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FUNNY PECULIAR
By Mikita Brottman

Review by David Kerekes

Recently I went to the cinema for a screening of Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes. Without getting into a full blown review of the film, it's a bitter sweet collection of vignettes set within coffee drinking establishments and stars a number of cult film actors and music stars. By no stretch of the imagination is Coffee and Cigarettes a laugh riot, and yet one member of the small audience was almost busting a gut. The trigger for this outburst was an episode featuring Iggy Pop and Tom Waits. Poignant more than hilarious (like most of the film), it nevertheless set the viewer off on a trail of laughter that continued through the perfunctory title cards for each segment, right up until the closing credits. Every character quirk, every raised eyebrow, every dry aside, every nod to the goofy no matter how trite caused this person to squeal with delight.

It was a distraction, little better than having someone talking throughout the picture and I just had to wonder what inner demons were being manifest in this forced delight - and believe me, it was forced. Or was it simply a case of 'I've paid to have a good time and I'm going to have it'?
Mikita Brottman is better qualified to answer these questions than I. Her new book Funny Peculiar is a study of Gershon Legman, author, publisher, sexologist, Alfred Kinsey's first biographer and compiler of the dirty joke. In studying Legman, Brottman also analyses jokes and laughter itself.

Early in the book, she determines how people can be defined and transformed by laughter, and illustrates these facts through people she has known. I think each and every one of us can draw a parallel or two with the 'man whose shoulders shrug up and down emphatically', not so much as a side effect of the laughter but more as a sign to say 'I'm laughing'. Elsewhere is the unattractive girl who was not lacking in male admirers, 'all because of the way she laughed'.

Laughter in large groups of people always upsets and disturbs Mikita, who relates how she will avoid 'funny' movies at the cinema for this very reason. She offers the story of how she attended a series of experimental short films at the ICA, confident that this would be a pretty safe bet in avoiding 'outbursts of public hilarity'. Wrong.
'So thrilled was the tiny audience by their cultural superiority, so attuned were they to the films' self-referential ironies and political critique, that they seemed compelled to express this intellectual acumen in the form of high-pitched squawks of delight.'
In my own experience concerning Coffee and Cigarettes, Iggy and Tom - cool pop culture icons - were the catalyst for unbridled laughter; the a-ok for our friend in the audience to publicly acknowledge that yes, indeed, here was a cool, funny and tuned in film.

'Even if the laughter was genuine to start with,' Mikita comments, 'by the time it ended, it had become a lie.'

It's probably fair to say that the laughter that sometimes accompanies a gruesome scene in a horror film is a lot more straightforward in that often it is a release of tension, and occasionally even a show of bravado. Not many people prior to Mikita Brottman however have bothered to investigate the laughter that accompanies a funny film, or even a film that is neither funny nor horrific. This makes Funny Peculiar something that is singularly fascinating and rather unique.

(On a different note, the author writes in a personable manner, which I think is somewhat uncommon for an academic book such as this.)

But films aren't the sole bearer of Mikita's wrath or anxieties. Theatregoers are much worse - self-styled cognoscenti who titter, tweet and squeal with mirth at 'any reference to current affairs (especially politics), any mild piece of ribaldry, and - worst of all - any long pause' at which times these patrons of the arts feel compelled to release their own mounting tension.

Funny Peculiar isn't solely about people in public places (or illustrations by way of friends and associates - I'm on page 42). Getting back to its core, it is a biography and appreciation of Gershon Legman and his work, a humourless man and writer of such hefty clinical deconstructions as Rationale of the Dirty Joke and No Laughing Matter. Legman like Freud believed that humour and sex are inseparable. His theories and ideas are brought into play throughout this book, which is a springboard for a treatise against 'funny' in general. Mikita follows Legman with her own disdain for clowns (who frighten as many people as they delight), the changing face of stand-up comedy and comedians (whose memoirs more often than not describe lives of anguish and abuse), and humour therapy (in which anecdotal tales of people's experiences of humour during the Holocaust can be 'strategies for hoping and coping').
You may come away from Funny Peculiar more cynical than when you came in, but you will be intrigued by it. Gershon is a fascinating and undervalued character, viewed nowadays with some suspicion, and this book, written with passion, offers great insight into what he was about. But if you care not a jot for Legman himself, don't worry, you will find plenty to ponder upon elsewhere in Funny Peculiar.

Now I have to ask: what about people who laugh alone?
[An early piece by Mikita on Gershon Legman can be found in Headpress 21.]
The Analytic Press, NJ 2004
174pp ISBN 0-88163-404-2

This review is taken from Headpress 21: [click here to buy this book]

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Many more reviews may be found in the Headpress Guide to the CounterCulture

by Temple Drake and David Kerekes. Click here to order a copy

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HOLYWOODOO
Incredibles movie posters du Ghana
Ed. Pascal Saumade

Review by David Kerekes

Holywoodoo is a digest-sized collection of film posters created for the film market in Ghana, Africa. But this isn't a film marketplace in any way comparable to that of Europe and the US. In Ghana, Africa, films are released onto a circuit comprising of television sets and video recorders where they play in small huts to the paying public. There is no cinema or projector in the traditional sense, and the movies themselves prove to be an eclectic mix of everything from Hollywood action features, kung fu flicks, animation, through to domestic horror yarns and pot-boilers.

Given this set-up, it is not surprising that the promotional environment is also rather unique. The posters for these films are all hand-painted, executed in a colourful, primitive style. Certainly in the case of the American titles, these posters are often adaptations of the original promotional artwork, but lacking in any detail or technical flair. It's difficult to see why someone would go to the trouble of painting Charles Bronson in his Death Wish 3 pose when it so closely attempts to replicate the original art. Why not simply use the original art? The same can be said of the machete wielding Michael Berryman in the familiar Cut and Run pose, except that here the odd looking Berryman looks even odder, while the rifle toting individual at the foot of the picture has no discernible facial characteristics at all.

It would be easy to pick through the chronic art in this book, the instances where the likenesses are way off the mark, or the attempts at replicating existing artwork are particularly dire. I'm sure that Juxtapoz readers and the like would argue that I'm missing the point, but to me this is bad art - merely an attempt to copy someone else's work which comes over as a bit of a mess. (The artist for Terminal Force has had a momentous struggle rendering Brigitte Nielsen.)

Far more refreshing are the instances in which clearly no original artwork has been at the disposal of the Ghana publicist, those paintings that rely entirely on the furtive imagination of the artists themselves: take for instance the barmy image used to publicise Scanners 3: The Take Over (comprising solely of a very basic man in very basic flames) or the three fighting femmes that are the Deadly China Dolls (approximating something akin to what Aline Kominsky might draw on a bad day). Species 2 depicts a prone woman with one alien springing from her belly and a second one springing from her chest onto the face of a startled soldier.

Similarly, posters for homespun movies exhibit a creative flair that is as insane as the films themselves sound (as in the case of much movie promotion however, I doubt that many movies here live up to the promise of their posters). Demonic Cat features a person being torn to pieces by cats (the pet variety), the evident feline leader generating beams from its eyes. A boy with a misshapen head stands nearby (?) holding a bloody dagger. "Deliverance" is the only other word on the poster. Highway To The Grave has a bible, a topless woman in water (beams again radiating from her eyes), a fish tail sticking out of the water, a snake on the grass and a man with a big nose.

