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New ‘visual history’ book celebrates 50 years of the Residents! Sneak peek and exclusive premiere!


‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1’
 
For about 50 years now, the Residents have operated in secret, hiding their identities behind masks and costumes. But now you can see the members of the band full nude!

Yes, the Residents are the subject of a handsome new coffee-table book from Melodic Virtue, the publisher of like retrospectives about the Butthole Surfers, Pixies, and Ministry. The Residents: A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1 collects beautifully printed reproductions of art, photos, correspondence, press clippings and ephemera from the first 13 years of the Eye Guys’ career, opening in their humble San Mateo dwelling in 1970 and concluding on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before the triumphant 1983 Uncle Sam Mole Show
 

‘Not Available’
 
While their faces remain mostly obscured in these pages, the Residents’ bare genitals are reproduced in black and white in more than one spread, so if you ever run into a pants-less member of the group, you’ll have no trouble recognizing him! That alone is worth the price of this volume. 

But let’s suppose you’re jaded about seeing the Residents’ junk; say you’ve already got enlargements of the Delta Nudes CD cover tacked up all over your walls, and Kinko’s quality is good enough for you. Well, how about a sharp full-color photo of the Mysterious N. Senada’s saxophone and another of its case, bearing the word “COMMERCIAL” in giant red capital letters? Do you have that, Mr. Great Big Residents Fan? How about shots from inside Poor Know Graphics’ design studio circa 1972, hmm? You got pictures of Snakefinger’s wedding? I’m so sure. What about the fucking floor plans for the Residents’ old Sycamore Street headquarters in San Francisco?
 

‘Eloise’ from ‘Vileness Fats’
 
Many of the book’s contents are things I’d hoped to find inside—shots from the set of Vileness Fats, beautiful stills from Graeme Whifler’s “Hello Skinny” film, W.E.I.R.D. fan club papers—but nearly as many are treasures I didn’t know I’d been missing, such as images from a proposal for an Eskimo opera, or screenshots from a prototype Mark of the Mole video game for the Atari 2600, or a snap of a promotional packet of Residents brand Tunes of Two Cities aspirin (to treat “the newest headache” from the band). Old favorites like the black-and-white promo photo of the band shopping for groceries are accompanied by contact sheets and other prints from the shoot. Turn the page, and it’s like The Wizard of Oz: the Residents are standing in the checkout line in Technicolor.
 

‘The Act of Being Polite’
 
Peppered throughout are testimonials from the group’s many-generational cohort of colleagues and fans. Collaborators and Ralph Records alumni like Mole Show emcee Penn Jillette, members of Tuxedomoon and Yello, and all of Renaldo & The Loaf get in reminiscences. Don Preston of the Mothers of Invention tells how he came to play his Moog parts on Eskimo; Patrick Gleeson conveys his delight at the Residents’ “fuck-you-ness”; Andy Partridge of XTC (a/k/a Commercial Album guest Sandy Sandwich) apostrophizes the Eyeballs in verse.

Then there’s Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten remembering the Berlin record store that turned him on to The Third Reich ‘n Roll in the Seventies, and Les Claypool takes us to the living room in El Sobrante, California where his teenage girlfriend first played him Duck Stab on her Marantz. Danny Elfman hears a different path his own life might have taken when he listens back. And bringing down the mean age of this all-star gang are some of the Residents’ “children”: Eric André, members of Steel Pole Bath Tub, Death Grips, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum…
 

Handwritten ‘Lizard Lady’ lyrics from the ‘Duck Stab/Buster & Glen Notebook’
 
The book includes a seven-inch of “Nobody’s Nos,” an unreleased song composed for the early masterpiece Not Available. There’s also a signed deluxe edition that comes with a picture disc of “Nobody’s Nos” and a supplementary 24-page book of notes and handwritten lyrics from the making of Duck Stab/Buster & Glen. Mercy.

Below, the band Star Stunted (Sam Coomes, Rob Crow, Zach Hill, Mike Morasky, and Ego Plum, all of whom contributed to the book, along with its author, Aaron Tanner) performs the Residents’ 1972 holiday heartwarmer (heartwormer?) “Santa Dog” in an exclusive Dangerous Minds premiere.

It’s a Christmas miracle!

Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.15.2021
05:18 am
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DEVO’s Gerald V. Casale talks about his new music videos and the vertiginous pace of de-evolution!
11.24.2021
06:07 pm
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Gerald V. Casale and Josh Freese in “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” directed by Davy Force

With the human species seemingly hurtling toward the center of a body-pulping, dream-pulverizing vortex, Dangerous Minds sent one of its bubble-eyed dog boys from the recombo DNA labs in the Valley for a briefing from Jerry Casale. DEVO’s chief strategist, film director, songwriter, singer, and bassist shed light on our dire predicament as few others could. He also discussed his new solo music video, “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” and revealed his plans for its upcoming 3D sequel, “The Invisible Man,” news that is balm for our awful hurt. A lightly edited transcript follows.

How was the tour, from your point of view? One of the high points of my year for sure was seeing DEVO again.

Where did you see it?

At the YouTube Theater at SoFi Stadium in LA.

You know, that’s an amazing amphitheater. It’s kind of a replacement for the wonderful amphitheater we had that we used to love playing at, that was ripped apart for Harry Potter rides?

The Universal Amphitheatre.

Up in Universal City. So this one kind of approximates that in architectural style, in the stage, in the sound, so, yeah, good venue. They don’t have their management together, that’s for sure. It’s overbearing; in these COVID times, they had so much security going on, it was like warring kind of TSA factions or something. But I thought the show went pretty well.

Well, for a guy like me, Jerry, I guess it’s the closest thing I have to a religious ceremony in my life, that Booji Boy, no matter how many times he dies, keeps coming back to sing “Beautiful World.”

[Laughs] It was hardly a tour, however. It was three measly shows. So, yeah.

I know. I wish there had been more—

Me too.

—but I’m grateful for what I get.

Well, if it were up to me, there would be a lot more.

Is that across the board, in terms of recording and touring and all that stuff?

Of course, of course. I mean, obviously, I founded the band, and I remain as excited and true to the concepts and principles of the collaboration and the experimentation as I was in 1977.
 

DEVO in the lab, 1979 (via DEVO-OBSESSO)
 
Dean Stockwell just died, and I know he was an early champion of the band, so I wanted to ask about your relationship with him. But I also wanted to ask about this weird phenomenon that DEVO seems always to have been, like, one degree of separation from the Black Mountain poets, and I think of Dean Stockwell as being part of that too, since he was friends with Robert Duncan. So if you could talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. Where do we start there? First of all, with Dean Stockwell, he was part of a group of kind of the outsider artist, [Topanga] Canyon people. I mean, he had been with Toni Basil, they were close friends with Neil Young, Dennis Hopper—there was a whole little universe of people there, actors, musicians. So when Toni Basil came to see us play at the Starwood in the summer of 1977 in Los Angeles, and converted, flipped out, she turned Dean and Neil Young on to us. And they, in turn, became very excited and became advocates, and, you know, insisted that we appear in Neil’s movie.

Neil was in the process of that movie [Human Highway] that kept morphing in terms of what it was, and what the message was, and who would act in it, and what the plot was, and we were involved in scenes in that movie early on, and many of the scenes that were shot were then jettisoned, because the whole idea of the movie changed, and it went on for another two years. And that culminated with us doing this vignette inside the movie of being disgruntled nuclear waste workers in Linear Valley, which was a fictitious valley in the film, and we were singing “It Takes a Worried Man” while we loaded leaky barrels of nuclear waste onto the truck and took them to the dumpsite. And that was an idea I’d thrown out that Neil liked, and he gave me his crew, basically, he let me direct that sequence. He gave me the funds in the budget to do a loading dock set, and used his truck—he actually owned that truck—and he made us the uniforms and the custom helmets with the breather packs that went into our noses.

So it was fantastic shooting 35 millimeter film, doing this whole thing that I thought was going to appear intact inside the movie. But of course, no; it was then decided upon some kind of editing whim to chop it up and make it a through line, and keep coming back to it throughout the movie, so it really made no sense [laughs]. But the movie made no sense. It’s an amazing piece. Certainly had a lot of talent behind it and a lot of budget behind it.

