Chris Hayes and Naomi Klein on MSNBC. This is totally worth watching. In the second half, she says some important things.
I was raised in a union family in West Virgina. My father worked at the telephone company (one of the Bells) and was a member of the CWA (Communication Workers of America). There is no doubt in my mind, NONE, that my family benefited massively—our lives were made a lot better—because of my father’s union and collective bargaining. I was actually able to have a special allergy medicine that was no longer manufactured made up for me a batch at a time and our insurance paid for it. I had to have special lenses made for my glasses. My sister was able to have braces, etc. How many American jobs have benefits like that anymore? Today, you’d practically have to pull a fucking John Q if your kid got really sick, even if you have health insurance!
When my father retired (he was bought out at age 62) he was extremely bitter about the wages the telephone company was paying the younger hires. He saw the writing on the wall and it wasn’t pretty. Outside of the medical profession I doubt that there are any decent paying jobs with benefits in my hometown anymore.
Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans are the lowest of the low. Traitors to the American middle class. The Wisconsin GOP are ready to knife these people to prove a point! Scum. I spit on them. If it’s not already obvious(!) we here at Dangerous Minds stand firmly with the pro-labor demonstrators in Madison. They’re heroes, these people. Good citizens. May they prevail. For their sakes and for all of our sakes.
The actress Billie Whitelaw couldn’t imagine what it was like. The theater darkened, apart from a spotlight on Whitelaw’s mouth, as she delivered Samuel Beckett’s babbling stream of consciousness Not I.
It’s one of the most disturbing images in theater: a disembodied mouth, telling its tale “at the speed of thought.” It takes incredible discipline and strength for the actor to perform: the text isn’t easy to learn, its full of difficult instructions, pauses, repetitions and disjointed phrases; add to this the speed of delivery, which means the actor has to learn circular breathing in order to deliver the lines. Jessica Tandy once gave a performance that lasted twenty-four minutes, only to be told by Beckett that she had “ruined” his play. And let’s not forget the rigidity of the piece: the actor’s lack of mobility, the mouth tethered to a spotlight, all of which says everything for Whitelaw’s brilliance as an actor.
Here, Whitelaw introduces Not I in the short documentary, A Wake for Sam, and explains the effect it had on her:
Plenty of writers can write a play about a state of mind, but [Beckett] actually put that state of mind on the stage, in front of your eyes. And I think a lot of people recognized it. I recognized it. When I first read it at home, I just burst in to tears, because I recognized the inner scream. Perhaps that’s not what it is, I don’t know, but for me, that’s what I recognized, an inner scream, in there, and no escaping it.
All observations made during his presidency, except for Edmund Morris’s recollection from the recent HBO documentary:
“A high-powered cheerleader for our worst instincts, a nasty man whose major talent is to make us feel good about being creepy and who lets us pretend that tomorrow will never come.”
—Activist Roger Wilkins
“His answer to any questions about young men being killed for some vague and perhaps non-existent reason in Central America has been to smile, nod, wave a hand and walk on. And America applauds, thus proving that senility is a communicable disease.”
—Columnist Jimmy Breslin
“Poor dear, there’s nothing between his ears.”
—British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
“I dig the cat. He’s spontaneous. A lot of times he’ll blurt stuff out – I can relate to that.”
—Van Halen replacement lead singer Sammy Hagar
“Reagan swaggering around. Poor old thing! He’s about as masculine as Marjorie Main. He was never a symbol of masculinity – though he sort of plays it ... There is something rather grandmotherly about Reagan. And then again, he’s rather boyish. Between the two, he comes off as non-threatening ... He isn’t popular. There isn’t anything about his policies anybody likes. The pollsters’ questions are so dumb: ‘Do you find him a nice old thing who makes you feel good when he honks away on the box?’ ‘Yes, he’s a nice old thing who makes me feel good when he honks away on the box.’ Well, that isn’t an endorsement of war in Nicaragua.”
—Author Gore Vidal
“His errors glide past unchallenged ... The general message of the American press is that, yes, while it is perfectly true that the emperor has no clothes, nudity is actually very acceptable this year.”
