Photo by Jasmine Hirst
 
*As if.

As reported at Pitchfork and elsewhere, Lydia Lunch is selling the rights to her life’s work. According to a March 25 press release, this would transfer “all intellectual rights and copyright ownership” of “all of her written articles, compositions, the majority of her Master Recordings, books, artworks, photography and more.” This would include 61 published works, nearly 400 compositions, and Lydia’s “ownership interest” in 326 master recordings. The ultimate buyer—obviously a person of wealth and refined taste who would respect the cultural and historical significance of such a body of work—will be able to exploit the material as they see fit.

Valuing transgressive art might have been a difficult thing in the past, but with a few decades of distance, what was once underground and perhaps violated cultural norms—like Fingered for instance—becomes history. (And in this case, it also gets uploaded to PornHub.) And that’s not to say that it’s “safer”—we’re talking about Lydia Lunch, for chrissakes—but that it can be more readily turned into a more mainstream commodity than in the past. 

It will be interesting to see what happens here. I asked Lydia a few questions over email, her answers below, but I think it’s worth mentioning that in the past two years, I personally have purchased seven Lydia Lunch authored, or related items—vintage vinyl pressings of Queen of Siam and 13.13, a newer vinyl version of 13.13, and three books, one by Lydia, the recent “oral history” Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over by Nick Soulsby (which I contributed to) and a book of her interviews with RE/Search’s V. Vale that I just bought. I realize that my spending habits aren’t the same as most people’s, but I’m a good example of someone who has spent, you know, more than $100 on Lydia-related products in the past 24 months.

What made you decide to do this?

Lydia Lunch: I have managed to own everything I’ve done, was able to release as much material as I have in various formats over the years, produce other artists, curate spoken word shows for decades, host workshops for writers, collaborate with so many incredibly creative artists, tour extensively…it would be a great relief if someone would step in and conceive possibilities that can allow me to carry on.

It would be extremely helpful to have support for my podcast The Lydian Spin with Tim Dahl, which has over 90 episodes online available for free.  I consider it an audio museum where we promote other artists, musicians, filmmakers, etc.  It is a mandatory platform not only to give voice to other artists to express their vision, but a vehicle for myself and Tim to try to make sense of the almost unfathomable mess this country is trying to lift itself out of after four years of complete absurdity.

I’m working on a documentary with Jasmine Hirst - Artists-Depression/Anxiety & Rage. We’ve interviewed over 35 artists and a few therapists and will have it finished by fall. An important subject especially now.
 

 
I have an LP finished with Tim Dahl’s psycho-ambient trio GRID, and a slinky jazz-noir LP with the amazing chanteuse and songwriter Sylvia Black. I’m working on a play. RETROVIRUS is waiting for shows to open up. All of this, as usual, self produced amd self financed…even I can only do so much without some financial support especially now for fuck’s sake. HA! Or should I wait for Spotify to cough up half a cent for every song they play?

How do you put a dollar value on your life’s work?

I can’t. But I’m open to proposals. Also after 43 years it begins to feel like a humongous invisible beast of sound and vision hanging over my head, or to quote Lawrence Ferlinghetti a “Coney Island of the Mind”. It would be great if someone stepped in who wanted to run The Cyclone.
 

“My Amerikkka” by Lydia Lunch
 
How would a potential purchaser do the same?

They would have 100 years to figure it out! There must be someone creative enough to find methods that I don’t have the time or energy to pursue, since I continue to create in multiple formats and have no intention of slowing down.
 

“Collateral Damage” by Lydia Lunch
 
What’s the process you envision?

Getting the word out that this material is available, targeting forward-thinking people who understand not only the future possibilities, but have an understanding of history as well. I was lucky to work with Nicholas Martin who recently acquired my archives for the Fales Library at New York University and is establishing a digital museum. But I still own the copyright on over 380 musical compositions, and partial ownership in most of the master recordings, 61 published works, my artwork and photography, etc. It’s all just really too much for me to manage as I continue to create. Selling this to the right party would also allow me to independently continue to produce and collaborate with other artists which is extremely important to me.
 

“Casualty” by Lydia Lunch
 
How does a serious possible buyer contact you?

Through my manager Tom Garretson at tgarretson@lydia-lunch.net

The trailer for Beth B’s documentary ‘Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over.’

 
If anyone is having a cultural revival these days, it’s Lydia Lunch. It’s not like she’s ever gone away, of course, she’s as productive as ever, it’s just that she’s starting to… I don’t mean to say that she’s “going mainstream” exactly, but the writer, vocalist, musician, artist, photographer, and underground movie femme fatale’s profile has risen a notch, even two, of late. Recently an oral history of Lydia’s life and times was published, Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over, Nick Soulsby’s companion book to the upcoming Lydia documentary of the same name directed by Beth B. And she’s got a great new podcast, The Lydian Spin.

In the first eight minutes of episode 47, her “Protest Special,” Lydia goes to town on Donald Trump, training her trademark firehouse of fury and frustration on the worst person alive, who also happens to be the most powerful man in the world.

If words could kill…

The Lydian Spin‘s “Protest Special” brings together V.Vale and Marian Wallace of RE/SEARCH Publications; author/musician Eugene Robinson of OXBOW; filmmaker Eva Aridjis; and Weasel Walter in a special podcast to discuss the protests raging across America.

Enjoy!
 

 
This coming Wednesday night in New York City an event called Suicide Sally will celebrate the music of the late Alan Vega and Suicide, featuring Vega’s musical partner-in-crime Martin Rev along with special guests like Lydia Lunch, Kid Congo Powers, Liz Lamere, Cynthia Ross, Peter Zaremba and Keith Streng from Fleshtones, Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hutz, Mr. Pharmacist (Gregg Foreman), Jesse Malin, Luke Jenner from the Rapture along with many others, including Vega’s son, Dante Vega. They will be supported by the Art Gray Noizz Quintet.

Genesis P-Orridge will be DJing and the event (produced by Sally Can’t Dance) will take place at Bowery Electric, 327 Bowery on February 27. Doors open at 7pm. Tickets available at Ticketfly.com.

