Jorma Kaukonen, bottom right

This is a guest post from Michael Simmons

Ah yes—I remember it as if it was yesterday! ‘Twas way back in the aughts, kids – the first decade of the 21st Century. Maybe four, five annums back. I was at a medical facility for a procedure related to what remains of my back. The cute young receptionist asked that I fill out an interminable form – the filling out of interminable forms being a hallmark of The Twenty-Worst Century. Name, address, next-of-kin, zabba-da-doo-bee-waba-da-booty – and ethnicity.

Ethnicity?

“What goes here?” I asked the receptionist, tossing back what remains of my longhair with a twinkle in my good eye, the one I can still see through. She assured me that it was an optional question for a study the facility was conducting and not for nefarious purposes or denying me my constitutional rights. I thought about it. What am I? I’m Caucasian, an agnostic Jew, an American, a human being (most days, some nights), but none of these rang right. And then the twinkle in my eye broke into fractals and I put pen to paper.

I answered Hippie-American.

“Hippie” is an inexact term that has many definitions depending on the perspective – and bias – of the definer. Many think of floral children with stupid grins and pinned eyes or The Eagles or people who subsist solely on brown food. Not I. My Hall Of Hippie Fame short list includes The Beatles, The Fugs, Allen Ginsberg (also a Beat), Abbie Hoffman (who held his flower in a clenched fist), a friend of mine who once punched a cop and who shall be nameless here, and Grace Slick—The Queen Of Sarcasm.

Graced with a thrilling set of pipes–pun intentional–Slick was in a rock band called the Jefferson Airplane that I dearly loved–and still do. I’ve been a frothing fan ever since I heard “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit” on the radio in ’67. I first saw them live on Friday, November 28, 1969 at the Fillmore East in New York City. They were a ragtag gang of freaks who eschewed any semblance of show biz, but whose advanced respect for—and pursuit of—musicality was on par with jazz cats and kitties. Their guitarist was Jorma Kaukonen, a singular slinger who invented an electric style too personal to be recreated by others. Jorma can wah and fuzz with the best and is also a primo exponent of fingerpicking blues, gospel and folk from the Reverend Gary Davis school of intricate hand gymnastics. He and fellow Airplaner–bassist Jack Casady (another absolute axe master)–also formed Hot Tuna, a kickass band that’s played everything from ragtime to heavy metal for 45-sumpin’ years now.

As he told me a few days ago, Jorma sobered up “16 years, 5 months, and 23 days ago – but who’s counting?” At the same approximate time, he and wife Vanessa Kaukonen founded the Fur Peace Ranch–a guitar camp in Darwin, Ohio. (O come all ye free associative evolution riffs!) Young and old alike attend Fur Peace to learn and play—it’s one of America’s coolest music schools. Jorma also gigs 150 to 200 nights a year under his own handle and with variations of acoustic and electric Hot Tuna. (Casady and mandolinist Barry Mitterhoff are regular partners–the latter being part of the “Jewgrass” Scene in Noo Yawk in the ‘70s–as was I.)

Given that the Airplane and Tuna are two of the mightiest hippie bands to emerge from the ‘60s, one day Vanessa suggested–nay urged—Jorma that they create something to keep the spirit truckin’, as it were, and make the artistry of that era available for education and inspiration. “I’m not a particularly nostalgic person,” he points out.  “I recognize the significance of a lot of this stuff, but since I was there I take a lot of it for granted and it’s kinda like ‘who gives a shit?’ Fortunately my wife is not like that. She’s younger than me and she does give a shit and she pointed out this stuff and I got it.”

They built a two-story silo next to Fur Peace in Darwin and dubbed it the Psylodelic Gallery. Being an American with a unique twistory of history, Jorma had his own take on the project. “The Psylodelic Gallery is a lot more interesting than The World’s Largest Ball Of Twine,” he explains. “I’m a huge fan of roadside America and I go see all that shit. The World’s Largest Prairie Dog in Oakley, Kansas – whatever. We have a little sign on the road, so we’re part of roadside America too.”

