A lovely and unlovely mix for the weekend from me to you.

  To Blast Away The Fungus In Your Ears  by brad laner
 
Runzelstirn and Gurgelstock- Bei Abwesenheit Jeglicher Genussempfindungen (excerpt)

Wolfgang Dauner/ Etcetera - Lady Blue

ID Company - Bum Bum

Pedro Santos - Sem Sombra

Chrome - TV As Eyes

Fleetwood Mac - Albatross

Jon Anderson - Transic Tö

Angel Rada - Upsadesa

Yoko Ono/ Plastic Ono Band - Paper Shoes

Taj Mahal Travellers - July 15,1972 part 3 (excerpt)

Matching Mole w/ Brian Eno - Gloria Gloom

Brian Eno w/ Brad Laner - Faraway Suns

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 Not different mixes, but substantially different versions which would have been lost to history due to the outdated format.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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Top Shelf for sending me this veritable holy grail of comics: Eddie Campbell’s “Alec” omnibus, which collects the lifetime autobiographical output of the Australia-based comic artist.

Eddie Campbell is known elsewhere as the artist on Alan Moore’s “From Hell,” as well as his own “Bacchus” series among other works. His sketchbook-y style is instantly recognizable to anybody who has encountered him. But for my money, his autobiographical comics—collected here—are his best work. I’ve been a massive fan since I discovered his comics as a teenager.

The work collected here covers much of Campbell’s life, centering on his tender, often hilarious looks at life, art, fatherhood, Australia and everything else that crosses his path. This is a life well-documented and examined in comics form, a great contribution to not only the field of comics, but also of the art of the memoir itself.

At 638 pages, this is a massively substantial work—in all senses. The book collects nine previously published “Alec” graphic novels, and adds a tenth, unique work, also titled “The Years Have Pants,” to the end. This is great stuff—“The Dance of Lifey Death” is a particular favorite, and has been since I bought it from Mr. Campbell himself at his booth at the San Diego Comic Con about ten years ago or so. That’s an incredibly touching vignette on life, time and sex that you won’t find paralleled anywhere else in the comics medium.

Campbell’s work has a certain “life directly documented on the page, through a wise and funny filter” quality to it that is absent from a lot of autobiographical comics work. This is the work of a mature, fully realized artist, the work of a grown man who has raised a family and been through the trials and tribulations of life and documented them with a sly grin and twinkle in the eye. That’s a quality that’s rare in autobiographical comics (or comics at all)—a lot of artists working in the field seem to filter their experiences through aloof irony or a kind of pretended, forced perspective. Consequently, they often feel alienated from their work—and alienate the reader. Not so with Eddie Campbell. Reading “Alec” is like spending a day drinking with a cool uncle and getting some much-needed insight on life.

Can’t recommend this one enough. A major achievement in many fields.

(ALEC: The Years Have Pants (A Life-Size Omnibus))

(Also check out this interview with Mr. Campbell by Brian Heater at the excellent Daily Cross Hatch comic blog.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
A wonderful essay—I think it’s one of his finest—from our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith, over at his Of Two Minds blog:

I am optimistic about the future because the status quo is doomed and better options abound.

One of the characteristics readers seem to like about oftwominds.com is that fundamentally I am an optimist about the future, even as I trace out the inevitability of the status quo’s devolution and implosion.

The two are inextricably bound in a yin-yang, electron/proton field: I am hopeful for the very reason that the status quo is doomed. Instead of being terrified of its devolution, I say “good riddance.” We all know it is unsustainable, rapacious and based on an interlocking net of lies; why should we mourn the passing of debt-serfdom and the dominance of interlocking webs of deceit, corruption and exploitation?

I am optimistic for the reasons laid out in Survival+: voluntary, transparent, non-privileged parallel organizations and productive structures are self-assembling under the leadership-by-example of The Remnant. Once 20% of the populace is permanently unemployed and permanently lost to the consumerist corporatocracy/Savior State status quo, then the Pareto principle suggests The Remant’s influence will grow rapidly.

Many people expect some sort of rapid implosion of social order into violent chaos. While anything is possible, my research into the devolution of the Roman Empire persuaded me that the Roman Empire remains the best available the model for our future: a slow decline and unwinding of Empire and the Savior State.

Why might it be slow? As I have explained at length in Survival+, various feedback loops are actively resisting collapse. History is not a vector so much as a slowly orbiting mass of complex feedback loops.

Devolution is not a chaotic mob of armed thugs rampaging. Such a concentration is relatively easy to control or simply liquidate by force. The State excels at violence and control, so rampaging mobs would be the State’s preferred “domestic enemy.”

Devolution is this: half the toilets in the Chemistry building no longer work, and they aren’t being fixed nor will they be fixed. The city/county/state can’t print money, and as the public unions demand higher taxes to fund their Protected Fiefdoms, then the compliant State and its parallel shadow structures of privilege will comply, raising junk fees and taxes on the dwindling class of still-productive citizenry.

This feedback loop has a consequence the Status Quo fails to understand: rather than toil ever longer to pay exploitative taxes, the productive can choose to opt out. As I have ceaselessly explained here, the Protected Fiefdoms of the Savior State simply cannot grasp that entrepreneurs and small business owners have a choice: they do not have to work long hours and endure hardships just to support the Savior State and its numerous Protected Fiefdoms. They can simply call it quits, close the doors and opt for a simpler lifestyle which generates no taxes and much less stress.

Many people moan that the U.S. is becoming a “Third World country.” I say, good; life is better in a well-ordered Third World country than in a debt-serf Empire. Not all Third World countries are equal; those hobbled by corruption, dictatorship, poor infrastructure and education, etc. are truly wretched. But those “developing nations” with lesser shares of these burdens can actually be better places to live than crumbling empires based on killing commutes, endlessly higher debts and a mindlessly self-destructive culture seeking ever-higher doses of self-medication.

