Taking a break from our spooky October posts here at the end of the month — we’ll let today’s merrymaking bring its own hard-earned scares — here’s a great little show from Canadian television that I stumbled upon the other day. Prisoners of Gravity was an interview show disguised as a pirate broadcast, covering all sorts of books, films and art through a countercultural lens to dazzling effect. The series aired 139 episodes over 5 seasons from 1989 to 1994. Here’s the word from the Wiki…

As established through a comic-strip montage opening sequence drawn by Ty Templeton, the premise held that a fan of speculative fiction becomes disturbed by news broadcasts describing the alarming state of the world and decides he must escape. He broadcasts his show each week from an orbiting space station. The show’s presentation was fully wrapped in its quirky premise, featuring on-screen graphics and background sounds to simulate a space station atmosphere, “using active, innovative cinematography to ease the visual boredom that often accompanies interviews with talking head(s).”

The week’s topic was introduced with a few opening thoughts before launching into various interview clips. In each episode, Rick would interview a number of authors and artists, along with filmmakers, animators, and the occasional futurist. Topics that were discussed ran the gamut: censorship, superheroes, humour, religion, fairy tales, Mars, cyberpunk, war, overpopulation, sex… Episodes were 30 minutes in length (having no commercial breaks on public television) and typically showcased six to fourteen interviewed creators alongside bridging commentary from Rick. Roughly six-hundred interviews were conducted and aired by the time the show’s run came to an end.

Prisoners has its own YouTube channel and this playlist is a bit chaotic so you’ll need to bounce around a bit to follow episode to episode. I’ve set the video in this post to start with the first segment of an episode that deals with racism because it dovetails so nicely with the recent news about Marvel’s upcoming Black Panther film. Here’s a bit about that from The Guardian…

The newly announced films are two-part Avengers sequel Infinity War and a Captain America movie called Civil War, alongside new film outings for Doctor Strange and – most interestingly – Black Panther.

The latter will be Marvel’s first lead black superhero, and it’s a breakthrough moment. The positioning of this ethnic minority as heroic – however tortured that heroism may likely be – is a valuable statement in this most high profile of US pop cultural products, in a year when the dominant media image of black men has been as subordinated to (often white) police.

My favorite thrill with this show comes at the beginning of every episode when it seems like a program called Second Nature goes to static and is “interrupted” by the program — so retro-meta I wanna roll around in back issues of Mondo 2000. Enjoy Prisoners of Gravity…

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This scary October post recalls a subject many of you likely find terrifying: the career of Nicolas Cage. Cage has done a lot of cash cow trash since he won the Oscar for Leaving Lost Vegas. That said, he’s also brought the wild edge to films like Bad Lieutenant, reminding me of the strange brilliance that illuminated his earliest roles.

One of my early Cage faves is the fang-toothed film Vampire’s Kiss, which is celebrating a 25th anniversary this year. Here’s an outrageous collection of crazy Cage scenes from the movie…

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Insomnia loves Gilda Radner not only for being a proud daughter of Detroit, Michigan, but also for being a counterculture hero as one of the best original members of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players when Saturday Night Live debuted in 1975.

Radner played outrageous characters like Roseanne Roseannadanna and even did spot-on impressions of celebrities ranging from Lucille Ball to Patti Smith. Radner brought a manic, physical energy to her performances, but, more importantly, she was a comedian whose joy always showed through her mask, and it endeared her to her audiences and fellow performers alike.

On the 25th anniversary of her death from ovarian cancer in 1989, here is Gilda as Roseanne Roseannadanna giving a commencement speech at Columbia University in 1980…

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25 years ago, Robert Anton Wilson starred in this experimental, made for television film, Borders. The movie combines interviews and commentary by luminaries like Wilson and physicist Michio Kaku with early computer animation and a dramatized storyline about an idealistic scientist trying to do honest research in the belly of the defense industry beast.

This show is dated in the best possible sense: The animations are primitive and charming, and the idealistic scientist is played by a baby-faced Steve Buscemi. Some of the then-current events mentioned here might cause a bit of temporal whiplash, but it’s also interesting that many of the problems being addressed and questions being asked here are the same ones we continue to deal in today.

The film is about crossing borders of all kinds — spiritual, political, geographic. Can you imagine a better guide than Robert Anton Wilson? Here’s the film…

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“Romeo Rodriguez squares his shoulders, curses Jesus
runs a comb through his black ponytail.”

That’s one of my favorite lines in a Lou Reed song. It’s from “Romeo had Juliette,” the opening track on Reed’s fifteenth solo album, New York.

