On the heels of Madonna’s half-time spektakular and the new M.I.A. video (torrents of Arabia), may I present the The King of Rock and Roll (the white one) immortally preserved in hi-def.
Elvis on Tour was shot during a 15 city tour of the States in 1972 and Elvis is in fine Vegas form, wearing enough bling, satin, scarves and hairspray to make Liberace look like Bon Iver. Chubbier than in his sleek ‘68 Comeback Special, Presley still puts on a dynamic, though somewhat predictable, show.
The montage (split screen) sequences were directed by Martin Scorsese. I guess the producers thought if they replicated the look of the film Woodstock that hippies would suddenly think Elvis was hip. Had The King’s handlers let him stick to his lean mean black leather look of the ‘68 Comeback Special that might have happened. Afterall, a decade or so later, Morrissey found the look compelling enough to imitate it.
I’ve always heard the expression “Don’t let me blow smoke up your ass” and never really knew where it came from. Do you?
Through hard research (Google) I found out it was actually a medical procedure used in the eighteenth century where, literally, smoke + tobacco was blown up a drowning victim’s bum to resuscitate them! Makes perfect sense, right?
Below, Stephen Fry and friends go into detail about the small bellows used to “revive” a drowned person.
Sir George Martin, Giles Martin and Dhani Harrison, listening to the multi-track master of “Here Comes The Sun,” reveal the audio channel with George Harrison’s “lost solo guitar.”
Kind of like X-raying a great painting and finding something significant underneath the surface. Sublime!
Using a silent video (from 8 mm film footage) uploaded to Vimeo by Ruby Max Fury, Clash fans synched audio from bootleg recordings to the film to re-create a sense of what it was like on the night of September 21, 1979 when the The Clash invaded New York City. The second night of a two night stand at The Palladium, this was the show where Paul Simonon made rock history when he smashed his guitar to the stage and Pennie Smith took the iconic photo that graced the cover of London Calling.
In February of ‘79, I was in the audience for The Clash’s NYC debut. Standing in the swaying balcony and watching the The Clash pummel and strafe the audience with rock so hard you could feel it in your guts, I knew instantaneously I was witnessing a band for the ages. If there had been any doubt that punk bands could play their instruments, The Clash crushed that myth beneath a barrage of tight visceral beats and lacerating guitars. It was epic. And it was very very good.
Writer Tom Carson described The Clash live sound beautifully:
The musicians’ confidence was evident at every turn. Lead guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon leaped around as if no stage could hold them; Nicky Headon’s drums cracked through the music with the authority of machine-gun fire. The group’s perfect ensemble timing - the two guitars locking horns above the percussion; the way Jones’ ethereal, incantatory backup vocals filled the gaps in Joe Strummer’s harsh leads - went beyond mere technical mastery; it was audible symbols of the band’s communal instinct.
The great painter Dorothea Tanning died yesterday in her sleep at the age of 101. Tanning, who was married for thirty years to Surrealist Max Ernst, was herself part of a small cadre of female Surrealists (Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Lee Miller, Maya Deren, Remedios Varo, and Leonor Fini) judged by history to be as equally interesting as their male counterparts.
Jerry Saltz, writing about Tanning today on Vulture:
In her memoir, we hear how she and Ernst fell in love while playing chess, how the two of them lived in Arizona before moving to France, of their double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, of her friendships with Picasso, Breton, Magritte (“sweet”), Duchamp, Tanguy, Truman Capote (“a neat little package of dynamite”), Orson Welles (“scowler”), Joseph Cornell (“the courtly love of the 13th century troubadours”), and how she designed sets and costumes for the great George Balanchine. Noting how pleased she was that Ernst never called her “wife,” she observes, “He was very sorry about that wife thing. I’m very much against the arrangement of procreation, at least for humans. If I could have designed it, it would be a tossup who gets pregnant, the man or woman. Boy, that would end rape for one thing. And ‘woman artist’? Disgusting.” She writes about being alone on a bus in Chicago and deciding, with no plans or place to live, to go on to New York. There she “ate curry powder sandwiches, took Hindu dancing, read the ‘Bhagavad-Gita’ and Emily Dickinson, impartially.” In 1936 she saw the MoMA show “Fantastic, Dada, and Surrealism” and recalled that “here, here in the museum ... are signposts so imperious, so laden, so seductive, and yes, so perverse that … they would possess me utterly.”
