Good Friday Skate Special: The Christ Air

Couldn't let Good Friday go by without some sorta woefully misjudged Christploitation, so here's a cool-ass photograph of Christian Hosoi pulling his patented inverted-cruxifiction-tastic 'Christ Air'. Hosoi, or 'Christ', led quite a life, pinballing from god-like skating preeminence during the 80s, to incarceration for drugs offences in 1995, and finally to born-again Christianity. I guess there's a sort of cosmic logic to all that. Happy Easter, y'all.

Cobra

Watching Cobra (1986) on FiveUSA. Appears to be ticking every box in the 80s Action Movie playbook with a vengance and I gotta say it's pretty enjoyable shlock so far. Infact, the genre cliches are being hammered so hard I'd almost say it was meant to be parodic, except I don't think it is and don't really want it to be either. Stallone is 'The Cobra', an outlaw, plays-by-his-own-damn rules LA cop who works for a department called The Zombie Squad. Wow! He drives a car with the license plate 'AWSOM50', has a gun with a picture of a cobra on it and lives at the beach by himself and eats cold pizza. The film is set at christmas (see also: Die Hard & Lethal Weapon), the dialogue is exceptionally hard-boiled stock stuff, and when some psycho threatens to blow up a mini-mart, Stallone says "Go ahead. I don't shop here." Which is a pretty good line. As I write this there is a music montage happening which features a v. 80s modelling shoot with robots, soundtracked by a sub-Phil Collins ballad apparently called 'Angel Of The City.' Really, this is a great movie.

Ringo Deathstarr: "That's not a moon, that's a shoegazing band from Austin Texas".

Everybody knows the most important thing about being in a band is choosing a kick-ass name. This band's name is so kick-ass that I was compelled to check out their myspace page based purely on the supreme kick-assiosity of their name. Turns out they're a pretty rockin' noise- pop, My Bloody Valentine-ish sorta outfit dealing in the contemporary brand of updated late 80s whitenoise indie that I believe The Kids are calling Nu-Gaze. With A Little Help From the Force, anybody?

The Pink Floyd Panther

Having worked at HMV for three years in my early twenties, (Oxford Circus & Doncaster branches) I sorta get The Fear when I enter a branch now. I find myself wandering around in an agitated mild panic, automatically re-sorting the A-Z racks and putting artist's most recent albums at the front of their 'pockets'. It's like an acid flashback, with a Ting Tings soundtrack. It's horrible. "How did I work here for three years? This is brutal. It's so loud. Why are the T-Rex albums under Marc Bolan? They don't put The Beatles under Ringo Starr do they? How can they only have one Public Enemy album? What sort of record shop is this? This sticker is on wrong. Maybe I should tell somebody. Wasn't this Ting Tings song on already? I need to get out of here."

But a visit today paid off, when I landed a DVD box set of all 120+ original Pink Panther shorts for a tenner. They're wonderful. They're not hilarious - though there is a peristant daftness which produces the odd out-loud chuckle, but they're gently off-kilter and exceptionally hip, plus Henry Mancini's score is of course flat-out beatnik cool jazz brilliance. Of particular interest are those episodes which lampoon some contemporary fad, and I imagine the cod-Filmore poster acid kelidoscopia of 'Psychedelic Pink' is a favourite amongst Pink afficionados. You can dig our rinky-dink hero's journey into his third-eye, here.

My B-Movie Life: Over The Edge With Jonathan Kaplan

I have a bit of a thing for late 70s - early 80s dystopian / urban breakdown / teen rampage / post-apocalyptic wasteland sorta flicks. Assault On Precinct 13. Mad Max. The Warriors. Escape From New York. I just read about 'Over The Edge' from 1979. Looks pretty great. Turns out the guy who directed it, Jonathan Kaplan, has built a whole career on knocking out blunt, punchy exploitation movies. My kinda guy. He seems like a smart cookie, a B-Movie director in the classic sense, able to turn his hand to whatever genre was doing box office business at any time, like:

THE EARLY 70s SOFTCORE SEXPLOITATION MOVIE a la Russ Meyer: 'Night Call Nurses'(1972)
THE MID 70S BLAXPLOITATION ACTION MOVIE a la Shaft: 'Truck Turner' (1974)
THE MID 70s TRUCKER ROAD MOVIE a la Convoy: 'White Line Fever' (1975),
THE LATE 70s SOCIAL URBAN BREAKDOWN MOVIE a la The Warriors: 'Over The Edge' (1979)
THE MID 80s TEEN ADVENTURE MOVIE a la War Games: 'Project X' (1987)
THE EARLY NINETIES SEXY THRILLER MOVIE a la 'Basic Instinct': Unlawful Entry (1992)

So here's to Jon Kaplan: doing it second, and with a smaller budget.