Maintaining or improving the infrastructure of the U.S. requires a mere slice of the GDP. Maintaining or improving sewage, water, rail/transport electrical and Internet systems requires very little money compared to the trillions squandered on Empire, bailing out various Financial/Power Elites and the 70% of the GDP squandered on “consumerist paradise.”

Were priorities to be re-ordered, a Third World GDP would be more than adequate to fund a functioning, efficient infrastructure. The money wasted on Empire and sickcare alone could rebuild the entire nation’s critical infrastructure.

No one is forcing us to be debt-serfs. That is a voluntary choice. Nobody has to work two jobs to pay the bloated mortgage on a house which is high in cost due to large-scale financial manipulations by the Savior State to benefit various financial Elites. Nobody has to agree to buy a bloated house and take on a bloated mortgage, or pay $3,000 per month for a crummy studio apartment in Manhattan to toil for a parasitic financial corporation.

Interestingly, much of the Counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s was founded on the understanding that a “Third World country” lifestyle was inherently more humane and worthy than the commuter-debt-serf model of Empire.

The Counterculture was voluntary and incremental. You could pick and choose which parts of it to join. You could be a “straight” and buy your food at the co-op. It existed in parallel with the status quo, which quickly co-opted whatever features gained widespread appeal. (“Natural” products appeared as if by magic on the shelves of supermarkets.)

Nobody has to change agribusiness dependence on growing corn and producing high-fructose corn syrup to inject in essentially every packaged and fast food; as the Savior State founders, its subsidies of agribusiness will decline, rendering growing corn for sugar unprofitable. Those pursuing that model of “farming” will either go bankrupt or they will pursue some other model of growing food that is not mandated by subsidies for Protected Fiefdoms.

When people become ill from self-destructive diets and lifestyles, and the Savior State no longer pays for sickcare treatments of these lifestyle ills, then they will choose other lifestyles. Choice isn’t capitalist or “free market;” it is human. We all have choices, and when the trade-offs and subsidies and incentives change, so will the choices.

When opting out of the work-harder-to-pay-more-taxes rat race becomes recognized not as “failure” but as freedom and blessed relief, then more people will opt out to do something else with their lives.

Read more of Why I am Optimistic at www.oftwominds.com

 
I’m not someone who tends to read much fiction. Ever. As in never. I read a novel once every… fifteen years. I prefer documentaries to narrative films as well. I need to devour information—lots of it—and fiction just doesn’t offer me the sustenance I require. I’m not saying novels are bad things, they just aren’t for sir.

Recently I started listening to audiobooks in the car during my daily commute in Los Angeles. I especially enjoyed the audio version of SuperFreakonomics read by Stephen J. Dubner because 1) it’s a wonderful, thought provoking book, a genre unto itself even and 2) Dubner’s delivery is incredibly engaging as he reads his and Steven Levitt’s well-constructed prose. He really knows how to hit his script perfectly and charmingly animates the book’s clever ideas. Listening to an author read their own words, especially when the writing style is somewhat idiosyncratic, is for me a real pleasure.

Post-SuperFreakonomics, I had no immediate plans for my drive-time entertainment, but this problem was solved by the audiobook of Nick Cave’s novel, The Death of Bunny Munro arriving in the post, thoughtfully sent to me by Iain Forsythe, co-producer (along with Jane Pollard) of the set. The novel is read by the author over 7 CDs, accompanied by a moody (and effective) score by Cave and Warren Ellis. There is also a DVD.

For a guy who claims to hate fiction, it took me all of about ten minutes to become completely engrossed in The Death of Bunny Munro. Admittedly, I’m quite well-disposed towards Nick Cave to begin with, and come to think of it, one of the last novels I did read was his And The Ass Saw the Angel. But I had no expectations, and not much foreknowledge of what the new book was about. I think this was a good thing, but I doubt that anything I write here will spoil anything for anyone.
 

 
The Death of Bunny Munro is one of the most profane novels ever written. It makes Celine or Henry Miller seem timid in comparison. The title character, an immoral, middle-aged, door to door beauty products salesman and unrelenting lothario, drives his wife to suicide as the book opens. Upon finding her corpse, the first thought that pops into Bunny’s head is that her tits looked nice. Bunny, a character devoid of any redeeming qualities, scoops up his sweet nine-year old son and goes on a road trip to Hell. It’s all downhill from there as we witness his flailing flameout.

Read in Cave’s distinctive mellow bellow, his prose comes richly to life. Cave is a performer as much as he is a writer, of course, and his performance of his own novel is remarkable. The musical soundtrack, which at first I thought “slight,” is a grower and I came to love it. My interest never flagged for a second of its nearly eight hour running time. It’s really well-produced, with some sort of spatial 3-D recording technique that makes Cave’s voice feel like it’s in the center of your skull, and inventive sound effects.

What occurred to me as I enjoyed the audiobook of The Death of Bunny Munro so very much was the notion that the plain old book version is a lesser experience when compared to the audiobook. When an audiobook is done this well, inevitably the text-only version will come to be seen as the script of the audiobook. Of course not every author is a performer the caliber of the great Nick Cave, but as the audiobook form matures, why would the consumer choose to forgo the music and intimate storyteller aspect of authors reading their own work?

A word about the packaging: The UK version is a beautiful object, with the top photograph, taken by Polly Borland printed on a waxy, sturdy box that feels like a luxury item. The American version sucks. The idiot who chose to go with the packaging they used for the US version should get an award for shitty design (or else fired). The British version you would keep and display on your shelf even if you had no intention of devoting another 8 hours of your life to it for a repeat listen, the US version you’d just pass on to someone when you’re done like it’s disposable.

Nick Cave on his monstrous, funny Bunny Munro (Los Angeles Times)
 

 
Dangerous Minds pal, Chris Campion’s fascinating liner notes for More Of Cake Please

Three teenage girls are discovered singing along to records in a New York night club by two hotshot managers. They are rushed into a recording studio, signed up to a major label deal and whisked off to Hollywood in a matter of weeks where they are treated like stars and consort with rock royalty. It sounds like a story spun from myth. But all this did happen and more. The story of The Cake is one of the last great untold stories of the 60s; a real life ‘Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls’.

