Bo Diddley

I’ve only recently discovered this pop psychedelic creation of Guy Peellaert, and haven’t seen any of the actual comics yet. (great, another expensive hobby no one needs: collecting vintage European comics…) And sadly, I sense none will add up to be as cool as this animated sequence, a slow load but well worth it! I especially love the lampoon of the three major western religions included.

When I was 5, I had a crush, and how much more innocent can you get, on a character from one of Syd and Marty Croft’s action/adventure shows “Electra Woman and Dynagirl”. Sure she was the sidekick, second fiddle, but the combination of a woman’s body and those pigtails set my pre-pubescent libido a-flame.

So doing a bit of hack research, I see that Judy Strangis was also a child actor in a ‘63 episode of the Twilight Zone, The Bard, which happened to feature a young Burt Reynolds. A television actress, as she grew up, she appeared in episodes of many classic shows of the day: Room 222, Love American Style, The Mod Squad, a few years later the A-team, though she seems to have retired in the 90’s.

Interesting doc on the history of hacking featuring: phone phreaks, the uncanny power of a piece of plastic from a cereal box, nerds of various flavors (duh), an early ultimatum from the dread ogre Gates, and an attempt to chronicle the moment when pranksters became boogie men.

Sundance channel is running this film and I caught it over the weekend. I can’t recall exactly where I first heard about Punishment Park (1971), but it was fairly recently, and considering the controversy, was surprised to get a chance to see it. Overall as a film, I must say, it’s not all that. But as I’m obsessed with that period in American history, it was something I had to see. Watkins was by chance ahead of the curve in terms of what reality TV has become, but the ideological back and forth between the radicals and tribunal comes off as overstated and cliche, the yelling between the camera crew and cops rather unrealistic (why wouldn’t fascists destroy the equipment and confiscate the footage?), and the “ironic hook” at the end can be seen from a mile off - or more accurately, 50 miles off.
But there is enough substance to keep this from being a “b movie”, despite it’s vague similarity to films of the era like Deathrace 2000, which came out 4 years later, and to be fair, is much more of a fantasy. In some ways, it falls into a dystopian genre with Children of Men, at least in terms of paranoia when viewing The State. Certainly a lot accomplished with a small budget. I’m always interested in films that for one reason or another are pushed off the radar, and now definitely curious to see more of Peter Watkins work.
As a time capsule, two things that are interesting are to look at how relatively naked “the pigs” are when compared with the modern day forces of control. And I couldn’t help but imagine a parody of this film, where various 19-27 year olds are lined to face “the tribunal” in the modern day - how timid they might seem in comparison…”you mean like, no Starbucks OR videogames?!? Dude…” But that’s unfair of course: more accurately the accused, if in fact youths from rejected bourgeoisie backgrounds, would be anti-G8 eco-terror types, and the virile minority man gagged and pinned to the floor would have a lighter skin tone and be talking a more religious jive. There would also be a lot more talk about The Patriot Act than the Constitution, and hopefully that realization sends a bit of a chill down your spine…

Arthur C. Clarke

I didn’t have this set, but had some other micronauts. I’d love to see the multi-compartment white plane again, or the magnetic black and white knights. The music in this clip sounds like an outtake from one of the first few Trans Am albums. Props to JTO for digging up this one.

This will only be news to certain devoted, and many will smirk ’so what’ as you read, but it just might add a little poetry to your day. Double interest to me, as it was discovered at Reed College, many of whose trustifarian students used to annoy me at parties when I lived out there. From the Reed press release

Portland, OR (February 11, 2008) – On a February night in 1956, Allen Ginsberg stood in front of a group of students in a dormitory lounge at Reed College and read from a manuscript that a few months later would be published as Howl and Other Poems. “Howl” is Ginsberg’s most famous and controversial poem, and a seminal work of the Beat Generation. The book sparked censorship debates that are credited with broadening First Amendment protections.

The February 1956 recording at Reed was duly labeled, cataloged, and then overlooked in the college’s library for more than 50 years. Literary scholar John Suiter rediscovered the tape last summer while researching a biography of poet Gary Snyder (Reed Class of 1951, winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry); Snyder and Ginsberg were on a hitch-hiking trip to the Pacific Northwest at the time the tape was made and spent February 13-14 on campus giving poetry readings. Suiter concludes in a forthcoming article in the Reed alumni magazine that this is the earliest-known recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl.” On the recording, Ginsberg reads to the conclusion of Part I, but ends before completing Part II, saying, “I don’t really feel like reading any more. I just sorta’ haven’t got any kind of steam.”

The pristine recording of “Howl” caught on tape that night at Reed differs in numerous ways from the legendary first public reading of the poem at San Francisco’s Six Gallery in October 1955. It predates by approximately five weeks the previous earliest-known recording of “Howl,” made at the Town Hall Theatre in Berkeley on March 18, 1956.

And the recording. It’s strange to me when these things are discovered after half a century: unknown sketches from great painters, previously unheard demos from famous rock bands etc. hidden and decaying in “archives”. But then I’m someone often with too much time on his hands who would relish access to certain caches.