TEASERAMA!

Teaserama! This cheesy movie trailer advertises a burlesque film from 1955. Innocent by today's standards, this "shocker" contains several famous striptease queens of that bygone era, including Tempest Storm and Bettie Page. Perhaps as a reaction against an all-out, no-holds-barred porn industry that leaves little to the imagination, burlesque is enjoying a resurgent popularity! Called Neo-Burlesque, or New Burlesque these days, the emphasis is on naughty and humorous rather then raw sex.

MAVERICKS OF THE MIND

Mavericks of the Mind contains thought-provoking interviews by David Jay Brown with over forty of the leading thinkers of our time on the subject of consciousness. Brown's interviews with a far-flung cast, including Mati Klarwein (painter of Annunciation, 1961, above, and Wet Curve, 1981, below) Ram Dass, John C. Lilly and Robert Williams, are guaranteed to provoke thought if not completely blow your mind. http://www.mavericksofthemind.com/index.htm

BREAKING NEWS

Harold Pinter, famous English playwright, is still very much alive. Pinter's plays often feature characters struggling for verbal dominance, and dialog marked with theatrical pauses and silences -- nicknamed "Pinter pauses." Pinter might appreciate this fractured announcement.

TALK SHOW HOSTS GROW BEARDS, SHOCK NATION

People magazine described them as the “full hairy” beard for David Letterman, and a “cinnamon scruff” for Conan O’Brien, who joked he’s been growing his beard since the last writers strike — in 1988. The beards are the result of both hosts being off for two months as a result of the Writers Guild of America strike.

PSYCHEDELIC EXPLOITATION MOVIE TRAILER

Some guy had a brilliant idea -- film all the crazy hippie runaway kids flooding the Haight and make a ton of money selling it to the curious squares! Why not? There were already tour buses jammed full of gawkers, why not some cheesy weirdo lava lamp psychedelic "trip" for the grindhouse? That's a very young Jack Nicholson, who acted in a lot of similar Roger Corman flicks, and Bruce Dern in a frightwig. This was the tipping point, a subculture on the verge of being packaged and sold by waterbed entrepreneurs with pencil-thin mustaches.

This clip reminds me of the Psychedelic Supermarket, a little rundown shop where I bought a blacklight poster and a teardrop-shaped peace amulet on a cheap leather string. It was lame, but to a sixth grader it seemed pretty cool. Squinting at the brilliant Day-glo posters, I literally stumbled into a dark backroom that looked like a sultan's tent with parachute silk ceilings and oriental rugs, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw faint images of hippies sprawled out on beanbag chairs. A pretty girl in a headband swayed to the music, undulating to trippy psychedelica, maybe the Electric Prunes, and there was a whiff of strawberry incense in the room, and the slightly acrid smell of burning leaves. I probably got a contact high just standing there. I was dumbstruck. The baseball team would never believe this. I felt like Toby Tyler, first discovering the circus. There was no turning back now. PSYCH OUT! PSYCH OUT!!!!

LE MYSTERE PICASSO

The third volume of John Richardson's A Life of Picasso has just been published. I just read a review in the New York Review of Books, and now I wish I had the books -- and a time machine! Here is an excerpt from the review by Andrew Butterfield.

The book starts with Picasso's trip to Italy in the spring of 1917 in the company of Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev, and Léonide Massine, three of his four collaborators on the ballet Parade that they were then planning. Erik Satie, the composer of Parade, stayed home in Paris, but Igor Stravinsky joined the group in Rome and swiftly became close friends with Picasso. Stravinsky and Picasso studied the Sistine Chapel and the museums of Rome, and with Massine and Cocteau explored the ruins of Pompei and Herculaneum. In Rome they went to the puppet theater, and in Naples they attended performances of commedia dell'arte, experiences that not only helped shape Parade but later directly inspired the ballet Pulcinella which Stravinsky, Massine, and Picasso created in 1920.

For the entire review
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20892



A clip from the documentary "Le Mystère Picasso", produced and directed by H. G. Clouzot. France 1956.

THANKS FOR THE VOTES, SUCKERS!

Huckababy