Couple days ago, the piped-in music in my neighborhood Chinese restaurant included Cyndi Lauper's hit version of the mournful Jules Shear song All Through The Night, which has bounced through my head ever since. I tried finding Shear's original (much superior) take on this song, and while I couldn't find that, I did find a clip of him doing another song that became a hit in somebody else's rendition, If She Knew What She Wants, covered (quite nicely) by The Bangles.
The most interesting thing about this clip, though, was that it came from Shear's brief period as host of the original incarnation of MTV's Unplugged, and featured him introducing Michael Penn. Shear was a former lover of Aimee Mann (he inspired her song J For Jules), and she would later marry...Michael Penn.
Okay, so here's logic gets sidetracked in my explorations on YouTube: Penn wrote the score for P.T. Anderson's Boogie Nights, one of my favorite movies, which got me on a kick trying to find some clips of John Holmes' "Johnny Wadd" pictures, so prominently referenced in that film. To my surprise, an edited version of Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here is posted in its entirety, and even more surprisingly, its basic set-up and even many of the shots are direct steals from Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. How did I not know this?
Fine, but then I decided, no, I'm not going to force anyone to watch Johnny Wadd clips, and Jules Shear's singing is kind of an acquired taste, and my plan to showcase the Richard Thompson song Psycho Street (as kind of a follow-up to my previous entry, as part of what I visualized as a series of ongoing missing-the-point stories tangentially related to the events in Mumbai...and no, I'm not going to bother explaining the connection because that would make this already tortured parenthetical aside even longer than it already is) was foiled by the fact that the only version I could find was frankly substandard. Yet I'm sitting here with an itch to post something, and even though I have a couple movies I'd like to write about, my mind's a little foggy to try to offer any penetrating analysis, so...
So here's a clip of Lynda Carter rasslin' some guy in a monkey suit, is what I'm saying.
