The Sign of the Surfer

This won't mean much to you if you're not a reader of The Galaxy's Greatest Comic, but here's some nice scribbling on display near my home – one sprayer’s homage to 2000AD’s Marlon Shakespeare aka Chopper, Mega-City One’s Midnight Surfer, complete with Chopper's trademark smiley face - evidently, Acid House made a comeback in the 22nd century ! But good to see the vicious young hoodlums paying their respects to the sacred texts of my youth.

Putting this post together jogged a long forgotten memory of a trip to Italy many years ago and a photograph of your humble narrator posing in front of a wall which had MONDO CANE spray-painted in large letters. When I saw this piece of graffiti I immediately thought of  Jacopetti and Prosperi's genre-defining 1962 film, but I doubt the artist responsible had quite the same thing in mind...

Rewind, press play, fast-forward...

Back in 2012, I took part in a Q & A series on film collecting, with contributors waxing lyrical about their film collection. I just happened to cruise by the website earlier and I see the series has been taken offline so I'm re-posting it here. I've made a few adjustments to the text, removing some outdated information, and adding some new info to bring it up to date...


WHEN DID YOU START COLLECTING FILMS AND CAN YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST ONE YOU BOUGHT?

In 1989 I was 12 and was given my very first film on VHS, an anonymous sounding film-clip compilation entitled The Best of Martial Arts, presented and narrated by John Saxon, which showcased various Golden Harvest films - Bruce Lee classics, ninja films, Jackie Chan comedies and so on. My primary interest though was Horror and Science Fiction. I was an avid reader of 2000AD from the age of 6 or 7 and by the time I reached my teens I was gravitating towards adult Horror. I have cherished memories of long summer afternoons spent behind closed curtains watching the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series, The Fly, Phantasm II (it would be a few years yet before I saw the original), Re-Animator and Day of the Dead. The first film I bought on VHS was undoubtedly the big-box New World edition of Hellraiser, from my local videoshop for the princely sum of 10 Irish pounds. I'm sure it never occurred to me that I could have bought a brand new sell-through copy for the same price at HMV. Fast forward to May 1992 and Dark Side magazine's Video Nasties issue appears, a pivotal moment in my film watching life that would change the map of Horror forever...

TELL US ABOUT DIFFERENT FORMATS: WHICH DO YOU COLLECT ?

The first decade of film collecting was VHS. Collecting Horror on video here in Ireland demanded patience and perseverance. The Video Nasties round-up wasn't quite so severe here, only a small amount of headline-grabbing titles were pulled off the shelves to satisfy moral outrage, but with fewer tapes in circulation, one had to spend hours of detective work sifting through grotty video shops looking for banned titles, and uncut pre-cert rarities. But even as late as the mid-90's I was finding the odd bit of buried treasure - Thorn EMI's uncut edition of  Suspiria, hard to find pre-cert titles like The Blood-Spattered Bride, The Crazies and Martin, Intervision tapes like The Exterminator and Poor White Trash, curios like The Jesus Trip and Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, and the occasional Video Nasty - The Burning, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Blood Bath, I Spit On Your Grave and Gestapo's Last Orgy...

Another important source came from a more underground connection. I knew someone who sold dupes of Cult, Exploitation and Video Nasty titles and had no qualms about selling his wares to geeky teenagers. These tapes came in color photocopied sleeves and were mastered from tapes that were usually degraded to an inch of their life, all swarming tracking lines and random color shifts, but after handing over £6 per tape (or 3 for £15!), I was finally seeing the likes of Cannibal Holocaust, Last House on the Left, Snuff and hard-to-see exotica like Nekromantik, Bloodsucking Freaks and New York Ripper (letterboxed with Dutch subtitles!). To my huge regret most of my tapes, originals and dupes are long gone. By 2001 I had transitioned from VHS to DVD, and consigned the bulk of  my tapes to the trash just because DVD was so superior. Who knew that The Devils would take 12 years to come out ?  Nevertheless, the sun had firmly set on VHS, and I remember well the seismic event of Pioneer's DVD edition of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre arriving through my letterbox from the US in 2001. DVD coupled with online shopping was a revolution in terms of film collecting, and I was fortunate that those frenzied years of DVD buying dovetailed with an era of strong Euro-to-Dollar rate, cheap shipping from the US and relaxed customs controls - none of which are true today.

