I miss dancing at clubs. The Mind Shaft in Calabasas CA was a great little spot to dance. It was a small tree fort type bar with a dance area and small stage for the usual loser cover bands. We drank outside before entering because we were under age. The drug & drinking scene was damn low-key at the time. No police, no trouble, just a little town. I was asleep, for most parts, to the world around me.
I heard a song today that reminds me of the Mind Shaft. The song No One Knows, by Queens Of The Stone Age reminds me of a song that a few of the cover bands drank through. I mean while trying to play their instruments and while stumbling and singing. We still danced.
Yes, it is a similar tune. Funny how certain riffs and tunes can blow over into new generations of music. I guess if you live that long, one can pick up on these things. Lost songs that sound like this song woke me up, as well, as the vast amount of serial killers. Fun and scary times.
1977 Holly Who and Sue Blue with our Mind Shaft T-Shirts, Our Mind Shaft Days summer of ’77
“…Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
I find comment ’bout my looks irrelativity,
Think I’ll go and have some fun,
‘Cos it’s all for free.
I’m not searching for a reason to enjoy myself…,”
– Yardbirds
How I looked in the dream last night !
Had one of those dreams of being back at the scene of the 1980s. A club morphed into a Golden Voice show! The tight feelings were there of knowing all the bands and the characters and players! Jim Kaa of the Crowd was talking in my ear when brother Gus showed up. We are not talking these days, but in this dream, we approached each other for a forgiving hug when I turned into myself. How I look now.
I asked myself if I had the password to get into the show? I said it does not matter because I am in and not going anywhere!
Lots of guys from bands were roaming around! I was consciously aware enough to dig being back in the middle of things. Running around and being part of what was happening…like everyone else there! My scene, my friends, something to offer and cover! Al approached me; we then were at an adjoining Chinese restaurant. We were shooting the breeze! I was wondering where the bar was ’cause a cold beer sounded good to ease my social tension!
Al Flipside had a new computerized contraption that took pictures, recorded bands, and interviewed bands; ready for documenting the whole scene. All from a large black computer book!
He was on the cutting edge and creative as usual. As we were eating our noodles a band came on! Al said he had to go see about a band. I told him go ahead I will watch over your noodles until you get back!!
I awoke from the dream with a missing feeling of belonging once to a music scene that was overwhelming wild and unpredictable. I was spoiled then! My heart will always mourn those days of youthful rebellion!
Punk Rock Colleague & Historian and Professional Consultant
Hudley Flipside
Connecting up with the mythos of the film/ book and theme song made my struggle in the world of rock & roll and journalism seem strangely important. I identified strongly with all of the female characters from Jacqueline Susann’s book. Where else was I to find women role models in the world I was part of? It was my continuity with the struggle of women reaching out to me from the 1960s. An echo of a women’s revolution which I feel is taken for granted in our modern times.
On the flipside B Note: At the end of the film there is a Valley Of The Dolls ending song that is a direct response to the original theme song. The film ends on a positive note for Anne… but this is of course not the case in the book.
Theme song from Valley of the Dolls and I Say A Little Prayer are songs which speak to an individual woman and to all women. The songs speak to all individuals and to all people who collectively struggle with life and finding their identity in this paradoxical world. Also a questioning of our humanity for each other and for something beyond us all.
“Ashley St. Ives: You’re a groovy boy. I’d like to strap you on sometime.”
~ Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
The theme song from Valley of The Dolls had a profound meaning for me as a young woman growing up in the underground music scene of Los Angeles. At that time things like records were not easy to find. Before technology came to make getting things fast there was a time when waiting to see if you could find it was a thrill.
Will I find that old record at a thrift store or will I see that forgotten film on late night TV?
Valley Of The Dolls is a novel by American writer Jacqueline Susann, published in 1966 and the film came out 1967. A quid pro quo for the 1960s.