Religion is a persistent theme in these films.

One particular poster advertises a film called Testimony whose tagline is "Good pastor vs Bad pastor". Beneath a man dressed as a skeleton, the titular pastors' battle it out with rays radiating from their eyes. Elsewhere in the picture there is a rat with a man's head, and two women remove a head from a body.

A clear difference in the art for homespun movies and those movies from the West is that for the former the artists devote little energy to depth or perspective. In creating their own little tableaux, the Ghana artists are pretty scattershot with figures and elements of the composition seemingly placed at random over the page. There is almost no regard at all for interaction. Another good case in point is the poster for Evil in the Land. Here, a hunchback man (who may or may not be wearing clothes) squats on a sheet, while all around him are figures and creatures locked in their own particular spaces (a man with his arms outstretched, a cat with a man's head, faces with wild expressions).

This book is a time capsule containing material I have never seen before. Unless I'm missing something in the short French introduction, I have no idea from what era these posters are plucked (they contain sparse information themselves beyond the name of a distributor and the occasional credit), whether these posters are still in production, or indeed whether cinema in Ghana has advanced at all from television sets and VCRs.
Initially, I thought several of the posters in Holywoodoo were in 3-D but I now realise that the blurry colour separations are lapses in quality control. Whose lapse, though? The printer of the original posters or the printers of this book?

I do like Holywoodoo, even though the paper stock smells bad. It has a sense of wonder.

[Thanks to Roger Sabin]

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Imagine, if you will, superior production values for an oversized book devoted to a tiny cinematic niche. It isn't Taschen but you could be forgiven for thinking it was. Succubus Press are the folks responsible for the lavish Gods in Polyester, a free-falling dip into obscure movies of all genres from the golden age of exploitation: the seventies.

As editors Donahue and Soviärvi stress in their foreword, Gods in Polyester isn't a reference book, so don't approach it expecting another Psychotronic Video Guide or an Aurum encyclopaedia. Progressing through the decade, Gods in Polyester acknowledges the editors' own personal favourite movies from each respective year, but rather than offering opinions of their own, they allow cast and crew members to speak for themselves. These anecdotes range from slight, off the cuff remarks (all that actor Richard Harrison can muster for Paolo Solvay's Achtung! The Desert Tigers is: "I like Paolo very much, but I don't think he knew how to direct. This was a mediocre war film.") to meditative and indepth musings. Joe Wiezycki's 1974 picture, Satan's Children, for instance, gets twenty pages courtesy of assistant cameraman, Marc Wielage. No, I've never heard of Wielage before, either, but then Satan's Children (on whose credits Wielage's name is misspelt) is so obscure it probably doesn't even qualify yet as a cult classic. Still, I do now know that $178 of the total budget was spent on Quaker Oats, which constituted the film's quicksand scenes.
And that's what I like about this book. Completely unpretentious minutiae concerning genuine cinematic curios, with a wealth of never-seen-before images. Shit, there are even on-set photos from one-time 'video nasty' Don't Go Near The Park, as well as several pages of commentary by teenage director Lawrence D Foldes.

Ferd Sebastian, half of a Born Again husband-and-wife filmmaking team, regales the reader with stories of Gator Bait and its production, as does actor Bruce Glover with Black Gunn and Walking Tall, the latter film being previewed to an entire audience of deputy sheriffs ("who all reacted to the movie as if it was their own life on screen").

There aren't too many overused names and movies in the book, but for every Ted V Mikels or The Big Bird Cage, there is a Hy Pyke or Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural; William Grefe or Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.
Highly recommended.

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THE MACC LADS
Three Bears The Best Of 1982-1988

Screen Edge DVD Cert: 18

Review by David Kerekes

AGAINST A BARRAGE of beer cans (some empty) and a chorus of "Eh up! Let's sup!" the three Macc Lads, wearing "I'm a SUN lover" T-shirts, embark on a set of short spiky songs that deal with drinking, slags, shagging, poofs, fighting and their hometown of Macclesfield…

It is likely that if you were of record buying age in the mid 1980s you will remember The Macc Lads. Fast and furious songs with unsavoury lyrics, The Macc Lads played politically incorrect good time gigs with no conscience and certainly no apologies. Theirs was music for people who didn't care much for music.

The first pal I knew to own his own car (Bradley; a Morris Minor), owned only one cassette to play in it: Beer & Sex & Chips & Gravy by the Macc Lads. On a dodgy car stereo system I got to hear The Macc Lads for the first time, cruising through Radcliffe after dark in search of the nearest petrol station and a party. If I heard them again after that, it wasn't through choice.

Musically the Macc Lads are as competent as anything else going on in the years post punk. The down side is that they were and remain a comedy band - a running gag that drives its joke to exhaustion. The Macc Lads can induce a pained laugh (much like Roy "Chubby" Brown can), but poor taste aside, any comedy band is essentially a novelty act: clever, rude or crude, as music it doesn't stand to be repeated often.

It was with much interest that I came to Three Bears DVD, however, being one-part live performance and one-part a potted history of the Macc Lads courtesy of music videos and television news reports. I wanted to know more about the band I had never really cared for, suspicious that the truth was likely to be much fouler than the foul songs. I was also eager for another look at a favourite haunt of mine, the old Gallery on Peter Street, Manchester, the venue where the live portion of this DVD was filmed. The size of a small kitchen, the Gallery is long gone, demolished with half of everything else on Peter Street. It was a music venue for local unknowns, the once famous and the soon-to-be famous. The Gallery was the place a four-piece by the name of R.E.M. played to a crowd of maybe 100 people on their first UK visit. Eighteen months later, on December 27, 1985, the Macc Lads played there.

"What's the difference between Miss Macclesfield and a tampon," asks Muttley of the Gallery audience, singer, bassist, lyricist and only constant in the band. "They're both stuck up cunts!"

In a socio-historic way, the Macc Lads can be seen as latter day minstrels, putting into song the small town attitude and the day-to-day lives of those around them. Of course, it's difficult to get beyond the crudity and sheer tastelessness, which seems even less acceptable in these post PC times.

Negative references to homosexuality and race can still make people twitch, and the Macc Lads are likely to cause a fit with the conviction and vitriol of their delivery.

One of my best mates came from Macc, we used to go out pulling crack / Now I know that was just a farce, he's got spunk dribbling out of his arse"

Now He's A Poof

The live footage is shot on video without any frills, and locked firmly on the performers on the stage. There aren't many shots of the rest of the venue or of the audience, which is a pity as I was trying to recall where the bar was situated. The fleeting moments we see of the crowd show some guy who can't play a kazoo (a spot of audience participation for the solo on Beer & Sex & Chips & Gravy) and, strangely, a number of people sporting the dark overcoats of Joy Division and dancing.

The other part of the video is a history of a band steeped in controversy, courtesy of their music video legacy. Like the live footage, these videos aren't anything to get excited about. All the videos feature the lads larking about in the pub with their mates and girlfriends or in the hills close to where they live. The closest these camcorder jobs ever got to being on television was probably through the VCR at the band's headquarters and record shop, Hectic House, during an after pub hours piss up.

The Macc Lads were a far cry from the cool of the Sex Pistols, but theirs is a story with clear parallels. And, without the entrepreneurship of Malcolm McLaren, arguably a more punk one at that.

