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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!
Jean-Jacques Perrey is a legend. Born in 1929 (yeah, that's right he's 82 now, how rad is that?!) he invented "a new process for generating rhythms with sequences and loops" by utilising the techniques of musique concrète. Armed with scissors, splicing tape, and a tape recorder, he spent weeks piecing together a unique take on the future. Befriending Robert Moog, he became one of the first Moog synthesiser musicians creating "far out electronic entertainment". In 1965 he met Gershon Kingsley, a former colleague of John Cage, and together they created two albums for Vanguard — The In Sound From Way Out (1966) and Kaleidoscopic Vibrations (1967).
We're overjoyed to present this special Live Music Show curated by Jean-Jacques Perrey, an artist we deeply respect. A giant of a man, he was gracious enough to tell us a bit more about his favorite live music videos:
Edith Piaf - L'Hymne à l'amour "Edith was a dear friend of mine. It is thanks to her that I made it to the United States in 1960 where I had planned to stay six months but ended up staying 10 years. It is in the fully equipped studio that Carroll
If there’s a better satirical film on the art world than A Bucket of Blood (1959) then I certainly haven’t seen it (note: John Waters’ Peckercomes close). This playful jab at the beatnik artist types of the 1950s easily translates into the ridiculousness of contemporary art. Reportedly made by “King of the B-movies” Roger Corman for a mere $50k, A Bucket of Blood is a thoughtful and provoking look at the beginning of modern art as cultural phenomenon. It has a lot in common with the 1953 version of House of Wax (André De Toth) in its representation of the frustrated and revengeful artist, however, it moves beyond the artist as “individual” to cleverly mimic -- and mock -- the capriciousness of the art world as a whole.
History, even punk history, is written by the winners. In the late 70’s, just before the straight edge aggro of hardcore swept the board, there bloomed in L.A a punk scene that was as musically adventurous as its suburban SoCal counterpart was orthodox. The light that burns the brightest often burns only briefly and for three or four years L.A was in flames. Among those fueling the fire were Tomata du Plenty and The Screamers.
Shot in colour on 16mm with the sound post-synchronized, Hans Richter’s extraordinary portmanteau film, Dreams That Money Can Buy is a real curate’s egg. Completed in 1947 for a budget of $25000 ($15000 of which had come from Peggy Guggenheim), the feature length film took three years to complete.
Conceived as a showcase for the work of Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Man Ray and Richard Huelsenbeck, the film was described by Richter as “7 dreams shaped by 7 contemporary artists”. The soundtrack features original compositions by John Cage, Paul Bowles and Darius Milhaud tied together by weirdly brilliant syrupy jazz interludes by Louis Applebaum, who later complained that his involvement with the project as musical director had almost bankrupted himi.
Although technically relatively sophisticated, today the tone of the film comes across as a queasy mixture of Cocteau and Monty Python, its satirical rhyming narration seems heavy handed and condescending at times. Despite this, there are moments of hallucinatory beauty and startling invention. It comes as no surprise that David Lynch should cite Dreams That Money Can Buy amongst his favorite movies ii.
Richter’s involvement with film dated back to 1921, when along with the Swedish painter Viking Eggeling, he had begun to experiment with the medium, producing Rythmus ‘21, one of the very first completely
The day after always comes with a loose, altered idea of fullness and emptiness. The salty furred taste of the day after the party: your ears are still throbbing with a crowd of sounds that don’t belong to your quiet bedroom, but are, somehow, still there, and you’re not sure you really want them to go away. It seems pretty undeniable that every subculture came with its own favourite drug, and that we cannot give a complete account of the history of contemporary music without devoting at least a few words to the world of chemicals and narcotic consumption. This might be true for the times of bebop improvisations and heroin-addicted Charlie Parker, later on for the lysergic hippie psychedelia, and the spiritually dense rhythmic skank of raggae, but even more for everything we put under the definition of rave culture and the evolution and devolution of dance music from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s through acid house, trance, gabber, techno, hardcore, breakbeat, braindance... All this wouldn’t have been the same without MDMA. Not even remotely the same. But I’m not going to talk about the music: to describe music, looking for metaphors to convey its feelings and moulding appropriate synaesthesia for its beats and loops makes me feel terribly ashamed. Moreover, even though our focus here is the so called “godfather of ecstasy”, Alexander (Sasha
Warhol’s Screen Tests show the artist’s gaze at its blankest. Auditioning factory stars and starlets in front of a locked frame in addition to whoever might drop by his notorious studio, these harshly lit studies function as portraits of the sitters. In the artist’s strategically vague or absent instruction of “no action”i, the subjects squirm or pout, fidget or stare blankly.
