The Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters showcases an array of posters from the Soviet-era. From a design standpoint, these illustrations are really cool, but I wonder if they were truly effective with getting their message across to Friends of Bill???
See more images after the jump…
The Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead has a rebuttal to Congresswoman Michele “Crazy Eyes” Bachmann’s rebuttal to Congressman Paul Ryan’s rebuttal of Obama’s SOTU speech.
It’s fun to consider just how far over Bachmann’s head this goes. Subtlety, or nuanced thinking, isn’t exactly Crazy Eyes’ strong suit…
The Village Voice is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York City by digging up some articles from their archives. This one by Jack Newfield published on September 2, 1965 is so off-the-wall I had to share the whole thing with you. The notion of a mods and rockers confrontation in Flushing, Queens is more hysterical than historical. I don’t recall a single point in American pop culture where hip youth were separated by the mod/rocker divide. Newfield, in trying to equate American Dylan fans to the mods and rockers of Britain, is just plain full of shit. And the reference to Stalinists and Social Democrats is even more amusing in its absurdity. Did anyone buy this back in 1965?
Newfield had a reputation for being a bit of a sensationalist and he lives up to that rep with tabloidy lines like “It was during the third rock number that the first wave of Rockers erupted from the stands and sprinted for the stage. This ritual was repeated by co-ed guerilla bands after each succeeding song. The Mods, meanwhile, responded to the ultimate desecration of their idol by throwing fruit.” What was probably a relatively civilized event is depicted as some kind of rock and roll riot. Accurate? I don’t know. Funny? Yes. Newfield was a smart cat, but rock and roll was definitely not his beat.
At Forest Hills: Mods, Rockers Fight Over New Thing Called ‘Dylan’
Twenty-four year old Bob Dylan may have been the oldest person in the crowd of 15,000 that jammed Forest Hills Stadium Saturday night.
The teenage throng was bitterly divided between New York equivalents of Mods and Rockers. The Mods—folk purists, new leftists, and sensitive collegians—came to hear Dylan’s macabre surrealist poems like “Gates of Eden” and “A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall.” But the Rockers—and East Village pothead—came to stomp their feet to Dylan’s more recent explorations of electronic “rock folk.”
The confrontation was riotous. The Mods booed their former culture hero savagely after each of his amplified rock melodies. They chanted We want Dylan and shouted insults at him. Meanwhile, the Rockers, in frenzied kamikaze squadrons of six and eight, leaped out of the stands after each rock song and raced for the stage. Some just wanted to touch their newfound, sunken-eyed idol, while others seemed to prefer playing Keystone cops with pudgy stadium police, running zig-zag on the grass until captured in scenes reminiscent of the first Beatle movie.
The factionalism within the teenage sub-culture seemed as fierce as that between Social Democrats and Stalinists, and it began even before Dylan set foot on the wind-swept stage. Folk disc jockey Jerry White introduced from the wings, “The Fifth Beatle, Murray the K.”
The leading symbol of commercialization and frenetic “Top 40” disc jockeying was greeted with a cascade of boos. “There’s a new swinging mood in the country,” Murray the K began, “and Bobby baby is definitely what’s happenin’, baby.”
The teenage argot drove the Mods to even greater fury. But when the K added, “It’s not rock, it’s not folk, it’s a new thing called Dylan,” a united front of cheers filled the night.
After three introductions, Dylan finally emerged from the wings like a timid bird with a lion’s mane. The first half of his concert was devoted exclusively to the image-filled, heavily symbolic absurdist songs he was identified with before he unveiled his “electricity” at Newport last month. The Mods listened enraptured as he sang the familiar images: “She is a hypnotist collector/You are a walking antique” and “She can take the dark out of the night and paint the daytime black.”
A few moments later, hunched over, his long hair rippling in the breeze, Dylan mesmerized the Mods, half singing, half chanting, “The Gates of Eden”:
“I try to harmonize with songs the lonesome sparrow sings . . . at dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dream/With no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.”
Then Dylan sang a long, new dream called “Desolation Row” that contained these two verses:
“All except Cain and Abel and the Hunchback of Notre Dame/Everybody is either making love or waiting for rain/Ophelia, she’s beneath the window, for her I feel so afraid/On her 22nd birthday, she’s still an old maid.”
“The Titanic sails at dawn/Everyone is shouting ‘Which side are you on’/Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are fighting in the captain’s tower/While calypso singers laugh at them below them . . . “
But Dylan is like Norman Mailer: He never repeats himself or exploits his past. Just as Mailer has moved inevitably from Trotskyism to hipsterism to mysticism, so has Dylan grown from political protest to rock folk.
A four-piece amplified band (electronic organ, electronic bass, electronic guitar, and drums) backed Dylan up the second half of the concert. After the first rock song, the Mods booed Dylan. After the second someone called him a “scum bag,” and he replied cooly, “Aw, come on now.” After the third the Mods chanted sardonically, “We Want Dylan.”
