Pop Smear: Dream Baby Dream

They Called Him 'Daddy'

A large part of who each of us is has been etched piecemeal by popular song and such remains the case whether any given one of us likes it that way or not. In the early days of popular recorded music, songs meant to be released on 78rpm shellac to a mass buying public seldom came in at over three minutes, as with the slammin’ bangers of our current times, whether we’re talking about the Carter Family warbling away at “Keep on the Sunny Side” or Robert Johnson running the devil’s own extended technique on “Hell Hound on My Trail.” A popular tune is finessed real slick so that is can be palatable to the majority even if its every last detail has been fussed over by ace players and technicians. An earworm can crawl inside the whole wide world and eat its damn brains. When it dropped as though hot in the year 2000, “Who Let the Dogs Out” by Baha Men seemed to be playing in every public place I happened to visit, including in the infamously snooty town of Montreal, and that raucous and idiotic tune never ceased to amuse and delight me even though I sure as fuck wasn’t about to go buy anything by Baha Men. This may be a controversial sentiment, but I believe, having grown up in the golden age of music videos, that commercial music that has been packaged adroitly can be very, very special. As a kid, I had no interest in the music-qua-music of King of Pop Michael Jackson, and yet the legendary videos for both “Thriller” and “Bad” revamped everything I believed and indeed was quite comprehensively. (It was only later that I would properly discover and go all gaga over the unimpeachable musical genius of the Jackson 5.) People who act like they are above popular music are like grumpy people at a party. They have all the charm of Jordan Peterson with his endless whiny Kermit the Frog-sounding lamentations. I would pick “Hey Ya!” by Outkast over this year’s Booker Prize winner any day of the week…even if it is almost four minutes long. When I was young people were always trash-talking Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys and I was always like: Oh yeah? Then why am I tapping my foot, fool? Backstreet's back, alright?  

Neneh Cherry & The Thing
"Dream Baby Dream"
Live in Ljubljana

Top-Shelf Soul Jazz Gold Sounds

Soul Jazz is a London, England-based record label whose longstanding curatorial vision remains second to none.

Gipsy Rhumba:
The Original Rhythm of Gipsy Rhumba in Spain 1965-74
[Full Album]

* What kind of women am I into? Thank you for asking! I enjoy women who enjoy sex and enjoy me.

Top Ten Jess Franco Films (with Contextualizing Introduction)

 

Aside from being the uncle of Javier Marias, probably the greatest European novelist of my lifetime and a heavy smoker who died at seventy of pneumonia shortly after surviving a COVID-19 infection by the skin of his teeth in 2022, the industrious and indefatigable low budget Euro gutter cinema iconoclast Jess/Jesús Franco is accorded by IMDb with having directed 204 films, most of which I suspect would fall into the gothic horror, sex comedy, and/or spacey freeform erotica genres. Google’s ever-accommodating AI tells me that there have been, according to “tracking data on Blu-ray.com,” 342 distinct Blu-ray releases of films by this widely beloved cult director. There can be no doubt that a hefty portion of those disks have special features showcasing the thoughts and eloquent meditations of gay English Franco aficionado and Nightmare USA author Stephen Thrower, who is definitely among the film specialists of our dodgy-ass era who I find most praiseworthy and personally likeable. Since he is indeed a confirmed gay man, I find it charming that Thrower enjoys watching ten minute scenes with no apparent presiding filmmaking logic in which nude women writhe like epileptics to the tune of modal piano jazz and comical overdubbed moans. Franco often did the music for his own films though usually under a pseudonym. When he started working in his native Spain again at the end of the 1970s, not long after the death of Francisco Franco the dictator (no relation), Jess found himself working with truly minuscule budgets, but that didn’t slow him down in the least. In fact, sometimes a producer would give him an absolutely piddling amount of money for a single picture and Jess would make two or even three movies without telling the producer. I believe that it always makes some sense to produce little lists of films because there are so many of them and so many things happening in this world all the time. It is helpful to put things down on paper so that you can organize your thoughts effectively. When a filmmaker has made something in the neighbourhood of 204 films, in such cases it might be truly helpful to have somebody who has seen a whole bunch of them lay out some faves in order to guide those just getting started toward getting themselves somewhat oriented.