What’s funny is, although this never happens, the subsequent re-editing, re-editing, re-editing, new director’s cut, new director’s cut—the last thing that Neil ever did to it was actually the most cohesive and the best, and worked the best. And he also collapsed the movie so it wasn’t some sprawling, two-hour bit, you know, it was concise. And it just suddenly made more sense [laughs], believe it or not, which never happens when people go back and rework something over and over, they keep going down a rabbit hole. But I actually liked it, and I got to speak at a couple of these screenings he had where there were Q&A from the audience about the making of it. So yeah, it was great.
 

DEVO shine as nuclear waste workers in Neil Young’s ‘Human Highway’ (via IMDb)
 
Back to the Black Mountain thing. It started with a poet, Ed Dorn, who had come to the Black Mountain school, he was a poet that liaised with all those poets that were famous at that time, from City Lights—

Ferlinghetti?

You know, like what was his name, somebody Giorno…

John Giorno.

John Giorno; of course, Allen Ginsberg; all these poets. And they had been part of this cadre of people of like-minded sensibilities that started as Beats, basically, in the Sixties. And Ed Dorn became a professor of poetry, English lit, at the University of Boulder, and he had gotten a, whatever it’s called, a guest professorship at Kent State University on the heels of the killings at Kent State. So he came in the following fall on a visiting professorship, set up in a house off-campus.

And immediately, you know, all the academics and hipoisie intelligentsia that were outsider people at Kent State—‘cause it was a tight-knit group of people who didn’t fit into the MBA, fraternity scene, right? We were the artists, we were pursuing fine art programs, pursuing MFAs in English literature and so on—we, of course, gravitated to Ed Dorn, he was a great guy. And Bob Lewis and I, who was an early colleague and, pre-DEVO the band, had, with me, created these DEVO concepts of de-evolution, and I had been applying it to visual art and he had been applying it to poetry, we hung out with Ed in 1971, ’72, and we were spewing all these theories to Ed, and Ed found us completely entertaining, you know, like, these strident kids think they reinvented the wheel. The ideas weren’t foreign to him at all. So he would say, “Oh, if you think that, here, read this!” and “Oh, well by the way, so and so said this!” And he just egged us on.

So he gave us the ammunition. And then Eric Mottram came in that following year from Kings College in England, and he had been friends with all these people, and he had been teaching their works at Kings College in England, and he was a quote “lefty” intellectual. And he brought in people like Jeff Nuttall, who had written Bomb Culture.

So it was just this big lovefest of wonderful ideas and concepts, where you’d been thinking things, other people across the world had been thinking things, and there was this beautiful synchronicity, right? Who knew this could happen at Kent State University? And half of the reason it happened is ‘cause of the killings, and the reaction to the killings, and people banding together, like as a survival tactic, against this pending fascism and Nixonianism. So there’s a long, convoluted answer to your short, concise question.
 
MUCH more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.24.2021
06:07 pm
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Residential: Homer Flynn on the Residents’ ambitious ‘God in Three Persons’ show at MoMA


God in Three Persons 2020, courtesy of the Cryptic Corporation

Next month, the Residents will perform their 1988 narrative album God in Three Persons at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show will combine new video projections by the artist John Sanborn with a live performance by the Residents and vocalist Laurie Amat, whose contributions to the original LP are memorable. 

Homer Flynn, the president of the Cryptic Corporation, has handled the Residents’ affairs since the 1970s. I called him just before Thanksgiving, interrupting his graphic design work on an upcoming release involving the Mysterious N. Senada to pepper him with questions about the Residents’ next moves.

Dangerous Minds: Has God in Three Persons ever been performed in front of an audience before?

Homer Flynn: Well, not in the way that it’s being done now, I’ll put it that way. You know, the Residents always felt that God in Three Persons was probably the thing that they had done that most lent itself into being expanded into more of a theatrical-slash-visual form. And one way or another, they’ve kind of worked around with that for some time now. But what happened was that they made contact with a producer, a guy named Steve Saporito in New York, and, you know, one of the Residents did a solo performance, I don’t know, seven or eight years ago, in San Francisco and New York. It was called “Sam’s Enchanted Evening.” And Steve, that producer, was the one responsible for getting that to New York, and afterwards he asks, “Well, what else are you interested in doing?” And the first thing in the meeting that came up was God in Three Persons. And so, in a lot of ways, that kind of picked up the energy, in that way. 

