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John Cale’s short Fluxus film, ‘Police Car’
07.26.2018
10:02 am
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Last week’s screening of The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound and The Velvet Underground Tarot Cards at the Egyptian Theatre was my idea of heaven. While Symphony of Sound has long been available (watch it!), so far as I know, Tarot Cards has never escaped into the wild. Screenings of the lone existing print are about as common as showings of Cocksucker Blues, Chelsea Girls, Eat the Document or, for that matter, California Raisins II: Raisins: Sold Out!

Warhol apparently intended to project Tarot Cards behind the VU at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, but the film has a vérité soundtrack nonetheless—mostly indistinct a-style chatter, no VU music (other than whistling). In it, the VU, Nico, and assorted Warhol superstars gather in an apartment and have a rave-up. Meanwhile, a dispirited Tarot reader is dealing Rider-Waite cards on the sheets of newspaper covering the floor and trying to make the Velvets’ fortunes heard over the din. A new copy of Pet Sounds is sitting out; almost everyone is young and gorgeous. I’ve already forgotten who pours beer on Mo Tucker’s hair by way of greeting. Eric Emerson?

But when I got home, there were no Celtic Crosses on the floor, no cans of Schaefer and Rheingold Extra Dry being passed around, no dancing Susan Bottomly, so I reached for the hypnotic effect of this “Fluxfilm.” John Cale shot Police Car in the middle sixties (the George Maciunas Foundation gives the date as “1966?”) with an 8mm camera he borrowed from Kate Heliczer. Cale describes the film in the biography Sedition and Alchemy (as quoted in Richie Unterberger’s White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day by Day):

I was interested in getting dim pictures with flashing lights from a street repair trench near the Chelsea Bridge. The film was left with someone in Fluxus who then included it in a box of Flux-stuff, which I totally forgot about until I got a call from someone saying my “movie” was mentioned in the New York Times review of the box.

 

‘Fluxfilms’ from ‘Flux Year Box 2’ (via MoMA)
 
Cale’s referring to Flux Year Box 2 and its mention in “Art Notes” in the June 16, 1968 issue of the Times. After reporting rumors that the Venice Biennale would be postponed or cancelled due to student protests, the Times’ Grace Glueck—who, in ‘66, described the Velvet Underground as “a combination of rock ‘n’ roll and Egyptian belly-dance music”—turned to the contents of George Maciunas’ $50 box set:

It contains such playthings as a squeezable rubber pear (anonymous); a “Flux Jewelry Kit” by Alice Hutchins (a spring necklace jumps out when you open it); a “Total Art Matchbox” by Ben Vautier (“Use the matches to destroy all art”); some rather strange card games. There are also 20 8mm film loops, by Stan Van Der Beek, Yoko Ono, John Cale, etc. Seen through a lorgnette-like hand viewer, the films include a run of bare bottoms (Ono); an underexposed sequence of blinking lights on a police car (Cale).

If you like the first part of this very short movie, in which only a single light appears, just wait until you get to the second part, where—but don’t let me spoil it for you…

Watch John Cale’s ‘Police Car’ after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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07.26.2018
10:02 am
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The Whippets: Beck’s mother and Jack Kerouac’s daughter were in a ‘60s girl group
11.26.2013
10:43 am
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Bibbe and friend

Love him or hate him, Beck Hansen’s family tree is jaw-droppingly cool. Not only was his maternal grandfather Fluxus artist Al Hansen, his grandmother was actress and poet Audrey Ostlin Hansen, and his mother Bibbe Hansen was, among her many incarnations, one of Warhol’s youngest Factory “Superstars” as well as an artist, actress, and musician in her own right.

Not long before she appeared in Warhol’s 1965 films Prison and Restaurant at the age of thirteen, Bibbe was in a short-lived girl pop group with Jack Kerouac’s only child, Jan Kerouac, called The Whippets.

Bibbe and Jan were twelve years-old in 1964 when they formed The Whippets in New York City with their friend Charlotte Rosenthal, using Whippet as their collective surname. The group formed when they met songwriter Neil Levinson one day while trying to panhandle for bus fare. The Whippets made one recording for Laurie Records, the Beatle-themed novelty single “I Want To Talk To You,” written by Levinson with the B-side “Go Go Go With Ringo,” written by Beatles zealot DJ Murray the K’s mother, Jean Kauffman. The song sold well enough in Canada to reach the pop charts. Any prospects of an ongoing music career were cut short soon after the recording session when Bibbe found herself in a state juvenile detention center.

