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Frida Kahlo’s secret revenge affair with Leon Trotsky
11.13.2013
05:17 pm
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To get back at her much older husband for his most recent infidelity, Frida Kahlo’s odd choice of a lover was their new housemate, the even older and also married Leon Trotsky. It is a plot out of a French farce, soap opera, proper high-brow opera, or an episode of The Jerry Springer Show if he had Marxist Revolutionary Week.

The exiled 58-year-old Leon Trotsky and his second wife Natalia Sedova arrived in Tampico, Mexico on a heavily guarded Norwegian oil tanker on January 9, 1937. The muralist and dedicated Trotskyite Diego Rivera had lobbied the Mexican government to offer Trotsky political asylum. Diego, ill and hospitalized, could not be at the port to meet the Trotskys. Instead his young wife, surrealist artist Frida Kahlo, was at the dock with journalists, Communist Party members, and government officials. She accompanied the couple back to Coyoacán and the home she shared with Diego, La Casa Azul (The Blue House), where the Trotskys lived heavily protected and catered to for two years.

Still angry and hurt from discovering Diego’s affair with her beautiful younger sister Cristina, Frida lost no time in openly flirting with Trotsky, who must have been flattered as hell at the attention. That spring their emotional affair grew into a physical one. Some of Frida and Trotsky’s clandestine meetings took place at Cristina’s house, which Diego had probably bought for her, along with a suite of red leather furniture. Frida and and Trotsky spoke English in front of their spouses, whose grasp of the language was paltry to non-existent, in Natalia’s case. He sneaked love letters to Frida between the pages of books he loaned to her.

Rivera was, by all accounts, an unrepentant philanderer with the hypocritical tendency to randomly fly into jealous rage when Frida behaved similarly with other men during their stormy marriage. (Her affairs with women, like Josephine Baker, didn’t bother him.) Stephanie Mencimer wrote in Washington Monthly, “Legend has it that for American women traveling to Mexico, having sex with Rivera was considered as essential as visiting Tenochtitlan.”

Diego and Natalia eventually discovered the dalliance, which seems to have been over by July 1937. Surprisingly he allowed Trotsky to continue to live at La Casa Azul instead of coming after him with a gun. There was enough of a political falling-out between the two men, not over infidelity but over Trotskyism, to prompt the revolutionary and his wife to move out of La Casa Azul and into a nearby house on Avenida Viena in early 1939. He left behind the self-portrait she had dedicated to him, “Between the Curtains.” In the painting she is holding a document that says, “To Trotsky with great affection, I dedicate this painting November 7, 1937. Frida Kahlo, in San Angel, Mexico.” November 7th was Trotsky’s birthday as well as the Gregorian calendar anniversary of the October Revolution.
 
fridacurtains
 

Frida and Trostky remained friends until his assassination by Ramón Mercader on Stalin’s orders the following year. She was a suspect in the murder and held by police for questioning for two days.

No passionate missives between the unlikely lovers survive. According to biographer Bertrande M. Patenaude, author of Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, at the end of their brief relationship Trotsky asked Frida to return all his love letters so he could burn them.
 
Frida & Diego & Natalia & Leon: Rare home movie footage from 1938 of the two couples in Coyocoán, Mexico:

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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11.13.2013
05:17 pm
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This could suck: Kathleen Hanna on public speaking
11.13.2013
04:31 pm
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Feminist performer, punk icon, writer and frontwoman for Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin, Kathleen Hanna’s talents also include being an engaging public speaker. Thanks to her experience talking in front of journalists, unruly crowds at concerts, tamer audiences in university classrooms, libraries and lecture halls, she knows what she’s doing. Here she explains how to get up in front of a group of people, who may or may not be throwing things and yelling sexist insults at you from the mosh pit, and get your point across without undue worry about whether you suck at public oratory.
 

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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11.13.2013
04:31 pm
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‘M’ is for Misandry: A horror movie for the man-haters
11.13.2013
04:08 pm
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I’m staunchly defensive of violence in horror movies. Sure, sometimes it’s an exercise in exploiting a visceral audience reaction with some cheap splatter, but when it’s done right, it can exorcise our fears and neuroses, and even give some really subtle commentary. This is not to say I don’t have my critiques within the horror genre.

For example, we need more ladies perpetrating the gore!

