Das Tagebuch Murnaus

Nash the Slash, a.k.a. Jeff Plewman, dead at 66
Bandaged musician a mainstay in Toronto music clubs during '70s and '80s
CBC News Posted: May 12, 2014 3:59 PM ET| Last Updated: May 12, 2014 5:07 PM ET

Jeff Plewman, the musician behind the experimental rock persona Nash the Slash and the band FM, has died at age 66.

Nash the Slash was a mainstay in Toronto live music clubs throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He was known internationally after a world tour with Gary Numan and Iggy Pop and had opened up for the Who. Before performing as Nash the Slash, Plewman played in the prog-rock band FM in the 1970s.

Two of his longtime friends and colleagues confirmed Plewman's passing to CBC, though details are sparse.

Nash the Slash appeared on stage in a black tuxedo, top hat, dark sunglasses and wrapped in bandages. It would become his signature look. His bandaged appearance from 1979 onward prompted many questions about his mysterious identity.

He started the independent record label Cut-Throat Records, which he used to release his own music. Among his albums was Decomposing, which he claimed could be listened to at any speed, and Bedside Companion, which he said was the first record out of Toronto to use a drum machine.

His biggest hit was "Dead Man's Curve", a cover of a Jan and Dean song.

More recently, he played at Toronto's Pride Festival and toured up until 2012. In 1997 Cut-Throat released a CD compilation of Nash the Slash’s first two recordings entitled Blind Windows. In 1999 he released Thrash. In April 2001, Nash released his score to the silent film classic Nosferatu.

Plewman retired in 2012, bemoaning file-sharing online and encouraging artists to be more independent. "It's time to roll up the bandages," he wrote.

He will be remembered for his experimental ethos as well as his unusual stage presence.

"I refused to be slick and artificial," Plewman wrote of his own career.

There has not been word on how the musician died.

*******

I loved this guy's music and his weird persona.
I was a fan from the time that I started to get into music, over 30 years ago.
I would play one Nash cut every time I would DJ Circuit Breaker (which, by the way, is still going on after almost 3 1/2 years - sorry I have not been posting setlists here, it's all at http://circuitbreakerclub.org) and last night I played "Citizen" from his album And You Thought You Were Normal.

I thought this was cute:



And this was Just Odd, but I think I read aobut this kink in a Savage Love column once. But why would the reporter conclude by saying that the women reported no injuries? Maybe in case one of them stubbed her toe on its way to the guy's lungs, the hard way?

Man allegedly approaching women in Guelph, Ont., asking to be kicked in groin

Published: Monday, May 28, 2007 | 12:23 PM ET
Canadian Press

GUELPH, Ont. (CP) - Police in Guelph, Ont., are looking for a man who allegedly approached women and asked them to kick him in the groin.

Three women reported similar incidents to police and two of the women reported the suspect was on a bicycle. The various incidents allegedly occurred over the last two months. The suspect is described as white, in his early twenties, with a brown goatee and a large gap between his front teeth.

None of the women reported injuries.
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MEZOMORF NEWS OF THE WORLD

Op-Ed Contributor: Kissing Cousins
Author: CLIVE D. L. WYNNE

Gainesville, Fla.

WHAT is it about watching young women being ravished by oversized middle-aged gorillas that presses so many buttons - and fuels so many King Kong movies, including the latest version opening on Wednesday?

Cynthia Erb in "Tracking King Kong" suggests a few of the factors behind the success of the first King Kong movie in 1933: racist fear of miscegenation, Depression-era desire for the exotic and sexist lust to see a woman taken against her will.

But 70 years of academic study have overlooked one crucial bit of history: a human and ape sexual drama widely reported in North American newspapers in the mid-1920's that, though now forgotten, must surely have informed the first Kong movie's creators.

