In the early 1970s Jamaican dubmeisters supreme King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry collaborated on an album called Blackboard Jungle wherein each mixed one channel of stereo down to what amounted to two separate mono mixes. It’s breathtakingly ingenious—not to mention a terribly elaborate and work intensive process—but it doesn’t hold a patch on what “easy listening” legend Juan Garcia Esquivel got up to a decade prior. He’d sometimes use an entire orchestra in each channel, the musicians sitting in adjoining recording studios…

Have a listen to “Mucha Muchacha” from Esquivel’s 1962 album, Latin-Esque—this is some serious stuff, is it not?
 

 
Mexico City-raised Esquivel was the primary creator of the sub-genre of easy listening that was retrospectively called “Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music” (a term coined by DM pal, artist/Subgenius Byron Werner). His innovative, idiosyncratic (and instantly recognizable) music made full use of the vast possibilities of the newfangled stereophonic soundscape—exotic instrumentation, quick-change dynamics, polyphonic percussion, ping-ponging sound effects—and the perfectionist composer, arranger and pianist created the sort of record albums that insured they were used to demonstrate the highest fidelity stereo equipment. Incredibly, he was an entirely self-taught musician.

Continues over…

 
The story would be dull—clichéd even—without the voyeuristic thrill that comes with the intimate details: a married German businessman and his married secretary, Margret, have a brief affair from 1969 to 1970. Everything you see here came from a suitcase purchased at an estate auction 30 years after the affair, and it’s an utterly engrossing collection of artifacts.

Not only did the unnamed businessman photograph the intimate moments before and after sex (including shots of dresses he bought for her—on the hanger, then on her, then on the bed), he kept keepsakes, including a lock of hair and an empty birth control blister-pack. The strangest part though is his “journal,” a series of typed, dated, wholly factual and completely emotionless entries—more of an impassive record of events than a log of romantic musings. Germans!

On their own, the photos seem to hint at a tender, maybe even loving time together, but the details reveal a much darker, volatile side of the tryst. At one point, the man’s wife confronts Margret, accusing her of disrupting a happy marriage. Margret is furious, and so the businessman then forces his wife to apologize to her. As delusional as she appears to be, it is this unseen wife who feels the most human, and one wonders if any guilt was felt on the part of the businessman or mistress Margret.

The collection is now being curated in its entirety as Gallery Margret: Chronicle of an Affair – May 1969 to December 1970, at the White Columns gallery in New York’s Meatpacking District, through April 18th.
 

 

 

 
More intriguing intimacies after the jump…

 
Meet Australian woman Karen Davis. She was able to do the impossible, flash her boobs at a Google Street View car which then made it onto Google Street View without them being blurred out. As most know by now, Google Street View’s algorithm blurs-out license plate numbers and faces. I guess there’s no algorithm for areolas.

“I look at Google Maps a lot and I wanted to be on there and I thought this is the way to do it,” Davis told the Port Pirie Recorder, her local newspaper. “I got to tick something else off my bucket list.”

“I also did it for a friend in the United Kingdom. Now he can see me all the time,” said Davis.

Google has since gotten a hold of this titillating information in the past few hours and have now blurred Davis out completely. Aussies, amirite?

Below, is the naughty photo for posterity.

 
via Death and Taxes

 
Shane Parrish at Farnam Street reminded me of an amusing passage from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) in which he explains how to keep the pounds off.
 

But if you do watch your weight, try the Andy Warhol New York City Diet: when I order in a restaurant, I order everything that I don’t want, so I have a lot to play around with while everyone else eats. Then, no matter how chic the restaurant is, I insist that the waiter wrap the entire plate up like a to-go order, and after we leave the restaurant I find a little corner outside in the street to leave the plate in, because there are so many people in New York who live in the streets, with everything they own in shopping bags.

So I lose weight and stay trim, and I think that maybe one of those people will find a Grenouille dinner on the window ledge. But then, you never know, maybe they wouldn’t like what I ordered as much as I didn’t like it, and maybe they’d turn up their noses and look through the garbage for some half-eaten rye bread. You just never know with people. You just never know what they’ll like, what you should do for them.

So that’s the Andy Warhol New York City Diet.

 
La Grenouille was and is a fancy eatery in Midtown, by the way. If the above passage teaches you anything, it might be “Don’t take diet advice from thin people.” Having said that, however, the intersection of Warhol and food yields some interesting nuggets.

Not terribly surprisingly, Andy Warhol claimed that his only weakness for nostalgia had to do with the old-style automats like Schrafft’s, for which, remarkably, Warhol did a 60-second commercial in 1968 that consisted of a single voluptuous pan over one of Schrafft’s scrumptious chocolate sundaes. That commercial, alas, appears to be lost to the sands of time, but you can watch a 2014 “re-creation” of the commercial here.

