FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
The Clash meet Futura 2000 and a riot they didn’t own
12.25.2010
04:12 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
The Clash, Futura 2000, Fab 5 Freddy and Dondi White recording The Escapades at Electric Lady Studio. Photo by Bob Gruen.

New York City graffiti legend Futura 2000 is one of the immortals, a spray can slinging Jesse James. Starting out in the 70s thru the 80s and beyond, Futura’s subway and wall murals are distinctive for their tight clean lines and wild but precise abstract lettering. They jumped out with a stunning clarity. He and Dondi White were the kings of Krylon.

When The Clash arrived in New York in 1981 to do their series of gigs at Bonds, they embraced the hip hop scene much in the same way they had absorbed reggae into their music. Joe, Mick, Paul and Topper hooked up with some of the major forces in rap and graffiti, including Futura. At the time Mr. 2000 knew nothing about The Clash but accepted their invitation to join them on stage and paint graffiti backdrops as the band played. He eventually joined them on tour.

During their 2 1/2 week residency at Bonds, The Clash took some time off to go into Electric Lady Studio with Futura, Fab Five Freddy and Dondi. As The Clash layed down rhythm tracks for “The Escapades of Futura 2000,” Fab, Dondi and Strummer sang background while Futura did his best to compress the history of graffiti into a 6 minute rap. His rapping skills leave alot to be desired; off the rhythm and with lyrics that are rudimentary at best. However, his mission statement and celebration of street art makes up in solidarity what it lacks in dexterity. “Escapades Of Futura 2000”  may not endure as a rap classic, but it was one vital element in the hybridization of punk and Black street culture. White/Black, we were all living in the ghetto, whether it be a council flat, the Lower East Side or the South Bronx. We were united by poverty, anger, music and art and looking for a riot of our own.

The coming together of the uptown rap scene with the downtown punks was the beginning of a melding of musical movements that had previously just observed each other from a distance. Uptown and downtown innovators started collaborating in New York and on an international scale. Bands like The Beastie Boys, Gang Of Four, Rip Rig Panic, The Slits, Bush Tetras, Liquid Liquid and PIL fell under the influence of dub, reggae, funk and disco. Even college kids like Talking Heads got into the action. Suddenly The Clash were being played in the discos and white hipsters were dancing to Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa at the Mudd Club.

The quintessential and most seamless marriage of punk to reggae and funk to hardcore was by a former jazz band from Washington D.C.: Bad Brains. The Damned had turned The Clash onto the Brains and were invited by the band to be an opening act at Bonds. The Clash/Bad Brains double bill was one of those seminal moments when the music really came together, in theory and action, and for those in the audience who were open to it (sadly, not many were) there was the realization that punk was more than a fashion statement or hip stance. It was part of a struggle that reached way beyond white suburbia or the enclaves of pale-skinned rock and rollers in Alphabet City. The White Riot was Black as well. And the beat was everything, the common ground, the heart. And it belonged to everyone. A riot of your own might give you a momentary sense of empowerment, but it won’t win the big battles.  When punk met rap, the seeds of a cultural revolution began. We just didn’t follow through. As the 80s and 90s rolled around, music became commodified once again along racial lines, urban or classic, hip hop or punk, rap or hardcore. And New York City has never been as musically segregated as it is today.

Here’s a video mashup of “Escapades Of Futura 2000” with excerpts from Manfred Kirchheimer’s Stations Of The Elevated. The Clash are rocking it as Futura invokes the gods of Rustoleum in his mission to change the world.
 

 
Futura 2000 art after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
|
12.25.2010
04:12 am
|
Bad Santa: Rare art by Warhol and Lichtenstein stolen from Greenwich Village Apartment
12.25.2010
02:30 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Christmas Eve bummer. It wasn’t Bad Santa that came down the chimney. It was art thieves burrowing through the walls of a Greenwich Village apartment. Prints by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were among the valuable pieces stolen.

The New York Times reports:

On Thursday night, the NYPD was in Greenwich Village investigating a major art heist. They said works by Andy Warhol and other famous names, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, were stolen from an apartment near 9th Avenue, reports CBS 2’s Dave Carlin.

Police said creepy is the right way to describe the art thieves who ransacked a home in a swanky section of the West Village. Investigators said while the owners were out of town during the final week of November, the burglars carved their way into an apartment from an adjacent hallway. They eventually came upon an art collection worth close to $1 million. Once the opening in the wall was large enough for crooks to gain entry, the crafty criminals looted luxury items.

Clearly rare prints of several important works of art by modern masters including Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were what they were looking for. “Those kinds of thieves are going to go for that kind of merchandise,” West Village resident Mitch Ely said. “The people who are going to go for this are going to have a clientele that is going to buy it.”

Police said the burglars must have known they’d be on film because they also stole a video recorder attached to surveillance cameras.”

Via NYT

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
12.25.2010
02:30 am
|
George Orwell’s recipe for Christmas pudding
12.24.2010
07:18 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
In 1946 George Orwell was commissioned by the British Council to write about food in Britain. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Britain was in the middle of a period of severe food rationing and Orwell’s manuscript, “British Cookery,” was seen as being a celebration of culinary extravagance at a time of enforced austerity. It was never published.

In this excerpt from “British Cookery,” Orwell shares a recipe for Christmas pudding. Suet is a critical ingredient in this particular pudding and there’s really no substitute for it. Butter or lard just won’t do. Unfortunately, obtaining suet may be difficult in your neighborhood. You can find it at some butcher shops. Good luck.