Shot between 1964 and 1966, the Screen Testsii captured Allen Ginsberg, Nico, Lou Reed, Salvador Dali, Dennis Hopper and Bob Dylan, to mention but a few of the countercultural celebrities, ingénues and slumming euro trash who found themselves trapped before the relentless eye of Andy’s camera. These 472 silent portraits, projected in slow motion iii, their four minute duration dictated by the length of a single reel of 16 mm film, capture the Factory at 231 East 47th street at its height.
Following his first solo pop show in New York at the Stable Gallery in 1962iv, the art world had sat up and
In a backwards-looking pop cultural landscape, permeated by nostalgia and meta-quotation, it is worth noting that no one seems to be trying to make it big aping Adam and the Ants. With post-punk, and indeed the wider sphere of 1980s pop, serving as popular reference points, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Talking Heads and many others have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity and influence, but you’d be hard pressed to find any hip teenager sporting the New Romantic look, except perhaps as a winking Halloween costume. That motley amalgam of Day-Glo glam, punk outrageousness and, um pirates, now seems gaudy and pretentious, which, incidentally is much the same words that New York Times critic Robert Palmer used to describe the band’s brand of “tribal pop” in 1981.
But if their fashion sense resolutely refused to become timeless, and ultimately eclipsed anything else about the group in the popular imagination, the actual music, conversely, stands up admirably even after all these years. Any band that draws on post-punk or new wave owes a debt to Adam and the Ants, even if they only choose to name-check their more canonized contemporaries. Formed in 1977, the original incarnation of the band was rooted firmly in post-punk, albeit a particularly accessible strain of that famously gloomy genre. Their debut album, Dirk Wears White Sox, released in 1979, is full of the punchy
Adam Curtis’ 2003 Documentary The Century of the Self gets right to the business of reminding us what a mass of consumeristic sheep we have been molded into.
He provides us with the story of Edward Bernays(1), the nephew of Freud who adapted his uncle’s theories concerning animalistic drives and deeply-sunken baser motives for the purposes of propaganda and, far more pervasively, advertising and politics. We are relentlessly reminded of our tendency toward self-interest, vile competitiveness, shallowness, and weak-minded caprice.
This is not unfamiliar territory in that we’ve been reminded of our tendencies towards conformity, self-gratification, and egoistic drives well before Freudianism put the whammy on our way of thinking about ourselves. What makes this a very valuable document is that the level of conversation is a bit more
While Mario Bava is known for dabbling in all kinds of genres, he was and is the pioneer of giallo. Giallo, a subgenre of Italian horror cinema in the 1960s, earned its name from cheap, pulp paperbacks published in Italy in the 1930s and 40s. Giallo means “yellow,” the bright and striking color publishing giant Mondadori chose to coat their crime novel covers in -- a practice that other publishing companies would soon imitate, making the terms "yellow" and "mystery" a synecdoche of sorts. As a name, giallo is perfect. The movies that characterize it were, like the trademark yellow paperbacks, low budget and, on the whole, commercially unsuccessful. Yet there are other associations. Despite it’s sunny exterior, the color yellow takes on more sickening undertones. Yellow fever. Yellow journalism. Yellow belly. That third notch in the rainbow is connected to disease, sensationalism, and debilitating cravenness. Yellow is the last color in blood-drained cheeks met with fear and left with sallow complexion.