The material in this new volume covers an era that sprints from Beat to hippie to punk rather quickly. Some of the recipients of Burroughs’ letters at this time were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, Gregory Corso, Billy Burroughs Jr., Paul Bowles, Ian Sommerville, Alexander Trocchi and Brion Gysin.
Here’s one letter, sent to author Norman Mailer. Mailer had written to Burroughs requesting that he join the anti-war tax resistance protest against the Vietnam War.
November 20, 1967
8 Duke Street
St James
London S.W.1
England
Dear Norman,
As regards the War Tax Protest if I started protesting and refusing to contribute to all the uses of tax money of which I disap prove: Narcotics Department, FBI, CIA, any and all expenditures for nuclear weapons, in fact any expenditures to keep the antiquated idea of a nation on its dying legs, I would wind up refusing to pay one cent of taxes, which would lead to more trouble than I am pre pared to cope with or to put it another way I feel my first duty is to keep myself in an operating condition. In short I sympathize but must abstain.
The cover portrait of Burroughs is a Polaroid shot by Andy Warhol. Below, some undated footage of Burroughs and Warhol dining together sometime in the late 70s, or more likely early 1980s that was used in a BBC documentary about the Chelsea Hotel. The voice heard off-camera belongs to Victor Bockris, author of the classic book With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker and Warhol: The Biography.
Music journalist Neil Kulkarni is one of the UK’s premier writers on hip-hop. He writes regularly for the Quietus, and readers of a certain age might recognise his name from the mid-90s, when he wrote about rap, and lots of other music, for Melody Maker.
Kulkarni has recently put together a mixtape of some of his favourite hip-hop tracks from the 90s, which he stresses is “not definitive”. It features music from the well known (Ice Cube, Cypress Hill, Camp Lo, KRS-1) to the more obscure (Cru, E-Bros, Don Jagwarr), and tracks from some of the most respected names of the era (Showbiz & AG, Kwest The Madd Ladd, Gravediggaz, Nas). On his blog he reflects on the artists and the tracks featured with some amusing anecdotes like this one about Jeru The Damaja:
Nastiest fucker I ever interviewed. Straight up racist. Once he figured out I wasn’t black, [he] clammed up, got surly, treated me like I was an idiot. I may have been, but fuck you very much Jeru and thankyouforthemusic, the songs I’m singing.
Shame to hear that Jeru is/was racist, as his tunes still sound great:
Jeru The Damaja “Ya Playin’ Yaself” live @ Rust, October 2010
You can hear ‘90s Hip-Hop Vol 1’ (and download it, once logged in) over at Mixcrate.
It’s around this time that the enthusiasm started almost a month ago begins to wane, and the pages of the diary remain blank, as days dissolve into weeks. Keeping a diary is hard work, but it is rewarding work. If you’ve started a diary and want a little encouragement to keep going, or even just to start writing, then here is a personal selection of diary and journal writers, who may inspire.
Sylvia Plath kept a diary throughout her life, which reveals a world beyond her poetry. Here is Sylvia setting out on her adventures as a writer, from November 13th 1949.
As of today I have decided to keep a diary again - just a place where I can write my thoughts and opinions when I have a moment. Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen. Every day is so precious I feel infinitely sad at the thought of all this time melting farther and farther away from me as I grow older. Now, now is the perfect time of my life.
In reflecting back upon these last sixteen years, I can see tragedies and happiness, all relative - all unimportant now - fit only to smile upon a bit mistily.
