The great Chilean-born director, artist, writer, shaman and “criminal madman, ” Alejandro Jodorowsky interviewed via Skype from a hotel room in NYC on October 30th.
Topics include Occupy Wall Street, why revolutions fail but mutation succeeds, the magical side of reality, the search for gurus and wisdom and why Twitter is the haiku of this century! Jodorowsky’s films El Topo and The Holy Mountain are available on Blu-ray from ABKCO.
Well, perhaps not quite everything, but enough that were you to personally experience the demonstration and look around with your own eyes, you’d likely come to regard the mainstream media reports about Occupy Wall Street (especially the lamebrain stuff printed in The New York Post or heard on Fox News) more like loose gossip, bullshit or random fiction, than actual journalism or considered opinion.
I had the extreme privilege of visiting Zuccotti Park on three of the five days I recently spent in NYC and I’m here to tell you that I am much more excited about Occupy Wall Street—and prospects for real progressive change in this country—now than I ever could have been admiring it from afar. It was a life-affirming and quite moving thing to personally experience and hopefully I can get some of those good feelings across here.
On Wednesday, I was picked up at JFK by my old friend (and frequent Dangerous Minds Radio Hour DJ) Nate Cimmino. I checked into my hotel and since I hadn’t been to NYC for a few years, we decided to just walk from Houston Street to the OWS site. It was raining, not exactly a heavy downpour, but the rain had been steady for most of the day. When we arrived at Zuccotti Park around 4pm, it was starting to get dark and it was pretty much locked down with everyone trying to keep dry. Plastic covered everything and people huddled under makeshift tarps just trying to keep their shit together. It resembled a water-logged shanty town and hardly anything was going on. The lines for the brightly-lit food carts on the southern side of the park were the most noticeable thing at that time (these guys must be making bank, especially the falafel vendors). CNN had a mobile video van with a crane and a “crow’s nest” for getting aerial shots of the park. Dozens of NYPD officers in rain gear ringed the park, many of them female officers.
The medical area of Occupy Wall Street.
This wasn’t the right moment to get much of a feel for what’s been going on there, obviously, so I resolved to return on the weekend. Some initial observations though: Zuccotti Park isn’t much of a park at all. It’s more like a concrete plaza and it’s not very big. Keep in mind when you hear people scoffing at the size of the demonstration, that about a thousand people (give or take) is all this area would hold. If many more people tried to join in the demonstration, it would not be possible to move about. It’s already densely packed as it is.
It’s also right across the street from Ground Zero. In my mind, it was in a different (southeastern) part of lower Manhattan, so when we walked down Broadway, the sound of the drumming got louder and then all of a sudden there it was, that came as a surprise.
Greg Barris and me mugging for the camera on one of the OWS live video feeds.
On Saturday I returned to OWS with my friend Greg Barris, a stand-up comedian and restaurateur. Greg’s been taking pizza from his restaurant to Zuccotti Park since the demonstrations began. The festive carnival atmosphere that morning was a striking contrast to Wednesday’s wash-out. Colorful flags, costumed characters and people of all ages, races, creeds and personality types circulated around the square. You could see people who were arriving alone with a look of apprehension in their eyes, but soon afterward, that same person would be seen joining right in.
Several people distributed free copies of The Occupy Wall Street Journal and a lefty books lending library operated efficiently (there were even a few books that I had published). Everyone was smiling at one another and a feeling of fun and solidarity was palpable. I saw no overtly negative signs and I saw no placards whatsoever for either of the major political parties (I’d put the number of Republicans at Zuccotti Park at slightly north of “zero,” but still I saw not a single pro-Democrat or pro-Obama item anywhere, either). There’s a medical area where minor things can be tended to by volunteer nurses and medics and a food area manned by park residents. Greg pointed out one earnest-looking California blond skater-type and told me he’s seen that same guy dishing out plates of free food since the earliest days of the demonstration. The park was notably clean, not at all the unsanitary mess Fox News viewers have been repeatedly told about.
A woman who identified herself as “The Knitting Granny” sat knitting sweaters and scarfs to give to the occupiers. Children in face-paint or costumes carried signs marching with their parents. An elderly gentleman using a walker who must’ve been in his nineties told some of us that he’d been an engineer working with dams and waterways his entire career and what he knew about the “fracking” that’s planned for locations upstate less than ten miles away from New York’s main water supply scared him to death. He came to share his expertise, he told me, and to see OWS with his own eyes.
Several “super heroes” circulated around. A man in his early 30s, who came to OWS alone from Delaware, brought along a solar electrical generator and set it up so people could charge their cell phones. One fellow, who we later saw on the subway, was dressed in a barrel. He must’ve been cold. Another guy carried a “Ross Perot for President” sign and wore a Ross Perot t-shirt and badges.over his coat. He might’ve been the weirdest guy I saw there.
When you hear dismissive asses braying about how it’s “all white people”—that’s a bunch of utter nonsense. You’ll encounter as diversified a group at OWS as you would if you were in a New York City DMV office and that’s really saying something, so these sorts of haters and naysayers, can go jump in the lake. All white? Maybe in the first few days, but now, that’s simply not even in the slightest bit true.
There are TONS of attractive people at OWS and the mood is so festive and jovial that making conversation with members of the opposite sex is very easy to do. I may get shit for saying this, but it’s true: If more guys knew how many super hot women were milling around OWS, there’d immediately be a massive increase in attendance and foot traffic in the area around Zuccotti Park.
Gay? Fret not, there is a “Queer Camp,” too (look for the feather boas on the northeast side of the park). We even saw someone who identified herself as a “T-girl pornstar” make herself hoarse shouting anti-capitalism things and the very wonderful Reverend Billy is a frequent visitor. The age range is all over the place, as well. In fact, it’s hard to generalize anything at all about the people you meet there except to say that they’ve got their eyes wide open about the problems of advanced capitalism and American democracy. That’s the bottom line. THAT was the commonality amongst all of us.