It's interesting that in this era of high-definition presentations I've become increasingly preoccupied with laserdisc, and in the last few years I've been putting together a modest collection. I don't have a laserdisc player but I find this dead format strangely seductive, indeed fetishistic, and I do enjoy seeking out laserdisc editions that came with vintage or exclusive artwork. And oddly enough I find myself collecting VHS again, in recent weeks I've picked up a copy of Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge and Mario Bava's Shock on VHS, both for their wonderful artwork.

WHAT WOULD YOUR SAY ARE SOME OF THE STANDOUT TITLES IN YOUR COLLECTION?

I don't have a whole lot of rarities on DVD, perhaps a few titles that have gone out of print in recent years - Anchor Bay's DVD of Cockfighter immediately comes to mind, and Barrel's DVD of Last House on Dead End Street which came in an attractive fat-boy case adorned with terrific artwork by Stephen Bissette. I'm quite fond of some European discs I've picked up over the years - the German edition of What Have They Done To Your Daughters ? and two Camera Obscura titles, Terror Express and Mondo Candido. Boxset wise, I like to show off my Raro boxset of Andy Warhol films, and Potemkine's massive 52-disc Eric Rohmer collection. And I've been fortunate to score a number of Arrow special editions - Videodrome, Phenomena, and I'm particularly proud that I was part of the crowd-funding campaign for the Walerian Borowczyk Collection.  I've been lucky too to land some very nice Japanese laserdiscs, and most recently I picked up a copy of Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things laserdisc, a very limited run signed by Bob Clarke and Alan Ormsby. And I must mention the 2008 documentary entitled Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky which I bought on DVD from the director Dmitry Trakovsky who included a handwritten letter thanking me for the interest in the film and explaining his ideas and motivation in making the film - a very nice touch.

Music of the Night (of the Living Dead)

“For a non-musician, the closest thing to composing a score is working a good set of library tracks into your picture”…

George Romero, as quoted on the sleeve of the 1982 Varèse Sarabande soundtrack edition of Night of the Living Dead. I’m currently enjoying the music of Romero’s great film - not exactly the kind of music fitting a bright summer’s morning, but I’m working a hectic 16-hour work shift today and the sturm und drang of Romero and Karl Hardman’s selections seem entirely appropriate. I’ve read that it was Hardman who applied the subtle electronic shading to the cues, which may account for some distortion heard on the tracks, but it makes for a far more eerie musical landscape than any conventional score could provide (fascinating to think what Louis and Bebe Barron might have come up with). The stand out track here is the final number, a mournful violin refrain credited to Spencer Moore, but crucially treated with some echo and used to powerful effect in the film over a disturbing photo montage of dead bodies. This edition of the soundtrack also includes a sampling of some of the more famous dialogue in the film and while I normally find such a thing intrusive, it’s always a treat to hear George Kosana say “They’re dead, they’re… all messed up”. The liner notes on the sleeve of the Varèse Sarabande LP mention other films that have shared Night of the Living Dead’s music – Terror from the Year 5000 (1958), The Hideous Sun Demon (1958), Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) and unmentioned here, The Killer Shrews (1959). I can’t recall the exact cue used in the film, but I had that distinct feeling of déjà vu whilst watching season 1 of Naked City…

Worth mentioning too, an additional Night of the Living Dead soundtrack album entitled They Won't Stay Dead from 2010 which gathers as many cues and effects as possible from the film. Unfortunately it's currently OOP but worth keeping an eye on Discogs...

