I adore Meredith Monk. She has a voice like no one else. I finally got to see her live in a small recital hall in the Los Angeles Public Library six years ago. It was one of the strongest performances that I’d ever seen a single person give. She sang accompanying herself on piano or acapella. The highlight was when she did the magical Gotham Lullaby, which is probably her best known piece of music. (Bjork often performs it live; here at the Coachella Music Festival in 2002)

She also happens to stunningly beautiful, looking WAY younger than her 67 years.

Controversial director Peter Greenaway’s fantastic Meredith Monk documentary from his Four American Composers series, which also included Philip Glass, John Cage and Robert Ashley can be viewed on UbuWeb. It’s excellent. I most highly recommend it.

Below a clip from Monk’s 1988 film Book of Days. You can get a DVD at her website. There is also a new CD of her early work, including a phenomenal piece called Candy Bullets And Moon performed with Don Preston of the original Mothers of Invention out now called Meredith Monk: Beginnings
 

 
It’s Her Party: Four Decades of Meredith Monk: Underground music’s matriarch throws herself a live retrospective at the Whitney (Encore)

 
Last week at the awesome Wolfgang’s Vault website, they posted a particularly interesting historical cultural document: a recording of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the young Grateful Dead at one of the infamous Acid Test raves. From the concert summary on the website:

“As 1966 began, San Francisco was rapidly becoming the epicenter of a cultural and musical shift that would impact the world. Dance hall promoters like Bill Graham and Chet Helms were in the early stages of opening venues where local bands could perform for the throngs of young people looking to dance socialize and listen to live music. Local writer Ken Kesey and his friends (known as The Merry Pranksters) were doing the same on a smaller scale, but adding high quality LSD to the mix, which was then still legal and readily available. As Kesey’s parties, or “Acid Tests” as they were called, began attracting more and more adventurous people, it was inevitable that The Merry Pranksters parties would merge with local dance hall venues, which is exactly what happened on January 8, 1966.

On that night The Pranksters and their Acid Test house band, The Grateful Dead, descended on Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium, loading in piles of sound equipment, projectors and strobe lights and ready to turn attendees on to LSD while subjecting them to sensory bombardment. The band had literally just become The Grateful Dead, having recently changed their name from The Warlocks, and was just one component of the overall experience. Ken Kesey, strategically overseeing everything, was also plugged in to the P.A. system and could ramble stream-of-consciousness commentary over the proceedings. Various Pranksters were also equipped with roving microphones, which could be fed in and out at any time. Mass free-form creativity while under the influence was the goal. Often it was utter chaos, sometimes it was divinely inspired and for the vast majority of attendees, it was incredibly liberating to “freak freely” with others who felt the same.

While no mere audio recording could ever capture an Acid Test experience, this one does manage to capture some of the spontaneous free-formlessness and remains one of the earliest (if not the earliest) examples of a live Grateful Dead recording, when they were essentially still a cover band playing for dancers.

The recording begins with the proceedings just getting underway and not surprisingly, plenty of chaos onstage. As The Grateful Dead attempt to get the stage powered up, Captain Ken Kesey is rambling away, welcoming attendees to tonight’s journey. After several minutes of embracing absurdity, The Grateful Dead begin the slow blues of “I’m A King Bee,” sounding not too different from the early Rolling Stones, but more hypnotic. Although primitive, many of the elements of the prototype San Francisco sound are in place, from Garcia’s banjo style electric guitar picking and his use of twang bar to end his riff lines to Pigpen’s largely improvised vocal style. Garcia and Pigpen team up on lead vocals for the next number, a bouncy cover of “I’m A Hog For You Baby,” which also includes Kesey interjecting Prankster style public service announcements over the band. Although occasionally tempo-challenged, up to this point drummer Bill Kruetzman comes across as the most accomplished musician here and when others drift off, he and Phil Lesh help keep things somewhat anchored.

The musical highlight of this recording follows as The Grateful Dead play a solid 17-minute sequence consisting of Pigpen’s “Caution” segueing directly into “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” Here one can hear the promise of this band and everyone turns in a respectable performance, particularly Pigpen and Garcia, who were clearly leading the way. “Caution” soon becomes a driving hyper-jam, featuring a great early example of Garcia’s shredding technique. The “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” that follows is downright spooky, thanks in no small part to Pigpen’s organ work, which rarely gets much mention. With the band cranking away about nine minutes in, suddenly the police pull the plug!