Greg Barris and his sign.
Most people, it would seem, sleep at their homes but come downtown whenever they can. I got the feeling that there was a small percentage of the occupiers who were the ones who were sleeping there. When you walk around in the interior of the plaza, it becomes somewhat apparent that the folks who the media are derisively describing as “hippies,” “punks” and “homeless people” are in fact, quite often hippies, punks and homeless people. They form the more hardcore inner group that performs the very important task of holding down the park. Without their presence, Mayor Bloomberg would have put fences around Zuccotti Park in two seconds flat, so remember that when you’re there and drop a few bucks in their cans. They’re not merely scruffy panhandlers, they’re there in YOUR place if you support the aims of OWS.
Aside from the resident demonstrators and the day-trippers getting their protest on, there are also thousands of tourists milling about taking pictures. The photos they take are then uploaded to Facebook, Flickr and their blogs. The stories they bring back home and to the water-cooler at work and to their online lives will continue to spread the word about what’s going on in Zuccotti Park.
Sunday afternoon at Occupy Wall Street, I met up with Em, the “undercover banker” who sometimes writes incendiary essays for DM, Nate Cimmino, his wife Nicole and my pal, noted photographer Glen E. Friedman. It was another gorgeous, glorious day like the one before it, with intelligent and engaged people joining together for a higher purpose. (I’ve already mentioned about all of the beautiful woman down there, but I’m going to mention it once more so it really sinks in, okay?).
My favorite moment—or moments, I should say—of my three visits to Occupy Wall Street was watching the open-air Big Apple double-decker tour buses drive past, full of tourists with their fists in the air! That was an amazing thing to see. Witnessing that sight, repeatedly, I might add, was as sure a confirmation as anyone should require that a little over a month after its improbably beginnings, OWS is becoming a mainstream phenomenon. When is the last time the mainstream media took up a progressive cause? The Civil Rights movement? The Vietnam War? This is a real thing, not a flash in the pan. The fist-pumping seniors on the tour buses are but one of the signposts of the shift that’s happening in this country. Is there anyone out there stupid enough to still ask “What is their endgame?” Even someone who only watches Fox News has probably figured THAT out by now!
The only disharmonious incident I witnessed in my three visits was when a dopey-looking born again Christian crew (I’m talking total Ned Flanders-types) started telling the people assembled there, but especially the ones sleeping in Zuccotti Park, that they were possessed by demons and bound for Hell. As you might imagine that message went over like a lead zeppelin. A late 40-something gutterpunk guy and a hilariously confrontational black kid got right up in their faces with such intensity (and volume) that they quickly left. When they fucked off, deflated, everyone cheered.
Having said that, the overall scene at Occupy Wall Street does feel, in some respects, almost biblical, with one thousand iPhone carrying Joshuas shouting down the walls of a very high tech Jericho. Let there be no doubts, dear reader, I, and everyone around me there knew that we were witnessing and participating in history. It’s not going to be an overnight change, but anyone who thinks that things can or will continue on indefinitely the way they have been are going to be in for a very rude awakening.
Obama and the Democrats are going to have to move quite far to the left to satisfy their base as we move into 2012 and from what I saw, I reckon that OWS is pretty much 100% bad news for the Republicans, who are going to get the free market and tax cuts for the 1% shoved right up their goddamned asses on election day (I’m looking at you, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan). I mean, shit, once the election season kicks fully into high gear next year, I expect to see some completely hilarious stuff happen, don’t you? It’s going to be the best election ever! Or the funniest, at least.
As the drumbeat for change in the way we “do business” in America gets louder and louder and louder, the elites will have no choice but to respond. 99% vs. 1%? Who’d be dumb enough to bet against odds like that? The changes that are destined to take place in the next decade of American life are going to make people of a conservative political disposition very uncomfortable indeed. The rest of us are going to be thrilled, though, so fuck ‘em.
From my point of view as an “old school” New Yorker parachuting into Manhattan after a few years away, Occupy Wall Street is functioning like a sun that is radiating its heat throughout all of New York City, and then via the media, to the rest of the planet. It’s extremely inspiring. As someone who lived in the city for the better part of three decades, NOW is the best I have seen NYC since the early 1980s. The energy in the streets is near an all-time high. New York is just killin’ it. Something is really happening at the moment and it’s an exciting time to be there. If you live in Philly, CT, New Jersey… go down there and check out Occupy Wall Street for yourself. If you live in the NY metro area and you haven’t been downtown, shame on you for watching it on tee-vee…
Trust me when I tell you that it pained me, absolutely pained me to be the old fart saying “New York used to be better back when I was young”... but I’ll never be tempted to say that again anyway, not after what I saw last week.
David Arnoff‘s post-punk era photography appeared in the NME, Melody Maker, Trouser Press, N.Y. Rocker and many other publications. The Cleveland-born, but London-based photographer and disc jockey’s work captures iconic bad boys and girls, relaxed and at their most playful. Arnoff is currently readying his photographs for a book and is looking for a publisher. I asked him a few questions over email:
Tara: Tell me about the Stiv Bators shot.
David Arnoff: I was hanging around with Stiv and his post-Dead Boys band in their hotel—pretty sure it was the Sunset Marquis—and we decided to do some shots of him on his own. He’d been messing about with a new air pistol, so we brought that along and just stepped out into the hall, after which it occured to him to maybe go back in the room and put some shoes on, but I said not to bother. We started out doing some rather silly and predictable 007-type poses before he chose to just sit on the floor and look disturbed. I always thought the stripey socks made him look even more so.
Nick Cave, 1983
Tara: You worked with Nick Cave several times. He seems like a guy very concerned about his image, yet playful, too. What’s he like as a subject or collaborator?
