Re-align your mind: the psychedelic music videos of “Mrs. Muddle”

On the Funhouse TV show, I often refer to the 1960s as “the gift that keeps on giving” (and giving and giving...) The rupture that occurred in the Sixties is still part of the fabric of popular culture, but it’s mostly present as petrified memories on “classic rock” radio and rerun cable networks. The renegade, often completely schizo, spirit of Sixties culture only returns front and center to the public consciousness when it’s time for middle-aged hearttugs in obituaries for Sixties idols like Davy Jones. Some folks, however, still craft their pop culture in a Sixties fashion… and so I come to the enigma that is “Mrs. Muddle.”

The music videos created by the Artist Currently Known as Muddle are mind-warpers that deserve a far bigger audience than they are currently getting on YouTube. In a just universe, the “muddles” (as their creator calls the music-vids) would be playing on some cable network *somewhere* — but, since the days of USA’s wonderfully eclectic Night Flight and MTV “alternative” shows like 120 Minutes are long (long!) behind us, we now must stumble across really great alternative culture on our own in the rabbit-hole that is the Internet, where lotsa trees are falling, but very few hear the sound. (Cable-access is still a great source for alternative weirdness, as I know all too well, but has been mostly forgotten in the rush to reach a higher-level of attention deficit disorder.)

Thus, I want to put the spotlight directly on the creations of this Mrs. Muddle person (my mind flits to W.C. Fields and “Mr. Muckle, honey…”). The vids are made up of a variety of elements: vintage psych and electronic music, new songs from current psych-sounding musical acts, clips from Sixties psychedelic films and sci-fi flicks, as well as “girlie” material (more on that below). Throw in some newsreel and exploitation images (Stecker, H.G. Lewis, the Japanese House), as well as longer clips that keep cinephiles like myself wondering “where the fuck did *that* come from?” and you’ve got this business known as “muddles.”

The videos hew to the original tenets of psychedelia, in that they are either hypnotic or jarring. A mood is adopted, and the visuals meld perfectly with the tune utilized. The copyright holders of the music and visuals have objected on occasion to the muddles and had them removed from YT, but they are short-sighted beyond belief — what is happening here is the music is being *promoted* and the images are being transformed.

In this era where pretty much every young person has an uncanny grasp of the visual language of music videos, thanks to sophisticated editing software that comes with every freaking computer, and celebrities custom-make their music videos to look like webcam karaoke so that their fans can easily recreate them (self-generating memes!), it’s really invigorating to watch someone creating something original using the rules of an era where the “Richard Lester style” was being refined while the undergrounders (like Anger and George Kuchar) were using pop-rock in even more original ways.

I first encountered this intrepid and talented video editor when he (oops, let the cat out of the bag) was doing the wonderful blog “The Lazy World of Arthur Ignatowski.” That blog was awash with eye-catching “girlie” pics from the Sixties, along with these great handcrafted video creations — vintage psych and garage music accompanying stag and “peel” footage.

While the “Lazy World” blog is now gone, Arthur (I’ll stick to that name for a bit) does often dote on the female form in the Muddle vids — however, that is not the sole raison d’etre for ’em anymore (in fact, some of them are — gasp — devoid of cheesecake content entirely). Whether they are “signed” by A. Ignatowski, Butch Tuffington (that was another interim nom du vid), or Mrs. Muddle, the videos are singularly wonderful, leagues beyond the quick-cut crap that gets millions of hits on YT and the other central vid-dump sites.

The music used includes the work of great instrumental composers/performers with a “futuristic” bent — Bruce Haak, Piero Umiliani, William Sheller, Gershon Kinglsey, Raymond Scott, and Mort Garson, Roedelius, Delia Derbyshire — as well as contemporary acts who could easily be labeled “trippy,” drone-y, or just plain strange: Stereolab, Broadcast, Spacemen 3, Spectrum, Boards of Canada, Cate Le Bon, Electrelane, Hope Sandoval and Death in Vegas, Honey Ltd., Girls at our Best!, and two guys name of Bowie and Eno.

