So what are the lessons learned coming out of the Iowa Caucuses?
Well, for one, only 5.4% of eligible voters even gave a shit. Despite all of the images we’ve seen in the media for nearly a year of the GOP hopefuls doing the “retail politics” routine apparently required in the state, just about one out of every twenty Iowans cared enough to caucus. Would you say that indicates an extreme “enthusiasm gap” on the part of Republican voters?
It’s quite difficult to spin 94.6% of your peeps staying home, isn’t it? Some portion of that 5.4% were Democrats and independent voters, too, of course.
And how to explain away that 75% of those most committed Republicans, the ones who, you know, actually made it to the polls, didn’t vote for the “winner,” Mitt Romney? To me that was the main takeaway from the Iowa vote. It was a total confirmation of the whole “anybody but Romney” sentiment we’ve heard so much about.
The reason I’ve never really written much about Mitt Romney here is simply that I don’t take him seriously. I could run through a litany of reasons why I hate him (such as the fact that he was a Richie Rich draft dodger living in a CASTLE IN FRANCE during the Vietnam War who himself protested anti-war protesters!Okay for thee (to die) but not for me, eh Mittens? There’s a special place in Hell for people like Mitt Romney) but I can sum up why Romney will either not make it to the nomination in the first place, or what will ultimately be THE reason Obama will win if Romney does end up running against him: Mitt Romney is a Mormon. And this is America, which means he might just as well be a Scientologist. Christian voters will simply stay home faced with the choice of Obama vs a Mormon, which is how the Democrats will frame the election: Obama vs. the fruitcake.
Romney the “weird religion guy” isn’t gonna win. It’s a blunt truth. It ain’t gonna happen. Nuff said.
I think James Carville got it exactly right when he compared the way Republican voters feel about Romney to a dog that keeps spitting up a pill that’s being shoved down its throat. His hilarious line was worthy of Mark Twain or H.L. Mencken:
I fully expect Romney to be burnt to a crisp by the time of convention. Republicans, as noted by Rick Perlstein at Crooks and Liars, tend to always nominate the “next in line,” but they’re also not supposed to speak ill of one another (Reagan’s so-called “11th Commandment”). The heir apparent this year will arrive DOA before the delegates even vote.
And then there’s Newt himself. Talk about a no-hoper. Everyone hates this guy. Just look at him. Even if you are a Republican, do you want to see his face daily for four years? Neither does anyone else. If there was a devastating nuclear war and the President, his entire cabinet, every sitting member of Congress and every single ranking member of the military were dead and Newt came forward, just like his inspiration, Winston Churchill, and selflessly offered to lead a tattered and broken nation, the nearest person with a gun and a lick of sense would shoot the guy in the fucking face without a moment’s hesitation!
He’s not going to be the leader of anything, except for a Shriner’s clown car parade. He’s not even worth getting irate about. He’s just what he is. Within a few months he’ll slink back under the rock of his old Fox News gig. I’d give 50/50 odds that nasty Newt will be doing live GOP convention coverage for the “fair and balanced” news network.
Rick Santorum? Well, what can you say about a guy who no one in Iowa paid any attention to whatsoever until a few days before the vote? The only thing Santorum had going into the eve of the Iowa vote over his better known opponents is that he isn’t named “Mitt Romney” and that the rest of them were already known quantities. He was the next logical benefactor of the “anybody but Mitt Romney” vote.
Outside of the US, in Norway, this is how they already view Rick Santorum, who most of the rest of the world is hearing about for the very first time:.
“God bless America,” all of you “foreigners” are thinking, aren’t you? We make you feel good about your politicians, don’t we?
Moving right along, I’ve already written about Ron Paul (and despite what some readers seem to think, I’ve not in any way changed or revised my opinion of the man for over two decades) but in brief, if this is a horse-race, he’s the one with “big mo” coming out of Iowa, not Romney and certainly not Santorum.
Michele Bachmann finally realized that God actually wasn’t calling her to run for President. Someone garbled the message when they wrote it down. Rick Perry? Who cares? I’ll just write “blah blah blah” about him.
Oh, I’m forgetting Jon Huntsman… like everyone else did. He should take a hint and a vow of silence for a few months if he wants the same deal Santorum got. Who knows, he might end up as the most credible VP pick after the Mexican standoff of the rest of the GOP primary season and this might be what he’s been angling for this go ‘round to begin with.
And just in time, because we’ve all missed him so much, one of the biggest idiots ever to foist himself onto the American political stage in our great nation’s history of political idiocy, HERMAN CAIN, IS BACK! That’s right comedy fans, Cain told Sean Hannitty (who else still cares about him?) on Fox News that he, just like Sarah Palin before him, is going to do his desperate and pathetic “Hey, look at ME” routine patriotic “duty” and take the “Cain’s Solutions Revolution” bus tour across this wonderful land of ours to push for his “ideas” as “articulated” in his “9-9-9” flat tax plan.
And Fox News will be there, too, no doubt!
[Note: NOTHING that you have read above should be misconstrued as support for the Democrats. I hate them, too. I just hate Republicans more.]
Billy Wilder spent 7 years with his co-writer I. A. L. Diamond working on the script of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. The finished film originally lasted over 3 hours, but the studios panicked over the failure of such long form films (Doctor Doolittle with Rex Harrison, and Star! with Julie Andrews and Michael Craig) and demanded cuts. The film was hacked down to an acceptable 93 minutes. Diamond didn’t speak to Wilder for almost a year
It was a terrible act of vandalism that robbed cinema of one of its greater Holmes, as portrayed by Robert Stephens. It was also bizarre that Wilder, who believed in the primacy of the word, allowed his script to be so drastically altered, turning what was an original meditation on Holmes into a mildly distracting caper. In the process we lost Wilder and Diamond’s analysis of Holmes not as just a fictional creation, but in comparison to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The clues are all there to be found. Let’s start with the casting, Stephens, who was one of the most gifted and brilliant actors of his generation - who sadly only graced the screen in a handful of films: scene-stealing in A Taste of Honey, adding flesh to the boney The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and as the BFI states, “sublime” in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Stephens was stage actor, the heir apparent to Laurence Olivier, indeed a far better actor than Olivier, who depended for success by flirting with the audience - Olivier could never be bad as he needed, demanded, the love of his audience.
When Wilder cast Stephens, the actor asked the great director:
‘“How do you want me to play it for the movie,” I asked Billy. “You must play it like Hamlet. And you must not put on one pound of weight. I want you to look like a pencil.” So, that’s the way we did The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.’
The game’s afoot on ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’, after the jump…
Reading through some of the year-end “summing up” articles appearing around the blogsphere post-Christmas/pre-New Years, there seems to a general consensus—right, left and all parts between—that if 2011 was an “interesting” year, then 2012, with a US presidential election as its centerpiece, should be a real firecracker. This year we had an Arab Spring, full-scale burn-shit-to-the-ground riots in England, a crisis in the Euro-zone, the re-awakening of the labor movement in Wisconsin and Ohio, Occupy Wall Street…yes, it was a, um, novel year, indeed.
We keep hearing that 2012 will = “the next 1968”—but if that’s true, did 2011 = the Summer of Love???
What’s love got to do with it?
Or is there something else entirely going on? (And no, I am not referring to the fucking Mayan Calendar running out, okay? There’ll be none of that around here…)
I think people are simply starting to wake up to which side of the fork they’re on.
And nothing less… That’s a very big deal for mankind, most who would rather not think about such matters.
Even for dummies who only get their “facts” from Fox News or talk radio, enough… ah… “reality” is still slipping through the cracks that it’s becoming harder and harder to remain ignorant of how the financial elites have left the world in economic ruin.
It’s not like you can blame this shit on the unions, illegal aliens or the budget deficit anymore, no matter what Fox News or Rush Limbaugh tells you. That entire worldview is leaking water.
Looking back on 2011, personally, the thing that I found the most astonishing—at least in terms of the media, which is all there really is anymore, right? I mean that in a Lacanian sense and in every other sense, too—is how so many mainstream commentators have taken it upon themselves to crank the rhetoric of “class war” up to 11.
It used to be that—how shall I put this—drumming up support for “the revolution” was not done in polite company. What is today casually said on television (and applauded) could have gotten you blacklisted—or worse—in the 1950s.
Nope, it used to be that unless you went out and looked for, you know, “left wing rhetoric,” it just didn’t come find you. Or you didn’t discover it by accident. And certainly not by accident in your own home. It was something you basically got from sources like ‘zines and punk rock records.
This was true up until fairly recently. This year, however, things changed in a big way and you could see and hear reasonable-seeming people making reasonable-sounding arguments for beheading stock brokers in the opinion pages of the major daily newspapers on cable TV.
Personally, I think it’s about time that, say, Jello Biafra’s politics became mainstream. As far as I am concerned, it’s taken long enough already… but make no mistake about it, it is happening.
There is a particularly good example of what I am talking about written by novelist and financial reporter, Michael Thomas and published at Newsweek/The Daily Beast. Thomas is no wide-eyed leftie or aging punk rocker, he’s a 75-year-old man who has lived his life at an especially high vantage point, one that makes him able to understand how the world really works: He was a partner in Lehman Brothers, where he worked for 30 years. He writes for the New York Times, WSJ, and the New Yorker. He’s got some hard-fought wisdom to share with us and it doesn’t sound all that different from what we’re hearing on the street level, too.
Is it significant when a former partner in Lehman Bros. publicly predicts, and indeed seems to support, a retroactive confiscation of Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains? I sure think it is, because it’s starting to look like common sense when there are these bastards living in gated mansions in Connecticut and upstate New York while entire families are living in their cars. What did Huey Long say in his famous “Every Man a King” speech? Oh yeah:
How may of you remember the first thing that the Declaration of Independence said? It said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that there are certain inalienable rights of the people, and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and it said, further, “We hold the view that all men are created equal.”
Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all me were created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10,000,000,000 and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing?
Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children’s children could ever dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?
That was not the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that all men are created equal of “That we hold that all men are created equal.”
Now was it the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that they held that there were certain rights that were inalienable—the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is that right of life, my friends, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120,000,000 people?
It’s taken a while, but nearly 80 years after Long said those words, the consensus position is anger. The default conventicle, only now beginning to be discussed in public, is becoming retribution. (And please don’t mistake my position here as advocating anything—even if I would advocate or otherwise support something like this because I most certainly would/do—I’m merely trying to make the case that this is something likely to become one of THE defining topics of 2012).