David Arnoff: Nick is very easy and unaffected to work with. That shot with Harpo is the result of what started out as another cancelled session at the Tropicana Motel. He apologized for being up all night and indicated all the empty bottles on the TV as evidence, but was perfectly happy for me to carry on regardless even though he was not looking his best. The only downside was he was trying in vain to play “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” not really knowing the chords and the guitar was painfully out of tune. Not an enjoyable aural experience. He was quite happy with the photos though.
Jeffrey Lee Pierce, 1983
Tara: Maybe it was the era, but several of the people you shot were junkies. Any “colorful” anecdotes about the likes of Cave, Jeffery Lee Pierce, Nico or Johnny Thunders?
David Arnoff: Far be it for me to say whether or not any of these people were actually junkies, but it’s funny you should mention Nick and Jeffrey together because I did squeeze all three of us into my little Volvo p1800 to go score on the street—Normandy, I think, around 3rd or somewhere. We then went back to my place in Hollywood, where Jeffrey became convinced they’d been ripped off. But Nick seemed more than happy with his purchase. Afterwards we went to that lesbian-run Mexican place near the Starwood. Nick tried to remember what he’d had previously and proceeded to attempt to describe what he wanted it to the baffled staff. I think they just gave up and sold him a burrito.
More with David Arnoff and his photographs after the jump…
Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico and French avant-garde film director Philippe Garrel had a ten-year romantic relationship between 1969 and 1979. Garrel, acclaimed in his youth as being a sort of cinematic Rimbaud, was much admired by Jean-Luc Godard, but is almost completely unknown in the English speaking world. Nico appeared in seven of his films and sometimes gave him music for them that has not been heard elsewhere. Stills from his films appeared on the covers of her Desertshore and The End albums, which show how interested she was in promoting his work. Garrel made his own clothes at the time and began dressing Nico, encouraging her to dye her hair crimson and cut her bangs.
During their relationship, the pair became hardcore heroin addicts resorting to petty thievery from friends and acquaintances to support their habits. According to Richard Witts’ biography, Nico: The Life & Lies of an Icon, their Paris apartment was a “garret” that lacked gas, electricity, hot water, furniture and housed a gargantuan mountain of cigarette butts. The entire apartment was covered in two coats of glossy black enamel paint. Their bed, apparently, was Garrel’s overcoat.
To call Philippe Garrel’s films “tedious” and “self-indulgent” is a bit of an understatement. They’re preposterously tedious and self-indulgent—I believe the Monty Python “French Subtitled Film” sketch was directly inspired by Garrel’s work—but no more so than Matthew Barney’s movies, if you ask me. About half of her Desertshore album (and one otherwise unreleased song, the mind-blowing “König” see below) is used as the film’s soundtrack. (This again seems worth comparing to Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, a collaboration with his wife, Bjork, herself a big Nico fan.)
To some, Garrel, who is still making films today, is an under-rated, visionary genius, whose work must be seen in the cinema to be fully appreciated. To them he is revered as some cinemaphiles worship John Cassavetes. To others, his films (the ones made during his relationship with Nico at least) look like what two junkies with a camera might get up to…
Phillipe’s Garrel’s early films are very difficult to see and he refuses to release them on DVD. I’ve only ever seen one of them, La Cicatrice Intérieure (“The Inner Scar”) which I found a bootleg of at Exene Cervenka’s general store in Silverlake maybe fifteen years ago. It’s a bit hard to watch. The dialogue, mostly made up right before they’d shoot it by Nico, consists of existential bitching, basically, as the pair walk around in barren, yet gorgeous landscapes shot in Sinai, Death Valley and Iceland. Garrel uses LONG static and simple linear tracking shots with minimal editing during scenes. Visually, the film is quite stunning—again think Matthew Barney—but the director forbade subtitles so unless you speak French, German and English, you’re bound to be confused. (A bootleg DVD popped up in 2005 with Japanese subtitles).
Nico does most of the speaking in La Cicatrice Intérieure, moaning throughout the film in her humorless, stentorian voice, at times coming off like some sort of prophetess of doom. As the Time Out reviewer said of the film when it was released in 1972: “You need a bloody big spliff to enjoy this. A miserable couple who you would not wish to meet at a party [Garrel, Nico] are joined by a naked weirdo [Pierre Clémenti, best-known for his role as gangster lover of Catherine Deneuve’s prostitute in Buñuel’s Belle de jour] with a bow and arrow and a desire to set everything on fire. That’s about it, frankly, unless I fell asleep, which is likely.”
Nico described the film like so:
“[It’s] an important film, a great film. It concerns the fragility of life. The film treats the story of a lunatic who starts to kill all of his sheep. It is not clear if he is a shepherd or a prince. He has no identity until I show up [of course!]. I am a queen on a journey. A queen finds a kingdom wherever she goes. There are more songs than dialogue in the film which I think is a good idea [of course!].
In the case of La Cicatrice Intérieure, she’s probably right about that, although the film does have its perplexing, often gorgeous, merits. But don’t take my word for it, La Cicatrice Intérieure is now in the public domain and a kind soul has uploaded it as a gift for Nico fans to download and watch. Yet another absolutely M.I.A. film that you can see without getting up from your seat. La Cicatrice Intérieure was once the litmus test case for obscure, nearly impossible to see movies, but obscure no more, eh?
Below, Nico and Garrel walk across a barren landscape as she yells weird stuff at him in La Cicatrice Intérieure:
“My Only Child” and “All That Is My Own” are heard in the following two sequence. The child is Nico’s son, Ari Boulogne.
Nico has some sort of freak-out while Garrel herds some animals. Then we hear “Abschied.”
In the closing moments of Garrel’s La Cicatrice Intérieure we hear “König,” an amazing song Nico recorded during the sessions for Desertshore with John Cale. This version of “König” can only be heard in the film, although Nico re-recorded the number for her 1985 Camera Obscura album.
