A “Psycho” passes: Deceased Artiste Bingo Gazingo

I can’t quite calculate the amount of brilliantly twisted entertainers (or just downright eccentrics) that I became acquainted with through the legendary Manhattan access show Beyond Vaudeville (which later transformed into Oddville on MTV). The series featured some major stars of long ago, but perhaps the greatest revelations were the performers who were genuinely off the map in terms of what they did — I am not alone in my continued love for a man named “Tray man” (unfortunately no clips of his amazing act have reached YouTube), who sported a tray (in fact a variety of different nicely-colored trays) atop his dome and then sorta… well, he sorta walked around. As a friend of mine explained it to me when we saw him do his act live, “if he spun the tray or danced around, Ed, now that might be considered a talent…”

I won’t say that the now-departed Bingo Gazingo was akin to (the also departed) Tray man — Bingo was a poet/singer/wildman who pretty much knew that his audience expected him to be over the top. And that he was, providing a crazed version of Beat poetry that he deemed song lyrics, to the extent that he performed with various musicians who tried to “flesh out” his tunes. Here is a 1997 New York Times article, in which Bingo is on the verge of “discovery,” as the Oddville folks had him on their pilot for the MTV series.

The Times piece reveals his real name (Murray Wachs) and some background: he worked for BMI as a song-logger (listening for BMI songs on the radio) and then had a longstanding berth at the U.S. Post Office. Once he retired from the post office, he devoted himself to his poems/lyrics and would appear around NYC at open mic nights. He became a cult figure and a regular fixture at the Bowery Poetry Club on Monday evenings. Very sadly, he was hit by a cab traveling to the Bowery Poetry Club and died in late 2009, but his death didn’t reach the attention of those of us who had been blown away by his maniacal art until New Years Day of this year. No category can contain him, least of all the fabricated label “Outsider Music” which oddly mixes the primitive (Shags, Hasil Adkins) with the musical sophisticate (Captain Beefheart). Like so many true primitives, he was sui generis, and so the time has come to celebrate the special man who wanted to be known as Bingo Gazingo!

First, Bingo performing at the Astor Place station on my subway line, the 6. He’s singing his masterpiece “JLo.” He wrote many tributes to contemporary pop performers. I don’t think anyone has summed up her sex appeal with the kind of perception that Bingo did, as with “You smell like a kosher deli/I want to put a baby in your belly”:



Another ode to a contemporary mainstream musician, this time Kenny G. Bingo is backed here by the band My Robot Friend, who gives his maniacal lyrics a high-tech sheen. Again, who can argue with “I can relax and take my Ex-Lax… we can reach our climax with Kenny G.”?



More Kraftwerk Gazingo, as Bingo sings” You’re out of the Computer,” again with My Robot Friend:



Perhaps the craziest clip of Bingo to be found on the Net is this slice of him performing at an atmospherically lit Halloween show in Bushwick, Brooklyn. This show took place in Halloween of last year (yes, folks, he’s 85 here!!!), and his performance consists of a medley of his “greatest hits,” including a new song about Beyonce and Jay-Z that was news to me:



There is no other way to close any discussion of Bingo than to spotlight his chef d’oeuvre, his own “Howl”-like anthem of the disturbed mind, “Psycho.”:



The photos of Bingo used above come from the Life Just Bounces blog

Lost movies and photomontage: two more great blogs

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I do it for no money whatsoever, but merely to spread the good word about the finest in high art, low trash, and other essentials. On the menu bar to the right I have a list of other sites and blogs that offer terrific content, but I think that perhaps only one of the bloggers actually is making money from what he’s doing on his blog (and that money comes from a nice side mail order business, and not the blog proper). These days, I seem to be discovering like-minded bloggers a few times a month, and have come to the very evident conclusion that the Internet is an unending series of trees falling in the forest. My advice is... just listen for the sound.

Sometimes another blogger approaches me, as happened when San Francisco artist Peter Combe wrote praising the full episode about New Yorker Films that I had put up on YouTube (btw, folks, it has been announced that New Yorker is coming back to life as of this writing). Peter does the blog A Tale of a Few Cities. He is a movie fan who posts arthouse-movie joke images in among the many fascinating images of l’art moderne.

And, since I like to move from art to trash and back again, I have to spotlight a blog that is absolutely chockfull of good things and represents of good deal of work by its blog-meisters. It’s called Temple of Schlock, and is a wonderful labor of love that sprang out of a zine started in 1987 by Syracuse residents Paul DeCirce and Chris Poggiali. Those gentlemen now run a blog with that name that incorporates a pretty sizeable collection of newspaper clippings, press booklets, posters (featured in the “One Sheet of the Week” entries), movie collectibles, and even View Master reels.

Here’s an example of the Temple-keepers’ newspaper clipping collection, including an ad for the “porn” re-release of Myra Breckenridge touting the participation of “Angel” Farrah Fawcett and a porn-ish promo ad for the Roman Polanski film What? (known over here as Forbidden Dreams or Diary of Forbidden Dreams). The blog also includes exploitation profiles, like this one about the marvelous Claudia Jennings.

The Schlock blog is very content-intensive, and two features are personal favorites of mine. The first is the “This Week on 42nd St.” entries, which gives us a list of what played on the Deuce on certain dates in certain years, for instance 1978 and 1985.

The most important entries DeCirce and Poggiali write, however, are the “Endangered List” blogposts about movies that they have information on, but which have never been released on VHS or DVD. They’ve written up dozens of these films, which include such unfindable rarities as the Romain Gary film Birds in Peru and an amazing-sounding (in so many ways) Rich Little vehicle in which Nixon and Agnew are seen as a kind of Laurel and Hardy for the Seventies. The film was produced by Tom Smothers, and directed by Bob “Super Dave”/“Officer Judy” Einstein. Its title? Another Nice Mess.

And what can be said about a blog that poses as many interesting questions about lost movies as it answers about surviving ones? In the case of the “endangered” films the bloggers ask us outright for more information on the films’ whereabouts, but in the case of some items, it’s time to just scratch one’s head and wonder. What in the holy hell was the midnight movie “event” entitled The Beatles Meet Star Trek? We’d all love to know.