I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

Holy Cow!

The next calendar I design is going to be just like this one

Rudolph the Red–Nosed Reindeer (1964)
A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966)

A world without Yma Sumac.

Peruvian songbird Yma Sumac dead at 86

(I have never seen her referred to as “The Peruvian Songbird” before this obituatry. “Amy Camus” and “Voice of the Xtabay,” sure…)

Yma, Uta, Uta, Yma…

I scanned in my two vintage bowling calendars to make the internet that much closer to encapsulating all human knowledge.

Bowling 1963 & 1965

Remember a month ago when I wrote about that awesome Honeycombs lip-synced performance I found on YouTube?

I just now found out where it originated—from the jukebox movie “POP GEAR” hosted by butt-of-QI-references Jimmy Savile. It’s a 1964 British Invasion cash-in… just a ton of lip-synced performances with truly bizarre camera swoops and blocking. Since Mad Men is jumping to 64 next season, I can only hope this gets put into the style-inspiration-file.

See the Jimmy Savile intro and the standout Honeycombs performance first… it’s the best of the bunch for all the reasons I wrote about last time. I kind of want to re-enact and re-shoot it Gus Van Sant Psycho style, but it would never be as spectacular.

Then you can jump further in to Peter & Gordon to see what Mike Myers based Austin Powers’ looks on. (And they do a killer Lennon/McCartney number to boot.) Peter (the red head/Austin Powers original) is like a one-two punch of spectactular ugly with the orange bowl cut and the clunky glasses and then he smiles sweetly exposing teeth you could saw through a 2 by 4 with and it’s the perfect comedy triple. Schwing!

And some humanitarian-historian uploaded the entire movie to YouTube. In Eight Parts.

This blogger added his own commentary a year ago but also serves up the missing “Gold Pants Dance” which just looking at it will give you a yeast infection. And pink eye.

Another killer track from ‘64—

This voice baffles and allures me. When I first this song I thought it was a pre-teen Mexican boy. Based on this blurry and dimly-lit footage (it’s like Sasquatch evidence), it appears to be a West Indian girl? Maybe you’d like in better in Czech.

Either way, thanks to ideas planted by this French AIDS PSA (NSFW unless you work at Screw Magazine), I can only imagine it underscoring scenes of someone getting blown by a dude in an alley. Depending on Sal’s storyline, maybe they will use it for Mad Men season 3…

Add: Jesus, I feel like such an idiot for not even thinking of using this for the molestation scene in Being Glenn (Safe for work, not recommended for anyone)

So, this song is on the Joe Meek collection that, like, everyone has, but it never even occurred to be that there was a VIDEO (or televised lip-synced performance) of it.

So much to love here. Uncomfortable-looking rock band in suits (one of whom inevitably has giant nerd specs… the Shadows had one of him too). Choreographed guitar movements. Weird avant garde framing on a minimalistic set. Underfeatured big-beehived girl drummer. Song produced by closet-case lunatic techno-wizard murder-suicide.

Watch it 10000 times.

Despite the fact it may forward the curse, I watched the rest of Roadhouse this weekend, then followed it with The Great Moment (out-of-character Sturges heroic dentist biopic) and Real Life (showcasing Albert Brook’s horrifying shoulder fur)

My parents were in town, briefly, and I went to the Met (museum, not opera) with them. They’ve renovated the 19th/18th Century painting area (I can’t remember what the old gallery looked like… I probably could reconstruct the layout of the National Gallery in DC from memory, though). The three temporary shows were a parade of snooze and yuck though… Courbet,Poussin, and Jasper Johns: Gray.

However, on Sunday, I have found a new obsession. I’ve been a cranky snob about the last couple years about the revival schedules put up at Film Forum. They flipflop from being paint-dryingly dull retrospectives of the third-best forgotten masters of Japanese drawing room dramas where 2/3 of the movie is people emotionlessly staring at each other or, the UA screening coming up, so broad and mainstream that every movie on the ticket is available at your local blockbuster. Although, I really do applaud Film Forum’s ability to work my favorite movie “One, Two, Three” into EVERY series. Hooray!

Anyway, due to a listing in the New York Times (that I was only reading because my parents had a copy in their hotel room), I saw the New-York Historical Society (I don’t know why it’s hyphenated) was showing a double feature of silents. Turns out this group—Silent Clowns—has been showing extremely rare silents for the last 10 years. I finally found a film series nerdy/unpretenious enough to meet my specific film needs.

They seem to have a show once a month from fall through spring—there’s only two showings left this month. Next month is some guy with a mustache but the next one after that is Laurel & Hardy (meh) shorts AND a female slapstick duo and I’m intrigued. One is tall and one is short and in the promo picture they seemed to be tied together at the waist with a guilt look on their faces—that says “comedy” to me!

First, watch the 3rd Mister Glasses, I edited the middle part.

Second item, I want to make a new show. I like making shows, but I’ve had a two-ton, cake-frosted albatross around my neck for the last year. I have a bunch of semi-developed ideas (many of these are really old), but I can’t tell if any of them have merit.

The more the trend towards really short one-off sketches continues on the internet, the more I want to make complicated, multi-scene, involved shows. I don’t care what they end up on, though I like seeing them live with an audience. These shows could be for any venue online or off.

Here are the top candidates, to keep a record of them for my sake as well as the handful of peeping peteys who read this blog (both of you).

Sui-slider
Main character is a overly-sensitive Poetry grad student who after a series of disheartening encounters with his advising professor, therapist, and ex-girlfriend; commits suicide. What he soon realizes that rather than find a tidy end to his put-upon life, he has become a sui-slider cursed to jump between alternate realities with each attempt to end it all.

Pro:

Bowling Noir
The one hack move that pisses me off more than anything is badly done Noir parodies… sketches, videos, whatever. It’s always the same stock shit off a detective in his office and the dame comes in, voice over…zzzzz. The detective in his office shit is like less than 5% of the genre, and it’s 99% of the parody. I’d do a show that’s the rest of the genre, poor suckers getting pulled into schemes they don’t know how to get out of, insurance fraud, lots of night driving.

And the main character is the world’s greatest bowler, continually suckered into doing illegal things, played by Matt DeCoster

Pro:

I’ve been up to my eyeballs in little annoying lingering things that need to be taken care of on the SuperDeluxe show, but it’s as boring to talk about as it is to listen to, so I’ll skip it.

I’m doing a CD package for my friend’s band. It’s a collection of all their vinyl releases going back to 1996, plus unreleased tracks. We started getting this ready as far back as 2005, but it, for whatever reason, never really happened. It’s massive… 13 pages of liner notes, 41 tracks; but nobody had any cover ideas. (The one we wanted to do was stolen… by Smashmouth).

It got a title the second time around, “Christmas for Breakfast,” so going off that I looked around for an idea. I found a kids book (the band self-describes as “kiddie pop”) from the 1960s (the main era they lift style cues from) with “breakfast” in the title, so there you go. I ran it by James, and he was game.

I drew the lettering from a vintage magazine headline which I had downloaded as research for the Madmen xmas card I did last year. Making lettering brings out the obsessive-compulsive tendancies I mostly keep in check. I can do it for hours.

So, as of about the third day working on it, this is the progress. I’m going to put some other stuff on the table. Textures and shading I’ll put in afterwards, using photoshop airbrush. The kid needs eyebrows, too.