Carnival of Souls

Just seeing some news that Criterion UK are releasing their Blu-Ray of Carnival of Souls just in time for Halloween, and while I warmly welcome this release, it’s probably best to say nothing about the hideous artwork. With that in mind, I’ve been looking at artwork and designs used for theatrical and home video editions of the film over the years. It’s frustrating that very few of the designs do justice to Herk Harvey and John Clifford’s evocative film, perhaps it was simply too difficult to market. I’ve never been fond of the film’s original poster (which fronted Criterion’s terrific 2001 DVD), the credited artist F. Germain includes all the familiar elements of the film, but unwisely imagines Candace Hilligoss’ character as some sort of 19th century saloon girl. The woman-in-peril theme reoccurs thru most subsequent US video releases, usually the shot of Hilligoss emerging from the car accident looking dazed and distressed, but it’s two British releases that have come up with something different. From 1991, Graham Humphreys’ exquisite b/w design for Palace Video, taps into the film’s nightmarish expressionism, and I love the inclusion of the keyboard of the organ, an integral element of the film.

The other design created for the film’s original theatrical run in the UK is also very striking, quite unlike any other design I’ve seen, looking more akin to one of Hammer’s psychological thrillers made in the wake of Psycho. Interestingly, this was a Tony Tenser release my initial thought was that it was marketed with Repulsion in mind but after consulting with John Hamilton’s Tenser/Tigon book Beasts In The Cellar it seems this was not the case. Information about the film's UK exhibition is rather sketchy. BBFC records list the film's submission for examination as June 1964, but Hamilton's book suggests the film was not publicly unveiled until May 1967 when it supported Tigon's debut film, a sexploitation item called Mini Weekend at the Jacey Cinema in London. And furthermore no evidence suggests the film had any additional playdates, it was not covered in the usually reliable Monthly Film Bulletin, and I have not seen any additional advertising material for the film. All very mysterious !

George A. Romero (1940 – 2017)

Waking up to very sad news this morning that George Romero has passed away at 77 after a short battle with lung cancer. This is hard news to take, Night of the Living Dead, Martin, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead are four sturdy pillars that my love of Horror Cinema rests upon. I haven’t been keeping up with Romero in recent times, every now and then I would hear speculation that a new Living Dead film was emerging but after half-hearted engagements with Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, I figured Romero had followed the terminal decline of Dario Argento and John Carpenter. Better to bask in the warmth of the classics than suffer the diminishing returns of Bruiser or Survival of the Dead (both of which I still haven’t seen). But all that fades from view now, Romero leaves behind a tremendous body of work. That would be true had he simply made the four films mentioned above, but Romero also gave us The Crazies, Creepshow and Knightriders, and there are films that I’m eager to go back and revisit – Jack’s Wife, Monkey Shines, and Romero’s half of Two Evil Eyes. Jack’s Wife is an especially intriguing prospect – I saw the film back in the 90’s when it screened on Channel 4 and strongly disliked it. But this was long before my tastes developed matured (and before I discovered Ingmar Bergman!) and now that I’m roughly the same age as the titular character, I feel much better placed to appreciate what Romero was trying to do.

I’ve only mentioned Romero’s films up to this point, and rightly so – I hate it when people sentimentalize the passing of remote, unknowable public figures, but in Romero’s case, I think I can grieve for the man he was. By all accounts he was an absolute gentleman, listening to his commentary tracks one gets a measure of his kindness, warmth, humor, the way he remembers his films like they were extended family outings. He remains always a joy to listen to. In Martin, I see Romero’s tenderness and humanity towards a character struggling with mental health issues. I look at Romero’s courageous casting of Duane Jones in Night of the Living Dead, a black actor given the role of a strong, resourceful and defiant man (and defiantly smacking a bothersome white man), at a time when Civil Rights was still a tinderbox within American society. When asked about it, Romero would always shrug it off and insist that Duane Jones was simply the best actor for the job, but it’s hard to believe that Romero and his partners at The Latent Image didn’t discuss the political ramifications of their decision. For me George Romero’s greatest legacy was perfectly encapsulated by my friend and film-maker John Mulvaney earlier today: "Watching the likes of Night of the Living Dead, Martin and Dawn of the Dead still gives me urge to want to just go out there and make art, irregardless of budget, or what popular culture dictates."

