If the gender-defying German performer Klaus Nomi (above) was an acquired taste, so is Jägermeister, the hangover-defying (some say inducing) German 70-proof herbal liqueur.
Synergies aside, it’s still surprising that any company big enough to have shareholders would elect to have as bizarre a scenemaker as Nomi to endorse their product.
If you can identify any of Nomi’s fellow Jägermeister fans, please let us know in the comments. Not every wonderful creature gets the documentary he or she deserves, but Andrew Horn’s 2004 The Nomi Song can hip you to the creature who came from outer space to save the human race. Watch it for free here.
What is Film Noir? Ask that question to the Film Noir Foundation and this is what they’ll tell you:
Film noir is one of Hollywood’s only organic artistic movements. Beginning in the early 1940s, numerous screenplays inspired by hardboiled American crime fiction were brought to the screen, primarily by European émigré directors who shared a certain storytelling sensibility: highly stylized, overtly theatrical, with imagery often drawn from an earlier era of German “expressionist” cinema. Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger, among others, were among this Hollywood vanguard.
During and immediately following World War II, movie audiences responded to this fresh, vivid, adult-oriented type of film — as did many writers, directors, cameramen and actors eager to bring a more mature world-view to Hollywood product. Largely fueled by the financial and artistic success of Billy Wilder’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s novella Double Indemnity(1944), the studios began cranking out crime thrillers and murder dramas with a particularly dark and venomous view of existence.
In 1946 a Paris retrospective of American films embargoed during the war clearly revealed this trend toward visibly darker, more cynical crime melodramas. It was noted by several Gallic critics who christened this new type of Hollywood product “film noir,” or black film, in literal translation.
Few, if any of the artists in Hollywood who made these films called them “noir” at the time. But the vivid co-mingling of lost innocence, doomed romanticism, hard-edged cynicism, desperate desire, and shadowy sexuality that was unleashed in those immediate post-war years proved hugely influential, both among industry peers in the original era, and to future generation of storytellers, both literary and cinematic.
If you want to get another angle on the question, you can always take into consideration Roger Ebert’s 10 Essential Characteristics of Noir Films. But our suggestion, especially on a long Sunday afternoon, is to spend some time watching the classic movies gathered in our collection of 50 Free Noir Films. The collection features public domain films by John Huston, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles and other celebrated directors. Here’s a quick sample of what’s in the archive:
Beat the Devil – Free – Directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, the film is something of a comic and dramatic spoof of the film noir tradition. (1953)
D.O.A. — Free — Rudolph Maté’s classic noir film. Called “one of the most accomplished, innovative, and downright twisted entrants to the film noir genre.” (1950) Five Minutes to Live — Free — Memorable bank heist movie stars Johnny Cash, Vic Tayback, Ron Howard, and country music great, Merle Travis. (1961)
Quicksand - Free — Peter Lorre and Mickey Rooney star in a story about a garage mechanic’s descent into crime. (1950)
Scarlet Street — Free — Directed by Fritz Lang with Edward G. Robinson. A film noir great. (1945)
The Hitch-Hiker - Free — The first noir film made by a woman noir director, Ida Lupino. (1953)
The Stranger - Free — Directed by Orson Welles with Edward G. Robinson. One of Welles’s major commercial successes. (1946)
We recently added another 15 films to the collection of free noir films. So even if you’ve perused the list in the past, there’s now something new to enjoy.
Europeans do weird things with American folk music. Sometimes they do horrible things, like the 1994 techno rendition of traditional country song “Cotton-Eyed Joe” by a Swedish act who called themselves “Rednex” and who dressed up like cartoonish hillbillies in a parody only slightly less offensive than their music. In the video above, we have three continents colliding for another Scandinavian appropriation of Appalachian tropes, by way of a cover of “Thunderstruck” by Aussies AC/DC. The Finnish bluegrass band Steve ‘N’ Seagulls has achieved viral notoriety with their most recent release, which features banjo, mandolin, upright bass, accordion, a drummer who plays the spoons, and an anvil. Oh, and of course a wardrobe of overalls and suspenders without shirts. And the accordion player arrives on the scene on a riding mower.
Offensive? I don’t know—where Rednex was clearly minstrelsy, this has the feel of a fond tribute to a culture whose musical traditions Steve ‘N’ Seagulls clearly adores, though their wearing of Native headdress (below) would not sit well with certain music festival organizers.