The Cake were the daughters of Sgt Pepper, a girl group baroque who wrote psychedelic madrigals and sang blue-eyed soul with rock ?��Ǩ��n?��Ǩ�Ѣ roll attitude. This trio of brash and beautiful teenage New York City girls ?��Ǩ��� Jeanette Jacobs, Barbara Morillo and Eleanor Barooshian ?��Ǩ���jumped onto the rollercoaster of the 60s music scene just as it hit its peak and spiraled into a downward curve. The Cake were formed in ?��Ǩ�Ѣ66 and baked by ?��Ǩ�Ѣ68, releasing 2 albums that have been cherished ever since by music enthusiasts as curios of the time. But their importance goes far beyond that.
 

 
Creatively, stylistically, and in terms of sheer attitude, The Cake were way ahead of their time. They were the first girl group to write original material as a group, and the first to have it released on a major label. This was not just a novelty at the time it was completely unheard of. They were also the first to break free of the stylistic yoke imposed by producers, songwriters and managers. In doing so, they bridged the gap between the pliable male fantasy of 60s girl groups and the advent of 70s girl bands who were doing it for themselves. The Cake are the missing link between The Ronettes and The Runaways, the Shangri-Las and the Go-Gos.
 

 
Accepted as equals by their peers in the rock world, The Cake palled around and were partnered with Jimi Hendrix, Skip Spence and members of The Animals. They also sang with Dr. John and The Soft Machine. Songs were not only written by them, but about them! The group had its origins somewhere far more mundane.

The Cake were formed in a New York bathroom; two bathrooms, in fact, located several months apart in the heady summer of 1966. The first is somewhere in Manhattan, where 16-year-old Jeanette Jacobs and 18-year-old Barbara Morillo find themselves sharing a mirror in an apartment that both of them are strangers to.

?��Ǩ��Being teenagers, both of us had stayed over at someone?��Ǩ�Ѣs house,?��Ǩ�Ѣ Barbara recalls. ?��Ǩ��Me, after hanging out at a disco. I don?��Ǩ�Ѣt know where Jeanette had been and we weren?��Ǩ�Ѣt even sure whose house it was. We just both woke up and were kind of in the bathroom at the same time. We hit it off really well; there was a chemistry immediately.?��Ǩ�Ѣ (Cont)

 
Although for myself, I can’t even comprehend not liking Bette Midler—for me it was love at first sight—I am told that she is an acquired taste; and one that my darling wife—who has great taste in music and everything else, I hasten to add—has not acquired. This morning, I was blasting her first LP, The Divine Miss M from 1972 while Tara was running errands—I haven’t heard it in years—and it simply knocked me out. Produced by Barry Manilow, Ahmet Ertegun and the Grammy-award winning producer Joel Dorn, with a crack set of session musicians and back-up singers like Cissy Houston and Melissa Manchester, The Divine Miss M is nothing less than the unveiling of a very major talent on the world, as Midler’s 40+ years at the top of her profession attest to. She didn’t write any of the songs, but trust me, she owns them all. She’s one of those people who just oozes talent and concerning the quality of her voice and its incredible power, well, she belongs in that smallest circle of all singing, all dancing, all acting diva divas, like Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli and the great Broadway talents like Ethel Merman. She’s got the lungs, no two ways about it.

This morning I was poking around the Internet reading about Bette Midler’s early career and there are a lot of interesting things I discovered, especially for those of you reading this who think of her more as the Midler-of-the-road songstress of From A Distance, than the raunchy, brassy young broad she started her career as.

The short story is that she was a talkative Jewish chick with a BIG personality who grew up in a mostly Asian neighborhood in Honolulu, who was probably dying to get out of there from an early age. She moved to New York in 1965 at the age of 20 and by 1967 she was playing the small role of Tzeitel in the original cast of Fiddler on the Roof, with Zero Mostel, Maria Karnilova, Bea Arthur and other notables.

Midler really came into her own, however, in the cabaret of the Continental Baths, a pioneering gay bathhouse where gay and straight culture mixed in the 70s. An Aretha Franklin album hit Midler like a bolt from the blue and she decided to become a singer, mixing campy classics like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Leader of the Pack” with her wacky thrift store fashion sense, quirky personality and dirty jokes. A friend suggested that she might want to consider launching her unconventional stage show at an unconventional place and so Midler took up a residency at the Continental Baths, playing next to a waterfall to an audience consisting of bath house patrons wearing nothing but white towels around their waists and “chic” straight couples looking for an unusual night out.
 

 
It was here that Midler’s brassy “fag hag” persona (“I am the last of the truly tacky women”) took shape and it was imperative that she do everything she could to capture the attention of the Continental Baths clientele: after all, there was basically a Dionysian orgy going on all around her. When Midler opened her mouth, the orgy parted like the Red Sea. Her musical director for her formative years was the aforementioned Manilow, who would perform, it has been said, wearing only a towel himself, as he sat at his piano.

While this underground residency was going on, Midler was performing regularly on mainstream talkshows like David Frost’s, Merv Griffin’s and even the super straight (but unfailingly sweet) Mike Douglas’ show. Where her star really rose, though, was when Johnny Carson took Midler on as a sort of protege. She appeared on The Tonight Show quite regularly for 18 months and opened for Carson in Las Vegas. By the time The Divine Miss M came out, she was already a known quantity and Midler went on to win a Grammy that year, the album selling nearly a million copies.

Bette Midler is an important figure in the history of gay rights in this country. Not for any one thing that she did, more for what she stood for. When her show came to town, it was an excuse for her gay fans to come out in force, dress up and get their freak on, at a time there would have been few opportunities to do so in most American cities. With her big personality and “trash with flash” Midler became a rallying point for young gay men of the 70s, not in a political sense, but a cultural sense, Midler injecting sassy gay sensibilities into the mainstream via her megawatt talents.

