A couple of collages from the archive, originally created for the front and back cover of an album I made called 'ASMR' which I ultimately realised was just a load of formless noise and so was abandoned before anyone else could hear it and come to the same conclusion.
It's the 24th December, 1979 and Tom Woods has a job in the engine room of a merchant ship. After a brief layover in Tahiti, he is about to embark on a 24 day 4,200 mile trip to the Panama Canal. He takes the time to send a Happy Xmas card to his Mum in Plymouth, although it will not arrive until well into the New Year, hopefully bringing joy and a small amount of tropical cheer into what was undoubtedly a cold and miserable January back in the UK.
Hepcats get hip in The Horror Of Party Beach (1964), a genuinely terrible film made all the worse by having some quite good elements, not least some of the music and the editing, which is excellent.
In it, a radioactive waste spill on the ocean floor turns the skeletons of long dead sailors into rubbery looking monsters with big googly eyes and a grudge against teenagers. As there are hundreds of them constantly frugging on the beach, the monsters assume someone has laid on a buffet and proceed to kill as many as they can. Only sodium can stop them, and lots of it. It's quite gory, really, but the monsters are made unscary by looking exactly like our old mate the Soup Dragon from The Clangers.
Anyway, there's a lot of dancing (see above).
In Rotte Sun (Red Sun, 1970) four West German women decide to kill as many men as they can. It's a groovy era, though, so even with a packed agenda, there is always time to cut a rug.
Red Sun tries very hard to be daring in terms of its attitudes toward life, death, sex and revolution but is far too turgid and muddled to shock. It is oddly compelling, however, rather like watching the old, slow, pleasantly boring early iteration of reality TV show Big Brother, just punctuated by murder rather than arguments about who's eaten all the cereal.
Dancer, choreographer, teacher, artist and rule breaker Anna Halprin (1920-2021).
I'm not really an envious sort of person: there are things I've got and things I'd like, but I'm not usually bothered about what other people have. The exception that proves the rule, however, is Halprins 'Dance Deck' at her Mountain Home Studio in Kentfield, California.
I seethe with burning envy about her wonderful dance deck and, for that matter, about her mountain home studio, her brilliance at dancing and her very long and extremely fruitful creative life, so I'm obviously not quite as chill as I make out. Please send money or, at the very least, several hundred planks of wood.
Luis Bunuel's 1965 film Simon Of The Desert is a huge favourite of mine for a number of reasons, a mere eight of which I will now detail below:
1. I have come to consider Bunuel as the single greatest film director of all time.
2. This film is a superb example of his mature style, being beautifully staged and filmed, but without any fussiness or obtrusive 'artistic' interventions.
3. It's ostensibly the story of a 5th Century Syrian Saint who lived on top of a pillar for 39 years, but Bunuel makes it far more relatable and, no pun intended, down to earth. Simon is just trying to get on with stuff, but it's just one thing after another for the guy.
3. It is very funny, particularly in how petty and pathetic and powerless the Devil actually is (see also Bedazzled).
4. It doesn't have the 'logic' of a dream, but it does work in the same way as a dream, i.e. it makes sense as you are having it rather than when you later remember it. This may, of course, be the point of Surrealism in general.
5. Fanatical religiosity is intrinsically weird and disturbing, a mental disorder, so Bunuel doesn't have to labour the weirdness, he just shows us the basics.
6. Bunuel cuts only when necessary, and each shot is exactly the right length no matter how long or short it is.
7. The film is only 45 minutes long, which, again, is exactly how long it needs to be.
8. It ends in an extraordinary way*.
* The Devil (Silvia Pinal) transports Simon Stylites (Claudio Brook) six thousand miles and fifteen centuries into the future to a nightclub in contemporary New York. They smoke, sip beer and watch the kids lose their shit to a groovy band. The frenetic dance, according to the horned one, is called Radioactive Flesh.
Bored and out of his element, Simon wants to leave, but the Devil tells him he'll have to stick it out - he'll have to stick it out to the very end. Such is the lot of the Ascetic, I suppose.
The idea of adapting Edgar Allen Poe's short story 'The Black Cat' has occurred to a great many film makers, but very few of them set it in Texas with a cast of amateurs and a budget that was probably less than most movies lunch bills. The results are pretty poor, although some of the more frenetic elements did remind me of the pleasures and pains of an amphetamine based diet.
In the best scene, some youngish people become reasonably animated while listening to the worlds whitest band play a frat boy version of 'Bo Diddley' that doesn't come close to punching the gut and jerking the limbs like the superlative original.
The Touchables (1968) is a lovely idea, but it runs out of steam very quickly. The visuals remain great throughout, however, with this sequence featuring dancer / model / actress Esther Anderson a particular pop art delight / highlight.
The multi-talented Anderson was originally from Jamaica, and played a pivotal and somewhat unsung role in popularising reggae in the UK, including helping to develop Island Records. She later became a photographer and film maker, and remains a very interesting person.
INVENTION IN DANCE (1959)
You'll need half an hour to watch this show featuring the work of the brilliant dancer, choreographer, composer, musician (he owned one of the first Moog synths) and teacher Alwin Nikolais, but it will more than repay that paltry investment. See it here.
Nikolais glows with a missionary zeal about the possibilities of dance in all its forms, and we see some incredible examples of his visionary style, all of which still seem fresh and experimental, even some 65 years after the event - the sort of result you can only achieve with an excess of skill, an innate understanding of your art and a vivid, unconventional imagination.
Early US TV is often lambasted as being crass, but it had ample room for art and culture, which often intersected with mainstream entertainment in interesting ways - Nikolas' experimental dance piece Web was featured on The Steve Allen Show, for example, and, in 1961, there was a ten part series called Self-Encounter: An Introduction To Existentialism that I watched on YouTube recently, wishing I had a French cigarette to stick in my open mouth.
Poland, 1970. In the District Cultural Centre in Pulawy, a troupe of state sponsored pantomine artists improvise a ballet while someone goes mad on a drum kit. Luckily, a film camera is there to record it.
This stuff is like catnip to me. And there are two more parts to the film!
It's 1969 and, in Canada, hipsters are starting to transform into hippies. Jean Beaudin's psychedelic study Vertige captures a select few - not necessarily freaking out, but certainly cutting a rug with various degrees of commitment.