Eh up! We're the Macc Lads, we're not fucking queer / We like pulling fit crack and supping lots of beer

Eh Up!… Macc Lads

Numerous bans were placed upon the Macc Lads by local authorities up and down the country, and outraged figures of authority voiced their concern ("surely it must be illegal?" asks one MP). At one time, the Macc Lads were threatened with arrest if they played in their hometown, while on another occasion they were banned from using swear words in their songs. EMI refused to press their first album Eh Up! and subsequently ordered the records destroyed when the band went ahead and pressed it anyway. A nationwide ban was overcome when the Macc Lads toured anyway and played from the back of a wagon (which harks back to a decade earlier, when the Pink Fairies did much the same thing outside festival gates). Most controversial of all was the government grant the Macc Lads managed to blag. When this political faux pas came to light, making the tabloids, the Lads were ordered to pay back the grant and were fined £2,000.

It's a long time since Bradley's car and my opinion of the Macc Lads has mellowed somewhat. The Beater plays more guitar solos than I remember, and the band was further out on a limb than many other bands operating at that time. But as for fuelling a desire to listen to any more of their music, well, no chance. I find the Macclife and Macctimes infinitely more interesting than the racket they make… which probably makes me a fucking queer.

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Many more reviews may be found in the Headpress Guide to the CounterCulture

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KNOTWERKMINDZ

No 1

Smile Orange [not credited]

Review by David Kerekes

ANYONE WITH any kind of interest in popular music will have come across music fanzines. Generally slim, photocopied affairs created for no profit by fans for fans, these music zines tended to fall into one of three basic camps: supportive of a particular type of music, supportive of a particular band, or supportive of the bands hailing from a particular town. I use the past tense because times have changed, notably musical tastes and small press technology: rave-ups and the superstar DJ have replaced the live band, while InDesign and the internet have replaced the scissors and glue of cut-and-paste fanzine production.

There is still evidence of these “hands on” type fanzines, but for the most part they have been rendered obsolete. My last brush with them was something called The Town Hall Steps, which I picked up from a shop selling musical instruments in Bolton. I think it was sometime in the eighties — the shop, a haunt for all the aspiring rock stars in the Bolton area, disappeared years ago. There was a rack on one wall that contained leaflets for local live events, sexed-up specs for the latest drum kits and a handful of small press publications. I bought a copy of The Town Hall Steps because it had a funny title (in homage to the local town hall, naturally), and contained a review of what appeared to be a local psych band — this being the era of the much heralded psych revival, yet to suffer the indignity of the A Splash of Colour album before sinking like a stone.

Anyway, the band received a two-page review of a gig at the Boar’s Head pub in Radcliffe. Bereft of any notion of psychedelia, I settled for the fact the paisley apparel the band appeared to be wearing was nothing more than smudged ink from the photocopier. I felt vaguely burned by this, having lavished a whopping ten or twenty pence on the zine. I have no recollection of any other contents in The Town Hall Steps — except that all the text and images had been pasted down with scant regards for aesthetics or orientation.

I had seen other zines like this. The punk ethnic essentially made it a criminal act to paste things down straight, and repercussions of this unwritten law filtered through to post-punk indie music zines like The Town Hall Steps and the less regionalised Bombs Away Batman!, etc etc. Contents were a jumble of wall-to-wall random images culled from a whole variety of sources, onto which pockets of poorly scissored text were thrown alongside disembodied newspaper headlines. (It may have been in Bombs Away Batman! that I saw the inspired comparative review of the different regional A–Z road guides available on the market.)

Which brings us to KnotWerkMindz.

Subtitled “The Energy That We Feed On”, KnotWerkMindz is in the tradition of the anarcho-music zines that attempted to blend gig and record reviews with designs for living. Full of puerile knee-jerk attitude, it includes short pieces on paganism, features an arts page, a rant (or rather “rantz”), classified ads and even recipes — all of which take second billing to the multitude of randomly cropped and placed band names. Cover date for this issue No 1 is January 1988. Price 55p waged; 35p unwaged.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction to “Global-Mindz”, the KnotWerkMindz round-up of world music:

This is Felix the Quill talking to you now so listen up: FUCK ACID HOUSE, FUCK RAP MUSIC, FUCK THE DJ, FUCK DISCO and fuck Pete Waterman’s BIG FUN.

Come on the future is now. It’s 1988 and you lot need yer ears opening and peeling back from the MTV USA invasion forces of rock or pop… (shall we call it Pock for ease?) that we are force-fed constantly.

So here’s Andy Brierly with some local world music reviews. I’m allowing Andy precious ink to bring us soundz from parrellel [sic] worlds in other countries. Hi Andy!

The gig reviews tend to be very brief, but Drug Free America are considered an important enough act to warrant a whole page and even a second opinion:

Drug Free America

The Royal Standard, Bradford, 12.6.88

Doors: 7.30

Support: Threads, Lord Lucifer and Razored Velvet

Such an important gig as this deserves a certain ‘event status’ to proceedings. In an attempt to be ‘democratic’ (does that word even mean anything any more?) both Hellspider and I went to the gig and present here our independent reviewZ of the event. Think of it as simply our personal minds simply poured onto the page:

Felix the Quill:

Position: At the front of the gig from the start!!

Set: They played for seventy-four minutes. BEAUTY! The longest I’ve ever seen them. Check them out those Beautiful bastards. Their rock is pure.

The new album ‘On the Edge’ is a quivering sonic slab of realism and futurism and calm and chaos and sleeping potency.

Just one small niggle; Drug free America play their guitars with knives. Knives have got their uses but not at a good gig venue like this.

But all was forgiven cos after the third track, ‘Napalm Breakfast’, they took off their shirts. We all followed as a mark of respect to Sgt Charlie (singer), Tango Camo Phosphate Powder (keyboards, guitar knife) Binky and the lad (the other two)

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention… they have a name for their dry ice machine!!

Hellspider:

A blare of car headlights from a keyboard, and I get some distance. “We’re in nam my pal” I said. Greg said ok. 76 seconds in and I had to write something for you bastards. Why have you done this to me. They’re coming at me, it’s you. You’re to blame.

Why did I not enjoy this gig but you, how can I enjoy the music whilst you’re doing this to me.

Gig summary:

Felix the Quill

A paranoid panorama of krautonic symphonic, garage-punk meltdown and electro-Kalashnikov attitood. Watch for them!!

Hellspider

Nam-Explosion-music. To be avoided.

Okay, you might be smelling a rat at this point. Drug Free America? The Royal Standard in Bradford? Never heard of ’em.* Indeed, the gig guide is equally suspect: Kennedy ‘T-Bone’ Lager at The Crackley Cellar, Brierley; Snow-Blind Profundity at York Puzzle-Mender’s House; New and Improved Funking Jellybean at The Wyke Moshpit, Mythmroyd…

Of course, KnotWerkMindz is a pisstake, it wasn’t printed in 1988, but more likely last month. But the give-away is in the use of obviously fictitious names and venues (and some of the reviewers, too — Charlotte Potatoes?); not the format, writing style or the content, which captures the spirit of the times pretty damn accurately.