Emerging in 1963 with Mario Bava’s film The Girl Who Knew Too Much,giallo came right on the tail-end of Italian neorealism. Bava himself worked as a cinematographer while directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica were making the masterpieces of destitution. In post-WWII Italy, neorealism afforded Italian filmmakers the opportunity to consider the relationship between reality and representation in a way that addressed the economic and moral climate of the country. Combine a believable, though often upsettingly sad, reality on film with horror and you have yourself the roots of giallo.
Yet giallo also comes at the root of another interregnum. Major world events, like the rise of space travel and atomic research, helped make 1960 a pivotal time in the world of horror. For centuries before, horror and mystery was predominantly built around the threat of some kind of monster. Giant squids. Man-eating whales. Vampires. Dragons. The threat of a horror story, and the challenge for any plucky sword-bearing hero, was to take down that monstrous “other,” the clearly defined and easily demarcated beast with its green skin or excessive fur. And then the 20th century happened.
How could any advanced-weapon toting aliens compare to the horrors of World War II? Dracula didn’t stand a chance against the fear of economic desperation that crept in at night. What cinematic realism led to, as much as anything else, was the realization that we are the monsters. Reality was made that much more terrifying with the understanding that horror was everywhere, that it didn’t hide in evil lairs or haunted castles. Horror is the mind unhinged. Horror is the emotions that tug out reason. Horror is peering over the edge of a ship, checking the depths for signs of blood-sucking tentacles, and catching your own reflection, sallow and mad.
Mario Bava straddles the lines between myth and man, between legend and life. At the crossroads, Kill Baby… Kill is at once a supernatural thriller set in a cursed Transylvanianesque village (with all the folklore trappings) and an inversion of every expectation that comes with such a premise. The set has all the cobwebs, fog, dark rooms reliant on the ever-capricious candlelight, and human-eyed portraits that a mystery film could ever need. It calls to mind any vampire novel you’ve ever read. The characterization of the townspeople plays with these expectations. We know early on that there is a legend, a curse that plagues the town, yet no one will speak of it. Dr. Eswai, the coroner who comes into the village to perform an autopsy on a dead girl and to help Inspector Kruger solve her demise is, like the Inspector, disgusted by pandemic superstition. He knows there must be a logical reason for the terrors of the town, that whatever is happening in Villa Graps must be real and unimagined. And he is right. And wrong.
The killer is both a ghost and a little girl. The citizens are being killed as much by supernatural forces as they are by a deranged and vengeful mother. Known to play with appearances, Mario Bava confirms and inverts our every assumption about the killing and saving forces in the world. The killer is a 7-year-old blonde girl who likes to play with a little white ball. Yet this girl is also a monster seeking revenge for her ignored and bloody death. Similarly, the unexpected heroine is not the handsome, logical Dr. Eswai but the scary, dark-haired witch-lady who roams the streets at night in her dark cloaks, ready to whip anyone with a leech vine if she thinks Melissa (the demon child) has set her sights on them. You know, bleed them to save them. But it’s scary witch-lady Ruth who ultimately rids the town of Melissa’s haunting spirit. It is both real and entirely unreal, and the terrors within the dichotomy are equal parts otherworldly and just-down-the-street.
Casting the angelic-looking little girl as the monster is something that goes so far against our expectation of evil that the proposition itself is immediately unsettling. Yet there are very real horrors buried within it: the death of a child by trampling, a mother’s psychotic reaction to the pain of that loss. An interesting distinction, though, is that Melissa doesn’t touch a single one of her victims. She kills by the victims’ self-killing. In each case, the citizens, no matter how fearful, become entranced and end their own lives by ramming stakes through their hearts or slitting their own throats. Melissa doesn’t kill. She watches. Perhaps this, of all things, is the most realistic aspect of the film. It suggests that our great killers are our own weaknesses; that the terrors we imagine are nothing compared to the unseen realness of fear itself. Each supernatural suicide suggests that we run the risk of killing ourselves the moment we give in to what terrifies us. The monster’s weapon is our yellow belly.