This Saturday, June 29 is the Grand Opening of the Psylodelic Gallery. Pioneer psychedelic rockers Big Brother & The Holding Company will perform and there’s an exhibit of photographs from the first day Jorma met Janis Joplin in 1962, plus the actual typewriter that can be heard in the legendary “Typewriter Tapes” of him and Janis playing together all those years ago. Also featured is Jorma’s original Fillmore Auditorium poster collection and his 1958 Gibson J-50 acoustic guitar that he picked with the Airplane and Tuna. (If you’re familiar with Jorma’s solo instrumental classic “Embryonic Journey” from Surrealistic Pillow, then you know the J-50.) Ephemera from Jack Casady and Wavy Gravy are displayed, quotes from Martin Luther King, Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia and others line the walls, and a film and liquid lightshow by Chris Samardizch of The Brotherhood Of Light will be screened. 

New exhibits will go up every three months–four a year total. Vanessa’s already working on visits from local students. She’s intent on promoting “Art through activism, art through action, art through conversation.” As for definitions, Jorma says his “vision of the hippie is productive, honest intensity. There were a lot of people back then who followed that creative path simply for the love of it. They couldn’t be bothered getting involved in the incredibly complex fine arts world or the business aspect. They did it cause they loved it and they did a lot of it.”

Makes one damn proud to be a Hippie-American.

For more information, check out the Psylodelic Gallery on their website or via Facebook. The first eight Hot Tuna albums have been reissued on CD and can be ordered from Culture Factory USA.

Below, Jorma Kaukonen and The Jefferson Airplane rip through “Eskimo Blue Day” live at The Family Dog in 1970:
 

 
Time-lapse video of Irish artist Vincent Keeling painting a portrait of Shane MacGowan.

Keelings paintings of rockers, including Nick Cave and Bruce Springsteen, are available at his gallery’s website.
 

 
Jonathan Moore didn’t find starring in his latest film 2Graves an enjoyable experience.

“There’s a lot of it where I’m hung from a chain,” Moore tells Dangerous Minds. “A hook, like a meat hook. This went on for like twelve hours on the first day because we were so short of time. I stayed in my harness even during lunch break. I wore one these flying harness things. It’s like the worst kind of corset you can imagine—it digs into your ribs, it chafes—so, I was in a lot of physical pain. But I was using it—I was using the pain.

“The bloke who did the flying said to me, ‘We don’t normally have people in one of these harnesses for more than 20-minutes.’

“He said, ‘Are you all right? You don’t have to do this.’ I just felt so much pressure to do it that I did it for a whole day. I thought, well at least that’s done. Then I came in the next day and the director said, ‘You’ve got to do it again.”

Jonathan Moore is an actor, writer and director. He may describe himself as “not a marquee name,” but over a 30-year career, he has proven himself, time-and-again, to be one of the most powerful, original, and talented creative artists of his generation.

In 2Graves Moore plays Jack Topps, a man set on revenging the murder of his father.

“It’s got this kind of Greek revenge quality to it. It’s an odyssey really, about this guy who is an ordinary kid, whose dad is killed by gangsters over some gambling debts. His dad was a professional darts player and he didn’t throw the match to keep the local crime family happy. So, they killed him. His son finds out about this and he decides he’s going to embark on this spree of quite bloody revenge. It destroys his soul.

“The title comes from Confucius, ‘The man who achieves revenge, let him first dig two graves—one for himself.’”
 

 
More from Jonathan Moore, plus trailer for ‘2Graves,’ after the jump…

 
Festively decorated surveillance camera in Utrecht, Netherlands on Tuesday in honor of George Orwell’s birthday

Yesterday the Dutch city of Utrecht celebrated George Orwell’s 110th birthday by placing colorful party hats on surveillance cameras in the city center. Orwell’s novel 1984, published in 1949, describes a futuristic world in which the all-powerful government, Big Brother, keeps its citizens under close surveillance in public and in their homes.

Via Front 404

 
I can’t say that this track—“Pursuit” by French producer Gesaffelstein—does much of anything for me (there was trippier electronic dance music being made in 1989), but the video, directed by Fleur & Manu, the duo behind those great M83 videos, is simply stunning.

Contains nudity.
 

 
Thank you Miles Clark of Los Angeles, CA!