Glam Rock Revivalism

For the first time in my whole life, I'm going through a bit of a Glam period. Not wearing stack-heeled silver space boots, glitter eye shadow, or Bowie/Eno-ish mullets yet, but heavily digging into T-Rex's back cat after chancing upon the mind-blowing bongos/acid rock guitar/sirens insanity of 'Calling All Destroyers' (1976) on some old Mojo magazine comp, and hearing Bowie's awesome 'Moonage Daydream' (1971) twice in one week on Radio 2. Never quite got Bowie to be honest, infact still don't really, and it will shock many to learn I'd never heard this song in my life before last week, but...yeah, great song, and I've been inspired to put a bit more effort into my Bowie education. Kinda remember a cool looking glitter-rock Nuggets type comp coming out a few years ago collecting together the some of the scene's less-appreciated acts...but I'm struggling to recall what it was called, and Google ain't helping. Any ideas?

Skateboarding And Selling Pop Culture

It seems to me that the history of US pop youth culture is the history of its ever-more rapidly executed commodification, of teenagers developing something of their own, surfing or rock and roll or comics, and subsequently having that thing taken away from them by Big Business and sold back to 'em, gutted, rebranded, and at a profit. Once upon a time, at the dawn of teen culture, this process might take years. Now Top Shop seems to sell the fashion before the fad has even been invented.

Sakteboarding culture would seem to me the perfect example of this process. I'm currently re-reading The Answer Is Never, Jocko Weyland's sparky, personalised potted history of the sport. What I dig about skateboarding, is that it really is the Local Summer Fad That Took Over The World. I mean...everybody has those games they invent over the summer holidays and play to death with their buddies, some mutation of baseball or hacky sack, the rules becoming ever more complex, the vocabulary expanding, limits and challenges met and exceeded, new records set and broken. Pop music, drinking and soft drugs may be involved. Truth be told, me and my pals have never really grown out of this impulse. Last summer three of us spent hours playing Egg In Glass, a 'sport' which initially involved taking it in turns to throw a small egg-shaped percussion instrument into a pint glass from a distance of roughly two meters. When this eventually resulted in a successful attempt shattering the pint glass, it transformed into Egg In Boot, which was basically the same, only with the glass replaced by - get this - a Boot. As the evening progressed, the rules solidified, points systems were put in place, successful throws led to bitter arguments about whether the thrower was 'far enough' away from the Boot, claims were made for particular styles and angles of trajectory, and ever more impressive levels of Egg In Bootery were attained. By morning, we were the 1992 Olympics US Basketball Dream Team of Egg In Boot, and my friend Stephen Ward was able to land The Egg in The Boot from halfway across a hotel car park, which was really something to see.

Despite its obvious appeal, Egg In Boot has not become a world-conquering phenomenon enjoyed by kids across the globe, nobody is internationally famous for it, no multinational sporting goods company has produced technologically advanced Eggs with names like The Boot Blaster 4000, Sky Sports 4 doesn't show The World Egg In Boot Championship Live From The Budokan at half 2 in the morning, there are no cash-in Egg In Boot movies, pop songs, comics, saturday morning cartoons, pinball machines, trucker caps, video games or Happy Meals, me and my friends have not become the world's first Egg In Boot billionaires, Barack Obama hasn't been 'pictured' playing Egg In Boot at some photo-op, and infact nobody has heard of Egg In Boot anywhere ever, until now, and I figure maybe about 6 people read this regularly, and one of them is one of the dudes who helped invent Egg In Boot in the first place.