Works Consulted:
Balmain, C. (2002). Mario Bava's "The Evil Eye": Realism and the Italian Horror Film. Post Script, 21(3), 20-31. (Can be accessed free here)
Needham, Gary. "Playing with Genre: An Introduction to the Italian Giallo." Kinoeye 12.1110 June (2002). Web. 22 Aug. 2011. < http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/needham11.php>.
Being human is tough business. From the moment we’re born, expectations are hung heavily around our necks. Parents dream of what their children might amount to and years of anxious hand-wringing begins. The pressures don’t get any easier as we grow older, either. Perhaps there’s a peak as we enter whatever one might consider life’s “twilight,” but up until that point societal pressures of finding success, starting a healthy and wholesome family, and generally being an impressive human being poke at us constantly like little needles breaching our skin. There are constant reminders too, like the people around us that seem to be more successful or happier or put together. Shit is hard, man.
But, what we often forget is that so much of our lives are wildly out of our control. You may be gunning for a promotion, busting your ass staying late at the office, taking on extra tasks but the CEO may have always had his nephew in mind. You might have the most astonishing singing voice anyone’s ever heard but the agent you audition for is more interested in finding a hot piece of ass that can only sing okay but will look amazing sprawled out on a velvet couch for a Maxim photoshoot. You can only do so much, it turns out.
That isn’t to say that hard work gets you nothing; of course it does. But, when it comes down to it, we humans have very little control on how our lives might turn out. We can make decisions, sure, and steer ourselves down certain “paths,” but what happens along those paths might surprise the hell out of us.
Jack Kevorkian believed in this. You might know him as Dr. Death, the man who helped upwards of 130
This article and video are the first part of our 5-day series on Early Japanese Animation. To read more go to NA Magazine and to see more of the films visit our Archives.
Why do anime characters have such big eyes? That is one of the most common questions asked of Japanese animation and it has one of the most unexpected answers: because of Mickey Mouse.
Animation as a popular medium had its start in Hollywood, from there filtering around the world clear across to the Land of the Rising Sun. How it infiltrated Japan, and how the Japanese in turn infiltrated animation, is a perfect microcosom of Japan's entry into the globalized economic and cultural world of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Through the first half of the 19th century, Japan was still secluded in the reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Effectively a military dictatorship with a well-defined class structure, the Shoguns restricted contact between Japan and the rest of the world. It is not proper to say that they were isolationist, for they did trade extensively with the Chinese, Koreans and Dutch. Rather, they were guarded and particular about working with “compatible” peoples. That did not include most Europeans or Americans.
This changed in 1852 when Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States arrived in what is now Tokyo Bay with an ultimatum to open the port to unrestricted trade on pain of canon-fire from his fleet of “black ships.” A treaty was signed in 1854 that shook Japanese society to its foundation. Unfair conditions, Western aggression and newly-introduced diseases provoked the population into wanting to confront the
Three saxophones clutter the front of Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s chest. His jazz band crams onto a tight stage at Ronnie Scott’s in London. Before crashing headlong into “Here Comes the Whistleman,” he passes whistles out to every audience member willing to lend their breath to his band. “I’ve been put down by many critics for exploring what I call ‘sound,’” he narrates minutes before. “Sound is something like eyesight to me.” Blind since he was two years old, Kirk told interviewers that he tried taking the sounds that he heard in his head and reproducing them onstage. But what does he hear now? Kirk demands his audience members to “play in the key of W!” “W!” he roars. And the cacophony rises. Kirk madly blows into his saxophone. The upright bass and drums follow along. The crowd’s manic, untrained whistling squeals like a flock of strangled blue birds. But as Kirk leads the room along, pushing the energy higher and higher, the audience’s trilling coos mesh together and begin forming something coherent amidst the jazz. Kirk also said that he heard sirens in his head when he played. Does he hear them now? Goddamn, the whistles begin sounding like sirens. And the crowd, itself, takes this room’s energy higher and higher. Everything is euphoric. Everything is in tune. Then the scene cuts to the avant-garde composer and philosopher poet, John Cage, who professorially intones, “Would we ever be able to get so that we thought the ugly sounds were beautiful?” But holy shit, Kirk and the audience just did. They just turned this ugly dissonance into something that might actually be considered beautiful. Maybe even mercurial.