Here are links to some clips of the Divine Bette performing at the Baths. Considering the scarcity of consumer video cameras at that time, it’s a wonder that any visual records of Midler’s performances there exist at all, but here they are, thank you to the glory of YouTube. The best two clips, “Marahuana” and “Fat Stuff” are not embeddable. “Fat Stuff” has a lot of stage banter. (I liked one of the YouTube comments: “Wow, this was back when you had to be talented to have a career!” Too true, too true…)
 

 
Short news story on Midler and the Continental Baths:
 

 
The Divine Miss M Tour (Bette on the Boards)

 
Betty Davis is one of the lost greats of 70s funk, but if there is any justice in the world her music will one day be as revered as it deserves to be. This woman was outrageous, sexy and she had mad musical chops! Originally a successful fashion model when she met trumpeter Miles Davis, Betty Mabry, as she was then known, traveled in circles that included Jimi Hendrix, The Chamber Brothers and Sly and the Family Stone. In 1968 she married Davis, but the marriage lasted just one year, breaking up, it was rumored, because she was having an affair with Hendrix (which she has always denied). In his autobiography, Davis credits Betty for opening his ears to the new possibilities inherent in the music of Sly and Jimi, and she inspired his music from Filles De Kilimanjaro (Mademoiselle Mabry is a tribute to Betty, obviously) to Bitches Brew (the title again alleged to reference Mlle. Mabry, albeit by then in a less flattering light).

After her divorce from Miles, Betty recorded two albums in the early 70s with crack backing musicians like Larry Graham, Merl Saunders (Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt), Neal Schon (Santana/Journey) and members of Graham Central Station, Tower of Power, even the young Pointer Sisters singing back-up. Davis was the original “nasty gal” creating the blueprint for suggestive “outrageousness” well-trod by today’s female chart toppers. One of her songs, the sexually forthright If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up was so controversial that the NAACP condemned her.
 

 
Then she recorded another great record of hard funk in 1975 called Nasty Gal, but sadly, she never really caught on. There’s no good reason for it, but luckily her reputation has risen again in recent years due to reprints of her albums by Seattle-based label, A Light in the Attic Records, who recently released her recorded in 1976 but shelved ever since album, Is It Love or Desire.

(When I met my future wife, she had a Betty Davis CD in her car stereo. As a man who puts “good taste in music” approximately third on the list of what makes a woman attractive, I can assure you I was impressed).

The Sound of Young America: Betty Davis Interview ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú June 21, 2007: Betty Davis gives her first radio interview in 30 years.

 
When I was growing up, I could read the Village Voice in the local library and fancied myself “up” on what was going on in New York, at the age of 14, even though I had never been anywhere even close to the island of Manhattan. Having said that, if I wasn’t exactly an expert on New York City per se, I was at least an expert on each and every issue of the Village Voice. (And you can tell a lot about a city from its alt weekly, let’s just say. Reading between the lines = very easy with the Village Voice. True now, and true then.)
 
But in my hometown, one thing I couldn’t experience, even vicariously, was the insane cable access world of Manhattan Cable, now known as the Manhattan Neighborhood Network.I’d read about shows like Ugly George, where a fat asshole in a silver-lame jumpsuit carried a video-camera (the huge old fashioned kind with the outboard decks) around New York and asked women to take their clothes off for him. Many did. Many more told him to fuck off and die. There was also Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party, which I longed to see, it was so glamorous sounding, there was Al Goldstein’s racy Midnight Blue, but most intriguing of all for me, living in Wheeling, WV where nothing ever happened, were Andy Warhol’s cable access programs. I loved the idea that anyone who wanted to have their own TV show could do so and saw myself having one myself one day (and I did, The Infinity Factory talkshow, which was on for over 2 years opposite ER!)
 
A great website I just discovered called Zamboni has files of a few of the Warhol programs for streaming and download. Other shows are knocking around out there, too. Many famous faces here including Halston, Pee-wee Herman, Debbie Harry and John Waters.
 

 
The music of minimalist composer Terry Riley has always had a special place on my turntable and in my CD player. His 1967 album, A Rainbow in Curved Air is the perfect thing to put on when guests are over—it creates a great mood but never overpowers conversation—and you can bliss out on it like a meditation mantra (the composer’s intent, obviously). You can hear parts of it behind the narration of the original BBC radio broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe and it’s on the radio station in Grand Theft Auto IV. Chances are you’ve heard it many times.
 

 
In the 1960s Riley used to play all night concerts, with audience members showing up with sleeping bags. He’d use tape loops to accompany himself, letting them run by themselves when he had to take bathroom breaks. His 1964 piece In C, where the same series of notes are played over and over and over again by (at least) 35 musicians, with a single anchor melody of a “C” note played at octaves as eighth notes (serving as the metronome or “pulse” and played preferably by “a beautiful girl,” as the music’s notation instructs) is considered the very first minimalist composition. At a recital of In C at the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, 124 musicians took part.
 

 
The repetitive synth section that leads off The Who’s Baba O’Riley was inspired by Riley’s signature sound and the title is a portmanteau of his name and that of Indian mystic Meher Baba. He also did a collaboration with John Cale—both of them heavily influenced by La Monte Young—called Church of Anthrax, which is absolutely amazing and deserves a post of its own at a later date.

 
The name Steve Ditko probably means very little to you if you aren’t a comics fan, but if you are, then the name is well known to you: Steve Ditko is the co-creator of Spiderman, the original artist who envisioned the character along with Stan Lee. The worldwide smash of Sam Raimi’s Spiderman franchise saw many Ditko-drawn Spiderman classics republished and a concurrent growing fascination with the reclusive artist, who is still working in New York, at age 82.

