The kids are all right.
The Prime Minister, however, appears to be a lil’ defensive today!
Both via The Telegraph’s live blog coverage of the today’s strike in the UK.
This surprisingly good documentary includes interviews with people who know what they’re talking about. Unexploitive and free of the usual finger wagging.
“One of them (The Sex Pistols) had to be a casualty to make the myth work, and Sid was only too willing to do it.” Steve Severin (Siouxsie And The Banshees).
Sid’s short and controversial life with The Sex Pistols and Nancy Spungen is profiled with new interviews from Jah Wobble, Steve Severin, Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McClaren, Dave Vanian, Rat Scabies, Marco Pironi, Viv Albertine, and many others who actually knew Sid.
Seeing a very fucked-up Sid performing onstage at Max’s with Jerry Nolan and his band The Idols (Jerry was a friend of mine and another dope casualty) was one of the saddest spectacles I’ve ever had the displeasure of witnessing. A train wreck in slooooow motion.
The last few gigs that Sid played at Max’s before his death (and Nancy’s) had become freak shows drawing crowds of curious bridge and tunnel punks to watch the ex-Pistol crash and burn right in front of their eyes. Something to share with your grandchildren as you tug your beard and run your fingers through your thinning gray Mohawk.
The new video for Miley Cyrus’s “Liberty Walk” single goes out in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement with clips of protests from all over the world. A caption at the beginning reads “This is dedicated to the thousands of people who are standing up for what they believe in…”
Predictably there have been hilarious comments left all over the Internet, both pro and con. Me, I’m all for a pop video that introduces 11-year-old girls to the evils of capitalism and the concept of mass civil disobedience. In fact, I think it’s fucking great!
If Fox News isn’t already feigning outrage about this video, surely they will be soon!
Photo: Philippe Taris.
Immortal and unstoppable. Next month will mark Patti Smith’s 65th birthday. Rock and roll is the fountain of youth. Back to back Patti posts on DM (scroll down) should make the case for that. The Patti Smith Group performing in 1977 and 34 years later shows none of their power, energy and relevancy diminished. May we all be as vital and commanding as this fucking band.
The Patti Smith Group at the Olympia in Paris last week was by all accounts in the French press absolutely stunning. This fan video seems to confirm there was some serious magic in the air.
Punk rock fucking lives!
More power and glory after the jump…
Patti Smith with neck brace. Photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe.
I remember seeing Patti Smith’s first performance on The Mike Douglas Show in 1977 and thinking how unexpectedly cool that show was. Just imagine how dumbstruck daytime TV viewers must have been seeing The Patti Smith Group popping up between episodes of As The World Turns and re-runs of Dobie Gillis. Hell, I was even blown away!
I actually had to go to a friend’s house to watch Patti on the Douglas show because I didn’t own a TV set. It was the first time I saw her perform live and it confirmed everything I imagined The Patti Smith Group would be: wild, inspired, unadulterated rock n’ roll. And part of what made this particular performance so bona fide is Patti and the band didn’t condescend to or mock the daytime TV format they were operating in. They put their hearts into it. Every fucking show mattered to them, whether it was sandwiched between soap operas or on the stage of legendary Manhattan punk clubs. Patti was a punk without the wiseass, holier-than-thou bullshit. She wanted to spread the rock gospel throughout the nation, from the Bowery to double-wides in middle America. Everybody was invited to the party.
The first half of the video was shot on December 7, 1976 and broadcast on January 19, 1977. The second half, with Patti in a neck brace, was aired on Apr 19, 1977. It was her first live appearance after falling 15 feet off a stage and breaking several neck vertebrae in Tampa Florida on January 23, 1977.
Thanks to Jim Laspesa at Bubbling Over who continues to unearth gems from his impressive video archive.
Ask The Angels, Free Money, I Was Working Real Hard and Keith Richards Blues.
When some magicians die, they vanish—their work done, their infernal ceremonies finished, their fire extinguished—leaving no traces behind. This was almost the case with self-styled high priest of rock magick, Geoffrey Crozier. Almost, I say, because some extraordinary documents of his short, turbulent time on this planet still remain. Dangerous Minds pal Otto von Ruggins is allowing us to showcase some of this rare and previously unseen material. If you are into vintage garage and punk rock insanity—like the MC5, New York Dolls or Alice Cooper, you know, the transgressively transcendent stuff that Julian Cope or Thurston Moore like—in all its mutant glory, then this post is for you.
Geoffrey Crozier was an enigmatic magician/rock performer from Australia who was a legend amongst New York City’s underground rock cognoscenti circa 1975-78. Crozier was the lead singer—you could also say lead shaman—of a rock group called Kongress whose other members at that time included pith helmet-wearing synth player Otto von Ruggins and nutzoid space rock No Wave madman VON LMO who beat the drums savagely, often with chains.
In the pages of The Village Voice, James Wolcott described a Kongress gig like so:
“A rowdy bottle smashing night…earlier in the evening there had been an altercation with a satanic occult band named Kongress that played music that sounded like a Concorde drone with Aleister Crowley lyrics. They abandoned the stage only after threats of violence were unfurled like vampirish cape flourishes.”