While The Woman, Teeth, and American Mary all have some great female roles, I think it’s time for a couple of women on a man-murdering spree, don’t you?

‘M’ is for Misandry is a submission to The ABCs of Death, a competition where up and coming filmmakers can submit a letter-themed short horror movie or trailer. We follow our two murderers (anti-heroines?) as they target, trap, and torture unsuspecting men. While it’s clearly a shoe-string budget (and the editing could be a little cleaner), I’m totally into this concept. Can we get this greenlighted with a fat budget and maybe flip the damned “final girl” cliche?
 

 
Via The Wall Breakers

Posted by Amber Frost
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11.13.2013
04:08 pm
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‘Face to Face’ with Allen Ginsberg
11.13.2013
03:38 pm
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This is a fine interview with Allen Ginsberg taken from the BBC series Face to Face, in which Ginsberg opens up about his family, loves, identity, drugs and even sings.

The series, Face to Face originally started in 1959, and was hosted by John Freeman, whose skill and forthright questioning cut through the usual mindless chatter of such interview shows. Freeman, a former editor of the New Statesman was often considered brusque and rude, but his style of questioning fitted the form of the program, which was more akin to an interview between psychiatrist and patient. The original series included, now legendary, interviews with Martin Luther King, Tony Hancock, Professor Carl Jung, Evelyn Waugh and Gilbert Harding.

In 1989, the BBC revived the series, this time with the excellent Jeremy Isaacs as questioner, who interviewed Allen Ginsberg for this program, first broadcast on 9th January 1995.

Watching this now, makes me wonder what has happened to poetry? Where are our revolutionary poets? Where are our poets who speak out, demonstrate, make the front page, and tell it like it is? And why are our bookstores cluttered with the greeting card verse of 100 Great Love Poems, 101 Even Greater Love Poems, and Honest to God, These Are the Greatest Fucking Love Poems, You’ll Ever Fucking Read. O, for a Ginsberg now.

 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.13.2013
03:38 pm
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Everything’s Turning Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals
11.13.2013
02:53 pm
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This is a guest post from New York-based writer Mike Sacks. Mike’s next book, Poking a Dead Frog, will be released in June 2014 from Viking Penguin. It’s the second volume of his in-depth interviews with comedy writers.

One of my favorite books of the last few months is Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals. Co-written by Steve Young, a long-time writer for Late Show with David Letterman, and Sport Murphy, a professional musician and pop-culture historian, the book is a tribute to a bizarre, fascinating world that I never knew existed, but had only heard about through back-alley innuendo and late-night, cross-country A.M. radio chit-chat: the personal life of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.

Wait a sec, I’m confusing my notes. Here we go: This book, published in mid-October by Blast Books, is a beautifully-designed, wonderfully-written tribute to musicals performed at corporate conventions, mostly taking place from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s.

Often written by professional composers and lyricists, these elaborate, expensive productions were used to elevate the morale of employees during their once-a-year company-sponsored vacations to not-so-exotic locales, such as Tampa or Pittsburgh. Some musicals were about cars. Others were about appliances, tractors, and fast-food. One 1971 musical, All Aboard, was written to promote Country Club Malt Liquor, a product whose mascot appears to have been an aging pirate with one hand in his pants. The product still exists. The mascot does not.

As if the musical productions weren’t enough for these sunburned, possibly inebriated employees, companies were sometimes also gracious enough to press LPs for employees to be enjoyed on home turntables, perhaps only a few times, if at all. Chances are better that the LP sleeves were taken out every once in a while just to prove that, yes, a musical did once take place that featured actresses in marching band outfits, singing disco-infused ditties about a brand-new Johnson & Johnson sunscreen called “Sundown.” (That musical took place from December 5 – 9, 1977, at the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Phoenix. The hotel still exists. The sunscreen does not.)

As with any sub-category of LPs, there exist a handful of experts. Luckily for us, the two foremost authorities in the world on “industrial musicals” joined forces (after having battled each other for LPs on eBay for years) in order to produce a book that will delight any fan of the glorious disasters that often resulted when big business crashed into big entertainment.
 

 
The book’s companion website, industrialmusicals.com, exists for those readers brave enough to listen to (among other earworm-inducing songs) the strangely melancholic “My Bathroom” from 1969’s The Bathrooms are Coming.