Kesey, not one to miss an opportunity for increasing the absurdity, announces “The chief security agent has taken over and has pulled the plug on the band! Completely nullifying the engines!” Several other roving microphones are also heard, including what sounds like an instantaneous tape loop of a police officer saying “Clear the house! The dance is over!” Many humorous and sarcastic comments are heard eminating from the stage as well as the room, while Bob Weir begins baiting the cops with a spontaneous monologue. As the police converge on the stage, several people begin belting out a hideously off-key rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” just to needle the police a little more. Amidst grumbling and noise, the tape runs out with a commentary from Jerry Garcia, who exclaims, “In the end, its nothing but mindless chaos. Good old mindless chaos, hassling, ever hassling…”

 
Sassy Lou Reed interview shot during the Sally Can’t Dance/Rock & Roll Animal phase in Australia, 1974. Reed is clearly having fun toying with the reporters on the topics of drugs (he’s for them), transvestism (sometimes) and what he spends his money on (drugs).
 

 
Many rock fans are aware that Don van Vliet AKA Captain Beefheart gave up making music many years ago to paint full-time, but have they seen the paintings? Van Vliet is one of the world’s finest abstract expressionists. This modern master of the off-kilter’s uniquely feral output is as powerful as Jean Michel Basquiat’s work and has been shown in many countries to great acclaim. There are several monographs about his artwork, most notably the highly coveted Stand Up to be Discontinued, which can sell for over $500 these days on ABE Books (I got mine for $75 back in the day). The above image, known as Fur On The Trellis and Just Up Into The Air (1985) is on the cover. In real life this painting is over nine feet tall.

The Captain Beefheart Radar Station website, the best place for all things Beefheartian on the Internet has a very large gallery of Van Vliet’s visual work, from the 60s to today. It’s absolutely worth your time to click through it. The images are startling and memorable. One thing to keep in mind as you look at them is to consider that most of the paintings (the ones I’ve seen at least) are absolutely huge. They’re really impressive in person.

Here are a few great Captain Beefheart clips from YouTube. There’s a lot of amazing Beefheart material there, including the complete BBC documentary The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart narrated by the late BBC radio master, John Peel, in good quality, a nervous appearance on Letterman and a TV commercial made for Lick My Decals Off Baby.
 

 
Rare footage of the late, great Lester Bangs ripping on Bryan Ferry, Emerson Lake and Palmer and calling for new something new musically in the mid-70s. Must be out-takes from All You Need Is Love documentary.

 
As the kids say, WTF?
via Alex G., gracias hermano !

 
Dangerous Minds pal Joseph Matheny of Alterati fame, has produced a trio of new Robert Anton Wilson related releases on audio CDs and DVD and you can get a discount by ordering all three at publisher Original Falcon and get The Insiders Guide to Robert Anton Wilson thrown into the mix for free. The DVD lecture, titled The “I” in the Triangle discusses the Western Hermetic tradition, Aleister Crowley, Jean Cocteau, extraterrestrials from Sirius and various conspiracy theories, And then there are the audio CDs, one a document of T.A.Z. A Night of Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism that took place on February 6th, 1993, the 2-disc set also features Rob “Real Astrology” Brezsny, Hakin Bey (his speech is great), physicist Nick Herbert, Joseph Matheny and Bob Wilson, who is in fine form here. The other disc is The Lost Studio Session that features a long intimate conversation with Bob.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Infinity Factory: Robert Anton Wilson, Genesis P-Orridge and me

 
I recently acquired *cough, from Demonoid, cough* a quadraphonic version (i.e. 4-channel) of The Worst of Jefferson AIrplane and their Volunteers set in 4-channel audio as well. Originally released during the heyday of Quad (which was approximately 1974 to 1976) on 8-track and reel to reel tapes (for the more discerning audiophile) these rarely heard versions of some of the Airplane’s best-loved songs are phenomenal. As a very hardcore fan of the band since I was a kid, I really got off on hearing something new in the music I was already so very, very familiar with. On Volunteers, three—count ‘em—three songs are totally different from the album versions. Not different mixes, but substantially different versions which would have been lost to history due to the outdated format. (Although they were included on the excellent Jefferson Airplane Loves You box set, these tracks sound way better in their original quadraphonic glory, not bounced down to stereo. Hey Fredrick has a completely different lead vocal, Volunteers is totally different, I think it was even recorded on a different day from the original, and The Farm is also a lot different).

