Blog Archives
Hollywood Babylon
Kenneth Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon made its first appearance in 1965. After less than a week, the book was banned and pulled from the shelves. A decade would pass before the book would be released again. Anger’s underground classic trolls the back alleys and bedrooms of Hollywood during the first half of the 20th Century [...]
Tom Waits’s Big Time at 25
Tom Waits released his groundbreaking concert video Big Time 25 years ago. Not only did Big expand the contemporaneous notion of a short, promotional music video into a feature-length work of art, it also served as a moving picture showcase for the artist’s audacious mid-career trilogy: Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Frank’s Wild Years. Of course, [...]
Mishima: A Life to Extremes
While America marks the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, right wing politicos and lovers of literature in Japan mourn the loss of their most famous — and infamous — post-war writer every November 25. But who was Yukio Mishima and how did he die? The Guardian provides a [...]
Jodorowsky’s Lost Movie
1980 wasn’t a great year for Alejandro Jodorowsky. Having just barely survived the end of the 1970′s when the film that was to be his magnum opus — an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic Dune — fell apart for the final time, Jodo was anxious to get back to work. He agreed to make a [...]
True Shepard
Playwright, actor, songwriter, poet, musician, sex symbol — Sam Shepard has worn many masks over his five-decade career. While his mercurial creative output has acted as a kind of camouflage against any too-intense celebrity spotlights, Shepard’s relative obscurity — for a Pulitzer Prize winner and Academy Award nominee — can also be chalked-up to his [...]
Good Morning, Zombies
While George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was originally panned by critics in 1968, the film has gone on to wide acclaim — it jump-started modern zombie cinema, and also mixed-in dark social commentary about the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960′s. Romero’s 1978 follow-up, Dawn of the Dead, didn’t suffer a sophomore [...]
Kubrick’s First Films
Ken Eakins — the fearless leader of the Coincidence Control Network podcast — and I have both been battling early fall colds and we have yet to get our latest episode edited and released. We’ve decided to reset this week and skip recording a new show so we can get the last one squared away [...]
Texas Chainsaw Forever
After seeing Night of the Living Dead, Tobe Hooper was inspired to make a horror movie of his own with the goal of giving fans as much scare for the buck as he could. Standing in front of a chainsaw display in a department store, surrounded by a rude throng of Christmas shoppers, Hooper had [...]
Spellbound: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Before Alice Cooper, before KISS, before Rob Zombie there was Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. The original shock rocker, Screamin’ Jay’s performances combined outrageous theatrics and costumes with sophisticated songwriting that combined exotic borrowings with elemental rhythm and blues — take the Eastern European waltz tempo of Jay’s classic “I Put a Spell on You” as the [...]