Bonus clip: Nico and Philippe Garrel met when she contributed this gorgeous (and heard only in the film) version of “The Falconer” to his 1969 film Le Lit de la vierge, which starred Pierre Clémenti as Jesus:
In the final moments of a documentary on Francis Bacon, made by a French TV channel, the great artist turned to camera and jovially announced, in his best Franglais, that he had lost all his teeth to his lovers. That is what he was like –dramatically revealing intimate scenes from his life at the most unexpected of moments. His paintings did the same, as they were images, which unnervingly presented the “brutality of fact,” within the most intimate and commonplace of locations – a bedroom, a living room, a toilet.
I once played Francis Bacon on his deathbed, tended by nuns. It was for a drama-documentary, which examined the Bacon’s work through his asthma. The idea was to find out how much this medical condition shaped the artist’s life. For as Bacon once said to critic John Russell:
“If I hadn’t been an asthmatic, I might never have gone on painting at all.”
If this was true, then arguably, it was his asthma that made him a painter, and his asthma, which induced the heart attack that killed him.
Of course, there have been other suggestions as to why Bacon became an artist: the childhood trauma of being locked in a cupboard by the family nanny, or more luridly, as writer John Richardson has claimed, it was Bacon’s masochism that inspired his work. Yet, neither of these fully explain his drive or resilience, or the influence of his strange relationship with his father had on his work.
Bacon was 82-years-old when he died in Madrid, on the 28th April 1992. In many respects, it is a surprise he lived so long. Bacon was a prodigious drinker, had a damaged and diseased heart, lost a kidney to cancer, and once, nearly lost an eye, after being “pissed as a fart” and falling down the stairs of his favored drinking den. But Bacon had resilience, rather than seek immediate medical attention he merely pushed the offending orb back into its socket, and continued with his afternoon debauch.
Bacon was a gambler. He saw himself as open to the opportunities of chance in both life and art. He made and lost small fortunes on the spin of the roulette wheel. He was an atheist who saw no hope of an afterlife, and gave credence to “the individual’s perceived reality.” He claimed he had been “made aware of what is called the possibility of danger at a very young age,” which led him to treat life as if it were always within the shadow of death:
“If you really love life, you’re walking in the shadow of death all the time…Death is the shadow of life, and the more one is obsessed with life the more one is obsessed with death. I’m greedy for life and I’m greedy as an artist.”
In the late 1940s, Bacon was told by his doctor he had an enlarged heart. One of his friends, Lady Caroline Blackwood, then wife to artist Lucian Freud, later recounted a tale of a dinner when Francis had joined her and Lucian, at Wheeler’s Restaurant :
“His (Francis) doctor had told him that his heart was in such a bad state that not a ventricle was functioning; he had rarely seen such a diseased organ, and he warned Francis that if he had one more drink or even became excited it could kill him.
“Having told us the bad news he waved to the waiter and ordered a bottle of champagne, and once it was finished ordered several more. He was ebullient throughout the evening but, Lucian and I went home feeling very depressed. He seemed doomed. We were convinced he was going to die, aged forty.”
More on Francis Bacon and part two of his interview with David Sylvester, after the jump…
I wonder if everyone has an Eric Bogosian story? Mine is from his first tour of the UK in October-November 1982, when he presented his solo shows Men Inside and Voices of America from London’s ICA, through Cardiff, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Middlesbrough, to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Which, thinking of it now, was quite a feat to travel alone city-to-city in some foreign land with just one small black suitcase of clothes and an overcoat to keep out the cold. It does, however, say much about his ambition and self-belief, and even more about his talents.
Bogosian had opened Men Inside and Voices of America that Fall, at the Martinson Hall in New York, where he was hailed as “the best performance artist I’ve yet seen,” by Valentin Tatransky in Arts Magazine. He had also been described as like “a man possessed, a medium, a schizophrenic,” by Sally Banes in the Village Voice) and as someone who could “perform the performer, and out-perform the performance artist,” in Flash Art.
At the time, I was a student, avoiding studies while editing the university magazine. How I’d heard about him, I can’t recall, a press release or flier most likely - my life back seems lived from the inside of an aquarium - knowledge, happiness, love and success were always beyond the glass. This disengagement might explain why I turned up late after his show at the Third Eye Center, on Sauchiehall Street. Understandably, he was pissed, but I made my excuses and walked him back to his hotel on Cambridge Street, with arrangements to see and meet the following night in Edinburgh. These then are extracts from that interview.
Bogosian performed in a small stage area, surrounded by tiered seating. He was a compact figure in black shirt, black pants. A bare stage except for one chair. Everything was suggested, created, from Bogosian’s physical presence. He walked onto stage and became a small child flying as Superman, talking to his father, mimicking adult bigotry before, shockingly, breaking into a stutter. So began the darkly comic Men Inside a carnival of souls from a troubled America - dysfunctional men, unable to interact with the world because of their bigotry and hate.
From Superman, Bogosian became a young man masturbating before declaiming his loneliness by saying “I love you” to a centerfold. Then on to a bored teenager, a stud, a bully, a sleaze-ball, a down-and-out, a Blood and Sword evangelist. It was loud, noisy and funny. Bogosian’s performance was as brilliant as his characters were low:
“Each character, each scene, flows into the next presenting different aspects of man gone wrong: his sexism, his racism, his hate.
It’s my effort on my part to try to communicate from a man’s point of view, trying to be sympathetic to men, saying this is how it happens, this is how a man ends up with these perspectives about women, about life - what can we do about it?
The thing I’m trying to lay out on women is the whole discussion of Women’s Liberation, Feminism, and the like, is all very complicated and that’s the first thing - it’s a complex issue, it’s not black and white. Women are perfectly justified in complaining about their situation, however, in different times men have also been put into situations that are not so great, the biggest one I can think about is certainly war.
