JIMMY PAGE’S SOUNDTRACK TO

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While I never fell into the “Kiss your good taste good bye” anti-Kiss crowd of the late 70’s I certainly never cared much for what they were doing musically. By that time I was leaning more towards bands like Led Zeppelin, Yes, Pink Floyd and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Not to say I do not like raw bands with a dirty sound or acts that lean towards heavy theatrics. I have no issue with that stuff. I may have had a problem with Paul Stanley’s vocals and lyrics I think as well as his totally arrogant persona backed up by mediocre talent. I am not sure as I have never analyzed it too deeply. I do not think a grwon man should be ruminating over Paul Stanley. I do recall once going to do some partying with some Kiss oriented friends and putting on Relayer by Yes and almost being ran out of the place. I always felt a little more tolerant of certain musical styles than some of my associates have been of mine. It might me easier to adjust from Yes or King Crimson to AC/DC or Kiss than the other way around.

I saw a post at My Retrospace on some Kiss songs and I thought it over and decided there were a few songs I had always liked by them. I think they are from their first albums, before the pretty good Kiss Alive, and I believe I have the correct album covers for the songs here. If I do not and one of the Kiss Army wants to attack me over my ignorance I will apologize in advance. This is my first post in my new “retrology” category because whether I like their music or not I acknowledge they had a significant impact on music and entertainment culture. It is not up to me to decide if it was good or bad. I liked Ace Frehley’s lead work and Gene Simmons actually had some good bass lines. The three samples I have here are what I liked about the band when they were on the mark. There are a few more songs I like but I think this sums it all up. Pretty straight forward rock and roll and there is never anything wrong with that.

Strutter

Cold Gin

Hotter than Hell

AUDIO FILES MAY BE NOT WORK FOR A WHILE. I AM RESOLVING THE ISSUE. PLEASE HANG LOOSE WHILE ALL FILES ARE MOVED TO MY HOSTING ACCOUNT AND THEN MOVED BACK TO INDIVIDUAL POSTS. IT WILL TAKE SOME TIME BUT IT WILL GET DONE EVENTUALLY. SORRY.

URANIUM WILLY 4 FEB 10

How to download the song. Must have Real Player:
1) Play the song.
2) Right click on player and select “Download  This Song to Real Player”
3) Song will down load using your download manger, but song title will change.
4) Save song, rename, enjoy.

Will not show download option? Go to the download link page in my sidebar.

This was to be the twenty women I admire meme. My concern when I started this post was could I come up twenty  women I truly admire in the entertainment business. Not just females I drool over, though a couple here fall into that category as well. After it I got going I had to actually trim it down to 25 from 29 and slow myself down. While to me most all of this women are extremely beautiful there is some other quality I am attracted to than there physical charms alone. Some survival quality that helped them to stay afloat in a tough business ran, mostly, by tough men with flexible scruples. Some of them did not always fair so well in the end but they are all intelligent fighters.

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Anyway, this is my 20 Men I Admire Meme. Gilligan over at Retrospace pointed that I blundered by selecting both Paul and John as they were members of a group. When it comes down to it Paul is still my favorite Beatle but I think as a persona, in and out of the Beatles, John certainly has the more engaging history. and certainly did some of the best song writing of the pair at times. I believe my decision is based on the men both as Beatles and as individuals after the band split up. Other wise I have to do a 21 Men I Admire Meme. I kept my choices to the fields of film, music and art and figured there is no point in listing Martin Heidegger or Nietzsche here. Anyway, I will try now to do the 20 Women I Admire Meme and I promise the choices will be based on their intellectual and creative attributes and not their boobs and buns.

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THE 2nd URANIUM CAFE POLL: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE MORE OF HERE AT THE CAFE?