So go the wild juxtapositions between Cage and Kirk in Dick Fontaine’s 1967 short film “Sound??” The two iconoclasts didn’t have much in common composition wise. But they did share the optimistic view that
On most days before 2007, you could walk down Saint-Laurent Boulevard in Montreal and find a fragile, bespectacled man working the crowd that often lined up outside of Schwartz’s Hebrew deli. As the smells of smoked meat wafted from the front door, the 50-something man who was known as the “unofficial” doorman at Schwartz’s would perform mime, do a dance, or make impromptu drawings for a Loonie or two. Other times he’d just hold out his hat and ask, “Sp-pare any change?”
Nearly forty years earlier, however, this loveable drunk without a permanent home was a 26-year-old Academy Award nominee for his psychedelic-influenced "Walking", a five-minute-long cartoon that’s been lauded as one of the most influential works in animation history. But that was a long, long time ago.
Throughout the 1990s and most of the 2000s, this man, Ryan Larkin, didn’t care that strangers could see him piss out on the street in broad daylight. The people of Montreal either knew him -- “I have people that expect me to be there in front of Schwartz’s restaurant,” Larkin said, “and I don’t want to disappoint them.” -- or they talked behind his back in agitated whispers: “I’ve seen that man scream at people when they refuse to give him money,” a woman said after her friend gave Larkin some change. He said that panhandling was “a job like any other job… You have to be there on time. You have to wear the right clothes. You have to be nice to your clients…” When his daily shift in front of Schwartz’s ended, he’d bury himself in his alcoholism by drinking beer after beer at the “far-from-hip” Copacabana Bar down the street. Then he’d be off to the Old Brewery Mission for the homeless once it was time to go to bed. The Academy Awards were a long time ago, indeed.
Ryan Larkin’s career in animation was brief---he only completed four short cartoons throughout his lifetime. His last was 1972’s "Street Musique", which he finished before turning 30. That incredibly brief oeuvre, however, is regularly described as “genius.” People who know animation still point to Larkin’s "Walking" for
Alice Bag (who goes by Alicia Velasquez these days) was one of the main figures in the first wave of punk. As a member of ground-breaking bands like The Bags and Castration Squad in Los Angeles, she paved the way for an entire generation of female musicians inspired by her ferocious performance style, her confrontational, provocative attitude and of course, her great and powerful music. She remains committed to her punk roots, and her website is an invaluable treasure trove of flyers, photos and interviews with many important figures from the early days of punk. As if that wasn’t enough, she is also a talented author, and her new book Violence Girl will be released this autumn on Feral House. She was kind enough to speak with us via email recently, and I am very pleased to share our conversation with you below.
NAmag: How did you get started in music?
Alicia Velasquez: Music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My father's Mexican rancheras and my sister's soul music were the soundtrack of my childhood. In school, the music teacher Miss Yonkers noticed that I could sing and singled me out when she needed help. She assigned a portion of the class to follow me when teaching two-part harmony or when we sang in rounds. I was still in elementary school when I got my first job singing for bilingual cartoons, so I thought of myself as a singer from a very early age.
NAmag: Like probably a lot of people, I was introduced to your music when I saw The Decline of Western Civilization in the early 80s. Your music really stood out against the other bands in the film, being very iconoclastic and hard to pin down, at least for me, being a teenager growing up in Billings, Montana. What were your musical goals at the time? Do you have any specific memories regarding the film? I understand there are full-set recordings from the shoot-- is anyone trying to find/release them?