—British journalist Simon Hoggart
“The difficulty about figuring Reagan out was he was not introspective. Therefore, to try and interview this guy, who was so incurious about himself, was very unrewarding. He would tend to take refuge behind anecdotes and jokes, but when I tried to probe him about fundamental things – his religious beliefs, his feelings about women and children – I just got this echoing sound that I was talking into a large, rather cool cave.”
—Reagan biographer Edmund Morris
Excerpted from the “Reagan Centennial Edition” of my 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor, available here as an enhanced eBook.
I ate 12 fat fresh buttons while drinking black cherry juice to mask the extreme bitterness of the cactus. 12 buttons is a large quantity of mescaline for an experienced peyote eater. This was my first encounter with peyote. I had made a serious commitment to Mescalito.
When the peyote came on, it came on strong. My home in the Berkeley Hills overlooked the bay and I could see the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond smudging the night sky with a reddish haze of sodium lamps and spewing infernal smoke like some futuristic version of hell. I felt a sense of dread. But soon the apocalyptic vision was swept away by a surge of powerful euphoric energy. My body started to hum and vibrate and I became aware of surging energy along my spine and pinwheels of light radiating from ganglion centers within my body. I gathered that this was the awakening of my kundalini and the sparking of my chakras. I know this sounds like new age jive talk. But it was 1969 and I was 18 years old. The new age was new and hadn’t become an industry. The era of spiritual materialism was dawning, but hadn’t arrived yet. There were a handful of books by scholars of Eastern mysticism on the subject of kundalini and you had to make an effort to seek out this information. I’d read John Woodroffe’s book The Serpent Power: The Secrets of Tantric and Shaktic Yoga and knew a little bit about the dormant energy coiled like a snake at the base of the spine waiting to be awakened. I had also read about about the chakras: seven clusters of energy bundled within nerves that radiate along the spine. I had read it, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Well, peyote introduced me to all of this in precise and intricate detail. The connection between flesh and spirit wasn’t conceptual, it was manifest right there in the moment.
In my dark Berkeley apartment, sitting in front of an altar of white candles, I fell into the grip of Mescalito’s magic. My body was suffused with blissful energy, my spine tingling with waves of ecstasy. I was horny for the cosmos, in love with the every little minutia of being. I chanted OM and the vibration in my chest worked its way into my skull where it tapped into some universal language composed of sympathetic waves of energy. And what my eyes saw, both inside and out, were the most sophisticated, intricate and dazzling visual constructs I’d ever encountered. Beautiful and perfectly detailed geometric mandalas were spinning in the space between my closed eyes. And when I opened my eyes the mandalas spun outward to meld with the billions of mandalas that were surging toward me and offering to embed their cosmic code upon my brain. And holy mother of jesus, my chakras were spinning, sparkling and luminescent. And when all the chakras were vibrating at the exact same frequency, none prevailing over the other, I disappeared into an infinite white light and no longer existed. Marc was dead. That little nub of ego that grinds up against what we call reality was shattered into a million little pieces. Marc was a pimple that had received a liberating squeeze.
Peyote taught me that when we emphasize just one aspect of our being while ignoring the rest, we create ego. If our sexual energy is dominant, we create ego. If our intellect is dominant, we create ego. If our emotions are dominant, we create ego. Only when sex, heart and mind are in complete balance and harmony do we experience so called enlightenment. When all of our chakras, our energy centers, are vibrating on the same wavelength, at the same pitch, we become in tune with the cosmos. Ego is the result of getting stuck in just one corner of our totality. Ego is the illusion of isolation. When our mind is in tune with our heart and our sexuality, we become one with the natural order of things and no longer exist apart from the world. That’s how it works. If you don’t believe me, eat 12 fat peyote buttons and get back to me.
The morning after my peyote trip, I re-entered the world tenderly, with the vulnerability and openness of a newborn child. I felt humbled and amazed. I never again felt quite as solid as I did before taking peyote. I was more conscious of myself on a molecular level. I felt oceanic.