 
If you are lucky enough to find yourself in London this summer, there’s still plenty of time to catch “The Alternative Guide to the Universe” exhibit at the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery. The exhibit, which was curated by Ralph Rugoff, runs through August 26 and features several key paintings by visionary artist Paul Laffoley, including the piece generally considered to be his signature work, Thanaton III.

Laffoley’s unusual artforms can be categorized in several different ways: His architectural works which are comparable to schematics or blueprints; his inventions of seemingly far out sci-fi devices (keep in mind that everything Jules Verne dreamed up eventually came to pass); his plans for a working time machine and a house that can be grown from a single seed. The subset of his work that seems to baffle critics the most are the Boston-based artist’s mysterious and awe-inspiring “operating systems.”

Laffoley’s operating systems are paintings (and some other types of work on occasion) that are meant to be interacted with in the “theater of the mind,” as the artist puts it. Some are like meditation or yoga devices, something you would stare it or “breathe in.” One operating system instructs the viewer of the painting to touch it on handpads (as above) and pitch their consciousness into a kite allowing for astral travel.

With 1989’s Thanton III however, there is something going on that’s a little bit different, because it’s a painting that’s actually alive in a certain way, but’ll let Paul Laffoley explain it himself in the video.

This interview comes from my UK TV series, Disinformation and was conducted in 2000. Most of the time when this painting is hung in a museum, they have this video playing right beside it.

This isn’t the only television segment to be done solely concentrating on Thanton III, it was also singled out for appreciation in France by Otto on Monde5 during the big Laffoley exhibit at Palais du Toyko in 2009. [You’ll note that when a French person pronounces his surname, they are, in effect saying “Paul The Fool.” In the same sense that he last name Esposito (“the exposed ones”) indicates an ancestor who was orphaned, Laffoley would indicate genetic predecessors who were mentally ill or perhaps severely autistic. “La folies” = “the foolsish ones,” basically. This is something that Paul explained to me himself. Furthermore he is convinced that the “la folies” were the real-life artists’ models for the gargoyles on Chartres Cathedral, but that’s for another time…]
 

Vitaly Komar and Alex Melemid’s first collaborative art show at the Blue Bird Café, Moscow, USSR, 1967.

“Today he is playing jazz and tomorrow he’ll betray the Motherland.” - Soviet era saying

The Blue Bird Café (Sinyaya Ptitsa) on Chekhov Street in Moscow opened in 1963, one of two jazz enclaves in the city. Students, nonconformist artists, writers, and musicians gathered there to listen to jazz and hold small unofficial art shows. A well-known quartet that frequently played there featured sax player Igor Itkin, pianist Mikhail Kull, bassist Alexander Chernyshev and drummer Vladimir Lesnyakov.

Painters Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, who founded Retrospectivism, held their first collaborative show at the Blue Bird in 1967 upon graduating from the Stroganov School of Art and Design. Other artists who displayed their paintings and sculpture at the Café in the 1960’s were Erik Bulatov, Igor Shelkovsky, Oleg Vassiliev, and Ilia and Emilia Kabakov.

Komar and Melamid described their Retrospectivism movement as featuring “three-dimensional abstract paintings in the style of the old masters and reflects a typical search for spirituality on the part of nonconformist artists working in an oppressively atheistic state.” According to the description of Melamid’s exhibit of life-size hip-hop icons in Detroit, “Komar and Melamid often faced government opposition and harassment.” So much opposition that in 1969 government censors removed their work from the 8th Exhibition of Young Artists in Moscow.

Jazz was tolerated to some degree in the USSR (unlike rock music) and had even been the music of the stilyagi (stylish) youth subculture in the late 1940’s and 1950’s. But jazz came under a new round of unwanted scrutiny in 1968 as ideologically troublesome. In Red Hot and Blue: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union 1917-1991 author S. Frederick Starr describes the Soviet establishment’s hostility toward jazz:

“There was no formal campaign against jazz. Indeed, Brezhnev applauded a modern jazz quartet that performed at his dacha outside Moscow in 1970. But many protectors of Soviet orthodoxy wanted to settle old scores. The jamming of foreign broadcasts, suspended in 1963, was reintroduced in 1968. Fearing unwholesome assemblies of young people, Komsomol [the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, the officially sanctioned youth group for people 14 and older] abolished jazz evenings at the Dream in Kiev and at similar youth Cafés in other cities. The Blue Bird (Siniaia ptitsa), which had opened only two years before on Chekhov Street in Moscow, dropped jazz entirely, and the Molodezhnoe Café cut back jazz to two nights a week. The Pechora was opened on Moscow’s Kalinin Prospect to replace these dens of iniquity; brightly lit and colorless, the Pechora at least provided a setting for open jam sessions, although it closed early.”

