Marcelo Machado’s lively and informative 2012 documentary Tropicalia features rare footage of Brazilian music legends Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, Gal Costa and Tom Zé as it explores a revolution animated by music and art. Mixing traditional Brazilian and African rhythms with contemporary psychedelic experimentation and the avant-garde, the 1960’s tropicália movement celebrated free expression in reaction and opposition to an atmosphere of increasing social and cultural oppression. As a military dictatorship took hold of Brazil, artists were among the front line of resistance and many were forced to leave the country or face death.
Tropicalia may not be definitive but it sure as shit is important and vital.
As the “arm the teachers” rhetoric surrounding the Newtown shootings refuses to go away, I remembered this old New Yorker cover by Maus author and illustrator, Art Spiegelman.
For a guy whose opus was about his father’s experience during the Holocaust, he managed to outdo himself in disturbing imagery with this one. And yet it doesn’t seem that far from what’s being suggested in 2013…
01. “A Rural Schoolhouse” (45:23)
02. “And See The Flaming Sky” ( 45:24)
03. “Tower Block” (16:47)
04. “Anniesland Cross As Seen From The Train Station” (14:18)
Four Landscapes is also available as a Limited Edition Hand Painted 3 Cassette and CDR Box Set, together with landscape photographs and several printed inserts. Includes immediate download of 4-track album in your choice of MP3 320, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire. Full details can be found here.
OK, this is my last feline-related punk rock post for at least the next 6 months, I promise, but we all know Glenn Danzig’s memetastic love of cats, so I couldn’t pass this one up.
Promo video for Nico’s “Evening of Light” (actually the alternate version, as heard on the Frozen Borderline set) directed by François De Menil in 1969, but probably finished much later. There was a tantalizingly brief clip of this in the Nico: Icon documentary and ever since the invention of YouTube, I’ve been hoping to find the complete piece online.
The story is told in Richard Witts’ (fantastic) Nico biography, Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, that De Menil, heir to the Schlumberger Limited oil-equipment fortune via his mother’s family, who knew Nico via Warhol associate Fred Hughes, had become besotted by the Teutonic ice queen and proposed making a film with her.
At this time Nico was having a brief affair with a then 21-year-old Iggy Pop, who she met through John Cale, then producing the first Stooges album in New York. (Iggy once revealed to a French interviewer that Nico taught him how to “eat pussy.”) Nico told De Menil that he had to follow them to Ann Arbor, Michigan if he wanted to do it. De Menil obliged, shooting the film behind the house where the band lived.
The way Witts tells the tale is that De Menil seemed to want to get revenge on Iggy because he was Nico’s boyfriend, making the Stooges singer wear white mime make-up and frolic around in a field to embarrass him, but to my mind, this film is absolutely stunning.
Day Comes Apart is a stunning song cycle, consisting 9 songs written by Mikael Karlsson and Rob Stephenson, and performed by the superb Abby Fischer (mezzo soprano) and Yegor Shevtsov (piano) at the Klavierhaus, New York, in May 2012. The video was shot by T. M. Rives and J. P. Bernbach, with audio by Patrick Lo.
Karlsson and Stephenson previously worked together on the wonderful diverse experimental album Dog, and Karlsson is currently on an opera and an orchestral score for the Norwegian National Ballet with Alexander Ekman.
I spent a fair amount of the holidays rediscovering the timeless genius of Wire’s late 70’s punk/post punk/art rock triptych of Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154 and I’d have to say, those three albums will never get old for me.
This 1979 set for the German TV series RockPalast, taped between Chairs Missing and 154, is the only professionally shot record of Wire during their (first) glory days and it kicks ass so hard. If you’re a fan of the band and you’ve never seen this before, prepare to be blown the fuck away.
1 Intro + Another The letter
2 The 15th
3 Practice Makes Perfect
4 Two People In A Room
5 I Feel Mysterious Today
6 Being Sucked In Again
7 Once Is Enough
8 Blessed State
9 A Question of Degree
10 Single KO
11 Mercy
12 Forty Versions
13 Former Airline
14 French Film Blurred
15 Men 2nd
16 Map Ref. 41°N 93°W
17 Heartbeat
18 Pink Flag (encore)
From the looks of things, the audience of long-haired German stoners had no idea what had just hit them!