My bathroom, my bathroom, is a private kind of place/very special kind of place/the only place where I can stay making faces at my face.

Profits is the perfect coffee table book. Buy it. I spoke to Steve and Sport by email and in person.

Steve, you’ve been in charge of Late Night’s and Late Show’s recurring comedy bit “Dave’s Record Collection” since you started as a writer for Letterman in 1990. Can you tell me about coming across your first industrial musical LP and your initial thoughts?

Steve Young: The first one I saw was Go Fly A Kite, in 1993. While I was typically going out to record stores to hunt for “Dave’s Record Collection” material, I think that particular album was actually sent in to the show by a viewer. I certainly didn’t understand what it really was; I just thought, Oh good, GE. We can make fun of that on the show. In those days, NBC was owned by GE and we were always mocking them. I had no idea of the significance of the names John Kander and Fred Ebb [composers for the stage musicals Cabaret, Chicago and Kiss of the Spider Woman, as well as the 1977 Martin Scorsese movie New York, New York], having grown up with no exposure to musicals. I did think, Wow, this is awfully elaborate and well done for some oddball private show. It wasn’t until later when I’d turned up a few more—and realized that songs about selling insurance or diesel engines were getting stuck in my head—that it began to dawn on me that this might really be a genre. In ’96, I began tracking down composers and cold-calling record stores.

How about you, Sport?

Sport Murphy: I found 1962’s Penney Proud [for retail chain J.C. Penney] in a Salvation Army thrift store on one of my oddity expeditions, circa ’79 or ’80. Like most civilians, I never knew these shows existed and I thought this was a singular slice of weird. There were any number of oddball finds in those bins: self-released horrible comedy albums, instructional records of the least practical sort, product promo giveaways, but it was the deluxe nature of Penney Proud that set it apart. Gatefold sleeve, performance photos, and the lush, totally professional music. As other such LPs gradually emerged over the years, the idea that this was an entire genre—one immortalized on vinyl for our hunting and gathering enjoyment—beguiled me.
 

 
How good a career could these songwriters achieve by writing industrial musicals?

Steve Young: Apparently the money was quite good. I don’t know that anyone ever had industrials in mind as their ultimate goal, but while a composer angled for his big “real Broadway” breakthrough, industrials could make life very comfortable. In the industrial heyday [1950s through 1970s], corporations often had enormous budgets for these productions, and if a composer had gotten their foot in the door with a successful first attempt, they might continue to work for many years for the same production company or the same corporation. The downside was that you’d often get stereotyped within the Broadway community as an “industrial show composer,” a lesser level of talent and seriousness. A 1976 NY Times article profiled the excellent Hank Beebe/Bill Heyer writing team, who’d just been hired to help with the Jerry Lewis flop Hellzapoppin’. In the piece, Bill Heyer said something like, “You do a great job, but you can’t really go brag to your friends, ‘I just did the American Motors show.’”

Sport Murphy: Not only songwriters but performers, designers and all other skilled specialists and artisans could build entire careers in the industrial field. One prominent purveyor of industrials, Jam Handy Corporation, had by the 1950s become the nation’s largest employer of theatrical talent, producing as many as twenty sales conference shows yearly. The rarity of these albums belies the enormity of the enterprise they represent.

Have you seen any video footage of these musicals?

Steve Young: Thanks to [composer] Hank Beebe and his transferring the original twenty-minute 1973 film to DVD, I finally got to see Love Is The Answer, the film that was part of the ’73 GE show Got To Investigate Silicones. Our industrialmusicals.com site has an excerpt, the legendary “The Answer.” Film of the actual stage productions is rare; there’s part of a ’55 Chevy dealer show on YouTube, and there are a few brief clips of the ’66 GE Go Fly A Kite show. Video is definitely harder to come by. I hope some more will emerge.
 

 
Sport Murphy: One of the things about writing this book that’s fun is getting to see what kind of stuff will turn up now that there’s a light thrown on the genre; for me, film and video footage is the most interesting possibility. We know that some of these shows were simulcast closed-circuit, so kinescopes are possible. Others were produced as films, to be shown in conjunction with live elements. I’m guessing that there are numerous privately-held videotapes and films, made as keepsakes or perhaps as work-sample reels for prospective clients. The thought makes one salivate. And the thought of that shames one, as it should. One had better just drop the whole subject.