The event is also a record release party for “You Pay/Too Many Teardrops,” an inspired collaboration that sees Vega backed by the synthesizers of Mr. Pharmacist.The song comes in three sizes: the original mix, a remix by Jim Thirlwell and another by Bad Seeds drummer Jim Sclavunos.  It’s out on March 8 and you can order a vinyl copy or grab a download here.
 

Alan Vega and Mr. Pharmacist AKA Gregg Foreman
 

Anni Hogan by Peter Ashworth
 
There is, I suppose, an almost sort of secret society comprised of the most ardent admirers of Torment and Toreros, the harrowing 1983 Marc Almond solo album released under the name Marc and the Mambas. It’s a cult album, to be sure, but with a seriously passionate fandom devoted to it. If I meet someone who likes this album—not that this happens all that often, but I consider it a variant on the Illuminati handshake for rock snobs—they immediately rise in my opinion. Fellow fans of that album—obviously—have great taste in music, which is something I correlate closely with high intelligence. In fact, everyone who I know who has expressed a fondness for this album, I tend to be very fond of myself. It’s a masterpiece—a singularly bleak vision put to sensuous and violent song—although admittedly not for everyone.

Fans of that album tend to be partial to a handful of other Marc Almond albums recorded in the 80s—Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters, The Stars We Are, the first Mambas album Untitled—and are very well aware of the fact that Almond’s main musical collaborator on these records was classically trained pianist/arranger Annie Hogan, who now goes by Anni Hogan.

Hogan’s contributions to those albums are of a paramount importance to their greatness. If you tried to subtract her playing from them, they simply couldn’t have existed. The sound of her grand piano on those albums is stunning, and distinctly and very uniquely her own. It couldn’t have been anyone else in her role and worked as well as it did, not in this universe or any other. Her style was the perfect accompaniment to Marc Almond’s wonderfully idiosyncratic voice. That they had a falling out and have not worked together in decades, in my eyes, is, and I am not alone in this, truly a damned shame.

But Hogan’s musical journey has seen her collaborate with other notable voices, and prominent musicians along the way, among them Nick Cave, Yello, Robin Rimbaud/Scanner (as Scanni), Barry Adamson, Budgie, Jim Thirlwell, Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flur and Simon Fisher Turner. It’s worth noting that as I typed that last sentence I realized I had all of these in my record and CD collection. I have considered Anni Hogan to be one of my favorite musicians for over three decades; if she’s involved with something, I want to hear it.
 

Anni Hogan by Peter Ashworth

And now she’s back with an extraordinary new album, Lost in Blue (Coldspring Records) featuring new collaborations with Lydia Lunch, Gavin Friday, Kid Congo Powers, Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür and Richard Strange from 70s cult band Doctors Of Madness. The album was produced by Dave Ball and Riccardo Mulhall. It’s released on March 8th, although vinyl copies signed by Anni can be ordered here now. I posed a few questions to Anni via email.

Richard Metzger: Anni, you’re best-known for your celebrated collaborations with the other half of Soft Cell, but this time you’re working with Dave Ball. How did that come about?

Anni Hogan: I’ve known Dave the same amount of time as Marc Almond and we have remained friends for nearly 40 years!  I’d chatted with him over the past few years about doing something together and we eventually met up at a pub in Soho, which actually became the album meeting place, The Coach and Horses, where I promptly tripped and spilled his pint all over him, perfect! We laughed a lot and so I knew then this was going to work,  we still had tons in common including our sense of humour, and of course our passion for music and music related books.  A couple of pizzas later and we had a plan.  I knew I wanted to make a really good record and from my heart rather than going through someone else’s remake as it where.  Dave is a genius anyway, but a generous and understanding old school producer.  He felt it was his job to elevate my musical ideas, we share a love of soundtracks and I wanted that shape around the album.  Dave had his own ideas to make this work, including working the main musicians as a band, and a adding electronics, orchestra, etc. where needed. 

It seems like in each case the singer wrote the words they are singing. Generally speaking how did the songs become composed and how did the recordings get made? I would imagine that the circumstances were different for each song. Was the album recorded over a long period of time?

The whole album was recorded mainly over two years, although I did already have a couple of demos from a few years earlier.  I had sent a piano piece to Kid Congo a few years ago and he sent back his wonderful autobiographical adventure in spoken word Kid drawl, which totally worked great against my Bernard Herrmann-influenced piano which I recorded on my baby grand in my own Studio Blue.  I kept it to one side and did the same with Wolfgang Flür, I had already made the song “Golden Light” with him after we met djing at the same event in Dublin, incidentally Dave Ball was also at that event, we all dj’d and destiny was in motion.  Of course I was a much better DJ and I remember Dave was like laughing and calling me “bitch!” when I mixed all my tracks seamlessly, haha, It was a funny night.

Anyway I digress, I sent Wolfgang a piano piece, very emotive and he sent back to me the spoken word “Silk Paper” over the piano.  Sounded gorgeous and perfect.  Again, I kept it to one side and similarly I had a song which I recorded with Richard Strange in London a few years previously, at the time I was house DJ for him at his fabulous weekly night Cabaret Futura.  I had given him a rough demo and we recorded vocals and trumpet in London. So I had these three tracks and late in 2015 began writing some new material. 

I got in touch with Lydia and sent her over a piano and melodica piece which she responded to “I love it” and “Blue Contempt” came from that.  I had not intended to sing anything myself, but after meeting up with David Coulter in Liverpool, he sent me a beautiful, hypnotic viola piece and I immediately heard a vocal melody and had a few words which seemed to fit so I went for it.  My friend of many years—and top sound engineer Andrea Ando Wright—came over to my studio and recorded piano and melodica to David’s violetta and then I said I wanted to try a vocal.  She wrapped me up in quilts and cushions, pillows and more quilt and we got the desired effect.

I don’t usually record vocals at my place. “Thunderstruck” came from a dark place of devastation an instant emotional response on the day Jo Cox MP was horrifically murdered, both the music and lyric came out as one. So I would basically write and pre-produce and then send down to the studio in Richmond, owned by Dave’s production partner Riccardo Mulhall and they worked on tracks whilst I wrote the others. 