War is Hell on Earth, and nobody should ever have to go through that. And of course, now, here in Great Britain people are thinking of the Falklands thing. I mean, it has to be thought about, if anything is sexist, it’s men should have to go off and die, that is sexist thing too. All I’m saying, we’re all people, let’s try and be a little sympathetic to each other, while we try to find out what exactly is going on.
I was in a restaurant on a Sunday morning in Vancouver, on tour, and I came in and had my breakfast around 10 o’clock in the morning, and there was all these men in the place, all by themselves: smoking a cigarette, reading a paper, eating a breakfast, looking kinda glum, kinda down. And these two couple came in, both in their sixties, and each guy was very dapperly dressed with his wife. And the women were happily chatting with each other and the men were sort of ushering their wives in. And you had a very strong feeling that these women were in some way protecting these guys, they were giving them something to do with themselves, yeah know. They weren’t like every other guy in this place, and you got the feeling that these guys were kinda looking across at these two couples, how these guys’ clothes were clean, their clothes were pressed, and how, how they had something to fucking do.
And all those other guys were just crumpled up pieces of paper. And here are these two guys, who because they stuck it out with a couple of marriages, now that they were in their sixties, had something to do. And somehow I wish people would admit this: that mean and women are different, and that for whatever reasons, whether they’re cultural or whatever, they are complimentary aspects of one another.
This might all seem quaint and unfocussed now, but let’s not be harsh, for these were issues that were important, politics was important, and many of the things we take for granted now were hard fought for then.
Bogosian was concerned that some of the audience was offended by certain aspects of his performance thinking they may have confused the views of the characters with the performer’s. After all, this was dangerous stuff to bring to a city more attuned to the Royal Lyceum’s revival of Noel Coward, than an act billed as a cross between Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor.
“I don’t expect anyone to be so critical about performance or experimental theater as I have been. I mean, it’s my life, it’s all I’ve been doing for the past 12-13 years, it’s all I’ve been doing - working in theater and complex theater. I don’t expect everyone who walks in off the street to understand about that - they’re taking it at face value, and they may not even notice the technique I’m employing.
For instance, the exotic dancer and the Led Zeppelin thing seem very alike, but their movements are very complex. You just can’t jump out and do that stuff, it’s all choreographed, and all rehearsed a lot, it’s just subtle. Someone might watch and go, ‘Hmm, not bad, that’s good movement.’ But not everyone’s going to understand that, what it’s about. They’re going to go ‘Ha-ha. look at that, he’s playing guitar,’ you know?
I can’t say if that’s something formal or theoretical in my work, it’s just something I’ve always done as an actor. It comes through from the inside. I don’t think any good actor can explain what happens when they become Someone. I become them totally and I know I’m inside them, and somehow it reads, and that’s the funny thing because at acting school they teach you how to relate what’s going on inside your head to what you look like outside. I don’t know what I look like, I’ve seen photos and stuff, but somehow what I look like is corresponding to what I’m feeling.
In a way that’s very direct and without any real training on it, I just hit the stage and it starts happening to me. But that’s just me, it’s like something I’ve got to my advantage, that I should make the best use of.”
The second half of the show was Voices of America a brilliant, mad imaginary tour of America’s airwaves, where every speaker, no matter how cheery or inane, is obsessed with death:
“If you had a choice to die from a nuclear holocaust (oh no!) or, a heroin overdose (oh wow!), which would you choose?” - ‘Voices of America’
This was all very much a hint of Bogosian’s Barry Champlain in Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio.
“Voices of America started out as a sort of finger exercise, so I could practice my voice, and it ended up as a piece.
At the time I was trying to get into advertising, so I made this demo tape of adverts and jingles and stuff, but the company thought it too cynical.
It’s very black. I’m interested in the way society’s fascinated with the lives of its stars and superstars, with its violence and consumption, its decadence.
Like how Keith Richard’s habits became published or how real death and real suffering are treated. How things are mass produced indifferently, and people’s suffering doesn’t come through, but is just forgotten.
Though I don’t think my philosophy or my ideas about anything are social or profound or anything, they’re just basic, mundane, liberal ideas, what we call liberal in America. It’s just like everyone else should be nice to everyone else, and how you can do it and go vote and I’m against the death penalty and for social programs. It’s just dumb stuff - I don’t mean these things are dumb - I mean I’ve got nothing to tell anybody that they shouldn’t already know. I’m just making stuff I’m interested in, it’s the piece I’m interested in - how can construct them and how can I act them out, it’s just all that stuff is in my head and it all might as well come out in the show, it might as well be there, as not be there.
And I know they’ll never put me on TV for saying these things, that’s the funny thing about it: I don’t think there’s anything radical about what I’m saying or doing, but they’ll never put me on a TV station saying this kind of stuff.
The current comedians in the States are just zany, they’re just crazy guys. Comedians with a conscience are not wanted in the mass media.
It’s just intuitive, a whole set of things are interesting to me, things that operate in my life. It’s like my face, if I get a nose job, and get my nose to be straight and my chin to be stuck out and stuff like that.
If I’m eloquent in expressing my particular set of perameters in my frame of mind they start to seem universal, or interesting or something like that, or, somebody at least might identify with them. I don’t start off with a theory and try to work it all out, it’s just that I try to express myself as best I can.”
Later, we walked out into the Georgian cobbled streets of Edinburgh’s New Town. It was late and cold, and the evening’s silence reminded us of our own different times walking round empty streets at night listening for parties to crash.
Bonus clips of Eric Bogosian in performance, after the jump…
This is a guest post by writer and musician Dave Madden. Take it, Dave:
What lingers in the closets of the Brass Ring of recent film composers? James Horner scored Robert Conrad’s kinda-crappy cult classic The Lady in Red. James Newton Howard did session work for Ringo and arranged songs for Olivia Newton-John. And then you have Ennio Morricone whose wardrobe contains enough oddity to match the awards on his mantle.
