THE URANIUM CAFE

CHHOM NIMOL AND DENGUE FEVER DELIVER SOME FINE 60′S STYLE CAMBOBIAN POP

uranium.cafe@yahoo.com (Uranium Willy) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:18:41 +0000

Lately I am not too much in reviewing films though I have more than a few reviews in the draft folder I am finishing up and should be back to some film material with my next post. But for now I am happy to be back to being able to post audio files and I am going to try to promote a band I really have come to enjoy since hearing their rendition of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. The song was played over the closing titles of the excellent Matt Dillon directed film City of Ghosts. The story takes place in Cambodia and I highly recommend the film and while it is a newer film I am planning a review of it here at the Café in the future. The band is Dengue Fever (I think pronounced dung-yi fever like the mosquito borne disease) and the band is the creation of brothers Zac (guitar and vocals) and Ethan Hotlzman (classic surfy Farfisa organ) . While traveling through Cambodia the brothers were so enthralled by the style of music they heard they decided to form a band that played 60’s based Cambodian pop music with a slightly psychedelic San Francisco twist to the sound. They decided they needed a genuine Khmer singer and searched the clubs and karaoke bars of Little Phnom Penh in San Fransisco until they found the vivacious and talented Chhom Nimol performing with a small group of singers. She had a presence and voice that stood out and the brothers approached her. Nimol’s Cambodian friends were a little shocked and concerned at the wild appearance of the Hotlzman brothers and warned her to stay away but she took the chance and a friendship and tight band were quickly formed. Nimol was a very successful karaoke singer and was able to support herself and was trying to have her family sent over to the States with her earnings. The little band has earned a good degree of success now and is on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label and I hope Nimol has been able to move her family closer to her. Most of the songs are covers of classic Cambodian pop songs but there are some originals and a few songs in English as well. As you may or may not know I live in Kunming China and I traveled to Laos for a month before and was so delighted to hear some style of music down there that was not the crappy J-Pop style music that is copied all over China these days. These are great songs and Nimol is a fantastic singer with heart and soul and you do not have to understand the words of the songs to understand the message.

BOTH SIDES NOW

Download audio file (bothsidesnow.mp3)
SEEING HANDS
Download audio file (seeinghands.mp3)
LOST IN LAOS
Download audio file (LostInLaos.mp3)

FLOWERS

Download audio file (Flowers.mp3)

SOBER DRIVER

Download audio file (soberdriver.mp3)

VIDEO FOR SEEING HANDS

HOW TO DOWNLOAD AND SAVE AUDIO/VISUAL FILES FROM THE URANIUM CAFE:
If you want to download and save an audio (or even video) file this is the easiest way to do it:
1) Use Mozilla Firefox
2) Install any number of add-ons that capture Flash Media. I use Fast Video Download. It is straight forward and easy.
3) Play the file let it buffer a bit then click on FVD in your status bar and select the file then rename it after the download completes.

AUDIO FILE UPDATES: JIMMY PAGE’S LUCIFER RISING OST FILE REPLACED

uranium.cafe@yahoo.com (Uranium Willy) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:07:32 +0000

I am finally getting around to replacing most of my audio files thought the process is one post at a time and will take a little time. I have decided the best way to do audio files is to host them yourself. Do not rely on all those ‘free’ file storage services out there. Too many size and bandwidth rescritctions and after a lot of work you may find one day that all your files have been removed for no particular reason. I upgraded my package at Maiahost.com and now have more storage than I should be able to use any way soon. The links should be more reliable load a bit faster on a decent connection. There are download instructions at the bottom each post and if you have issues downloading I will try to help you. Best thing to do is work with a media downloader add-on in Mozilla. You can get audio or video from here if you figure it out. Realplayer and the full version of Quicktime have some options for downloading and saving audio and visual media as well. I may not replace all old audio posts and I will just have to wait and see. I will begin first by replacing album length features since those take a lot of time to do and I can get them out of the way. Some I will replace file in posts featuring hard the find albums Death Wish II by Jimmy Page, the rock opera Flash Fearless vs the Zorg Women parts 5 & 6, John Paul Jone’s Scream For Help and the European version of the Zombi (Dawn of the Dead) soundtrack by Goblin. But first I will link you back to one of my most visited posts ever, the one featuring Jimmy Page’s soundtrack to the Kenneth Anger film Lucifer Rising. In my original post I could only feature a version in two parts with about five trimmed off of it but now, for the first time ever, I present the entire uncut and unedited Lucifer Rising OST. While it is not impossible by any means to find this online some people just do not know how to search for this stuff or how to use things like bittotrrents or Rapidshare. So if you have been looking for this all your life and simply can find it anywhere then follow the instructions at the bottom of the post and you should be able to download the album with no majorproblems. And if you have some issues leave a comment and I will try to guide you the fairly painless process.