But...this is essentially what did happen to skateboarding, or at least to the Dogtown, modern style of skateboarding, skateboarding as we understand it today, the style of skateboarding which turned into a multibillion dollar industry. At some point in the mid 70s, a buncha punk drop-out kids from Venice California ('Dogtown'), a ragbag of young freaks digging on Led Zep, Sabbath, beers and reefer, take a sorta lame, kiddy, faddy sorta enterprise, and get so insanely good at it that the world is forced to take notice, and the big money starts rolling in, and allofasudden..its a big deal, and it's here to stay. The Z-Boys, as the team were known, didn't plan for this. They were, as they say, Just Doin' Their Own Dang. For their own pleasure. Inventing ever-more insane stunts. For kicks. Taking it to the next level, within their own frame of reference. And it became something else. It Blew Up. Imagine that. Imagine the stoopid-ass sport you and your pals invented one summer becoming a bone fide world-wide Big Fuggin' Deal.*

(*Of course, this is simplifying The History Of Skateboarding to a ridiculous degree, but there's some truth to it.)

The Crazy World Of Crazy Golf

As a number of my posts suggest, I spend a lot of my time daydreaming about junky Americana of one sort or another, from Christian acid-rock to Harlem Globetrotter pinball machines. Recently I have been obsessing for no particular reason about Miniature (or Crazy, Goofy, Adventure...) Golf. I like activities that are simple, dumb, imaginative and fun. I also like stuff that's been minaturised. (Like model villages, I dig them the most.) So mini golf ticks a lot of boxes for me. The more I've investigated, the more it seems like the best American minature golf courses are little psychedelic road-side wonderlands, self-contained junk-yard universes populated by over-sized pirates, giant skulls, windmills and pyramids.

The first trade-name course was established in 1926 at the Fairyland Inn (wow!) holiday resort on the Tennesee / Georgia border, under the name 'Tom Thumb's Golf'. In keeping with the fairy-tale theme of the resort, patrons of Tom Thumb's Golf were required to negotiate Brothers Grimm-ish obstacles like Little Red Riding Hood, elves and gnomes. By 1929, Tom Thumb golf courses were being manufactured and distributed nationally, and by mid 1930 mini golf had exploded into a bone fide national phenonemon, with an estimated 25,000-30,000 courses being enjoyed by 4 million Americans every day. Insane, huh? Like any good pointless fad, at the height of Mini golf mania there were a clutch of quick-buck pop records released to cash-in on the trend, including "I've Gone Goofy Over Miniature Golf", "Since My Wife Took Up Playing Miniature Golf", and "I'm Put-Put-Puttin' on the Dinky Links All Day".

BUT THE BOOM TIME FOR MINI GOLF WAS SHORT LIVED!

'Cos then The Depression hit and apparently most Americans didn't consider mini golf fees an essential part of their budget. Whatever, Americans.

BUT THEN TWENTY YEARS LATER, THERE WAS A SECOND GOLDEN AGE OF MINI GOLF!

The unstoppable spread of suburbia and the post-war baby boom contributed to a resurgence in mini golf popularity during the 50s and early 60s. This was when things got really crazy in terms of obstacles, hazards, stunts and themes. Courses were often attached to drive-in movie theatres or motels or mom 'n' pop road-side diners. While there was a handful of national companies servicing the mini golf industry, distributing pre-fab branded kits, most courses were home-made works of redneck ingenuity, folk-art essentially, hammered together with lumber, scrap metal and poured concrete. I cannot think of a pursuit more noble than the creation of an awesome mini golf hole. Check this out:

How ace is that?

Pinball Machines: The Best Thing Mankind Has Come Up With So Far

After a period of long and careful consideration, I have decided that the Pinball Machine is the Best Thing That Mankind Has Come Up With So Far. Jukeboxes, crazy golf, Junior Kickstart and Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars made the short list, but deep down I always knew that the pinball machine would edge it. I guess when God put us here a few thousand years ago he figured that once we were up and running with the basics, like the wheel, and fire, and clubs, and clubbing things, and clubbing each other, that we would find time between clubbing stuff to invent cooler and cooler shit, less essential than fire and wheels and clubbing stuff, but probably easier to brand as part of a movie franchise merchandising operation. The best thing we've come up with so far is the pinball machine.

Pinball machines look cool, sound cool, and are universally desirable in a way that few other objects are. Ask around. Ask people if, should the the opportunity arise, they would choose to have a pinball machine in their home. They get to pick which one. A 1960 Wagon Train pinball machine. A 1979 Rolling Stones pinball machine. A 1990 Back To The Future pinball machine. I mean, you'd have to be some sorta insane pervert to say no to a Back To The Future pinball machine, wouldn't you? If you don't want a Back To The Future pinball machine, you've lost all sense of perspective and humanity. You are, essentially, a robot.