As for their take on AC/DC; I almost prefer it to the original, though one Metafilter user pointed out that being able to hear the lyrics with such clarity does confirm one’s suspicion that they’re completely inane. And lest you think Steve ‘N’ Seagulls is some one-cover-hit wonder, check out their covers of Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” above and Dio’s “Holy Diver” below.
If you read the novels and stories of Ursula K. LeGuin and J.G. Ballard, you drop yourself into invented realities both overwhelmingly alien and unsettlingly familiar. And if you heard them on the radio — That Most Intimate of All Media, so they say — wouldn’t those qualities take on a new intensity? Thanks to CBC Radio’s Vanishing Point, a science-fiction anthology series which ran from the mid-1980s to the early 90s, you can do just that and find out for yourself what it feels like to have them piped more or less directly into your mind’s eye. Fans of both LeGuin and Ballard may take exception to the straight labeling of them as “science fiction” authors, and rightly so. The former’s work belongs as much to the tradition of fantasy as to that of sci-fi, and in both modes does a lot of detailed sociological world-building; the latter’s dark psychological dimension and near-nonfictional use of the modern world always prevented easy categorization. Still, I suspect that the makers of Vanishing Point not just knew all this, but understood its appeal.
They must also have realized that neither LeGuin nor Ballard had grown famous for their adaptability. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven got made twice for television, to varying opinions; opinions varied even more when her Earthsea books more recently became a Sci Fi Channel miniseries and a film from Hayao Miyazaki’s animation studio. Ballard’s novel of auto-wreck-eroticism Crash became a cult favorite in the hands of David Cronenberg, but usually his work crosses into other media in a more bizarre fashion (such as the television short of Crash we featured last year). But radio can handle pretty much anything such imaginative writers can throw at it, as you’ll hear in Vanishing Point’s six-part adaptation of LeGuin’s The Dispossessed at the top of the post, or in the Internet Archive playlist of its six adapted Ballard stories just above. History, alas, hasn’t recorded the reaction that LeGuin, always outspoken about others’ treatments of her worlds, had to these CBC dramas. When Rick McGrath of jgballard.ca sent Ballard himself CDs of all the productions in 2004, he received “a great note from him explaining he’d love to listen to them, but he has yet to buy a CD player.” And if I had to make a guess, I’d say that visionary of our alienated, fragmented technological future never got around to picking one up.
Find more sci-fi radio dramatizations in the relateds below.
Rookie’s never less than worthy “Ask a Grown Man” series provides a forum for mature males like actor Jon Hamm and radio personality Ira Glass to offer thoughtful, straightforward advice and explanations, born of personal experience, to teenage girls (and other interested parties).
The most recent edition adds depth, and could just as accurately be titled “Ask a Level-Headed 50-Year-Old Father of Three, Who’s Been Happily Married to His Children’s Mother for Years.”
Lurking just beneath Stephen Colbert’s hawkish Colbert Report persona is a fair-minded, serious fellow, who’s unembarrassed to weigh in in favor of parental authority when a 19-year-old fan complains of her dad’s opposition to sleepovers at her boyfriend’s place while she’s still living at home. Perhaps she should’ve asked a grown man whom experience hadn’t equipped to see things from the other side of the fence, as Colbert foresees that his answer won’t “go over great with everyone.”
Perhaps this segment should be called “Ask a Grown Man Whose Unequivocating Moral Compass Is Inconveniently Close to Your Dad’s, But Whose Position Allows Him to Offer Insights Without Losing His Temper or Going Off Message.”
Colbert’s children’s extremely low profile in the media’s line up of celebrity offspring reflects well on those charged with their upbringing. Were his 18-year-old daughter to take issue with the old man’s musings on Twitter or Snapchat, she’d have the luxury of doing so in the way of the average Rookie reader, rather than some obsessively observed nearly-grown baby bump.
As to how to tell whether a boy—or anyone—likes you, Colbert says “they want to hear your stories.”
As one viewer noted, “ask a grown-up, get grown-up answers.” Word.