Anyway, here’s Warhol on Schrafft’s and Chock Full O’ Nuts:
 

My favorite restaurant atmosphere has always been the atmosphere of the good, plain, America lunchroom or even the good plain American lunchcounter. The old-style Schrafft’s and the old-style Chock Full O’ Nuts are absolutely the only things in the world that I’m truly nostalgic for. The days were carefree in the 1940s and 1950s when I could go into a Chocks for my cream cheese sandwich with nuts on date-nut bread and not worry about a thing.

 
A few lines later, Warhol writes, “Progress is very important and exciting in everything except food.” But that didn’t prevent him from proposing an eccentric dining solution for lonesome foodies:
 

I really like to eat alone. I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called ANDY-MATS—“The Restaurant for the Lonely Person.” You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television.

 
Incredibly, as the blog Restaurant-ing Through History explains, that ridiculous Andy-Mat idea nearly happened in real life. Below is a picture of Warhol with three associates, architect Araldo Cossutta, developer Geoffrey Leeds, and financier C. Cheever Hardwick III; it appears that the picture was taken at some sort of announcement event for the Andy-Mat, which was to be “an unpretentious neighborhood restaurant serving homely comfort food at reasonable prices which was slated to open in fall of 1977 on Madison Avenue at 74th Street in NYC.”
 

 
For anyone who knows New York, Madison and 74th Street is a terrible place to place an “unpretentious neighborhood restaurant” serving food at “reasonable prices.” The plan was to include “pneumatic tubes through which customers’ orders would be whooshed into the kitchen. The meals served in Andy-Mats, in keeping with the times, were to be frozen dinners requiring only reheating.” Hooray, frozen dinners! Unsurprisingly, the restaurants never happened.

Continues after the jump…

 
We’ve posted these musicless music videos here on DM before, but this one for Ray Parker, Jr.‘s “Ghostbusters” is like a paranoia-fueled nightmare. I never realized how stalker-ish the video was until the music was taken away.

So if there’s something strange in your neighborhood it’s probably just Ray Parker, Jr. and you should just skip over calling the Ghostbusters and call the cops. Immediately.

 
via Geekologie

Angela Davis
 
I’ve been noticing a recent (though long overdue) trend in woman-centric education tools for the tiniest of tots, but frankly, a lot of them are super lame. I don’t really think preschoolers need to learn about Hillary Clinton, she’ll be ruling over them soon enough. They’ll get it by osmosis…

The new alphabet book—Rad American Women A-Z: Rebels, Trailblazers, and Visionaries who Shaped Our History . . . and Our Future! is a breath of fresh air on that front. Combining figures from the arts like Patti Smith and dancer Isadora Duncan with human rights activist Yuri Kochiyama, and the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, Wilma Mankiller, the book goes for the deeper cuts and avoids a wholesome/boring lecture on “foremothers”—plus, the graphics beat a princess theme any day. Considering how many times kids request the same book, I’d say it’s a good move for parental sanity.
 

Carol Burnett
 

Isadora Duncan
 
More after the jump…

 
Whether or not you’re a fan of their unique brand of turgid hardboogie-prog, this recently uploaded video of Kansas performing their signature hit “Carry On Wayward Son” in 1978 at the Canada Jam is, to say the least, energetic.

Perhaps it’s unfair to make speculations about ‘70s rock band members cocaine habits—to firstly assume they are on the drug—and to further assume Scarface office desk levels of the white stuff being inhaled before the show, but holy shit THIS VIDEO. The band, or at least singer Steve Walsh, appear to have had some degree of chemical enhancement working in their favor.
 

 
A few online sources mention that years later, in the ‘90s, Walsh was supposedly arrested for possession and threatened with jail time. We also know from this 700 Club interview that guitarist Kerry Livgren and bassist Dave Hope were seriously addicted until they “found God.” In that particular interview, Hope admits to having spent $40,000 (in 1980 dollars!) on cocaine the year before his Christian rebirth. We can only guess what the differences would be between Dave Hope’s and Steve Walsh’s level of commitment to the white lady, but this performance seems to indicate Walsh was in imminent danger of flying off the stage and into the stratosphere at any second.

Me personally, I think “Carry on Wayward Son” is a killer ‘70s jam. It’s not even a “guilty” pleasure—and I don’t really care what was getting them through the show—to me, this totally rules. Your mileage may vary. If Kansas’ brand of arena rock is not exactly your cup of tea, you might just want to watch a guy completely out of his mind, going absolutely apeshit on what is probably a mountain of blow. In that case, proceed directly to 1:46 and 3:39 in this over-the-top performance.

There ain’t no dust in the wind here.
 