But they did a reading of God in Three Persons for ACT, the American Conservatory Theater, which is a very well-established theater in San Francisco, and that happened, I think, a little over two years ago or a little over three years ago. They got some interest at that, but then the woman who was the artistic director left, and there was a big changeover. And they are still interested, but meanwhile, in between, they’d also been talking to the Museum of Modern Art, and the interest really started picking up there, so the energy started going in that direction.

So in answer to your question, they did do a reading of it at ACT about three years ago; they also worked with an American classical composer and conductor who was doing a museum show at a contemporary art museum in Rotterdam, and they performed some pieces of it with him as part of a museum installation. And then they did some more pieces of it at a performance in Bourges, France, just this past April. So they’ve done pieces of it here and there, but they’ve never done anything nearly as extensive or ambitious as what they’re doing now.
 

Homer Flynn, courtesy of the Cryptic Corporation
 
Can you tell me how it compares to the original touring show that was planned? I don’t know how far along that got.

You know, that really didn’t get very far. They had some conversations with BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, oh, back in the late Eighties, about potentially doing God in Three Persons with them. But ultimately, what happened was that, one, they felt like they were not gonna be able to do justice to it in a touring scenario, and then also, two, before anything could happen, they completed their King & Eye album, you know, which was all Elvis covers, and they just felt like that was gonna lend itself much more to touring than God in Three Persons. So at that point they kinda dropped God in Three Persons as a performing piece and moved towards The King & Eye, which ultimately became their Cube-E tour. That was probably about ‘89.

It would probably have been harder in a number of ways to stage God in Three Persons in ‘89. For one thing, you have the video doing some of the work in this version—

Absolutely.

—but also the content. The end, I find it hard to imagine taking that on the road with the ending it has, which I think is still pretty shocking, actually.

Yeah. Well, in some ways, it almost seems like it’s more shocking now than it was then. But it also feels, in a lot of ways, you know, the whole idea of the twins being very gender-fluid—you know, that idea was kind of completely off the charts, at that point, and now it actually feels very much in line with the times, in a lot of ways.

Is [genderqueer porn star] Jiz Lee playing both of the twins?

Yes. Right. Correct. There are a few shots that John did where he brought in another one, another person that looked very similar to Jiz, so there would be some times when both of ‘em were in the frame, and he wasn’t having to do video doubling or whatever. But for the most part, Jiz plays both twins. 
 

‘Holy Kiss of Flesh,’ the ‘almost danceable’ single version of ‘Kiss of Flesh’ (via Discogs)
 
I have a sense that the story of God in Three Persons is about show business, more than anything else, and I wonder if the Residents see it that way.

Well, it’s interesting that you would say that. How do you make that connection?

Maybe the horrible celebrity environment we live in has just permeated every last fold of my brain. There’s something about the Colonel Parker aspect of Mr. X, and the road show, freak show aspect of the story.

Well, it’s interesting you would say that, especially given the fact that Cube-E, you know, The King & Eye, with Elvis and the obvious Colonel Parker connection, and then Freak Show were the next few things that came after that.

Right. Elvis is a thread, in a way.

In a way, yeah. The Residents—well, they’ve always found connections in, shall we say, unpredictable ways. 

One of the things that’s interesting about seeing what the Residents are gonna do at MoMA is, with this piece, the lyrics carry so much of the story, it seems like there would be a lot of really interesting staging decisions. At some places what’s happening in the lyrics is really explicit, and in other places, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on in the story. Can you tell me about the staging?

In the same way that the original piece is really a monologue set to music, the staging will be similar, but there will be other performers. The primary additional performer will be a shadow Mr. X, who will be a dancer that, at times, will be like a kind of a doppelgänger, in a way, echoing Mr. X. And then, other times, there will be three projections in the performance. One will be the primary projection which will go all the way across the back of the stage. But then there will be another narrow vertical screen that will kind of come up and down, and it will bisect that larger screen. And then there will be a third screen that the shadow Mr. X will carry, at times, and then there will be another performer holding a hand-held projector, in order to project upon the hand-held screen. So that’s the basic setup, from a performance point of view. And then, of course, all the music will be live.

Staging Mr. X with a double: I can’t help but make the connection with the songs that inspired the album: “Double Shot,” which is two, and “Holy, Holy, Holy,” which is about the Trinity. And that’s kind of what the story is about, right?