I went to London for the physical recording, so for the horns and harp and some backing vocals.  Dave suggested Gavin which was a brilliant idea as was bringing in 1970s legend John Fiddler from Medicine Head and the writers Scarlet West and Celine Hispiche. I wrote the music for them to then respond to, it was a very challenging and interesting aspect of recording to write for people I had not yet met, but did do research on.  Most of the vocals were recorded in London but Gavin wrote and recorded his epic love poem (with a vast array of backing vocals) to a fairly complete demo I sent over.  The real magic happened in production I think, bringing all the songs to full potential and the boys created a wonderful resonant album “sound.”

I’ve always felt that Lydia Lunch is an underrated singer. She’s got such an instantly recognizable voice—when she opens her mouth there is no one else it can possibly be—and that sort of bleak, Erik Satie-esque dreamscape you’ve got her singing to works spectacularly well, I thought. You can really hear the nuances in her voice.

“Blue Contempt” is a sensational recording, and I agree, underrated and oozing visceral edgy coolness forever. Queen Of Siam and 13.13 are two of my favourite albums.  Queen Of Siam particularly blew me away when I first heard it in the 80s and still does. Jasmine Hirst actually filmed Lydia on the day she wrote the lyric and the video was equally sensational with Lydia looking gorgeous as ever.  Dave and Ricc were excited to work on the track and enhanced the delicious “Lynchian” film vibe.

I think her prodigious cigarette smoking has given her voice a greater depth as she’s gotten older, like Marianne Faithfull’s, and that’s also true of Gavin Friday. I understand that he’s a pretty heavy smoker, too. These wonderfully smoky voices. Obviously he’s worked with Dave as a producer in the past, on the final Virgin Prunes album, so it was Dave who brought Gavin into the project?

Yes, sure was, Dave suggested Gavin early on when we were chatting about the album.  Of course I’m a Virgin Prunes fan, saw them live several times and love Gavin’s solo stuff.  Dave suggested I particularly listen to his ‘95 solo album Shag Tobacco (which is brilliant!) as a reference and that helped me find a way into a piece for Gavin. It turned into quite the epic!

I wasn’t expecting Wolfgang Flür’s contribution to be vocal. I guess I was expecting him to be playing drum pads or something!

Well he is rather well known for that : )  But yes we explored his performed written word for the tracks we have recorded together.  Previously we recorded “Golden Light”  and he loved it so much he included it on his album Eloquence and Wolfgang has encouraged me ever since we have become friends. “Silk Paper” was seductive little prose which worked so well against my semi classical piano piece and then production enhanced along the way.

How did you coax Richard Strange back into the studio?

Well it wasn’t difficult: I asked, he said yes : )  Richard is a gorgeous, giving guy, very talented and very open.  He was very encouraging actually and wrote and delivered a great lyric and performance in “Death Bed Diva,” an intricate camp tale of faded glory. I love it.

I wanted to ask you about Celine Hispiche. Her voice is so striking. I loved the lyrics where she’s mentioning famous drinkers at the Colony Room and lamenting what’s become of Soho. It seems like that could be an entire concept album on its own, a lost London lament, if you will.

Yes, the regeneration of our famous old cities and the life fading out of them and turning into something corporate and just much less. A lost London lament but it could be equally talking about New York or any other major old city. Celine is a wonderful character, a talented writer and actress, a bohemian figure at the center of Soho life. She painted a perfect picture of the London we all knew and loved, our 80s haunts all but gone now. The album was certainly planned in Soho and Dave and I did a tour of all our old haunts on the fateful “spilled pint” day.

The album factored in to the artists involved and our combined musical histories and many cities did feature in a way, all being regenerated as we speak, Liverpool (my nearest city) London, Dublin, New York ..

Having collaborated with so many iconic voices is there a “dream” collaboration that you’d like to see happen in the future?

Françoise Hardy I listen to practically every day so that’s a secret special desire. I would love to work with Stuart A. Staples and Claire Denis as I love his music for her films and I love her films, they are a beautiful combo and seeing Tindersticks film performance in Liverpool inspired my melodica playing on my album.  Scott Walker still inspires me, his latest musical ventures really challenging textually, visions of wonder and artistic truth.  Beth Gibbons is also an artist I love to listen to and respect very much … there’s a lot more I’m sure!

What happened to your “e”?

Hahahahaha, well there is a photographic artist Annie Hogan who I have actually become friends with, anyway seemed easier to drop the e, less confusion. 

Lost in Blue is released on March 8. You can order signed CDs and limited edition blue vinyl here.

Videos after the jump…

 
In 1986, Penn & Teller put out “Barbecue Death Squad from Hell,” a parody short film purporting to advertise a company whose business model was to take home movies shot in vapid suburbia and transform them into heart-palpitating schlock horror movies, all for the low, low price of $109. The movie lasts eight and a half minutes and manages to represent the brash and sarcastic comedic style of Penn & Teller adequately.

The idea of the short is that Penn & Teller portray two sleazy Hollywood producers who think they have hit upon a can’t-miss idea: send them your otherwise-useless home movies and, with the use of automated dialog replacement, or ADR, and a little bit of added footage, they will turn it into a schlocky horror movie in the Troma style, a type of entertainment that was seemingly omnipresent during those years. Somehow the conceit allowed the two alt-magicians (?) to direct their satirical eye at two hated groups, regular normies and shitty fly-by-night entertainment people.

What sets the project apart isn’t so much the content but the collaborators. Former Monkee Michael Nesmith was firmly ensconced in the world of video production by that time, and he is credited with directing “Barbecue Death Squad from Hell.” Strangely, at the precise moment this was being produced, the other three Monkees were enjoying an improbable career renaissance courtesy of MTV. Furthermore, no wave goddess Lydia Lunch was featured in the video for no discernible reason, other than the obvious.

The main actor in the “home movie” featured in the movie is James Rebhorn, a noted character actor (a favorite of mine) who appeared in such movies as The Game, Lorenzo’s Oil, and Scent of a Woman before unfortunately passing away in 2014. For a brief moment I thought that “Uncle Ernie” was a very young Ben Stiller, but no such luck. 

