brandt, Steckler dabbled with producing porn films during the 1970s and 1980s, and catering to the home video market.

Robert Duncan @90

Robert Duncan, American poet (1919 – 1988)

Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the New American Poetry and Black Mountain poets. Duncan’s mature work emerged in the 1950s from within the literary context of Beat culture and today he is also identified as a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.

Robert Duncan also translated Nerval’s Les Chimères, famous for being referenced by Eliot‘s Waste Land. I am very much fascinated these days by poetry and the translation of poetry.

RIP Stooges band member Ron Asheton (1948 – 2009)

RIP Ron Asheton

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OyLRgLMSOM]

A New Order song (not the UK band, an early Asheton project)

Ron Asheton (July 17, 1948 – c. December 31, 2008 or January 1, 2009) was an American guitarist and co-songwriter with Iggy Pop for the rock band The Stooges.
Asheton was found dead in his Ann Arbor, Mi. home of a reported heart attack on January 6th, 2009, having died several days earlier, probably either on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.

God, I would hate to die alone like that.

Happy birthdays J. D. Salinger (90) and Grandmaster Flash (51)

With all this dying, one would forget about the living. Fear not! Happy birthdays J. D. Salinger and Grandmaster Flash. The first birthdays of 2009.

Jerome David Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature; he has not published any new work since 1965 and has not granted a formal interview since 1980.

The Catcher in the Rye original cover

Signet Books “sensationalist” cover

The famous “fuck you” excerpt:

“‘That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘Fuck you‘ right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say ‘Holden Caulfield’ on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died and then right under that it’ll say ‘Fuck you.’ I’m positive, in fact.'” – Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye page 183

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3kRuJhIVIo]

“The Message“

Joseph Saddler (born January 1, 1958 in Bridgetown, Barbados), better known as Grandmaster Flash, is a hip hop musician and DJ; one of the pioneers of hip-hop DJing, cutting, and mixing. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five are best-known for their single “The Message“.

“The Message” is an old school hip hop song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released in 1982. The song’s lyrics were some of the first in the genre of rap to talk about the struggles and the frustrations of living in the ghetto. Another fuck you, I guess.

RIP Donald Westlake

A Gold Medal Books original by Westlake under the name Stark.

Donald Edwin Westlake (12 July 1933 in Brooklyn, New York – 31 December 2008 in Mexico) was an American writer, with over a hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit. He specialized in crime fiction, especially comic capers with an occasional foray into science fiction. He created the psychopathic fictional character Parker.

Film still from Point Blank

Outside of the world of literature he is perhaps best-known for the film adaptation of his novel The Hunter as Point Blank in 1967 with Lee Marvin. The Hunter was written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark. The plot concerns a criminal, Parker (or Walker in Point Blank), who is himself betrayed, shot, and left for dead by his partner, and his relentless pursuit to retrieve his money and wreak revenge.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPKL3KHE–I]

“As Tears Go By” by Marianne Faithfull in Jean-Luc Godard‘s Made in USA (1966)

Jean-Luc Godard‘s Made in USA (1966) which was an extremely loose adaptation of “The Jugger,” a novel by Westlake. Neither the film’s producer nor Godard purchased the rights to the novel, so Westlake successfully sued to prevent the film’s commercial distribution in the United States.

RIP Freddie Hubbard (1938 – 2008)

Moanin’ with Freddie Hubbard

Freddie Hubbard (1938 – 2008) was an American jazz trumpeter.

He was primarily known as a sideman to Art Blakey in the latter’s Jazz Messengers and many other jazzmen’s bands but achieved his greatest personal success in the 1970s with a series of albums for smooth jazz record label CTI Records. Although his early 1970s jazz albums Red Clay, First Light, Straight Life, and Sky Dive were particularly well received and considered among his best work, the albums he recorded later in the decade were bashed by critics for their commercialism.

Polar AC

A particularly accomplished track is Gibraltar, compiled by Ashley Beedle on the Grass Roots album.