The results of the second Uranium Cafe poll are finally in. I waited so long as a couple choices had been tied for almost two weeks and I was just waiting to see which one was going to pull ahead. Lets take a look at the results with the category receiving the least votes first:

6) Music Posts: I know one of the people who voted to see more music posts was Kimberly over at one of the best movie culture blogs around, Cine Beats. So her vote matters to me. And I have struggled so hard with trying to get some downloadable audio and have a huge task ahead of me here soon to redo all my music posts one at a time that even if this category came in last I am still going to continue it and soon you can expect at least one music post per page (eight posts). do we listen to he readers here at the cafe? yes. Do we do what they want us to do all the time? no. I know my music posts get lots of hits and support, so they are going to continue and grow rather than diminish.

5) Classic European Horror: While never my preferred cup of tea I am watching more and more Eurosleaze and general horror/sci-fi and developing a taste for it. Just got in Lucio Fulci’s Perversion Story and it looks wonderful. Learning more and more about the main directors (Jess Franco, Jean Rollins, Mario Bava, Antonio Margheriti etc. ) and finding that while not all of their work is worth the effort a lot of it is visually stunning and loaded with plot quirks and twists you would not see in most American films. A little more will be on the way but the site will not go bonkers over too many of those films simply because I still find the stories incomprehensible at times.

4) Comic Books and Art: expect this category to stay at about where it is, with a post or two per page dedicated to comic book and movie poster art yesterday and sometimes today. I once wanted to draw comic books and love the period when Marvel ruled the world back in the 70’s. I have a huge collection of material on my hard drive, ranging from the precode period to late 70’s. Some great stuff there. I also have thousands of movie poster, pulp paperback cover and  miscellaneous art samples. Since I a graphics oriented person they will continue but will not dominate the site.

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Another collections of old movies posters from the Uranium Cafe vaults. The only films here I ave actually see are the Hammer version of Dracula, some of Blood Bath (still need to finish that one) and Russ Myer’s Motor Psycho. The rest of the images just caught my attention and thought I would share them with the readers here. While some of these movies may be the bottom of the barrel in terms of production and final quality the art that promoted them is great and much more exciting than the Photoshopped works that grace cinema lobbies these days. The glory days of movie posters are long as far as I am concerned. You just do not see art like that promoting The Undead anymore and I fear we never will again expect in arcane collections.

MORE POSTER ART HERE >>

THE URANIUM CAFE PODCAST: EPISODE ONE

Okay, so I think this will be the final post for the introduction of the Cafe’s new podcast. I am using the Blubrry Powerpress platform and it works okay though my podcast RSS will not validate as it did with Podpress. Not a biggie as I integrated my podcast into my feedburner account. I simply gave up with the JW FLV player. If anyone knows what I am talking about I did actually manage to turn it into a plugin but I really got tired after that with trying to make a file play. I am sure I could do it eventually but what is the point. It would seem too that I would have to store the files locally, on my server, to make the JW player work and that did not appeal to me. So I set up a Youtube account for my podcasts and simply embeded the the video code into my Daiko Youtube Player and we now have the podcast back in the sidebar. Damn. Now I am wiped out and have no mental energy to create a podcast or written post.

Thanks again to the guys at Audioshocker for their help and advice and now maybe I can move past this and get some actual commentaries going. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for topics. I will try to do something for Chick Young on Mara Corday shortly. I do take requests.

Thanks Bill

PODCAST EPISODE 01

After almost 120 posts I finally get to Ray Harryhausen and while that is a sad it took so long I also knew it was only matter of time before I began some posts on this great man and his work. I am sure he needs no long winded introduction and since this posts is a Quickie (bereft of original vidcaps, media or research that involves more than some skimming) I will just say I truly admire his film work. This one is certainly one of my favorites as far as his fantastic stop action animation technique goes. It was directed by Nathan H. Juran and produced by Charles H. Shneer for Columbia pictures, who collaborated with Harryhausen on many of his films. It stars William Hooper as the no bones, he man hero Col. Robert Calder. This type of ale lead was so prevalent at the time. Calder is take charge ex-quarterback type who though brimming with misogyny always wins the girl, in this case Italian medical student Marisa Leonardo, played by pretty Joan Taylor.