Born in 1888, Dr. Fritz Kahn was an actual Gynecologist, who just happened to have a flare for art. His interpretations of mechanized human anatomy are as striking as they are fascinating, as gears and pipes disrupt bodies that have been rendered all but biological.
Kahn a Jew, was expelled from his native Germany not long after some of his work gained notoriety. His books were even burned and banned by the Nazis, with one edition surviving under a fake name, after the addition of an anti-Semitic chapter.
Kahn eventually escaped to the U.S. and continued a successful career as an author until his death in 1968. His work has recently been collected in the book, Man Machine, showing the growth and evolution of his perceptions of the body.
Jean Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers while in prison in 1942. It was published anonymously the following year, and sold around 30 copies. It wasn’t until after the Allied Forces liberated France in 1944 that the bulk of the copies were bound and sold.
Due to its sexual content Our Lady of the Flowers was sold as high class erotica, but Genet never intended it as such. It would take until the book had been revised and reprinted by Gallimard in 1951 that Our Lady of the Flowers received the critical accolades it richly deserved - even if Jean-Paul Sartre described it as “the epic of masturbation.”
It was an over-the-wall conversation with a neighbor that led Lindsay Kemp to create and produce his now legendary dance production of Flowers in 1974. As Lindsay recounted to Dangerous Minds last year:
‘I’d just rented a little cottage, a country retreat, in Hungerford in Berkshire, and my next door neighbor - it was one Sunday morning and we were listening to Round the Horne, we all did on those Sunday mornings - and my neighbor across the fence leaned over and said.
“Oh hi, I think this book might interest you.”
And it was Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. And I began to read it, and as soon as I began to read it I could already see it on the stage, and I could see myself as Divine, the central character. And two weeks later, we opened it.
Only someone of Kemp’s incredible talents and vision could have produced Flowers, and the production put Kemp and his dance company literally “on the map.” Since then, Kemp and Co. have performed Flowers all across the world to incredible acclaim.
In 1982, a video was made of the Lindsay Kemp Dance Company performing Flowers at the Teatro Parioli, Roma. It is rarely been seen since, and the video is a incredible treat for anyone interested in dance, performance and theater.
Alchemy: The Telenomic Process of the Universe, 1973. Oil, acrylic, ink and vinyl lettering on canvas, 73 ½ x 73 ½ in.
If you live in NYC—or anywhere near the city—there’s going to be a unique event tomorrow night that many Dangerous Minds readers will probably want to attend, a rare “evening with the artist” that will open a new retrospective survey of Paul Laffoley’s artwork at the Kent Fine Art gallery in Chelsea. The talk will take place Friday, January 4th, 6 to 9 p.m.
The Boston Visionary Cell, founded by Paul Laffoley in 1971, was based on the model of an artists’ guild. Although there have been numerous presentations of Laffoley’s work over the past decade, the Boston Visionary Cell has never been examined in the context of his life’s work. It is a crucial piece in understanding Laffoley’s methodology. As stated in its founding charter, it was created “to develop and advance visionary art”:
“We . . . believe that the evocation of the mystical experience by means of symbols, which has functioned as part of the intentioning process throughout the course of human history, is the intended direction of evolution that becomes most expressive through visual art during those periods in history that are characterized by rapid change, e.g., the twentieth century, which has seen a series of movements from the Modern era to the Post-Modern era, finally culminating in the Bauharoque era.”
Our current exhibition extrapolates on the mission of the Boston Visionary Cell as it has related to Laffoley’s production over the past forty years. An extensive online publication will accompany the exhibition.
KENT FINE ART, 210 Eleventh Avenue, Second Floor, NYC (212) 365-9500
Xanatopia, 1995. Ink, gouache, vinyl lettering, and collage on board, 30 x 30 in.
Anthe Hieronymus Box Two, 1999-2003. Serigraph inks, aluminum, gold and copper wire, mahogany, blood, glass. No. 5 from and edition of 6, 25 x 25 x 3 in.
Below, in this extended clip from the Laffoley’s Odyssey documentary, you can see inside The Boston Visionary Cell, the one-room office space where Paul Laffoley lived and worked for three decades.