Filming Night of the Living Dead, 1968

With Stephen King and Richard Rubinstein on the set of Creepshow, 1982

Playing an FBI agent alongside Charles Napier and Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs,1991

Filming The Dark Half, 1993

Filming Land of the Dead, 2005

A scare at bedtime

A marauding, enraged giant, a child-snatching goblin, a nana-eating wolf and an unstoppable pot of oozing porridge - the stuff that nightmares are made of... My 20-month daughter tends to dictate most of my reading these days – her current faves are Daisy Duck, Little Lamb and the unputdownable Puppy Dog, and it has me reflecting on Ladybird’s Well Loved Tales series which I loved as a child. I haven’t thought about these books in well over 30 years so it was a treat to discover a page containing scans of the various covers. Ladybird have re-issued the series many times over the years but the original artwork courtesy of Eric Winter and Robert Lumley has rarely been bettered. I’ve always cited 2000AD as the origins of my love of Fantasy and Horror, but I wonder was something already stirring in those early years with the help of those Ladybirds ? Even now, looking at the cover for The Magic Porridge Pot, I can feel a little frisson of panic, perhaps an ancient buried memory of fooling around with a sink and gushing taps beyond my control… Check out the Well-Loved Tales series here

As I was putting this post together, I was reminded of Cinema's first adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk made by Edwin S. Porter in 1902. Over a century later, it looks undeniably stagey and primitive - the camera is locked down and distant, and the special effects, rudimentary, but this 10min film is remarkable in two respects. Firstly, the concept of a narrative cinema can be seen slowly emerging from the film - unlike many silent films from the era which were little more than brief sketches of everyday life, Porter's film has a definite story structure. The film has no intertitles and was most likely made before intertitles were introduced (Porter's own film Uncle Tom's Cabin is said to be one of the earliest uses of intertitles, in 1903) but Porter sticks closely to the folktale so audiences could follow the story. The second important aspect of the film was that it showed how Cinema could transcend theatre. Porter was able to bend space and time with a simple edit, and the film's optical effects, create a kind of magic that could not be replicated on the stage. This charming film can be viewed here

Alice

My latest round of obsessive listening comes courtesy of David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label and their new compilation of Alice Coltrane devotional music recorded in the 80’s and 90’s. Despite one track sharing its title with her 1971 masterpiece Journey In Satchidananda, this collection of Ecstatic Music, taken from three self-released albums Divine Songs (1987), Infinite Chants (1990) and Glorious Chants (1995) has little to do with Alice’s signature astral jazz music; on the face of it, the blend of Tangerine Dream-esque synths, Eastern instrumentation and Krishna chants and mantras would be more in line with New Age, that most loathed of musical genres. But it’s good to have your prejudices trashed once in a while, and in some considerable style too - the music Alice composed primarily for an audience of religious devotees and scholars at the Vedantic Center, located in the hills of Santa Monica, is absolutely spellbinding, radiating the warmth and joy of American Gospel, and the sublime spacey futurism of analogue electronica. Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson are well known Alice fans (the closing track on sunnO)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions album is named after her) and I wonder were the long funereal Wurlitzer drones on the aforementioned Journey To Satchidananda (the slight variation on the names is noted) an inspiration for the opening track on the live Dømkirke album ? As well as extraordinary music, the album also serves as a rare outing for Alice’s gorgeous bluesy, yearning voice which alone marks these recordings as essential. World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is available on all formats, (the CD and 2LP come with extensive liner notes) and can be sampled over at the dedicated bandcamp page

Bloomsday

Continuing the theme of last year’s Bloomsday post...  I’m always on the lookout for interesting and unusual cover designs for Ulysses, and I very much like Kirsty White’s cover for Penguin’s 2011 Annotated Student edition. Pictorial views of Dublin in the early 20th century are de rigueur for art directors tasked with presenting Joyce’s masterwork but it’s nice to see an artist given the opportunity to present original work. I haven't seen a cover this striking since Richard Hamilton’s 1985 etching The Transmogrifications of Bloom, used on various editions of the Oxford World Classics series, and I particularly like that the artist has included little references to the book within the drawing - thoughtfully color-coded for the reader to puzzle over. And the framing device of the drawing, a faux supplement of the Freeman's Journal newspaper (where Leopold Bloom sells advertising space), is rather ingenious too, in fact I initially assumed the design was adapted from an actual illustration from that paper. (Click here for a large scan of the cover)