At the very end of “Barbecue Death Squad from Hell” there briefly flashes a disclaimer, which is sort of the funniest thing in the video. Using my “pause control,” I froze the image and read the following:
 

Notice:

If you went to all the trouble to use your pause control and read this, you probably have enough of a brain in your head to realize that this whole thing is a joke, get it? We don’t really beef up videos, and if you do send your tape and money to us, Mike Nesmith will keep your hundred and nine dollars and we will all laugh at you and make fun of your family.

You can check out the video after the jump…
 

 
For the last few years, venerable no-wave provocateur Lydia Lunch has been collaborating with guitarist Cypress Grove, releasing in 2014 a split album with Spiritual Front called Twin Horses and a full LP called A Fistful of Desert Blues. The latter title is aptly descriptive of the moods evoked by Grove’s guitar playing—he initially gained notice as a collaborator with The Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce, and the sounds he wrests from his guitar can recall the barrenness of Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas soundtrack, or the lush menace of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. And Grove has in fact worked with Cave.

The duo’s new release is Under the Covers, which you’ve surely already guessed is a covers album because evidently when you make one of those you’re required to give it a title that telegraphs its content with a pun. The track list is…amusing. It includes versions of Cracker’s “Low,” Tom Petty’s “Breakdown,” Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode To Billie Joe,” and Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory,” a terrible song written for the pointless movie Young Guns II, which nonetheless became a huge hit because America’s love affair with quality is motherfucking unstoppable.

In contrast with her legendary rep as the often frightening and often tuneless screamer who announced her existence to the world chanting “LITTLE ORPHANS RUNNING THROUGH THE BLOODY SNOW,” Lunch’s Bon Jovi cover is a fairly reverent take (though it should go without saying it’s infinitely more listenable). But that shouldn’t really come as a surprise if you know her career—she’s done a fair few covers that would seem out of character. On her very first solo album, Queen of Siam, she did a straight cover of Classics IV’s “Spooky.”
 
Continues after the jump…

 
During the decade of the 1980s, I saw Lydia Lunch perform maybe fifteen+ times and I caught some pretty seminal performances of hers, including the premiere of Fingered, the gleefully violent porn film she made with Richard Kern and South of Your Border, the two-person theatrical play she did with Emilio Cubeiro that ended in a blood-covered, naked Lydia trussed up on a giant “X” onstage pissing all over him!

To truly appreciate the aggressively confrontational nature of her powerful one woman shows—just her and a mic—you had to be in, or very near, the front row. As with fellow in-your-face monologists like Eric Bogosian and Brother Theodore, it was fucking scary and rather intimidating to be anywhere near the stage for one of her rants, but I always figured why not get all of the Artaudian benefits from having someone scream in your face for an hour at close range? If anyone can deliver on the cathartic promise of Theatre of Cruelty, it’s Lydia Lunch. Audiences leave her shows limp. I mean, what do you say in the cab going home about a show that unexpectedly ends in blood-stained golden showers? (Incidentally, she drank an entire six-pack during the play’s penultimate scene. What she unleashed on Cuberio the night I saw the show was not merely a trickle, I can assure you. Good times!)
 

 
Lunch’s The Gun Is Loaded video, an angry nihilistic rant about life in Reagan’s America, long out of print, is now available to watch free online via MVDVideo (who also put it out on DVD). I actually saw this show twice when she did this material at the Performance Garage space in New York (and yes, I was in the front row both times). Here’s how the filmmakers describe the project:

THE GUN IS LOADED is a 37-minute performance video featuring former punk rocker, political satirist and sexual provocateur Lydia Lunch.

This video trails Lydia in 1988 through a series of staged sets and location shots in New York City as she fires her spoken word manifesto directly into the eye of the camera, and in haunting voice-over.  Underscoring Lydia’s onslaught is cinema verité footage of bottom-rung Americana: racecar crowds, dead-end streets and meat packing plants effectively illustrate her ruthless examination of “the American dream machine turned mean.” J.G. Thirlwell’s ominous score magnifies this brutal desolation.

Identifying herself as “the average, all-American girl-next-store gone bad,” Lydia vivisects her own sustained damage as a product of this emotionally ravaging environment.

Co-director Joe Tripician wrote to me on about the piece:

This was partially shot at the Performance Garage, but without an audience. Lydia asked me and my former partner Merrill Aldighieri to record her show, but we wanted to expand the production from its theatrical base and exhibit her in an outside environment. So, this video is also a document of the ‘80s NYC street life—from the 14th Street Meat market to Wall Street. We called it a “video super-realization” of her spoken word performance.

In the video she fires her venom directly into the camera lens, and in an intimate voice-over. J. G. Thirlwell supplied the original music score - a one-of-a-kind aural onslaught.

It was released on VHS in the late 80s, but has never aired on TV. The one response we received was from PBS, who called the video in their rejection letter “exceptionally unacceptable.”

They were probably right about that…
 
Watch ‘The Gun is Loaded’ after the jump…

 
Richard Kern was a big part of the underground cinema of the East Village in the 1980s. Among other things, he directed videos for Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley ‘69” (which featured Lydia Lunch, of course) and King Missile’s ”Detachable Penis.” Kern was very much a part of the same scene that was more or less defined by Nick Zedd. He made many experimental and sexual movies on Super-8.

According to Richard Kostelanetz in A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes,
 

This fascination with the dark side of looking—with the dynamics and aesthetics of voyeurism—is Richard Kern’s theme and it runs through his films and photography. In many ways, Kern’s work is a culmination of self-referential approaches to depicting the artist’s relationship to his “subject.” And his subject is a kind of seeing. ... In many ways his movies are responses to popular film and commercial culture as a whole.

  
One of Kern’s early movies was The Right Side of My Brain, a 23-minute black-and-white experimental movie that is unabashedly about sex, violence, and control. This movie is about as NSFW as anything we’ve ever presented on the site.
 

 
The whole movie is told from the point of view of the character played by Lydia Lunch in a dreamy and sexualized and insular mode that was well-nigh invented by Maya Deren in 1943’s “Meshes of the Afternoon.” Lunch’s character goes through a series of assignations that involve varying degrees of violence. Around the 10th minute an actor credited as Clint Ruin (actually the musician J.G. Thirlwell) shows up and he proceeds to dominate Lunch’s character somewhat, after which she gives him a blow job. Yes, you read that right, most of that highly X-rated act is captured in the movie.