But the best song of all to hear in Quad was Lather. It sounds fantastic and there is an incredibly cool Philip Glass-style ostinato that Grace Slick is doing on the piano that has never been clear and audible in any version of this song I’ve ever heard before (and lord knows the JA catalog has been released in as many crappy permutations as their RCA label mate, Elvis’s catalog, has). It’s always been there, you just couldn’t hear it like this.

It’s fascinating for me to see the (rapid) flowering of an audiophile underground in Bit Torrent land. Anonymous professional and amateur audio engineers are buying up the original Quad tapes from the 70s on Ebay, restoring and refurbishing their old quadraphonic gear and then transferring these old tapes to Pro Tools, and then into DVD ISO files that you can burn with Toast. The ones made from the reel to reel tapes are by far the best, but even the ones made from 8-tracks are still pretty cool to hear, even in a lower fidelity.

Why doesn’t the music industry (specifically a label like Shout Factory, who would do the best job) look into what people are obviously quite interested in on the torrent trackers—especially the Russian ones— and get some ideas of what they still might actually purchase on disc (i.e. multi-channel versions of classic rock albums). A few of the original Quad mixes have actually been put out on DVD-A or SACD, such as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (amazing) as well as Black Sabbath’s Paranoid (also amazing). For the most part, however, they only see the light of day on torrent trackers via these inspired hobbyists.

But back to the Jefferson Airplane. Below is an odd lip-sync’d performance of Lather from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Who else would on television then would have let Grace Slick get away with this?!?!
 

 
I’ve (finally) been devouring On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno and working my way through the lesser known nooks and crannies of the man’s mid 70’s output. One of the most pleasing discoveries so far has been Lady June’s Linguistic Leprosy. Recorded in ‘74, released in ‘75, it’s a very psychedelic spoken word-driven LP recorded in Kevin Ayers’ living room with a heavy assist from Eno in all his suitcase synth tweaking /tape manipulating glory. Lady June (1931-1999) was a much beloved UK prog scene fixture (it was her apartment’s 4th story window that Robert Wyatt fell from, rendering him paraplegic in 1973) and her work here is wonderful. She, Ayers and Eno make a great, unlikely team. She’s even graceful enough, in consideration of her company, to go non-verbal for many long spacy stretches. That’s my kind of spoken word LP.
 

 
Vivienne Westwood’s pointedly anti-consumerist remarks backstage at London Fashion Week after her big show were taken by some as more “dotty” remarks by the great British designer, but they didn’t seem that way to me. Yes, there is certainly a, uh, tension between showing a new collection of clothes and then telling everyone assembled not to buy them, but do you think Westwood doesn’t know that?

And besides, since when is the pure act of telling the truth, somehow dotty in the first place? Have I missed something here? The woman’s 1000% correct. She should be commended for her commitment to the future of mankind—and speaking with common sense—and not mocked.

I actually met her once about ten years ago and she was a trip. My close friend Oberon Sinclair was doing some PR work for the opening of the Westwood boutique in New York and there was a big sit down dinner for a lot of people. Westwood didn’t know a lot—if any—of the people present and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who I attended the dinner with, gallantly and sweetly, sat down with Westwood to put her at ease. So I was along for the ride and we sat across from her for about two hours and she was a delight, if a little non-sequitur at times. (Not a judgement, just a description. People must say that about me all the time…)

One-of-a-kind designer Vivienne Westwood Sunday night presented a gorgeous collection of autumn and winter outfits at London Fashion Week, then went backstage and told reporters she hopes people stop buying her clothes.

“Stop all this consumerism,” said Westwood, the former high priestess of punk who has increasingly used her catwalk shows to spotlight her concern about climate change.

“I just tell people, stop buying clothes. Why not protect this gift of life while we have it? I don’t take the attitude that destruction is inevitable. Some of us would like to stop that and help people survive,” she said.

 
Below is part one of Dame Westwood’s interview on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross last year. I thought she was fucking awesome when I saw this. Part II is here. Both parts are well worth watching. When is the last time you heard a public figure speak this passionately about something?
 