Aside from Spiderman, Ditko was also the co-creator, again with Lee, of the cosmic Dr. Strange, who was my favorite comic book hero as a child (as I am sure will surprise few of you reading this…). The comic panels of Dr. Strange were some of the most vividly psychedelic ever seen in comics, and they contrasted sharply with his rendering of Peter Parker’s drab world, which was almost Soviet in comparison.
 

 
In the mid-60s, Ditko began to chafe at Stan Lee’s dictatorial editorship of Spiderman and eventually got Lee to agree to let him plot Spiderman—unheard of at Marvel—while control freak Lee would write the actual dialogue suggested from Ditko’s stories. The arrangement did not last long. Spiderman as originally written was very much a conflicted character as we all know, but the character also had a lot of anti-establishment appeal—he was a smartass—and this is one of the many reasons the character took off in the heady era of the ‘60s. At the time that Ditko’s grasp on Spiderman tightened, so did his interest grow in the Objectivist philosophy of Russian-born novelist, Ayn Rand. When Rand’s humorless black and white moralizing started creeping into the Spiderman stories, Lee balked and soon the two men were not speaking to each other. Eventually Ditko left, leaving behind a character that would go on to become a billion dollar enterprise with Sam Raimi’s films. He would never draw Spiderman again and has essentially erased himself as much as possible from the character’s history.

 
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that Ditko sees himself as a real-life “Howard Roark,” Rand’s fictional architect in The Fountainhead, a man who refuses to compromise his vision. Rand’s influence was even more obvious in his right wing vigilante character Mr A, who would throw someone off a building for disagreeing with him. His work became didactic, shrill, hectoring and far-right his influence waned. Mr. A was like Bill O’Reilly as a superhero. What teenager wants to be yelled at by a moralistic superhero? In the opinion of many, his work degenerated into fascistic rhetoric and lunacy from the late 60s onwards.

There have been almost no interviews, ever, with Steve Ditko. While really not a hermit or a recluse, he’s an intensely private person and refuses all interviews, although there are stories of him speaking to a fan ballsy enough to ring his doorbell, but always standing in the doorway, never inviting them in to his studio. In his recent BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko, otaku British talkshow host Jonathan Ross tracked Ditko down in New York City and called the artist on the telephone. Ditko politely refused his request for an on camera interview. But when Ross (and Neil Gaiman) showed up on his doorstep, he did in fact entertain them, although not on camera.

 
I may be a little late to the game on this one, but I recently got a copy of Blake Bell’s Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, a coffeetable book published by Fantagraphics last year and it is a wonderful and fascinating look at Ditko’s life and work. Kudos to Bell for putting together such a volume which was clearly a labor of love and unique erudition. I can’t imagine how much shit he had to go through to be able to put together such a book. I’m sure Steve Ditko was no help!

Below, part one of Jonathan Ross’s wonderful BBC documentary Searching for Steve Ditko:

Charles Ludlam and Black Eyed Susan in Eunuchs of the Forbidden City, 1971. Photo by Leandro Katz
 
A fine book came out a few years back, 2002 to be exact, about the great American absurdist dramatist, Charles Ludlam. Ridiculous!: The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam by David Kaufman is certainly one of the best books I’ve read this decade and I wanted to tell you about it. I feel it’s a book that deserves a far wider audience than it originally got. Even though it tells the story of a very particular person and of a very particular “scene”—in this case Ludlam and his gender-bending Off Off Broadway troupe of drag queens, druggies and bohos—like a biography of say, Andy Warhol, the canvas is so widescreen and cinematic that it tells the tale of an entire era, not just the story of one man and his orbit. Ludlam’s story—which Kaufman spent a decade researching, interviewing over 150 people who knew the playwright—is simultaneously the history of Off Broadway theater in the late ‘60s to the late ‘80s, it’s also the story of pre and post-Stonewall gay life, the anecdotal histories of certain types of “only in NY” culture vultures and media mavens and, of course, the life of the complex and exasperating force of nature that was Charles Ludlam, a self-created character if ever there was one.

Charles Ludlam should in many ways be seen as the American Moliere. He was the proprietor, creative genius, task master and (one of) the star attraction(s) of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, who called a small theater at One Sheridan Square—at Seventh Ave, where a street sign commemorates Ludlam’s memory—their home for many years.  For several years, I lived a block away. I only actually saw two Ludlam shows—The Mystery of Irma Vep (I still have the Showbill) where Ludlam and Everett Quinton played all the characters, male and female, their frenetic costume (and gender) changes part of the play’s berserk charm, and Salammbo, where Ludlam played the high priestess of the Moon, surrounded by muscle men. The play also featured live doves and an extremely obese naked woman—she had to be 400 lbs—with massive breasts and… leprosy. It was absolutely outrageous. Imagine a mutant cross of Shakespeare, early John Waters, Flash Gordon serials and Arsenic and Old Lace and you’ll kind of be in the right ballpark.

A few years later, in 1987, Ludlam was dead of AIDS. When a theatrical company shuts down, theater being what it is, there is usually not much left over to remind us that its performances ever existed. It’s an extremely ephemeral art form. You’d think that there might be some videos of Ludlam and the Ridiculous showing up on YouTube, but so far, nothing. Which is not to say that Ludlam has been forgotten, far from it: His plays are performed with ever increasing regularity on college campuses and several scholarly works have been written about his 29 plays and influence on American culture (Bette Midler and the original cast of SNL, are two examples, according to Kaufman’s book). When Ludlam died, his obituary made it to the front page of the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt from another appreciation from the TImes:

To be Ridiculous is to be a step beyond the Absurd. Ludlam defined his form of theater as an ensemble synthesis of ‘‘wit, parody, vaudeville farce, melodrama and satire,’’ which, in combination, gives ‘‘reckless immediacy to classical stagecraft.’’ That recklessness led some people to misinterpret his work as anarchic. It was spontaneous, but it was also highly structured - and always to specific comic effect. Though Mr. Ludlam was a titanic Fool, he was not foolish. He knew exactly what he was doing, whether the object of his satire was Dumas, du Maurier, the Brontes, Moliere, Shakespeare, soap opera or grandiose opera - or himself.