My first reaction upon learning about Bob Dylan’s brief conversion to Evangelical Christianity may have been something like “What in the hell?” It wasn’t a religious Dylan that surprised me; it was Dylan embracing a faith that can often seem doggedly literal and, well, just a little inflexible. What with his love of ambiguity, of occult symbolism and symbolist poetry, and his resolute contempt for convention, Dylan has always struck me as more of an ancient Gnostic than a modern Bible thumper. While Dylan’s immersion in the Christian world may have been brief, it was deep, and it was confusing—enough so that Andy Greene in Rolling Stone comments that his proselytizing from the stage “took audience provocation to the next level.”
In his gospel shows of 1979/80, Dylan presented “a night of music devoted exclusively to selections from his new gospel records, often pausing for long, rambling sermons about Christ’s imminent return and the wickedness of man.” Hear one of those sermons at the top, a seven-minute theological disquisition, before Dylan and band launch into a powerful performance of “Solid Rock.” Just above, in another sermon from 1979, Dylan holds forth on the “spirit of the Antichrist” before an unsympathetic crowd in Tempe, Arizona. That same year, he gave an interview to Bruce Heiman of KMGX Radio in Tucson on the subject of his conversion (below).
In a certain way, a Dylan obsessed with divine judgment and the book of Revelation jibes with his pursuit of the arcane and the mystical, with his consistently apocalyptic vision, prophetic mumblings, and tendency to moralize. But the preaching is just…. well, kinda weird. I mean, not even Dylan’s friend, the deeply devout Johnny Cash, used his musical platform to harangue audiences about the Bible. Was it a stunt or a genuine, if perhaps overzealous, expression of deeply held beliefs? That question could be asked of almost every move Dylan has ever made. This brief period of very public religiosity may seem anomalous, but Dylan’s interest in religion is not. Google his name and any faith term, and you’ll see suggestions for “Dylan and Islam,” “Dylan and Buddhism,” “Dylan and Catholicism,” and, of course, “Dylan and Judaism,” the religion of his birth. Some contend that Dylan still keeps faith with Jesus, and that it doesn’t mutually exclude his Jewishness.
And yet, how Dylan’s Christian preaching could line up with his later commitment to Chabad—an Orthodox Hasidic movement that isn’t exactly warm to the idea of the Christian messiah, to put it mildly—is beyond my ken. But logical consistency does not rank highly on any list of virtues I’m familiar with. Dylan seemed to be reconnecting with Judaism when he explicitly expressed solidarity with Israel in 1983 in his Zionist anthem “Neighborhood Bully” from Infidels, in other respects, a wholly secular record.
Three years later, Dylan appeared on the Chabad telethon (above), accompanying his son-in-law Peter Himmelman on harmonica in a rendition of “Hava Nagila,” along with, of all people, Harry Dean Stanton (whose chilling turn as polygamous Mormon sect leader in HBO’s Big Love you may well recall). By this time, at least according to Jewish Journal, “Chabad rabbis had helped Dylan return to Judaism after the musician embraced Christianity for a time.” The mid-90s saw Dylan worshipping with Brooklyn Lubavitchers, and in 2007, he was sighted in Atlanta at Yom Kippur services at the Chabad-Lubavitch of Georgia, saying the “blessings in Hebrew without stumbling, like a pro.”
So is Bob Dylan a firebreathing Christian or an Orthodox Jew? Or, somehow… both? Only Dylan knows, and frankly, only Dylan needs to. His beliefs are his business, but his public expressions of faith have given his fans much to puzzle over, reading the lyrical tea leaves for evidence of a solid rock center amidst the shifting sands of Dylanology. Let ‘em sift. Some people obsess over Dylan’s religious commitments, others over his “secret” wife and daughter, his corporate sellouts, or his sometimes inscrutable personal politics. It’s all part of the business of fame. What I find fascinating about the many layers of Bob Dylan is not how much they tell me about the man, who has the right to change his mind, or not, as often as he likes, but how much they reveal about his strange lyrical themes. After all, Dylan’s seemingly contradictory allegiances and ambivalent identities as an artist may in in fact make him all the more the archetypal American songwriter he’s always said to be.
Sophocles and Aeschylus may be spinning in their graves. Or, who knows, they may be taking some delight in this bizarre twist on the Oedipus myth. Running 8 minutes, Jason Wishnow’s 2004 film puts vegetables in the starring roles. One of the first stop-motion films shot with a digital still camera, Oedipus took two years to make with a volunteer staff of 100. But the hard work paid off.