I still do not know myself. Perhaps I never will. But I feel free – unbound by responsibility, I still can come up to my own private room, with my drawings hanging on the walls…and pictures pinned up over my bureau. It is a room suited to me – tailored, uncluttered and peaceful…I love the quiet lines of the furniture, the two bookcases filled with poetry books and fairy tales saved from childhood.
At the present moment I am very happy, sitting at my desk, looking out at the bare trees around the house across the street… Always want to be an observer. I want to be affected by life deeply, but never so blinded that I cannot see my share of existence in a wry, humorous light and mock myself as I mock others.
Playwright Joe Orton filled his diaries with his sexual escapades, and vignettes of the strangeness of the world, from January 18th 1967.
On the bus going home I heard a most fascinating conversation between an old man and woman. “What a thing, though,” the old woman said. “You’d hardly credit it.” “She’s always made a fuss of the whole family, but never me,” the old man said. “Does she have a fire when the young people go to see her?” “Fire?” “She won’t get people seeing her without warmth.” “I know why she’s doing it. Don’t think I don’t,” the old man said. “My sister she said to me, ‘I wish I had your easy life.’ Now that upset me. I was upset by the way she phrased herself. ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ I said. ‘I’ve only got to get on the phone and ring a certain number,’ I said, ‘to have you stopped.’” “Yes,” the old woman said, “And you can, can’t you?” “Were they always the same?” she said. “When you was a child? Can you throw yourself back? How was they years ago?” “The same,” the old man said. “Wicked, isn’t it?” the old woman said. “Take care, now” she said, as the old man left her. He didn’t say a word but got off the bus looking disgruntled.
More diaries from Jack Kerouac, Emily Carr, John Cheever, and Andy Warhol, after the jump…
French director Henry Chapier’s 1968 documentary American Summer is a companion piece to Sex-Power which DM featured a couple of months ago. What I said about that film applies to American Summer: ” Revolution has never been sexier, more romantic, existential or just plain goofy when seen through the prism of the nouvelle vague.”
In American Summer we’re confronted with a bunch of white California militants who’ve aligned themselves with the Black Panther movement during the trial of Huey Newton. The film captures a moment in which the youth movement of the Sixties was becoming restless with passive forms of resistance against the Vietnam War and civil inequality, a time in which giving peace a chance was being supplanted by a naive and relatively unrealistic notion of revolution. The ideology was becoming more radical and language more provocative, but little action was actually being taken by the children of privilege. It was mostly a theoretical revolution composed of words and salutes. “In dreams begin responsibilities”...but most of us were still dreamers.
Featuring clips from speeches given by Black Panther party militants, an interview with Black Panther Party information secretary Kathleen Cleaver, concerts, a Black Panther military parade and music by Quicksilver Messenger Service.
CSN&Y live at Wembley Stadium on September 14, 1975.
Joni Mitchell joins the group to provide harmony on “Helpless.”
The day long concert included appearances Mitchell, The Tom Scott Band, The Band and Jesse Colin Young.
The Wembley set was the last concert of the CSN&Y 1974 reunion tour and was marked by a lot of tension between the members of the group fueled by cocaine, Stills’ tenuous grip on reality and quarreling girlfriends. Young wasn’t into the drama and kept at a distance, traveling alone with his son in a camper van. But despite the animosity within the band, the show has moments of greatness.
Ossie Clark was a master cutter, who could run his hands over a figure and cut a dress to fit perfectly. He liked his dresses to lie next to the skin, nothing in between, capturing the wearer’s form, beauty and shape. Clark’s inspiration was dance, his idol was Nijinsky, and the movement, flow, and freedom of dance inspired his clothes to enhance the female form. At the height of his success, in the early 1970s, his clothes were worn by some of the world’s most beautiful women - Ali MacGraw, Patti Boyd, Gala Mitchell, Twiggy and Elizabeth Taylor. His leather jackets were worn by Keith Richard, while he designed a jump suit for Mick Jagger to wear during The Stones Exile in Main Street Tour. His favorite model, the beautiful Gala Mitchell said in 1971:
“Usually I lack confidence, but when I wear Ossie’s designs I know I’m beautiful and sexy. His clothes are like a play. I act to suit the mood of the dress. Fashion now is very sophisticated - as always Ossie had that feeling first.”