I first encountered him in performance 17 years ago when he was playing ‘‘Bluebeard’’ far Off Broadway - with a beard like blue Brillo and a diabolical glare in his eye. This was a distillation of every mad-doctor movie ever made. In his role as Bluebeard, he said, ‘‘When I am good, I am very good. When I am bad. . . ,’’ and he paused to consider his history of turpitude. Then he concluded, ‘‘I’m not bad.’’ As hilarious as ‘‘Bluebeard’’ was, it gave no indication of the body of work that was to follow it. Almost every year, sometimes twice a year, there was another Ludlam lunacy on stage. As a critic who reviewed almost all of his plays, I must say that Ludlam was always fun to watch and fun to write about. His flights of fancy could inspire a kind of critical daredevilry, as one tried to capture in words the ephemeral essence of Ridiculous theater.

Looking back on our debt to him, one remembers his rhapsodic, hairy-chested ‘‘Camille’‘; the Grand Guignol vaudeville of ‘‘The Ventriloquist’s Wife,’’ in which he spoke both for himself and for his back-talking dummy, Walter Ego; ‘‘The Enchanted Pig,’’ a helium-high hybrid of ‘‘King Lear’’ and ‘‘Cinderella’‘; ‘‘Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde,’’ a Molieresque send-up of minimalism; ‘‘Galas,’’ with Mr. Ludlam as the title diva. The range ran from ‘‘Corn,’’ a hillbilly musical, to ‘Der Ring Gott Farblonjet,’’ a three-Ring Wagner circus. There were also sideshows - a Punch and Judy puppet theater in which he played all 22 characters, and ‘‘Anti-Galaxie Nebulae,’’ a science fiction serialette.

‘‘The Mystery of Irma Vep’’ (in 1984) was a tour de force, a horror-comedy in which he and his comic partner, Everett Quinton, quick-changed roles in a scintillating send-up of ‘‘Wuthering’’ and other Gothic ‘‘Heights.’’ For Ludlam, ‘‘Irma Vep’’ became a breakthrough of a kind. The first of his plays to demonstrate a broader, popular appeal, it has been staged by other companies, in other countries as well as in America’s regional theaters. Not all of Ludlam was equal, but his batting average was extraordinarily high -as author, director and actor.

His acting was, of course, his most noticeable talent. As a performer, he unfailingly enriched his own work, as he charted a chameleonesque course, specializing in satyrs, caliphs and fakirs - as well as playing the occasional damsel. He was also an expert teacher of theater, as I discovered some years ago when, over a period of several months, I took an acting workshop with him. In these intensive sessions, we studied and practiced physical, visual and verbal comedy. He was most informative about what he did on stage. For example, he thought of his body as a puppet; through his imagination, he pulled his own strings.

Bedlam Days

My report on Ridiculous Theater

Ridiculous Theatrical Company

Black-Eyed Susan: La Dame aux Ridiculous

Black-Eyed Susan

A long article I just wrote about the bizarre, hallucinatory, sickening, purgatory, Bardo-like experience of browsing 4chan has just been published on R. U. Sirius’s h+ Magazine blog. Check it out!

In the last decade, we’ve seen the increasing acceleration of information (a la Terence McKenna and Moore’s law) heralded as the key to new business development, though it has, in fact, so ruined our attention spans that it is almost impossible for modern man to get any kind of productive work done. We’re too lost in the datastream, too focused on taking in new information to complete a task that takes more than a few minutes, at best. I think a direct correlation can be made, for instance, between the rise of social media and the fall of the economy. The kaleidoscope of the Internet is more endless, more distracting and more mutating than even the most potent psychedelic drugs could have ever prepared us for. And 4chan is the ultimate, final trip.

If the mainstream Internet-using world has driven itself to distraction and insanity with social networking, the denizens of the Chans have upped the ante past all conceivable boundaries, like switching from a light alcohol problem to crushing and injecting Oxycontin. This is the place where all senses are deadened, where the mind cannot function because it is trapped in its own overstimulation. This, I am sure, is where media theorists from Marshall McLuhan to Neil Postman to Douglas Rushkoff assured us that the inherently liberating force of information technology was leading us. And though I am sure they knew that the filth and fury would follow, I’m not sure they ever expected it to look quite like… this.

My own 4chan addiction crept up slowly. Once a casual user of gateway drugs like icanhascheezburger.com, ytmnd.com and Encyclopedia Dramatica, I followed a link to the black hole itself one day and—sucked past its event horizon—have since been unable to escape. Stuck there now, I am clicking back and forth from this article to peruse the halls of 4chan’s /x/ forum, afraid that I might have missed the latest spew from the Internet’s collective maw. It is the car crash that cannot be looked away from. Ever.

(h+: Lost in the Filth Simulacrum)

 
If you’ve never heard of Jobriath Boone, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Obscure even by “rock snob” standards, Jobriath was the first really openly gay rock star. David Bowie and Lou Reed flirted with bisexuality, nail polish and make-up, of course, but Jobriath was in his own words, “a true fairy.” He wasn’t just “out of the closet” he was out like a police siren with the volume turned up to eleven!

I’ve been a Jobriath freak for about 20 years when I stumbled upon his first LP at a New York City flea market. “What is THIS?” was my initial reaction to the cover, obviously influenced by the artwork for David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs.” Clearly from the image on the cover, Jobriath was a 70s glitter rock wannabe. Make that perhaps a “neverwas,” for aside from a massive advertising campaign that saw his image on 250 New York buses and a 40 foot high poster in Times Square, two solid LPs (recorded with the likes of Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones and Peter Frampton) and a memorable Midnight Special performance, Jobriath was a massive flop at the time. Too gay for mid-America in 1974? For sure, but that hasn’t stopped Jobriath’s Broadway showtunes meets glam rock oeuvre from being rediscovered by fresh ears this decade. Championed by Morrissey, Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys and singer-actress Ann Magnuson (who once told me that I was “the only straight guy in the world who’s ever even HEARD of Jobriath” back in the early 90s), the tiny cult of Jobriath got a lot of new members when the CD complation Lonely Planet Boy was released in 2004. His life was also a major part of the inspiration for Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine although few people realize that fact (the Maxwell Demon album covers are direct homages to the original Jobriath records). Admittedly, his music isn’t for everyone—some people just HATE it—but for those of you who embraced the equally obscure Klaus Nomi, you’ll probably love Jobriath.