During the mid ‘60s, while Morricone was securing his role as the Spaghetti Western king via Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, he became a member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, a revolving collective of musicians dedicated to “anti-musical systems and noise techniques” (note: he was part of the band even throughout his days with Dario Argento and his first academy award nomination for the 1979 Days of Heaven).
GDIDNC loosely labeled their technique “Instant Composition”, as everything went direct to tape, not staff paper. They merged a collage of the previous 50 years – Webern-like serialistic pointillism, free jazz, spectralism, Musique concrète – with extra-musical philosophies and disciplines; not to be confused with aleatoricism, they crafted their works not by emptying their preconceptions to get to zero, but incorporating myriad ideas and exercises to guide themselves to zero. While that reads as par for the course for improvising musicians today, there are a few things that separate them from your average non-musician – and placed the crew in the flagship ranks of AMM and Musica Elettronica Viva, and turned them into idols for a young John Zorn (he wrote the liner notes to their 2006 box set, Azioni) .
First, each of the tenuous group was a fantastic musician, respected sound artist and/or scientist: a friend and collaborator of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono (who, together, established the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio in Warsaw), Gruppo founder and pianist Franco Evangelisti was involved with the Studio of Experimental Electroacoustics of UNESCO, focusing on the biophysics of brain impulses as sonic vibrations; Mario Bertoncini (percussion, piano) made his living as a music educator and, for decades, a concert pianist; Roland Kayn’s (Hammond organ, vibraphone, marimba) “monumental graphic scores” for orchestra were performed by Pierre Boulez, though he later devoted his life to “Cybernetic Music”, a sonic renewing process that became the focus of his ten-hour long Scanning. And so on with all eighteen-and-counting purported contributors.
More importantly, as former Down Beat editor Art Lange points out, they were all known for their compositional savvy:
The key words here, however, are “composers” and “organized.” Evangelisti insisted on a performing ensemble that consisted solely of composers in part because of the inherent (even if intuitive) sense of formal logic they would bring to the performance, but also to avoid any taint of instrumental virtuosity for its own sake.
Lastly, when they performed, the disparate personalities combined into a single, flailing behemoth that did not understand the concept of “lull” or “wandering” as it pursued its artistic objective.
The off-Broadway musical Man on the Moon was conceived by John Phillips and his third wife, the South African actress, Genevieve Waite, as a potential film or stage production originally entitled Space. John would spend more time trying to realize this project than anything else he worked on in his career; nearly five years all told, beginning in 1969 during the period he was recording his first solo album, John the Wolfking of L.A.
Space was born the day Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. Like millions of other people, John watched the 1969 moon landing on TV. He was living, at the time, on the Malibu property rented by British film director Michael Sarne, who was under contract at Fox to direct the adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel, Myra Breckenridge, with Rex Harrison, Raquel Welch and Mae West. Sarne had commissioned John to write songs for the film.
The Apollo 11 moon landing became an obsession. John would watch a recording of the TV transmission made on an early video tape machine over and over. The idea of exploring this new frontier - and particularly Neil Armstrong’s scripted aside as he stepped onto the lunar surface that it was, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” - fired John’s imagination, and he began to piece together ideas for a mythical space opera set to music. “He loved myths,” says Genevieve, who was first introduced to John by Sarne that summer. “He liked Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey.”
John first began performing a small song cycle he had written about “space exploration” as early as the fall of 1970, as part of the short tour he undertook to promote Wolf King. Over the next two years, he and Genevieve formulated ideas for the story, and created a theatrical treatment (later adapted as a screenplay). Seeking a backer, they pitched it to Michael Butler, producer of the stage musical Hair. He provided seed money to realize a book and a score for Space, and brought a young director called Michael Bennett on board.
For several months, the Italianate mansion at 414 St. Pierre road in Bel Air that John and Genevieve were renting became a hive of Space-related activity. Among their collaborators was British costumier Marsia Trinder, who had designed clothes for Elvis Presley and Raquel Welch. “It was a very creative period for about two or three months,” says Trinder, who moved into another wing of the mansion with her then boyfriend to work on costumes for the production. “John was the key person organizing it all and coming up with ideas. But everybody was feeding into it. John felt that with all the secrets in the world, there wouldn’t be wars if people didn’t have secrets. And then they kind of figured out the plot.”
The initial story for Space gradually took shape: When a humanoid bomb left on the moon by the Apollo space mission threatens to blow itself up and destroy the universe, an astronaut on Earth is tasked with leading a delegation of interplanetary dignitaries to travel there and defuse it. Humanity is forced to curb its destructive impulses for the universal good.
The role of the astronaut was originally written for Elvis, whom John and Genevieve had befriended in 1971, while living in Palm Springs shortly after the birth of their son Tamerlane. “John was trying to sell him songs,” says Waite. “They would sit around and John would sing him different songs.” At one point, Ricky Nelson was also approached for the part.
Read more about the ill-fated musical (with a second exclusive video clip) after the jump…
At his lowest ebb, it was the book that kept Ken Russell believing in his talents.
Alone, unrecognized and poor, the struggling, young film-maker found faith, during the 1950s, in a slim biography of the Vorticist sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The book, Savage Messiah by H. S. Ede, consisted of letters from the young artist to his soul mate, the older, writer Sophie Brzeska. Of the artist’s life, Russell later said:
“I was impressed by Gaudier’s conviction that somehow or other there was a spark in the core of him that was personal to him, which was worth turning into something that could be appreciated by others. I wanted to find that spark in myself and exploit it for that reason.”
Born in 1895, H. S. Ede became a curator at the Tate Gallery London, in 1921, where he promoted works by Picasso, Braque and Mondrian. Ede often found himself frustrated by the more conservative tastes of the gallery directors. However, the position allowed Ede to become friends with many avant garde artists, and, more importantly, offered him the opportunity to obtain most of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s work through the estate of Sophie Brzeska. An event that helped ensure Henri’s art and reputation.