Eating peyote was the most profoundly religious experience I’ve ever had and it continues to inform my point of view on a daily basis. At 18 years of age a door opened and it has remained slightly ajar ever since. The ego is monolithic and stubborn. It takes something powerful to put the brutal bastard in its place. The modern world has been the ego’s best ally. It provides little space for the dissolution of ME. Thank goodness for psychedelics.
Peyote is called “medicine” for a reason. It can heal, purge and cleanse. But it’s just one part of a bigger process. The deal with psychedelics is that you get the Cliff Notes version of cosmic consciousness. Don’t me get me wrong, the experience is real, genuine, but it’s also just a kind of crash course giving us a quick glimpse of who we really are. Most of us, actually all of us, can’t afford to leave our jobs, family etc. to sit on a mountaintop completely devoting our lives to contemplating the nature of existence. There have been a handful of human beings who could make that commitment: Milarepa, Buddha, Jesus and those divinely intoxicated bums who used to practice their Dharma on Bowery and Broadway back in the 70s. But, in this day and age, when there are so many forces conspiring against our attaining even the slightest insight to who we are and what has authentic value in our lives, we need guidance that can lead us to a deeper and more profound understanding of why we are here and where we are going. I suggest taking the crash course. If you can get your hungry hands on some peyote, psilocybin mushrooms or clean LSD (I’m not sure it still exists) go for it. Don’t wait for the world to become your paradise. Throw away the travel brochure. Create your own cosmic getaway. If your head’s in the right space, Newark is just as beautiful as the beaches of Belize. But ultimately it’s up to us to follow up on the psychedelic experience and do the hard work of self-realization on a daily basis.
While psychedelics do open the doors of perception, it is our responsibly to walk through those doors and keep walking. There are no quick fixes for what ails us. Peyote showed me the way, it was a cosmic road map, but I still had to do the driving and part of the trip is to question the “I’ in the driver’s seat. One way that I found to keep the “I” real is to have a gallon jug of peyote tea in the refrigerator at all times. Depending on my particular mental state on any given day, a sip or gulp of the tea might be the perfect prescription for clarifying a moment in time or reminding me of what really matters. Every household should have at least a week’s supply of peyote tea on hand. It’s better than coffee for kickstarting your day. Unfortunately, peyote is so effective in bringing balance and insight into the lives of men and women, that most peyote fields through the Southwest and Northern Mexico have been picked clean. I am hoping that once marijuana is legalized that we can look to making peyote a legal sacrament for the population at large and the cultivation of peyote will become a thriving industry like artichokes and endive. America would greatly benefit from having psychedelic salad on our dinner tables.
The following documentary on peyote will help you plan ahead.
Out of the ashes of Punk came the New Romantics, rising like a painted phoenix over London’s club scene. From clubs like Billy’s and Blitz, where Steve Strange and Rusty Egan played Bowie, the Velvets and T.Rex, and Boy George was the coat-check guy, came the New Romantics. Clubbers known as the Blitz Kids, who were made-up and beautiful, and knew imagination was more important than money when it came to having fun.
The Blitz Kids were Steve Strange (Visage), Rusty Egan (The Rich Kids), Boy George (Culture Club), Tony Hadley, Martin Kemp, Gary Kemp, John Keeble, Steve Norman (Spandau Ballet), Tony James, James Degville (Sigue Sigue Sputnik), Siobhan Fahey (Bananarama), Marilyn, Princess Julia, Isabella Blow, Stephen Jones and Michael Clarke, and together they were the generation of New Romantics.
Last year, in the Guardian, Priya Elan talked to some of the “movers and shakers behind the scene that spawned the New Romantics.”
STEVE STRANGE, BLITZ CLUB HOST, VISAGE FRONTMAN: By 1977 I’d gotten very bored by punk. It’d become very violent. The skinheads and the National Front had moved in.
RUSTY EGAN, BLITZ DJ, VISAGE MEMBER: The punk venues got invaded by football hooligans wearing Le Coq Sportif clothes. They’d call us “poofs” because we weren’t dressed in a normal way. Hence why we formed the club. It was for those ex-punks who liked Lou Reed, Bowie and Iggy.
SS: It was about being creative, we wanted to start something that didn’t have anything to do with punk.