The only real clue as to the origins of KnotWerkMindz is the Smile Orange email address hidden on the back cover (beneath the full page advertisement for ‘Don’t Get AIDS Day’). Yes, the Yorkshire-based film and TV outfit [interviewed in Headpress 28] are the mad brains behind this ode to teenage angst, anti-consumerism and all-round pointless bit of fluff. And it’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen all week.

KnotWerkMindz is unlikely to have any semblance of a proper distribution, so copies are going to be extremely hard to come by (unless you happen to frequent the right bus stops in Bradford town centre). To save you the heartache and tears, Headpress are giving away free copies. [Competion now closed]

NOTE: The Town Hall Steps aren’t dead.

* Since writing this review, I've been informed that the Royal Standard was a legit pub and live music venue. A hangout for Bradford's Satan's Slaves, it was knocked down years ago. Thanks to Gary Ramsay for this info.

I also recieved an email (that I have since lost) from the founder of The Town Hall Steps zine. There is now a very interesting website dedicated to the zine, which had a fair innings at seven issues. The site gives some background to the bands featured and some of their music. Rock on, anybody.

Go to The Town Hall Steps

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Many more reviews may be found in the Headpress Guide to the CounterCulture

by Temple Drake and David Kerekes. Click here to order a copy

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PREGNANT RAINBOWS FOR
COLOURBLIND DREAMERS
The Essence of Swedish
Progressive Music 1967-1979

Various Artists / CD box / ISBN 9789189136427 /
Premium Publishing 2007

Review by Ganymede Foley

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA of Swedish Progressive Music was a book published last year by Premium, which came with a free CD featuring one of the bands of the Swedish Progressive era (the rather dull Baby Grandmothers). From the same publishing house PREGNANT RAINBOWS FOR COLOURBLIND DREAMERS is a four CD box and a more satisfying and representational audio experience, collecting seventy one of the hundreds of bands that never made it beyond the Swedish border.

Sweden is famous for sexual revolution in the 1960s. Music from Sweden didn't impact on the world in quite the same way, or at all, but is quirky and unique, flitting between jazz, rock and Zappa in his Hot Rats period. This is a great package of music that many listeners will not have heard before, presented with a lavish full colour book — so you needn't worry about having missed the Encyclopedia.

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THE COMPLETE LINDA LOVELACE
A Deeper-Than-Deep Look at America’s First Porn Queen
by Eric Danville

ISBN 0-9705502-0-0 | 217pp $20.00 | 2001
Power Process Publishing, 168 Second Ave. #333
New York, NY 10003, USA

Review by Tom Brinkmann

THE COMPLETE LINDA LOVELACE is a little gem of a book that I found in the gift and souvenir shop while visiting the Museum of Sex, NYC, ironically enough with my first girlfriend from High School.

Linda Lovelace died at age fifty-three on April 22, 2002, from injuries received three weeks previous in a car accident in Colorado, where she was living. She was reportedly busy gathering items together to be shown in a Linda Lovelace exhibit at the Museum of Sex, which — as of writing — has yet to materialise.

Whether you loved her, hated her, or could have cared less, Linda Lovelace came along at the pivotal moment in the American adult film industry, such as it was in 1972. In fact she helped it become an industry. In the introduction to The Complete Linda Lovelace, author Eric Danville, starts by explaining what this book is not — it is not a biography, and it isn’t a place to find out “the truth” about what Linda says. It is, according to Danville, “a book about a porn star”, specifically the female porn star, that for all intents and purposes gave the adult porn industry its start, or at least a fresh start.

My first encounter, unknowingly, with Ms Lovelace’s image was in the early seventies when I sent away for a handful of Tijuana Bible reprints from the back of a girlie mag to add to my growing collection of underground comix. When they arrived in the mail, included in the envelope was a couple of 8.5” x 11” tan flyers, folded in thirds, with pics in b&w, advertising hardcore 8mm film loops, which included one still from each loop with a title and minimal description next to each. Some were just hardcore shots of male/female penetration, but several of them were shocking in that they had names like Dog Fucker and showed a woman on all fours, being screwed by a Great Dane. Aside from showing the flyers to a few friends in order to watch their reaction, I put them away and forgot about them. A year or two later, Deep Throat was playing in Boston on a double bill with Behind the Green Door, which I went to see with friends (both male and female). That was the first time I had seen a hardcore adult film, and was amazed that it was being shown on the big screen. Later, I made the connection that Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, and the nameless girl in the doggie flick, were one and the same!

The Complete Linda Lovelace is decked out with lots of photos and starts with a section called “Indecent Exposure,” which covers most all of Linda’s appearances in magazines and newspapers, with most of the covers and some interior pages reproduced. The pics are complemented by the text corresponding to each, with the title of the publication, date and writer/interviewer listed. The publications represented range from the porn slicks concerning Lovelace and Deep Throat, to publications as diverse as Esquire, Women’s Wear Daily, Screw, The New York Times, People, Bachelor, Swingle, etc. The common thread that runs through this history is the part Chuck Traynor played in the exploitation and manipulation of Linda Lovelace and the making of her early loops and Deep Throat. The articles and interviews quoted from have enlightening commentary from Eric Danville, who was responsible, in part, for Lovelace’s appearance in the January 2001 issue of Leg Show, as covergirl and layout model.

The next section “Token Gestures” covers Lovelace’s 8mm film loops, which total eight, and include her two bestiality loops (Dog 1 and Dog Fucker aka Dogarama) with a dog called “Norman” and a watersports loop simply called Piss Orgy. Her last two loops, filmed in a Jersey City motel room by Chuck Traynor, The Fist and The Foot, where Lovelace has the titular body parts inserted into her, would seem to be classics of early seventies extreme porn. This section is illustrated with blurry stills from most of the loops.

“Coming Soon” is basically Lovelace’s short filmography, with Danville expounding on each film with interesting info, including the legal trouble in which Deep Throat found itself in several states. Judge Joel J Tyler, the judge in the New York City trial, called the film “the nadir of decadence” and ruled it to be obscene.

The six films mentioned in this chapter are as follows: Deep Throat (1972); the lost Deep Throat Part II (1973); Lovelace Meets Miss Jones (1974) a compilation of watersports loops that includes Piss Orgy; Confessions of Linda Lovelace (1974) which does not have Lovelace in it; Linda Lovelace for President (1975); and The Last Porno Flick (1975), which again does not have Lovelace in it.

So, when its all said and done Linda Lovelace’s film output consists of eight loops and three movies, one of which has been lost.

“That’s All She Wrote” covers the books related to Lovelace and Deep Throat. Her autobiographies alone total four — although the first two, Inside Linda Lovelace (1973) and The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace (1974) she had little, if anything, to do with. Ordeal (1979) is her most widely read book, helping to spin her side of the story and detailing her captivity with Chuck Traynor. Written with the help of Mike McGrady — a writer for the Long Island, NY based Newsday newspaper — who also assisted Lovelace in the writing of Out of Bondage (1986), her second volume of autobiography (or fourth if you wish to count Inside… and Intimate Diary…).

Also in this section is the transcript of the lie detector tests demanded of Lovelace by the publisher of Ordeal, Lyle Stuart, before he would release the book. Danville has certainly done his homework in covering paperback obscurities that relate to, or mention, Linda and Deep Throat. He comes up with books such as The Deep Throat Papers (1973) a compilation of articles on Lovelace and the cast of Deep Throat with emphasis on its NY trial, Blue Money: Pornography and the Pornographers (1974) by Carolyn See, Crazy Salad (1975) by Nora Ephron, Here Comes Harry Reems! (1975) by Harry Reems, and others.