This time, I fear, the public anger will not be deflected. Confessions, not false, will be exacted. Occupy Wall Street has set the snowball rolling; you may not think much of OWS—I have my own reservations, although none are philosophical or moral—but it has made America aware of a sinister, usurious process by which wealth has systematically been funneled into fewer and fewer hands. A process in which Washington played a useful supporting role, but no more than that.
Over the next year, I expect the “what” will give way to the “how” in the broad electorate’s comprehension of the financial situation. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of “Tobin tax” on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over.
But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ’em go!
At the end of the day, the convulsion to come won’t really be about Wall Street’s derivatives malefactions, or its subprime fun and games, or rogue trading, or the folly of banks. It will be about this society’s final opportunity to rip away the paralyzing shackles of corruption or else dwell forever in a neofeudal social order. You might say that 1384 has replaced 1984 as our worst-case scenario. I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood.
The Big Lie: Wall Street has destroyed the wonder that was America (Newsweek)
And then, after you have, watch this video of Ian Bone’s infamous “hypothermia speech” from 1985’s Class War conference. Notice how they’re sorta saying the same thing? And how long will it be before Ian Bone has his own TV show, anyway? I’d watch, wouldn’t you?
The clueless conservatives chatterboxes on Fox News and AM talk radio cheering on the evictions of the rapidly dwindling in number Occupy sites around the country have another thing coming if they think that the fun is over. It’s not the end of anything, no matter what smug frat-boys like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh or Eric Bolling claim to “think.”
The Occupy movement isn’t waning, it’s mutating into something different now. Something we can’t predict yet. The rightwing echo chamber acts as if standing around in freezing cold public spaces with the intention to annoy the “job creators” was the movement’s sole aim. I think these Marie Antoinette Republicans are… wrong.
Here’s what respected historian Todd Gitlin told Associated Press:
The Occupy movement is beginning to follow a familiar pattern, said Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and an authority on social movements. He noted that the 1960s anti-war movement grew gradually for years until bursting onto the world stage during the election year of 1968.
He predicted big rallies around the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., and the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.
Until then, “I think there will be some kinds of occupations, but I don’t think they’ll be as big and as central,” Gitlin said.
When the dust settles and the history is written, Zuccotti Park will be seen as a “strange attractor” rallying place, a “temporary autonomous zone” and a very potent symbol of what could be, but that’s all it will be in the final narrative: The First Act.
And what a beginning it was. People in Wisconsin, in Ohio, in Michigan, in Los Angeles, in Oakland, previously apathetic Americans are starting to wake up to the stark and shitty realities of life in our times in an unprecedented manner and actually fight back. I’m someone who thought “the revolution” would have taken place by the end of the 1980s. I’ve been predicting something like this for 30 years. Even a stopped clock has the right time twice a day, I suppose, but it was getting ridiculous.
As everyone who was there knows, something really special happened in lower Manhattan. Now, no matter where you live, it’s time to use the winter months to organize for next year’s election. There is a chance to gain a lot of ground in 2012. The Reichwing is in a state of preposterously comic disarray with no savior in sight. It might even be possible to push Obama and the Democrats truly leftwards for a change (stranger things have happened, see also FDR; see also what REALLY happened during Great Depression). No one knows what is going to happen next, but I do suspect for there to be a lot of it about, to paraphrase Spike Milligan.
To get too bogged down in trying to hold on to some real estate would have merely become a distraction and as time went on, the “visuals,” as so many in the media like to say, would have taken on a different semiotic and not done the movement any favors in what is, essentially still a war of images. All things considered—and this is just one asshole’s opinion, mine—I think it’s probably the right time for the various Occupy encampments to disperse. It was starting to feel like the first act needed to come to a climax. And what a G-spot barnstormer that curtain-closer was.
Even as I was privileged to have witnessed Occupy Wall Street on three occasions in all of its life-affirming, carnivalesque glory, for anyone looking at the situation as a supportive outsider, the writing was on the wall in October about how long Zuccotti Park could reasonably be expected to be held by the wide cross-section of people who kick-started the movement. As more and more people were going to get peeled off because of the diabolically cold New York winter, it’s a blunt fact that after a certain point, only the chronically homeless would have still been camping out in that freezing cold concrete park. And Fox News would have been all over Zuccotti Park, the open-air homeless shelter.
Lest you think I am disparaging the homeless contingent at Occupy Wall Street, I’m not. In very little of the reporting I’ve seen or read on the OWS encampment, is there any mention of the extremely pivotal roles that were played by the hardcore homeless people and the gutterpunk types in what went down at Zuccotti Park. THEY are the ones who made it possible for the park to be held long enough for the others to join them. Nope, I’m not dissing the homeless participants in OWS, in the least, I think they were amongst the very first frontline heroes of the movement, but it’s just time to move past romancing this idea of the ragtag encampments. go back inside and get better organized. Some people, sympathetic to the movement’s goals are never in a million years going to do something “rash.” It’s time to reach out to them now, so the government knows what size crowd it’s dealing with! (That “silent majority” thing works both ways, as the establishment is finally starting to find out. Americans don’t like “Socialism” but they seem to LOVE socialist ideas, especially in times when their families are starving and they can’t afford to heat their homes. Just saying).
During the past few days, I’ve noticed quite a few more than just vaguely supportive “What’s next for the Occupy movement?” articles popping up in the mainstream media, including the front page of the New York Times, and from the Associated Press and Reuters. There’s also been some worried “What are we going to do about the OWS movement?” type things appearing in the conservative blogsphere.
A pretty good indicator of opinion on the right can be seen in Republican strategist Frank Luntz’s comments to the Republican Governors Association this week in Florida. Say what you will about Luntz—I hate his guts and think he’s made this country a much shittier, meaner, stupider place than had he never been born—the man, like Karl Rove, is an evil genius. But can even the sinister Mister Luntz do anything to stop the tidal wave of history? (To paraphrase the Carol Beer character in Little Britain, “Dialectic says ‘NO’”).
“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” Luntz told the GOP governors. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”
“I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz told them. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”
You could read into that statement a lot of different ways. I’ll leave you to your own interpretation.
Another thing I see happening, and I applaud the editors who are sharp enough to get why this would be a good idea, is that people who have actually physically been at the various Occupy encampments and were writing from an “on the ground perspective” there, are starting to get hired by some of the major newspapers to cover current events, and the arts, from the point of view of the Occupy movement.
One of these individuals is Arun Gupta, the founding editor of The Indypendent, who wrote “This is a movement for anyone who lacks a job, housing or healthcare, or thinks they have no future” in a fascinating essay, “The Revolution Begins at Home An Open Letter to Join the Wall Street Occupation” that I read on Naomi Klein’s website. I’ve taken notice of his byline ever since.
“This is uniquely American,” I remark to Roy about interviewing her while both in cars but thousands of miles apart. Having driven some 7,000 miles and visited 23 cities (and counting) in reporting on the Occupy movement, it’s become apparent that the US is essentially an oil-based economy in which we shuttle goods we no longer make around a continental land mass, creating poverty-level dead-end jobs in the service sector.
If that last bit didn’t drain the blood out of your face, then read it again.
From the interview with the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things:
Arun Gupta: Why did you want to visit Occupy Wall Street and what are your impressions of it?
Arundhati Roy: How could I not want to visit? Given what I’ve been doing for so many years, it seems to me, intellectually and theoretically, quite predictable this was going to happen here at some point. But still I cannot deny myself the surprise and delight that it has happened. And I wanted to, obviously, see for myself the extent and size and texture and nature of it. So the first time I went there, because all those tents were up, it seemed more like a squat than a protest to me, but it began to reveal itself in a while. Some people were holding the ground and it was the hub for other people to organise, to think through things. As I said when I spoke at the People’s University, it seems to me to be introducing a new political language into the United States, a language that would be considered blasphemous only a while ago.
Arun Gupta: Do you think that the Occupy movement should be defined by occupying one particular space or by occupying spaces?
Arundhati Roy: I don’t think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. I don’t think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost. The fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment. I think the movement will, or at least should, become a protean movement of ideas, as well as action, where the element of surprise remains with the protesters. We need to preserve the element of an intellectual ambush and a physical manifestation that takes the government and the police by surprise. It has to keep re-imagining itself, because holding territory may not be something the movement will be allowed to do in a state as powerful and violent as the United States.
Arun Gupta: At the same, occupying public spaces did capture the public imagination. Why do you think that is?
Arundhati Roy: I think you had a whole subcutaneous discontent that these movements suddenly began to epitomise. The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it – and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent.
Arun Gupta: You mentioned that they are under attack. Dozens of occupations have been shut down, evicted, at least temporarily, in the last week. What do you see as the next phase for this movement?
Arundhati Roy: I don’t know whether I’m qualified to answer that, because I’m not somebody who spends a lot of time here in the United States, but I suspect that it will keep reassembling in different ways and the anger created by the repression will, in fact, expand the movement. But eventually, the greater danger to the movement is that it may dovetail into the presidential election campaign that’s coming up. I’ve seen that happen before in the antiwar movement here, and I see it happening all the time in India. Eventually, all the energy goes into trying to campaign for the “better guy”, in this case Barack Obama, who’s actually expanding wars all over the world. Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.
—snip—
Arun Gupta: You’ve written about the need for a different imagination than that of capitalism. Can you talk about that?
Arundhati Roy: We often confuse or loosely use the ideas of crony capitalism or neoliberalism to actually avoid using the word “capitalism”, but once you’ve actually seen, let’s say, what’s happening in India and the United States – that this model of US economics packaged in a carton that says “democracy” is being forced on countries all over the world, militarily if necessary, has in the United States itself resulted in 400 of the richest people owning wealth equivalent [to that] of half of the population. Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.
In India, 100 of the richest people own assets worth 25% of the gross domestic product. There’s something terribly wrong. No individual and no corporation should be allowed to amass that kind of unlimited wealth, including bestselling writers like myself, who are showered with royalties. Money need not be our only reward. Corporations that are turning over these huge profits can own everything: the media, the universities, the mines, the weapons industry, insurance hospitals, drug companies, non-governmental organisations. They can buy judges, journalists, politicians, publishing houses, television stations, bookshops and even activists. This kind of monopoly, this cross-ownership of businesses, has to stop.
The whole privatisation of health and education, of natural resources and essential infrastructure – all of this is so twisted and so antithetical to anything that would place the interests of human beings or the environment at the center of what ought to be a government concern – should stop. The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people’s wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.
Standing ovation!
The interview concludes when Gupta asks Roy if the term “occupation” can be reclaimed: She tells him “We ought to say, “Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine.” The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.”