AV: The Bags' performance in The Decline of Western Civilization documents a time when the band itself was in decline. We were pulling in different directions and had just had a major falling out with founding member Patricia Morrison. It's no wonder that you have a hard time figuring out what we were going after, I think we were having the same issue. By the time the film was released, the band itself had broken up. I couldn't watch the Decline for many years because I didn't think it had captured the band at its best, but I'm over that now. I think despite the band's struggle, you can still see some of its good qualities and the film had a tremendously positive effect on many people. I ran into Penelope Spheeris a few years ago and she mentioned releasing a Decline DVD, possibly with additional footage but I haven't seen it.
NAmag: We are running a Bags performance from 1978 that is pretty fiery and aggressive-- do you remember this show specifically or why it was video taped? What was the general reaction to the band live? Were you supported in LA?
AV: This particular show is at The Troubadour in West Hollywood. It was the first time that the Troubadour, a club accustomed to hosting “soft rock” opened its doors to punk. Aside from that, the thing that sets this show apart is that it’s part of a bigger story which has come to be known as the “Trashing of the Troubadour.” It was during this show that my boyfriend (and our drummer at the time) got into a fight with the singer Tom Waits, who was in the audience. It’s a long story. The mayhem resulted in punk being banned from the Troubadour for a couple of years. It was a rough show but certainly not the rowdiest crowd or performance for the Bags. We had a reputation for wild shows and between us and the Germs, we probably had the most out of control audiences of the early punk scene. This particular show was videotaped for a student documentary about the LA punk scene. Clips from it surface from time to time but as far as I know, it has never been officially released.
I don't know if this answers your question. The Bags were very popular in L.A. We could play a club twice in one night and sell it out both times but aside from that we were all part of a growing yet intimate punk community. We all went to each other's shows and supported each other.
NAmag: I also really like Castration Squad, at least, the very little I can find on the internet about the band. Did you release any records?
AV: The Castration Squad did not release any records. There was talk a few years back when the band reunited for a one- time show, of doing some recording but we never got around to it.
NAmag: I read in an interview on your blog that, as of 2005, Castration Squad is working together again-- what is the status today?
AV: Well, I'm living in Arizona right now and the other girls are in California so that's one obstacle. I love working with the women of CS and if I had the chance I would play with them again in a heartbeat. I don't know if we'd have an audience anymore and we might not even need to play out. Just hanging out with my old friends and playing music would be enough for me.
NAmag: Seeing as this is part of our "Women in Punk" week, what do you think the legacy of female artists from the first wave of punk is in 2011?
AV: You're having Women in Punk week? I think you need 52 of those!
The legacy of punk is not determined by gender. Any legacy that punk has left behind is as much due to women's contributions as it is to men's. The DIY ethic, the challenge to the status quo, the confidence to pick up an instrument, a paintbrush, a camera or any other tool that you have not been trained to use and to discover your power for yourself without feeling intimidated are all part of having a punk attitude. I see punk attitude in the women of Saudi Arabia who recently got in the driver’s seat of their cars to challenge that country’s restriction on women driving. I see the legacy of punk in hacker groups like Anonymous who target corrupt governments and corporations. The legacy of punk is not in its musical style, it’s having the audacity to actively participate in shaping our world.
NAmag: Indeed. The music industry has changed significantly in recent years, especially in terms of distribution-- do you see any emerging opportunities women should take advantage of? Do you think it is easier for young women to get started in music today?
AV: Yes, I do think it's easier in some ways but more difficult in others. It seems that anyone can produce a recording and sell it on the Internet but I think it's difficult to build an audience without first creating a community. A community is a powerful support system. Without it, an individual artist can get lost in a sea of talented individuals.
NAmag: To turn one of your standard interview questions back on you, what are you listening to now?
