more tales of PJ Proby

"I relate to Proby the tale of a kid I once knew who swears to this day that he saw PJ jump through a giant paper hoop on Top Of The Pops, while singing Hold Me. He has no proof. No fanzine curator can confirm it. The BBC wiped all those early TOTPs years ago. So did ya do it Jim? 'Yes I did. Onto a sprung floor as well. The crew didn't wanna do it 'cos of the risk of injury. They wanted to show a cartoon with me on it and then a shot of me stepping through. I said, No I'll dive through it. You couldn't rehearse it. I would have broken their prop. Once that thing was up you couldn't see the floor so I did it blind on live TV.' And burned himself into the consciousness of a 10-year-old in the process. And yes, dear reader, I was that Saul on the road to Damascus.
"

from Lary in Japan a copy of the uber-rare Marc Almond/St. Etienne produced "Legend" by PJ Proby--

"Proby was riding high and living large when, in the spring of 1965, it all came to an abrupt and messy halt. While on a U.K. tour with Brian Epstein teen-pop protege Cilla Black, P.J. succeeded in splitting his dubiously stitched velvet pants from knee to crotch mid-performance. At first it was shrugged off as coincidence, only to happen again at the following night's show. This was all the opportunity the famously rabid and duplicitous British tabloid press needed. They had a field day, screaming for Proby's head and other appendages, until he was thrown off the tour in disgrace. He was replaced by another singer with a propensity for belting out a song, and who would come to fashion a career out of a watered-down rendering of the live Proby persona: Tom Jones." 

wonderful painted Beehive Covers from Slovenia

(thanks Plep) 

The Great American Spy Novel, purchased for a mere quarter at the Pulpfiction sale table!--

"Anyone who has ever wondered why this amazingly cinematic novel has never been filmed can stop wondering right now: What is so disturbing about McCarry's theory, and so unlikely to appeal to Hollywood, is that it essentially says that Kennedy's death was his own fault. "

restored on the big screen in Seattle, maybe The Greatest Film of All Time

"Though it sounds like an urban myth, there are still people who haven't seen Chinatown--it's always a shock to discover them, often working right alongside you; they look just like regular people..." 

Climbing the Wall

Climbing the Wall, originally uploaded by biggfish.

My blog turns two today. Thanks to everyone looking, especially those that have written or linked to me.

"Scrap Iron truck" 2002 , by Greg Girard at Monte Clark in Vancouver--


"In 1994 Girard began photographing in Shenzhen, just across Hong Kong’s border with China, a city of millions that grew from a village in just a decade. Here he began to study the transformation of the Chinese landscape from agriculture to industry, farmland to city. In his series Factory Girls, Girard registered the exodus of young migrants, largely young women, from the countryside to the factories of China’s Special Economic Zones. Since 1998, Girard has lived in Shanghai. Shanghai had been little changed physically since Mao established the People’s Republic in 1949, but in the mid-nineteen nineties the city began an accelerated program of industrial and economic development. Girard’s ongoing photo series Phantom Shanghai depicts the effects of this transformation in a style that balances lyricism and anthropology. " 

n+1 on Hitch

" From its first days in office, the Bush Administration has made clear its determination to reverse as much as possible of the modest progress made in the 20th century toward public provision for the unfortunate; public encouragement of worker, consumer, and neighborhood selforganization; public influence on the daily operation of government and access to the record of its activities; public protection of the commons; and public restraint of concentrated financial and corporate power--not only at home but also, to the (considerable, given American influence) extent feasible, abroad. And from the first weeks after 9/11, as Paul Krugman and many others have documented, the Administration has found ways to take advantage of that atrocity to achieve its fundamental goals. The results, now and in the future, of this return to unfettered, predatory capitalism have been and will be a vast amount of suffering. Enough, one would think, to be worth mentioning in the second or third place, after the dangers of clerical barbarism. Not a word from Hitchens, however, at least in print. Perhaps he is whispering a few words about these matters in the ear of the "bleeding heart" (Hitchens's description) Paul Wolfowitz and his other newly adopted neoconservative allies."