And seeing as Pinball is the best thing mankind has come up with so far it follows that Multiball Magazine, a short lived American publication devoted to pinball, was the best thing ever published. You would have to say that the people who put this magazine together were pragmatists: "Pinball is the best thing mankind has come up with. Therefore if we are to produce a magzine, there is no point in making the magazine be about anything other than pinball." Then they made their magazine even cooler by putting split 7" records on the cover by kick-ass super-hip garage bands like The White Stripes and The Dirtbombs, singing about pinball, with song titles like Pinball City and Cave Ball and Deathball 2000. Feeble human brain...struggling to comprehend...ridiculous level of...coolness...These 45s have been collected on two compilations, Hot Pinball Rock Volumes 1 & 2. As befits a trash-as-high art endeavour like this the quality of the tracks varies pretty wildly, but the good stuff is really good. I particularly dig The Bellrays 'Mother Pinball', which is like a rough-ass James Brown number, a"there's a brand new dance...do The Pinball" sorta affair. The White Stripes' 'Hand Springs' is Route One Jack 'n' Meg patented garage punk, unremarkable in itself, but features a genuinely brilliant, laugh-out-loud funny lyric about Jack taking his girlfriend bowling, and how there's this smooth pinball wizard kid there giving her the TV eye, impressing Jack's gal with his flash flipper skills, and Jack gets all bent outta shape about it, so:

"I dropped my red bowling ball

Through the glass of his machine

I said 'are you quick enough to hit this ball, Mr. Clean?' "

Which is a pretty great lyric in anybody's book. (Note that it's a red bowling ball, natch.) Now, if somebody would just make produce a White Stripes pinball machine, we could really all just give up and go home.

Christploitation: The Jesus Movement Era

I am not a Christian, but I am fascinated by The Bible, and I figure Jesus was a pretty hip guy, and anybody with any sorta interest in the arts is hardly in a position to ignore The Bible anyways. I'm interested in the life and work of Jesus Christ just like I'm interested in the life and work of Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe, I guess. It's a cult of personality thing, and I like archetypes, and the blockbuster scale of it all, and it's a great story. I've always dug The Bible, ever since I was a kid. I like the language, and the iconography, and most of all I dig all the obscure minor characters and their relationships, and all the weird inter-connecting sub-plots. The Bible is a nerd's paradise. It's better than Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings put together. You think it's hip to know the name of the band that plays at the Mos Eisley Cantina? How about knowing the names of the musicians that accompanied the Ark Of The Covenant back to Jerusalem (I Chronicles 15:16-24)? I just learnt the other day that when Judas Iscariot quit The Desciples, they replaced him with some dude called Matthias, by pulling lots (not by 'pulling' Lot, like picking him up in a cocktail bar or something.) So, like, there was this guy, this 13th Apostle, Judas betrays Jesus and dies, and this guy gets the call like "Yeah, hey, Matthias? Judas flaked on us big time. You're up, dude. " And then he gets to rep for one the twelve tribes of Israel in the Kingdom of Heaven. Crazy. I don't know whether The Bible is 5% historically accurate or 75%. I guess it's probably closer to the former. I'm not sure if I care really, though I guess I'd like at least some of it to be true, beyond the regular "well, um, yeah, there was a guy called Jesus, and he was kicking about around this time, but apart from that..." yadda yadda yadda.

Anway, part of my interest in Jesus and The Bible is the consequence of another fascination of mine, which is post-war US history. I have been aware of the (largely and predictably West Coast based) Jesus Movement of the late 60s & early 70s for some time, forming as it does part of the general background to the Nixon, Altamont, Kent State, Black Panther era that popular historians generally paint as the grim '68 -'75 post-hippie era, aka Sixties Burn-Out. Essentially, these 'Jesus People,' or 'Jesus Freaks', were dissafected long-haired acid casualties looking for The Answer, the kinda drop-outs who had tried all the drugs and all the Eastern philosophies and free-love yadda yadda that the counter-culture had pushed on 'em, and having failed to find whatever it was they were trying to find, were now willing to give ol' Jesus - a guy many young freakniks had conciously turned their back on - a shot at saving their souls. They always come crawlin' back to the J-Man. Rather than walking with the Lord, these cats we're "Truckin' With Jesus". The general tone of the Jesus Movement was very much a hybrid of hippie and early Christian ideologies, perhaps most notably the emphasis on simple / communal living, and a desire to take their message out of the churches and out into the streets. At the time, this was all pretty big news, making the cover of Time Magazine and generating a fair media frenzy. In 1972, 80,000 Christians gathered in Dallas, Texas for what is generally regarded as the movement's watershed moment, a weeklong celebration known as Explo '72.