Arundhati Roy: ‘The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution’ (The Guardian)
Look for more of Arun Gupta’s work on Salon. Follow him on Twitter.
Another strong—and often very amusing—new voice emerging from the media on the Left is Tina Dupuy, the managing editor of the mighty Crooks and Liars blog. She’s a powerful and persuasive writer and a sometime stand-up comic. Dupuy gave a fascinating firsthand description of what she saw the other night when Occupy Los Angeles—the largest of all the encampments—was evicted, when she was on Sam Seder’s Majority Report yesterday. I’m glad this woman is out there on the frontlines. Tina Dupuy could be another Rachel Maddow. It can’t be long until Current TV or MSNBC snaps her up (Or The Daily Show for that matter. They could use a real Lefty…)
In Congressional districts represented by Tea Party lawmakers, the number of people saying they disagree with the Tea Party has risen sharply over the year since the movement powered a Republican sweep in midterm elections, so that almost as many people disagree with the Tea Party as agree with it, according to the poll by the Pew Research Center.
Support for the Republican Party has fallen more sharply in those places than it has in the country as a whole. In the 60 districts represented in Congress by a member of the House Tea Party Caucus, Republicans are viewed about as negatively as Democrats.
The survey suggests that the Tea Party may be dragging down the Republican Party heading into a presidential election year, even as it ushered in a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives just a year ago.
Other polls have shown a decline in support for the Tea Party and its positions, particularly because its hard line during the debate over the debt ceiling and deficit reduction made the Tea Party less an abstraction. In earlier polls, most Americans did not know enough about the Tea Party to offer an opinion.
But the Pew survey shows that Tea Party support has declined even in places where it had been particularly robust.
“We know that the image of the G.O.P. has slipped, but to see it slip so dramatically in Tea Party districts is pretty surprising,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew center. “You think of those as bedrock Republican districts. They are the base.”
In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier this month, 76 percent agreed that the “current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country.” In another recent poll, by The Washington Post/ABC News, respondents were asked: “Do you think the federal government should or should not pursue policies that try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans?” A majority – 60 percent – said the government should pursue such policies.
Meanwhile, public concern about the Tea Party’s linchpin issues – taxes and the deficit – has receded. Asked in late October to name the most important issue facing the country, just 5 percent of respondents to a New York Times/CBS News poll named the budget deficit. A majority said jobs and the economy. This same poll included another result that should give Democrats hope: A strong 69 percent of respondents agreed that the policies of Republicans in Congress “favor the rich” while just 12 percent thought the same thing about Obama’s policies.
Actually that poll should do more than just provide the Democrats with some “hope”—it should give them SOME FUCKING IDEAS. Here’s one for free: TAX THE RICH.
And lastly, here’s the New Statesman blog had a look at the numbers from big strike in the UK:
The unions claim that around 2 million people were on strike yesterday, but ministers dispute this, putting the number closer to 1.2 million.
Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? Either way that’s well over a million people striking. And David Cameron calls that “a damp squib”? What number would it take to really rattle the boy Prime Minister? Let’s hope we get to find out soon!
The recent News of the World ‘phone hacking scandal wasn’t the first time the red top used illicit means to obtain stories. Back in the swinging sixties, the paper regularly bartered with the police for information to use in its pages.
One of the News of the World’s tip-offs to the cops led to the most infamous drugs trial of the twentieth century, where Mick Jagger, Keith Richard of The Rolling Stones, and art dealer Robert Fraser were imprisoned in an apparent attempt to destroy the band’s corrupting influence over the nation’s youth.
For the first time, the true story behind the arrests and trial is revealed by Simon Wells in his excellent book Butterfly on a Wheel: The Great Rolling Stones Drugs Bust. Wells’ previous work includes books on The Beatles and The Stones, British Cinema and most recently, a powerful and disturbing biography of Charles Manson. In an exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds, Wells explained his interest in The Stones drugs bust:
‘As a student of the 1960s it was perhaps inevitable that I would collide with the whole Redlands’ issue at some point. Probably like anyone with a passing interest in the Stones, I first knew about it mainly from legend - the “Mars Bar”, the fur rug, the “Butterfly On A Wheel” quote etc. However, like most of the events connected to the 1960s I was aware that there had to be a back story, and not what had been passed down into myth. This story proved to be no exception, and hopefully the facts are as sensational (if not more) than what has passed into mythology. Additionally, as a Sussexboy - I was familiar with the physical landscape of the story- so that was also attractive to me as well.’
Just after eight o’clock, on the evening of February 12 1967, the West Sussex police arrived at Keith Richards’ home, Redlands. Inside, Keith and his guests - including Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, the gallery owner Robert Fraser, and “Acid King” David Schneiderman - shared in the quiet warmth of a day taking LSD. Relaxed, they listened to music, oblivious to the police gathering outside. The first intimation something was about to happen came when a face appeared, pressed against the window.
It must be a fan. Who else could it be? But Keith noticed it was a “little old lady”. Strange kind of fan. If we ignore her. She’ll go away.
Then it came, a loud, urgent banging on the front door. Robert Fraser quipped, “Don’t answer. It must be tradesmen. Gentlemen ring up first.” Marianne Faithfull whispered, “If we don’t make any noise, if we’re all really quiet, they’ll go away.” But they didn’t.
When Richards opened the door, he was confronted by 18 police officers led by Police Chief Inspector Gordon Dinely, who presented Richards with a warrant to “search the premises and the persons in them, under the Dangerous Drugs Act 1965.”
This then was the start to the infamous trial of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Robert Fraser.
More on Simon Wells ‘The Great Rolling Stones Drugs Bust’, after the jump…
Happy Birthday to Roy Wood - musical genius and founder member of The Move, the Electric Light Orchestra and Wizzard.
From the moment the needle hit the vinyl and the sirens screamed, I was hooked on Roy Wood’s music. His single “Fire Brigade” was 2 minutes of perfect pop with the best opening lyric I’d then heard
Cast your mind back ten years
To the girl who’s next to me in school
If I put me hand upon her leg
She hit me with a rule.
I’d have to cast my mind back farther than 10 years to recall the girl who sat next or near to me in school. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d put my hand upon her knee, but do know she grew up to be a cop, who made headlines for her sexual shenanigans, and is up before the beak for perverting the course of justice. But, so much is life.
“Fire Brigade” charted in February 1968, and was The Move’s fourth single, it’s a work of sheer bloody brilliance that later helped the Sex Pistols with “God Save the Queen”.
I don’t think Roy Wood has ever received the full respect and recognition his musical talents deserve. Founder of 3 highly successful bands - The Move, The Electric Light Orchestra and Wizzard, and a composer of a jukebox full of hit singles, Wood is as important as Goffin & King, Lennon & McCartney, Jagger and Richards. But where they all had writing partners to bounce ideas off, Wood was on his own.
Born on 8 November 1946, in Kitts Green, Birmingham, England, Wood tested his mettle with various bands before forming The Move with Chris “Ace” Kefford, Carl Wayne, Trevor Burton and Bev Bevan. By dint of writing the songs, Wood was the band’s unofficial leader, yet his lack of confidence saw him share lead vocals with Wayne.
Wood was also a multi-instrumentalist, which made him and The Move far more experimental than any of their rivals, and this includes The Beatles. Take for instance, The Move’s first single “Night of Fear”, from 1966, which sampled Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture to create a song about the downside of LSD. The subject matter reflected the band’s interests in the pop sherbets - particularly Burton and Kefford, who were “the ones out of their brains on drugs,” as drummer Bev Bevan later recalled.
In 1967, Kefford tripped out of his mind and the band during a fancy dress party at Birmingham’s Cedar Club. As he later told Mark Paytress for the liner notes for The Very Best of the Move:
‘There were all these little men sitting around me with pointed heads and big noses and long fingers that touched the floor. They were with me all night, man. Acid screwed my life up, man. It devastated me completely.’
It wasn’t just drugs that brought The Move national notoriety, their stage show involved the chain-sawing of motor cars, and at one point, long before Punk, they were banned from nearly every venue in the UK.
On the upside, The Move’s popularity led to their single “Flowers in the Rain” used to launch BBC’s Radio 1 in 1967. It should have been a crowning moment, but turned out to be a painful loss. The Move’s original Manager Tony Secunda decided to promote the single with a satirical postcard of then British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson in bed with his secretary, Marcia Williams. The postcard was Secunda’s idea, and had nothing to do with Wood or the other band members. Unfortunately, Wilson sued for libel, and won. All of Wood’s royalties for the single were paid over to Wilson, who donated them to charity - a situation that continues 16-years after Wilson’s death.
In a way, this story captures the essence of The Move, a band more dangerous than The Stones, more original than The Beatles, but too often short-circuited by their own and others’ actions.
The Move followed Wood’s musical direction through psychedelia (“Night of Fear”, “Disturbance”, “Flowers in the Rain”, “Lemon Tree”, “I Can Hear the Grass Grow”), pop (“Curly”, “Omnibus”, “Tonight”, “Blackberry Way”, “Beautiful Daughter”), Heavy Metal (“When Alice Comes Back to the Farm”, “Brontosaurus”) and Rock (“California Man”). These were all stunning songs, but The Move never achieved legendary status because they didn’t conquer America. By the time the US music press did pay attention to the band, it was too late, as John Mendlesohn noted for Rolling Stone in 1971:
“The Move is the most under-rated rock group and deserve to be put in the same category as Led Zeppelin and The Faces.”
Wood had three other careers going by the early seventies. After Trevor Burton left in 1969 and Carl Wayne in 1970, Wood invited Jeff Lynne to join the group, and also suggested starting a second group The Electric Light Orchestra, together with Bev Bevan, which would mix classical music with Rock ‘n’ Roll, and “start from where The Beatles left off”.
For me the sixties finished when When Roy Wood announced the end of The Move and his departure from the Electric Light Orchestra. Thereafter, the ELO was Jeff Lynne’s band, which never realized the potential of Roy Wood’s original idea.
But Wood wasn’t finished yet, he was about to become the Grandfather of Glam with his next band Wizzard - a Brummie fusion of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. The seventies started when Wizzard released their first single “Ball Park Incident”. I can still recall the sensation when I first heard it, an epiphany akin to Jesus walking on the water and turning it into wine. Here was the past and the future all rolled into one.
Wizzard flourished with a series of hit singles and the albums Wizzard Brew (1973) and Introducing Eddie and The Falcons (1974). Then there was Wood’s solo work, firstly the superb album Boulders, originally recorded between 1969 and 1971, and released in 1973. Then the brilliant follow-up Mustard in 1975.