I read the book, viewed the film, when I could, and found the Scepter 45 vinyl at a thrift store. I engaged it as part of who I was struggling to become as a woman in a male dominate punk rock scene. I played it on a few of my broadcasts
“For [Aleister] Crowley, who was a painter himself, the artist ranked above the magician on the totem pole of illuminism, and he considered poetry and art as precious tools for transmutimg one’s innermost psychic visions…”
Pg. 92 Wormwood Star, Spencer Kansa
Cats and me …always !! 1970s
Magic is fleeting as is a synchronicity. In contrast to this is the focus upon something that is fleeting. Art and poetry often catch the essence of a fleeting beauty, feeling or moment. The continuity of fleeting moments seem like a continuous projection of a single life. As a kid I use to draw little images in the corner of a large pad of paper. Flipping through the fleeting images we have animation. For me, life is animation for our growing soul.
“This he [she] feels, is my proper vocation, this is the optimum, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the degree of equilibrium, safety, calm and leisure which I need, or here I find the challenge, passion, fight, and hardship with which my soul’s energy expires.”
~ Pg. 256 Par. 1, The Varieties of Religious Experience William James
Dad, mom and me
Making fruit salad this morning is a proper thing to do for breakfast. It is when I got to the pineapple, after the strawberries, that I thought about Dad. He was the one that showed me how to cut up a pineapple. He grew up on the California Santa Monica Pier.
His mother gave him his own stand on the pier selling pineapple. She set him up good for a young teen. He cut up the pineapple and sold pineapple on a stick.
All profits were his to keep. Along with diving off the end of the pier for two bits, or body building at the original Muscle Beach, his stories where nice to hear while he taught me just this skill.
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross. To see a fine lady upon a white horse, With rings on her fingers, And bells on her toes. She shall have music, Wherever she goes.
~ Nursery rhyme
Watching “That ’70s Show” with the teenage son last night took me back when I was actually a teenager at that time. Some of the show is superficially realistic.
There were the pot smoking circles of deep reflection…ha ha. The same record (vinyl) playing repeatedly. Sex was a big deal as well as a girlfriend or boyfriend. The same old thing…my kids have a different experience.
It got me thinking about the time when my dad was asked over to my boyfriend’s house. I was 15 and went missing.
I was gone for two days and no one knew where I was. Even my brother Greg looked out over the valley concerned that I may have been abducted.
Mike’s dad said to my dad,
“So your daughter and my son are having relations.”
My dad gave a strange look,
“You mean they are copulating?”
Of course, Mike’s dad laughed and said,
“Something like that…”
Mike and I were in the room and we were a bit scared. They had found us hiding in the attic above Mike’s parent’s house. Mike had a nice little set up, like a ’70s van with food, beer and pot. We had two days of copulating and I even read a book. Well that was the real version of “That ’70s Show!”
This takes me to the word my dad used, copulating. Tonight, Venus will merge with Jupiter in the night sky. It will not be a Venus Observa!
“Technical term for the male-superior sexual position, which Adam tried and failed to impose on Lilith, and which the Catholic church designated the only legal position for marital intercourse, since it afforded the least pleasure to the wife. Patriarchal societies generally opposed such female-superior sexual positions as those favored by the worshiper of Shiva and Hecate, and by medieval witches who, as the nursery rhyme says, rode on top of their “cock-horses.”
~ Pg. 1044 Barbara G. Walker
Tonight, Venus is doing her magic. Lilith will be proud and a few happy men!! As Jupiter and Venus merge tonight guess who will be on top??
What a wicked web we weave /When governments deceive/And I wanna believe……/I gotta believe/Conspiracy theory abound/But the truth is under ground,/I wanna believe I wanna believe/I gotta believe ` GBH
I have a sneaking suspicion and I believe that Colin Abrahall wrote the lyrics to the song “I Want To Believe!” I woke up with it on my mind. Also those “X-Files” feelings got my pineal gland stimulated again. Something is in the air. I can always feel it when Chris Carter is creating by way of the vast unconscious collective of writers. Believe me I just know. Before big hair Giorgio A. Tsoukalos there was the great big hairdos of GBH!! See how it all comes together here. I am pulling the threads tighter too.
Original Poster to X-Files film I Want To Believe
Scully: Mulder, since we’ve been here you’ve acted as if you’ve expected to find every piece of evidence that we’ve come across. What aren’t you telling me? Why are we here? Mulder: A true piece of history, Scully. The very first X-File. Initiated by J. Edgar Hoover himself in 1946. ‘ X-Files
When the X-Files film I Want To Believe came out in 2008 I was thrilled. You have to know that I was a hardcore fan of the 1990s X-Files series throughout the 90s; besides nursing the babe I looked froward to Unsolved Mysteries and then the X-Files on Friday nights.