Right, exactly. Yeah. But, you know, the Residents kind of love dualities, and you see dualities reoccuring throughout their pieces all the time. The twins are a certain duality, and Mr. X and the shadow Mr. X become another duality, and there’s probably other ones in the same piece, too. It all kinda fits in with the Residents’ world.
 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.06.2019
12:22 pm
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David Bowie and the making of ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’

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The director Nicolas Roeg wanted to cast David Bowie as the lead in his next film The Man Who Fell to Earth—the story of humanoid alien called Thomas Jerome Newton, who comes to this world in search of water. A copy of the script was sent to the singer and a meeting arranged. Roeg arrived at a recording studio in New York where Bowie was working on his next album. “David will be finished by ten, so if you come round about nine-thirty….” Roeg wanted to cast Bowie after seeing him in the BBC Arena documentary Cracked Actor. There was something ethereal about him, something alien, he seemed isolated in the world around him, traveling in a limo, drinking milk from a carton, watching the world go by. As Roeg later said:

“[Bowie’s} actual social behaviour was extraordinary—he hardly mixed with anyone at all. He seemed to be alone—which is what Newton is in the film—isolated and alone.”

Roeg waited, drank a couple of Martinis, met some exotic people, and wondered what was going on? Ten o’clock. No Bowie. Another call came through: “David will be finished by eleven.” Half-past eleven, no Bowie. Twelve, no Bowie. “He’ll be with you by two.” Five in the morning Bowie arrived. He was pale thin strange looking. Roeg started talking to him about the film. Did he want to do it? What did he think about the script? What about that scene where…? Bowie seemed keen, agreed with most of Roeg’s points, but was also nervous. He said he would do the film, yes, he’d be there. But he seemed more in a hurry to get Roeg out of the studio. Bowie was worried that if the director asked any more questions he would get wise to the fact he hadn’t as yet read the script.

Bowie was writing his own film scripts. He moved to L.A. with some vague idea of getting into movies. “Me and rock-and-roll have parted company,” he told Tina Brown from the Sunday Times.

“Don’t worry, I’ll still make albums with love and with fun, but my effect is finished. I’m very pleased. I think I’ve caused quite enough rumpus for someone who’s not even convinced he’s a good musician. Now I’m going to be a film director.

“I’ve always been a screen writer, my songs have just been practice for scripts.”

Bowie read the script and watched one of Roeg’s previous films Walkabout—a movie based on a fourteen page screenplay by playwright Edward Bond. He liked both and signed-up to play Newton.

Filming took place over eleven weeks in New Mexico starting in July 1975. According to Bowie, he was “blasted” off his tits on cocaine, snorting ten grams a day. This runs counter to what his co-star Candy Clark claimed. She said Bowie gave a vow to Roeg he would take “no drugs.” Bowie was focussed, on the mark, and “luminescent.” Though Bowie later fessed up:

“I just learned the lines for that day and did them the way I was feeling. It wasn’t that far off. I actually was feeling as alienated as that character was. It was a pretty natural performance—a good exhibition of somebody literally falling apart in front of you. I was totally insecure with about ten grams a day in me. I was stoned out of my mind from beginning to end.”

Whatever the truth, Bowie gave (arguably) his best performance. Bowie liked Roeg, they got on well together, with the singer desperate to please the director. The New York Times noted:

Mr. Roeg has chosen the garish, translucent, androgynous‐mannered rock‐star, David Bowie, for his space visitor. The choice is inspired. Mr. Bowie gives an extraordinary performance. The details, the chemistry of this tall pale figure with black‐rimmed eyes are clearly not human. Yet he acquires a moving, tragic force as the stranger caught and destroyed in a strange land.

When Roeg delivered the finished film to Paramount, the studio refused to pay for it, saying it was not the movie they had agreed upon. It was eventually distributed by British Lion Films. Critical reception was mixed. Some thought it “preposterous and posturing” (Roger Ebert), others (Richard Eder) thought it “absorbing” and “beautiful.” From its initial release, The Man Who Fell to Earth gained a cult status, and a fanbase that has grown to the point where the movie is now considered one of Roeg’s and Bowie’s best work.

In February 1976, Films and Filming magazine gave a sneak preview of Roeg’s latest “masterpiece,” which was followed by a four star (“not to be missed”) review in the May issue from that year.
 
