Mal Sharpe was an American humorist.
His most notable work was done as part of the duo Coyle and Sharpe. They were active as street interviewers in the early 1960s and were simply hilarious.
The filmed sequence of “The Warbler” is hilarious. Sadly, it appears to be offline at the moment.
I give you “Maniacs In Living Hell”, collected on the album The Insane (But Hilarious) Minds Of Coyle & Sharpe (1964).
Max von Sydow was a Swedish-born actor famous for playing chess with death in the film The Seventh Seal (1957).
In my universe, he has a minor role in Death Watch (1980) a film which caught my attention at a young age. It tells the story of a woman with an incurable disease who will be filmed 24/7 until her death.
Its theme is still my theme: technology, reality television and its impact on society.
Von Sydow has but a minor part in this film.
Speaking of reality television. The most underrated film with reality television as a trope is Paul Bartel’s The Secret Cinema (1968).
McCoy Tyner was an American jazz pianist.
What links McCoy Tyner to the Jahsonic 1000?
Let me tell you.
Among Tyner’s most critically acclaimed albums is Trident (1975).
On that Trident album there is a musical composition called “Impressions” which features a bassline by Ron Carter which was sampled throughout the “The Choice Is Yours (Revisited)” (1991) by Black Sheep. The sample is well-known in hip hop midst because in fact it is the spine of that song. It is also in the Jahsonic 1000.
The song “Impressions” is an interpretation of Coltrane’s composition Impressions (1962).
Ulay was a German artist, best known for his collaborations with Marina Abramović.
The duo are perhaps best-known for The Other: Rest Energy (1980) in which Ulay holds a bow and arrow to the heart of Marina Abramović.
David Roback was an American guitarist, best-known for co-writing “Fade into You” (1994). That was a song by Mazzy Star and it featured the vocals of Hope Sandoval.
Listening to this, I can’t help but think that Lana Del Rey has a very similar sound and voice. Not surprisingly, both Mazzy Star and Lana Del Rey are considered dream pop.
José Mojica Marins was a Brazilian film director, best-known for his persona “Coffin Joe“.
I just finished watching At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) and it’s actually quite good. I especially like the atheist bits, his materialist world view, his Nietzschean take on things.
For example, Coffin Joe eats meat on Holy Friday, just to taunt his catholic fellow townspeople.
And consider the opening oration of Coffin Joe:
“What is life?
It is the beggining of death.
What is death?
It is the end of life!
What is the existence?
It is the continuity of blood.
What is blood?
It is the reason of the existence!”
All this blasphemous discourse makes you wonder how this went down in Brasil. After all, it was 1964, another four years for 1968 to happen … and … did that even ‘happen’ in Brasil, the sexual revolution?
See atheism in Brazil, the sexual revolution in Brazil.
Flavio Bucci was an Italian actor known in my canon for his tiny part in the metafilm Closed Circuit (1978).
I wrote about that film here.
In that film Flavio Bucci sports thick glasses and plays the part of a nerdy sociologist who takes notes of the audience’s reactions during the screening of the film.
Afterwards he is interrogated by the police. Has he seen anything which can solve the murder of a man in the audience by a gun man IN the film?
You can see Mr. Bucci from 27:20 onwards.
Mr. Bucci also played in the sex comedy Gegè Bellavita (1978) which can be found in full on YouTube.
Andrew Weatherall was an English DJ, record producer, and remixer.
There was a time when music research took up most of my time. It coincided with the golden age of the music compilation, roughly from 1990 to 2005.
From that era stem Nine O’Clock Drop (2000) and Fabric 19 (2004).
Andrew Weatherall is also the man who made me discover “Black But Sweet” (1931) via his “Wilmot” composition.
Claire Bretécher was a French cartoonist, co-founder of L’Écho des savanes.
I used to buy issues of L’Écho des savanes in the late 1980s, a particularly fruitful time for comics, with highlights such as Tanino Liberatore, Enki Bilal, Wim T. Schippers, Jacques Tardi, Guido Crepax, Jean Giraud, Milo Manara, Georges Pichard and François Schuiten.
There was something subversive about the whole comics scene in those days, what you may now call the pre-internet days. Shops all of over Europe catered to the tastes of underground comic lovers, or so it seemed.
Only now that Claire Bretécher is dead, I discover her Agrippine character who was the heroin of nine albums. On the first self-titled album of 1988 Agrippine is shown reading the fictional Heidegger in the Congo (1988), a reference to Tintin in the Congo (1931).
I have not had the time to fully investigate Heidegger in the Congo but I suppose the link is that Heidegger was a Nazi and that Hergé’s album in the Congo is now considered racist.
Above, you will find an episode of the televised Agrippine.
Alas. No subtitles.
Lyle Mays was an American musician.
He shares writing credits on “This Is Not America” (1985)
I saw the film that composition stems from. I saw that film when it came out and never forgot the music. I later bought the twelve inch. I sold my collection of records when I moved into my current apartment in 2015.