The magic of Clark’s fashion was the cut, the shape, the heart-tugging style, and the beautiful prints designed by wife Celia Birtwell. Together, Ossie and Celia brought a fabulous, ethereal beauty to fashion in the late 1960s, early 1970s, which has often been copied, but rarely equalled.
Here’s a small selection of Ossie and Celia’s fashions from German TV, circa 1969. Painting above David Hockney’s Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1971).
More of the Clark’s beautiful fashions, after the jump…
As you all know, the role for “Sonny Corleone” went to James Caan. I think Robert De Niro might have made a better “Sonny” IMHO. At least he’s part Italian.
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band filmed onstage at the 1968 Rome Pop Festival at the Palazzo Della Sport. Image how freaky these guys must’ve seemed at that time. Hell, even by today’s standards, they’re still arch freaks!
From the description on YouTube:
Paul Brown: One obscure Beefheart performance, which has been preserved on film, is the Rome Pop Festival from May 1968 - this was broadcast by the BBC on Saturday 18th May 1968. The BBC were covering it, possibly due to the influx of UK bands, ie Julie Driscoll and The Brian Auger Trinity who were headlining it and The Move who, on the third day, were the ones to incite the police and authorities to close the Festival two days early. Captain Beefheart was the only one to represent the West Coast although there were big plans to try and get a few of the larger, and possibly at the time more well known groups to attend. (But it seems Beefheart was the only one willing to attend on the money offered. Probably because they were already in Europe). The clip with Beefheart and the band shows an unknown person, it is Krasnow?, nodding his head to what sounds suspiciously like Dropout Boogie - then the camera is on-stage and the band are performing Sure Nuff ‘n’ Yes I Do. There are closeups of Don Vliet in Top Hat and Jeff Cotton in his Yellow Leather Coat and also Alex Snouffer and Jerry Handley.
The clip I managed to see was luckily, somehow, saved on Reel to Reel and, despite its length and rather poor sound, was a sight for these sore eyes. The camera pans to someone, who on first viewing I thought was Grant Gibbs, Beefheart’s manager in the early days, although it may possibly have been someone complete different. This someone looks completely oblivious to the interview and is just nodding his head to what sounded suspiciously like Dropout Boogie (old non-circulating dubbed version). Then the camera is on-stage and the band are performing “Sure Nuff ‘n’ Yes I Do.”
It ain’t long, or in sync, but take what you can get.
This is an excerpt from a longer piece. You can watch the entire BBC report from May 19th,1968 here.
Eric Hobsbawm, the prominent British Marxist historian was on BBC Newsnight earlier this month discussing the “pathological degeneration” of the Capitalist system. The eminent, 94-year-old best-selling author recently published a new book How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism.
It’s difficult to imagine a conversation like this appearing on American television, but that is what YouTube is for, isn’t it?
The North Poly student body & friends clarify their stance, 15 March 1985.
By the spring of 1985, The Jesus and Mary Chain had become the Western world’s most intriguing new band. With punk a tired memory and the charts full of “Ghostbusters” and “Say Say Say,” there was very little dynamism in pop music and very little out there to excite anyone.
Enter singer Jim and guitarist William, the spotty Reid brothers from the Glasgow suburb of East Kilbride, accompanied by bassist Douglas Hart and drummer Bobby Gillespie (who would go on to sing for Primal Scream). Signed by fellow Scot Alan McGee to his fabled Creation Records after he heard one of their sound checks, The J&MC had both a widely reported drug bust under their belts and their first single “Upside Down” firmly entrenched in the UK indie chart by the time they hit the stage at the Polytechnic of North London in the spring of 1985.
The college itself was embroiled in unrest the previous year over the lectures of National Front fascist Patrick Harrington, which engendered a threat from the Secretary of State for Education to shut the place down. So the place was in a hot mood in general.
Finally, chaotic rock noise had made it into the charts, and these geezers had a TV spot on their hands on which to sport their unique brand of soft-spoken post-punk arrogance. Now, would the crowd come through in response to their speed-drenched 20-minute headline set?
Well, well, well… Look who was PRO-medical marijuana—actually went out on a limb for it—way back before he wanted to behead people and cut off their hands for possessing it…
Here’s what Newt Gingrich wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1982:
Legal Status of Marijuana
To the Editor:
The American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs should be commended for its report, “Marijuana: Its Health Hazards and Therapeutic Potential” (1981;246:1823). Not only does the report outline evidence of marijuana’s potential harms, but it distinguishes this concern from the legitimate issue of marijuana’s important medical benefits. All too often the hysteria that attends public debate over marijuana’s social abuse compromises a clear appreciation for this critical distinction.
Since 1978, 32 states have abandoned the federal prohibition to recognize legislatively marijuana’s important medical properties. Federal law, however, continues to define marijuana as a drug “with no accepted medical use,” and federal agencies continue to prohibit physician-patient access to marijuana. This outdated federal prohibition is corrupting the intent of the state laws and depriving thousands of glaucoma and cancer patients of the medical care promised them by their state legislatures.
On Sept 16, 1981, Representative Stewart McKinney and I introduced legislation designed to end bureaucratic interference in the use of marijuana as a medicant. We believe licensed physicians are competent to employ marijuana, and patients have a right to obtain marijuana legally, under medical supervision, from a regulated source. The medical prohibition does not prevent seriously ill patients from employing marijuana; it simply deprives them of medical supervision and access to a regulated medical substance. Physicians are often forced to choose between their ethical responsibilities to the patient and their legal liabilities to federal bureaucrats.
Representative McKinney and I hope the Council will take a close and careful look at this issue. Federal policies do not reflect a factual or balanced assessment of marijuana’s use as a medicant. The Council, by thoroughly investigating the available materials, might well discover that its own assessment of marijuana’s therapeutic value has, in the past, been more than slightly shaded by federal policies that are less than neutral
Newt Gingrich
House of Representatives
Washington, DC
Fourteen years later, as House Speaker, this same hypocritical piece-of-shit would introduce the Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996, which called for executing any person caught importing just an ounce or two of high-grade marijuana (“100 usual doses” is how it was written in the legislation, which obviously didn’t pass).
What’s more, when challenged about his own admitted use of marijuana in the past, Gingrich had this to say to Wall Street Journal reporter Hilary Stout:
“That was a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era. See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”
“Okay for thee, but not for me,” sez rich, well-fed white guy. Thanks for the succinct explanation, mean old man!
Now, if you’re looking to make sense of this stuff don’t even try. He’s a Republican, ‘nuff said.
Here’s what Gingrich said at a fundraiser for fellow Georgia GOP pol Rep. Charlie Norwood in 1995:
“If you import a commercial quantity of illegal drugs, it is because you have made the personal decision that you are prepared to get rich by destroying our children. I have made the decision that I love our children enough that we will kill you if you do this.”
“I have decided”???
Imagine this asshole being allowed to decide anything of importance!
Gingrich, unable to help himself, continued:
“The first time we execute 27 or 30 or 35 people at one time, and they go around Colombia and France and Thailand and Mexico, and they say, ‘Hi, would you like to carry some drugs into the U.S.?’ the price of carrying drugs will have gone up dramatically.”