AV: I love Amanda Palmer, Girl in a Coma, the Gossip. I also sometimes listen to Lady Gaga. She is different from the other women I mentioned in that she does straight-forward dance music but I find her creativity undeniable and I admire her strong commitment to gay rights and her contributions to homeless youth.
It is, perhaps, a strange and unsavory thing to say but, alas, the truth must make itself known: Beavis and Butthead had a profound impact on me as a kid. I remember sitting on my basement couch in an uncommon state of awe and laughter; I felt high, though I’d never so much as known the smell of weed at that point (I do now, thanks). All of the MTV-produced programming at that time blew my spongy little mind. Shows like The State, Liquid Television, and even Remote Control all had nuanced, well-developed sensibilities that spoke to me in a way that the sound-stages of sitcoms could not; it all felt so new, and almost revolutionary. However, it was Beavis and Butthead that ultimately won the largest share of my heart.
I obsessed over the show. I watched the re-runs and would write down the funnier lines in a spiral notebook. I bought the video game, and the guidebooks, and saw the movie four times in the theater. Every time the pair sunk into a fit of laughter, I joined in with them, narrowly avoiding death by choking on whatever salty, powdered snack I was inhaling. My hair, at the time, was a large brown poof and braces lined my teeth. Someone once called me Butthead, and I was surprisingly okay with it.
At the time, I couldn’t be certain why exactly it was I loved them so. True, I had always been partial to fart jokes, but looking back, I was nothing like those characters. Though every episode makes it clear that
“It makes no sense. I mean, how can people just vanish off the face of the Earth in this day and age?”
In 1977, a conspiracy was hatched involving writers, actors, politicians, scientists, and Brian Eno. The British television series Science Report was about to be cancelled, and its scheduled April 1 finale gave the creators an opportunity to prank those who believed everything they saw on television, and those so skeptical of everything as to see conspiracies all over the place. The resulting program, Alternative 3, is a classic in fake news programming; The War Of The Worlds by way of the BBC’s 1957 spaghetti harvest hoax.
Alternative 3 is presented as an investigation, with an aborted episode of Science Report as the frame. Twenty-four people interviewed for a Science Report episode on Britain’s “brain drain” have gone missing, including three profiled before the introduction. Over the next hour, further pieces of the puzzle are put into place, connecting the disappearances to the death of a prestigious astronomer, the drunk ravings of a former astronaut, and the theories of an early proponent of the climate change hypothesis, Dr. Carl Gerstein. Contemporary news events, such as the Tangshan earthquake and United Kingdom heatwave and drought in 1976, and the North American mega-blizzard of early 1977, hint at a more destructive event than even the producers of The Day After Tomorrow could have imagined.
“The enemy is at the gate, and the enemy is the human mind itself, or lack of it “
There are bands who grunt a career out of being really dumb. Devo aren’t one of them. They’re the archest of art school pranksters, all wrapped up in parodying Western culture with affection and despair. When founder and director Gerald Casale likens them to the house band on the Titanic, playing as the ship goes down, he’s spot on— they never head for the life boats because they love the old girl too much. The magic of Devo lies in the contradictions—that a group of educated, self consciously intellectual musicians and non musicians, sticking career-long to a high concept that’s entirely bleak in its interpretation of a world going to shit- that they can make song after song of bizarro art pop that’s pure funtimes, without ever losing sight of the ideas that shaped them, is incredible. Still, if the ship’s sinking, you may as well party....