 
Westwood Condemns Consumerism After London Show (ABC News)
 
Vivienne Westwood meets James Lovelock on video (Dazed Digital)

 
Whenever the discussion of a “favorite” movie comes up, my eyes glaze over. I’ve seen so many films that when pressed, exactly none of them stand out as a particular favorite. Not one. But when the favorite album question gets asked, Nick Cave’s first post-Birthday Party solo outing, From Her to Eternity comes immediately to mind.

To say that this album was a significant soundtrack to my ill-spent youth is a bit of an understatement. I listened to this record obsessively. I was a huge Birthday Party fan, but From Her to Eternity absolutely captivated my imagination. It was the most intelligent, most literate, most criminally insane rock music I’d ever heard, a quantum leap past everything else that was happening at the time. At the tail end of the post punk era, when once great bands—like the Psychedelic Furs, PiL and Ultravox to name but three—had lost their mojos in disheartening ways, Nick Cave became the standard bearer of intellectual cool in my late teen years. Talk about a dangerous mind, I thought Nick Cave was the baddest motherfucker alive.

True story: For the better part of 1983 and all of 1984, I lived in the south London neighborhood of Brixton. Today it’s a trendy area, but then it was anything but gentrified, its residents consisting of mostly poor West Indian immigrants, dreadlocked rastas and a small subset of squatters and junkies from all across the globe. I loved it there. One night I was exiting the Brixton tube station with my friend Sam when we were accosted by none other than Nick Cave, looking very much worse for wear, who politely asked us if we could direct him to where he could find some smack, please. (In truth, Cave didn’t ask “us,” he asked Sam, who looked all gothy and weird while I looked like what I was, a preppy, 18-year old American kid. He wasn’t addressing me at all, I was just standing there.)

Sam kindly pretended not to know who Cave was—oh we knew—just shook his head no and kept going. When we walked up the stairs and out of the station, he turned to me and said “That’s the second time he’s asked me that.”

I have always prided myself on my ability to be at the right place at the right time…

Cut to 1986. CDs had been on the market for a couple of years, but at that time it was still all stuff like Billy Joel, Tina Turner and Phil Collins that got released on the format. I was stomping around New York City with a Sony Walkman clamped to my ears and I was slowly beginning to understand the concept of hi-fidelity audio. I was curious about CDs, but there wasn’t that much there to lure me in just yet. Finally things I cared about started slowly trickling in, but it wasn’t until Kicking Against the Pricks, Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s third outing, an all covers collection, came out, that I decided to bite the bullet and buy a CD player (which used to cost $500!). If Kicking Against the Pricks on CD could sound even better than it did on the cassette version I’d been listening to, then sign me up.

The first 3 CDs I bought were Kicking Against the Pricks, Nancy Sinatra’s The Hit Years comp and the first Psychedelic Furs album. Later that day, eager to hear more of this newfangled digital audio, I bought Marc Almond’s Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters, Julian Cope’s World Shut Your Mouth and John Zorn’s Morricone tribute, The Big Gundown.

Cut to December 2009. Since about 2002 I had been buying multi-channel SACD and DVD-A audio discs, but since I had only a stereo system—a really good one, I should add—I was just able to listen to the two channel versions of some of my favorite classic albums, but never the 5:1 mixes. Once again it was hearing that the Nick Cave catalog was coming out, remastered and in 5:1 that caused me to get antsy about upgrading the audio gear to a surround system. I’d managed to keep a lid on my once unparalleled ability to buy massive amounts of CDs for a good 3-4 years now and my lovely, but financially cautious wife, agreed to loosen the pursestrings for a major refurbishment of the home entertainment electronics.

Since it would be ridiculous for me to “review” an album I’ve already told you at the outset is probably my top, top favorite record, I’ll spare you the middle-aged fanboy rhapsodizing and instead concentrate (mostly) on the matter of the “Okay, I already own this CD, do I need to buy it again?” equation. In my case, in the past, I have purchased the album, the audio cassette and the CD of From Her to Eternity. The CD has always sounded amazing, how much better could it get?