In the process of investigating (re: "Googling") a compilation of late 60s/early 70s heavy psychedelic Christian rock called "Holy Fuzz", I have stumbled across some really fascinating websites about this subject, containing lots of great period photos, newspaper articles, info on bands and movies, wonderful poster art and so on. I guess there is an element of what I'm gonna call Christploitation to all of this. There is a kitch, camp value to record sleeves, badges and psychedelic posters containing Christian iconography. Jesus looks like a member of Creedence Clearwater Revival anyway, so his image in the late 60s was about as perfectly sell-able as it could be. I mean, I'm thinking about buying a Jesus People badge if I can find one, which - considering I ain't really a Christian of any sort - is kinda awful and disrespectful I guess, apart from I really mean no disrespect. But camp appeal aside, The Jesus Movement scene does resonate with me on some genuine level, 'cos I can see what these kids got out of it, and why they would get into it. Here's this guy, looks real hip, like one of them infact, and he's saying, y'know, hey, you can play rock music if you want, you can drop out of the rat-race if you want, keep your hair long, live off the land and I can dig it, in fact I'm gonna help you do all those things, you just gotta promise me a few things in return. So yeah, I can see it.

If you really wanna know more about this, go to the site dedicated to the LA based Hollywood Free Paper, http://www.hollywoodfreepaper.org/.

Obsessing About The Whole Schoolhouse Rock Thing

While the best British kids telly of the 60s and 70s was all acid-folky wooziness a la Bagpuss and The Clangers, the equivilent Quality Educational Programming being done in America adopted a tone of street-smart funkiness a la Sesame Street, The Electric Company..and Schoolhouse Rock. First airing on ABC in 1972, Schoolhouse Rock was a series of Saturday morning animated shorts which used a broad range of pop music idioms to teach the Youth Of Nixon's America about all sortsa useful things, from politics to science. The recently re-issued Multiplication Rock LP is one of I think two LPs put out during the show's original run, and is quite simply a wonderful selection of kooky, fun, pop-folk-funk songs, including Schoolhouse Rock's 'hit record', 'Three Is A Magic Number'. After purchasing the record at the weekend and a subsequent 48 hours of obsessive Googling, I'm very happy to report that for Fans Of This Type Of Thing, 'Three Is A Magic Number' represents only the tip of an exceptionally funky iceberg.

The thing about This Type Of Thing is that in so many ways the music produced for Schoolhouse Rock and similar enterprises is more interesting, original, useful, fun, cool and witty than most anything being put out by 'legitimate' pop performers of the time. There is care and craft here, a dedication to making Good Music, but there is not an ounce of the other bullshit which rock and roll culture wades around in. There's no navel gazing, there's no ego, there's no money-drugs-girls, there's no portentous statements or leather trousers. I like the fact it has a purpose, and that the purpose is an inarguably righteous purpose, and the fact that the people who put it together had the good taste and sensibility to tie the purpose to genuinely hip music. In 1972, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and John Lennon were releasing entirely self-regarding records about themselves, and trying to convince us that The Pop Artist can write honestly only about themselves, or else it ain't art. Bob Dorough, the key architect of the Schoolhouse Rock sound, was releasing records which featured songs as good as anything Taylor-Mitchell-Lennon were putting out, and contained about a zillion better ideas, and were - to some extent, certainly to greater extent than Taylor-Mitchell-Lennon's out-put - for somebody else's benefit.

Anyway, here are a couple of examples, I think they're pretty great, and so what. The best thing Dylan ever did was that song about God naming all the animals from 'Slow Train Coming', and that's about as Schoolhouse Rock as Zimmy ever got. Dig, y'all.