It was during the third rock number that the first wave of Rockers erupted from the stands and sprinted for the stage. This ritual was repeated by co-ed guerilla bands after each succeeding song. The Mods, meanwhile, responded to the ultimate desecration of their idol by throwing fruit. But they should have been listening to the lyrics—they were as poetic as ever.
Perhaps in an attempt to show the Mods he wasn’t “going commercial” or “selling out,” Dylan performed a few of his earlier hits like “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” with a muted rocking beat. The message seemed to get through, and much of the Mods’ wrath subsided. And the Mods joined the Rockers in wildly applauding Dylan’s second new song of the evening (no title announced), which he sang while playing the piano standing up.
America’s most influential poet since Allen Ginsberg then sang his top-selling “Like a Rolling Stone,” and the factions divided again. The Mods booed, and during the last chorus a dozen teenagers charged the stage, exhausted police in slow-footed pursuit. Keeping his cool, Dylan finished the song, mumbled, “Thank you, very much,” and walked off without doing an encore, while kids and cops cavorted on the grass.”
Keeping in the tabloid spirit of Newfield’s article, I’m sharing the notorious Dylan/Lennon limousine footage from May 27, 1966 in which both musicians were reputedly drunk and/or tripping. Dylan certainly seems out of it. Lennon seems bemused. While we’ve previously shared a portion of this on DM, this is the long version. There’s an additional four minutes of footage that wasn’t included in this clip because it’s silent and consists mostly of Dylan looking nauseous and Lennon looking bored.
Via the website kickstarter.com, director Leilah Weinraub is looking to raise $25,000 to finish the final cut of her film Shakedown, before the deadline of Monday 7th of February. Focusing on three main performers, the film is a look inside a black, lesbian strip club in L.A. called, appropriately, Shakedown, and also looks at the history of queer strip clubs in Los Angeles. From the Shakedown2011.com website:
SHAKEDOWN emphasizes the symbiotic nature of how things work in a system. Shakedown’s system functions like a family, put into motion for all the reasons that people need a family, support (financial and emotional), a place of self-growth and a place of self-expression. Through the lens of family, a desire for stability and love, the film meditates on dense topics like three generations of teenage pregnancy, lesbian motherhood, chosen family, and money as a symbol of that love.
Director Weinraub says:
I videotaped the shows at Shakedown every Thursday and Friday night for six years. The first two years I recorded the performances and created video installations at the club. The closed-circuit media making was parallel to the by-women for-women performances that were happening on stage, channeling back an instant history to the creators of the moment. On stage at Shakedown there is a narrative being performed, about sex and sexuality and pop music and the emotional interior of the performers. There is the narrative on the stage, then there is the narrative that is told by the stories of the protagonists in the film, then there is the story that is put together when I edit the film. They all work together.
I’m donating to this film, and so should you - it looks great, and has interest for viewers not just black or queer-identified. You can donate at the Kickstarter website , and there’s an interesting range of gifts for donors too. If you liked Paris Is Burning, check it out:
Innovative L.A.-based electronic music label Plug Research scored big-time when they signed Philly-raised soul singer Bilal Sayeed Oliver in the middle of 2009 to release his revelatory sophomore album Airtight’s Revenge. Bilal left his former label Interscope soon after they shelved his proposed second album, Love For Sale, based on their skepticism of its commercial potential and the fact that it was leaked before official release. Seems like an aphorism for the steady decline of the music industry to me.
Directed by stoned prodigal son Flying Lotus (damn, does that mean he did all that animation?), the recently released video for Bilal’s track “Levels” seems to evince how eagerly the singer has swallowed the red pill. This is some high high Afromythofuturistic material right here.
FULL SCREEN
The Sounds of VTech / Bilal Levels
Get: Bilal - Airtight’s Revenge [CD]
Dada artist and filmmaker, Hans Richter made Ghosts Before Breakfast (AKA Vormittagsspuk) in 1927. In it, inanimate objects come to life and rebel against their normal routines. Extremely clever use of stop-motion animation, it’s as if the art form is practically being invented before your eyes… because it kinda was.
A version of Ghosts Before Breakfast with a soundtrack was destroyed in the Nazi purge of “degenerate art.” The music here is by Nikolai von Sallwitz. His modern score is pretty effective.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Dreams Money Can Buy: Surrealist Feature Film from 1947
An art show with a Terence McKenna-inspired theme opens this Saturday in Los Angeles. The Archaic Revival, after McKenna’s book of the same title, will explore “the collective subconscious of contemporary art through “allegorical code, sacred plant knowledge, magic and an untethered glossolalia.”