Mute Records has been redoing certain major artists’ back catalogs (Depeche Mode, Can, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) with significant sonic upgrades in recent years. They do a consistently great job and these audiophile editions are quite good value for the consumer, especially ones with the high end audio systems to fully appreciate what’s on offer. It’s these consumers who are, let’s face it, just about the only dependable audience left anymore for the purchase of actual discs and it’s good business for Mute to cater to them. Aside from the new King Crimson releases (which sound amazing), Mute’s refurbishment of the Nick Cave catalog is one of the few major efforts in the audiophile arena, at least for pop music, this year or last. Jazz and classical see quite a few SACD, DTS and DVD-A releases each year, but the rock and pop category fewer and fewer. The pop marketplace seems largely to have abandoned the space. Even the Stones and Dylan SACDs have been replaced now with standard “red book” CDs. Considering that the Stones SACDs can rarely be found for less than $80 these days, used, it shows, once again, how short-sighted most of the record industry is. Then again it is the record industry, isn’t it? Visionary business practices are hardly what we’ve come to expect.

Which is what makes the Mute Nick Cave reissues all the more worth savoring. To answer the question posed above, are they worth buying even if you already own them on CD, the answer is a strong yes. They did a fine, fine job on these reissues, each one a 2 disc set, consisting of the album on a regular CD to play in the car or rip to iTunes, and a DVD with fantastic multi-channel versions of the album, in both Dolby 5:1 and DTS. As objects, they’re quite sweet to unwrap. Each of the albums comes in an ultra glossy gatefold sleeve with intelligent liner notes by Amy Hanson and graphics faithful to the original releases, but better. There is a multi-part documentary spread out over the span of the catalog called Do You Love Me Like I Love You directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. Key members of Cave’s orbit, well-known fans and writers—everyone but Cave himself (and Anita Lane)—are interrogated under harsh lighting not unlike a forensics video. Watching this film before listening to the music really whet my appetite to hear it afresh.

For an album that had always sounded so amazing, no matter what format, the improvement in sound quality would have to go some way, by my own personal subjective standards, to move the needle much on my jaded audiophile reviewer’s scale. When I got to the choice of which surround mode to listen in, I chose the Dolby 5:1 because it generally sounds better to me than DTS. 

Simply put, the immersive aural experience of the multi-channel version of From Her to Eternity—supervised by Mick Harvey from the original recordings by Flood—blew my doors off. To stand inside the violent maelstrom of sound that is the Bad Seeds, with Blixa Bargeld’s anarchic slide guitar in that speaker, the skull-cracking thwap of the drums coming from behind, the rumble of Barry Adamson’s bass in the subwoofer, and hear it like you were in the studio with them, is something awesome and fearful to behold. The album is heavily percussive—whether the drums, piano, vibes or the guitars—there is a lot of banging on this record. If anyone knows how to record percussion, it’s Flood (who subsequently worked with U2 and Depeche Mode). The extra channels of audio give even more room ambiance and “air” around the various instruments. Far greater nuance is achieved here than would be possible in a stereo mix. The album is rife with moments where a sonic crack appears in the proceedings, and something crawls into your ear for a split second before scurrying off into the floorboards. Listening to From Her to Eternity in multi-channel caused me to think of the way Stockhausen often used a moment of dissonance to capture listener’s attention, although I doubt he was an influence here.

The real test came for me with the final song, A Box for Black Paul. An enigmatic narrative about the final resting place for a Baudelaire-esque character, when someone asks ‘what’s your favorite song?’ this one, like the album it’s from, comes in at my #1 spot. It’s the final tour de force on an album consisting of one wildly uncompromising tour de force after another. I stood in the middle of the room, in the multi-channel “sweet spot,” as it were, and listened. A Box for Black Paul is not a piece of music that anyone could listen to casually. It was stunning, exquisite. The sustain on Cave’s piano and the close-mike recording of his vocals truly sounded like you were in the room with him during the performance. By the time its nearly ten minutes long running time had elapsed, I was limp, exhausted and exhilarated.

And that brings me to my final point about the new version of From Her to Eternity and why it is worth acquiring this edition even if you already own the admittedly already great sounding earlier CD. Although I stated at the outset of this essay that it was the first thing that came to mind when someone asked me what my favorite album was, it’s not something that, after 26 years, I pull out and listen to all that much. By offering the consumer such a rich package, the documentary, the extra tracks, the substantial liner notes, it achieves what releases of this sort should achieve, and that is to say, it allows the deep fan the chance to really immerse themselves in the music again and to hear it with fresh ears, like the first time they heard it. I must have played this album 30 times all the way through since I got it and when you can hear new things in music that is meaningful to you personally, this is a fun, great thing and actually worth supporting with your hard earned dough. I find it pretty difficult to get a hard-on for buying a regular CD anymore—I don’t care who it’s by—but I do find myself actually returning to the record stores and Amazon these days to look for multi-channel releases. If the record industry gets smart and starts to look at Mute’s quality repackaging of its major artists back catalogs as a model to emmulate, maybe just maybe, they’ll coax more middle-aged rock snobs like myself back into the record stores. I wouldn’t bet on that happening or anything (!) but Mute should be singled out and commended for actually giving music fans a real value for their money.