The core of this contradiction lies largely in the make up of the group. The foundations of Devo were laid at Kent State University in the late 60s. The college had swelled suddenly and massively, rising from 8,000 students to 20,000 in the space of a few years, necessitating the hiring of a new body of staff. This meant that the campus thrummed with cutting edge thought, as early Devo member Bob Lewis eulogises in his
In The Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger, the Joker’s catch phrase to try to convince Batman not to kill him is “we complete one another.” Batman can’t morally bring himself to kill the joker because that would make him a villain too, but as he says, he doesn’t have to save him. Presumably, he lets the Joker die. We’ll see what the sequels say. So ends the Joker’s theory that if one dies, so too does the other. The fact is that once the Joker goes, many other villains will fill his shoes. This narrative trope has been repeated recently in the non-comic world by talking heads debating the death of Osama Bin Laden, the closest person we’ve had to an evil villain with a vision for world domination. Jokers come and Riddlers go, but there is always Batman. The hero perseveres. Well, unless you’re Captain America who was killed by one of his own on a simple walk into a courthouse – so much for the resilience of superpowers.
I’m driving at a point – the Joker does not complete Batman, just as Elmer Fudd does not complete Bugs Bunny, or Melamid complete Komar, or Garfunkel complete Simon, or Ulay complete Marina Abramovic (though for a time becoming a united self was the couple’s goal). Pairs such as these, whether combative or collaborative can split up and each individual can attempt a solo career or, in the case of superheroes, find new villains to rascal around with. Bugs had that construction worker, Yosemite Sam, and the Tasmanian Devil. Since 2003 Vitaly Komar has been making art independently, and - well - I don’t quite know what Alexander Melamid is up to. Marina Abramovic, since her collaborative’s poetic end on the Great Wall of China, went on to much success culminating in the first ever retrospective by a performance artist at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, and Ulay - well - I don’t quite know what he is up to either (though, in a touching moment, he did appear in the chair opposite Abramovic in The Artist Is Present). Paul Simon went on to a fully blossomed solo career, and Art Garfunkel’s career has continued as well, but not to the same commercial success. The pair, though battling over business issues for decades, has revived their friendship on occasion to continue touring as a duo. In some cases a star is born and a superhero grows out of the collaborative and, unfortunately, the other can never step out of their shadow, remaining the perpetual sidekick.
But I have yet to get to my point. Unlike the pairs I’ve mentioned, there are some dynamic duos that are absolutely co-dependent. Without the one, the other would simply not function. These seem to occur best in dynamic duels where the relationship is uniquely tied to one’s need to destroy...
By all accounts, Liska's ability to compose was nearly effortless, his scores seemingly flowing from his body like an exhaled breath. Besides being the most prolific composer in Czech history, he was known to work on composing new scores while in the studio recording others, apparently able to devote full attention to both. His gift for melody is unparalleled and his knack for combining disparate sounds, moods and genres into a wholly new musical package while also working within the rhythms, emotions and time limits of any given film is beyond compare. His many musical innovations include using the human voice as a wordless instrument, (or even as the rhythm section), using unusual combinations of instruments to create a new timbre (like for example harmonica and glockenspiel) and using sounds considered "sound effects" like whistles, creaks and bangs in his compositions, but most importantly, elevating the language of film music to the point where the music was at least as important as the image (in some cases even more so). Even Svankmajer admits that in many of his films, there is little action, but it feels like action thanks to Liska's delightful music.
Liska's working relationship with Svankmajer was especially long and fruitful. Liska's endless reservoir of invention was the perfect fit for Svankmajer's equally inventive, surreal and playfully macabre creations. They made many films together (my internet research proved inconclusive, but the final count was certainly in the double digits) and one could argue that neither would have been as artistically successful without the other. Since Liska's death in 1983, Svankmajer has never used music in his films again. That's how powerful their collaboration was.
Liska's ability to translate and enhance the action and emotions on the screen is almost entirely unique to the history of cinema. I could name a handful of exceptions, like Morricone or Rota, but I would put myself out on a limb and say that Liska was even better at it, or at the very least, had a more unique take on it. The combination of all of the elements unique to Liska's music came together to create a gripping and overwhelming emotional reaction in the viewer that, at times, feels like nothing else.
Take for example his remarkable score for Mala Morska Vila, the 1976 adaptation of Hans-Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. In the opening theme, wordless voices swell and crash like the ocean...