The bulk of the movie was shot in some claustrophobic NYC tenement, but in the sole outdoor sequence—possibly shot in Central Park?—Henry Rollins appears and follows the Lunch character. They too start making out and then the Rollins character has a kind of tantrum.
 

 
By the bye, when this was shot Rollins had the “SEARCH AND DESTROY” part of his back tattoo in place but not the rest. At one point Lunch is shown wearing a T-shirt with the Einstürzende Neubauten homunculus on it.

The images of sexual violence are, of course, disturbing; many ladies in the audience will enjoy the three smoking hot dudes in various states of undress.

The Right Side of My Brain is available on Blu-Ray in Hardcore Collection: Director’s Cut.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Lydia Lunch’s sexy ‘Fashion Calendar,’ 1978
Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins: A tale of jealousy, rage and obsession

 
This “fashion calendar” featuring Lydia Lunch, queen of New York’s no wave movement of the late 1970s, was executed by Julia Gorton for a class at Parsons School of Design in 1978. This was the same year that the seminal No New York compilation was released, including key contributions from Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, of which Lunch was the frontperson.

Gorton, who today is a professor at Parsons, also designed flyers for Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, such the following:
 

 
This calendar appears in No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980.  by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley. The caption refers to it as “a 1978 Lydia Lunch fashion calendar, assembled by Julia Gorton for a design class at Parsons.” No other information is given.

March and June and October aren’t present—either they were never made or they have been lost to the sands of time; I suspect the former. In any case, the 9 months that are there do not include the days of the week, so you can print them out and use them in any year. If it’s a leap year, hold your nose and stay at home all day on February 29th.

Here’s the calendar in its original layout, followed by the individual months. The first two images, you can click on them to see a larger view.
 

 
Continues after the jump…

 
There are times in life when it seems that certain things, events, people or books have been strategically placed for our benefit. For example, I read Nick Zedd’s Totem of the Depraved which ends with the filmmaker homeless, on the streets looking for a place to stay when I was homeless, wandering streets, sleeping rough, and getting by however I could. The book was apposite and Zedd’s words kept me company through some uncomfortable nights. And of course, there was the inspiration, the small luminous epiphany—if artists like Zedd could get by, stay sane, live and create, then so could I.

Self-styled “King of the Underground” Nick Zedd was the pioneer and major player of New York’s Cinema of Transgression in the late 1970s and 1980s with his films They Eat Scum, Geek Maggot Bingo and Police State. Knowing that “History is whoever gets to the typewriter first,” Zedd edited the Xeroxed and stapled together zine The Underground Film Bulletin and wrote (under various aliases) reviews for his own films. In 1985, he composed the Cinema of Transgression Manifesto:

We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged.

We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possesed the vision to see through this charade.

Zedd (writing under the pseudonym Orion Jeriko) described his comrades as “underground invisibles” and named them:

Zedd, Kern, Turner, Klemann, DeLanda, Eros and Mare, and DirectArt Ltd, a new generation of filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straight jackets of film theory in a direct attack on every value system known to man.

And announced what they were going to do:

We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed.

Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression.

We propose transformation through transgression - to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves.

 

 
Filmmaker and photographer Richard Kern described the Cinema of Transgression as “a loose coalition of people who just joined together in order to have a movement.”

Along with Zedd, Kern was one of the was the group’s main players, making short brutal (some might say “depraved”) films like You Killed Me First (1985), Thrust in Me (1985), The Right Side of My Brain (1985) and Fingered (1986). These films teetered on the wire, and were so personally demanding (mentally and physically and in drink and drugs) that Kern eventually left New York City for a while for the sake of his health. 

Artist, writer, actress and performer, Lydia Lunch appeared in many of Kern’s movies and saw the Cinema of Transgression as a way to “show the ugly fucking truth the truth. Period.” Around her were artists like Joe Coleman, who began his career by biting the heads off mice, and became an alchemist—turning pain into gold.

While much of the Cinema of Transgression is now mainstream or like Kern’s photos suitable for the fashion shoot or cat walk, Nick Zedd continues to plow his own visionary path as artist and filmmaker. I, at least, now have a roof over my head.

Angélique Bosio’s documentary Llik Your Idols captures the excitement, thrill and power of the Cinema of Transgression, interviewing Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch, Joe Coleman, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and others.
 

 
This was uploaded a couple of months ago, and how I missed it for this long I do not know, but No-Wave high priestess Lydia Lunch has posted a video openly soliciting a sexual relationship with the doughy ginger comedian Louis CK. I found it on the Vimeo page of photographer Jasmine Hurst, at which, if you’re a fan of Lunch, you should really have a look, as it also contains a recording of her Future Feminism monologue from a couple of weeks ago.

But back to the wanting to eff Louis CK (OK, specifically, she suggests jacking/jilling off in front of each other, but tomayto/tomahto)—it should be obvious that it’s a not-even-close-to-work-safe soliloquy, shot in a confessional-booth style, with lighting so blown out that Lunch looks disquietingly not unlike Jeff the Killer. Given that Lunch has been known to deploy sarcasm as a rhetorical tool from time to time, just once in a while, there might be some kind of satirical point to this, but I feel it can be enjoyed more fully just taken at face value. The balls are in your court, Louis.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Future Feminism: a social cultural and political vision for a feminine utopia
Dangerous women: Lydia Lunch interviews Admiral Grey of Cellular Chaos

The power of pussy: The inimitable Kembra Pfahler, spreading the gospel with a friend

So much of the popular, social media-driven feminist discourse is desperately treading water these days. The advances we’ve made over the years that have drastically improved the lives of women (unions, better wages, health care advances , reproductive rights) are under attack, and it only makes sense that we’d cling to what little we have left. It’s in this frantic crisis that we can sometimes forget the more utopian ambitions of the feminist second wave—the impulse not to preserve what little we have, but to recreate society entirely, in a way that exceeds the meager ambitions we’ve come to accept. Future Feminism seeks to nurture and develop that impulse.