While Reed was always preoccupied with and identified with the city, the New York album is a concentrated, focused poetic study of the place that is by turns a heartbroken love letter and a flaying satire: In a song like “Halloween Parade” Reed addresses the AIDS epidemic as effectively as any songwriter ever has, while in “Dirty Boulevard” he rewrites the words on the Statue of Liberty, intoning in a sepulchral mumble:

“Give me your hungry, your tired your poor I’ll piss on ‘em
that’s what the Statue of Bigotry says
Your poor huddled masses, let’s club ‘em to death
and get it over with and just dump ‘em on the boulevard”

Also, Lou Reed’s guitar has never sounded better than it does here.

Lou Reed’s New York is celebrating a 25th birthday this year and it’s one worth remembering. Some folks might say that some of the album’s themes are a bit dated, but, I don’t know — I still hate Rudy Giuliani, don’t you?

Here’s the record in its entirety…

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As we continue to remember Kurt Cobain 20 years after his suicide, let’s take this opportunity to look back even further to the beginnings of what was to become “grunge.” While bands like Green River, Melvins and Mudhoney all had music released by 1988, their mixing of punk and metal mostly set the scene for grunge’s mainstream success.

While 1991 has become dubiously known as “the year punk broke” because of the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind, it’s 1989 that I find most interesting. We generally think of grunge as a ’1990′s phenomenon, but its roots dig back into the middle 1980′s and that decade’s last year looks like the high water point before the damn burst.

Let me explain…

Mudhoney’s self-titled 1989 debut album is considered disappointing in light of the singles and EP’s that came before it, but it marks a milestone in grunge music: Mudhoney boasted members from both Green River and the Melvins, tying them back to the very beginnings of the Seattle sound, and Kurt Cobain acknowledged them as a major influence on Nirvana. In 1989 Mudhoney was straddling the first and second waves of grunge in a manner that makes their debut album seem much more important 25 years on.

Soundgarden’s Louder than Love came on the heels of their definitive debut LP, Ultramega OK. Louder was the band’s major label debut and the record most fans heard first as the band screamed toward mainstream success.

Mother Love Bone’s first release was the 1989 EP, Shine. While the story of the band’s tragic lead singer, Andrew Wood, has earned MLB a place in grunge history, his overdose death cut short the band’s musical impact. However, MLB’s Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament (who both traced their roots to Green River) would quickly go on to form two successful projects out of MLB’s ashes: Temple of the Dog and Pearl Jam.

Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach was released in 1989.

These albums aren’t necessarily my favorite grunge records. In fact, one can argue that the genre hasn’t held up particularly well. That said, grunge was a wide cultural phenomenon — one that happened to have a great soundtrack. The music still speaks to a particular time in our collective history and it always will. 1989 is the year when it all comes together for the Seattle sound. That’s the tipping point.

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25 years ago, in February of 1989, filmmaker John Cassavetes died. One of the greatest actors of his generation, Cassavetes mostly turned his back on appearing in front of the camera in favor of self-financing a series of highly personal, deeply polarizing films that continue to vex critics, actors, directors and audiences alike.

I discovered Cassavetes in a book a long time before I discovered him on a screen. He gave me some good advice at a time when I needed it. Paraphrasing: If you’re the kind of artist who hears a voice and you stop listening to that voice, the voice will stop talking to you. I made major life-decisions based on this advice from an interview in a book and I’ve never regretted it.

I first saw Cassavetes as an actor when I was a kid watching The Dirty Dozen on TV with my dad. I saw the films he wrote and directed much later when a retrospective came to my local art house theater in Nashville. The films were scheduled as double features, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to pay for each one. The woman taking tickets told me that if I could sit through the first one, the second one was free.

I love these challenging films and this challenging artist who was so maddeningly unrelenting in his love for his art, his family, his friends and his audience. He loved them all so much he’d accept nothing from them — or us — but the absolute best of ourselves. He expected revelations and he found them. And he filmed them.

Here is the man with his friends and family working on one of his greatest…

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Getting some links together for the latest Coincidence Control Network podcast, I was shocked that we hadn’t talked about the 40th anniversary of my favorite Alejandro Jodorowsky film The Holy Mountain. I’ve mentioned the film in previous posts, but this important birthday is one that must be observed with reverence and open eyes.

Check out this great retrospective which tracks our hero’s work from his earliest art projects through the making of his 1989 “comeback” film Santa Sangre. One Week Only: Alejandro Jodorowsky offers candid interviews with the master as well as lots of footage from El Topo and The Holy Mountain which the documentary describes as “Perhaps the ultimate acid trip on film”

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