The film has since been screened at 70+ film festivals and was eventually acquired by the Sundance Channel. Separate videos show you the behind-the-scenes making of the film (middle), plus the storyboards used during production (bottom). This video first appeared on our site in 2011, and, stellar as it is, we’re delighted to bring it back for readers who have joined us since. Hope you enjoy.
Most everyone who comments on the phenomenon of the supergroup will feel the need to point out that such bands rarely transcend the sum of their parts, and this is mostly true. But it does seem that for a certain period of time in the late sixties, many of the best bands were supergroups, or had at least two or more “super” members. Take the Yardbirds, for example, which contained, though not all at once, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton. Or Cream, with Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker. Or Blind Faith—with Clapton, Baker, and Steve Winwood…. Maybe it’s fair to say that every band Clapton played in was “super,” including, for a brief time, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band.
It started with the one-off performance above in Toronto, which led to an undated eight-page letter Lennon wrote Clapton, either in 1969, according to Booktryst, or 1971, according to Michael Schumacher’s Clapton bio Crossroads. The letter we have–well over a thousand words–is a draft. Lennon’s revised copy has not surfaced, and, writes Booktryst, “the content of the final version is unknown.” In this copy (first page at top), Lennon praises Clapton’s work and details his and Yoko’s plans for a “revolutionary” project quite unlike Lennon’s former band. As he puts it, “we began to feel more and more like going on the road, but not the way I used to with the Beatles—night after night of torture. We mean to enjoy ourselves, take it easy, and maybe even see some of the places we go to!”
Lennon explicitly states that he does not want the band to be a supergroup, even as he recruits super members like Clapton and Phil Spector: “We have many ‘revolutionary’ ideas for presenting shows that completely involve the audience—not just as ‘Superstars’ up there—blessing the people.” While Lennon and Ono don’t expect their recruits to “ratify everything we believe politically,” they do state their intention for “’revolutionizing’ the world thru music.” “We’d love to ‘do’ Russia, China, Hungary, Poland, etc.,” writes Lennon. Later in the missive, he explains his detailed plan for the Plastic Ono Band tour he had in mind—involving a cruise ship, film crew, and the band’s “families, children whatever”:
How about a kind of ‘Easy Rider’ at sea. I mean we get EMI or some film co., to finance a big ship with 30 people aboard (including crew)—we take 8 track recording equipment with us (mine probably) movie equipment—and we rehearse on the way over—record if we want, play anywhere we fancy—say we film from L.A. to Tahiti […] The whole trip could take 3–4‑5–6 months, depending how we all felt.
It sounds like an outlandish proposal, but if you’re John Lennon, I imagine nothing of this sort seems beyond reach—though how he expected to get to Eastern Europe from the Pacific Rim on his ship isn’t quite clear. The problem for Clapton, biographer Michael Schumacher speculates, would have had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with his addiction: “after all his problems with securing drugs in the biggest city in the United States, Clapton couldn’t begin to entertain the notion of spending lengthy periods at sea and trying to obtain heroin in foreign countries.” In any case, “in the end, Lennon’s proposal, like so many of his improbable but compelling ideas, fell through.” This may have had some relation to the fact that Lennon had a heroin problem of his own at the time.
The clip of Clapton performing with the band comes from Sweet Toronto, a 1971 film made by D.A. Pennebaker of the band’s performance at the 1969 Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival (see the full film above). That event had a wholly improbable lineup of ‘50s stars like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bo Diddley alongside bands like Alice Cooper, Chicago, and The Doors. As the title opening of the film states, “John could at last introduce Yoko to the heroes of his childhood.” Pennebaker gives us snippets of the performance from each of Lennon’s heroes—opening with Diddley, then Lewis, Berry, and Little Richard—before the Plastic Ono Band with Clapton appear at 16:43. (This performance also produced their first album.) The Beatles Bible has a full rundown of the festival and the band’s somewhat shambolic, bluesy—and with Yoko, screechy—show.
Read the full transcript and see more scans of Lennon’s draft letter to Clapton over at Booktryst, who also explain the cryptic references to “Eric and,” “you both,” and “you and yours”—part of the “soap opera” affair involving Clapton, George Harrison’s (and later Clapton’s) wife Pattie Boyd, and her 17-year-old sister Paula.
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If the gender-defying German performer Klaus Nomi (above) was an acquired taste, so is Jägermeister, the hangover-defying (some say inducing) German 70-proof herbal liqueur.