The House of Lost Women (1983)

Shining Sex (1976)

Sex is Crazy (1981)

She Killed in Ecstasy (1981)

Vampyros Lesbos (1971)

Macumba Sexual (1983)

Two Undercover Angels (1969)

Two Female Spies in Flowered Panties (1980)

Blue Rita (1977)

Faceless (1988)

A Spritely Rendition of "La vie est une merde"
Composed by Jess Franco, Alain Petit, and Daniel J. White

Obligatory Fall Fashion Spread

 

I Knew Her Well (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1965)

File under: what the actual fuck? A little while back under slightly suspicious but probably basically chill circumstances my father showed up at my place randomly and handed me over these ultra snazzy size kazillion slip-on dress shoes that could only ever conceivably fit an acromegalic seventy-six-year-old freakazoid like my old man (who clearly hasn't the slightest idea how big my somewhat girlish little feet are, only compounding my shame with respect to said feet). So, you know, if you're suffering from gigantism hit me up. As I would naturally sympathize/commiserate with anybody suffering from gigantism, you can consider these puppies free for the taking. 

Featured below: hanky panky swan shirt by Obey, sparkly celestial jeans by Minimun, and Skor Blizzard by Dairy Queen. All for less than $200, sucka. 

Neneh Cherry, "Buffalo Stance" [Official Video]

Ol' Dirty Bastard, "Cold Blooded"

First of the Month Physical Media Roundup

It’s all design and opportunity with me, as it is with you.
- James Ellroy, Widespread Panic

With the Ellroy and the Whitehead, both summer 2026 hardback releases, the two best literary crime series in living memory hit third gear! No doubt they'll leave permanent tread marks! Jazzed to finally have my copies!

Blu-ray satori! If you can't take my word for it just ask Wyatt Fuckin' Earp!

Keeping a record of EVERY DAMN THING! [L'amour fou.]

The Animals, "Bo Diddly"

[Live at Club A-Go-Go, 1963]

Paracelsus [Doublet]

 
They live in the four elements: the Nymphse in the element of water, the Sylphes in that of the air, the Pigmies in the earth, and the Salamanders in fire. They are also called Undinse, Sylvestres, Gnomi, Vulcani, etc. Each species moves only in the element to which it belongs, and neither of them can go out of its appropriate element, which is to them as the air is to us, or the water to fishes, and none of them can live in the element belonging to another class. To each elemental being the element in which it lives is transparent, invisible, and respirable, as the atmosphere is to ourselves.
- Paracelsus

The Age of the Medici (Roberto Rossellini, 1973)

The Idiots (Lars von Trier, 1998)

Founded in 1995 by Lars von Trier (an intermittently great film director) and Thomas Vinterberg (a consummately poor one), the Dogme 95 movement began as a thought experiment and rapidly became an oddly serious and even Calvinistic attempt to bring filmmaking back to its basics in an era when even the festival circuit seemed to be inundated with fatuous, overblown productions with multimillion-dollar budgets. The movement as such was announced publicly on March 13, 1995 at a Paris conference celebrating cinema’s centenary, when the sometimes flamboyant and ever-troubled von Trier threw conspicuously red Dogme pamphlets into the audience. At the heart of the Dogme 95 movement were ten commandments or “vows of chastity,” primarily relating to total renunciation of specialized lighting rigs, fake sets, props introduced to and therefore not found at locations as they naturally existed, tripods and dollies, or non-diagetic sound/music of any kind. As far as breaking the vows of chastity or transgressing against them, von Trier would go on to say that neither he, with his sublime The Idiots (which the great Jean-Luc Godard at the time said was the only good von Trier film), nor any of the other directors who made or attempted to make actual Dogme 95 films had been able to avoid breaching the basic prohibitions periodically. “We must conclude,” he went on to aver, “that the genuine Dogme film has not been made.” Well, authenticity is a Heideggerian concept and it’s as overrated as champagne or caviar. The only American to attempt to make a Dogme 95 film, in the form of Julien Donkey-Boy, Harmony Korine flagrantly broke the rules throughout the production of that estimable work of rough-and-tumble renegade videography. Korine would later defend himself by saying that though the exercise helped him to discover a more elemental or even religious idea of cinema’s properties and capabilities, “as when I was a child, the temptation to sin was always a romantic option.”   