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More pages of Bowie and ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth,’ after the jump….
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.17.2019
08:09 am
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‘Qaeda, Quality, Question, Quickly, Quickly, Quiet’: Learning the alphabet with George W. Bush
01.03.2019
08:33 am
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I remember watching George W. Bush deliver the State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, on the TV of a tiny barroom in the East Bay. No cocktail was strong enough. This was the speech that denounced the “axis of evil,” a coinage of Bush speechwriter David Frum, who has lately been rehabilitated as a true friend of democracy and stalwart defender of the realm. Perhaps when the professional eulogists are finished carving the likenesses of Poppy and W. into Mount Rushmore, they can squeeze in this august son of Canada, who believes the problem with the Iraq War was the people of Iraq.

With every patriot face now awash in tears for these old-fashioned Republicans, the kind who could, when the occasion demanded it, speak in complete sentences, let us remember “Qaeda, Quality, Question, Quickly, Quickly, Quiet,” the artist Lenka Clayton‘s alphabetized cut of the address, which blasted those sentences to rubble and sifted the bits. Marc Campbell posted this vid on DM many moons ago, but it’s worth revisiting now. On one hand, it is a cognition-destroying mindhammer that smashes illusions about the stimulus-response theory of government. On the other, even alphabetically reordered and condensed to 18 minutes, W.‘s oratory sounds like Pericles next to the barnyard squawks and grunts that will comprise the phonemic index of the 2019 State of the Union address, which I understand will be subtitled “A Case Study in Lycanthropy.”
 

Detail from the soundtrack LP cover

If you like the movie, you’ll love the soundtrack LP (side one: “A - My,” side two: “Nation - Zero”) and accompanying flip-book.
 

via Reddit

Posted by Oliver Hall
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01.03.2019
08:33 am
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David Cronenberg on Andy Warhol
09.20.2018
05:49 am
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The soundtrack CD from the Art Gallery of Ontario show
 
In between A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg curated a Warhol retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario. ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962–1964, a selection of work from Warhol’s first years at the Factory, also appeared at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, but the AGO show was special in at least two respects.

Only the Toronto iteration of the show presented Warhol’s death and celebrity paintings alongside his early films. For instance, Cronenberg set Silver Disaster #6, Warhol’s silkscreened image of two electric chairs, in the middle of a triptych, looping the movies Kiss and Blow Job on either side. The director also recorded a soundtrack for the exhibition which he narrated himself, splicing in contributions from Dennis Hopper, Amy Taubin, James Rosenquist, and Mary-Lou Green. In a masterstroke, Cronenberg included Elvis’ recording of the title song from Flaming Star on the soundtrack; as he pointed out at the time, the Don Siegel movie that was the source for Warhol’s Elvis I and II is “about racism, and everyone dies in it, including Elvis.”

Recall that the brilliant explosion characteristic of a supernova is the moment of a star’s death. With its Ballardian preoccupations, the show might as well have been called Death Drive. Fittingly, the Guardian marked the fifth anniversary of 9/11 by running an interview with Cronenberg about his contribution to ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA.
 

David Cronenberg at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2006 (via Seems Artless)
 
The show also provided an occasion for Cronenberg to reflect on the New York underground scene that inspired him as a young filmmaker. He told a wonderful story about Stan Brakhage’s first encounter with Warhol’s movies during a Q&A at the museum:

Stan Brakhage, who was a very hardcore—I think he just died recently, didn’t he—just very hardcore art-art-art-film maker, with work in Super 8 and 16 mm and ultimately in video, but very, very obscure, difficult, you know, not very well known except in his own circle. Andy really knew everything that was going on in New York. He knew the underground, he knew the music, and he produced the Velvet Underground’s first album, I mean, he was into everything. He knew what was going on with underground filmmakers at [Jonas Mekas’] Co-op, and at one point, once he had made a few films, Jonas Mekas told Stan Brakhage he must see this work of Andy Warhol’s.

So he watched about 16 hours of Andy’s stuff, and he came out, and he said, “This is trash! This is ridiculous, this is ludicrous, it’s nothing. I mean, it’s absolutely nothing, it’s bullshit.”

And then Mekas said, “Did you watch it at 24 frames a second?”

And he said, “Yeah.”

He said, “Stan, I want you to go back and watch it at 16 frames.” Which, of course, makes it longer. “Because if you’ve only seen it at 24, you haven’t really seen it.”