In the mid-1920's, the culture wars were dominated - as they are today with "intelligent design" - by the debate between creationism and evolutionary thinking. In 1925, John T. Scopes had been found guilty of teaching that mankind arose from something other than divine creation. But the United States was not the only country passionate about the issue. The young Soviet Union, in its effort to stamp out religion, was determined to prove that men were descended from apes. In 1926, a Soviet scientist named Ilya Ivanov decided the most compelling way to do this would be to breed a humanzee: a human-chimpanzee hybrid.

Ivanov set off for a French research station in West Africa. There he inseminated three female chimpanzees with human sperm. Not his own, for he shared the colonial-era belief that the local people were more closely related to apes than he was. He stayed long enough to learn that his experiment had failed.

Next Ivanov wrote a Cuban heiress, Rosalia Abreu. Abreu was the first person to breed chimps in captivity and had a large menagerie outside Havana. Ivanov asked if any of her male chimpanzees might be available to inseminate a Russian volunteer known to posterity only as 'G."

At first Abreu was agreeable. But Ivanov made the mistake of approaching Charles Smith of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism for fund-raising support. Smith was something of a showman - he liked to appear in public with a chimpanzee dressed in a business suit - and went to the newspapers with Ivanov's proposal. The New York Times thundered, "Soviet Backs Plan to Test Evolution."

The resulting publicity brought the case to the attention of the Ku Klux Klan, which threatened Abreu with retaliation if she took part in Ivanov's experiment, calling it "abominable to the creator." Abreu withdrew her consent.

Before Ivanov could find another chimpanzee breeder, he fell out of favor in one of Stalin's purges and was exiled to Kazakhstan in 1931. He died a year later, in March 1932, waiting for a train home to Moscow.

Twelve months later the first King Kong movie opened in New York. Though The New Yorker regretted "the need felt for a plot and love interest," other moviegoers clearly did not agree and the film grossed $89,931 in its first weekend (tickets were only 15 cents). This success, in the darkest days of the Great Depression, saved the film's makers, RKO, from bankruptcy.

We now know that, though we share much of our genetic code, chimp-human hybrids are probably impossible because the genetic material is arranged quite differently on our chromosomes. But I doubt that will stifle interest in this kind of interspecies romance.

Because, in the end, it isn't the science, history or philosophy that keeps drawing us back to King Kong, but an age-old story. As the showman Carl Denham says at the end of the original "King Kong," with the beast dead at his feet on a New York City street: "Oh, no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast."

Clive D. L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida and the author of "Do Animals Think?," is working on a book about apes and people.

http://www.mezomorf.com/editorials/news-16075.html

Well, I have to admit I posted yesterday in a fit of pique. Been rather stressed lately. And why the hell am I apologizing to a cathode-ray tube?

As I tried to explain in a reply to a comment made, that even though "Dr. Seuss" wartime cartoons were a product of their own time and place, and yes, did reflect prevailing culture and mood, what annoyed me was the hypocrisy in sweeping this chapter of his career aside and 'sanitizing' him for general post-war consumption.

I love and respect history, but not the cleaned-up versions of it.

So, that being said, here is something I wrote in pastiche/tribute when I hear about his death in 1991, on a slow day in the offices of the Kudamatsu City Municipal Board of Education:

An ABC of Substance Abuse

( Read more... )

I guess you are all wondering how I spent New Year's Eve, albeit quietly. I spent it quietly too, watching with Aki a long video compilation of Christmas-themed cartoons my sister made for me. It could have been boring, especially since the gin ran out, but for three examples of the most astoundingly brain-damaged piece of holiday film footage I've ever seen:

Santa Claus and his Helpers: http://www.kgordonmurray.com/f07.html
Santa's Magic Kingdom: http://www.kgordonmurray.com/f13.html
Santa's Enchanted Village: http://www.kgordonmurray.com/f14.html

You must read this background, and one day, when I get enough curare and ibogaine together to hold you all still for it, you shall watch these features with me.



Thank you, K. Gordon Murray. You saved Christmas for me!