“Wrap Her Up” is, strangely enough, about audio recordings related to Deep Throat — yes, there was a soundtrack album, two versions even, one with the music and another with the dialogue and music! Also included are mentions of Lovelace in songs from little known artists, novelty records and obscure B-sides of 45s. Included is a unique photo of Linda Blair, Keith Moon and Linda Lovelace (in a see-through blouse) at Moon’s twentieth-eight birthday party in 1974.

“So Help Me God” reprints two transcripts of testimony by Linda Marchiano nee Lovelace. The first from a testimony given on December 12, 1983, before the Minneapolis City Council at hearings for the Dworkin/MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance. The second, a piece of testimony given before the Meese Commission on September 12, 1984, as she is questioned by Senator Arlen Specter.

“Speak of the Devil” is a more recent Lovelace interview conducted by the author, which updates her life and thoughts since Ordeal and Out of Bondage. Undoubtedly these are her last words on record before her untimely death.

Ultimately Linda Lovelace’s tale is a tragic one. We will never know what her life would have been like had she never met Chuck Traynor. Possibly the same, but lacking the fame and abuse — a life of marriage, kids, divorce and poverty. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Lovelace was abused physically and psychologically by Traynor. The question for me has always been to what degree did it influence her participation in her exploitation. She was exploited and saw little if any money from it. Finally getting away from Traynor after two-and-a-half years, she was replaced by Traynor with Marilyn Chambers, the Mitchell Brothers’ Ivory Snow girl.

The Complete Linda Lovelace is a must-have for any Linda Lovelace fan or collector, or those interested in the history of porn and its trivia. As mentioned above, Danville defines this book by what it isn’t — what it is to me is an interesting collection of information about the woman who was caught in the international limelight and who started the “Porno Chic” seventies – Ms Linda Lovelace.

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CHARLIE'S FAMILY
aka The Manson Family
Directed by Jim VanBebber

Fright Fest premiere, Prince Charles cinema, London 2003

Review by David Kerekes

A LONG, long time coming, Jim VanBebber's Charlie's Family finally gets beyond the working print stage and receives its world premiere at the 2003 Fright Fest in London's prestigious West End. I assume this is the official premiere - there have been other screenings of the film and one "unofficial" premiere in Chicago back in 1997. It says premiere in the Fright Fest programme and I got an invite, but my invite surprised some of the organisers on the night, so who knows?

Charlie's Family is a retelling of the Manson Family Tate/LaBianca slayings which took place in California in 1969. It differs from numerous other Manson inspired movies in that it attempts to replay the events without any brow beating or moral interjection. If anything, it swings the other way, clearly the product of someone sympathetic with the whole Manson creepy-crawl.

As filmmaking was governed by whatever budget was available at any given time, the production of Charlie's Family edged forward, taking around ten years to reach a state whereby it looked almost ready to unleash on the world. If the screenplay prematurely published by Creation Books back in 1998 is anything to go by, the film sat dormant in this state for another five years, requiring that one elusive cash incentive to polish up the loose ends.

It seems that production company Blue Underground, the team responsible for so many fascinating documentaries on cult films and cult film personalities, may have been the stepping stone here, given that their name rolls by on the opening credits.

The lateness of the hour (11:30pm) ensures that the Prince Charles Cinema is only part full when Carl Daft, of Blue Underground, takes to the stage to introduce Charlie's Family. A dissenting voice in the auditorium asks why VanBebber isn't present, given that it's the film's premiere. There is a fairly noncommittal reply from Daft when a second dissenting voice, desperate for the movie to start, encourages the swift evacuation of the stage.

And so commences one of the most widely known, near legendary unseen films of modern times. My expectations are reserved. I do like VanBebber and his ability to generate some truly dynamic set pieces - as the end of Deadbeat At Dawn will testify - but I also find he comes unstuck when directing non-action scenes, with dialogue and character interaction coming across as hackneyed and wooden.

Unfortunately, there are many characters and lots of dialogue in Charlie's Family.

The narrative in the film is choppy and dreamy (trippy, I guess would sum it up). Events in the here and now are intertwined with flashbacks, and facts pertaining to the actual Family murders are presented alongside speculative and fictionalised scenarios. For instance, a television news journalist working on a Manson Family retrospective forms a bookend to the film, adding further to the sense of displacement, as does the 1978 audio recording of the Rev Jim Jones inciting mass suicide in Guyana, which is played intermittently.

The combination of factual and fictitious scenarios, the use of genuine Family recordings on the soundtrack (but no Beatles), and the nod to earlier Manson feature films, most notably Lawrence Merrick's 1972 documentary Manson, lend the impression that VanBebber wants to create some kind of cultural pot pourri - that he wants to tell the truth except that he knows the mythos is such an integral part of that truth. Possibly the most blatant example of this is the coda to the film where a teen in a Manson T-shirt has no grasp of what it is he wearing beyond it being "cool."

Much of the first hour comprises Family members going about their daily business, such as having sex, dropping acid, lifting food from garbage bins, arguing, listening to Charlie. Then they deliberate from their prison cells on what it is they have done and the meaning of it all. This in itself wouldn't be so bad but for the fact the actors - with the exception of VanBebber as the incarcerated Bobby - don't have what it takes to pull it off.

Worse of all, Marcelo Games as Charles Manson, the hinge on which the whole film has to swing, is a terribly uncharismatic and not very frightening figure, never looking more than a cuddly bear sporting a theatrical wig, beard and retro threads.

It's always refreshing to see a contemporary horror movie that avoids the "postmodernist" disease that is the wisecracking know-it-all teenager. There's certainly none of them present here. Neither does the film have a feel-good ending. We all know how this is going to end and Charlie's Family tries to paint the picture as unpleasantly as possible. The last section of the film is devoted to Tate/LaBianca slayings and is depicted in unflinching, knife-wielding, gore-drenched detail. This protracted homicidal freakout stunned much of the Fright Fest audience, who were clearly cranked on more traditional horror entertainment.

I found little in Charlie's Family to be engaging. The whole thing lacks spirit and cohesion. It echoes Merrick's documentary Manson, but cannot hope to match the strange creepiness of seeing members of the actual Family sporting rifles, espousing their garbled philosophy and advocating murder. Nor does it match the twisted faux reality of Wade Williams' garbled movie The Other Side of Madness, which tries a lot less hard to be trippy.

It's more than twenty five years since the BBC aired the TV movie Helter Skelter. Thinking back to that movie and Steve Railsback's crazed, eye-rolling performance as Manson, I really do think that Manson and his Family need to be held as pariahs in order to work properly. In playing devil's advocate, VanBebber's movie is a mess without focus and is missing the frisson.

[Thanks to Blue Underground and Fright Fest.]