CLICK HERE FOR THE POST FEATURING THE SOUNDTRACK TO LUCIFER RISING

FANZINES REMEMBERED: SAMPLE PAGES FROM VIDEO VOICE #11

uranium.cafe@yahoo.com (Uranium Willy) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:47:10 +0000

Some people of a certain and more decrepit age bracket may remember a day not that long ago when there was no Internet. No blogs. No forums. It was actually a time that seems Medieval but was really not far into the past that our world existed in this primitive fashion.. I remember when video games at the little pizza place run by George from Greece (later busted for selling LSD along with his excellent pepperoni pizzas) jumped from Atari ping pong and the slow moving cowboy shootout thing to Space Invaders and then to Gallaga. But even then when the whole technological world seemed to transforming at a ludicrous pace there was still no Internet or blogging and people had only one option for reading and learning: holding a book or magazine in their hands and looking at it. Many people now may not realize what a luxury being able to sign up to a place like Wordpress or Blogger really is. You can sign up for an account and then have a film blog up and going in a matter of a few minutes. And you can reach some sort of reading audience. Here at the Uranium Café I am proud to get about 1500 to 2000 hits a day on average. At my other blog, Necrotic Cinema, I only get maybe 15 to 20. I cannot figure that out. The Café is hosted and Wordpress based and I spent some considerable time figuring out sitemaps and SEO plug-ins for it. It gets promoted on Google, but my Google based Blogger blog does not really do much even though the same brilliant mind is behind both sites. Well what do these numbers matter to me when at one time my dream to self-publish a ‘zine’. Sometimes called fanzines, or zines for short, these were usually short little booklets that were basically the size of typing paper (maybe folded in half), Xeroxed off (sometimes on a Xerox machine at some one’s job) and hurriedly stapled together. They were almost always only black and white and full of hard to correct typos. You had to type it right the first time or use loads of white out. The themes were usually about off the wall films or bands no one had ever heard of and that did not get much coverage in the more mainstream music magazines of the day. Hit Parader or Circus just did not cover The Cramps or The Dead Kennedys.

Zines typically had an extremely limited readership. They may have even been given away free at local record stores or comic book shops rather than sold. While the appearance of the zines were often crude the material on the inside was as well researched as you could get at the time. Remember there was no Internet to do the research on. No IMDB. People had to try to find printed material on people Lucio Fulci or Barbara Steele any way they could. And getting a hold of images was tough too. I have no problems now either finding images on the net or capturing them from an AVI file. We can all create images from a film now that no one else has published if we want. In the days of the zine people relied on images already long published in magazines. Some images have now become rather iconographic in nature because of the sheer number of times they have been reproduced first in magazines and then in fanzines and fan styled poster art. The more successful of the zines were able to advertise in the back of some sort of near underground type magazine or comic book. You had to mail order them and I used to have a small collection of cool little fanzines I had ordered from the back of magazines. Magazines like Psychotronic Video Magazine had loads of cool ads. I think that is where I saw the ad for The Betty Pages (later the Bettie Pages) and managed to get every single copy at one time simply by ordering them and then waiting by the mail box for a couple weeks. Maybe some readers remember these days.

I have a small little collection of old zines in digital format and thought I might share some samples here once in a while. Here are some pages from a zine called Video Voice. Published by Tim Paxton and Dave Toderello out of Oberlin Ohio it is a little more polished looking than many fanzines and sported a, by then standards, hefty price of $3. It has a nice layout and even has some advertising. There are some pages here with small reviews of some horror/cult films and they are pretty good in my opinion. Mind you I love the net and that I have a couple movie blogs people actually check out and that I even belong to a sort of blogging community where I have some sort of reputation. I doubt that would have ever happened if I had created and published my own paper fanzine and tried to distribute it. I have now learned to manipulate the net and I can get all sorts of groovy things for free. But in the end they are all ‘digital things’. JPEGS. MP3s. PDFs. AVIs and MPEGs. And that is all cool too. But there was really something almost magic about ordering some grainy little pulp zine from the back of Film Threat Magazine or some of those Jim Steranko publications I forget the name of now and then having it arrive in your mailbox in a drab manila envelop and laying back with some chips and dip and reading it and smelling the paper as you turned the pages. I have enough material here to make this a regular category so expect more in the future.

