It’s only the 13th of December, but it felt like Christmas came early when I stumbled upon this Bandcamp guide to the Sun Ra selections that are available on the site. I had no idea there were so many Sun Ra albums available to stream and download through the independent music hub that many of my peers and I use to make our own music available to our listeners. I discovered Sun Ra in the late 1980′s when I saw Sun and his Arkestra playing on the late great Night Music show hosted by saxophonist David Sanborn. Of course, I was completely blown away and I’ve been a mark for everything Ra ever since. Here’s a bit about the offerings on the Bandcamp site from the guide…

The thing about being an alien from outer space, sent to spread enlightenment and happiness through sound, is that some of the things you set out to do can’t be accomplished on Earth. “Everything that’s possible’s been done by man,” the composer, pianist, and bandleader Sun Ra told interviewer John Corbett in 1986. “I have to deal with the impossible. And when I deal with the impossible and am successful, it makes me feel good, because I know that I’m not bullshittin’.”

The late Sun Ra enjoyed the paradox of accomplishing the impossible, a feat that extends to his very career path. It’s rare enough for any Black artist having enough time, energy, and money to run a large jazz ensemble for 40-odd years, but Sun Ra did it while also operating a record label, which boasted countless releases tracking his band’s transformation into a collectively-improvising “cosmo-drama” troupe he called the Arkestra. He did all of this while presenting himself as a costumed, Egyptology-citing, completely serious court jester from the planet Saturn. His work was informed by, and influential within, the greater jazz community, and yet somehow also stood apart from it—adjacent, outside, and beyond.

“He’s not just some crazy guy, and he’s not just some brilliant musician,” says Irwin Chusid, the radio host and music writer who has become administrator of Sun Ra LLC. “He is an institution. He is a cosmic force. He is a genius. He’s one of the great neglected composer-musicians of the 20th century. There’s no question what this man created is singular. There’s no one like Sun Ra.”

Amen.

Check out the rest of the guide and Sun Ra’s Bandcamp selections at the link above. In the meantime, here’s Ra’s early doo-wop project The Qualities singing “It’s Christmas Time” from 1960…

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The Godfather is one of the greatest American films of all time, and in many ways it represents the best of the New Hollywood movement that flourished roughly from the 1960′s into the early 1980′s. The film included all of the greed, violence and lust for power that earlier films like Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932) had established as defining tropes in the gangster genre. But director Francis Ford Coppola expanded his movie’s themes to tell the story of a family and — ultimately — of America itself. Over the course of his Godfather Trilogy the story of Corleone family is one of love and loyalty as well as brutality and vengeance. Coppola’s original movie turns 45 this year. Celebrating half a century of The Godfather here’s a deep dive documentary about the making of the trilogy…

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Earlier this evening I had just finished a yummy dinner of homemade soup with Japanese noodles, miso/lime broth, chicken, carrots, seaweed, and some hot red peppers I bought at the farmers market on Friday evening. I had a great workout this morning and then proceeded to knock the hell out of a to-do list full of tasks, and I even found time to finally unload some winter clothes from my truck at my storage space and sort through a bunch of cold weather clothes before taking a big load to the Salvation Army down the street. The sunset was lovely and the soup was tasty and filling — a nice ending to a productive good day. That’s when I saw a headline on my phone informing me that Sam Shepard had died.

Shepard, his plays, his prose, his films and his persona as an American artist all loom large in my pantheon of creative heroes. I actually admire and enjoy the work of lots of writers, actors and directors, but Shepard is way up on that mountain for me. Shepard is right up there with the Beat Generation which inspired him, and Patti Smith his one time lover and collaborator. Shepard is on that mountain next to other great anti-leading-man actors from the 1980s like Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts at their very best. Among the rocks you can see Shepard sharing a handful of mushroom buttons with Eugene O’Neill and rolling another smoke with Nina Simone whom Shepard saw performing while he was a busboy at the Village Gate when he first moved to New York City. He plays his beloved drums on an outcropping with Jimmy Dean and Brando — they both loved to play the drums and what if Shepard had had the chance to put them on his stage with his words in their mouths?