In the coming weeks I’ll be discussing the rest of last year’s Nick Cave releases leading up to the releases of Tender Prey, The Good Son and Henry’s Dream by Mute this spring.
 

 
Michael O’Donoghue, AKA Mr. Mike, the demented writer and performer from the “original cast” era of SNL was the man who made comedy dangerous. He was often seen on the show doing imitations of famous show biz people (nice-guy talk show host Mike Douglas, singer Tony Orlando) after they’d had 6-inch spikes shoved into their eyes, and telling his creepy “Least Loved Bedtime Tales.” (Sample title: The Little Train That Died).

Before SNL, O’Donoghue wrote for the National Lampoon, where he published “The Churchwill Wit” a portion which is below. I recall falling out of my chair, laughing, when I first read this:

Churchill was known to drain a glass or two and, after one particularly convivial evening, he chanced to encounter Miss Bessie Braddock, a Socialist member of the House of Commons, who, upon seeing his condition, said, “Winston, you’re drunk.” Mustering all his dignity, Churchill drew himself up to his full height, cocked an eyebrow and rejoined, “Shove it up your ass, you ugly cunt.”

When the noted playwright George Bernard Shaw sent him two tickets to the opening night of his new play with a note that read: “Bring a friend, if you have one,” Churchill, not to be outdone, promptly wired back: “You and your play can go fuck yourselves.”

At an elegant dinner party, Lady Astor once leaned across the table to remark, “If you were my husband, Winston, I’d poison your coffee.”
“And if you were my wife, I’d beat the shit out of you,” came Churchill’s unhesitating retort.

Below the first 5 minutes from Michael O’Donoghue’s seldom seen cult item Mr. Mike’s Mondo VIdeo. This was originally made for NBC. Imagine what the execs there thought when they saw this:

 
I have no idea if the new Devo album will be any good, but this ultra-snotty new promo clip gives me a wee bit of hope.

 
Austrian millionaire Karl Rabeder wants to give away everything he owns. And he means everything, He’s actively in the process of divesting himself of over $6 million dollars of his wealth and look at him. Look at the expression on his face. Look at his smile! THIS is something money cannot buy… enlightenment.

“My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come.”

Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck. His entire proceeds are going to charities he set up in Central and Latin America, but he will not even take a salary from these. “For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness,” he said. “I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years,” said Mr Rabeder.

But over time, he had another, conflicting feeling. “More and more I heard the words: ‘Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life’,” he said. “I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need. I have the feeling that there are lot of people doing the same thing.”

However, for many years he said he was simply not “brave” enough to give up all the trappings of his comfortable existence. The tipping point came while he was on a three-week holiday with his wife to islands of Hawaii.

“It was the biggest shock in my life, when I realised how horrible, soulless and without feeling the five star lifestyle is,” he said. “In those three weeks, we spent all the money you could possibly spend. But in all that time, we had the feeling we hadn’t met a single real person – that we were all just actors. The staff played the role of being friendly and the guests played the role of being important and nobody was real.”

He had similar feelings of guilt while on gliding trips in South America and Africa. “I increasingly got the sensation that there is a connection between our wealth and their poverty,” he said.

Suddenly, he realised that “if I don’t do it now I won’t do it for the rest of my life”.

Mr Rabeder decided to raffle his Alpine home, selling 21,999 lottery tickets priced at just £87 each. The Provence house in the village of Cruis is on sale at the local estate agent. All the money will go into his microcredit charity, which offers small loans to Latin America and builds development aid strategies to self-employed people in El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile.

Since selling his belongings, Mr Rabeder said he felt “free, the opposite of heavy”. But he said he did not judge those who chose to keep their wealth. “I do not have the right to give any other person advice. I was just listening to the voice of my heart and soul.”

 
The late, great Derek Bailey was the Grandaddy of all extended guitarists. It’s safe to say that he completely re-invented the instrument and succeeded in getting up the noses of jazz snobs everywhere (check the pathetic comments) with his seemingly random, atonal approach. But listen carefully and discover an entirely personal and fluid vocabulary utterly removed from convention.