Between 1970 and 1975, Wood recorded 8 hit albums - 3 with The Move (Shazam, Looking On, Message from the Country; 1 with ELO; 2 with Wizzard and 2 as a solo artist. The quality and consistency of these albums is unparalleled, and when compared to the output of Lennon or McCartney at this time, Roy Wood puts the former Beatles in the shade.
From this he deserved to go on to greater success, but his career was drastically cut short by his asshole manager, Don Arden, as Wood explained in an interview with the Sunday Mercury in 2009:
“I was contracted to Don Arden for longer than I should have been,” he sighs. “When I broke away he stopped me from recording in any London studio. I ended up booking in under false names but I was soon recognised.
“He ruined the momentum. After Wizzard it was difficult. People haven’t got very long memories and suddenly you fall out of favour. When that happens it’s really hard to get back if you’re not high-profile. I was working flat-out but to little effect. After that, I was just mucking about with musicians and going into local studios. We had an album called On The Road Again that was originally going to be on EMI but wasn’t promoted at all.”
Sadly, Wood disappeared from the music scene, releasing the solo albums On the Road Again in 1979 and Starting Up in 1985, to little affect. Now, to those in the UK, Roy Wood is generally associated with his 1973 festive hit “I Wish It Could be Christmas Everyday”, rather than as a highly talented musician and performer, and a true pop genius. But, then again, so much is life.
Happy Birthday Roy!
Roy Wood will tour the UK this November and December, details here
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.
Candy should, I repeat should be off the scale incredible. But it’s not.
Candy was a film that was always talked about, but no one ever saw it. The poster of Candy topless in the airplane cockpit would always be for sale in the back pages of magazines like “Famous Monsters of Filmland” next to ones of King Kong and Frankenstein and it became a familiar image of the era. But the movie you never saw. Not on any late night movie show, never on a Sunday morning “Million Dollar Movie” or anything like that, Candy was seemingly banned from TV for being too racy and for whatever reason was never released on VHS either. Nor was it ever on HBO or Showtime. It was the great lost movie in my eyes.
I became mildly obsessed with this film I could never see and went about collecting movie posters, lobby cards, publicity photos and I own several different versions of the novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg with different groovy covers. The mythical Candy became a cult movie Holy Grail for me. I really built it up in my mind. For years I tried to get hold of a copy in the tape trading underground, but the best I was ever able to find was still unwatchable. Then finally it came out on DVD. It was like Christmas had arrived.
But it sucked! Really sucked. It was such a let down!
I mean just LOOK at the cast: Ringo Starr (Emmanuel, the Mexican gardener), Charles Aznavour (the horny hunchback), Marlon Brando (Grindl, the horny (fake) Indian guru), Richard Burton (MacPhisto, the drunk, horny Welsh poet), James Coburn (egotistical surgeon), John Huston (dirty old man doctor) and Walter Matthau (horny military general). Sugar Ray Robinson and Anita Pallenberg make cameo appearances. How could you go wrong with a cast like that?
Let’s not forget the amazing opening space travel sequence by Douglas Trumbull who went on to make 2001 with Stanley Kubrick. And the soundtrack by The Byrds, Steppenwolf and soundtrack great Dave Grusin (it’s INCREDIBLE and easy to find on audio blogs). The script was adapted by Buck Henry. HOW could this fail?
It even featured the decade defining pulchritude of Miss Teen Sweden, Ewa Aulin, in the title role of “Candy Christian,” the ultimate All-American girl.
But despite all this Candy is a terrible film and even worse, it’s boring.
One of the things that must have mucked up things badly for the production is—and I am just theorizing here—the contracts for the lead actors. These were THE leading actors of the day, all of them top drawer A-list 60s talent. After watching Candy the thought occurred to me that Marlon Brando’s agent probably asked how much screen time Richard Burton was getting and demanded the same for his client. Then James Coburn’s manager asked the same question and demanded equal time for his client and so on and so until each actor was guaranteed “Most Favored Nations” equal screen time. How else to explain the film’s structure? It’s maddening to watch and Candy feels like it’s never going to end.
STILL, I’m not saying it’s so bad you shouldn’t watch it. Actually I think that if this sounds even remotely intriguing to you then it’s definitely worth seeing. It’s not good, no, we’ve already established that fact, but it is a super insane, trippy, campy relic of the 1960s with some of the most iconic actors of the decade behaving like total hambones, each trying to outdo the other in chewing up the scenery.
The other day, whilst looking for something else in the garage, I happened across some old photographs taken by me in 1984 during a major demonstration that I participated in, in London, called “Stop The City.” The idea, for what was described as a “Carnival Against War, Oppression and Destruction,” was to put enough bodies in the way to effectively cut off the routes whereby the bankers and stock brokers would get to work, block the entrances to the office buildings themselves and stop business activity in “The City” (as London’s financial district is known) for a day.
The 1984 demo that I was at was the second such “Stop the City” event. The first had taken place six months before, but the second demonstration was a lot bigger. I don’t know exactly who was behind it, or organized it, but certainly the vast majority of the young people taking part could have been described as “Crass punks” or anarchists. I heard of it via my friend Ron, who was at one point in a punk band either called “The Living Legends” or “The Apostles” with Ian Bone of Class War infamy. Class War, as well as London Greenpeace, were certainly involved in getting out the troops. There were many anti-nuclear protesters and an anti-vivisection contingent which formed a significant subset of the demo. An item on the excellent Kill Your Pet Puppy blog posted by editor Al Puppy reads:
What I can add is that the idea for Stop the City came from Dave Morris – of McLibel trial fame, longest trial in English legal history – and London Greenpeace. It was organised from a house on Ickburgh Road, Upper Clapton, Hackney. Dave and others (including my future wife Pinki) had been given the house by the GLC so they could organise an anti-nuclear march from Faslane in Scotland to Greenham in Wiltshire.
Protesters met at 6am outside one of the underground stations. I got there five minutes early (I am nothing, if not punctual, even for a riot). At first it looked like nobody was going to show up. Then it went from almost no one there, to hundreds and hundreds of people streaming into the area within a matter of just minutes. In France they call uprisings of this nature “manifestations” and that’s what it felt like was happening that morning as the numbers of spiky-haired anarcho-punks and squatter-types arriving in the area grew very, very suddenly. It was an absolutely magical moment to partake in as people seemed to “materialize” in the light London rain that morning. It’s worth pointing out to the (ahem) younger generation that this was long before cell phones, Facebook and Twitter. Most of the people at this demo, I’d wager, didn’t even have land-line telephones because they lived in squats (as I did then). This was basically a word of mouth thing.
For a long time it was just a bunch of young punks milling about, trying to be threatening to stock brokers and bankers and yelling stuff at them. The cops had already partially prepared the area and there were crowd control fences everywhere, but they’d underestimated the size of the crowd. The metropolitan police were badly out-numbered for the first few hours of the protest as the lobbies of several office buildings were occupied and a general “mild” ruckus was caused.
It got pretty nuts pretty fast when a hot-headed stockbroker-type actually decided to try to run some of the protesters over with his car, which was then upended by furious onlookers. That’s what ignited the next phase of what happened when a small faction started tossing smoke bombs and balloons filled with paint. A friend of mine chucked a trash can through a bank window. I spray-painted “Smash Capitalism” on the side of a building. Good times!
At a certain point, hundreds of police reinforcements, including some on horseback, arrived and surrounded the epicenter of the activity and started squeezing about 3000 of us into a pedestrian area near the Stock Exchange. Several military trucks blocked the streets completely. I got stuck in that maneuver and had to stay there for several hours. The tactic the cops used to neutralize and disperse the rioters was pretty clever, or at least it worked: The street grid made it easy for them to herd perhaps as many as 25% of the protesters into this cordoned-off area which they surrounded with metal fences and a line of Old Bill standing shoulder to shoulder staring defiantly into the protester’s eyes as they moved them tighter and tighter together. Several people on my side of the barricades covered the police officers and their horses with “Silly String.” (There was a LOT of “Silly String” around that day). After five or six hours, everyone who had been squeezed into that spot really had to pee.
After they were able to disperse much of the crowd outside of this area, they started to let people out a few at a time. A long line of London bobbies brandishing truncheons made sure everyone kept moving along a narrow path cut via the crowd control barricades. Gagging for a piss, I, like my wilted anarchist comrades, was only too happy to wuss out without much of a fight to seek out the nearest pub for a slash.
Revolutionary fervor has its limits when nature has been calling for hours on end and keeps getting a busy signal…
Stop the City was one of those mythical events that if you weren’t there it’s almost as if it never happened. I saw little major coverage in the London newspapers the next day. Only The Evening Standard, The Times and Sounds really covered it, if memory serves and it simply disappeared into the mists of history. There’s hardly anything on the Internet about it, but when you do see it referred to—and I stress that this is rare—it’s usually in the context of how the “Stop The City” demos were, historically speaking, the very first major anti-globalism/anti-capitalism demonstrations, and the precursor to the Poll Tax Riots of 1990, the Battle in Seattle demonstrations of 1999 and the London Carnival Against Capitalism that same year. As those events, in turn, are referred to as being the precursors to Occupy Wall Street, then Stop The City would be the granddaddy of them all. Still, it doesn’t even have a proper Wikipedia entry, just a couple of Flickr slide shows.
I can’t recall how many people were there over twenty-five years-ago, but I do recall that a pregnant friend of mine who did not attend STC told me that BBC radio reported all day long that there were approximately 12,000 demonstrators in the City, but then late in the afternoon they changed their tune and said there were but 3000 protesters. I think it was certainly closer to the original, higher number as there were close to 3000 of us trapped like sardines in the cordoned-off area alone.
The idea of the “Stop The City” (STC) demonstrations was hatched by three London anarchists at a party in the early eighties. At around the same time people in Australia and America had had the same brainwave. The plan was to bring together the radical end of the peace - ecology - “third world” - and anarchist movements to attack the root cause of all their problems - Capital - by attacking the heart of finance. It took a lot of work to promote the idea of STC and then hold together an uneasy alliance of radical liberals and anarchists. The main problem was the issue of “violence” - many pacifists were worried that people might defend themselves against police attacks/arrests and buildings could be damaged by “violence (sic) against property”. Pat Arrowsmith, veteran CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) labourite did her best to successfully sabotage CND involvement.
Police freaked
The police were freaked out by the idea of an organised demo which wouldn’t consult/inform them - very rare in modern Britain. They repeatedly tried to contact the organisers and on one occasion two plain clothed senior cops turned up to a London anarchist meeting pleading to meet with people only to be met by an angry silence and sent away.