Bibbe told Scram magazine the story of the group’s formation and brief life in 2005:

Charlotte Rosenthal, Janet Kerouac and I were all downtown street kids in 1964 New York City. While panhandling, we three met songwriter Neil Levinson (“Oh, Denise”) and hustled busfare from him. On the bus ride we fell to chatting. The Beatles had just come out big in the US and Neil had written a girl-song response to “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Would we be interested in hearing it? We met him later that day at Steinway Studios on 57th Street and together finished the lyrics and music for “I Want To Talk With You.” It was a classic girl group riff and we dug it. That same day we went to a half dozen record companies auditioning the song without any takers. As a last resort, Neil called Colpix label’s Don Rubin from a payphone. When Don said he would see us we ran all the way over to the audition. We sang the song and within the next couple days we were signed to Colpix and to DuLev Productions. DuLev was Levinson’s company with his partner, Steve Duboff. For the B-side Neil brought in pal Jean Murray (Jean Kauffman) who had co-written the Darin hit “Splish Splash” with Darin and her son, DJ Murray the K. Oh, that she only wrote us another “Splish Splash!” Instead it was the rather silly and insipid “Go Go Go With Ringo.” We loved the A-side but weren’t too wild about the Ringo song. Over the next few weeks we rehearsed daily, shopped for matching outfits and had 8x10 glossy promo pictures taken. At one point we were introduced to the group The Tokens who apparently were now 1/3 owners of our act along with Dulev (1/3) and Jean Murray (1/3). Our percentage was apparently not accounted for under this bookkeeping arrangement. Similarly, I have no idea how Don Rubin and Colpix were supposed to get their cut.

Within a few weeks we were recording. The record was pressed—at least dj copies. We got a box of these records to split between us. I believe it was released however briefly but nothing much happened with it. I heard our masters were sold to Laurie Records at one point. Later I heard we’d charted somewhere in Canada. Shortly before she died, Janet Kerouac told me her Rhino Records lawyers were looking into that and had found that we were owed a little bit of money. Apparently not enough to bother collecting from what I can tell.

The Whippets, “I Want To Talk To You,” 1964:

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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11.26.2013
10:43 am
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Liberace gets all avant garde and artsy fartsy on ‘The Monkees’
09.28.2013
01:43 am
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Episode 37 in the Monkees’ TV canon, “Art for Monkees’ Sake,” is a pretty routine episode as Monkees episodes go. The premise is that Peter gets interested in art, paints his version of Frans Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier at the local museum, which then gets switched for the real thing, it gets stolen, hijinks ensue. It doesn’t really matter. It’s a Monkees episode, with two wonderful songs (“Randy Scouse Git” and “Daydream Believer”) and as many dumb sight gags as they could cram in there.

Because it’s set in a museum, the writers took full advantage of the opportunity to make “modern art” the target of as many silly jokes as possible. There’s a brief scene where Mickey wanders into an artist’s studio and the artist says most of the things you’d expect a pretentious “actionist” painter to say in an absurdist sitcom. There’s a gag where three of the Monkees are surprised in the darkened museum by a security guard, but they just freeze in odd poses, and the guard doesn’t “see” them, thinking they’re just some dumb art installation. Get it? Modern art! Hah!

Right in the middle of the episode, Mike’s off looking for Peter and wanders into a chamber music concert. And then something remarkable happens.

The room is populated by snooty-snoots wearing tuxedos and fine gowns. Through a door enters Liberace, who wordlessly opens a large case, extracts a golden sledgehammer, and proceeds to lay waste to a blameless piano while Mike mugs and cringes. Then Liberace, clearly having enjoyed himself, is wordlessly congratulated by the snooty-snoots as the scene fades out.

But wait! Destroying a piano with a sledgehammer? That’s a Fluxus move, innit? Pretty sure…..
 
Piano Activities
George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell, Benjamin Patterson, Emmett Williams performing Phillip Corner’s Piano Activities at Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik, Wiesbaden, 1962

By the autumn of 1967, when “Art for Monkees’ Sake” first aired, destroying musical instruments was a well-known Fluxus trope. As Hannah Higgins reports in her book Fluxus Experience, in Nam June Paik’s 1961 work One for Violin, “The performer raises a violin overhead at a nearly imperceptible rate until it is released full-force downward, smashing it to pieces.” Furthermore, Higgins continues,

In Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, performed in 1962 at the first Fluxus-titled festival in Wiesbaden, Germany, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, Alison Knowles, and Emmett Williams engaged in the apparent destruction of an old, unplayable piano belonging to the Kunstverein. They did destroy the instrument, but not haphazardly. … [the performance included] the careful rubbing of a brick over the strings, patient waiting for the right moment to use a hammer.”

As Richard Meltzer writes in The Aesthetics of Rock, “One of the farthest-reaching dissonant-worlds-of-quality moves that the Monkees (or their producers) have carried out has been their TV scene with Liberace destroying a piano with a sledge hammer before an appreciative chamber music audience.”

I have to agree. I don’t know if Liberace gave a hoot about Fluxus or not—probably he didn’t—but I have to applaud the discipline and sheer insouciant gumption it took to do that scene and that scene only and not demand even a line of dialogue for his trouble.
 


 
The complete episode, after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.28.2013
01:43 am
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Charlotte Moorman’s answering machine message tape
06.11.2010
02:51 pm
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A voyeuristic and mesmerizing tribute to key Fluxus player and muse to Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys, the experimental cellist Charlotte Moorman. Listen to personal phone messages to Moorman from the likes of John and Yoko, John Cage, Paik and others and drink in that good old-timey analog tape phone machine atmosphere.

 
A Trove of Archival Performances by Charlotte Moorman (UBUWEB)

Posted by Brad Laner
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06.11.2010
02:51 pm
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