Gorbachev’s perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union resulted in a proliferation of nightclubs and the Blue Bird’s elevated status as a “jazz centre.” The Café continued to be a revered attraction for jazz fans until its closure in 2010.
 

 
Above, UB40 jamming with local musicians, including Roman Suslov from polite refusal, at the Blue Bird Café, Moscow, USSR, on October 16, 1986.

 
We’ve featured Justin Hager‘s work here on Dangerous Minds before, but not THIS piece titled “Buffalo Bill Cosby.”

I’m rendered speechless by this one.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Danzig with Wolves: Illustrated funnies with famous bands and musicians

Via reddit

 
You know, even though I’ve checked out a huge amount of art over the years, in galleries and museums, I can’t claim to have really “understood” much of it, nor did I want to: I’d look at works by Picasso or Monet in much the same way I might check out a band in a club, I wanted it to hit me where I live or make my feel like a child or completely disorient me and alter my perceptions of space, time or even reality. It’s even better if you can physically go inside the art, like with Richard Serra’s 400 ton steel pieces or Carston Holler’s art slides. That’s why this new retrospective exhibit of James Turrell’s works at the Guggenheim kicked my ass so much.

James Turrell has made a career out of manipulating light or focusing on some aspect of how our eyes and brains generate images and then he rides that aspect way the hell out into new territory that can really boggle your mind. Photos (such as the one I took above) really don’t do his pieces justice, particularly as many of them are entire rooms or environments. In the piece above (called “Aten Reign”) Turrell basically created a giant work shaped like a corkscrew that fits into the famous spiral ramp at the Guggenheim perfectly (Indeed, ascending the ramp outside the piece you basically see smooth walls where the open atrium used to be). You basically enter in at the ground level and then stare up into that mesmerizing concentric image that filters and colors the light that shines down through the Guggenheim’s glass ceiling. Hidden LCD lighting slowly changes and radiates outward and, meanwhile, perspective is basically destroyed. So you’re left staring upward at this weird pulsating primordial Bardo light-source that seems to have been pulled out of our normal physical reality.

What’s it all mean? I dunno. But man is it cool.

On upper floors of the Guggenheim there are a few other rooms, some showing earlier works. One of them looked like a box of fluorescent lighting recessed into the wall, but when you got up close you saw that it was nothing but a bright square of light projected onto a surface in a dark room, tricking your brain into believing it was seeing the source of the light itself.

Now if you’re thinking that you have to be in New York to check out Turrell’s installation pieces, there are simultaneous retrospectives in Los Angeles (at the LA County Museum until April 2014) and Houston (at The Museum of Fine Arts until September). The art world has apparently decided to organize itself and promote Turrell and his unique work. It’s worth making the trip as his pieces don’t lend themselves to permanent placement, though here and there you might stumble across one (last week I found out that one of his pieces sits a few blocks from where I work, since 1986, but that I never knew about).

James Turrell himself is quite a character as he owns and operates a ranch in Arizona that contains an extinct volcano he once saw from an airplane he was piloting back in the mid 70s. Since then, he’s been transforming the volcano into an absurdly mind-bogglingly ambitious work of art called “Roden Crater” that many believe is one of the greater works any single human being has ever created.

If you want to call all this overly brainy self-indulgence on a hubristic scale, well to that I say “Who gives a shit?? On that level alone the work is interesting. But check out Turrell’s pieces in real life and you may be tempted to believe that there’s actually some “there” there, even if you can’t put your finger on what it means or precisely what it’s all about.

That’s the best art anyway, isn’t it?

Below, James Turrell talking about his work and revisiting some of his older pieces: