MEDIA PART I: FEDER IS BACK ON THE BEAT




My mentor and friend Robert Feder is back on the media beat - this time at TimeOut Chicago.

Read his column here (and don't forget to check out his list of Fellow Travelers and Tweet-list on the right; you may see a familiar name or two).

You can read my media column about his media column here.









MEDIA PART II: ROGER EBERT AND THE SEX PISTOLS



My column leads with a piece about a 1977 copy of Triad magazine I dug up while hunting for records with my pal Jim Sclavunos, who plays drums in Grinderman and percussion in Nick Cave's Bad Seeds.

The mag features a long interview with Chicago move critic Roger Ebert about the script he wrote for a Sex Pistols movie that was to be directed by Russ Meyer.

It turns out that Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten were fans of 1970's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which was penned by Ebert and directed by Meyer, and wanted the same team to work on their film.

Marianne Faithfull was cast as Sid's mother, and one scene was actually shot -- where Bambi was killed.

And then it all fell apart.

“There is more than one account of what went wrong,” Ebert wrote on his blog last year.

You can read his screenplay here.

Read my column about it (and see some more quotes from Ebert) here.

Read Feder's colunn about Ebert's latest TV venture here.

And hear amazing vintage Triad radio broadcasts (complete with head shop ads) here.

And a rare Triad radio interview with Kraftwerk here.