More Kongress after the jump, including insane live footage from Max’s Kansas City, Halloween of 1976 and 1977!
.
UK Uncut describe themselves as “a grassroots anti-austerity network”. In the footnotes to this video, this is how UK Uncut they describe the boss of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs:
Dave Hartnett, head of HMRC, has spent the last few years shaking hands on sweetheart deals with multinational corporations. Vodafone were let off upwards of £6bn in tax, Goldman Sachs were let off over £10m in tax. By pure chance, Dave Hartnett also happens to be Whitehall’s most wined and dined civil servant, accepting expensive dinners and drinks from companies such as KPMG, Ernst and Young, PWC and, of course, Goldman Sachs.
On 9th November Dave Hartnett was delivering the keynote speech at the Corporate Tax Conference, the biggest annual gathering of everyone who’s anyone in corporate tax. Some UK Uncut activists dressed up as Vodafone and Goldman Sachs execs and surprised Dave to say a huge thank you for his kind favours.
Here’s what happened when they met:
For more info on UK Uncut, visit their website
Jeff Salen of Tuff Darts and Talking Heads’ David Byrne at CBGB, 1976. Photo: Robert Spencer.
It has been said that when a city is in decline the arts flourish. I don’t know who said it or when it was said or if anyone actually said it at all. It’s one of those things that sounds true and feels true and when I say it people tend to agree, whether it’s true or not. It certainly seemed true when I arrived with my band in New York City in 1977 to play a Monday night gig at CBGB.
Crawling out of an Econoline van into the humidly dense New York night and having a fistful of Bowery cesspool stench sucker punch me was like being greeted by a Welcome Wagon full of decaying dog dicks. I liked it. I took in a lungful of the jaundiced air and knew immediately that my Muse was there somewhere…stuck like a moth in the viscous Manhattan murk.
The asshole smell of downtown NYC was exactly the kind of reality check I needed after spending six years languishing at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado. I had arrived in 1970s Manhattan ready to have my world dismembered like a frog in anatomy class. I offered my neck to the city’s rusty scalpel with only a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a bindle of blow to deaden the pain. 25 years later, I came out of surgery a changed man. And I have the scars to prove it. Lovely scars that you can count to determine my age.
In the first few years of living in NYC, I spent most my nights hanging at Max’s, CBGB, Danceteria, The Peppermint Lounge, The Mudd Club, Hurrah’s and countless other clubs soaking in the glorious sounds of local bands like The Patti Smith Group, The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Suicide, Tuff Darts, Mink DeVille, The Contortions, Steel Tips, The Dictators, The Mumps… many of whom were gaining international reputations for rescuing rock and roll from the corporate death grip of a dying music industry and from its own artistic stagnation. This was not a commercial strategy, it was something closer to a collective religious epiphany. Poets, painters and philosophers were adding guitars and amplifiers to their arsenals of typewriters, journals and canvas to further expand their medium of self-expression and resurrect a pop culture that had shot its wad at the tail end of the Sixties.
While my main interest was with what was happening in the punk clubs, there were major musical tremors snaking throughout Manhattan,The Bronx and Spanish Harlem. Jazz, rap, disco and Latin music were all drawing from some deep well of inspiration in a city that, on the surface, seemed to be collapsing in on itself. The economy, infrastructure and racial division were crushing Gotham like Godzilla-sized pigeons with restless leg syndrome.
Darkness breeds light and pockets of artists, of every color and cultural background, were conjuring all kinds of magic. And the magic was converging and intermingling in a melting pot, a Hessian crucible, in which alchemical beats, rhythms and song were being transmuted into healing vibrations balancing Gotham’s gloomy Kali Yuga yang into Shakti-powered yin transforming the tortured cries of the city into ecstatic utterance you could dance to, fuck to and get high to. Music was the wave that kept the city from tanking. As the garbage piled up on the streets and triumphant rats were raising flags on mounds of rotting debris like rodent versions of the Marines ascending Iwo Jima, glittering disco balls gaily revolved like tin foil prayer wheels in Studio 54 and downtown The Ramones were generating more energy on the Bowery than Con Edison and the psychotic barker from the Crazy Eddie commercials combined. Music provided the make-up, the blush and mascara that gave New York City the appearance of still being alive.
Will Hermes’ exhilarating new book Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years In New York That Changed Music Forever captures the energy and excitement of New York’s music scene from 1973 to 1978 in all its multitudinous forms. It is richly detailed, never dull, and exhaustively researched. I came to the book knowing most of what there is to know about Manhattan’s punk scene and as someone who was there at the time was pleased to see that Hermes (who was also there) manages to make it all come alive again. This is not a dull slog through familiar turf. Herme’s prose pulses with a rock and roll heart. He loves what he’s writing about. And he’s writing about much more than just what falls within my frame of reference. He sees and connects dots between various scenes creating a kind of musical mandala. From the lofts of downtown avant-garde jazz composers like Philip Glass to the South Bronx and the roots of rap with Kool Herc to disco’s inception spun off the turntables of Nicky Siano to The Fania All-Stars’ explosive sets at the Cheetah Club, Hermes is like a human Google map, giving us the God’s eye view and zooming in right down to the graffiti in the bathroom.