Do you think that these musicals actually did improve company morale? The attendees seen in the book’s photos tend look a bit indifferent, if not drunk.

Steve Young: Hard to tell. For a long time, the companies seemed to think there was a definite effect, and composers I’ve talked to have anecdotal evidence about audiences moved to tears. I do think it was a less cynical time, at least until the ’70s, and employees really could feel that the company was their home and something to believe in. Of course, as with many areas of endeavor, the best examples have a long comet tail of knock-offs and wanna-bes, and there’s a large percentage of industrial shows that were not terribly ambitious or clever. For a while it seemed to be “the thing to do,” and a lot of it felt perfunctory.

But I love those shows just because they’re so sad and desperate. Probably most of them were well-received enough to provide a brief flash of amusement, and make attendees at least think, Well, that was sort of fun, I guess. The best show really did address the rank and file’s concerns and problems in an amusing, tuneful way, and must have really been very effective. I know the ’65 Seagram show wasn’t going to be recorded, but the audience went so wild for it that the executives had to hastily promise a recording. I also know of a song in 1966’s Diesel Dazzle with a line that, according to Hank Beebe, brought down the house so thoroughly that the orchestra had to vamp for a while until the howling stopped . . . and yes, the audience may have been drunk.

Sport Murphy: Undoubtedly, there were many gradations of indifference and/or inebriation among attendees. I’ll bet these pics were snapped during early morning speeches, not during our corporate extravaganzas. And I bet that even the photographers were too busy imbibing and cheering during these showstoppers to take pictures. But I do believe these shows boosted morale, though it likely needed little improving. These shows were commissioned by companies that had an obvious interest in keeping their employees motivated and team-oriented. That fact alone suggests a corporate environment difficult to understand today, when company “lifers” are as rare as ballplayers loyal to only one team.
 

 
What specifically is it about the combination of commerce and creativity that intrigues you to such a degree?

Steve Young: I’m tickled at the deepest level by the improbability, the resoundingly odd juxtaposition of jolly musical entertainment and messages about selling and product details. Of course, it made perfect sense at the time to the people who were in the middle of it, but to us outsiders it seems like it must be the work of comedy writers trying to be perverse. Yet it’s real, and at the genre’s upper reaches, it’s so far superior to what you could have imagined that it blows you away—yet another layer of improbability. It’s like finding out that Shakespeare secretly wrote a play about his favorite tavern’s ale, or that Rembrandt produced paintings of wagons for a calendar to be distributed only to employees of the wagon company. Again and again I’ve heard from composers both famous and less famous, “We always did our best, because that’s the only way we knew how to work. It was a great way to practice the craft.” And the more I looked into it, the more I moved from glib mockery to respect for creators and performers who gave 100%—often on extraordinarily daunting assignments, knowing their work was never going to be heard by more than a handful of people.

Sport Murphy: The dorkiness of it has a charm I cannot quite explain, but part of that comes from growing up with a sensibility honed by Mad magazine. The culture’s idiocies and contradictions were upended in every issue, but without savagery. A good-natured sense of sanity-as-irreverence, redeeming the tedium of everyday entertainment and its attendant commercial touting, became reflexive for me.

In the popular music I enjoyed, there were many lyrical “givens” to which I had no connection or interest; loved the Beach Boys, but had zero interest in surfing or cars. There are songs that connect emotionally to me based on a recognized lyrical truth or resonance, but there are also any number of things where I just dig the sound, or the melody, without any personal significance. Syd Barrett can name the planets and stars in “Astronomy Domine” and I dig, so why not a list of the possible uses for silicones? 

The cynical/absurdist side of me, existing after all these years on the outskirts of the music biz, also gets a kick out of the flat out honesty of this stuff: rather than some idealistic anthem created by some talented hack to inflame the naive yearnings of a record buying demographic, gimme an idealistic anthem for a product, aimed at those who sell it. Up Came Oil is more genuine in its emotional appeal than “I Wanna Know What Love Is.”
 

 
What I very much like about the book (among other things) is that it’s in no way snarky or condescending to the musicals or the people who produced them. There seems to be a genuine love for this world.