Gaudier-Brzeska was one of the leading artists of the Vorticist Movement, formed by Wyndham Lewis in 1913. Vorticism developed from Cubism and was linked to Futurism and Impressionism. However, Lewis and some of the other Vorticists, saw themselves as separate - a group of artists focussed on Dynamism, or as the Vorticist and poet, Ezra Pound wrote in his memoir on Gaudier-Brzeska:
VORTICISM
“It is no more ridiculous that a person should receive or convey an emotion by means of an arrangement of shapes, or planes, or colors, than they should receive or convey such emotion by an arrangement of musical notes.”
“Vortex :- Every concept, every emotion, presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form.”
Vorticism is art before it has spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary application.
Gaudier-Brzeska’s early sculptures had a hint of Rodin, though this wasn’t to last, as the dynamic young artist soon adapted Chinese and Japanese prints and paintings for his needs, before using the processes of Cubism to develop his own unique artistic vision. As Pound later wrote, Gaudier-Brzeska, “had an amazing faculty for synthesis…” which, Pound believed, had the Gaudier-Brzeska lived, would have made him as famous as Picasso. He didn’t. But the fact he produced so much work, “a few dozen statues, a pile of sketches and drawings, and a few pages about his art,” in just a few years (whilst living in desperate and impoverished conditions), only confirms Pound’s belief.
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska : after months of fighting and two promotions for gallantry, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in a charge at Neauville St. Vaast, on June 5th, 1915.
He was twenty-three.
Born in 1891, the son of a carpenter, Gaudier had been a translator, a forger of paintings, and a student, by the time he met Sophie Brzeska in 1910. Brzeska was almost twice Gaudier’s age, but there was a connection that kept them together for the next 5 years. To mark their bond, they adopted each other’s surname, and became Henri and Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska.
Sophie’s life until meeting Gaudier, had been one of misery and heartbreak, a tale no author of Gothic romantic fiction could have conceived. Sophie was a writer with ambitions to publish her autobiography, Matka, of which she wrote several versions. With intentions to revolutionize art, the pair moved to London, and began their creative life together.
It wasn’t easy. Henri worked by day and sculpted by night. Sophie wrote and rewrote, worked and kept house. Henri forged his own tools, and carved directly into stone. He used off-cuts and (allegedly) a marble headstone to make his sculptures. One story goes, that after an idle brag to an art dealer, who he told he had three new statues ready for show. Henri worked through the night to deliver the statues. When the dealer didn’t turn up at the expected time, Henri carried his sculptures round to the dealer’s gallery and hurled them through its window.
Gaudier-Brzeska was passionate, industrious, creative and dynamic. You can see the attraction Henri’s life and work would have to a young Ken Russell.
In London, Henri met and mixed with Pound, Lewis, and Edward Wadsworth, who together exchanged ideas and loosely formed the short-lived Vorticist group. It was through his association with Vorticism that Gaudier-Brzeska formed his own ground-breaking maxims about sculpture, which he published in the Vorticist magazine Blast:
“Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation.
Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes.”
Henri was re-defining sculpture, using “the whole history of sculpture” as his Vortex, to give a “complete revaluation of form as a means of expression.”
As Henri slowly flourished, Sophie started to weaken. Her health was poor, and their bond constricted. While Sophie recuperated outside London, Henri enlisted in the French army. They never saw each other again.
Even on the front line, Gaudier-Brzeska sketched, carved small statues from the butt of a German rifle, and wrote down more of ideas:
With all the destruction that works around us nothing is changed, even superficially. Life is the same strength, the moving agent that permits the small individual to assert himself.
After his death, Sophie went slowly mad, and wandered the streets of London, her fingers knitting together, distraught over the loss of her love.
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska at work in his studio.
In 1972, having succeeded in establishing himself as the best and most original British director since Alfred Hitchcock, Ken Russell repaid the debt he felt he owed to Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and that slim volume by H. S. Ede, by adapting Savage Messiah for the screen. Russell made a beautiful and inspiring film, with a cracking script by poet Christopher Logue, set design by Derek Jarman, and sterling performances from Scott Antony as Henri, Dorothy Tutin as Sophie, along with Helen Mirren and Lindsay Kemp. As Joseph Lanza noted in his biography of the director, Phallic Frenzy:
...Russell draws bold battle lines between artists and society, as well as true art and commercialism…
Or, as Russell explained:
“Gaudier’s life was a good example to show that art, which is simply exploiting to the full one’s natural gifts, is really bloody hard work, misery, momentary defeat and taking a lot of bloody stick - and giving it…If you really want to show the hard work behind a work of art, then a sculptor is your best subject. I was very conscious of this in the sequence when Gaudier sculpts a statue all through the night. It’s the heart the core of the film, the most important scene to me.”
As the book Savage Messiah had inspired the young director, so Russell’s film inspired me. Though I doubt I will ever be able to pay back this debt, as Russell did so beautifully for Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
Ken Russell’a film Savage Messiah can be watched here on Veoh.
The Vorticist magazine Blast, with contributions from Gaudier-Brzeska, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, is avaiable as a PDF. Issue 1 can be found here and issue 2here.
When my friend and label-mate Michael Kentoff of the fine D.C. area band, The Caribbean posted some clips of local public-access phenomenon T.V. John Langworthy to his FB wall I wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. I liked that the line between knowingly funny and genuinely disturbed was truly blurry. So I asked Michael to try to provide some regional context and personal testimony about this hitherto unknown (to me and probably anyone else not living in the greater D.C. area) outsider artiste.
Well, you asked for it.