Motel Chronicles will always be one of my favorite books, and I’ll never forget the Lobster Man from “Cowboy Mouth,” and I’ll never forget Shepard as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff appearing out of the red flames and black smoke from his wrecked plane putting one foot in front of the other crossing the desert walking straight at the camera; not speaking or crying or screaming or yelling, just walking, right into his own legend.

Adios, Sam. Here’s the man himself looking back on his big screen breakthrough in Terence Mallick’s Days of Heaven…

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As technology becomes smaller, smarter and more ubiquitous, questions about machine sentience and artificial intelligence are as common today as inquiries about long term climate change or global economic forecasts — we know it’s coming, but when? Of course science fiction is where a lot of these anxieties get worked out and recent films like Ex Machina, Her, and Morgan are just the most recent examples of cinema’s attempts to introduce audiences to its versions of ghosts in machines. Way back in 1984 a bizarre flick called Electric Dreams presented audiences with a cyber love triangle, and one of the first articulations of the problems and possibilities that arise when our personal lives become plugged-in.

Here’s the AV Club with the word…

When Spike Jonze’s Her was released in 2014, mentions of the 1984 film Electric Dreams were nearly as prevalent in reviews as “Siri” or “weird pants.” Though Jonze denied ever having seen it, the films, though separated by 30 years of technology, are at least superficially similar. Both see lonely, socially awkward schlubs using their computers to find love (though that’s a logline that could be applied to plenty of stories and users of eHarmony). Both hail from former music video directors, with Electric Dreams marking the feature debut of Steve Barron, the man behind such classic clips as Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing,” and A-ha’s “Take On Me.” And both films view artificial intelligence as invasive and omnipresent. They also believe A.I. is every bit as capable of love—and its potential for causing pain—as flesh-and-blood people.

Electric Dreams establishes this from the vantage point of the early ’80s, a time when PCs were still uncommon enough to seem like magic wizard boxes. Akin to the clunky, supernatural units that allowed suburban teens to break the nuclear code in WarGames or build the perfect woman in Weird Science, the fictional Pinecone Computer bought by Electric Dreams’ awkward architect Miles (Lenny Von Dohlen) talks to him in full English sentences right out of the box. It also immediately assumes control of every aspect of Miles’ apartment, and can do everything from composing music to impersonating a dog, to singlehandedly designing the earthquake-resistant brick he’s been struggling over. “I don’t know anything about computers,” a hapless Miles tells the woman at the electronics store. “Nobody does!” she replies, speaking for an entire generation of movies.

Those mystical, mysterious computer powers grow even stronger when Miles accidentally douses his new machine in champagne, which magically causes it to gain sentience, adopt the name “Edgar,” and—with the help of a new audio chip that Miles probably should have traded for something more pleasing—the fragile, volatile voice of Bud Cort. Completely giving itself a pass on making any sense from the get-go, Electric Dreams’ opening credits describe the film as “a fairy tale for computers.” Edgar is the digital Pinocchio who’s eager to become a real boy.

Here’s Electric Dreams…

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Burroughs: The Movie is a 1983 documentary by Howard Brookner about the author William S. Burroughs. Brookner shot the film for five years with Burroughs’ full cooperation. The two became good friends before Brookner died of AIDS in 1989. In 2012 Brookner’s archive was discovered in a variety of locations, and the filmmaker’s nephew, Aaron Brookner, oversaw the restoration of the Burroughs film including the recovery of never-before-seen interviews with the likes of Andy Warhol and others. That film was re-released last year to coincide with the Burroughs Centenary. This year, Aaron is premiering his own film about his uncle and his work at Sundance, and the trailer for Uncle Howard reads like hanging out in the greatest scene in New York’s late 1970′s and early 1980′s…

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One of the most interesting — and tragic — conspiracy theories of recent times has been the Satanic Panic of the 80′s and 90′s. During this time faulty research, hearsay and the fears projected by Christian conservatives resulted in a very real panic that saw a number of innocent people’s lives ruined over what amounted to an urban legend. Here’s a long quote from Wiki as the panic was a very complex and nuanced phenomenon and their summing-up is too thorough not to include here…

Satanic ritual abuse (SRA, sometimes known as ritual abuse, ritualistic abuse, organised abuse, sadistic ritual abuse and other variants) was a moral panic that originated in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout the country and eventually to many parts of the world, before mostly diminishing in the late 1990s. Allegations of SRA involved reports of physical and sexual abuse of people in the context of occult or Satanic rituals. In its most extreme form, SRA involved a supposed worldwide conspiracy involving the wealthy and powerful of the world elite in which children were abducted or bred for sacrifices, pornography and prostitution.