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IT WAS the esteemed Headpress contributor and cider wizard Martin Jones who urged me to purchase a copy of A Serious Life declaring it to be “the best £20 I’ve ever spent.” How glad I am to have heeded his sage counsel, as this is clearly an important work, worthy of the cover price and the lavish attention to production values. For starters, it’s a hefty tome and in its steely dustcover resembles a polished breezeblock and could inflict just as much damage if dropped on someone’s head. However, it’s the damage done inside the skull that makes this work significant. Just a cursory flick through the copious illustrations gives the eager reader a heady thrill of anticipation for what lies ahead — everything from Baudelaire to John Willie, Little Richard to Hogarth’s Tarzan — a swirling maelstrom of influences to invigorate the jaded mind and an indication of just how broad a field Savoy draw their inspiration from.

And perhaps the best summary of Savoy’ emphatic stance (to destroy the rigidly-enforced line between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture) is visual — the page where the cover of Conan The Adventurer is laid alongside the Picador edition of The Samuel Beckett Trilogy. Elsewhere there’s a cover of Lovebirds magazine (“every girl an English rose”) opposite the cover for The Savoy Book, which features W Holman Hunt’s ‘Lady of Shallot’. Disparate influences, atoms in collision, powerful art via the fusion reactor of ‘improper’ juxtapositions.

The text that accompanies the fantastic images is made up of Mitchell’s own ruminations on Savoy’s place within the culture, starting with an erudite consideration of their spiritual precedents (giving special emphasis to DeSade) and leading on to a series of interviews with the main culprits — David Britton, Michael Butterworth, John Coulthart, Kris Guidio — and overviews of some of their more significant releases such as Charles Platt’s The Gas, Henry Treece’s series of Celtic novels and leading onto a breathless championing of the novels and comics of David Britton, featuring Savoy’s most enduring (and notorious) icon, Lord Horror. There’s also an appraisal of the majority of Savoy’s late eighties/early nineties musical output, mainly featuring a perpetually pissed PJ Proby and, to close, a discussion of the numerous court cases Savoy have been involved with during their ‘Savoy Wars’ against the Manchester police. It’s appropriate that there is no overall thematic structure to the work — Mitchell takes the same approach to the material as Savoy have done to their publishing ventures — he’s all over the shop but it all comes together in the end.

He starts strong with a steely appraisal of the woeful state of modern ‘youth culture’ and, indeed, the almost entire absence of any genuine and effective ‘counter culture’ in this country. We now exist in a sanitised wasteland of ugly joy, fogged by ennui, gasping in the chokehold of ‘compulsory leisure’, with only the occasional fire of inspiration glimpsed through the mists. The coverage of Savoy’s inception and early years should be ample inspiration for anyone looking for a cue to do their own thing, to start their own fire. The era of the late sixties and seventies, before Forbidden Planet, before Waterstone's, before Bizarre magazine and ‘apocalypse culture’, is fondly evoked, highlighting just how significant magazines like Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds were at the time, acting as a clarion call to the imaginative youth who felt doomed by their own futures in industrial wastelands up and down the country. Moorcock is revealed as the spiritual Godfather to Savoy, lending a guiding hand and providing solid inspiration for their early ventures in publishing. Savoy emerged from the last genuine period of possibility before the media students started graduating and ruining the situation for all concerned.

There’s also entertaining recollections of the Savoy shops that for a brief time in the 1970s acted as cauldrons of prurience in cities across the North of England, selling pulp fiction alongside Picador literature, comics, film magazines, records and the inevitable soft porn, all against a backdrop of obscenely loud music. I have my own enduring memories of Bookchain (now The Savoy Book Emporium) in Leeds and the sense my young mind had of transgressing into the Forbidden Zone as I crossed the threshold of the shop, to be faced with haphazard piles of Creem, Fangoria, Starburst and Warrior, though my eye would always be drawn to the less-than-discreetly curtained area in the far corner where the ‘fun books’ were on display. A Serious Life makes much of Men Only being the cash cow that saved Savoy but there was usually much stronger fare festering behind that curtain. We can wonder how much of such spermy contraband has put wind into the sails of the good ship Savoy over the years?

A Serious Life does great service to the Savoy legacy and draws necessary comparisons (some obvious, some not so) with aesthetic equivalents throughout history; a championing of the great and noble tradition of standing against the populist mainstream acquiescence to mediocrity and cretinism. If the motives and intentions of Savoy have been vague to its detractors in the past I wonder what they might make of this book, which is as clear a statement of purpose as you could wish for. It should certainly be obvious that Savoy is not employing ‘shock tactics’ for the mere sake of it — though there is some value in the ‘shock’ approach in terms of getting attention amidst a swarming radar screen of annoying signals — and attempting to engage with what is clearly never going to be a wide audience in terms of numbers but is certainly not restricted to black clad miserabilists with bookshelves full of Colin Wilson. The only ‘typical’ Savoy reader will be someone who is seeking more from their art than what is considered appropriate by the arbiters of taste and interested parties should start with this book and proceed on through the back catalogue. At the very least, the plethora of names dropped, books recommended and obscure artists and writers championed should give you numerous new lines of enquiry. I can’t recommend this book highly enough and can only echo the words of the esteemed Jones: it’s the best £20 you’ll ever spend.

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AMERICAN SPLENDOR
Our Movie Year
by Harvey Pekar (and various artists)
Titan Books

BIZARRO WORLD
Various writers & artists
DC Comics/Titan Books

Review by David Kerekes

Harvey Pekar in Bizarro World.
Story: Harvey Pekar.
Art: Dean Haspel (DC Comics)

HARVEY PEKAR may not be a household name but the comic book writer from Cleveland, Ohio, is a lot more famous nowadays thanks to American Splendor, the clever movie adaptation of Pekar’s long running comic book of the same name. Pekar’s stories – seemingly illustrated by whoever happens along – are personal, slice of life observations, ranging from short, fluff pieces (such as the letter from a famous politician that Pekar losses) to a book length revue of his yearlong battle with cancer.

Following his retirement from many years working as a filing clerk, Pekar is concerned about supporting his family on a pension, which ultimately translates into a brand new compendium of American Splendor stories. Subtitled Our Movie Year, this book is at once a retrospective of the highs and lows that the critically acclaimed feature film has brought to Pekar, while at the same time is also a belated cash-in. In between the movie stuff, Pekar delivers a tale of blackouts and takes his pet cat to the vet (hold onto your hats, he then has to sort out board for the cat while he goes away for a few days!).

Pekar is brutally honest and at times the reader winces because of it, such as the time he accepts a birthday gift off his wife and daughter and feigns gratitude so they don’t get upset, or the shocking revelation that he has undergone shock treatment.

Pekar is modest, but he loves the publicity the movie brings and the thrill of total strangers recognising him in the street. In one respect the success of the movie is a blessing for Pekar because it opens the door for a lot more comic strip gigs. At the same time he worries about how the movie will fade from public consciousness one day and with it the gigs.

No surprise this book is less daunting than the earlier Our Cancer Year (which was co-written with Pekar’s wife, Joyce Brabner). However, it also lacks focus and is occasionally repetitive due to the broad selection of publications courting Pekar following his movie break. It seems nearly all of them wanted only to read an American success story in comic form.

Still, success for Pekar is at times no different to the temporary acquisition of a washing machine, a story he relates in Our Movie Year. He tells this tale, like all his tales, with gravitas and without irony. As for the artwork in Our Movie Year, typically for Pekar’s stories it is hit and miss. It veers from the sublime (the R. Crumb one-pager, ‘Reunion’, has the stamp of a genius in cruise mode about it) through to the grotesque (Gerry Shamray’s work on ‘Waiting for a Jump’ is a weird mix of line art and digitally enhanced photographs).