RE: It was a horrible time of recession. Covent Garden was isolated and badly lit. But then you’d walk into the club and it was like “Ta-da!” Everyone was drinking and taking poppers. The atmosphere was like Studio 54.
SIOBHAN FAHEY, BLITZ CLUBBER AND BANANARAMA MEMBER: We’d spend the whole week preparing our outfits for the club. We’d go and buy fabrics, customise our leather jackets, make cummerbunds, find old military things and throw them together in a mix of glam, military and strangeness. It was all DIY because we didn’t really have any money to properly eat. We lived off coffee and cigarettes, really.
RE: The song that became the anthem of the club was Heroes by Bowie. “Just for one day” you could dress up and be more than what Britain had to offer you.
The age-old advice given to musicians of “don’t quit your day job” has never seemed so prescient. But if your day job is in the business end of the music industry you’re fucked. Where does an A.R. person go to get a $200,000 a year gig nowadays? How the mighty have fallen. The chart above looks like an electrocardiograph of a patient who is on the verge of flatlining. For most executives at major labels, life is an 8-track tape.
When my band was signed to RCA records I could sense that the foundations of the corporate music world were shaky even back in the 80s. People who had little expertise in anything, particularly music, were running a multi-billion dollar industry fueled by their own arrogance, greed and a false sense of invincibility. I remember how appalled and dismayed I was to discover that the people in charge of getting my music to the public had little or no passion for the product they were selling. With rare exceptions, the executives, A.R., publicity and sales people at RCA knew very little about rock and roll. The record label that signed Elvis Presley was clueless when it came to dealing with new music and how to promote it. The handful of people who knew what they were doing got out and started their own projects. The rest went down with the ship and were forced to join the ranks of people who actually had to work for a living. The sad thing is a bunch of naive musicians were caught up in the whole charade and many had their careers destroyed before they even really began. I got off clean. I never planned to have a career in music.
I formed a rock band out of love and outrage. Love for the music, outrage at what it had become. I never had a game plan. I never dreamed of making money from my music. Rock and roll wasn’t there to provide for me, I was there to provide for it. I had no strategy for getting a record deal. In fact, I did almost everything a person should NOT do if they’re interested in making a career out of music. I pissed a lot of people off by refusing to kowtow to the established power structures and formalities of the music scene. When I got signed to a major label my behavior didn’t change. But now I was pissing off people who thought they had power over me. I didn’t give a shit and that just pissed them off more. I wasn’t impressed by their power. Without the music they had nothing and I had the music. They weren’t artists. They were barely even business people. They stunk of fear and insecurity. I knew they were part of a dying system and I wasn’t interested in being part of their death dance. I had started a band as a form of guerrilla theater. My intentions were to shake the system up and here I was a part of it. I was an infiltrator. And the suits at RCA knew it. They had been tricked and they hated me for it.
In an interview with Musician magazine in 1985, I accused RCA, along with the CIA and FBI, of being part of a government plot to destroy rock roll. Of course I was joking but the interviewer was shocked that I would, as he put it, “bite the hand that feeds me.” I had to remind him that without musicians the record companies would have nothing to sell. We were “feeding’ the record companies, not the other way around. Sadly, too many musicians forgot that and ended up becoming dependent on an industry that was essentially parasitic. I know many of those musicians and they’re bitter. But it was their own fault. They bought into the hype.
It is the nature of pop music that success should be immediate and profitable. Rock musicians in the past generally approached their trade with the notion that fame and money were intrinsic to what they did and the payoff should be swift and lucrative. Unlike painters, writers, sculptors and poets, rock and roll wasn’t something you were expected to continue to do if you weren’t financially successful at it. Record sales were the barometer by which you measured the value of what you did. Start a band, make a couple of records, if they didn’t sell go back to working at your dad’s hardware store. But many of us approached rock for reasons other than fame and money. Because rock and roll had profoundly transformed our lives we believed by practicing the art we too could change the world around us. Just as Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Doors, Patti Smith, The Clash and so many more, had thrown open doors that were liberating, cathartic and soul deepening, we committed ourselves to an energy and lifestyle that was more than just music, it was a movement - spiritual, political and cultural. In so doing, we joined the ranks of the poets and painters who created for the sake of making the world a better place, more alive, more sexy, more conscious. In the wake of the music industries financial collapse, I think rock and roll is again becoming something vital and deep, less concerned with cultural trends, fashion and fame. Stripped of the allure of money and stardom, rock is regaining some of its soul.