On the day of the first STC the phone of one of the main organisers was ‘mysteriously‘ cut off, and on the night before a large number of riot cops stormed the ‘peace centre’ near the Angel in Islington (a large anarcho-pacifist squat where many of the demonstrators were crashing, searching for weapons - none were found).
Several Stop The Cities were held in London and caused a lot of disruption in the square mile - the first caused and estimated £100 million losses. A number of ‘Stop Business as usual’ demos also occurred Numbers involved ranged from 3,000 in the first STC, dwindling to 500 odd at the last one as energy and enthusiasm were sapped by arrests, greater police sus, etc.
Repression
A repressive Public Order Act was passed in response to STC and the activities of hunt saboteurs, etc. Close to 1,000 arrests were also made over an 18 month period.
“I used to joke: ‘At least when you’re being beaten up by skinheads, you can pray that the police turn up. But when you’re being beaten up by police, there’s no point thinking some skinheads will save you’.””
David, then a 19-year-old student with a radically big haircut, had travelled to the City of London to join a Stop The City demonstration run by a fringe anarchist group called Class War.
What followed was an eight-hour encounter with the strong-arm of the law that saw him hurled around a police van and thrown into a crowded cell.
“There were quite a few of those demonstrations in the Eighties,” says David, 32, who was studying English Literature at Kings College, Cambridge.
“There were no proper political motives. The intention was just to cause a disruption. I went along only because I thought it would be a laugh.
“At the time, I had really big hair and everyone else did so I fitted in and looked the part. Basically, the demo was people walking up and down shouting slogans. ”
“But the police tried to get us all into a small pedestrian area off Threadneedle Street where we were bounded in by railings.
“I was up against the railings and thought I was going to get crushed. So I climbed over and tried to get through the police cordon.
“The police wanted to throw me back into the crowd but I said: ‘No, I’m not moving.’ When I said I was going to be crushed they ran me off into their van.
“Inside the van about five of them started throwing me around. I didn’t suffer any serious injury but basically they were beating me up. “One of the policemen put his fist in my face and told me if I caused any more trouble, it would be going through my head. They filled the van with some other people then took us off to the police station.
“We were put in a cell with about 25 other blokes and one toilet in the middle of the floor.
“We were there for hours and I was bursting but I couldn’t face having a pee in front of all these other men just in the middle of the floor.
“Right at the end, after hours in there, the police gave us one polystyrene cup of water to drink - between all of us. By the time it got to me, it was just spittle.””
David was accused of trying to lead an aggressive charge and charged with obstructing the police and the highway. But when his case came before a magistrate, he was cleared.
“A young junior barrister took on my case for free. He pointed out that the police evidence contradicted itself and the case was dismissed.
And finally, here’s the description from Punk Torrents of a long out of print documentary film, Stop the City: 1984 made by Mick Duffield and members of Crass that came out in the mid-90s. I had no idea this even existed:
The Stop the City demonstrations of 1983 and 1984 were described as a ‘Carnival Against War, Oppression and Destruction’, in other words protests against the military-financial complex.
Activities that formed part of these events were separate day-long street blockades of the financial district (‘The City’) of London — which supporters of the protest argued are a major centre for profiteering and consequently a root cause of many of the world’s worst problems.
One blockade involved 3,000 people, which succeeded in causing a $100m shortfall on the day according to The Times. Around 1,000 arrests were subsequently made by the police over 18 months.The first demo took place on the 29 September 1983 and involved hundreds of protestors, but six months later on 29 June 1984, thousands brought the City to a standstill. This rare documentary by Mick Duffield and Andy Palmer of Crass offers unique footage of the day’s events. Stop the City is widely regarded as being the precursor of modern protest such as the J18 Carnival Against Capitalism in 1999 and the birth of the Anti-Globalisation movement in the 21st century.
About halfway through The Freedom Trap, author Desmond Bagley reveals his hand towards his sources. It comes around page one hundred, when the central character Owen Stannard is briefed by his boss, Mackintosh:
‘What do you know about the British prison system?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I’ll let you have a copy of the Mountbatten Report,’ he said. ‘You’ll find it fascinating reading. But I’ll give you the gist of it now. Lord Mountbatten found that the British prisons are full of holes as a Swiss cheese. Do you know how many escapes there are each year?’
‘No. There was something about it in the papers a couple of years ago, but I didn’t read it too closely.’
‘More than five hundred. If it’s any less than that they think they’ve had a good year. Of course, most of the escapees are picked up quite soon, but a small percentage get clean away - and that small percentage is rising. It’s a troublesome situation.’
I’d picked up a copy because of its cover, who doesn’t? Maybe the French, as once most of their covers were all the same - that’s equality for you. The cover had Paul Newman, as Stannard, with suit and tie, gun in hand, and it left a fluid memory of John Huston’s rather fine film version, The Mackintosh Man.
Bagley’s story mixes a little bit of fact with a lot of page-turning fiction, in a tale of double agents, the British Secret Service and the Scarperers, a fictional organization that helps long-term prisoners escape gaol - all for the right money. Back to our opening scene, Mackintosh now makes it clear, he isn’t interested in the “‘murderers or rapists, homicidal maniacs or ordinary small time thieves’” that escape from gaol, his focus is State Security, and how to stop double agents, like the real-life George Blake, turning up in Moscow “‘where he chirped his head off.’”
‘For the first time in years someone has come up with a brand new crime. Crime is just like any other business - it’s conducted only for profit - and someone has figured a way to make profit out of getting people out of prison…
...an organization was set up, dedicated to springing long-term prisoners who could pay enough, and you be surprised how many of those there are. And once such an organization gets going, like any other business it tends to expand, and whoever is running it has gone looking for custom - and he doesn’t care where the money comes from, either.’
‘The Russians?’
‘Who else?’ said Mackintosh sourly.
It was the Cold War and the Russians were still off the Christmas card list. The way Bagley tells it, the Red Menace was everywhere, and in the Freedom Trap it was actively liberating double agents like Slade. As the character Stannard explains when he meets Slade in prison:
It was about this time that I first met Slade. He was a new boy inside for the first offence and he’d got forty-two years, but I don’t believe the First Offenders Act covers espionage. I had heard about him before, of course: the news broadcasts had been full of the Slade Trial. Since most of the juicy bits had been told in camera no one really knew what Slade had been up to, but from all accounts he was the biggest catch since Blake.
To those reading this in the early seventies it would have seemed like non-fiction, coming nearly a decade after notorious double-agent, George Blake had been sentenced to forty-two years in jail, who, only 5 years later, had managed to escape from Wormwood Scrubs Prison, in 1966. Then it was commonly believed Blake had been helped by an organization, just like Bagley’s fictional “Scarperers”, paid for by the K.G.B., and run by a petty criminal, Sean Bourke.
It wasn’t just fiction writers who believed this was what happened, respected journalist, E. H. Cookridge stated in his 1970 biographyGeorge Blake Double Agent that the K.G.B. had financed Blake’s escape, claiming the cost for such an operation was “mere chickenfeed”, and Blake was far too important a spy for the Russians to lose.
This was all fine on paper, but in reality both Bagley and Cookridge were wrong, as Blake’s escape from prison was the work of amateurs and more reminiscent of Carry On Spying than Funeral in Berlin.
George Blake was born George Behar in the Netherlands in 1922. During the Second World War he worked as part of the Dutch Resistance against the invading German army. Blake was so successful he was soon on the Gestapo’s most wanted list. His keenness verged on the fanatical, something which would become more apparent as Blake grew older. His experience with the Resistance highlighted his seemingly natural talent for subterfuge. Arrested by the Germans, Blake just managed to escape, following his family out of Holland to England.
In Britain, Behar was at first frustrated by the long immigration process required to ensure no sneaky German agents were hidden amongst the influx of refugees. To fit in with his adopted country, Behar changed his name to the anglicized Blake, and applied for work in the Navy, his intention was to become a spy, and return to Holland. It didn’t quite happen that way, as his superiors were more than a little suspicious of Blake’s methods which were straight out of the fictional Richard Hannay, and anticipated the fantasy of James Bond and even Matt Helm. It’s worth considering whether Ian Fleming ever met Blake during the war years and if he had, did Blake fuel the writer’s imagination?
After the war, Blake became fully fledged spy, working undercover as part of the diplomatic service. This was when his B-movie imagination kicked-in - writing in invisible, arranging bizarre pick-ups for worthless information and running a team of spies.
In 1950, Blake found himself under a different invading army when he was posted to Seoul, Korea. He was captured by insurgents form the North and held prisoner. The North Koreans had no sympathy for prisoners of war, and Blake and his fellow POWs were treated barbarically and forced on a long death march from city to bombed city. Cookridge described part of it thus:
The death march went on for many days. Occasionally there were overnight stops in villages. Usually the civilian internees were packed into one room which had no windows and was covered with vermin and excrement….
...Those who fell by the side of the road, watching mutely as the column passed them by…“We heard many shots…the dying were pushed into the ditch.”
They were repeatedly moved village to village, until they reached their destination, Chung-Kang-Djin. On arrival, the POWs made a rough estimate of the casualties - a least one hundred had died or been shot during the march, just over a quarter of their number. But this was only the start, as they were handed over to the Chinese military, who began a process of brainwashing techniques on the beleaguered inmates.
Blake has since claimed he was never brain-washed, claiming he turned to Soviet Communism because of the horrors witnessed during the Korean War. Whatever the truth, the attempts at brainwashing were later confirmed by his fellow POWs.
After negotiations for a cease-fire, Blake returned home a hero to Britain. Ironically, it wasn’t long before he offered his services to the KGB, and so began his 9-year career as a dastardly double-agent.
Working for the British Secret Service, Blake was transferred to Berlin where he set-up and ran his own spy ring for the K.G.B. Blake’s love of cloak and dagger defined his time in Berlin. He was responsible for the exposure and deaths of an estimated 400 agents - something else he later denied, though his K.G.B. bosses have since confirmed this number as correct. Blake verged on the fanatical with his work, having no compunction in hiring spies to work for him, then exposing them as traitors, as Cookridge explains:
I have a long list of agents Blake had betrayed between 1955 and 1959, but in deference to the regulations of the Official Secrets Act, I shall mention only a few, whose names became known through “show trials” in East Germany.
In 1955 Hans Joachim Koch, a then 43-year-old radio operator, was arrested when emptying a “dead letter box” in Pankow Park, which Blake had arranged and of which he had given the information to the K.G.B….