ENGAGING BRIAN ENO DOCUMENTARY FROM THE BBC4

uranium.cafe@yahoo.com (Uranium Willy) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 08:17:50 +0000

I have not actually seen all of this fine looking Brian Eno documentary in its entirety but what I have seen looks great. I have sent the last day or two trying to edit the full film down to manageable sizes and then getting it uploaded to my trusty Viddler account. it covers the range of his career from the glam days of Roxy Music to his more modern recording. The guy is absolutely brilliant and interesting all the way through even when he is wearing women’s clothes. The film also touches on some of his non-music related interests such as art, his curious journals and odd little inventions. I am about to finally sit down and watch the entire documentary with my wife. Renaissance man hardly begins to describe Eno and the vast contributions he has made to the areas of experimental and popular music. I have another Eno documentary whose quality is far from the level of this BBC4 production but I may edit it up and get it up here as well one day if anyone is interested.

Later: I finished watching the video just a moment ago and cannot recommend this enough to both Eno fans and to people who hardly know the guy or his work. But I am sure most anybody has heard one of the songs he has produced for U2 and maybe for the less super-popular Coldplay. I was so inspired I am getting some hardware and software I have long needed in order to finally (I hope) be able to record my own original music onto my computer. I do that now with prerecorded loops but I want to make my own loops. And this Eno documentary got me off my lazy rump and shopping on line for the weird gadgets I will need to do that. A gentlemen, a musician, an artist and a philosopher.

ENO DOCUMENTARY PART 01

ENO DOCUMENTARY PART 02

ENO DOCUMENTARY PART 03

URANIUM WILLY’S CHOICE FOR THE RONDO’S AWARD BEST HORROR BLOG: CINEBEATS

uranium.cafe@yahoo.com (Uranium Willy) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:08:40 +0000

I was actually about to vote for Pierre’s fabulous Frankensteinia blog over at the Rondo Awards based on a post from Arboghast’s blog. But while on the Rondo page I noticed a blog had been nominated that I have long admired and would like to style my site after in some way in the future if I have not already started on some level. That blog is Kimberly’s Cinebeats. Cinebeats is in no way strictly a horror blog and covers many other genres from a period usually before 1980. She promotes exploitation, Japanese and British cinema as well and gives attention to musicians and artists. I do not know her but I can sense from her writing she is a kind person and is passionate about her varied subjects. She handles the topics with the respect they deserve. The blog has a nice retro themed appearance that I love as well. So many horror blogs these days use that standard annoying black Blogger template with red letters for the font. Cinebeats has a cool look that shows pure creativity and relevance to the themes it addresses. When I first began The Uranium Cafe I did not want it to be seen as strictly a horror movie blog. I lifted the retro sounding title from the famous diner near the site of the early atomic bomb tests. I usually feel my direction is all fragmented and not focused while Kimberly has managed to handle a variety of classic and cool topics and keeps it all wrapped up nicely. I cannot say enough about Frankenstenia as well but I had to choose one or the other and I am going with Cinebeats as the official vote from The Uranium Cafe as the best horror blog for the 2009 Rondos.

SPICY SPANISH HORROR MAGAZINE COVERS: HEMBRAS PELIGROSAS

uranium.cafe@yahoo.com (Uranium Willy) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:53:55 +0000

Found out about this magazine called Hembras Peligrosas (Dangerous Women) online somewhere and cannot find out much information on it other than it is in Spanish and well drawn. I even found a PDF of an entire issues and the interior drawings are nice b/w pen and ink drawings. There seems to to be four female characters and the stories are built up around them from issue to issue. One is a vampire and another is a werewolf and i am not sure what is up with the other two. The couple fan sites I found were in Spanish and the few English posts on the magazines were not very informative. In fact sometimes I sort of like to not know too much about a new thing like this. I like the element of mystery about it, the unknown. One thing that seems apparent is the the cover illustrator certainly has a fanny fetish. And there is nothing wrong with that. The magazine was printed in Spain and these books were printed in the early 80’s as far as I can gather from the information on the PDF issue I have. I will probably put up some samples of the inside artwork another day. There is a sister magazine called Sukia and I will probably finds some covers scans of that magazine one day and get them up as well. I think Sukia was an Italian magazine but had a Spanish translated version.

Here is a link to a site that contains little information about the magazine’s history but what it does contain are the covers to every issue of Hembras Peligrosas and a rapidshare link in most posts to a PDF of the inside artwork. When I do my post on Sukia I will provide a similar link. Thank you to whoever runs that site.

