Mike Vraney (1957-2014)

Mike Vraney, collector of weird movies, weird movie memorabilia, and founder of Something Weird video, succumbed to cancer on January 2.  He is survived by wife Lisa Petrucci and two children, Mark and Danielle.  Vraney was 56.

As a teenager, Vraney was exposed to exploitation and sexploitation films when he worked as a theater projectionist in Seattle.  According to Something Weird's press release, he became active in the local punk rock music scene, being instrumental in the founding of the local music venue The Showbox, and going on to manage bands such as the Dead Kennedys, TSOL, and Seattle's own The Accused.  He founded Something Weird in 1990 as an outlet for his burgeoning collection of penny-arcade nudie loops, prints of exploitation and sexploitation films, trailers, short subjects and film ephemera.  First marketing his films on VHS with covers based on original one-sheets and lobby cards, he went on to the DVD medium in 1999 when he entered a production deal with Image Video.

His unique approach to marketing video began with his VHS releases, the two-hour length of which he would typically pad out with two features (which we commonly an hour or less), along with as many trailers, loops, odds and ends, and supplementary material as he could fit.  When he graduated to the DVD format, he could utilize the 220 minutes of a double-layered DVD to fit in even more of his seemingly endless collection of sleazy obscurities and bits and bobs.  His endless quest to seek out and preserve these forgotten and half-remembered slices of history led him to befriend and collaborate with a number of figures from the exploitation film scene, in particular David F. Friedman, who boosted Vraney's collection with films from his own vault and who also appeared on some 25 commentary tracks with Vraney, and who paid him the best compliment when he dubbed Vraney "the forty-first thief" (a reference to the exploiteers' reference to themselves as "The Forty Thieves"), in recognition of his love for these films and his efforts to preserve them.  He also got to know other exploitation and sexploitation filmmakers such as Joe Sarno, Doris Wishman and Herschel Gordon Lewis.

I own something like 25 or 30 DVD titles from Something Weird, and they occupy a place of honor in my home, not only because they are fun to watch and were great value for money, but also because they were put together with the right combination of love, humor, and respect.  When SWV was getting off the ground in the nineties, it was a hey-day of alternative music, art and publishing, of photocopied zines, alternative newsstand magazines, comics and cassette music releases and even radio, and the Something Weird DVD collection carried the DIY spirit from the analog realm into the digital.  Putting on a SWV DVD always manages to carry me back to that era of exploration and discovery.

Something Weird Video, in its announcement of Vraney's death, promises to carry on the mission further, and in addition to DVDs, the company also has an on-demand channel with Comcast and also some of its titles on Netflix.

For my part, I still intend to continue writing this blog, although I am also devoting considerable time to my sister blog, on atheism, on Wordpress.  Again, the best way to keep abreast of my blogging is probably to use a blog aggregator, as I don't finish things quickly, though there are always works in progress.


This clip has opened SWV's video releases from the analog into the digital era and puts the weirdness, wildness, and coolness of the films (and Vraney's approach to them) into a two-minute nutshell.

Something Weird Video on Facebook
Something Weird Video on Wikipedia
Something Weird Video Official Site

Peter Bergman (1939-2012)

At the risk of having this blog turn into an obituary page, I am sad to report that Peter Paul Bergman, co-founder of the Firesign Theater, succumbed to leukemia this morning at the age of 72.

Born in Cleveland, OH, Bergman's talents for political humor and satire came early with school newspaper columns and a single, "Attention Convention," parodying the 1956 Democratic convention and made in a cut-up style similar to that of Buchanan & Goodman's humorous sound collages, that was released under the name The Four Candidates. He also lost a job as announcer over his high school's PA system when he announced that Chinese Communists had taken over and that a "mandatory voluntary assembly" was to take place immediately. He pursued undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale, did six months in the Army, and toured Europe. He worked with Tom Stoppard, Spike Milligan, and the Living Theater, the latter two forming two poles of influence between which the art of the Firesign Theater was to take shape.

In 1966 he did a nightly free-form radio show in Los Angeles, Radio Free Oz, where he began to work with poet and broadcaster David Ossman and actors Philip Proctor and Philip Austin, and under the name The Firesign Theater (so-called because all four were, astrologically speaking, "fire signs") the four recorded their first album, Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him, in 1968. In this and subsequent albums such as How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All and Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, the Firesign Theater explored a form of surreal, stream-of-consciousness audio comedy-drama that incorporated the techniques of old-time radio, a counterculture sensibility, puns and wordplay, full of recondite references and allusions to high culture and low, absurdity and dystopian science-fiction and utilized the resources of the multi-track recording studio.