The brainchild of Kembra Pfhaler (best known for The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black and her performance art), Johanna Constantine (of The Blacklips Performance Cult), Sierra and Bianca Casady (CocoRosie) and Antony Hegarty (Antony and The Johnsons), the collective is the result of three years’ of consensus-based artistic and intellectual collaboration, much of it forged during rigorous retreats in isolated locations.
 

Kembra Pfhaler, Johanna Constantine, Sierra Casady, Bianca Casady and Antony Hegarty, presumably on retreat
 
I had to opportunity to speak with Bianca Casady about the projects’ multi-faceted development.

“We didn’t have any plans, so we definitely didn’t have any models [for organizing],” Casady confesses, “it was five artists—the most obvious thing to do was an art project together, a co-authored piece.” The “group-authored sculptural work” is to be debuted at The Hole gallery in NYC, Thursday September 11, but it’s merely a fraction of the multimedia project that Future Feminism has bloomed into. The Hole also promises performances and lectures from such heroic foremothers as Lydia Lunch, Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramović and no-wave goddess No Bra. The sculpture itself remains somewhat shrouded in mystery, as are the “13 Tenets of Future Feminism” they will reveal on the opening night.

The five artists central to the collective will perform a concert at Webster Hall this Sunday to fund the exhibition, as it’s completely artist-funded thus far. Casady notes that the relative independence and autonomy of the Future Feminist collective has allowed them the freedom and time necessary to truly work as a unified body, though the timing for the reveal could not be more provident.

Some of us are very unplugged from the media. Mostly we really come together as artists. We’re certainly noticing a lot of uprising and actions going on formally, and a lot of momentum and energy right now. The timing feels like less of a coincidence. It feels like things are at a boiling point.

 

Image from the Future Feminism Benefit Concert poster
 
No one can predict which projects will inspire or move the masses, but it’s exciting to see feminism embrace the ambition of utopian thinking again—and it’s especially powerful to see women working together and creating new, strange culture—something that could (if we’re lucky) threaten the status quo.

“We’re not really looking for equal rights—that’s really different in our attitude,” says Casady. “We’re not looking to climb up the male pyramid scheme and try to assimilate into it to find some kind of balance. We’re proposing a complete shift, with the goal of balance, but it’s not like we want to meet in the middle. We have to reach for a better sense of ‘middle.’”

That’s a sentiment that’s existed before in feminism—the idea that having “what men have” is not enough, that we all deserve more. It’s fallen to the wayside in years, but I foresee a revival, as movements like Future Feminism strive for a radically different society, invoking the very qualities so often derided as “feminine.” In the words of the collective, “The future is female.”

The (absolutely packed) roster for the run at The Hole gallery is below.

Thurs Sept 11: Opening 6-9PM

Fri Sept 12: Bianca and Sierra Casady, Sarah Schulman

Sat Sept 13: Johanna Constantine, Lydia Lunch

Sun Sept 14: Clark Render as Margaret Thatcher, Laurie Anderson

Wed Sept 17: Narcissister, Dynasty Handbag, No Bra

Thurs Sept 18: Ann Snitow speaks with the Future Feminists

Fri Sept 19: Kiki Smith presents Anne Waldman, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and Anne Carson

Sat Sept 20: Kembra Pfahler and The Girls of Karen Black

Sun Sept 21: Lorraine O’Grady

Wed Sept 24: Marina Abramović

Thurs Sept 25: Carolee Schneemann, Jessica Mitrani, Melanie Bonajo
 
Fri Sept 26: Terence Koh as Miss OO

Sat Sept 27: Viva Ruiz, Julianna Huxtable, Alexyss K.  Tylor

Sun Sept 14: The Factress aka Lucy Sexton, Clark Render as Margaret Thatcher, Laurie Anderson

 
Gregg Foreman’s radio program, The Pharmacy, is a music / talk show playing heavy soul, raw funk, 60′s psych, girl groups, Krautrock. French yé-yé, Hammond organ rituals, post-punk transmissions and “ghost on the highway” testimonials and interviews with the most interesting artists and music makers of our times…

This week’s Gregg’s guest is singer, artist, writer, performer and all around dangerous mind, Lydia Lunch, who discusses her work with The Birthday Party’s Rowland S Howard and Nick Cave; her first performance (age 14) at an acid party in upstate NY doing spoken word in front of a psychedelic backdrop; running away to NYC (age 16) to hang out with Suicide and Mink DeVille; how she got her name, which filmmaker Russ Meyer told her is “the best name in show biz” and why she considers herself a journalist above all else.
 

 
Mr. Pharmacy is a musician and DJ who has played for the likes of Pink Mountaintops, The Delta 72, The Black Ryder, The Meek and more. Since 2012 Gregg Foreman has been the musical director of Cat Power’s band. He started dj’ing 60s Soul and Mod 45’s in 1995 and has spun around the world. Gregg currently lives in Los Angeles, CA and divides his time between playing live music, producing records and dj’ing various clubs and parties from LA to Australia.
 
Setlist

Mr. Pharmacist - The Fall
The Clapping Song - Shirley Ellis
Help You Ann - The Lyres
Intro 1 / I Can’t Stand Myself - Rx / James Chance and the Contortions
Lydia Lunch Conversation Part One
Liars Beware - Richard Hell and the Voidoids
Dance With Me - Lords of the New Church
Memorabilia - Soft Cell
Girl - Suicide
J’aime Regarder les Filles - Patrick Coutin
Last Time - The Anchors
Intro 2/Scientist at His Best - Rx/Scientist
Lydia Lunch Conversation Part Two
Atomic Bongos - Lydia Lunch
Thoughts by Sterling Morrison - Sterling Morrison/ Sun Ra
Temptation Inside Your Heart - The Velvet Underground
Contort Yourself - James White and the Blacks
Low Life - Public Image Limited
Intro 3 / Too Many Creeps - Rx / Bush Tetras
Lydia Lunch Conversation Part Three
Solar Hex - Lydia Lunch / Rowland S. Howard
Sonny’s Burning - The Birthday Party
Intro 4
Lydia Lunch Conversation Part Four
Intro 5 / Father Yod & The Spirit Of ‘76 - Rx / Ya Ho Wha 13
Open Up and Bleed - James Williamson and the Stooges
Mr. Pharmacist - The Fall

 
You can download the entire show here.