Ethan Nadlemann, the executive director of Drug Policy Action, a bipartisan advocacy group for ending the drug war called Gingrich “basically a nightmare” when it comes to drug policy issues. “For a guy who’s supposed to be an intellectual and intelligent, the quality of the argumentation on his part is embarrassing.”
As one wag quipped on the topic of Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996 at The People’s Forum:
Fortunately didn’t pass. His other proposed acts, the Serial Adultery Death Penalty Act and the Congressional Influence Peddling Death Penalty Act, unfortunately failed as well. And he reportedly killed the Fat Loudmouth Pandering Pseudo-Intellectual Death Penalty Act before it could be introduced.
Republicans whine and Republicans bitch/Our rich are too poor and our poor are too rich.
Below, Newt Gingrich shooting his big mouth off about the drug war and how the US should emulate Singapore(!) on The O’Reilly Factor as “Papa Bear” nods with approval.
Here’s something quite lovely, a tour inside of Salvador Dali’s Spanish home.
Open Culture provides some history and description:
Along the Costa Brava in northern Spain, in the little seaside village of Port Lligat, sits the house that became Salvador Dalí’s main residence in 1930. It started off as a small fisherman’s hut. Then Dalí went to work on the structure, renovating it little by little over the next 40 years, creating a living, breathing, labyrinthine home that reflects the artist’s one-of-a-kind aesthetic. Writing about the house, the author Joseph Pla once said:
The decoration of the house is surprising, extraordinary. Perhaps the most exact adjective would be: never-before-seen. I do not believe that there is anything like it, in this country or in any other…. Dalí’s house is completely unexpected…. It contains nothing more than memories, obsessions. The fixed ideas of its owners. There is nothing traditional, nor inherited, nor repeated, nor copied here. All is indecipherable personal mythology…. There are art works (by the painter), Russian things (of Mrs. Gala), stuffed animals, staircases of geological walls going up and down, books (strange for such people), the commonplace and the refined, etc.
For many, it’s a long trip to Portlligat, and only eight people can visit the house at a time. So today we’re featuring a video tour of Dalí’s Spanish home. The interior shots begin around the 1:30 mark. If you love taxidermy, you won’t be wasting your time.
Nicely photographed. But I find the music a bit distracting.
These two delightful behind the scenes videos from The Muppet Show were generously posted by an ATV cameraman who worked on the program named John O’Brien.
In the first clip, we see what The Muppet Show would have been like had they used real-life actors—well, at least the crew members—instead of puppets. Not quite the same, is it?
A little bit of fun by the crew recorded at the end of the first series/season of The Muppet Show in 1976 (I joined ATV in 1977 during Season 2) ... I am not sure who was responsible for putting this together (I suspect Peter Harris had an input) but I’m sure someone will tell me.
The cast includes Peter Harris, Richard Holloway, Jim O’Donnell, Brian Grant, Steve Springford, Jerry Hoare, Phil Hawkes, Gerry Elms, John Rook, Martin Baker, Sue Boyers, Francis Essex, Dennis Bassinger, David Chandler, Bryan Holgate, Peter Milic, Claude Walters and the ladies from the Canteen.
And then there’s the second video, which is also pretty amazing:
A behind the scenes glimpse of the Muppet Show on it’s last day of recording at the Elstree Television Studios in 1980 on which I was privileged to work as a Cameraman.
Featured is Jim Henson and Frank Oz who were the main inspiration and creative forces behind the show. Narrated by Peter Harris, one of the two directors on the show … it mostly reveals crew and cast having a very silly day as everyone said their final farewells. Richard Holloway (now Executive Producer on “The X Factor”) had been the Senior Floor Manager for the duration and it was probably inevitable that he became the victim of the flan flingers … he took it in great spirits.
This last day in Studio D was the culmination of 5 years work, fun and laughter on what was arguably the most successful Children’s Programme in the world at the time, having been sold to some 110 countries … it was the end of an era for many and the Muppets have gone on to become truly iconic.
was published in 2003.
, out this week from Ecco. 
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