At about the same time Johann Baumgart, an official of the East German railways, who had produced twenty-five remarkable reports about railway transports, was given away by Blake and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment….
Ewald Jantke, a former Luftwaffe radio operator, and Arno Gugel, son of a Gestapo official, who with a young woman called Ursula Lehmann had formed a successful “cell” in East Germany, were betrayed when Jankte became too cocky and joined the East German People’s Police…
Blake was instrumental in “burning” an outpost established in Dresden, which kept in contact with the secret service in West Berlin by exchanging stamps for collectors…marked with microdots…
The list goes on, but you get the idea, it was all fun and games straight from a John Le Carre. It beggars belief how he wasn’t uncovered, or even suspected as a double-agent sooner, until you appreciate nearly the whole of the British Secret Service was a private members’ club for Soviet double agents, most famously the Cambridge Five (Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross) and most controversially, the suggestion Director General of MI5, Roger Hollis was also working for the K.G.B.
Blake had a good run, destroying most of MI6’s operations in eastern Europe, seeding double agents, and notoriously revealing the tunnel the Allies had built under the Berlin Wall. But all things must pass, and in 1961, the game was up, Blake was arrested sent to trial, parts of which were held in camera for security reasons. He pleaded guilty to the five counts against him, and expected to receive a sentence of 14 years imprisonment. However, Lord Parker of Waddington imposed a sentence of 14 years imprisonment on each of the 5 counts:
“Those in respect of counts one, two and three will be consecutive, and those in respect of counts four and five will be concurrent, making a total of forty-two tears; imprisonment.”
Forty-two years, it was “the longest prison sentence ever imposed in modern British history…” And herein lies the tale of his escape.
Blake wasn’t set free by the machinations of the K.G.B., but by passionate amateurs, who disagreed with Blake’s harsh sentencing.
When he was in Wormwood Scrubs, Blake came in to contact with Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, two men imprisoned for their non-violent protest against USAF Weatherfield, a British airbase used by the American Air Force during the Cold War.
Randle was a conscientious objector, and a member of the Aldermaston March Committee which organised the first Aldermaston March against British nuclear weapons, in Easter 1958. Pottle was a founder member of the Committee of 100, an anti-nuclear direct action group which broke away from Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Their outrage at the “vicious” sentence imposed on Blake saw Pottle and Randle team up, once they were released from prison, with another ex-con Séan Bourke, in a bold plan to set Blake free.
Prior to his escape, the police and prison authorities received numerous warnings that Blake would make a bid for freedom. Security was tightened but it was to no avail, as the BBC reported on October 22 1966:
One of Britain’s most notorious double-agents, George Blake, has escaped from prison in London after a daring break-out believed to have been masterminded by the Soviet Union.
Wardens at Wormwood Scrubs prison last saw him at the evening roll call, at 1730 GMT.
An hour-and-a-half later, his cell was discovered to be empty.
After a short search, the escape route was found. Bars in a window at the end of a landing had been sawn away and a rope ladder hung down inside the prison wall.
Sean Bourke had prepared a ladder made from nylon thread and knitting needles. As in Bagley’s book, the ladder was thrown over a perimeter wall, where Slade/Blake climbed over to an awaiting vehicle. Unlike the novel, Blake wasn’t liberated to Ireland and a well staffed safe house, but was moved apartment to apartment, bed-sit to bed-sit by Bourke, Pottle and Randle, never staying anywhere long enough to attract police attention.
Eventually, in a farcical denouement, Blake was driven by Randle, in a Commer Dormobile from London to Berlin, and then through to East Germany. Through the crucial parts of the journey, Blake remained hidden under the bench seat, with Randle’s children sitting comfortably on top. The incident made fools of the security and secret services, but revealed the ability of committed individuals to change history.
Blake became a hero in Soviet Russia, but his actions seemed pointless after Perestroika. In 1990, he published his autobiography No Other Choice, and claimed his time spent in Moscow had been the happiest of his life. Sean Bourke dined out on the escape story for years, becoming the focus for media attention and, of course, Simon Gray famously turned the relationship between Blake and Bourke in prison into his play Cell Mates- the production Stephen Fry ran out on, in 1995.
In June 1991, Randle and Pottle were eventually put on trial for their involvement in Blake’s escape, but were found not guilty by a jury, after arguing that, while they in no way condoned Blake’s espionage activities for either side, they were right to help him because the forty-two year sentence he received was inhuman and hypocritical.
Interviews with George Blake and Sean Bourke, after the jump…
It was a little after three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, when the dark green Cherokee jeep, loaded with canisters of propane gas, hurtled towards the Departure zone at Glasgow International Airport. The driver was saying prayers and asking for god’s help, when his vehicle hit security bollards and burst into flames. 28-year-old, Kafeel Ahmed had intended that the jeep would crash through the glass doors, enter into the airport concourse, where it would blow-up, killing as many of the men, women and children who queued patiently for their holiday flights.
It was June 30 2007, and this was the first terrorist attack in Scotland since PanAm Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in 1988. Little could Ahmed, or his co-conspirator Dr. Bilal Abdullah, have known that their actions were not to lead to holy martyrdom, but rather to the resurrection of one of the funniest, most popular and successful comedy creations of the last 50 years.
In a hotel room in Budapest, the writer Ian Pattison watched the images beamed from Glasgow onto a flickering TV screen, as the would-be terrorists were arrested, all Pattison could think of was one question: “What would Rab C Nesbitt make of this?”
Fall, present day, the trees are cashing in their savings, and the streets are covered with gold. I meet Ian in a coffee house, in Glasgow’s West End, a background of children and mothers laughing and chatting, and the hiss of an espresso machine. It’s a clear day, and we have a long sweeping view down to the Clyde and across the water to the high rises and tenements of Govan beyond, home to the fictional Rab C. Nesbitt - “the original unemployed man”, whose comic television adventures have brought national acclaim, incredible viewing figures and a cabinet full of awards.
Pattison looks relaxed, toned and much younger than his grey hair implies, and he must be older than he looks for It’s twenty-five years since he first dreamt up the alcoholic, head-bandaged street philosopher Rab C. Nesbitt:
“It was New Year’s Eve,” recalls Pattison, “And I was married and living in this masionette apartment in the north of England. Now I’m an anti-social person and when the front doorbell went, I said to my then wife, ‘That’ll be them from downstairs coming to First Foot, I don’t want to see these people. You entertain them, give them a drink and send them on their way. I’ll go upstairs and you tell them I’m in Glasgow.’
“I go upstairs to ‘Glasgow’, but wives don’t always do what you ask them, and these two neighbors sat there until about 5am knocking back the swally. I was upstairs fuming, wondering what can I do? I just can’t suddenly materialize – I’m in Glasgow!
“So I had a notebook up there, because I used write in the wee room, and I started trying to write something about a Liverpool councilor, but it wasn’t working. Then suddenly, I don’t know why, this mutated into a Glasgow speech rhythm, and in about 10 minutes I’d written the first Nesbitt monologue.
“I’ve no idea where it came from. All I knew about him was he raved, he had a head bandage and wore trainers.””
It was a piece of genius inspiration and Ian passed it on to Colin Gilbert, producer of the sketch show Naked Video. Gilbert liked it, but the actor chosen to play the part, Gregor Fisher, wasn’t so keen.
“There was no inkling of developing the character. I just knew it was a character piece, that is to say you weren’t going from gag to gag to gag. I just knew if it got into Gregor’s hands, I knew what he could do with it, and how he would play it. The trouble was persuading Gregor to do it.”
Anyone who has seen Fisher’s work will know that he is a brilliantly gifted actor, with a warmth and subtlety most Hollywood actors would pawn their looks to possess. I first saw Fisher as an unforgettable, happy-go-lucky, wide-boy in Peter MacDougall’s brilliant Just a Boy’s Game, then a few years later stealing the crappy eighties version of 1984 with a cameo role from under the noses of Richard Burton and John Hurt.
Now Naked Video had made Fisher a household name, on the back of his incredible comic acting, but when presented with a new character to play, he was less than impressed by Pattison’s latest creation.
“Gregor read it and said it was as funny as cancer,” Pattison recalls.
Thankfully, Head of the Comedy Unit, Colin Gilbert was on hand to quietly help matters along. Gilbert is a legend in TV comedy, with a long list of ground-breaking shows from Nesbitt to The Limmy Show, Still Game and Gary - Tank Commander on his long and impressive CV. Indeed, Gilbert with his white hair and beard and twinkling eyes is a polar bear disguised as a man - he may look nice and cuddly, but underneath you know there is this formidable energy just waiting for its moment.
“Colin quietly insisted, and Gregor tried it 2 or 3 times, and by the third time, I think Gregor began to think maybe I’m wrongish, and we never thought any more about it. But when the show went out, people picked up on this drunk character, largely because of Gregor’s eye-catching performance.”
Rab C Nesbitt returns to BBC 2 for 6 weeks from Wednesday 5th October at 22:00 hours
The full interview with Ian Pattison and more from Rab C Nesbitt, after the jump…
Robert Conroy has the voice of an angel - an angel who’s lived a season in hell.
Conroy is one half of the exquisite pop duo, Misty Roses, whose beautiful and ethereal voice is married to the dramatic and mesmeric music of Jonny Perl. From when they first met, they understood each other. Call it synchronicity. Call it good taste.
Together they are Misty Roses - the most startlingly original and brilliant group of the past 5 years.
In an exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds, Misty Roses, Conroy and Perl, explain the who’s, what’s, why’s and wherefores of their music.
Robert: ‘I met Jonny in late 2002, when he was still living in Brooklyn. We had a mutual friend and, in passing, I mentioned to that mutual friend that I was obsessed with Scott Walker and Julie London. To which he said “There is only ONE other person ON EARTH who is obsessed with Scott Walker AND Julie London! That’s this English guy I know, Jonny Perl!” And I found out he was a musician, and I was intrigued - so I got Jonny’s number and I called him. We met soon afterwards, and we just realized very quickly that we were on very similar frequencies. I mean, after our first rehearsal - which was three hours long, maybe - I think we came away with working demos of three or four songs that ended up on our first LP. We understood each other - musically - from the get-go.’
Born and raised in NYC, Robert had performed with a range of bands “post-punk, goth, electronic” over the years, and says he “was lucky enough to have a front row seat for a lot what happened musically over last decade or two.” The range of experience only confirmed his talents and focused his ambitions.
