Bill Graham was a rock and roll man, a promoter with a feel for the underground. He knew which bands were going to be hot and how to get their music out to their fans. He opened the famous nightclub, the Fillmore, in San Francisco. That venue, along with Graham’s promotion skills, were instrumental in the success of the Grateful Dead.
The telephone is 140 years old today, and nobody alive today can remember a world without one. We’ve always been able to reach out and touch someone. Something so remarkable, being able to push a few buttons and talk to another person around the corner or around the world, is something we take for granted.
The recent Arrow Video compilation, Nikkatsu Diamond Guys Vol. 1, highlights the kind of films we don’t often think of when it comes to Japanese cinema. These aren’t cheesy monster movies with guys in rubber suits, nor are they fantastic period dramas about dynastic politics and great wars. These three movies are star vehicles, melodramatic potboilers with handsome leading men and damsels in distress.
Normally, when you hear about someone who started with nothing, made it big, then lost it all to drugs and general bad behavior, it’s some Hollywood starlet or Tom Sizemore. This is not the case with The Sheik, a documentary about one of the most famous professional wrestlers of all time, The Iron Sheik.
The USS Cyclops was a Navy ship during the First World War. She set sail from Rio de Janeiro in February of 1918, carrying a load of manganese ore, crucial for the manufacture of munitions. The ship and her crew set sail for Baltimore on March 4.
They never reached their destination.
What happened to the USS Cyclops?
The Bermuda Triangle, that’s what.
If you’ve ever been to public school or a sporting event, you know that at some point, you’re going to be expected to sing the national anthem. Some of you may fake your way through part of it, just moving your mouths while everyone else carries the weight. That’s fine. Anthems are generally long, slow, and hard to sing, like anything by Adele.
It’s fascinating to find out what people are afraid of, specifically what movies frighten them. For example, one person may be scared by Jaws but not scared of Orca, the Killer Whale. You might be frightened by Paranormal Activity, but not by Poltergeist. These objects of fright change from decade to decade, as the zeitgeist shifts and people become more jaded. But who would have thought that, in the 1930s, so many people would have been afraid of a giant ape?
Mother Nature always gives us humans a little something to be afraid of. Fire ants, hurricanes, just some little nudge to remind us that the links on the food chain are weak and interchangeable. In the late 1970s, the big scare was killer bees, super-aggressive buggers that migrated from Mexico into the United States. They attacked in swarms and wouldn’t stop, even after their prey was dead.
These bees became the subject for a few nature-run-amok movies. None of them were particularly good (see Irwin Allen’s The Swarm for some high-level bad moviemaking), but none of them were quite as earnest or weird as Alfredo Zacarias’s exploitation movie, The Bees.
The movie, The Witch, has brought the concept of witches back to the forefront of American culture. The film tells the story of a New England family in the 1700s, fighting against nature, boredom, and black magic. It’s based on old folk tales from the time, which are a decent reflection of history. The family in the movie chose to go outside the village gates and live on their own, unprotected by numbers or any kind of militia. It’s no wonder they get into trouble.
A very real trouble descended upon New England on this date in pop culture history. Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba may sound like the headliners for the new and improved Lilith Fair, but they were center stage for a quite different kind of show. Today, in 1692, the Salem Witch Trials began.
It is Leap Day, and if you don’t believe that time is a man-made construct that we overlay onto our eternity just to keep work appointments and make sure we don’t get to the movies late, then today should be a real challenge for you, buddy. How is it that we can just arbitrarily decide to add an entire day to our calendar once every four years? If time were real, wouldn’t it prevent us from breaking its own laws with something crazy like Leap Year?
What is this madness?