Rock of Ages on The Midnight Special

I’m Ready for my Close-Up an informative Jobriath article from MOJO.

Why You Should Like Jobriath

This article originally appeared at Boing Boing when I was guest blogging there

 
I think it’s safe to say that all four of us here at Dangerous Minds are big Julian Cope fans. Jason and I are HUGE fans and I have loved The Teardrop Explodes and followed Cope since I was a teen. The guy’s as cool as anyone’s ever been, he doesn’t care what you think about him and he can write the best guitar riffs since Ray Davies. I’ve seen him in concert four times, read all of his books and I interviewed him once around the time Peggy Suicide was released, in 1991. He was a fascinating guy to talk to, full of energy, his mind wandering off in every direction at once. My guess is also that he was probably pretty stoned that day!

My friend Wm. Ferguson and I met the Arch Drude at the Island Records offices near Tower Records in lower Manhattan. During the interview Cope told us about the mystical experience he had that led to his vision of the earth dying that inspired Peggy Suicide’s somewhat bleak environmentalist message. I recall that we discussed a certain book about Helena Blavatsky which he and I had both read and he compared the physical sensation of his mystic moment to the first time a pubescent boy masturbates, not quite pleasurable and very confusing, a sort of mental orgasm felt in the brain. I asked him if he felt conflicted about bringing a child into a world—his wife Dorian was then pregnant with their first daughter—that he so obviously thought was terminal. He paused and said, “Well, yeah the world is fucked, but it’s not THAT fucked that it can’t be saved, certainly. We’ve got to try.” I then voiced my own skepticism about bring new life into the world—I was 25 at the time—and he said something that I will never forget and have repeated to friends expecting children several times: “If people like you and I stop having children, we’ve ceded our world to the idiots. All intelligent people should have as many babies as possible to prevent all the thick, ungroovy Christians from taking over.”

When we were leaving, I mentioned in passing that I’d seen the infamous Hammersmith Palais show of his first UK solo tour in 1984, a concert that saw Cope performing a bloody act of self-mutilation. During the encore of Reynard the Fox, Cope snapped his mike-stand in half and proceeded to rake the jagged edge across his chest, back and stomach drawing lots of blood and generally freaking out the entire audience! Up until the very end it had been a slick, professional rock show. A girl standing near me puked when she saw what he had done. It cemented Cope’s reputation as a Syd Barrett-like acid casualty.

Cope laughed sheepishly and pulled out his wallet. “Well, you’ll appreciate this: Whenever I’m feeling like I am fucked in the head, I pull out this picture—” it was of a bloodied Cope from the concert I’d seen “—and I remind myself that however fucked up I think I am I am still not THAT fucked!”

And with that he was off. It’s often said of Cope that he’s the last of a dying breed or something to that effect. Not true. This implies that there were more like him, but Julian Cope’s a one off. All hail the Arch Drude!

Above, Julian Cope, tripping on LSD during a Top of the Pops performance of Passionate Friend. Read about this experience in Cope’s own words here.

Great, really intelligent extended Julian Cope interview by Jon Savage

Dennis Cooper on Cope

Julian Cope’s Head Heritage website

 
A few weeks back, regarding Jacques Demy’s Model Shop, I wrote about my fascination with the great European directors crossing the Atlantic to reign in and make sense of ‘60s America.  Resigning himself to merely making a film called Made In U.S.A., Jean-Luc Godard resisted the impulse.  Michelangelo Antonioni, most spectacularly with Zabriskie Point, did not.
 

 
As hatched by a team of writers that included Sam Shepard, and wife of Bernardo Bertolucci, Clare Peploe, the plot of Zabriskie Point wasn’t terribly complex.  Rebel Angelenos (my favorite kind!) Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette (who go, in the film, by their real names), hook up in the desert, have sex in the sand, then separate to meet their own explosive ends.

More complex, though, was the anger and confusion the film provoked at the time.  Typically gorgeous cinematography aside, cineasts looking for a worthy philosophical successor to Blow-Up were left disappointed by Zabriskie’s relatively unnuanced take on capitalism.  Hollywood watchers were appalled that Antonioni squandered so much time and money ($7 million in 1970 dollars) on something that, despite it’s notorious “desert orgy” sequence, managed to rake in barely a million hippie-box-office dollars.

Fortunately, 5 years later, Antonioni secured cinematic redemption with The Passenger.  Daria Halprin acted in only a handful of films, but went on to become, briefly, Mrs. Dennis Hopper.  After her marriage to Hopper fizzled, Halprin developed an interest in art therapy, and now, with her mother, runs Marin County’s Tampala Institute.

The future was far less kind to Mark Frechette.  You can read the Rolling Stone article about his “sorry life and death” here, but the shorthand goes like this:

He was the apparent victim of a bizarre accident in a recreation room at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk, where Frechette had been serving a six- to 15-year sentence for his participation in a 1973 Boston bank robbery.

Frechette’s body was discovered by a fellow inmate early on the morning of September 27th pinned beneath a 150-pound set of weights, the bar resting on his throat.  An autopsy revealed he had died of asphyxiation and the official explanation is that the weights slipped from his hands while he was trying to bench press them, killing him instantly.

What the above leaves out, though, is that prior to his incarceration, Frechette was living in a commune run by American cult leader Mel Lyman.  The entirety of Frechette’s Zabriskie earnings were tithed to Lyman’s “Family,” and it’s presumed that whatever money Frechette hoped to abscond with post-robbery would have wound up there as well.