Robert: First and foremost, I am a singer - I’ve trained with some serious vocal coaches, in my day. And I like a lot of different kinds of music. So if I dig the people and I dig how they write songs and they dig how I write songs, then I’m game.’
British born Jonny has always been musically gifted, as a child he learned to play the cello, piano, and saxophone. Before Misty Roses he had played in a variety of combos, and was playing with a surf band in NYC when the conversation about Julie London brought him to Robert.
Jonny: ‘The synergies between our musical interests seemed so strong that we both figured it was worth giving it a shot.’
Together, they create music that is the perfect fusion of cabaret and cinema, of torch song and widescreen. You are listening to the score for a dream by Kenneth Anger or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk or David Lynch.
Robert: ‘We have been described as Lynchian - which we take as a great compliment. (And we did cover a David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti song on our disc Komodo Dragons - so it sort of fits, don’t it?) But we both love the way Mr. Lynch takes something seemingly innocuous and pretty - such as a song like “Sixteen Reasons” or “Blue Velvet” - and discovers all these inherently disturbing elements beneath its surface. I hope we create a similar kind of frisson with our best songs.
‘Musically, we are deeply influenced by non-rock popular music from the later half of the Twentieth Century. Soundtrack composers like Ennio Morricone, John Barry and Jerry Goldsmith, exotica, bossa nova and tropicalia records, dub and a lot recordings of jazz and vocal standards - Ellington, Julie London, Peggy Lee, Nina Simone and such like.
‘Likewise, the work of people we like to call “middle-of-the-road mavericks”- artists who were able to create music that was both very accessible and deeply idiosyncratic and more than a little odd. People like Scott Walker, Serge Gainsbourg, Bacharach and David, Dionne Warwick, Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, Jimmy Webb, Bobbie Gentry, etc. And these influences get filtered further through the “rock” music we like, which is primarily the “artier” end of the spectrum. Stuff like the Velvet Underground and its alumni, Bowie, Roxy Music, Sparks, Joy Division, The Banshees, The Associates, Soft Cell, The Smiths, The Pet Shop Boys, Suede, Broadcast, Goldfrapp, etc.
‘Jonny described our sound as “glamorous easy listening music” initially. I loved that. Jonny and I are really attracted to glamorous sounds. We love orchestrations - strings sections, and french horns and flutes. We dig those gleaming, cold textures of synthesizers from the 1970’s.
All the things that you’re supposed to reject if you’re into music that is “true” and “real”. We dig artifice.’
Jonny: ‘Yes - we had pretty much all these things in common as interests from the start. I will never shake off the Smiths/Postcard/C86 influences I had when I started to play guitar, but there has always been cross-fertilization - from playing in orchestras and ensembles to collecting old easy listening, Latin and Brazilian records.’
Robert: ‘And our music tends to drift into the shadows, as it were. Traditionally - until the last century, really - “glamour” was an occult term. Its a synonym for “spell”. One casts a glamour. And that connection to magic also suggests a sense of mystery - I think. Nothing can be truly glamorous without an element of darkness or strangeness. All my favorite music has some eerie, even creepy, aspect. And I find a lot of classic horror and science fictions films - like Forbidden Planet or Suspiria or The Bride of Frankenstein - wildly glamorous. Star Trek and Space: 1999 likewise.’
Their first performance as Misty Roses took place in an old East Village Buddhist tea house. Jonny played guitar and backing tracks, while Robert “channeled Dusty Springfield”. For both, it was a moment of magic, and the promise of greater things seemed almost within reach. Almost….
”Starry Wisdom” from ‘Villainess’ by Misty Roses
More from the fabulous Misty Roses, plus bonus tracks, after the jump…
Hard to remember it now, but it was well into the 1980s before VCRs were commonplace in America life. I lived in lower Manhattan at the time and there were very few video rental stores there. The only ones I can recall are Kim’s Video (originally sharing space with a dry cleaner, then several locations, now down to one again) and the New Video mini-chain, now a DVD distributor. By mid-decade the “tape trading underground” was starting to organize itself (aided by the then burgeoning zine scene) and an unlikely character named “Dan the Record Man” became a key node in that machinery.
“Dan the Record Man” was probably in his mid 50s when I met him, but he was in such terrible shape that he looked far older. He was a classic example of what eating SHITTY FOOD 24/7—in his case dirty water sauerkraut and mustard slathered hot dogs sold by street vendors outside of the Canal Street flea market where his stall was located—could do to a human body. My god did he just reek of poor health and future strokes and heart attacks, but he was a super cool old guy who had been a dancer on Hullabaloo and knew everything about music and had records so rare it made my head spin. Case in point he had copies of The Great Lost Kinks Album as well as the live Yardbirds LP and the novelty record “Stairway to Gilligan” both which Led Zeppelin’s lawyers had yanked off the market. Once he knew you were “cool”—he was really paranoid—he’d pull back the black curtains covering the top shelves in his overstuffed corner booth and show you the bootlegs (there were thousands) and the real treasure he had, the bootleg videos.
Dan had EVERYTHING you ever wanted or could ever want. And if he didn’t have it, he could get it for you (he scored Nancy Sinatra’s TV special for me as I recall). Tapes were $20 and he’d do trade if you had something really good, but in keeping with his Gollum-esque character, you had to have two really good things in order to get one of his really good things for free. Those were his rules and you could fuck the fuck off if you weren’t prepared to play by them. Old school record collectors out there will feel me when I say: you did play by his rules. Otherwise you were cut off from so much illicit bootleg goodness.
Every once in a while you could surprise Dan with something incredibly rare. At the time I knew Dan, I was working in a digital video studio that did Super-8, 16mm and 35mm film transfers. On one occasion, photographer Robert Frank booked time to make a film transfer from his little seen documentary of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 American Tour with the title Cocksucker Blues. The Stones had an injunction against Cocksucker Blues being screened (unless for charity) because, well, it was a fairly decadent and at times quite unflattering portrait of them, let’s just say. The staff were told that under no circumstances could we make our own copies of what Frank was coming in to transfer. Yeah right! So, uh, this friend of mine, yeah this friend of mine, made copy, a copy of which I then traded to Dan, for, as I recall, a live video of David Bowie’s “Heroes” tour from 1978 and Bowie’s “1980 Floor Show” performance from The Midnight Special. Whenever I saw a bootleg of Cocksucker Blues, I would always look to see if it was a generation or two (or ten) away from the one I traded to Dan. Over the decades, most of them were my copy’s progeny (I can tell by a warble in the opening credits) although this has changed in recent years as a far better version has surfaced on DVD and torrent sites.
In any case, my rambling anecdote about the VHS tape trading underground of the late 1980s is because I wanted you to know that the legendary Cocksucker Blues documentary has been posted once again by some kind soul for viewing on the Internet. My 25-year-old copy is NOT the parent of this version, which looks pretty good (Note: The film was shot on Super-8 film to begin with, so it’s never going to look much better than this. You can find torrents for a great looking DVD version all over the place).
It was art out of chaos. Pop art. The Sweet‘s “Ballrooom Blitz”, Glam Rock’s catchiest, trashiest, most lovable song, came from a riot that saw the band bottled off the stage, at the Grand Hall, Palace Theater, Kilmarnock, Scotland, in 1973. Men spat, while women screamed to drown out the music. Not the response expected for a group famous for their string of million sellers hits, “Little Willy”, “Wig-Wag Bam” and the number 1, “Block Buster”.
Why it happened has since led to suggestions that the band’s appearance in eye-shadow, glitter and lippy (in particular the once gorgeous bass player Steve Priest) was all too much for the hard lads and lassies o’ Killie.
It’s a possible. Priest thinks so, and said as much in his autobiography Are You Ready Steve?. But it does raise the question, why would an audience pay money to see a band best known through their numerous TV appearances for their outrageously camp image? Especially if these youngsters were such apparent homophobes? Moreover, this was 1973, when the UK seemed on the verge of revolution, engulfed by money shortages, food shortages, strike action, power cuts and 3-day-weeks, and the only glimmer of hope for millions was Thursday night and Top of the Pops.
Another possible was the rumor that Sweet didn’t play their instruments, and were a manufactured band like The Monkees. A story which may have gained credence as the band’s famous song-writing duo of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, preferred using session musicians to working with artists.
The sliver of truth in this rumor was that Sweet only sang on the first 3 Chinn-Chapman singles (“Funny, Funny”, “Co-Co” and “Poppa Joe”). It wasn’t until the fourth, “Little Willy” that Chinn and Chapman realized Sweet were in fact far better musicians than any hired hands, and allowed the band to do what they did best - play.
True, Chinn and Chapman gave Sweet their Midas touch, but it came at a cost. The group was dismissed by self-righteous music critics as sugar-coated pop for the saccharine generation. A harsh and unfair assessment. But in part it may also explain the audience’s ire.
In an effort to redefine themselves, Sweet tended to avoid playing their pop hits on tour, instead performing their own songs, the lesser known album tracks and rock covers. A band veering from the songbook of hits (no matter how great the material) was asking for trouble. As Freddie Mercury proved at Live Aid, when Queen made their come-back, always give the audience what they want.
Still, Glam Rock’s distinct sound owes much to Andy Scott’s guitar playing (which has been favorably compared to Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck), Steve Priest’s powerful bass, and harmonizing vocals, and Mick Tucker’s inspirational drums (just listen to the way he references Sandy Nelson in “Ballroom Blitz”). Add in Brian Connolly’s vocals, and it is apparent Sweet were a band with talents greater than those limned by their chart success.
So what went wrong?
If ever there was a tale of a band making a pact with the Devil, then the rise and fall of Sweet could be that story. A tale of talent, excess, fame, money, frustration and then the decline into alcohol, back-taxes, death and disaster. Half of the band is now tragically dead: Connolly, who survived 14 heart attacks caused through his alcoholism, ended his days a walking skeleton, touring smaller venues and holiday camps with his version of Sweet; while the hugely under-rated Tucker sadly succumbed to cancer in 2002.
The remaining members Priest and Scott, allegedly don’t speak to each other and perform with their own versions of The Sweet on 2 different continents. Priest lives in California, has grown into an orange haired-Orson, while Scott, who always looked like he worked in accounts, is still based in the UK, and recently overcame prostate cancer to present van-hire adverts on the tube.
This then is the real world of pop success.
I doubt they would ever change it. And I doubt the fans would ever let them. So great is the pact with the devil of celebrity that once made, one is forever defined by the greatest success.
Back to that night, in a theater in Kilmarnock, when the man at the back said everyone attack, and the room turned into a ballroom blitz. Whatever the cause of the chaos, it gave Glam Rock a work of art, and Sweet, one of their finest songs.