Below, Lydia fucking Lunch in NSFW action…

Photo by Christine Navin

Lillie Jayne aka Admiral Grey is a composer, writer, actress, performance artist and the mesmerizing lead singer for Weasel Walter’s New York City-based Cellular Chaos.

The details are a little sketchy. A petite blond in a flimsy sundress has lost her shoes as she wraps herself around a Boojum tree as a cyclone devastates Baja, California. The truck she was traveling in to escape the storm had been swept up in a flash flood and sent careening through the rapids. Quick thinking propelled her through the open window. After four hours of pounding rain and thrashing winds, she releases her grip from the fragile branches and begins the long journey back to town. Battered and bruised, the white tornado known as Admiral Grey has just stared down a tropical hurricane and somehow weathered the storm undaunted.

Lydia Lunch: At what age did you realize you were born to perform? And what was your first performance?

Admiral Grey: My first performance was in kindergarten at Catholic school. A boy and I got picked out to be Leo and Leona the lion in the school nativity musical. I had one phrase to sing that finished with an extended-note ‘ROAR.’ I took my performance very seriously, and there was a great crowd reaction. I was proud, but a little taken aback and embarrassed by all the fuss everyone made – all I did was go out and do what I was supposed to do and do it well.

My first rock performance was at 14 singing Janis Joplin songs with a band at a talent show at school, at full force, fully inebriated and in full Pearl-era regalia - oh good god people didn’t know what to make of that. I’m glad I wasn’t beat up. Although it probably would have been great to get in a fight that night.

Lydia Lunch: What books or music inspired your young psyche and pushed you forward toward recognizing your calling as a performer?

Admiral Grey: At first, T. S. Eliot, a book of Hemingway’s lost half-written poems, searching - I was a bit obsessed with Rimbaud, young, with laser-sharp eyes wide open and a filthy romantic heart.. And of course I thought I was him reincarnated because we had the same birthday. Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, the confessional poets…Speaking of confession, growing up Catholic, with all of its inherent pomp and ceremony, hugely formed me - my sense of performance, my sense of reverence and need for ritual. My sense of opulence - the Catholic church is so opulent and pagan, and so am I.

Henry Miller was another filthy romantic philosopher, and he too thought he was Rimbaud.The art, writings and sad story of Zelda Fitzgerald because of her frustrated and suppressed genius and ultimate disaster – as girls grow up it’s easy to get lost and pushed away from one’s talents and passions especially if your interests lie in a wide range of arenas and you don’t know how to live and act like everyone else. Marguerite Duras, as an intellectual and brilliant writer and uncompromising person. Obsessive workman-like writers like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, DH Lawrence – Nietzsche. And Genet, Artaud, Camus… E.M. Cioran, Joan Didion, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski. Then there’s all of the current writers, too - right now, George Saunders is just destroying me. I went through a childhood phase of historical western and war books, and I continue to love history and non-fiction. It’s important to keep in touch with the scope of humanity.

Musically, discovering Frank Zappa was huge. I lived in a culturally isolated area with relatively strict parents. Of course hip-hop and R&B were huge growing up in the New York area. And renegades like Nina Simone and Jacques Brel. Joni Mitchell’s stubbornness as an artist as her work and career developed and got more esoteric and also as a woman, consistently staying single and taking on new lovers with each artistic phase and being open about it, was very bold and inspiring to someone like me who couldn’t picture having children. The Janis Joplin in Concert LP influenced me deeply, especially about pushing boundaries in performance and music.

Lydia Lunch: What historical figures do you most relate to?

Admiral Grey: Queen Elizabeth the first, which also happens to be my Christian name.  She was hyper-intellectual, spoke several languages, read several books a day and translated texts for fun, found time for creative and sporting pursuits, led powerful armies through battle and England through arguably the most intellectually, financially and artistically prosperous time as the most powerful country in the world, refused to marry, and never got assassinated even though that was a daily threat and intent of many for her entire life. And she did this all 450 years ago. Cleopatra before her was very similar and I am in awe of these people.

Lydia Lunch: What´s the zone like that you get into on stage? Are you conscious of what´s going on in the audience? Do you disappear into a hypnotic time warp where the music teleports you into the nightmare scenarios that your words paint?

Admiral Grey: Yes, and no. Since I’ve performed my whole life I almost always hover on the precipice of that fugue-state, although occasionally I slip straight in…I need to consistently check in with the audience, to give and receive from them, as it is truly something we are all doing together… it’s almost like hunter-survivor mode, with heightened senses and strengths and capabilities and very quick reaction times.  Plus a bit of ancient storytelling, and gospel hour. Sometimes I black out momentarily.

Lydia Lunch: What´s the difference between staging a piece for theater and playing live rock music?

Admiral Grey: Theater, to me, is choreography. It’s perfecting each moment and rehearsing it and rehearsing it until it bores you to tears – and then in performance, finding a way within that choreography to trick your brain into feeling and believing that all of that is happening for real, for the first time, and letting it be spontaneous, while another part of your brain makes sure that you hit all of the marks. That’s exactly what I like my bands to be like, though I don’t think it has to be that way. To rehearse so that the material is ingrained, so that one part of your brain can help you hit the marks while in performance you can free yourself to dance on the edge of mayhem and disaster throughout the performance. The trained unconscious part of your brain secretly holds your hand through the performance while the front of your brain thinks it’s going apeshit.

Lydia Lunch: Are there any classic plays you would like to stage?

Admiral Grey: I’d love to stage a Genet play.

Lydia Lunch: How do you blow off steam when you´re not on stage?

Admiral Grey: Performance is definitely my idea of blowing off steam, but when I am not working obsessively on my myriad projects…I love making things with my hands. My room is a bit of a tree house in a loft and it has grown into a sort of installation. And I like to cook and eat and drink and spend intimate, real time with people I love, of course. And I need a certain amount of extreme physical activity, so if I’m not performing I need to find ways to do that, in whatever regimented or bonkers ways I can without dying or getting pregnant. And I also need to run away and be alone, very alone.

