Month: October 2008

Early 1980 Electronic Weirdness

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Gotsdamn, I love the Internet sometimes! Case in point: music blog Mutant Sounds. For a month or so now, the owner of this blog has been posting rips of extremely rare electronic music from the early ’80s that only saw release on obscure, home-made cassette labels like Adventures In Reality, Roding Recordings, Integrated Circuit Recordings, and plenty others. Some I have downloaded have been a bit too gnarly and amateurish for my ears, but others are just gems.

Two I recommend are Rick Crane’s A Long Week in Houston from 1982 (maybe) and Robert Lawrence & Mark Phillips’s The Dadacomputer (1981). “Houston” is two side-long analog synth space noodlings, one with taped voices, the other without, but both transport me back to the times when you could pick up weird music on the radio, late night. Or maybe that’s just my memory. “Dadacomputer” is more rough and ready cut-up style, but bits remind me of Tuxedomoon. There’s more to choose from, but I don’t have the time to grab ’em all.

Interview wtih 74 year old porn star

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Continuing our senior theme for the day, here’s an interview you won’t see in AARP magazine. VICE interviews Shigero Tokuda, who has found a strange niche being one of the oldest porn stars. Sure his films aren’t mainstream, but there is an audience out there for them, and it sounds like he does rather well. Also, his thoughts and outlook are quite progressive.

What are your views on the sex climate in Japan?
I first learned about sex in the postwar period, when we didn’t have anything. Everybody was so focused on living, studying, graduating, and working that neither my classmates nor myself were all that interested in sex. So for my generation, it’s all about getting back those lost dreams of our youth. Society is more open about porn now, which I guess is a good thing. But personally, I think that sex should be regarded as something more austere. I mean, it’s the physical communion of two people. I know it sounds rich from somebody doing the work I do, but I sincerely believe that. I would like to make a deeper human-to-human connection with the people that I sleep with.

Sweet Gene Tierney

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Posts like this one by David Cairns remind me why I subscribe to his Shadowplay blog. Here he is rhapsodizing about 1940’s starlet Gene Tierney:

I now list the features, and excuse me if I get overcome and have to go lie down:
The eyes: large, long, and very wide apart. I have a vision of walking up to Gene and putting my hand over the centre of her face, and of her looking back at me from around either side of my palm. THOSE EYES IS WIDE APART.
The big pale moonlike forehead. I am a man who likes a forehead. (Paulette Goddard, what a forehead that is! An eighthead, in fact.)
The nose, apparently hand-shaped from some soft, wonderful material — butter, perhaps – by tiny master craftsmen.
The cheekbones, beautifully defined, as if constructed especially to receive Von Sternberg’s light.
The mouth, completely redesigned by ambitious lipstick in these images, but in reality a wide, full and elaborately flared labial sculpture, balancing the eyes, and containing slightly erratic teeth which add charm to what could otherwise be chilly perfection.

Our Lips Are Sealed

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Has there ever been a pop song like “Our Lips Are Sealed”? Check the facts: Terry Hall (Specials, Fun Boy Three) was in a relationship with Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Gos. They co-write this song about their love affair. Weidlin takes it back to her group and the Go-Gos have a huge hit with it. Wiedlin sings the bridge. Terry Hall then brings out his own version with Fun Boy Three and he also has a hit with it, just on the other side of the Atlantic. Compare and contrast the sunny California pop of the Go-Gos version with the pop-Goth Fun Boy Three version and you hear the two personalities behind the songwriting talking about the other.

So, in the annals of pop, is there a song that is written by two lovers about their own relationship that then goes on to be a hit for both parties in their respective groups? I doubt it. But if there is, let me know.
P.S. Whoever shot the bridge section of the GoGos video has complete FAIL in showing the person singing it. Jane, what happened??

My New Hero

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A naked Brit went for a swim in the moat around Tokyo’s Imperial Palace the other day, and it took a Benny Hill-esque amount of police to corner him, tag him, and release him into the wild and arrest his pale gaijin ass. The above photo rocks the house. But the video footage is something else altogether.

By way of BoingBoing and Tokyo Times