To the long-time local, there’s something very suburban DC about TV John Langworthy: proudly small-town yahoo just miles from the power center of the universe. It’s difficult to explain, but there he is: TV John (who is a twin!) flaunting his big-headed goofiness involuntarily and in defiance. Suburban DC or not, his similarity to other people ends there. In truth, he’s from a suburban DC on another planet. Television host, songwriter, open mic night organizer, singer, and whatever he does for a living, TV John is both obscure and conspicuous in any place at any time because he is completely and functionally in his own world – and we’re all invited!
Like his legion of fans (the number is anywhere from 17 to 17,000, I’d imagine), I stumbled across the TV John Show, which played to countless carpet-scraping jaws in the early 1990s, on local cable access. His show immediately followed The Music Shoppe, a survey of local music that was morbidly fascinating on a whole different level. Over the course of 30 cable minutes, the TV John Show usually featured two here-today-gone-later-today local performers and, the real pay-off, two lip-synced originals by the towering, flailing, smiling, gyrating host himself. He called them and still calls them “dream songs,” which, he reports, literally wake him up at night and demand to be captured on the nearest magnetic tape tout suite. Sort of like McCartney with “Yesterday” if McCartney woke up restrained by straps and safety pins to a hospital bed. Or if he awoke in a ranch-style house in Montgomery County, Maryland.
I taped a few TV John Shows and would subject unprepared friends to the late-80s video graphics, the parade of oddly matched bands, and, most importantly, to TV John himself – the dream songs and, if we were lucky, a solo comedy sketch that could only be funny somewhere deep inside the cedar closet of John’s brain. Some friendships ended – as if we were laughing at a disturbed asylum escapee, but most people cringed with delight. I, for one, always figured John was in on the joke. He both meant it for real and meant it as a gag. That was his genre (my theory).
Years later, Dave Jones and I went to see him perform with his band at the venerable Galaxy Hut in Arlington. At first sight, John was just a big, dorky guy in his 50s, smiling, chatting, drinking a beer. The most conspicuous thing about him was his giant overly-colorful silk shirt that looked like something a clown might pull endlessly from his left sleeve. Then the music started and TV John emerged – hurling around and singing in poses that almost seemed right out of pro wrestling. The normal big dork did not appear the rest of the night – TV John held sway. It was pretty magical. Definitely entertaining to the extreme. Dave and I chatted him up and showed him some video Dave shot of his set. The three of us laughed. Dave said, “Hilarious, man!” TV John, enormous face, raised two large craggly eyebrows over a giant, toothy smile and nodded, “Sure is!” Knew it.
Many more inscrutable TV John clips after the jump…
What is the through-line in this batch of tunes I’ve selected to present to you, the discerning Dangerous Minds consumer? Perhaps it’s what Brian Eno refers to as idiot glee. At least that’s the emotional state that these songs tend to evoke in yours truly. That is until the last few tracks when my stock-in-trade taste for melancholic melody and downer sentiment kicks in. Whatever, hope you enjoy being inside my head for an hour. It’s a weird place to be.
Don Van Vliet - What Are We Gonna Do With You ?
Wild Kingdom - Roma-Destiny
Shoukichi Kina - Haisai Ojisan
Rick Grossman - Mellow Heaven Clout
Bobby Brown - Hawaii Nei I’ll Miss You
Lila Downs - Pinotepa
Albert Ayler & Don Cherry - Ghosts
Aksak Maboul - A Modern Lesson
Can - Turtles Have Short Legs (original 7” version)
Vogel - Flaschenzug
Eno (with The Winkies) - Totalled (I’ll Come Running)
The Van Dyke Parks - Do Want You Wanta
T2 - J.L.T.
Toru Takemitsu - Sky, Horse and Death
Nick Lowe - Endless Sleep
Serious video bonus: The internet debut of the only video footage of the band Wild Kingdom that I know of from my personal collection of New Wave Theatre episodes. I’m truly hoping a member or two of this band will turn up and tell me where the other recordings are (or at least what the incredible drummer ended up doing!)
On new years day 1984 25 million people (myself included) throughout the world tuned in to PBS to watch video art pioneer Nam June Paik’s pleasantly shambolic live experiment Good Morning, Mr. Orwell featuring the likes of John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Glass, Salvador Dali, Laurie Anderson and other usual suspects. All hosted by a bemused and mildy annoying George Plimpton. The full version of this was once up on the mighty Ubuweb but has mysteriously disappeared, so I bring you as many fragments of said program as I could find. Watching this in retrospect it comes off as perhaps the last 60’s style large scale “happening” featuring some of that era’s major hitters and is of course very quaint seeming “We’re linking New York to Paris on live TV !”, still very enjoyable to watch.
Word from a Fab Five Freddy tweet and a post on his own MySpace blog is that New York hip-hop futurist Rammellzee has passed away at age 50 from as-yet-unrevealed causes. (@149st features a great, fact-filled interview with the man.) Emerging as a teen graffiti artist in the mid-‘70s, bombing the A-train from its last stop in his Far Rockaway, Queens hometown, Rammell ended up like many of his talented peers—a multidisciplinary creative icon submerged in the nascent metropolitan hip-hop scene. He first surfaced as a persona to the world in amazing fashion, dressed in trenchcoat and wielding a sawed-off shotgun as he MC’ed for the Rock Steady Crew in the Amphitheatre scene of hip-hop’s famous first film, 1982’s Wild Style.
Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly er, Doris) were a bloody-mindedly brilliant 80’s German post-punk band/ performance art concern, part of the self-styled Geniale Dilletanten movement (along with Einstürzende Neubauten and Malaria!) if you will. As a seemingly central tenet, manipulation of expectations is the rule, extending most fantastically to their 1984 release “Chöre & Soli” which consists not of conventionally playable records but rather a set of 8 miniature colored plastic discs and dedicated player. The sound content is limited to mere seconds per side, as befits the original use of the devices: the internal voice boxes of “talking” dolls. Needless to say these things are now rare as hen’s teeth. Anyone have a spare ?
on Varese Sarabande Records.
was conceived by 
