You can be sure that the next chapter of media star Christine O’Donnell’s career—the one that starts after she loses her bid for a Senate seat—will be even bigger than the one she’s writing with the media’s help now.
But her campaign evokes the limits of populist-driven politics, which is where your man Jay Smooth comes in. Jay is the founder of NYC’s longest-running hip-hop radio show, WBAI’s Underground Railroad. He’s also a hip-hop generation activist and has also made a name as a grassroots common-sense political commentator for both his own Nil Doctrine and the Giant magazine blog.
It’s for the latter that he gives his perspective on why “I’m you” falls flat as a political meme.
Tom Snyder interviews Divine, Andy Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn and playwright/director Ron Link in July of 1979. Link wrote “The Neon Woman” which starred Divine and ran off-Broadway in 1978.
This is wonderful. Part of the fun is watching Snyder struggling to fathom the whole thing. By the end, Snyder seems ripe for a lifestyle change.
Looks like it’s mid-60’s day at Dangerous Minds. So be it ! Here’s both sides of this moody/self-loathing/noisy/lysergic 1967 single from Minneapolis band The Calico Wall. Looks like there’s next to no information about this anywhere, but have a listen to this glowering beast. It’s perfect for the rainy day here in Los Angeles
Sixties Japanese garage band The Cougars perform “Aphrodite” in this beautiful black and white video. Go go heaven. This looks like it could have been directed by Seijun Suzuki.
Taking their cues from Devo, Yellow Magic Orchestra and The Plastics, Japan’s hardest-touring band, Polysics, have a way with retro-futurism. From the looks of their amazing “period piece” music videos and fashion sense, you’d just assume this was a Japanese New Wave group from the 1980s that you never heard of, but no, that’s not the case, they formed in 1997. Much of the time they sing in a made-up “space language” so you don’t even have to speak Japanese to appreciate the lyrics. Their briskly played tunes and odd time signatures also sound like The Fall (to me at least) in a playful mood, so what’s not to like here?
Here are a couple of great examples of the what Polysics do. First up is “New Wave Jacket.” I love this song and video:
Below, “Each Life, Each End.” The Devo influence is rather unmistakable here…
Polysics tour outside of Japan frequently. Don’t miss their energetic show when they’re in your neck of the woods on their next tour.
New York garage-psych band The Druids Of Stonehenge on the Joe Franklin Show 1968.
Vocalist Dave Budge, guitarists Carl Hauser and Bill Tracy, bassist Tom Workman and drummer Steve Tindall came together in 1965 as r&b ravers The Druids. In 1968 they went psychedelic and changed their name to The Druids Of Stonehenge. This clip of the band on the Joe Franklin Show has to be one of the weirdest of the 1000s of weird moments on Franklin’s loveably nutty TV program. Franklin, who knew alot about music and film pre-dating the sixties, was comically clueless when it came to rock and roll, as evidenced by his inept attempt to be “with it’ in this wonderfully warped video.
The Druids Of Stonehenge had a good rep for their live performances at New York nightclubs like Ondine’s and Cheetah, but this performance on the Franklin Show is pretty dreadful. Their take on Billy Holiday’s ‘God Bless The Child’ borders on the sacrilegious, but the arrangement, a total rip of ‘Paint It Black’, is the kind of wackiness that makes rock and roll the unruly mess I love.
Above, a painting of Joe Coleman and its life-sized doppelganger.
Dangerous Minds pal, the great painter Joe Coleman, has a major new art show, “Auto Portrait.” opening in New York at the end of the month, and running from October 28 to December 22, at the prestigious Dickinson Gallery. If you live in the NYC area, this is one art show that should not be missed!
From the press release:
NEW YORK—Dickinson is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based painter Joe Coleman.
The Artist:
Coleman’s portraits create complete biographies by surrounding their subjects with interweavings of minuscule images and explanatory text. Artist and viewer embark on exploratory excavations of the subject’s life through the painting. Coleman’s jewel-box approach means that one experiences the paintings afresh at each viewing, uncovering ever more details and nuances that were previously undetected. An admirer of Northern artists such as Bosch, Brueghel and Grunewald, Coleman employs the same attention to detail and delicate sense of scale, utilizing dual and single haired brushes in conjunction with magnifying lenses to create his refined masterpieces. Like those artists, Coleman also displays a propensity for the gruesome and grisly and often attempts to both dissect and glorify the terrible in many of his paintings, unmasking with brutal honesty the truth of human nature.
The Exhibition:
Centering around a full-length self-portrait, the artist’s largest and most ambitious painting to date, AUTO-PORTRAIT is an exhibition of new work which provides a fascinating insight into the life of this artist. Depicting himself almost life-size, this portrait is set against the usual tapestry of minuscule portraits and scenes from the artist’s life, presenting the viewer with captivating insights into the enigmatic artist at its center.
Around this large-scale composition will be a series of small, religious icons. Painting on ‘found’ folding dyptichs and tryptichs, coleman has produced a group of family portraits, self portraits, and highly personal subjects, with the intensity of religious icons. The devotional format not only gives each picture a sense of veneration, but also references Coleman’s long-professed obsession with early renaissance painting.
Auto-biography has long been the focus of Joe Coleman’s painting, and this new body of work represents the artist’s most personal and intimate group of paintings to date. None of the works in the show have been previously exhibited or published.
A fully illustrated catalog will accompany the exhibition.
Joe’s also got a new YouTube channel, just launched, where you can view close-up scans of the details of his incredible paintings, such as his 1997 portrait of actress Jayne Mansfield, “American Venus.”
The experimental writer, novelist, poet and film-maker, Bryan Stanley Johnson was born in February 1933. He was the author of several highly original and important works of modern literature, of which the autobiographical Alberto Angelo (a novel that had holes cut in the text to give a premonition of what was to come); the sinister and darkly comic House Mother Normal ( a novel split into equal internal monologues, except the last, which turns the story on its head); the brilliant and hilarious Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (a novel Auberon Waugh declared should win Johnson the Nobel Prize); and The Unfortunates are amongst his most acclaimed and best known.
In 1968, Johnson was approached by the BBC to make a short documentary about his latest book The Unfortunates - a novel split into twenty-seven separate sections contained in a box, of which only the first and last were to be read in order, with those in-between were to be read in any order of the reader’s choosing.
The story dealt with Johnson’s visit to Nottingham to cover a soccer match, and his memories and thoughts on the death by cancer of his closest and most trusted friend, Terry Tillinghast. The structure of The Unfortunates, or the book in a box, was a “a physical metaphor for randomness….I wanted the novel to be a transcript or version of how my mind worked in this random way.”
As both novel and documentary film, The Unfortunates is a powerfully moving and intelligent meditation on death, drawing reader and viewer into a contemplation of their own existence.
Bonus clip of B. S. Johnson’s ‘The Unfortunates’ after the jump…
He’s right, too! Sometimes it takes as little as 24 hours for something discussed on Alex Jones’ radio show to appear on Beck’s Fox News program. Glenn Beck cribs a lot of stuff from Alex Jones. Usually—not always—I just roll my eyes at Alex Jones, but what he says here is actually pretty much on the money, if you ask me.