Portrait of a Gentleman in His Study
Lorenzo Lotto 
1527
[Late Renaissance and the Birth of Mannerism] 

A Few Words More on Recovery

 

The Author Poses in Front of His Small Garden

Because still in 2026 it is not anything like commonplace knowledge to anybody other than the long-suffering or the recovering-in-practice alcoholic and/or addict, I thought I would take a moment before casually deplatforming myself for a spell so that I might delve deeper into personal inventory and spend less time worried about making some kind of small ongoing public splash, to fill you in on what I believe to be far and away the two most important lines in the colloquially-designated Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (the cover of which has always just said Alcoholics Anonymous). While in a very real way the concept of anonymity was of foremost importance to Bill Wilson, Dr. Bob, and early adopters of the program, I don’t at all myself believe anonymity to have the same cultural value or cachet it had in the 1930s here where we find ourselves now in the world of TikTok and Twitter. (That being said, it remains good form for the recovering alcoholic to abstain from telling others, especially normies, who they have seen in attendance at this or that meeting.) The key principle to my mind is the whole one day at a time precept, which is something most people who have a cursory knowledge of twelve-step recovery will be in some sense aware of but may not have seen explicated in the flawless language of the Big Book (page 85): “What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.” Suffice it then to say that it’s not a matter of there being no future to worry about and every sequential day another frivolous day at the beach. The alcoholic is physically, emotionally, and spiritually sick and had better do their damndest to work on that third piece with at least as much vigilance and they do the first two. A spiritually sick person will go all wrong and the spiritually sick alcoholic/addict will pick up the drug of choice or the next best destructive thing. A simple and useful way to describe spirituality is as cosmic and worldly connectedness, but there isn’t any prosaic language that can lay it out for the neophyte in a manner that won’t sound fuzzy and incorporeal. The individual person must feel their way into and through spiritual awareness like somebody trying not to bump into anything in pitch dark. Alas, possible nightmares await all who kid themselves…and we all kid ourselves betimes. Addiction can be horrifying even with many years clean and/or sober and life going along famously when we capture a sharp, devastating flicker of awareness of how close we might in fact be to going too far off course…perhaps irretrievably so. The second most important line in the Big Book (page 43) is the most terrifying fact I know about alcoholism and the most terrifying fact of any kind that I have had validated by personal experience: “The alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defence against the first drink. Except in a few rare cases, neither he nor any other human being can provide such a defence. His defence must come from a Higher Power.” Wait a second, does this mean that the alcoholic and/or addict can relapse as though directed by a domineering inner daemon or malevolent supernatural force? Yes, that is what it means and that is exactly what it feels like. The alcoholic a couple years sober may find themself walking to the liquor store and asking “what the fuck is happening?” as they march forward like infantry, all but unstoppable. In actual fact, it happens all the time. That is why the recovering alcoholic and/or addict must do daily personal inventory, clean their side of the street (wherever possible), and work on their relationship with the bigger picture. Recovery is there to forestall future horrors more than it is there for any other practicable reason. Philip Seymour Hoffman, for example, with his twenty-plus years sober in the program, knew that perfectly, and yet he’s dead. It’s usually trial by fire. When you get sober your old friends vacate the premises almost totally. A certain person in a certain position won’t have too much trouble conceding: well, I guess it’s just me and God now. I’ve been working at recovery since 2009 and I still only have a slipshod notion of how to go about it (and all of two months clean and sober as of yesterday). At the very least, I can say I take recovery extremely seriously and insist it defines me more than gender, ethnicity, or nationality. Obviously I’m not trying to win any popularity contests. The other day as I left my house in the midst of brutal dental pain and a searing existential crisis, I closed my door and prepared to lock it; for a moment I was dumbstruck with fear that I might buy liquor while I was out. Looking down I saw my old recovery key chain, of which I almost never take conscious notice these days, procured in 2013 on Vancouver Island. A pair of shoes on the front and an inscription on the back: “STAY IN YOUR SHOES.” Instantly I knew that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I was getting loaded that night. That’s not a Higher Power. No. That’s evidence of a Higher Power. In that moment it was more than enough.

Monsters Never Die

Process (C.S. Leigh, 2004)

Colloque de chiens (Raúl Ruiz, 1977)

I remembered my father's bitter phrase, "Monsters never die," and I shuddered. I drank a mug of wine without pausing.

- Manuel Mujica Lainez, Bomarzo

There was never no love

No kind of

Any kind of love

Love was there for certain

Never, never ever.

Instead there was

Flotsam and

Cosmic abandonment’s 

Drifts, how uneasily 

All gracelessness shifts

Shuffling in nullity;

Cleaved notions

The Pacific Ocean.