In the second half of the midday meal we come upon one of the greatest glories of British cookery—its puddings. The number of these is so enormous that it would be impossible to give an exhaustive list, but, putting aside stewed fruits, British puddings can be classified under three main heads: suet puddings, pies and tarts, and milk puddings.

Suet crust, which appears in innumerable combinations, and enters into savoury dishes as well as sweet ones, is simply ordinary pastry crust with chopped beef suet substituted for the butter or lard. It can be baked, but more often is boiled in a cloth or steamed in a basin covered with a cloth. Far and away the best of all the suet puddings is plum pudding, which is an extremely rich, elaborate and expensive dish, and is eaten by everyone in Britain at Christmas time, though not often at other times of the year. In simpler kinds of pudding the suet crust is sweetened with sugar and stuck full of figs, dates, currants or raisins, or it is flavoured with ginger or orange marmalade, or it is used as a casing for stewed apples or gooseberries, or it is rolled round successive layers of jam into a cylindrical shape which is called roly-poly pudding, or it is eaten in plain slices with treacle poured over it. One of the best forms of suet pudding is the boiled apple dumpling. The core is removed from a large apple, the cavity is filled up with brown sugar, and the apple is covered all over with a thin layer of suet crust, tied tightly into a cloth, and boiled.”

Recipe after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
|
12.24.2010
07:18 pm
|
Dingushead: Dr. Steve Brule meets Eraserhead
12.24.2010
06:22 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
“Dingushead” by Dylan Mitchell-Funk.

I’ve been reading boingboing for a while now (...) I’ve just put the finishing touches onto a poster I’ll be printing out as a gift tomorrow - Steve Brule and Eraserhead… I’m really pleased with how it turned out and thought I’d share it. Merry Chrimbus!

(via Boing Boing)

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
12.24.2010
06:22 pm
|
The Music They Made: Ones we lost in 2010
12.24.2010
05:50 pm
Topics:
Tags:

Dangerous Minds pal Wm. Ferguson’s sound-collage-and-video tribute to musicians who died in 2010.

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
12.24.2010
05:50 pm
|
Solar Skeletons Coming to Save the Planet
12.24.2010
04:45 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Solar Skeletons consists of French duo TZII and RIPIT, who brought their musical talents together in January 2006 to create “a conceptual band with no limit of genre nor process.” Their music fused Industrial Minimalism with Blues, and a dash of psychedelia.

They sell their wares with a mix of tongue-in-cheek and sci-fi babble:

The Dead Sons of the Sun are roaming the Earth, choosing the musical weapon to convince the so-called human intelligence to fight if they can’t love each other. After conquering Mars and Pluto, they chose the East Coast of the USA to land and start their crusade. Their Head Quarters is now established in Brussels. They will blind the audience with raw rays of unseen light, and preach through distorted music clichés. The absurdity of human beings needs to be shown by pointing its most obvious form: religion, drugs, love etc… After being reprogrammed, humans will be able to save their planet.

Best stick to the tunes, guys, which are hypnotic, addictive and exceedingly tasty.
 

 
Bonus Solar Suns track after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
12.24.2010
04:45 pm
|
Underground filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s ‘Lemon’ (1969)
12.24.2010
03:48 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
America’s abstract expressionist on celluloid, Hollis Frampton’s early still life, Lemon. What would you do with a light, a lemon and a camera? (On second thought, after seeing how you lot are doing with the band naming contest, please don’t answer that).
 

 
More Hollis Frampton on UbuWeb

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
12.24.2010
03:48 pm
|
Georges Bataille on French television, 1958
12.24.2010
02:11 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
“Naturally, love’s the most distant possibility”—Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille—the French academic and author of Story of the Eye, the pervy, transgressive erotic novel beloved by Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida—was only interviewed on television one time, in 1958. It’s fairly easy to see why after viewing this clip! Seen here, Georges Bataille discusses his book Literature And Evil with interviewer Pierre Dumayet.
 

 
Via Kembra Pfahler

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
12.24.2010
02:11 pm
|
Limited edition Kembra Pfahler poster
12.24.2010
01:35 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Still looking for that “difficult to buy for” friend’s Xmas gift? What about this badass poster from artist Kembra Pfahler? It comes in an edition of just 50 from The Hole. The poster is 24” by 36” with each one being numbered. Buy here.

These are both part of a Levis-sponsored traveling art exhibit at The Hole. The show is an homage to POSTERMAT, one of the shops that made 8th Street in NYC so great in the 80s, also featuring notables like Bruce LaBruce, Yamataka Eye, Gavin McInnes, Jack Pierson, Maripol, Clayton Patterson, ARE Weapons,  Robert Lazzarini, Shepard Fairey, Cheryl Dunn, and Yoko Ono. Kembra also appears in Bijoux Altimirano’s poster. All posters limited to editions of 50 and numbered.

I thought Robert Lazzarini’s clever homage to the famous Farrah Fawcett poster (I had one on my childhood wall right next to one of Cherie Currie, I can assure you) was especially good, but a lot of them are awesome.
 
image

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
12.24.2010
01:35 pm
|
The Divine David’s Christmas Carol
12.24.2010
08:40 am
Topics:
Tags:

 
The Divine David wishes us all the best for the Holidays. Let’s sing along.
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

It’s Christmas, The World is Burning, Let’s Masturbate: The Divine David Hoyle


 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
12.24.2010
08:40 am
|
Page 1884 of 2338 ‹ First  < 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 >  Last ›