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FOOD is a short film directed by aritst/photographer Robert Frank about Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden's conceptual restaurant. Founded in 1972 in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, FOOD brought together many factors of the local community, artists and otherwise, becoming a space for dialogue and conversation as well as a living piece in it of itself.
When I was 22, I was lured to Provincetown (once a thriving hotbed of underground artists and cultural revolutionaries, now home to condominiums and dogs in strollers) by the promise of relatively easy money and the opportunity to meet my favorite living director, John Waters, who spends his summers there. When the film festival brought Jane Lynch and Gael Garcia Bernal to town, I kept my eye on the prize: a man whose own twenties were spent living in a treehouse and having sex in the town cemetery, activities that seemed to have been replaced by the current crop of twenty-somethings with shopping at Marc Jacobs and fucking in the gym.
While the money never came that summer, a chance to speak with The Pope of Trash did. One balmy evening, he and his boyfriend were sitting on a bench in Town Square while I walked by on my way to
With some friends working on a Peter Cook / Dudley Moore project recently, my mind wandered back to thinking about the many hilarious and truly outrageous things that they had filmed and recorded over the years. Someday I'll do a long article about them but for today I just want to talk about one of my favorite comedy albums as a teenager - Derek and Clive / Ad Nauseum. My record-buying budget was slender in those days (1979), and I recall vividly how upon seeing the new copy of Ad Nauseum in the store, with its cleverly designed cover and special screen-printed clear bag I had to have it. But as usual with my "going up to the city to buy new records" trips, this meant that some cheaper lps would be sacrificed altogether in order to get the higher-priced import vinyl (Ad Nauseum was on Virgin Records, right when they went from the sweet little painting of a virgin on the label to the more punk 'side one RED and side two GREEN' format).
Here's a (NSFW) sample of one of the few fully pre-scripted scenes from this record: Horse Racing
The ghastly Spectres which were doomed at last To tell as true a tale of dangers past, As ever the dark annals of the deep Disclosed for man to dread or woman weep.
In 1960, while on a scouting journey for locations for Mutiny On The Bounty, Marlon Brando visits the atoll Tetiaroa and falls in love with the former home of Tahitian royalty. Two years later, Brando marries his second Mutiny co-star, Tarita Teriipia, who played his Polynesian wife in the film and purchases Tetiaroa for $200,000 with the intention of making it his home. Little did Brando know what his island paradise would bring he and his visitors, for in acting, one not only brings himself to a role, but the role can transform the actor's real personality, permenantly -- a most dangerous game for friends and family of the 'Godfather' and 'Colonel Kurtz'.
Perhaps you had one in your family. It was a decade of rambling, disconnected souls seeking a way out of a button-down life. Scruffy, a bit worn-down at the heels, rather old to be "dropping out". Hippy hoboes. Nature boys and girls. Old beatniks. In the case of the character in question today "J. P. Rags", a bit childlike, a folkie nature boy slinging a guitar, sitting on the railroad tracks to dump gravel out of a worn but stylish boot. You know that there's more to him than that. He has several stories and lives that he has perhaps walked away from. And Mr. Rags has songs about what he has learned, written in an innocent, caressing tone, hard to listen to uncynically today, but seemingly heartfelt and well-meant at the time.
Here's a song from his one and only album; and then come back and see what we've been able to find out about the elusive Rags.
Life with a three-year-old can find you focusing on on forms and representations of transportation you wouldn't otherwise. Trains, for example, hold a particular resonance with the developing mind that challenge their relative rarity compared to cars and airplanes. We've found ourselves meeting constant demands for all things trains by discovering the online world of obsessive documentarians of all things locomotive. Watching this narration-and-music-free modern footage of old-fashioned steam engines has caused us to consider the sensual impact the advent of train travel would have on the rural blues men who would incorporate the sound of trains into their music and use the eeire whistle of the coming train as a metaphor for all great changes in life, love and death.
For prior DJ favorites lists, click here. This time around, we've got posts from Paul Haney, William Berger, Jesse Jarnow and Chris T... First up are Paul Haney's favorites...
As with all musical fanatics, I listen to a breadth of music that spans numerous decades, and since in recent years I've been especially moved by albums that were released well before my birth, or even albums I may have missed from a few years prior, I've tended to lose a certain perception of time, which can make for difficulty when compiling such year-end lists. And as all these disclaimers tend to go, I apologize in advance for the absence of any albums from 2011 that I have yet to hear that I'm sure I would've made this list (i.e. Graham Lambkin's Amateur Doubles, the Eleven Twenty-Nine album on Northern Spy, etc.). Anyway, as it goes this list has no particular running order, nor is it even a definitive ranking of the albums bestowed upon us this past year that truly moved me. Simply, these are records that made a great impression on me and stood out with an unsullied immediacy. Onward we go...