At his best, Arthur — actually a Welshman, who was born after the Sixties, but possesses a good eye for, and great taste in, cinema — is a descendant of the holy trinity of Sixties pop-narrative editor-filmmakers (Anger, Lester, and Meyer). A number of the best examples of his recent work are embedded below, but I can’t resist adding in a few others, like:

— a b&w female dance-class scene, clipped to match an instrumental with killer horns
— A study of “health and exercise” from films unknown
— A kaleidoscopic meditation on les femmes
— A horrific freak-out, replete with images from Steckler’s Incredibly Strange Creatures
— A re-dit of Metropolis, set to Link Wray
— Images from a mod Japanese flick seemingly inspired by Seijun Suzuki
— A clip from an unnamed Golden Age musical where some babe recites the lyrics to a tune… and then things get weird…
— Skulls, psych music, trippy patterns, and dancing girls, who needs more?
— A sensory assault edited to a fitting song by the band the United States of America
— From outer space to inner with thermal images, and a great hard-driving instrumental

The alternate-universe Banana Splits — the ones who recorded the Sonics’ garage anthem “Strychnine”:



Bring on the dancing girls! With William Sheller music from the film Erotissimo, which I discussed in my Deceased Artiste trib to Annie Girardot — and had inititally discovered via Arthur I’s “Lazy World” blog.



Image from a 1968 Brazilian sci-fi film Viagem ao Fim do Mundo (1968), with sexy women, Tropicalia, and an overt political message (oh, the Brazilians!)



A key Arthur Ig discovery, the Flemish film Princess that looks as if it might have sprung from the imagination of today’s retro-minded moviemakers (hot babes with machine guns!), but is actually from the sacred annum of 1969:



As with the muddle scored to Delia Derbyshire and the often somewhat upsetting Anthony Newley, here is a psychedelic re-envisionment of AM-radio music, with a cover of “Both Sides Now” by the Collection:



Author Anthony Burgess tells us what’s wrong with today’s youth — but we know what turned him on:



Can a woman really be President? Mrs. Muddle declares an end to the “war on women” with a montage of assertive women — including “Ms. 45” herself, Funhouse interview subject Zoe Tamerlis:



Consider the “end times,” you heathen sinner, with music by Mort Garson:



Psychedelia with ventriloquist dummy and scary insects, as well as an upbeat tune by Snapper:



The muddles are pretty fashionable on the whole, but some are about nothing other than swinging Sixties duds:



A small shard of a muddle, with sound logic and interstellar women:



One of the more hypnotic creations, a vision of “Dead TV,” with a little Mickey Mouse head floating around the cosmos:



There are a number of muddles set to the weird electronic music of the incredibly strange Bruce Haak (the man who made children’s LPs with some of the oddest music *ever* made). Here he brings us to a computerized future (we’re there!), inviting you to “Program Me”:



I don’t think I could ever tire of Ms. Jane Birkin and the nutsy enigma that is Wonderwall. Images from that film crop here, as we reflect on stars onscreen and stars in the skies, as Stereolab informs us about “Celluloid Sunshine”:



A video that is a great example of Arthur’s editing creating a sort of “invisible narrative” involving spiders, Christ, powerful machines, and kids who need to “listen carefully”:



Although he’s done full justice to Bowie’s “Mooonage Daydream,” Arthur has done his trippiest work to tracks by the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Here is a vision of “Panic in Babylon” with toys, creepy masks, and marching bands:



Another seminal music act for the muddles is the band Electelane. Arthur has offered us a sexy, quick-cut mindfuck, a survey of dance stylings, and a truly fucking brilliant slice of psych weirdness:



I’ll close out with vision of cinematic heaven: Romy Schneider, seen in extremely trippy sequences shot for Clouzot’s Inferno (1966):



In the week and a half that it’s taken me to put together this blog post, about seven or eight "muddles" have been taken down and another five have gone up (including the Inferno one above).

Thus, I’ll repeat what I’ve said before about rarities and oddities on the Net: if you like ‘em, save them with savevid.com or keepvid.com, since they could disappear at any point (and you won’t know how to find them again). So the muddle vids (trade ‘em with your friends!), and keep monitoring the work of this talented mindbender.

Departing in droves: Deceased Artistes of early 2012 (part two)

The parade of DAs continues. From a maverick publisher, two character actors, and an exploitation icon in part one to an extremely mainstream composer and a consummately trippy humorist in part two...

Composer-lyricist Robert B. Sherman died last week, thus causing many folks to dote on his best-known score, Mary Poppins, written (as all his works were) with his brother Richard. Poppins certainly got them many accolades, but the two Sherman brothers wrote a number of other unforgettable tunes, since songwriting was definitely in their genes — their dad Al wrote the songs “You Gotta Be a Football Hero” and “No! No! A Thousand Times No!”

It was said in their obits that Walt Disney cried every time he heard their song “Feed the Birds” from Poppins (I'm guessing he never heard “Artificial Flowers”). The brothers were in-house for "Unca Walt" for several years, writing songs for movies from That Darn Cat! and The Gnome-Mobile to The Aristocrats and Bedknobs and Broomsticks.They also wrote songs for Snoopy Come Home (a score that is pretty awful, but cannot be forgotten), the Johnny Whitaker Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which they also scripted), and the cartoon feature Charlotte’s Web.