The big record companies are dead, but musicians are still alive and creating greater quantities of music than ever before. Fewer will get rich and famous, but they’ll be making music for the right reasons. Money is a byproduct of art not its purpose. If you go into music thinking you’ll make a living at it, you’re not only going into it for the wrong reason, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment, heartbreak and poverty. While there are a handful of people making money writing commercial jingles and movie/TV soundtracks, the era of a big fat monetary advance from a record label for a newly signed rock band is over. The music business has always been a gamble, but the odds against the musician are now stratospheric. I see a day when the phrase “pop star” has become antiquated and Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are just dim memories of a time when the machinery of stardom still had fuel firing its engines.
The above graph of declining music sales doesn’t take into account the struggling music tour business. What will be left when that collapses? There will still be middle-class rockers on Econoline/Econolodge tours playing the few college towns that still have indie record stores and music venues. They will roam the earth like prehistoric animals going from one rock and roll watering hole to another. I visited with a friend of mine recently who is currently on such a tour. He’s in his early 50s. He’s got an infant daughter and a wife. He’s making rent money. He loves his music but he’s clearly worried about his livelihood. His art is overshadowed by the struggle of making ends meet. He seems resigned to a lifestyle that emphasizes the grind over the grandeur. He’s devoted most of his life to his art and has learned the tough lesson that art is sacrifice. He’s willing to make that sacrifice but I detect a sadness in him where there should be the ecstatic. On the other hand, there is something almost heroic about my friend. He’s a true believer in the power and glory of rock and roll. Music is his redemption. Art justifies itself.
If all of the above isn’t reason enough to convince any musician that the only reason to make music is out of love, then consider this: given the nature of downloading from the Internet, musicians should reconcile themselves to the fact that their music will be given away.
So, don’t quit your day job.
I’ll be releasing a new album this summer. The music industry may be dead but I’m not.
P.S. My experience at RCA would have been far worse had it not been for the comradeship of two people who did love rock and roll: Bruce Harris (R.I.P.) and Gregg Geller. They signed me to RCA and they had the foresight to leave before it all went to hell. Bruce quit his high paying job in A.R. to start a rock band. Geller moved on to become a music historian and compiler of some terrific rock anthologies. They were the last of a dying breed, they believed in the music. They walked the walk.
Shit, it’s worse than I thought. Update via DM reader Dollar Van Demos: The real death of the music industry here.
Jean Cocteau was disingenuous when he wrote, “It is often said that The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète) is a surrealist film. However, Surrealism did not exist when I first thought of it.”
Cocteau was wrong. Surrealism not only existed, it was a major artistic and cultural force.
The idea of a film had its germination during a house party given by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles at Hyeres in 1929. Georges Auric, Cocteau’s lifelong musical collaborator, surprised his hosts by announcing that he wanted to compose the score for an animated cartoon. Cocteau was asked on the spot to provide a scenario. After some discussion, the Noailles agreed to give Cocteau a million francs to make a real film with a score by Auric. This became The Blood of a Poet, still one of the most widely viewed of all Cocteau’s screenworks. Cocteau described its disturbing series of voyeuristic tableaux as “a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body.”
By then, Max Ernst had painted the first major Surrealist painting, “The Elephant Celebes” in 1921, and André Breton had written the Surrealist Manifesto, in 1924.
Blood of a Poet can’t even be classed as the first Surrealist film, as Entr’acte had been made by René Clair, in 1924; The Seashell and the Clergyman (La Coquille et le clergyman) arguably the first true Surrealistic film, directed by Germaine Dulac, and written by Antonin Artaud, was made in 1928; and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí had made two landmark Surrealist films, Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L’Âge d’Or (1930), by the time Cocteau was ready to put his thoughts on celluloid.