I first heard the Firesign Theater in college when one of the local radio stations played a few of the albums (I believe I remember hearing excerpts from Don't Crush That Dwarf, I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, and In The Next World You're On Your Own) all in a segued, free-form mix that was hilariously funny and terrifying at the same time. I wasn't high at the time, but I could have been. It was one of those transformative moments, but I didn't know who the artists were until a year or so later.

To many, The Firesigns' humor was "head humor" and a lot of people lumped them in with acts such as Cheech & Chong, but their albums were mostly full-length plays for the medium of the long-playing record. If radio drama was the "theater of the mind," the Firesigns made full-on avant-garde movies for the mind, with a cinematic sensibility exquisitely translated into audio that somehow never got garbled in the presentation and always rewarded repeat listening.

In addition to Firesign, Bergman worked widely in radio and embraced the creative possibilities of high-tech and the internet early. He also worked in film and television, co-writing and appearing in the cult film J-Men Forever, which incorporated a great deal of footage from old movie serials, and Americathon, a dark satirical comedy about a future America attempting to stave off complete bankruptcy by holding a telethon. In recent years he worked as a speaker and lecturer and revived his old Radio Free Oz as a podcast. A dyed-in-the-wool progressive, his opinions were as fiery as his sign and his wit caustic.

Michael S. Hart (1947-2011)

Michael S. Hart, inventor of the electronic text or "etext" and founder of Project Gutenberg, passed away at his home in Urbana, Illinois on September 8 at the age of 64.

As a freshman at the University of Illinois, Hart entered the text of the US Declaration of Independence into the university's mainframe on the night of July 4, 1971, almost literally at a keystroke creating the first electronic text and inaugurating what was to become Project Gutenberg, the mission of which is to make electronic versions of as many literary works as possible available to anyone at no cost. He followed the Declaration of Independence a year later with the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights. A year later, a volunteer entered the entire text of the US Constitution.

For the first two decades of Project Gutenberg, Hart and a handful of volunteers worked at entering by hand works such as the King James Bible -- released as an ebook in 1989 -- and the collected works of William Shakespeare -- released in 1994. The development of hypertext and the World Wide Web in 1990, and the availability of the first public web browser, Mosaic, in 1993, facilitated the distribution of ebooks and the recruitment of volunteers, and from 1991 to 1996, the production of new ebooks doubled every year. Distributed digitization and proofreading led to further growth, and in August 1997, Project Gutenberg released its one-thousandth ebook, the original Italian text of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Other milestones in PG's growth included:

• #2000: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote (original Spanish text), May 1999
• #3000: Marcel Proust, Á L'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (original French text), December 2000
• #5000: Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, April 2002
• #10000: The Magna Carta, October 2003
• #20000: Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, December 2006
• #30000: Chester Albert Reed, The Bird Book, October 2009.

By June 2011, the collection listed over 36,000 titles in sixty languages, available in formats capable of being read using computers, PDAs, smartphones and ebook readers, and all freely downloadable and redistributable. Affiliated projects exist in Europe, Australia and Canada, and tens of thousands of titles are downloaded every day from the main sites and from 40 mirror sites worldwide.

I don't know who coined the phrase "information wants to be free," but Michael Hart embodied the spirit of that slogan. For four decades, he worked to make the collected cultural legacy of humankind available to all. Our thoughts are with Hart's family and friends. Project Gutenberg continues, a living monument to one of the digital age's most important yet uncelebrated visionaries.

Please consider giving money or time to keep the project going. Donations are tax-deductible in the US and can be made via PayPal.

Tura Satana RIP

Tura Satana's longtime manager Siouxzan Perry announced that the actress, who played Varla in the Russ Meyer film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! passed away on Feb. 4. Perry gave Ms. Satana's age as 72, though other sources say she was 76.

Ms. Satana's other credits included Irma La Douce (1963), The Astro Zombies (1968), and The Doll Squad (1973), as well as appearances in episodes of television series such as Burke's Law and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.

She is survived by two daughters and two sisters. Our condolences and best wishes to them.

Bettie Page (1923-2008)

Some sad news today. Betty Mae Page passed away last night in Los Angeles at the age of 85.

She will be missed.

Via Metafilter.
Some classic Page images at Flickr.