 
Here’s a stellar trio recording with his fellow free-improv giants, Evan Parker and Han Bennink :

 
And finally, here’s the man himself describing his approach far better than any lousy critic ever could.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds : Masters of the Extended Guitar, Part One: Fred Frith

 
Have you been keeping up with Scott Timberg’s excellent multi-part article about Philip K. Dick’s time spent in the most conservative county—that would be the O.C.—in America? From part 3:

Orange County, he wrote, was far to the south of us, an area so reactionary to us that in Berkeley it seemed like a phantom land, made of the mists of dire nightmare Orange County, which no one in Berkeley had ever actually seen, was the fantasy at the other end of the world, Berkeley opposite.

Kidding aside, there were certainly times when suburban SoCal, and life as a married father, didn’t satisfy him. I hadn’t realized before how [expletive] dumb and dull and futile and empty middle-class life is, he wrote in a 1975 letter. I have gone from the gutter (circa 1971) to the plastic container.

Dick’s supposed paranoia didn’t wane during these years: As often happened, the culture and American history caught up with him. Dick was fond of pointing out that the Watergate trials validated his obsession with conspiracy. Tessa, who is hoping to run for Congress as a Libertarian, says that his distrust of the government and fear of the police state increased during his decade in Southern California.

Lethem, editor of Dick’s Library of America volumes, called this a period where he seems less grounded in place. From the evidence of Dick’s work, Lethem said, it’s a time of very strong alienation from any real environment it’s about Disneyland, about condos where you park your car under the building, where you barely get to know your neighbors. It was about Nixon. It’s almost like Dick was a spy in Orange County a mole within the culture.

 
Philip K. Dick, an uneasy spy inside 1970s suburbia (Hero Complex/Los Angeles Times)

 
First Zinn, now my second favorite literary recluse, J.D. Salinger.  Given Salinger’s nonexistent output since Hapworth 16, 1924, the broad strokes were probably written years ago, but here’s a snip from today’s obit in the New York Times:

J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years.  He was 91.

Mr. Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. Despite having broken his hip in May, the agency said, his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel The Catcher in the Rye, the collection Nine Stories and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.

Catcher was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you?Ñ¢ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Previously on Dangerous Minds: Salinger On Why Catcher Will Never Be A Movie

J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author, Dies at 91

 
Sad to hear this:

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist “A People’s History of the United States” became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favourite of such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87.

Zinn died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, California, daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said. The historian was a resident of Auburndale, Massachusetts.

Howard Zinn, author of ‘People’s History’ and left-wing historian, dies at 87 in California

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has a new show opening on January 31 Renwick Gallery in New York City. (Apologies for earlier post which misidentified show as being in Washington, D.C.)

Renwick Gallery is pleased to present Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is?¢‚Ǩ¬¶ A LOVE STORY a split exhibition of new works by Daniel Albrigo and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. This is the artists?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ first exhibition at Renwick Gallery.

The exhibition Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is?¢‚Ǩ¬¶ A LOVE STORY takes as its catalyst the power of synchronicity. Some bonds go beyond the accepted, expected and understood limits of collaboration. It is a common occasion for two individuals to allocate a respective portion of themselves to be shared, however it is only during the rarest of occasions that two bodies can blend so explosively as to leave no trace of their being discreet from the other. Dream of a venn diagram where the two circles don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t simply overlap at their centers, but orbit around one another, creating ongoing eclipses with the immeasurable dimensionality of two mirrors staring into one another.

During Genesis Breyer P-Orridge four decade long revolutionary path through the underground and the avantgarde what has emerged as one of h/er most outstanding and ongoing subjects is the malleability of forms and formats. P-Orridge has developed a virtuosity for collage to take advantage of the pervasive malleability. Breyer P-Orridge collages life and society in all scales from the micro material of the printed image to the macro ontological classifications of gender. The supposedly a priori motifs of taste and decorum, the clich?ɬ© hierarchies of power, and the trite logic of composition have all be previously arranged according to an order that is arbitrary at best and oppressive at worst. Breyer P-Orridge has taken courageous and experimental leaps to redistribute these sequences and sensibilities of culture.

View the Full Press Release Here (Link fixed also.)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Interview with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Parts 1, 2

Thee Psychick Bible Now Out!