RIP Ann Savage (1921 – 2008)

RIP American actress Ann Savage at age 87, best-known for her iconic bad girl role in Detour.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFXQqEoNofA]

Ann Savage discusses Detour

Ann Savage (1921 – 2008) is mainly remembered as the cigarette-puffing femme fatale in Detour (1945) and other Hollywood B-movies and film noirs of the 1940s.

When it became public domain, Detour was often run on syndicated television and several versions were released on VHS home video. Although made on a small budget and containing only rudimentary sets and camera work, the film has garnered substantial praise through the years and is held in high regard. Director Wim Wenders called her work in Detour “at least 15 years ahead of its time”. The film’s ending is notable as an exemplum of involuntary manslaughter.

Ann most recently earned rave reviews in all media for her stunning performance as Canadian director Guy Maddin‘s mother in his most acclaimed film My Winnipeg (2008).

Introducing Coyle and Sharpe

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFHxn_9aVq8]

The Warbler, 1963, “man on the street” interview

Coyle and Sharpe was the name of American comic duo Jim Coyle and Mal Sharpe who appeared on television and radio during the early sixties, exhibiting their mastery of the “man on the street” interview, with humorous results.

Coyle and Sharpe began their comedy team in 1958 in a boarding house. In their official website Jim Coyle is described as a “benign conman who talked his way into 119 jobs by the time he was 25”. Mal Sharpe. At the time of their meeting, Mal Sharpe had just graduated college and was interested in the burgeoning scene that was happening in in the San Francisco area in that time.

In 1964, they were hired by radio station KGO in San Francisco to pull pranks, or as they jokingly referred to them, “Terrorizations”. The radio show was called “Coyle and Sharpe On The Loose”. Shortly after these broadcasts aired, they released two records: “The Absurd Imposters“[1] and “The Insane Minds Of Coyle And Sharpe“[2], which were released on the Warner Records.

The whereabouts of Jim Coyle are unkown, but in their website, a supposition is offered that he left the act to pursue a career in “tunneling” and that he died in 1993 burrowing under the city of Barcelona.

Mal Sharpe continued to do the “Man on the Street” interviews. In the year 2000, Sharpe hosted a centennial exhibit at the Whitney Museum, called “The American Century“. Coyle and Sharpe were featured in the Soundworks Exhibit for this presentation.

They have one record that re-presented their seminal comedy material in 2000 from Thirsty Ear, entitled Coyle And Sharpe-Audio Visionaries[3].

The Best of LCD: The Art and Writing of WFMU
RE/Search #11: Pranks!. RE/Search Publications, 1986.

On the semantics of sex

Ten years ago today, on December 19, 1998, then U. S. President Bill Clinton is impeached because of alleged sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, known at the time as the Lewinsky scandal.

The scandal was primarily interesting from a semantic point of view, it was a rare instance of a public discussion regarding the semantics of sex.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIP_KDQmXs&]

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman“

From a personal point of view, I was tremendously insulted by Clinton saying of his relation with Lewinsky: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman“[1]. It’s the “that woman” that struck me as totally offensive to Lewinsky, only later in his sentence referring to Lewinsky by her name.

On the semantic side:

The nature of the Clinton’s statement was called into question within hours when skeptical reporters noted that the term “sexual relations” can be defined as meaning coitus, and asked whether the President and Lewinsky had been engaging in other forms of sex. The controversy deepened when Clinton was revealed, in fact, to have had sexual contact with Lewinsky, although the issue remained a semantic one as to whether the words “sexual relations” includes oral sex.

Lewinsky on the cover of Cigar Aficionado by you.

Clinton later admitted that he lied to the American people and that he had had inappropriate intimate contact with Lewinsky but only after a blue dress with Clinton’s semen stain had shown up as testimony, as well as testimony from Lewinsky that the President had inserted a cigar into her vagina.

After this admission, Clinton denied having committed perjury because, according to Clinton, the legal definition of oral sex was mutually exclusive of “sex” per se. In addition, relying upon the definition of “sexual relations” as proposed by the prosecution and agreed by the defense, Clinton claimed that because certain acts were performed on him, not by him, he did not engage in sexual relations.

On the ambiguity of sexual terminology, no one can top the bible which terms sexual relations as knowledge, see biblical literalism.

Jahsonic

Aantekeningen uit Dodenstad.