While there are undoubted references to Surrealist imagery (i.e. the lips on the artist’s hand), The Blood of a Poet shouldn’t be tied into any group or movement, for it is a film very much centered in Cocteau’s artistic sensibilities:
The Blood of a Poet like so much of what Cocteau created, abounds in autobiographical motifs: the macho Dargelos and the snowball fight, the opium smoker, the poet with his sexual stigmata, and the gunshots that, intentionally or not, echoed his father’s suicide long before.
Like all great artists, Cocteau sourced ideas from what was around him, what was new, to create his own distinct artistic vision. Of course, such magpie instincts left him open to the criticism of dilettantism, which was unfair, when considered against the range and diversity of his output as artist, writer, film-maker, designer, poet and man-about-town.
It was while out on the tiles at his favorite hot-spot “Le Boeuf sur le Toit” that Cocteau met the model, and later photographer, Lee Miller. Cocteau was casting for his film, and Miller breathlessly volunteered her services. It was her only film, and she would later describe the difficulties in making the film:
Feral Benga, the black jazz dancer who played the angel, sprained his ankle and became an angel with a limp. Cocteau put a star on Enrique Riviero’s back to cover an old bullet wound from the pistol of some cuckolded husband. The mattresses used to soundproof the studio walls were, unfortunately for the cast, infested with ravenous fleas and bedbugs. When the “bull” (really an ox) rented from an abattoir arrived at the studio with only one horn, Cocteau made a second one himself.
The film was financed by Charles, Vicomte de Noailles at a cost of one million francs. The Vicomte and his wife agreed to appear in the film, a scene where they talked amongst themselves and, on cue, began applauding. However, Cocteau intercut this footage with a another sequence, which ended in a suicide. Upon seeing the completed film, they refused to let Cocteau release it with their scene included. It was therefore re-shot with Barbette, the well-known female impersonator, and some extras.
Prior to its release, there was further controversy when it was rumored the film was filled with hidden symbolism:
Cocteau himself always denied the presence of hidden symbolism in the film, but word got about that it had anti-Christian undercurrents. This greatly distressed the Noailles. After the scandal caused the Viscount to be expelled from the elegant Jockey Club, and even brought threats of excommunication from the Church, they forbade Cocteau to allow public release of The Blood of a Poet for over a year.
It is often said that The Blood of a Poet is a surrealist film. However, surrealism did not exist when I first thought of it. the interest that it still arouses probably comes from its isolation from the works with which it is classified. I am speaking of the works of a minority that has opposed and unobtrusively governed the majority throughout the centuries. This minority has its antagonistic aspects. At the time of Le sang d’un poète, I was the only one of this minority to avoid the deliberate manifestations of the unconscious in favor of a kind of half-sleep through which I wandered as though in a labyrinth.
I applied myself only to the relief and to the details of the images that came forth from the great darkness of the human body. I adopted them then and there as the documentary scenes of another kingdom.
That is why this film, which has only one style, that, for example, of the bearing or the gestures of a man, presents many surfaces for its exegesis. Its exegeses were innumerable. If I were questioned about any one of them, I would have trouble in answering.
My relationship with the work was like that of a cabinetmaker who puts together the pieces of a table whom the spiritualists, who make the table move, consult.
The Blood of a Poet draws nothing from either dreams or symbols. As far as the former are concerned, it initiates their mechanism, and by letting the mind relax, as in sleep, it lets memories entwine, move and express themselves freely. As for the latter, it rejects them, and substitutes acts, or allegories of these acts, that the spectator can make symbols of if he wishes.
Somebody’s finally liberated Reggae Britannia, BBC4’s excellent—though by no means not exhaustive—documentary on the origins, growth and influence of British reggae from the ‘60s to the present. Reggae Britannia takes you from the scene’s ska beginnings in the hands of the children of the country’s first post-war wave of Carribean immigrants (known as the Windrush generation), through to the emergence of Bob Marley, the first Brixton riots, the UK sound system phenomenon, the Two-Tone era, reggae’s merging with punk and appropriation by pop, and more. Reggae Britannia is definitely worth a look.
Here’s the trailer…click on any of the title links or graphic above to check the full thing. And please, watch instead of embed so we can hold off our friends at the Beeb from bringing it down for at least a short while.