Bonus ‘Block Buster’ plus documentary on Brian Connolly, after the jump…
Maverick Salt Lake City-based indie filmmaker Trent Harris (who made the quirky cult favorite Reuben & Ed with Crispin Glover and Howard Hesseman) was working as a cameraman at a local TV station in 1979 when he met Richard LaVon Griffiths, AKA “Groovin’ Gary” (Griffiths’ CB radio handle). Harris was in the parking lot testing out a new video camera that the station had just bought and “Groovin’ Gary” was taking pictures of the station’s news helicopter. Their meeting, caught on videotape, would prove to be a fateful encounter for both men.
As he is initially revealed in the film, “Groovin’ Gary” seems to be a Jeff Spicoli-esque, late 70s stoner-type. He’s even got blond “feathered” hair. Gary is a bit of a ham-bone and describes himself as Beaver, Utah’s answer to Rich Little. He (somewhat inexplicably) seems to see his impromptu time on camera as an unexpected showbiz “break.” After doing some terrible impressions of John Wayne and other celebrities, he takes Harris over to his car and shows him his AM/FM stereo 8-track tape player—of which he’s very proud—and the engravings of Farrah Fawcett and Olivia Newton-John he’s had put on the windows. It’s banal, yet weirdly compelling.
“Groovin’ Gary” then invites Harris (via letter) to a talent show he’s producing at a high school in Beaver. A pageant that Gary himself will perform in. In drag. As his alter-ego “Olivia Newton-Dong.” He suggests in a letter that Harris might want to get to the local mortuary (?) at 8A.M. to shoot his hair and make-uo session.
During the make-up application (done by the mortician), he discusses his profound love of Olivia Newton-John. Even in full drag, he somehow does not come across as gay, more like someone who thought that they were about to do something just totally hilarious.
We see the talent show itself, with some truly soggy “talents” on display. Then “Olivia” is onstage and it’s weird, ending with a strange-looking masked man picking up Gary and carrying him offstage. To say that it’s a riveting performance is an understatement. Keep in mind as you watch this, that he orchestrated the entire talent show just so he could do this!
Afterwards “Groovin’ Gary’ happily recaps the event with Harris in his car. Harris drives off. Then the film cuts back to Gary, out of drag, doing a shitty Barry Manilow impression from earlier in the talent show. That’s how it ends.
The video below is out of sync, but it didn’t bother me that much.
Two years later, in 1981, Trent Harris directed a “dramatic” remake of the first video with a young Sean Penn playing the goofy kid from Beaver, Utah. There is an ending now, in the scripted version—based on what really happened or not, I have no idea—of “Groovin Gary” coming to the suicidal realization that perhaps his drag performance getting on TV would not be the best thing for his life in a small Mormon town and he tries to talk the Harris character out of showing it. The second film was made, apparently, for $100, and often recreated the scenes from the original video (Harris does not play himself here).
It’s not like this is the greatest thing you’ll ever see, but it is fascinating to see a pre-fame Sean Penn performing in drag (the short was made the same year Penn appeared in Taps). It seems clear that Penn picked up some tricks for his actor’s repertoire here that went right into his infamous character from Fast Times at Ridgemont High the following year. In many ways, this short was just a dry run for “Jeff Spicoli” and the next film in The Beaver Trilogy starring Crispin Glover.
After the jump, the final installment of The Beaver Trilogy starring Crispin Glover…
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…
“Like a crazy singer in a band that’s lost the words.”
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that I think the Virgin Prunes are THE most underrated group of the post-punk era. Go ahead and do your worst. What about _____? Or ______? Or _____?
What about ‘em? Sorry, but I’m right. No band with their theatrical power and musical genius has been so wrongly overlooked as the Virgin Prunes have been for the past 30 years.
The main reason for this gross miscarriage of cultural justice is simply because their albums were extremely difficult to find until seven years ago. Unless you bought the expensive limited edition import vinyl pressed in France and Italy when they actually came out in the early to mid-80s, you were pretty much shut out of enjoying the din glorious of the Virgin Prunes. You probably weren’t going to encounter much, if anything, of the Virgin Prunes’ output in a used record store, either. People who owned those albums, even those who slimmed their record collections down considerably over the years (like me) held onto them. They were not common on Limewire or Napster. Not only were they rare and coveted albums, they were glossy, darkly glamorous and obscenely weird objects d’art in their own right.
I think another reason for their obscurity has to do with the (mostly) misinformed notion that the Virgin Prunes were a goth band due to their “Pagan Lovesong” being a big dancefloor hit at places like London’s Batcave discotheque (which is admittedly where I first heard them myself sometime in 1984). Being lumped in with bands like The Specimen, Danse Society, Gene Loves Jezebel and Clan of Xymox hurt their credibility with rock snobs, but their scary, intimidating noise/art rock had more in common with Faust, The Pop Group, The Birthday Party, Public Image Ltd. or Throbbing Gristle, certainly, than it did with Sex Gang Children. The goth label was, and is, an unfortunate one for the legacy of the Virgin Prunes to bear and is still a barrier to proper critical re-appraisal of the group’s work. The goth label didn’t exist when they started.
Another excuse that they’re still so unknown and underground after 30 years have passed is that their work is simply not for everyone. Motherfuckers are evil sounding. If you don’t like an evil-sounding racket, get back to your Carpenter’s albums—quick—and just keep moving. These guys might damage you for life. If Satan himself had a band, they would sound like the Virgin Prunes.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall. Mirror, mirror, I’ve seen it all…”
It’s been remarked often that the Virgin Prunes are the reverse image of U2. For those of you who don’t know it, Dik Evans, original Virgin Prunes guitarist, is the brother of The Edge and the members of both groups grew up as friends in Dublin. Quoting from the Wikipedia entry:
The band consisted of childhood friends of U2’s Bono. Lypton Village was a “youthful gang” created by Bono, Guggi (Derek Rowan) and Gavin Friday (Fionan Hanvey) in the early 70s, where every member got a new identity and where they could escape from dreary and predictable Dublin life and be anything they wanted to be. It was both lead singers Friday and Guggi who first gave a teenaged Paul Hewson his alter-ego and world-famous moniker “Bono Vox of O’Connell Street,” later simply “Bono.”
U2 were the good boys, the Christians. The Virgins Prunes were feral and downright demonic.
And did I mention the whole smearing “chocolate” on their faces and simulating sodomy onstage thing? The ritualistic, fetishy transvestite infantilism of the live act put a few people off, too. Below, meet the “Pig Children.”
The music heard on their albums A New Form of Beauty and If I Die I Die… (produced by Wire’s Colin Newman) can perhaps best be described as “insane” and “disturbing,” yet it’s always somehow still “beautiful” (in a very broad definition of the word, I grant you). The best comparison to the Virgin Prunes sound would have to be Bauhaus, although that’s just getting you into the ballpark, so don’t make too much of it. The Prunes exist in their very own, very singular continuum. Theirs is the sound of tightly controlled chaos. Rubbery, almost metronomic bass. Pounding primitive drums. Eerie tribal percussion effects and trippy tape loops. Bone-crunching guitar riffs. Dark, apocalyptic lyrical matter and three wailing weirdo singers including a mentally handicapped young man. Their music was the stuff of nightmares. The perfect soundtrack to a bad trip.
Aside from their louder, more violent music, the band could make Eno-esque instrumentals like “Red Nettle” and “Mad Bird in the Wood.” As freaky as these dudes were, they were also great musicians with a lot of range. They were capable of recording profound and subtle tone poems like… “Suck Me Baby”:
More new forms of beauty from the Virgin Prunes 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:
Bram E. Gieben (aka Texture) is the editor of the Edinburgh-based fiction/non-fiction website Weaponizer, and also co-founder of the net label Black Lantern Music. I asked him to write DM a primer on the genre “witch house”:
The Niallist (aka Niall O’Conghaile) asked me to write something about witch house, summing it up, providing a genre overview, and talking about some of the artists I’ve discovered over the last year or so. The problem is witch house is nothing like a traditional genre. It is not defined by a tempo, a style of production, a specific group of artists, a region or country or city, or any of the things one could use to pigeonhole, say, shoegaze, dubstep or hip-hop. Even the pool of influences from which it draws are so diverse as to stagger the mind of even the most ardent avant garde completist: witch house can (and does) sound like everything from experimental noise and drone to EBM and darkwave and aggrotech, from hip-hop to punk rock and black metal, often all at the same time.
Witch house is perhaps the first anti-genre, in that it has always actively resisted not just definition, but also detection. Much mockery has been made of artists spelling their band names with strange typographic symbols, but in the early days of witch house this had a specific intent: namely to create a ‘lexical darknet’ (to quote Warren Ellis, the comics writer and novelist whose blog posts led me to my first discoveries in the field), whereby fans had to use the specific symbols in the band names to locate their music online.
Witch house has incubated and mutated on free music sharing platforms such as Soundcloud and Bandcamp, and survives and breeds on private forums like www.witch-house.com, and on invite-only Facebook groups like Witchbook and Dior Nights, which use Facebook to run miniature secret societies and covens. These technologies (or services, however you want to define them) are core to the distribution of the music, but equally important have been the Tumblr and Vimeo platforms. The cut-and-paste ethos behind many witch house projects extends to their visuals, and the gifs, music videos and photo collages that populate artists’ feeds and channels are as much a part of the aesthetic of witch house as the music is.
The equal importance of visual and audio material helps us get closer to a definition of witch house: it is a mood or a feeling, the kind of atmosphere generated by the seminal Goblin’s soundtrack for ‘Suspiria,’ the creeping, schizophrenic suspense of the Laura Palmer mystery, or the Red Room at the heart of Twin Peaks, the final twenty minutes of The Wicker Man, or a basement rave in the house at the end of The Blair Witch Project. In repose, it generates an aura of ritual, darkness and suspense. In motion, it combines the glamour of fetish clubs and serial murder and hard drugs into an amoral dystopia of sound and vision.
Excited yet? You should be. Witch house is almost completely free from the constraints of mainstream hype - aside perhaps from the majestic witch pop of S4LEM, the mysterious feedback glyphs of WU LYF, and the luxurious electronic experimentation of Balam Acab, the three artists closest to crossing over into mainstream consciousness.
After the jump, the bands including Gummy Bear, Ritualz, Skeleton Kids, Fostercare, Gvcci Hvcci, Mater Suspiria Vision, oOoOO and many, many more.
should, I repeat should be off the scale incredible. But it’s not. 