Steve Young: Yes. There will always be something deeply amusing about the whole field, but I found myself launched on a journey in which I went from snarky to puzzled to curious to respectful. Some misbegotten industrial show tunes may make me gasp with horrified glee, but overall, I have great affection for the material, and gratitude that I got to learn about a hidden history and to meet interesting, talented people (and in many cases bring them satisfaction as their work gets unexpected recognition). And I’ve got enough bizarre, catchy songs in my head and in my iTunes that I’ll never lack for entertainment as long as I live.

Sport Murphy: For me, it comes not only from a love of this work, but a sensibility about what constitutes humor. I used to date someone who worked in an old folks’ home, and sometimes I ran A.V. for theatrical presentations there. Often, the staff and other residents would laugh at the antics of some addled performer, which at first shocked me until I quickly noticed that it was a gentle, sympathetic laughter that served as a vent for everyone’s frustrations in dealing with the limitations of age and infirmity; mockery was never a part of it.

I should also mention my lifelong addiction to the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon. I watched every one of these annual ordeals—in its entirety—since 1976. At first it was strictly teenage camp: mocking old borscht-belt comics and 3 A.M. performer-on-drugs-on-live-TV shenanigans. Gradually, I began to recognize that the old comics were brilliant. And that I ain’t exactly at my peak, performing late at night under the influence of this thing and that. Maturity, life lived, and learning the difficulties of performance taught me but good. However, the blunders and excesses are still funny! So one can laugh at and with this stuff, the same way that This Is Spinal Tap is the favorite movie of just about any heavy metal musician you’d ask.
 

 
This is a guest post from New York-based writer Mike Sacks. Mike’s next book, Poking a Dead Frog, will be released in June 2014 from Viking Penguin. It’s the second volume of his in-depth interviews with comedy writers.

Below, Steve Young talks to Dave Letterman about the book on October 18, 2013.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.13.2013
02:53 pm
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Check out Muhammad Ali’s Broadway chops as he performs a number from a Black Power musical, 1969
11.13.2013
01:34 pm
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Muhammad Ali
 
I use the term “chops” a little loosely here. When Muhammad Ali was banned from boxing and stripped of his heavyweight title in 1967 after refusing the draft, he began a lecture tour to pay the bills. Ali’s money troubles during this three and a half year blackball may be the reason so many cynical, cynical people assume his participation in the musical, Buck White was a ploy for cash, and not a reflection of his legitimate love of Broadway!


 
Below, you can see Ali performing the song, “We Came in Chains,” on The Ed Sullivan Show. Buck White is actually a pretty cool concept for a musical; based on Joseph Dolan Tuotti’s play Big Time Buck White, the show centers on its namesake, a militant Black Power leader who invigorates and focuses a group of radical black activists. Unfortunately, it only ran for seven performances, and full footage of Ali’s “musical talent” is near impossible to find.

Maybe if they had hired a lead with a musical background the show would be a classic?
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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11.13.2013
01:34 pm
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‘Once in a Lifetime’: Talking Heads’ mind-scrambling concert video
11.13.2013
11:41 am
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Once in a Lifetime
 
In 1984, the same year that Stop Making Sense was released, another meticulously crafted Talking Heads concert movie made its debut as well. I refer to Once in a Lifetime, a 69-minute piece of experimental television that surely startled the great piebald tapestry of viewers tuning in to Britain’s Channel 4 that night.

From the perspective of today, Once in a Lifetime (some sources call it Talking Heads vs. the Television or Talking Heads vs. Television) is very much a document of its moment, as filtered through the cheerfully experimental sensibility of David Byrne (although Geoff Dunlop was the director). It elevates quick-cutting montage using heterogenous sources to the non plus ultra of confrontational video art. This was 1984, the high-water mark of MTV; other directions were not considered. It would have been obscurely baffling and disappointing if a movie like this had not used aggressively random splicing.

Once in a Lifetime opens with barrage of video content and a few voiceover musings by Byrne before getting to the footage of a Talking Heads show at Wembley, which is amusingly described in an early scroll as a place where a “Horse of the Year Show” might occur—this might be the last foray into actual humor in the movie.

As far as I can tell, the Wembley footage was shot in 1982—anybody know? Did anybody reading this attend?