Lydia Lunch: What´s it like working with Weasel Walter?

Admiral Grey: Oh, man. Well, let’s just say I feel very lucky to have him in my life. We enjoy the same things, we like to work in the same way, we enjoy music in a lot of the same ways, we enjoy making music together and performing with each other and touring together, and we have a deep mutual love and respect and trust that everyone should be lucky enough to have with a collaborator. Just a total blessing that we ended up working together. I feel lucky obviously as well to have him as a friend because he is solid as hell. And we laugh, at each other and with each other, all of the time, which is of the utmost importance.

Lydia Lunch: Any aspirations, premonitions or prophesies for 2014?

Admiral Grey: This year my biggest project is composing the music for and performing in a theater piece that I’m collaborating on with The Nerve Tank, a great experimental theater group in New York. It’s called “The Maiden” and is based on the myth of Persephone. It has already been very inspiring developing it. I want Cellular Chaos to release a new album and I want to finally release an album and videos of my solo work. I want to get the funding and team for a very ambitious absurd three act musical play that I have written and that has been sitting on the backburner for too long now. I want to not die, which is a great feeling to have.  I want everyone I love to be happy and healthy. And I’d like to collaborate with you.

The new full-length Cellular Chaos LP out now on ugEXPLODE.

Cellular Chaos on Facebook. Lydia Lunch’s website.

Below, an entire Cellular Chaos set taped at Death By Audio, Brooklyn on July 13 2013. Cellular Chaos are Admiral Grey: vocals, lyrics; Weasel Walter: guitar abuse; Kelly Moran: bass; Marc Edwards: sci-fi drums

JG Thirlwell in 1987, portrait courtesy Richard Kern

This is a guest post written by Graham Rae.

“This isn’t the melody that lingers on/it’s the malady that malingers on.” – Foetus.

Flashbacktrack: for reasons that I am not going to discuss, I was in a great deal of mental and emotional pain in August of 2010. I often found myself listening constantly to the albums Hole (celebrating the 30th anniversary of its release this year) and Nail (30th anniversary next year) by Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel, which I have now been listening to for a quarter of a century. At that time, and others preceding it, these two therapeutic sonic works helped eat my pain and keep me sane. The reasons why they did, and why they will no doubt continue to do so in the skull-suture future, are what I intend to discuss here.

James George Thirlwell, the one-manic band behind Scraping Foetus, was born in Melbourne in Australia in 1960. He spent the first 18 years of his life being down in Down Under, saying that he hated every minute in the country. He attended an all-boy’s Baptist School for twelve years, singing in a choir and playing cello, the school experience a life-scarring one that resonates through a lot of his work to a greater or lesser degree. “I’ve put myself through a deprogramming process so I’ve blocked out most of my childhood, but I remember as I grew up I felt like I didn’t want to be where I was,”(1) he noted later. “I remember getting a bad report card that said my studies were okay but ‘James needs to have more faith’. I was pro-evolution and I’m an atheist to this day.”(2)

Thirlwell flirted with and dropped out of art school, but his disaffection for his art-content-informative (de)formative years soon led him across the ocean to London, where his Scottish mother had studied music. He told his parents he was going on there holiday and quite simply did not return to Australia, which had been his plan all along. He’s rarely been back to the land of his birth since; there are no Antipodean (or Scottish) melodies in his music that I have ever heard. Scorched earth policy from lifestart to teen angst finish.

Finding himself in the post-punk-blitzkrieg soundruins of England’s capital, the displaced Australian got himself a job at Virgin on Oxford Walk, which meant he could keep an ear and eye on the latest musical releases as they came out. After some sonic noodling in a couple of undergroundsound outfits (pragVEC, Nurse With Wound, Come), Thirlwell put out his first Foetus-themed release in January 1981, Foetus Under Glass doing OKFM/Spite Your Face.

Before we go any further, I have to explain something to the Foetus virgins in the audience. In order, apparently, to let the music speak in tongue twisters for itself, Thirlwell has recorded using more Foetus-themed pseudonyms and bandwagons than I would care to remember for three decades, but since 1995 has used Foetus as his main moniker. And what is the significance of that six-letter babybrand? Well, Thirlwell has been known to say with a shy sly wry grin it’s just an embryonic human, and that he likes the connotations of potential. But one thing’s for sure: with this mercurial never-miss-a-beat pimp of the perverse, you can never be quite be sure.

There have only ever been three Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel releases. Of the bizarre and slightly disturbing name, Thirlwell says: “My mental image of that is a foetus being tied to a railway track and being run over by a train and the engineer going, ‘Oh shit, not another!’. It’s a strong image and I like it. The word foetus is great, you know. I love f-o-e-t-u-s. I love the fact the oe is ee. I see it more in an abstract sense. It’s like a vague, abstract term.” (3)

Eventually-just-Foetus’s first few releases were cheaply recorded in London, with tiny numbers pressed for lack of cash, making small raindrop-in-puddle splashes in the British music press. Although he met his several-years-long girlfriend, firespitter No Wave punk provocateur Lydia ‘Lunch’ Koch during this time (more on which later), hanging out with her in a Brixton high rise flat, Thirlwell still wasn’t happy. He had no money, but fortuitously met Stevo of Some Bizzare, records through his Virgin job. This sonic-malefactor benefactor offered him unlimited 24-track studio time free, which Thirlwell jumped on, pulling mad 24-to-36-hour shifts to produce a full album and two 12” tracks.
 

 
The end result was the album Hole, recorded in May-October 1983 in London. The name shows its composer’s penchant for four-letter one-syllable titles. “You know, each (record title) has triple entendres. Like, say Hole, for example. It can mean hole in a sexual sense, hole as in a hole in the wall, or hole as in the hole that you descend into Hell with.”(4) The recording was originally conceived as a six-song album, with a three-minute rendition of “Clothes Hoist” for the whole of Hole’s first side. “The trouble is that as I worked on the song it started growing into a monster and the others just came from nowhere.”(5)
 
Read more after the jump…