Before all this, though, back when television talk show guests could still indulge in a cigarette, Halprin and Frechette found themselves—along with Mel Brooks and Rex Reed—on The Dick Cavett Show.

As you can watch below, Cavett had yet to see Zabriskie Point—and Frechette makes him pay for it.  In defending Lyman, Frechette also goes on to argue the fine line between “commune,” and “community.”

 
Trailer for Zabriskie Point: Where A Boy And A Girl Meet And Touch And Blow Their Minds!

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Thee Psychick Bible, the complete magickal writings of Genesis P-Orridge and Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, is now shipping. (I edited it.)

Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, or TOPY for short, was the group responsible for popularizing body piercing and tattooing, acid house music, and magick, all aimed at personal liberation and the construction of a model of life outside of, and very opposed to, the status quo of the 1980s and beyond. They did a tremendous amount of work at shifting our culture in new and creative directions, and I am proud to be able to help showcase their work in this new, expanded edition of the book.

The group was, of course, conceived and headed by Genesis P-Orridge, the lead singer of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV; the endeavor played a crucial role in the survival and modernization of magick.

The book is hardcover, 544 pages, limited to 999 copies, and comes with a DVD of Psychic TV performances and Derek Jarman videos. (There’s also an introduction written by me.)

From the Feral House website:

Thee infamous PSYCHIC BIBLE from Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth receives an updated, expanded, corrected edition,complete with dozens of new visuals and essays. The Feral House edition is handsomely presented in smyth-sewn hardcover with a red ribbon. Thee 544 pages within are printed in two colors on high-quality 60-pound stock on acid-free 100% recycled paper stock.

This signed, numbered limited edition (999 copies only) is also presented with a remarkable DVD of impossible-to-find videos from P-Orridge archives of early Psychic TV and TOPY creations which includes the work of Peter ?¢‚Ǩ?ìSleazy?¢‚Ǩ¬ù Christopherson and Derek Jarman. Several of the videos included were seized by Scotland Yard in 1991, and as a result the DVD is provided here are second-generation and are reproduced in this CD for their historical value.

The artist, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, says about this edition: ?¢‚Ǩ?ìIt has been a revelation and become very thrilling for me to see 30 years+ of social, ritual and communal creative explorations consensed into what we feel may become the most profound new manual on ?¢‚ǨÀúpractical magick?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ taking from its Crowleyan level of liberation and empowermeant of the Individual to a next level of realization that magick must then give back to its environment, its community, become about liberation and empowermeant to change this ?¢‚ǨÀúworld?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ and evolve our humanE species.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

I began working on this book with Genesis about 4 years ago, shortly after I published Generation Hex. I can hardly believe it’s out. I edited the book chock full of ritual and magickal goodness; it truly is the most important book of magick you’re likely to stumble on in this lifetime. It’s a privilege to have worked on it and it’s a privilege to announce the release to you. Get them before they’re gone forever!

(Amazon: THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant)

 
Another vintage Infinity Factory show for you fine people. This late ‘90s episode features an in-depth interview with my good friend and lifelong hero, Genesis P-Orridge on the topic of the then new book, Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of Coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle.

THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant is Gen’s latest work, published by Feral House (and edited by Dangerous Minds own Jason Louv). It’s been produced in a high-quality, strictly limited edition of 999, signed copies, each with a 2-hour DVD of GP-O related video rarities, some directed by Derek Jarman and Peter Christopherson. Order yours here.

Parts II, III, and IV

 
Leonor Fini is one of the few women to be closely associated with the Surrealist Group, although Fini herself did not see her self as a Surrealist at all and rejected membership. Still she remained a fellow traveler of the Surrealists throughout her career, although in many ways her work—a sensuous celebration of female sexuality—tweaks the misogynistic and homophobic tendencies of movement, especially its founder Andre Breton (who was all for lesbianism). Her work has been represented in nearly every major Surrealist exhibition.

Much is made of the artist’s good looks and upfront sexuality. Fini was famously photographed naked—and clean shaven—floating in a pool by Henri Cartier-Bresson. (This photograph sold for over $300,000 in 2007). Fiercely bohemian, she also lived in not one, but two menage-a-trois relationships. When she died her obituaries were as much about famous men she’d slept with as her own career, but Fini kowtowed to no man, she lived life completely on her own terms, a feminist long before the term existed.

 
Hurry, Hurry, Hurry, My Dolls Are Waiting (1975)

It has been said of Fini, that she was a “female Dali” and in many ways this is true. The narcissistic artist was an imposing presence in any room with her beauty and flamboyant fashions. And like the Divine Dali, her art came from a place deep inside her, as she was forced to develop a inner vision during extended teenage bouts with an ocular ailment that saw her eyes bandaged shut for months at a time. When the bandages came off, she wished to document what she had been inwardly visualizing and declared herself an artist.

The self-taught Fini began to exhibit her art at the age of seventeen and she knew anyone worth knowing in Paris and internationally. She also designed clothing and ballet and opera sets. Her design for the bottle of Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shocking perfume is considered iconic. She is one of the most photographed people of the 20th century and famously attended dozens of costume balls in elaborate costumes. She was always in magazines. During her lifetime she was quite a big name, although by the time of her death in 1996, she’d become a bit obscure. The French government even refused to take paintings in lieu of back taxes owed by her estate, although she was called “...the most undervalued artist of the 20th Century” by the Art Dealers Association of America.

Schiaparelli’s Shocking

A reappraisal of her work seems due and this appears to be happening with the publication of a new monograph/biography of Fini titled Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini, written by her friend, art critic Peter Webb. It is an absolutely superb and beautiful volume—it’s sitting beside me as I type this—truly it’s one of the finest crafted objects I’ve seen in some time. If you’re looking for a nice coffee table book that will knock someone’s socks off for a gift, this is it. Her work is also part of the Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism show at Manchester Art Gallery until January 10, 2010.