There never was no

Fellowship also

Friends were

Abstract projections 

Oblivious to oblivions

In naught and ingratiation

Whatever breathes so fickle

Never touches;

Things and their 

Moats of atomic buffer.

Time as we simplify 

And compartmentalize

No there wasn’t

It was not

Not until we arrived

To impose and clove it

Encoded and cloak’d

Meaning Kant was

Errant as Newton

In nude foreboding.

The seas remain

Forever barely explored

The Pacific Ocean

And its impossible Luciferian force

Could power the enlightenment 

Of eternity's creatures 

Whom God will not 

Allow to arrive besides

No, certainly not

On account of 

There never was no love.

The most infernal creatures

Deep in blank witholding sea

Where light cannot reach;

Monsters never die

They just lay down in the garden

Toppled by red wine

And in their loveless state

They petrify.

Morton Feldman, "For Samuel Beckett"

Top Ten Jazz Bassists

 

Charles Mingus

Jimmy Garrison 

Charlie Haden

Ron Carter

William Parker

Barre Phillips

Henry Grimes

Malachi Favors Maghostut

Ronnie Boykins

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten

Charles Mingus Sextet 
Oslo, 1964

News of the World (Vodún Edition)

Strip Nude for Your Killer (Andrea Bianchi, 1975)

The Great Muppet Caper (Jim Henson, 1981)

I've warned you repeatedly and now you look on helplessly as the great and indefatigable Bret Michaels is laid woefully low for the foreseeable: the power and authority of the Fozzie Bear vodún/loa/daemon are second to none and to find out the hard way is to get knocked about and positively dropped. Of what principal properties does the Fozzie Bear vodún/loa/daemon consist? Look at it this way, simplified but not excessively so: Fozzie Bear combines the early pre-Gracie teenage vaudevillean George Burns, doing pratfall comedy with roller skates and similar cockamamie business, with an irrepressible sui generis enthusiasm that your normative world-frame will never be able to either assimilate or suppress. It's a good thing Bret Michaels opted for the surgery because trying to pass those stones would have shredded his dick complètement. One of the laws of both African and Haitian voodoo is that whatever you do you definitely don't want to strip nude for your killer. When those heavy cosmogenic forces come down upon you, passing through astral bodies like X-ray, you want to be in good health, dressed to the nines, and wearing an easeful, frolicsome expression on your face. Alas, Fozzie may just fuck you up anyway. Give you the heavyweight treatment. It is okay to become psychotic, saturated in archetypal spirits, but when you do so your whole domestic set-up better look good from a distance or the bird's-eye view. Not nearly as many people are able to host the Fozzie Bear vodún/loa/daemon as was once the case, so props to Kayla from local gutter punk band Puppet Wipes who is the only person I know at all well who has the same Fozzie Bear knack that I do. Shalom.

Antoine Dougbé et L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou

The human race cannot be satisfied unless it is inundated each and ever day with far more music than any creatural intelligence could ever make sense of let alone catalogue. I would not be able to keep a straight face and tell you that this or that release was the best reissue or archival release of the year, on vinyl or otherwise, simply because I am not in a position to have gathered enough information and everybody reading this implicitly knows that. However, I think I can comfortably assert that the recent Analog Africa release of the collected works of Antoine Dougbé et L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou, originally recorded between 1977 and 1982, is the best archival release of 2026 with which I have found myself in, ahem, possession. Hailing from Benin, Antoine Dougbé was the son of a vodún priest and would go on to become one himself, ultimately dying of cirrhosis of the liver. He would often call himself the devil's prime minister. Whereas L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou consisted of a stacked lineup of top-shelf virtuosic musicians, many among them vodún initiates themselves, Dougbé learned to produce songs by singing and making complex rhythms slapping his hands on his legs. The sublime, upbeat party music Dougbé made with the Orchestre stands at the threshold of postmodernism and Pan-African globalization. Rhythms and percussion are influenced by Afro-Cuban traditions and Congolese rumba figures too. The presence of synthesizers in the arrangements serves also to emphasize the pathbreaking transglobal nature of this exciting and energetic music. Should you fail to procure for yourself a personal copy of this extremely fine double LP of West African sublimity, well, that's your funeral, dawg. 

Antoine Dougbé et L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou

"Vile De Nan Gni Noude"