Curator Dani Tull has gathered 31 artists together who’ll visually explore alchemy, prophecy, mysticism and of course, this being a Terence McKenna inspired show, the end of time and psychedelics. The exhibit runs from Saturday, January 29th to February 26th at artist run gallery, Las Cienegas Projects at 2045 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Featured artists include Chromium Dumb Belle, Alison Blickle, Tracy Conti & Stephen McCarty, Liz Craft, Sarah Cromarty, Michael Decker, Francesca Gabbiani, Wendell Gladstone, Pearl C. Hsiung, Charles Irvin, Pentti Monkkonen, Sandeep Mukherjee, Alia Penner, Brian Randolph, Ewoud Van Rijn, Eddie Ruscha, Amy Sarkisian, Allison Schulnik, Anna Sew Hoy, Mindy Shapero, Jim Shaw, Laurie Steelink, Thaddeus Strode, Marnie Weber, Owleyes “James” Weigel, and Landon Wiggs.
Here’s the trailer for the event with an awesome Tony Conrad and Faust soundtrack:
The Oscar nominations were announced today, and as I suspected, this guy isn’t going to get a look in. Actually, that’s a bit unfair as Gainsbourg - or Gainsbourg (Vie Héroique) to give it its full title - hasn’t been nationally released in the States, despite premiering as part of the Tribeca film festival last year.
Perhaps not well known enough in America, and with an Oscar win for a lead in a French language music biopic still fresh in the memory (Marion Cottilard) it seems even less likely that he’d get a nod, but Eric Elmosnino is superb. Gainsbourg is one of the best music biopics of recent years, and skillfully blends animation and puppetry into his life story, from growing up in Nazi-occupied Paris, to writing some era-defining music, to bedding of some of the most beautiful women on the planet.
Fans of Gainsbourg’s music should check out its soundtrack, a mixture of re-recordings by the cast, stripped down pieces that dance around themes for the “here’s how I wrote my biggest hit” moments, and orchestral re-arrangements of some of Gainsbourg’s best melodies by the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra. The scenes of Gainsbourg writing with Brigitte Bardot are great, especially if the actual lyrics had passed you by up til now (thanks, subtitles!).
Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra “Initials BB”
Gonzales “Gainsbourg cherche “Je t’aime… moi non plus””
Laetitia Casta “Bonnie And Clyde”
As if Elmosnino’s performance as the legendary pop lothario wasn’t good enough on its own, it should be noted that he actually sang all the lead vocals on the film’s soundtrack himself. He doesn’t just look like Serge, he sounds like him too. It’s uncanny. Here he is with the band Dionysus performing the somewhat slightly controversial Gainsbourg hit “Nazi Rock” (Serge’s Jewish identity is one of the main themes of the film):
Gainsbourg has just come out on DVD in the UK and is available to buy on Amazon, as is the soundtrack.
Let me say right upfront that I am a huge fan of The Stranglers and their former lead singer, songwriter and guitar player Hugh Cornwell. I vividly remember the day in 1977 that I bought Rattus Norvegicus at a shop in Greenwich Village (Robert Quine was also buying a copy) and the subsequent thrill of listening to it over and over again that night and for months to follow. A big influence on the punk scene in England, The Stranglers’ guttural, malevolent and beautiful rock and roll was primitive and yet sophisticated, savage and sublime. Seeing them live a few months later at the Second Avenue Theater was among the most exciting rock shows I’ve ever experienced.
In 1990 Cornwell left the band and as far as I’m concerned that was the end of what was arguably one of the best and most underappreciated bands of the past four decades. Although The Stranglers have recorded and toured with various different lead singers, the magic has long been gone. I saw the reconstituted Stranglers with some nondescript lead vocalist in the mid-90s at The Cat Club and it was like seeing the Doors without Jim Morrison or The Sex Pistols fronted by the guy from Creed. Nothing worse than a pioneering punk band reduced to an oldies act.
It pains me that there is so much much bad blood between Hugh Cornwell and the rest of the group that they’ve never buried whatever hatchet exists between them and gone back into the studio to make more of the sound I’ll always love.
Cornwell seems to be on an eternal solo world tour. He must need the money. I can’t imagine he’s thrilled playing Stranglers’ classics with pick-up bands or by himself on electric guitar. Which brings me to this recent performance on Brazilian TV. Why, Hugh, why? It’s the money, right? From the rollergirls in bathing suits waving flags to the drummer who looks like an extra from The Young Ones, this has to be one of the lamest things I’ve seen a rock legend subject himself to in the name of keeping his career alive. I know I’m probably overreacting, but don’t we all feel a twinge of sadness when one of our heroes suddenly seems ordinary, smaller than life rather than bigger?
Hugh, if you’re reading this, give Jean-Jacque, Jet Black and Dave a call. Tell them all is forgiven. The Stranglers aren’t The Stranglers without you and you’re not the artist you were without them. It’s never too late.
Some choice videos of The Stranglers after the jump…