Being the hardcore guy that he was, he went back, and he sat there for, you know, 20 hours, came out, he said: “He’s a genius.” True story.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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09.20.2018
05:49 am
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Meet ‘Reluctant Hamsters’ & ‘Pork Wallets’ in the hilarious ‘70s Adult Titles’ Twitter feed
07.30.2018
07:50 am
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For a couple of years now, a Twitter account dedicated to unappetizing stills from cookbooks dating from my childhood has ranked as one of my favorites—I refer of course to 70s Dinner Party.

This may have been inevitable but that account has recently been one-upped by a new arrival, the hilarious and eternally puzzling account 70s Adult Titles.

According to the account’s mission statement, the images, which consist entirely of screenshots from the covers of decades-old porn magazines, are
 

the mostly safe-for-work and sometimes surreal titles of stories and photosets in hardcore porn magazines of the 1970s & 80s.

 
Well….. SFW, maybe in a technical sense; still, a large image trumpeting “Boulevard St. Fuck” might not necessarily be appropriate cubicle décor in every setting.

I reached out to the “70s Adult Titles” guy, who declined to offer his real name but goes by the porny sobriquet “Dick Hardman.” Saying that he was currently based “somewhere in Europe,” he divulged that approximately the same is true of these magazine covers, which come from publications featuring interior text in “English, French and German.” 

Hardman wittily touts his account as fodder for lovers of typography; it’s certainly true that there’s much to like about the use of fonts here. After I noted that the “Barking Up the Wrong Twat” image must have come from the same imprint as “Reluctant Hamster,” Hardman revealed that “it looks like the same typefaces were used in rotation over several publications (which were probably all owned by the same publisher).”

The insouciance of these bizarre snippets of text are a sign of a more innocent time when widespread porn was first gaining a foothold in Western culture. “Anything was possible back then,” says Hardman. “Sexual liberation quickly took a depraved nosedive.”

Enjoy these ridiculous images and subscribe to 70s Adult Titles on Twitter for more of the same.
 

 
More delightful images after the jump…...
 

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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07.30.2018
07:50 am
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‘How the World Went Mad’: A diagnosis of the confusing, topsy-turvy world of President Donald Trump

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I could start with a nod to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis by writing:

“Rupert Russell awoke one morning from unsettling dreams to find the world had gone mad.”

But that isn’t quite right and doesn’t fully describe the situation that filmmaker Russell found himself when he awoke on the morning of November 9th, 2016, to the news that Donald Trump had been elected the 45th President of the United States of America. Russell described it better himself:

“I felt a sense of unreality. That I had woken up on a different planet than the one I had gone to bed on.”

Seemingly, the world had had gone mad overnight. But how had this happened? And what had caused this strange insanity?

Russell wanted to understand what the fuck had just happened. He also wanted to do something about this new topsy-turvy world, where the lunatics had taken over the asylum. He was finishing work on his documentary feature Freedom for the Wolf. Nick Fraser, the editor of BBC’s Storyville, had come onboard as executive producer. Fraser had also just launched a new venture, Docsville, and asked Russell if he would like to make some short films for this new platform.

On the day after the election, Russell had written a Medium post on being sane in insane places inspired by the work of David Rosenhan, in particular his famous experiment in which he entered an asylum claiming he heard voices. The doctors and nurses had diagnosed Rosenhan as insane, however, the patients quickly realized that Rosenhan was actually faking it.

Russell also “sketched out two more essays on madness under the new regime of (in)sanity”. He sent these along to Fraser as a possible idea for a series of animations called How the World Went Mad which would diagnose Trump’s election as a form of madness and offer up a possible cure. Fraser told Russell to go for it.
 
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The end result was a series of five short films explaining How the World Went Mad by which Russell asked the very pertinent question:

In a world gone mad who can you trust?

Beginning on that fateful morning in Fall 2016, Russell takes the viewer through a brief history of psychiatry, culture, and politics to explain how we have all ended up here. I contacted Russell to ask him about the making How the World Went Mad and what he hoped his diagnosis of our current malady would achieve.

How did you go about making ‘How the World Went Mad’?

Rupert Russell: I spent a month in the British Library going through histories and psychologies of madness. I picked out studies that could be linked together to form a narrative arc of the series: diagnosis, symptoms, transmission, epidemic, and cure. I turned the notes into scripts, recorded them, and sent the files to Dare Studio in Poland, who had worked on my last feature, who got to work on the animation. The rest is archival footage, which I trawled through.