In February of 1990, I xeroxed 2 pages of the New Yorker magazine, to hold onto what I considered one of the funniest pieces of writing ever. It was titled Coyote V. Acme and was penned by regular New Yorker writer and NJ resident, Ian Frazier. In a nutshell, and I'll post part of it after the jump, Wile E. Coyote, plaintiff sues the Acme Company for product liability and the injuries he sustained over his career at Warner Brothers Entertainment. It's written in legalese and describes so well some of the cartoons and shenanigans involved, that you'll be able to be there with Mr. Coyote when he endures a violent feet-first collision with a boulder. Frazier published a book bearing the same name in 1996; a collection of his short humorous pieces, and has other books to his name, some humor collections like Coyote V. Acme, others full length adventures. I was reminded of the original piece the other day and wanted to share some of it, since it's been sitting xeroxed in my file cabinet in the FUN folder for decades. Ian's books are available through several online retailers. This time of year can be one of reflection and I'd like to look at the attempts of Mr. Coyote to capture his prey over the years, and the purity of his actions. Wile E. Coyote; Genius, and at some point in the Roadrunner cartoons, upgraded to Super Genius, was dedicated and single minded. He'd have made a great employee at the time of his upswing into the public eye. He was inventive beyond belief, and even when the same item would malfunction three radically different ways, he would remain a loyal customer of the Acme Company. Brick and mortars would die for a shopper like him! He is a reminder to all of us that perseverance and hard work pays off, or at least keeps you gainfully employed, and that there's a super genius lying in wait inside all of us. Perhaps it just takes an anvil to the head! There was a response to the article published in 1995, I'm not certain of the source, which more or less takes the stand that since our beloved Mr. Coyote quite often looked directly at the camera before sustaining injuries that the Acme Company's products caused, that he was faking the extent of his physical damage. Imagine that!
December 23, 1979, Germs play the Masque Christmas Ball at Whisky-Au-Go-Go, performing what would be dubbed on-stage "art" by singer Darby Crash, self-proclaimed "Manimal" and possessor of "television and supervision," who read "every Bible story," and was educated in mind-control by public school Scientologists, an A+ hustler whose world-famous catchphrase was "buy me a beer" and whose demands for "beer and damage" do not go unheeded this night. Watch as Darby, spolight directly in his eyes, eats a lit book of matches, transforms into a panther, demands each audience member "hit the person next to you," sets fire to his (A+) lyrics (balls-on-fire-great teenage Blake) all before guitarist Pat Smear kicks a bouncer in the head (several times+) for crossing number one invisible line in rock n roll: the artists own the stage.
I've been fascinated by Kenneth Anger's work since I first read Ed Sander's sensationalistic bullshit The Family as a teenager (it took me a few years to actually see one of his movies tho. Thanks Ralf Haussmann for being Cleveland's greatest collector and exposer of all thing weird.) A couple of years ago I was contacted by Anger's manager and bandmate Brian Butler to see if I could track down a theremin for them to use during a performance to benefit the Anthology Film Archives. I did, it was a success.
The Anthology Film Archive benefit was really cool, I drank expensive cocktails all night on my friend Jen's employer's tab. Lou Reed did a noise guitar soundtrack to Maya Deren's Meditation on Violence. Seriously, fuck the Lulu haters. Pop bands played, people lectured, etc, but the highlight for me was Technicolor Skull, Kenneth Anger on theremin and Mr. Butler on guitar. They have just put out a record, a one sided monster in blood red vinyl. I asked Brian about it:
Nashville Tennessee has earned a star on the map for many things: state capital, “Music City,” “Athens of the South,” and for Robert Altman fans, the site of the 1975 classic Nashville. Befitting a place known for twangy tunes and an imitation Parthenon, Altman’s two and half hour long tragi-comic epic follows 24 protagonists’ lives as they’re interlaced in the Nashville music industry and political scene. The stories are snapshots over a 5-day weekend ending in political rally for an outside (and unseen) presidential candidate running on the Replacement Party ticket. At the same time, most characters are all reaching for some level of fame or success in what’s portrayed as a microcosm of the United States, and one that is personally shallow, politically empty, and commercially tapped-out.