Let’s hope the paid gigs don’t take the shine off Harvey Pekar. But then we shouldn’t mope too much now he has the opportunity to take the occasional diversion.

Which brings us neatly to Bizarro World — not a book by Pekar, but a superhero book to which he has contributed, a genre far removed from Pekar’s usual habitat.

Given its misleading title, like myself you might come to Bizarro World expecting material based upon the strange parallel world to Earth where everything is opposite: square is round, truancy is applauded and Superman is the anti-Superman. Indeed, on Bizarro everyone is a superhero — the place is populated by craggy, white-faced Supermen (and Supergirls), except they don’t fight crime because crime is good. It’s the yin to the ‘real’ Superman’s yang.

Contrary to the title, this isn’t that book. In fact, only two of the strips in it bother with the Bizarro world at all.

Instead Bizarro World is a collection of strips that portray DC superheroes and their universe in a somewhat goofy and demeaning light. Executed by a multitude of artists and writers — such as Peter Bagge, Rick Altergott and Dave Cooper — who are top notch but generally not associated with superhero work, the strips here seem better suited to the pages of Playboy or a satire mag like National Lampoon or maybe even MAD. These are comic strips for people that don’t normally read comic books, and most certainly not comic books featuring superheroes.

The notion of superheroes doesn’t hold water in the real world — every child in the schoolyard knows it — and Bizarro World plays like a broken record on the shortcomings of the superhero conceit. Consequently, Bizarro World is a soulless mess in which the gags are lame, the situations unfunny and none of it very entertaining at all.

On the few occasions the material deviates from the formulaic — superheroes in petty crisis, superheroes with dumb powers, etc — we get a glimmer of hope. Chip Kidd and Tony Millionaire’s strip ‘Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder’ is unsettling in its execution and nonsense pay off, while Dylan Horrocks and Farel Dalrymple’s ‘Dear Superman’ is rather touching.

In a strip illustrated by Dean Haspel (‘Bizarro Scmizarro’), Harvey Pekar relocates to the untidy and unkempt planet Bizarro. “Sick of living screwed-up Bizarro life,” he seeks the help of Superman’s arch enemy Lex Luther in order to try and sort himself out.

‘Bizarro Scmizarro’ is a superhero strip with the autobiographical trappings we have come to expect of Pekar.

So there you have it. Bizarro World — bizarre in that it is an almost unmitigated mess. DC Comics really mustn’t care a jot to have let this one out. Or am in state of awful confusion.

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“Shoot! Don’t fucking talk to me! Shoot!”

Takashi Miike has stated in interviews that you can only be described as a director when you’re actually making a film. By this definition Miike is one of the only full-time directors around, having made over fifty films since 1991, and with four or five new projects a year shows no signs of slowing down. In a salutary lesson to the likes of Terry Gilliam, who lurches from one fatally grandiose project to the next, Miike accepts almost all of the proposals offered to him, as long as he feels he can do something with the material. He does not stick religiously to scripts, preferring to let his films evolve on set, and makes a virtue of his characteristically low budgets, using audacious claymation sequences ostensibly for scenes too expensive to shoot live, and filming wild on the streets to avoid dealing with Japan’s restrictive authorisation processes.

Miike is best known abroad for his more visceral work — Audition, described by the director as a film “about cutting off someone’s foot”, the Dead or Alive trilogy and Ichi the Killer. But while he has returned again and again to yakuza films, he has also made films (and TV series) in pretty much every other genre going, bar ‘pink’ films: from pop-group promo (Andromedia) to demented musical (The Happiness of the Katakuris).

This exhaustively researched book charts Miike’s film career from production assistant on a TV crew through to international festival favourite, giving detailed synopses and some analysis of each of his films. While the difficulty of even seeing most of these films makes such an account indispensable in working out the true nature of Miike’s achievements, the synopses begin to pall after a while — if you’re not intending to track these films down, the entries will often be of severely limited interest — and the analyses are sometimes sketchy and repetitive.

Mes lacks either the fannish enthusiasm of a Steve Pulchalski or the incisive commentary of a Kim Newman or Stephen Thrower, and his prose (which could, incidentally, have done with a better copy-edit) is too dry to go down very easily. Audition and Ichi the Killer, as two of Miike’s more interesting and well-known films, fare better than most of the others in terms of analysis, but Mes’s workmanlike style is thrown into stark contrast by the final sections of the book. There Miike’s ‘making of Ichi’ diary and an in-depth interview allow the director’s ebullient unconventionality to add full-spectrum colour to what is otherwise an often lifeless read; and the director’s response to a criticism of misogyny — “Generally if the audience feel that it’s like that, then they are right” — makes a refreshing change from Mes’s contorted justifications of the violence in Ichi.

While Mes draws on previous Japanese critical commentaries of Miike’s films as the basis for his own critical analysis, the book could do with more details of the critical reception of his films, especially in Japan. What analysis there is skips over what (with my limited experience of Miike’s films) has seemed a key stylistic element: his audacious use of non-narrative imagery. Mes’s reductive view of Miike’s claymation sequences as being simply ways to cut live-action costs glosses over their high weirdness; and other startling images, such as those at the end of Dead or Alive: Final, meet disapproval for not fitting the film’s ‘tone’. This, it seems to me, is to miss the point: Miike’s films are about breaking rules, confounding expectation. As he writes in his Ichi diary, “What good is life without adventure? We don’t need a manual for making a movie… we make movies but we’re not authentic filmmakers. We are artisans and amateurs rather than professionals. We are agitators fiddling around with something that gives us enjoyment.”

These caveats aside, if you’re interested in Miike Agitator is still an indispensable guide, offering a complete and detailed filmography, hundreds of stills including a colour section, details of the director’s films available on DVD and a great cover. But some of the excitement of watching Miike’s films seems to have been lost along the way.

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AFTER LOW
Various Artists

Gallery 16, 1616 16th Street, San Francisco, California, 94103 USA | Gallery 16

Review by Johnny Strike

THIS UNIQUE reworking and deconstruction of Bowie's Low is a weird and successful release. A loose collective of San Francisco underground and avant garde recording artists, record store employees, Bowie fanatics, electronic engineers and visual/video artists — even a guy from something called the Free Music Society — altogether recorded a low fi, spooky, sometimes messy, yet seamless rendition that leaves other Bowie tributes in the dust. That is if we can even classify this as a tribute since in a way it surpasses the original. I remember liking Low when it came out, but I got bored with it: a bit too arty. In a way After Low is the real Low.

The player's roster reads like a list of pop groups from A Clockwork Orange… Elephone, Foibles, Whoa Nellies, The Sadnesses, Love Among Puppets, Troll, The Gentle Leader. The uncanny effect is a subtle connectedness and the feeling that the same ensemble, with changes here and there, is doing it all. I understand the project was done very quickly — and this too I think adds to the appeal.

The San Francisco artist, Rex Ray, was the organizer of the Bowie exhibit titled Fascination at a Mission District art gallery in 2002, which also included the presentation of a one-act play of the same name. The characters were: Angie, Hermione, Marc Bolan, Valerie Solanis and Lindsay Kemp.