 
In 1966, an unremarkable-seeming children’s album called Batman and Robin was released, by an insignificant label called Tifton Records, to cash in on the very popular Adam West Batman TV series. Apart from the remake of the TV show’s theme, the album was mostly instrumental, and had nothing in particular to do with Batman, but it remains an item of interest because of who played on it. While it was credited to “The Sensational Guitars of DAN & DALE,” the actual studio band was made up of members of Al Kooper’s Blues Project and Sun Ra’s Arkestra! Organs on the Batman and Robin album are played by Ra, saxes are performed by Arkestra stalwarts Marshall Allen and John Gilmore, and guitars are played by the Blues Project’s legendary Steve Katz and Danny Kalb. (Kalb is the only “Dan” present; there is no one named Dale in the credits as far as I can find. It should be mentioned that there are a ton of crappy albums credited to Dan & Dale on the Diplomat label, and I can’t imagine there’s any way that the Arkestra and Blues Project played on them. That’s a junkyard rabbit-hole for another day, though.) The album—and again, this was marketed to children to cash in on a goofy TV show—is accordingly badass, full of satisfying soul riffs and fiery surf-guitar leads. It also nods to classical music and the Beatles. Per Bruce Eder’s deeply-researched Allmusic overview:

No, Batman and Robin doesn’t match the importance of the Blues Project’s own official recordings, or anything that Sun Ra was doing officially, but what a chance to hear these guys kicking back for a half-hour’s anonymous blues jamming. Everything here, apart from the Neal Hefti “Batman Theme” is public domain blues built on some familiar material (including Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Bach), one cut, appropriately entitled “The Riddler’s Retreat,” quotes riffs and phrases from a half-dozen Beatles songs, and another, “The Bat Cave,” that’s this group’s answer to “Green Onions” (and a good answer, too). Along with Sun Ra, who dominates every passage he plays on, Steve Katz and Danny Kalb are the stars here, romping and stomping over everything as they weave around each other, while Gilmore, Allen, and Owens occasionally stepping to the fore, Blumenfeld makes his percussion sound downright tuneful in a few spots, and some anonymous female singers throw out a lyric or two on a pair of cuts, just as a distraction.

 

 
As Eder pointed out, the female singer on the following two tracks is uncredited. Whoever she is, good GOD, she deserves her accolades, especially for the blowout performance on “Robin’s Theme!”
 

Sun Ra & the Blues Project, “Batman Theme.”
 
More Sun Ra and the Blues Project after the jump…

 
Being one of The Beatles meant being mobbed, followed and even stalked everywhere you went. They quit Liverpool for London for its mix of anonymity and excitement—and because everything happened there. Eventually, John, George and Ringo moved on to the stockbroker belt to find peace, quiet and happy isolation. But even there, Lennon had unwelcome visitors who wanted a photo or to say that they understood what his songs were about, and touch the hem of his clothes.

Eventually, Lennon moved again, this time to New York where he said he could walk the streets without anyone bothering him. Going by these fan photographs of Lennon in London and New York, it’s obvious he was just as mobbed by devoted fans in the Big Apple as he had been back in the Big Smoke.

These fan snaps capture Lennon from the late 1960s, through his relationship with Yoko Ono, to just before his untimely death in 1980.
 

 

John Lennon signing an autograph outside the Abbey Road Studios, 1968.

More fan snaps of John Lennon, after the jump…
 

 
Aside from actual Nazi skinheads (and those petulant, “ironic” listeners who fancy themselves “edgy”), Skrewdriver presents one of the more divisive ethical conundrums in punk. There are those who abstain entirely from their music, arguing that even their pre-Nazi album is tainted by an eventual embrace of fascism, there are fans who maintain that all non-Nazi material is fair game, and there is the camp who argues that—providing you’re not actually putting cash in Nazi pockets—no art should be off-limits. I tend to agree with the third philosophy, and while I don’t really listen to Skrewdriver anyway (and certainly wouldn’t crank it outside the privacy of my own home), I don’t see how critically listening to Nazi punk is any more an endorsement of Nazism than listening to Wagner is (though it’s a bit of a moot point anyway, since unlike Wagner, Nazi punk pretty much all sucks, and isn’t really worth listening to for anything other than educational purposes or curiosity).
 

 
But what if you’re really, really in the mood for the infectious meathead Oi! that only Skrewdriver provides, minus the revolting white nationalism? Enter Jewdriver, an all-Jewish Skrewdriver cover band—sort of. The brainchild of 90s Oakland punks, Skrewdriver was formed with the express purpose of ripping off Nazi licks while ridiculing Nazi dicks, with songs like “Hail the Jew Dawn"and “Our Blame is Goyim Glee”, the band mimics Skrewdriver’s sound really well. They’ve had a few line-ups over the years, but they keep popping up for the odd show—they even have a following in Germany (these days, the country tends toward a certain redemptive Judeophilia, embracing all things of “the Tribe”)! It can be hard to find their records, but you can hear their EP below.
 

 
As far as I’m concerned, Jewdriver is a win-win. First of all, you can’t really understand most of Skrewdriver’s lyrics anyway, so it’s not like you’re distracted by parody kitsch (thought the odd joke about circumcision does bring a smile to one’s face). Also, you can now listen to a reasonable facsimile of Skrewdriver in public! Most importantly though, the band probably really pisses off some Nazis, and isn’t that a valiant pursuit in its own right?