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 cannot find it anywhere then follow the instructions at the bottom of the post and you should be able to download the album with no major problems. And if you have some issues leave a comment and I will try to guide you through the fairly painless process.

CLICK HERE FOR THE POST FEATURING THE SOUNDTRACK TO LUCIFER RISING

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.

MORE OF THE FANZINE VIDEO VOICE HERE >>

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.

MORE OF BRIAN ENO’S BBC4 DOCUMENTARY HERE >>

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.

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. (As of 15 Apr 10 the site no longer exists. Too bad).

MORE EROTIC COVERS FROM HEMBRAS PELIGROSAS >>

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.

MORE SHOHEI OTOMO HERE >>

TODAY’S SEXY ACTION PACKED ADVENTURES FROM NIPPON:

GIRL BOSS GUERILLA w/ CRIMINAL WOMAN-KILLING MELODY

MORE PINKY VIOLENCE RIGHT HERE >>