Nearly every aspect of SRA was controversial, including its definition, the source of the allegations and proof thereof, testimonials of alleged victims, and court cases involving the allegations and criminal investigations. The panic affected lawyers’, therapists’, and social workers’ handling of allegations of child sexual abuse. Allegations initially brought together widely dissimilar groups, including religious fundamentalists, police investigators, child advocates, therapists and clients in psychotherapy. The movement gradually secularized, dropping or deprecating the “satanic” aspects of the allegations in favor of names that were less overtly religious such as “sadistic” or simply “ritual abuse” and becoming more associated with dissociative identity disorder and government conspiracy theories.

The panic was influenced to a large extent by testimony of children and adults that were obtained using therapeutic and interrogation techniques now considered discredited. Initial publicity generated was by the now-discredited autobiography Michelle Remembers (1980), and sustained and popularized throughout the decade by the McMartin preschool trial. Testimonials, symptom lists, rumors and techniques to investigate or uncover memories of SRA were disseminated through professional, popular and religious conferences, as well as through the attention of talk shows, sustaining and spreading the moral panic further throughout the United States and beyond. In some cases allegations resulted in criminal trials with varying results; after seven years in court, the McMartin trial resulted in no convictions for any of the accused, while other cases resulted in lengthy sentences, some of which were later reversed. Scholarly interest in the topic slowly built, eventually resulting in the conclusion that the phenomenon was a moral panic, with little or no validity beyond paranoia.

Official investigations produced no evidence of widespread conspiracies or of the slaughter of thousands; only a small number of verified crimes have even remote similarities to tales of SRA. In the latter half of the 1990s interest in SRA declined and skepticism became the default position, with very few researchers giving any credence to the existence of SRA.

Here’s a Satanic Panic propaganda classic preserved on shiny black VHS tape. Here’s Escaping Satan’s Web…

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We’re about to be submerged in the hype surrounding Virtual Reality, but it’s important to remember that we’re witnessing the second coming of VR which began its life as a cultural artifact/technological prophecy in the 1980′s and early 1990′s. Fiction authors like William Gibson, films like Lawnmower Man and magazines like Mondo 2000, gave us the words and images we needed to understand what the new technology might be capable of and this charming 1991 BBC documentary reminds us of the aesthetics that defined VR’s debut.

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Purple Rain — the record and the film — came out thirty years ago this month and Prince recently reunited with Apollonia to celebrate the date.

Prince was a musical prodigy who transformed himself from “the new Stevie Wonder” into a genre blurring phenom who had as much impact on the culture of the 1980′s as established superstars like Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen who were dominating the charts and the mega-tour scene.

The album Purple Reign included hits like When Doves Cry, Let’s Go Crazy and the epic title ballad. The recording introduced his band The Revolution and proved that Prince could make complex, sexual, personal music while still catching the ear of a mass audience.

Here’s a doc about the purple one’s reign during the 1980′s.

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This crazy video features an insane look back on the toys and cartoons of the 1980′s by a couple of confused evangelical Christians who see the Devil in every detail. Author Phil Phillips and Pastor Gary Greenwald would be just a couple of bumbling buffoons if their brand of humorless hysteria hadn’t been part of a bigger trend that lead to the “Satanic Panic” of that era — a time when hundreds of unsubstantiated cases of so-called Satanic ritual abuse were reported around the United States.

The good people at i09 published a short version of this video. Here are some of their favorite bits:

• Dungeons & Dragons “game pieces” scream when you set them on fire!

• “There’s a form of witchcraft [in Star Wars] called ‘Obi witchcraft.’” Obi obi obi!

It’s all in good fun kids until you draw a direct line from a pastor obsessed with zombie Smurfs to the convictions of the West Memphis 3. Be careful when you see the Devil that you do not see him in a mirror.

There is a sevenish minute version of this floating around on the net. Here is the the full 90 minutes plus:

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