“We are made of stardust, our whole body consists of material that has been here before the beginning of time.” ‘Giorgio A. Tsoukalos
Now before the 2008 release of the I want to Believe film we listened to the Ha Ha CD in our car. GBH’s song I Want To Believe, was to me, the perfect new addition to the this film. I put so much anticipation into the song and the film I thought for sure that Mr. Carter would use the song in his film. I was sad when the two songs only came together in my mystical place of belief… but I was projecting it real hard onto the movie screen … believe me!!
What does all of this mean… it means something and in time I may understand…. but for now…
@@@ until next time..
“The Electromagnetic Hypothesis of Olfaction” at the Society for Scientific Exploration conclude that insects use a portion of the EM spectrum to communicate.” ‘Pg 207 Lost Star of Myth and Time by Walter Cruttenden
There is a fresh graffiti / slang near the front of my home. I posted an image of it on Facebook. I just wanted to see the reaction that I would get when I asked others how they read it. This graffiti / slang takes me back to the 1970s. When the graffiti was usually lyrics from a song. I had a boyfriend in middle school. He was older and in High School. I remember the excitement around school when such lyrics showed up on the wall near classes. He broke in the night before and he spray painted the wall with these lyrics,
“Black white green red
Can I take my friend to bed…”
He got my attention and my innocence soon enough. Yet I have not told anyone until today…. that he did it for me. We all need to feel special now and then. This song always makes me smile. Looking back at the 1970s: songs and fires in trash cans rumbled and tuned us kids on!! No hard feelings!!
A Cold Wind in August (1961) is a low-budget independent film directed by Alexander Singer and adapted from the eponymous novel by Burton Wohl. The film stars a Lola Albright as a mentally unbalanced burlesque show stripper in her thirties who becomes involved in a torrid romance with a 17-year-old boy played by Scott Marlowe
Netflix and their unknown B movies always are the best. B movies seem more realistic to me and down to earth. This is a delightful little story about a short romance.
A young man Vito is just finding his sexuality and an older woman Iris is slowly losing the charm of a once very provocative and talented life. She is learning to make the usual compromises when her air-conditioning goes out.
The father superintendent is too exhausted to go to the room where the beautiful woman is, so he sends his son.
Papa Perugino is a wise man. He wears his insight on his face at the beginning of the film, and it turns out to be true. I think this film incorporates romance and intimacy very well. It leaves a lot to the imagination, but the passions show on the faces of the actors. It is very believable.
The characters in the film are earthy and the environment in the city is symbolically hot, and the drinks are extremely refreshing. The ending of this film is predictable but understandable. All and all this film takes you away to a nice little romance that flares up and cools down. I look forward to viewing it again.
A transcontinental flight from Los Angeles to Washington DC, carrying three top scientists, unexplained begins a climb to 10 miles up. With all other passengers unconscious, the scientists find themselves in a dimension where time does not exist. There they are put on trial by citizens of the future for their potential involvement in the creation of “the ultimate weapon.”
I passed by this film a few times. It is Sunday so I took a chance. I love when I do this because I always find some interesting B movies that are better then most films coming out today. The Flight That Disappeared has that melodrama drive-in movie feel to it. I like that. The message of the film has a powerful anti-nuclear weapons motif. The big film Contact written by Carol Sagon kind of rips this film off, if only indirectly. SO here we go…the future comes to the present, out of time and space, to warn us about the destructive forces of building weapons used in war that are fucking insane. Happily the scientists and lobbyists come to their senses and listen to what has been told to them and destroy all of their notes.
I wish this was the case in the real world. The three main characters have a dream, similar to a near death experience, and see the destruction of life on this planet; A scientist, a mathematician and a scientist/ lobbyist. The mathematician is a sexy dame too with a beauty mark above her left cheek. Smart, pretty but not too quick. Sorry no sex scenes in the bathroom and no waitresses with push-up bras.
Just a good old B movie with a profound message to us present day earthlings from the masters of the cosmos. They may be speaking to you!!!
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