Though many fans and critics believe Nashville to be one of Altman’s greatest films, actual Nashvillians and country music die-hards looking for an extended tribute were more than a little disappointed. Both camps took the film pretty hard, seeing Altman’s signature cynicism as unduly harsh and patronizing. The
Caught this Tim Buckley performance from the non-stop-excellent media feed of master drummer Hamish Robert Kilgour, whose brother once asked the immortal question, "Is it wrong or is right to be a beatnik?" Pulled from the final episode of The Monkees, in which the Pre Fab Four tussle with a sentient potted plant from outer space, Buckley's immaculate "Song To The Siren" is as out of place as can be. Out of place even further in its inclusion on Buckley's farthest-out studio album Starsailor, where it lies hidden behind a wall of free jazz shreik and moan, the free-floating 12-string strum, like lapping waves in the sunset, further rippled out in electric reverb.
The spare beauty and narrative economy of the film work of Charles & Ray Eames should really come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the couple's design work. Their fabric patterns, chairs, buildings...everything they did was approached with an eye for combining simplicity, functionality, and beauty.
Applying those principles to films is a much trickier prospect than one might realize. Just take a look at any Hollywood creation from the last 15 years and you'll see what I'm talking about. In comparison, the Eames films are almost meditative to watch. They unfold slowly and patiently, getting the subject matter across using simple narrations and augmenting it all with a bouncy jazz score. It is impressively easy to drink in and absorb everything they are trying to accomplish and, yes, communicate.
Because for as much as scholars like to point to their 1968 documentary Powers of Ten as being their
We are all the same, but in different words, In different bodies, and different versions.
These words above (especially the dub-science word, version and the ultimate word, words) called out to me from the media feed of fellow sub sub Jason D. Bigelow, subtitling what seemed to be a still from one of the only 70s/80s Occult Horror Films Starring Moon Eyed Brunette I hadn't seen yet. The web search for the phrase brought only one return, an ancient message board movie-quote stump game for which this phrase proved successful in obscuring its source, the Andrzej Zulawski film, Possession 1981.
A bit of quicksilver dislodged by last week's run-through with the Panavision camera reminded me to finally get down and find the title of The-Weird-Cartoon-Special-Seen-Once-In-Early-Childhood, which a simple search for keywords “Faustian, Animated” would have produced fairly instantly, had only the hazy memory of a jazz singer signing her name in blood flickered more frequently. The flick in question, The Devil & Daniel Mouse, a 1978 television special made by Nelvana, the same animation studio that produced that other piece of the media memory puzzle, The-Weird-Cartoon-Movie-Taped-Off-Cable-And-Watched-Over-Again-Over-Again, in this case the 1983 sci-fi furry musical Rock and Rule. Rewrites of each other, both feature shapeshifting monster dandies in the mold of Rocky Horror / Phantom Of The Paradise, tempting and attempting to control the talents of “sexy” humanoid rodents who triumph in the end through vocal harmony, all written in the language of decadent post-Ziggy David Bowie dystopia (Year Of The Diamond Dog, 1974).
I still haven't had the time to fully immerse myself in this one yet, but here's the beautifully pastoral film made in 1973 depicting Japanese drone-geniuses Taj Mahal Travellers on tour. A soothing collection of wandering excursions and performance images set to the collective's stark and mysterious improvisations. As good an entry point into their world as your likely to find.
It's sing-along / recite-along time again here in the mountains as I offer up a few more tracks of that delightful lp, so worthy of re-release, Songs and Stories of the Gold Rush (1960), with our hero, Oliver Burgess Meredith. This record takes itself just seriously enough, and goes to some trouble to create the appropriate atmosphere for the fun songs and delirious poetry. Join us for some vintage Burgess after the jump!
Witchbeam tipped me to this typically idiosyncratic yet excellent 1991 BBC Arena profile of that grand sorcerer of cinema, underground or otherwise, Kenneth Anger. Balefully glaring from window of a chauffeured hearse as it tours the stations of the cross of Hollywood Babylon, Anger raps nostalgic on the scandals of the Golden Age of the Silver Screen, his own films, and life in Hollywood as “the chronicler of their foibles, follies and excesses.”
Heavy Metal Week on Network Awesome November 7th - 11th
Network Awesome is happy to present a week-long celebration of all things Heavy Metal! You'll see the full info below -- and please do take a quick looks as it's filled with a wide-diversity of interesting, fun and rockin' shows!
Featuring documentaries on Iron Maiden, Slayer, Norwegian Black Metal and Ronnie James Dio to name just a few! We’ll also be digging deeper with shows on Christian Black Metal, Japanese Metal in the 80s, pre-teen metal and much, much more! Each day holds surprises and favorites so stock up on hairspray, metal studs and put up your black-light posters: Network Awesome will rock you!