The most arduous of which was finding out who the infamous “fat guy” that Trump tormented in The Apprentice was. When we locked picture, Alex Williamson composed a wonderfully off-kilter score and three sound designers at Unit Post created a soundscape of insanity filled with screams, explosions, and even orgasms.

The polemic for your films rests on the idea Trump is mad—what happens if he is not mad?

RR: The source of my anxiety, as I describe in Episode 1, “Diagnosis,” is precisely this question: What if Trump is the new definition of sanity and it is I who am in fact mad. The line between sanity and insanity has been a skipping rope throughout history, pulling people in and out of it. Gays, lesbians, and women have only recently escaped their 19th-century diagnosis as perverts and hysterics. The Trump/Pence victory signalled another swing of the rope. In their Handmaid’s Tale morality, these gender traitors deserve no voice in the patriarch’s definition of sanity—where only the male “commanders” are capable of rational judgements.

The insanity of this position should be self-evident. But too increasingly, it’s becoming the new definition of sanity. We are living through another reaction to social progress that has resurrected the same tropes and characters of the feminist backlash in the 1980s, which inspired Atwood’s original novel.

More diagnosis of ‘How the World Went Mad,’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.18.2018
10:02 am
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Punk mystery solved: the face in the Discharge logo is Mark Stewart of the Pop Group
06.07.2018
06:51 am
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One item you might have missed in the neverending news tsunami of the past couple years: the quadrisected, photocopied face in the Discharge logo belongs to the great singer Mark Stewart.

That’s him staring back at you (or so it seems; I always assumed Discharge guy’s eyes were open but hidden by shadows, not closed as Stewart’s are) on the reverse of Discharge’s first seven-inches, “Realities of War,” “Fight Back” and “Decontrol,” not to mention all those T-shirts, back patches and leather jackets. The image comes from the print ad for the Pop Group’s debut single, “She Is Beyond Good And Evil” b/w “3’38,” released in 1979, when Stewart was still a teenager.


The ad for the Pop Group’s first single in the March 31, 1979 issue of NME (via Beat Chapter)


The back cover of Discharge’s first release, ‘Realities of War’ (‘thanks to no fucker’)

The Pop Group posted one Randulf Stiglitz’s astonished discovery of the Discharge logo’s identity on Facebook last year. I assumed it would pass immediately therefrom into the common fund of human wisdom, so I did not write about it at the time. As it happened, everyone was distracted by alarming signs of the human species’ descent into barbarism, with the result that news algorithms—today’s cigar-chomping J. Jonah Jamesons—buried this fun fact on the last page of the internet. So enjoy it again, for the first time!
 

 
After the jump, video clips of Discharge and the Pop Group…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.07.2018
06:51 am
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New book collects every issue of the Crass zine ‘International Anthem’


The ‘domestic violence issue’ of International Anthem, 1979
 
This deserves more press than it’s received: a new book collects every issue of International Anthem: A Nihilist Newspaper for the Living, including two never before published. The volume is an official product of “the publishing wing of Crass and beyond,” the venerable Exitstencil Press.

International Anthem was Gee Vaucher’s newspaper, but denying its connection to the band would be a challenge. Its 1978-‘83 run coincided, roughly, with Crass’s (as opposed to, say, Exit‘s), and the Crass logo sometimes appeared on the paper’s cover (see above). Eve Libertine, $ri Hari Nana B.A., Penny Rimbaud, G. Sus (aka Gee Vaucher) and Dave King contributed to its pages.
 

Gee Vaucher collage from International Anthem #2 (via ArtRabbit)
 
The book contains scans of the originals (“bad printing, creases, mistakes and all”), reproduced at full size. If it is good to buy quality art books, it is better to buy them directly from the artist. Buddhists call it “accumulating merit,” and they say you want to do a lot of it in this life, so you don’t have to come back as Eric Trump. Below, consume two hours of Crass programming broadcast on Australia’s JJJ Radio in 1987, featuring some Crass texts read in Australian accents and contemporary interviews with Gee and Penny at Dial House.

Help Gee Vaucher collect 20 million hand-drawn stick figures for her World War I project.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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05.17.2018
08:47 am
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