What I love about the films with Harryhausen’s animation is just that as the stories no not really rise too much higher than the rest of the science fiction-fantasy fare of the day, with some notable exceptions such as Jason and the Argonauts and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. The story here is really pretty campy to the point of being a bad movie I love type film. However it is not really a bad movie , in my definition, though there are some sore spots. The acting is wooden and Calder is simply an asinine ape in ways and to see Marisa fall under his “charm” and promise him a candle lit dinner right after he denigrates her is too much to believe. The action takes place in Italy and was filmed in Rome where Harryhausen wanted to spend his vacation. One character is one of the most obnoxious I can recall since Omar the love spreading beatnik from The Flesh Eaters. Pepe, played by Bart Baverman with a horrible Italian accent, is simply grating on your nerves as he does whatever he can do to get a real cowboy hat “…like the cowboys in Texas wear”. This included selling a canister with some slimy substance inside to the local zoologist who lives in a little aluminum sided trailer, the type so popular in Italy in the 1960’s. The canister washed ashore after an American spaceship returning from Venus crashes into the Mediterranean Sea. Only two men survive but one of them soon die while being cared for in the local hospital by medical student Leonardo. No need to have a real nurse or doctor attend to injured astronauts, much less notify the American embassy, when you can have a student do all that.

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Though graphic and extreme to the point of repulsion sometimes I like the work of Vincent Locke. I did an earlier post highlighting his notorious Cannibal Corpse album covers. While totally freaky they basically convey, for the most part, horror movie themes. Sometimes they go to far even for my taste but in general I find them entertaining. Locke has also done some comic book work and the title he is most well know for is the zombie holocaust series Dead World. I saw this was available for download on Demonoid and snagged it, but was disappointed to see it was all in PDF format. It is a hard format to edit but I got a few covers and even some pages to share. Of course getting them in CBR or at least JPEG format would be better and I apologize if the quality is a little imperfect but I think it all came okay really. That is an issue with cropping images from the PDF and converting to JPEG. I hope the samples will be satisfying enough. Certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, including horror fans. I feel he crosses some lines sometimes but it is my choice to peek at the stuff. I consider this material to be his more popular style. So you can imagine what some of the stuff looks like that I would not publish here. If you are curious here is his website and his myspace page. Proceed with caution!

MORE DEADWORLD HERE >>

I CRIMINALI DELLA GLASSIS (WILD WILD PLANET)

1965/Director: / Antonio Margheriti/Writers: Renato Moretti, Ivan Reiner

Cast: Tony Russel, Lisa Gastoni, Massimo Serato, Carlo Giustini, Franco Nero

Antonio Margheriti

I will be honest and say that of all the countries whose films I watch regularly the one I struggle with the most and still have the most ambiguity about is Italy. While there have been some masterpieces like Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief and Shoeshine and Fellini’s La Strada most of the stuff coming out of Italy leaves me a little confused and disoriented. For example some people find it amazing that I as a horror fan cannot really stand almost all of Dario Argento’s output. The are incoherent stories and all the ranting about his prowess with camera work and lighting is exaggerated. Then again Mario Bava ranks as one of my all time favorite directors and I have a folder on my hard drive full of Italian horror and giallo films just waiting for me. Now one area that I know basically zip about is Italian science fiction and in particular the genre films of the 1960’s. Other than Bava’s excellent Planet of the Vampires I know virtually nothing of Italian cinema’s visiosn of the future, until watching Wild Wild Planet, or I Crimialli della Gallassia (maybe Galaxy of Criminals). It was directed by Antonio Margheriti (who usually directed as Anthony Dawson and did films like Cannibal Apocalypse and Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein) and co-scripted by the man who brought The Green Slime to life Ivan Reiner. Spaghetti western star Franco Nero has a role as Commander Halstead’s second in command.

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