JTTV - Season 2, Episode 11 - Molene Jackson Plans New Year's Spectacular at Caeser's in Las Vegas

After her triumph last year playing Radio City Music Hall, my dear friend show biz legend Molene Jackson plans to play Caeser's in Vegas this year. Tickets are fetching $5,000 and up.

Although long a dedicated feminist, Mo caught a lot of flak for the lyrics in this featured tune. However, as our close friend Angela Davis said in coming to her defense, even the best lyrics of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday contain similar sentiments and embody women's struggle with white male oppression. On top of that, how can you knock a gal that can pick up a zither and make it sound just like a banjo!

Trixie Friganza - Restored at Long Last!

Yes, yes, I know I just made my comment about curbing my YouTube postings, but I still have a couple more to go before topping this month's quota, and this one is just to glorious to wait on.

While weaving through incredible third disc of The Jazz Singer, I just about fell off my chair, when to my delight, I saw the charming face and full figure of Trixie Friganza. Trixie Friganza! I first discovered her a few years back in an American Masters episode on Vaudeville. Trixie appeared in the 1937 A Star Is Born, some Chaplin films and others. She was also a suffragette at the turn of the century.

This is a brief clip from a six minute clip in The Jazz Singer reissue, one of nearly three and a half hours of Vitaphone Varieties, a series of weird and wonderful shorts from the late 1920s and early 1930s. In a jazz age rap, Trixie gives tips on how married gals who like a nip at the speakeasy when the husband isn’t watching can cover her tracks.

Each minute is superb, but this half minute clip is arguably the pinnacle in which she chronicles the fate of Lulu who ventures off to the Aloha state. Though comic, what's amazing about Trixie, is that she's a pretty strident feminist even by today's terms. This 33-second interlude comes out of nowhere in the middle of a technically comic tune in which she tells the fate of her two husbands. They're both losers, but when one decides to hit her, she does him in.

Enjoy!

Trixie the suffragette.

JTTV - Season 2, Episode 3 - Mothra Dissected

Blog superstar Bryce Digdug makes his JunkThief TV debut by giving us insights into the classic Japanese monster movie, "Mothra". Vivian Valvoom lends her talents for our new opening credits.

UPDATE: A few people have asked about the aspect ratio on this episode. Yes, it was shot in Cinerama. Yes, we are planning to show it on a big screen. Details are being ironed out, but if all goes right Bryce and I hope to be in Hollywood for the big gala screening during Thanksgiving weekend. We'll be wearing acrylic sweaters just to be on the safe side.

Libra Like Me

One of the reasons for less output here, at YouTube and MySpace has been an ongoing obsession to write out something about my aunt whose suicide in December. I have 35-45 pages, none of it completely weaving together, but at the same time I am glad I am capturing it. Were I ever to do something with it, it would definitely need to be fictionalized, but then she always lived life as a great fiction.

And, no, that's not her on the right, but it's all the more important to have her represented by this icon who was one of several women she aspired to be. For shy of three years she attained it during her third marriage when she played the role of (almost) Park Avenue Swan just down the street on Lexington Avenue, looking down in disdain from her living room window 24 floors below, disappointed that so few could see the perfect mannequin in the perfect dressing so far above them. And if you can't name the icon, than I guess you wouldn't understand either of the two women in question.

One of the eerie things was that we shared the same birthday -- September 26 -- separated by 19 years but both born at precisely 11:48 p.m. Like little Edie Beal she obsessed over her horoscope and would read it aloud to me. Unlike Little Edie, she married the prince, more than once, but lost her passion for the dance early on.

Molene - The Legend Returns

Have I happened to mention the huge concert on New Year's that my dear friend Molene Jackson is putting on? Her first in, well...a while.

Tickets sold out 90 seconds after of going on sale, and one poor matron from Rye, New York, was trampled to death in all the hub bub surrounding the release of the tickets. I've heard that some tickets have shown up on eBay for $10,000 but I question how long they will last.

I've known Mo since 1980 when she was working in a catheter factory. She now works in a dairy products factory but is still an eternal legend all the same. I just feel honored to have been able to have helped with this little video promoting the concert.