The After Low CD is contained in a booklet that catalogs the show's work and various writings, held together by a thick rubber band.

The bonus track is Let's Dance which is sung/spoken in German, and the band sounds like some zapped out lounge group entertaining tourists on a trip to Mars.

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I HAVE a book somewhere, printed in 1960, called Faces, Figures and Feelings: A Cosmetic Surgeon Speaks. It tells first-hand the story of the revolutionary development that is plastic surgery, and endeavours to dispel “the legend of wickedness” through case histories, surgical procedure and pictures.

That was a small book. Aesthetic Surgery on the other hand is a big book. Taschen big — which is very big.

Taschen’s take on the subject doesn’t make any concerted effort to dispel legends of wickedness — this wouldn’t be necessary given that cosmetic makeovers have been so thoroughly absorbed into the media consciousness, courtesy of celebrity nose and boob jobs, a hit TV soap like Nip/Tuck and liposuction performed live on Channel Four (presented by Vanessa Feltz). That isn’t to say cosmetic surgery is now widely accepted as a good thing. I think it’s fair to say that a good percentage of the populace still frowns upon unnecessary violations of the human form as being bizarre and a little mad. Think of Wacko Jacko, mad as a hatter with a face to match.

Aesthetic Surgery opens with a history lesson, detailing first recorded instances of tummy tucks (1899), face lifts (1901) etc, and establishes that the roots of modern day cosmetic surgery lie in WWI, where surgeons had to come up with new methods of treating the disfigured.

The emphasis of the book lies with the physical and cultural impact that vanity surgery has had over the past half decade: its depiction in films, surgical extremes, jokes and caricatures. It includes interviews with several of the world’s most famous aesthetic surgeons (some of whom have rather irresponsible attitudes, if you ask me), collects celebrity opinion on the subject, and offers an A-Z of surgical technique.

One chapter on ethnicity details how surgeons can remove distinguishing features of race to assimilate minorities – in other words, help to ‘create new Americans,’ as in the case of John Orlando Roe who, in the 1880s, removed the pug noses and bat ears of Irish immigrants.

There are gruesome photos aplenty to compliment the text. In an earlier age, Aesthetic Surgery would have probably been a book from a radical US publisher such as RE/Search. Lavishly presented, full colour throughout, I guarantee you’ll be fascinated.

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Abbey Road/Let It Be/The Beatles
By Peter Doggett

ISBN 0-02-864772-6 | 151pp $14.95 £9.95
NY: Schirmer Books, 1998

Review by David Kerekes

IN JANUARY 1969, only months away from an ugly split embroiled in monetary dispute, public animosity and petty backstabbing, the Beatles entered Twickenham film studios to prepare new material for a proposed live concert. It was a far cry from the close-knit confides of Abbey Road No 2 studio, where the group was used to working: Twickenham was the size of a aircraft hanger. The band was only perfunctorily a working unit, each member essentially producing solo compositions on which the others often begrudgingly played. At Twickenham it got much worse. Conflicts within the Beatles were accelerating, thanks in part to the band being unable to agree on a business manager and ending up instead with two: one for Lennon, Harrison and Starr, and one for McCartney, both working in opposition.

Another conflict was that Lennon, either strung out on heroin, or trying to kick the habit, would bring his girlfriend, Yoko Ono, to the sessions, insisting that she should have as much say in the group as he. That was when Lennon bothered to turn up at all.

And the icing on the cake? A film crew was present recording the whole thing for the contractually obliged new Beatles film, which, in lieu of bothering the group with an actual script, was to be a documentary about the Beatles rehearsing to go on the road and perform live for the first time since 1967.

It quickly became apparent that the gig was not going to happen, and the project switched in mid production to being a film about the making of a Beatles album.

Day-in, day-out, the band bickered. A typical dialogue has McCartney warning Lennon that the band is facing a “crisis” and when would Lennon up with some new material? “I think I’ve got Sunday off,” Lennon flippantly replies.

Amidst the cameras and lights and conflicts, the Beatles managed to lay down a handful of fresh songs, and jam endlessly on useless rock’n’roll standards. Every bitter word, every bum note seems to have made it onto magnetic tape: what wasn’t caught by the sound engineer recording the band, was captured by the sync-tape operated by the film crew. Hours and hours of it.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s completed film, Let It Be, is a dull, mournful experience (alleviated only in the closing minutes, with an impromptu decision by the Beatles to take their amplifiers to the rooftops and play their live concert to no one in particular). If Peter Doggett’s excellent book is anything to go by, however, the film is a Walnut Whip compared to the real air of hopelessness and desolation that permeated the Let It Be sessions. The film lasts for eighty one minutes, but the sessions and back-stabbing went on for weeks.

After the live concert angle dematerialised, the intended album (Get Back as it was then known) became one in which the Beatles would play raw music, free of overdubs and stripped of extraneous production. The tapes from the sessions were given over to Glyn Johns, an engineer with the thankless task of arranging the bits and pieces of songs, and come up with an album package. The Beatles washed their hands of any further input.

The result, together with the whole Twickenham experience, has become a bootlegger’s wet dream.

Not surprisingly, Johns came up with an album that no one liked very much. Doggett, in his book, derides the engineer-producer’s inclusion of several tracks, when more complete and better versions of the same songs had been recorded and were available. To be honest, it’s all rather subjective and Johns no doubt was trying to balance the general awfulness with good humour.

The Get Back acetates were ‘leaked’ to American radio stations, and soon after became the only album in history to be bootlegged before receiving an official release. But it never did get released, and at the Beatles’ behest, Johns was forced to compile a second and third Get Back album, each with a different track listing, each getting a thumbs down.

Such was the delay, the Beatles had recorded and released a subsequent album, Abbey Road, still without any sign of Get Back making it into the shops.

Ultimately, the Get Back project was handed over to Phil “Wall of Sound” Spector, and the intended spontaneous “back to basics” album — now titled Let It Be — came out swamped in strings. McCartney thought it was a travesty, while a relieved Lennon, who had considered the raw material to be “the shittiest load of badly recorded shit… ever,” said of Spector’s effort: “I didn’t puke.” Some commendation.

Let It Be and Abbey Road are inexorably linked, and Doggett tackles the recording of both albums in his book. However, it’s the former that is of most interest, given that Twickenham’s film cameras and audiotapes offer a fascinating notebook on the world’s biggest and most influential band at work. That the band was fast burning up seems only to give the endeavour an even keener edge.

The book is part of a series called “Classic Rock Albums,” whose editor is Clinton Heylin, author of Bootleg, so it comes as no surprise that Abbey Road/Let It Be keeps bootleg recordings a stable part of its itinerary. Indeed, one must question whether such an insightful behind-the-scenes book would even exist without access to bootleg recordings, surely the source for some of the alternate takes and band member banter discussed in its pages.

You may not want to know how many different bootleg albums have grown from these sessions, but amongst them can be found everything from the complete rooftop live set, through Glyn Johns Get Back albums, to every taped minute of Twickenham dialogue. Favourite moments include McCartney suggesting to other parties that Lennon ought to shoot Yoko Ono, director Lindsay-Hogg repeatedly bringing up the jaded subject of a live concert, and Harrison meeting with apathy every time he introduces a new composition of his own.)

Other books in the same series include the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks and Cream’s Disraeli Gears.

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