THE AMAZING BALL POINT PEN ARTWORK OF SHOHEI OTOMO

uranium.cafe@yahoo.com (Uranium Willy) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:51:50 +0000

Don’t know too much about Japanese artist Shohei Otomo except that his work is utterly amazing and he does it all in ball point pen. He mixes traditional and contemporary themes in his drawings successfully. A lot of modern Asian art mixes old themes with modern/western images and a lot of it is simply mundane. For example the image of Chairman Mao eating at McDonalds in a painting in China is a little worn out but you still see similar images all the time. Shohei Otomo’s images are hard line, high contrast drawings and the impact is stunning sometimes. He often leaves much of the drawing surface blank and nestles his finely detailed illustration in the center. Other times he fills in the page with painstakingly drawn imagery. He dabbles in Henati and Manga themes and other times takes traditional Ukiyo-e wood cut themes and warps them around a bit. A couple of the images are fairly adult in themes and at least one I was just not comfortable uploading to the site. I used to do some drawing and preferred the pen and ink medium. When I see work like this I have an ambivalent mixture of inspiration and despair. On the one hand I want to suddenly draw something again and on the other I become more resolved to never pick up an ink pen again. His site called Hakuchi is here and it is in Japanese but easy enough to navigate or just translate using Google.

THE URANIUM CAFE MATINEE: TWO TOEI PINKY VIOLENCE CLASSICS – GIRL BOSS GUERILLA w/ CRIMINAL WOMAN-KILLING MELODY

uranium.cafe@yahoo.com (Uranium Willy) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:36:47 +0000

TODAY’S SEXY ACTION PACKED ADVENTURES FROM NIPPON:

GIRL BOSS GUERILLA w/ CRIMINAL WOMAN-KILLING MELODY

GIRL BOSS GUERILLA

CRIMINAL WOMAN-KILLING MELODY

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMEPLTELY DIFFERENT: LECHEROUS GIRLY MAGAZINES FROM JAPAN

uranium.cafe@yahoo.com (Uranium Willy) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 07:53:46 +0000

Got these files in as PDFs and edited them using my trusty Fastsone Image Editor. Not really sure what the title would translate as. I think it is ‘Young Animal’ but it is Japanese and I speak and read zip thereof. There is a website connected to these two magazines at http://www.younganimal.com and I checked it out and it is not, I promise, any sort of bestiality site. If it had any such connection, even remotely, the site or the books would not be here. The images below are not nude images and fall not a type of photography form from Japan called gravure. The word can refer to a printing process or, more in line with the ‘research’ done for this post, to a type of modeling in Japan where the models pose in usually non-nude shoots. The style ranges in its scope from modeling cosmetic products and fashion wear to borderline porn. The models have the appearance of being nymphets at best. This sort of modeling has spread across across Asia as the standard practically for product promotion. The recurring themes seems to be a coquettish nature mixed with the Japanese penchant for cosplay scenarios. The magazines have the initial appearance of being aimed at teenage girl readers and in fact a certain percentage of the readership are young girls reading the fashion tips and looking for models to imitate. But there seems to be no secret that the bulk of the readership is made of slimy old guys, er, who like looking at girls, um, in bikinis on a ski slope. The lack of nudity keeps the magazine out of the pornography category technically but there is something even more titillating about the non-nude images. One more reason why Japan is the greatest culture in all of Asia. All the girls in the magazine are over 18 as far as I can tell from the web site.

THE CRAZY BUT HIP JAPANESE GIRL SURF GUITAR BAND FROM KILL BILL: THE 5,6,7,8′S

uranium.cafe@yahoo.com (Uranium Willy) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:35:01 +0000

Here are some selections from the album Teenage Mojo Workout by the surf/rock-a-billy style girl band from Tokyo called The 5,6,7,8’s. So named because they focus their sound on music from the 50’s to 80’s. The core of the band are sisters Sachiko on drums on and Yoshiko (aka Ronnie) Fujiyama on guitar and lead vocals though the girls often take turns wailing into the mic. There have been some lineup changes as far as bass goes but Akiko Yomo has filled the slot since the 1990’s. The band has a garage sound and Quentin Tarantino used them in his Kill Bill film during the House of Blue Leaves sequence. The sound is definitely raw but it is a side of Japanese music I welcome over the sappy J-Pop stuff you hear all over Asia these days. American culture, with good reason, has been more noticable in Japan than any other Asian culture. This is for better or worse and there is a strong fascination with good ol’ Yankee kitsch in Japan that is noticeably absent from countries like China. Their album covers are clever take offs of old 60’s covers by girl bands like the Ronnettes. The songs are usually sung in Japanese but sometimes in a pretty rough English that you will either love or hate. Part of the band’s underground success is their appearance and attitudes. They stay in character most of the time off stage and they sport teenage-deb type tattoos. The gals all typically wear groovy retro hairdos and rolled up blue jeans or sleek leather outfits. And hell they’re just cool Japanese chicks so that is a super plus no matter how crumby their songs are. Not for everyone’s taste and that is why there are here at The Uranium Café. More 60’s style Japanese pop music coming in the future.

TEENAGE MOJO WORKOUT
Download audio file (TeenageMojoWorkout.mp3)
HARLEM SHUFFLE
Download audio file (HarlemShuffle.mp3)
GREEN ONIONS
Download audio file (GreenOnions.mp3)