Today, things seems as bleak as they did in New York City during the 1970s. There’s a sense of hopelessness, a sense that things are getting out of control. But underneath the despair there is a subway-like rumbling, a rhythm, a beat, a sensation that something is moving and about to surface and it could be a train entering the station or it could be something like music, something pulling us all together in a movement that thrusts forward into the future and will not be denied. I’ve seen what the power of music can do. I saw it in the Sixties and I saw it again in the Seventies. And right now my eyes are wide open and ready to see it again.
Love Goes To Buildings On Fire is that fine kind of book that takes you backwards and forward at the same time. Will Hermes reminds us that music matters and every revolution, every movement, every cultural and political upheaval, creates its own soundtrack. What will ours be this time around?
Here’s a video mix inspired by Will’s book which includes some seminal songs that came out of New York City in the 1970s.
1. “Jet Boy” - The New York Dolls 2. “Piss Factory” - Patti Smith 3. “X-Offender” Blondie 4. “Born To Lose” - The Heartbreakers 5. “SuperRappin’” - Grandmaster Flash 6. “Darrio” - Kid Creole 7. “The Mexican” - Babe Ruth 8. “Pop Your Funk” - Arthur Russell
Jesse LaGreca, the articulate young man who effectively “schooled” Fox News creep Griff Jenkins in an amusing encounter that has become one of the defining “viral videos” of the Occupy Wall Street movement so far, has been with the encampment for two months. Speaking for himself, but on behalf of the movement, LeGrecca summarized what the movement is seeking, on his Ministry of Truth blog at Daily Kos.
I think this is a pretty good to-do list for the progressive movement in this country, and as LaGreca correctly points out: We know the Republicans are our enemies, but with friends like the Democrats… I mean, come the fuck on, it’s time to get real!. The Dems are in a rough spot: They have to decide which side they’re on and if they can’t decide, it will be decided for them.
Are millionaire Deomcrats in the House and Senate going to vote against their own interests and the people whose money got them elected in the first place? You’re dreaming if you think that.
I keep hearing from people that Occupy Wall Street protests don’t have a clear message, so here is a short rundown of the “message” as far as I have seen.
It is time to TAX THE RICH
It is time to END THE WARS
It is time to restore Glass-Steagall
It is time to repeal Citizens United
It is time to get the money OUT OF POLITICS
It is time to invest in infrastructure and education
It is time to STOP busting labor unions, whether private or public
It is time to defend Medicare and Social Security tooth and nail from phony reforms or baloney cuts
It is time to STOP the spending cuts and start investing in America, and if we have to raise taxes on the rich and corporations in order to force them to invest in America, then so be it.
It is time to STOP the racist and discriminatory practice of “Stop and Frisk” and other tactics of racial profiling
It is time for civil rights for ALL, and that means equal rights for LGBT Americans to serve our military and marry whom ever they will
It is time for ACCOUNTABILITY for the men who lied us into war and crashed our economy
It is time for immigration reform that does not punish workers, but provides a clear pathway to citizenship for everyone
It is time for investigations that lead to prosecutions on Wall Street in response to the crimes that have been committed in the last decade.
It is time for a serious discussion about the Federal Reserve and it’s role in this economic disaster
It is time for universal health care that everyone can afford. It is time to talk about Single Payer Health Care.
It is time for alternative green energy instead of Oil and Coal.
It is time to protect our civil liberties and our constitution.
It is time for a discussion about free trade and how it has undermined the working class while enriching only the wealthiest among us.
It is time to end corporate personhood.
There are sooooo many things that need to be fixed, reformed and addressed, and this short list does not do justice to the many grievances that the 99% have, but we must accept the fact that the GOP only serves the rich and the Dem Establishment only serves to cave to the GOP. They are NOT going to help us. We are going to have to do this ourselves.
It is time to have the BIG conversation about what kind of country we want America to be, and the lobbyists and corrupt career politicians and the corrupt corporate media are NOT going to hijack our conversation. Do we want America to be a nation where 1 out of 5 children live in poverty while the wealthiest among us get ever more wealthy and more powerful? Do we want to live in a nation with crumbling infrastructure that can only reward the rich with ever decreasing tax rates while our schools go unfunded? Do we want to live in a country that can always fund these never ending wars but must cut spending on everything else?
Hear, hear!
It’s time to forget about the park, that’s over and it’s probably a good thing that it is. There’s work to be done this winter. It was never about sleeping in a park in lower Manhattan in sub-zero weather in the first place.
After today, the movement needs to figure out what it’s going to do next. Phase one has been a rousing, inspiring success. Bring on Phase two!
Read the rest of Welcome to PHASE 2 of Occupy Wall Street, now here is a message (Daily Kos).
Jello Biafra throbblehead just in time for the Holiday Season.
This figure capturing his look from the 80s is limited to 1000 numbered units, stands at 7 inches tall, and is made of super strong polyresin.
Jello is accurately sculpted right down to the piercing glare, star belt buckle and Alternative Tentacles tee.
A little bobbing Dead Kennedy can be yours for only $19.95. Pre-order at Aggronautix