Some personal faves include this attempt at really catchy-dippy pop sung by the twin Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap. This film, which is wholesome as all get-out, was the subject of many adolescent boy’s fantasies — that’s clearly the subject for someone’s future treatise on the covert sexuality in the Disney live-action pictures (after the tomes on the hidden sex in the cartoons are completed), but I guess this sequence and the catfight scene (in which one “Hayley” tears off part of the other’s skirt) were nowhere as innocent and cute to the young male viewer as they seemed to girls and older audience members:



Boppin’ The Jungle Book, with Louis Prima seen rehearsing (in photos) his big number for the cartoon, and the finished song itself:



Robert Sherman (not to be confused with teen-idol Bobby Sherman!) was a self-professed American Anglophile who lived over in England after the war (during which he won a Purple Heart), and then again in more recent years. Poppins contains a number of songs that depend on Cockney accents (Dick Van Dyke’s oddly spirited but goofy ’alf an accent has been the subject of much ridicule in the UK), but this number from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has Dick participating in a great song-and-dance number with a bouncy melody that is very hard to shake:



Since I must include something from Mary Poppins, I offer up this bizarre find, someone’s upload of the song “Chim-Chim-Cher-ee” in Russian (fuckin’ title makes no sense anyway!). It was noted that the Sherman brothers switched off on the lyrics and melodies, so then Robert did contribute to this Slavic ditty:



To close out, I note that the Sherman brothers wrote the single most memorable, and also most grating, Disney tune, “It’s a Small World (After All)” for the 1964 World’s Fair. One of their much less annoying pop creations was the song “You’re Sixteen” for Johnny Burnette. Here is Ringo Starr’s version, circa a 1978 TV special (the girl he’s romancing is a young Carrie Fisher):


*****

I still hope to pay tribute to another immaculately talented Deceased Artiste, Erland Josephson, in the future, but in the meantime, I’ll note that as I was writing this, I learned that Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre died. I have a weird relationship with the work of the Firesign guys, in that I love the “theater of the mind” quality of their comedy, and yet I was never a diehard fan — those I know who love Firesign speak of them as having changed their life and way of thinking. For me, they were brilliant audio satirists who did some miraculously headphone-friendly humor, but were not compulsive listening material.

That said, their best work comprises some brilliant spoofs of TV programming, commercials, and golden-age radio drama. They were indeed a product of radio — after having studied playwriting and teaching economics at Yale, Bergman became host in 1966 of “Radio Free Oz” on the Pacifica station KPFK in L.A.

It was there he started working with Phil Austin, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor, and the Firesign troupe was born — their moniker taken from the old Fireside Theater TV show and the fact that they were all “fire signs” astrologically (this was the Sixties, after all).

Among his many head-trip credits Bergman is credited with coining the term “love-in” for an event he organized that took place in L.A.’s Elysian Park. He was the Firesign member with the most conventional “radio voice,” and it was used to great effect in the Firesign parodies of mass media. At the time of his death he had was doing a daily podcast — he concluded the last episode, which aired a few days before he died, with this extremely hopeful message.

Onto the clips. Here is a very nice video tribute to Bergman:



My personal favorite of all their bits is an item where they would read fake listings from TV Guide (I used to write real listings for the same mag, and the Firesign spoofs are so spot-on they’re often not that funny, just all too deadpan-accurate). The bit was used on their radio show Dear Friends and was included in two incarnations on the 1972 LP of the same name. You can find them here at 19:27 and 43:39 (find out about the children’s show “Minority Street, where ‘Happy Hamburger recites the Book of the Dead’…”):



The Firesign Theatre was such an audio-centric act for me that I can’t imagine them live in concert, but they have indeed toured in different permuations since their debut in the late Sixties. Here’s a sample of the kind of odd anarchy that comprised their stage act in 1972:



Far more potent for me is this deranged VW commercial the group did for a real L.A. dealership in 1969. The full run of Firesign commercials (that auto dealer was one adventurous dude) are available on Archive.org:



Perhaps the group’s supreme achievement in my view is their ongoing series of spoofs of hardboiled detective stories, “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, America’s Only Detective!” (or alternately, “Nick Danger, Third Eye”). They made one film of Nick Danger, which has its moments. But the single best way to experience the concept, naturally, is in headphones:



Various wacky lines have been posted on the Net based on the very famous (intentionally wordy) Firesign LP titles — "there's one less bozo on the bus," "he can be two places at once because he's not anywhere at all," etc etc. Since that way lies eulogistic madness, I'll just say RIP Peter Bergman.