400 Beats That

I shouldn’t let June slip by without saying something about The Wire magazine which celebrates its 400th issue this month. Putting out a magazine of any kind is a Herculean task, but for a publication, which has for most of its tenure dealt with experimental and marginal music to reach 400 issues is something significant. I picked up my first copy of The Wire back in 1996 when the October issue devoted an article to Throbbing Gristle, and I’ve been buying it ever since. If that unwieldy stack in the pic below looks impressive, my collection is still short about 100 issues from the magazine’s early years when it was primarily a Jazz journal, bearing the immortal strapline: Jazz, Improvised Music and.....

I picked up a few issues here and there from the early years, (and worth noting that this era featured some exquisite photography) but it was the arrival of the millennium that saw The Wire really hit its stride (at least for this reader), as every new issue would see my album collection expand in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions. It was through the good offices of The Wire that I discovered the music of Sun Ra, AMM, Herbie Hancock, Evan Parker, Fela Kuti, John Fahey, Tod Dockstader, Phill Niblock to name but a few. The magazine's championing of The Grateful Dead, King Crimson, John Martyn, even James Brown, artists that I previously had only a casual interest in, inspired me to delve deeper into their output. I heard Coil for the first time through The Wire, when in 2000, an early draft of A Cold Cell appeared on the 6th installment of the magazine's cover mounted CD series The Wire Tapper. To borrow a phrase from Cornelius Cardew, this was the time of The Great Learning.

If The Wire seems less vital in these recent times, it is perhaps a consequence of this reader not having the time to keep up with the endless flow of new music that emerges every month, but I must admit I've become increasingly frustrated by the magazine’s unfortunate inclination for fussy scholarly writing. The most recent offender, Philip Clarke's overview of Lou Reed's RCA & Arista Album Collection, in issue 397 in which the author couched the review in esoteric musicological language ("plagal cadences" and so on) was virtually unreadable. And yet I still eagerly buy it every month, usually rushing to grab one of the four or five copies my newsagents stocks. Incidentally, I had my name mentioned in The Wire back in 2012, albeit in the letters page when a tongue-in-cheek complaint about the previous issue's cover was fired off to the amused editor, who published it much to my dismay...

The Wire reviews Throbbing Gristle's TG24 boxset, issue Issue #227, January 2003

Coil, Issue #194, April 2000

The Herbie Hancock Sextet, Issue #174, August 1998

Yoko Ono, Issue #146, April 1996

What is Blade Runner ?

"A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. New climate, recreational facilities.....absolutely free. Use your new friend as a personal body servant or a tireless field hand - the custom tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant designed especially for your needs. So come on America, let's put our team up there...."

Quoted from the Blade Runner FAQ... I was rooting around some film magazines over the weekend when I discovered to my delight, a dog-eared copy of the Blade Runner FAQ bulking out an old Empire magazine. Compiled back in the early 90’s, the 70-odd page FAQ was a treasure trove of Blade Runner lore, crammed with fascinating facts, trivia and answers to those niggly questions the film poses (Was the Unicorn sequence taken from Legend ? What is the significance of the chess game?) Back in 1993, the BR FAQ felt like it was beamed from the future – my older brother, working at Motorola at the time printed me a copy from that mysterious newfangled thing known as the Internet, and for years the FAQ served as my Blade Runner Bible, endlessly read cover to cover up to its retirement with the arrival of Paul Sammon’s definitive chronicle of the film, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (which seems to be out of print these days). I’m looking thru an online version of the original FAQ now and enjoying the minutiae that easily slips the mind, like the association of each of the characters with an animal: Leon (Turtle), Roy (Wolf, Dove), Zhora (Snake), Rachel (Spider), Tyrell (Owl), Sebastian (Mouse), Pris (Raccoon), Deckard (Sushi (raw fish), unicorn). Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates? Answers here...