What makes the movie remarkable is the band’s willingness to have its performances messed with. None of the songs are presented straight—all feature some form of montage or visual comment. The strategies for each song are largely dictated by the song’s content. For instance, “Life During Wartime” is puncutated with footage of urban strife, in the form of police sirens, drug use, and automated weaponry. “Big Blue Plymouth (Eyes Wide Open)” features an unwitting ancitipation of “Road to Nowhere” in the form of a lengthy take of a dusty southwestern horizon receding from the camera. “Once in a Lifetime” weaves in ample footage of American evangelists; it struck me for the first time that Byrne’s famous forehead-slapping gesture is an obvious reference to evangelical ritual (I know, I’m an idiot). Testament to the Heads’ commitment to experimentation, the live rendition of “Once in a Lifetime” gives way to perhaps 20 seconds of the music video (you’ve surely seen that before).

Implicit in this mode of presentation is an imperative of showing UK audiences what vulgar America is “really” like, so a premium is placed on material not available overseas, such as the evangelical footage, the TV commercials, the news coverage, and so on. For “Mind,” the chorus of which is, let’s recall, “I need something to change your mind,” the accopanying montage is all about good old American hucksterism, particularly billboard advertisements and the patter of late-night TV commericals. While listening to “Big Business,” the viewer sees images evoking technology, industrialization, and the assembly line.
 
Once in a Lifetime montage
 
The boldest stroke is probably “Psycho Killer,” an ingenious montage folding together perhaps twenty different versions of the song, each with its specific venue, camera quality, sound quality, outfits, and so on. They seldom stay with any version for more than about a line, but the result is not unpleasurable. For “My Big Hands (Fall Though the Cracks),” Byrne busts out a megaphone. “Swamp” features a series of stills of Byrne’s face, often distorted through video or computerized effects, and ends with a freeze frame of Byrne’s singing, hot red visage—a clear reference to nuclear annihilation. 

The video is a must-see for any Talking Heads fan—I’ve emphasized the experimentation but you also hear a dozen songs (nine Talking Heads numbers, three from Byrne’s The Catherine Wheel score), and that’s always a good thing. But the emphasis on the avant-garde nature of the proceedings tends to undermine the “concert” aspect of the movie. Early on Byrne says in a voiceover, “When the performance is successful, something sort of transcendent happens that has to do with the audience and the musicians losing their egos and immersing themselves in sort of one identity or whatnot. It need only happen in a performance for maybe thirty seconds or so, and that justifies the whole thing.”

I take Byrne at his word, but to judge solely from Once in a Lifetime, it’s sheer poppycock.

Song list:
“Life During Wartime”
“Big Blue Plymouth (Eyes Wide Open)”
“Once in A Lifetime”
“Mind”
“Big Business”
“I Zimbra”
“Slippery People”
“Psycho Killer”
“My Big Hands (Fall Though the Cracks)”
“Swamp”
“What A Day That Was”
“Crosseyed And Painless”
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Zen rockers: Talking Heads performing at CBGB in 1975
Remain in Light: Talking Heads live in Rome, 1980

Posted by Martin Schneider
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11.13.2013
11:41 am
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Wire’s Colin Newman advised My Bloody Valentine to cut down on the white noise stuff!
11.13.2013
10:56 am
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Two nights ago I saw My Bloody Valentine in New York. I had not seen them before, and they more than lived up to expectations. Way back in 1992 I was living in Austria, I was feeling out of touch with music so I asked a friend to send me three discs—my choice of material was almost arbitrary, and yet I was inexplicably certain that all three albums would be at worst really solid. The CDs were Doolittle, Loveless, and Slanted & Enchanted. Yeah. And MBV has been a constant, beloved companion of mine ever since.

Some of the reviews of the MBV shows from earlier this year were surprisingly tepid, but I can assure you that they worked out whatever was holding them back. The unremitting volume of the gig was a constant theme, including the free earplugs distributed at the venue. The show ended with a tibia-rattling rendition of “You Made Me Realise” that for quite a while sounded approximately like Apollo 11 taking off for orbit.

I didn’t time the white noise section, but according to reports it lasted six minutes—BrooklynVegan referred to it as a “Holocaust.” In an intriguing comment in that same BV thread (most of the time BV threads are entertainingly moronic), reader “ME” wrote, “MBV faced a lot of criticism after the previous tour, when the white noise ... lasted for about 20 minutes. Even Colin Newman, who knows a thing or two about making noise from when MBV were still infants, confronted Kevin, telling him it was irresponsible to inflict such a damage on their fans. Maybe that is why they cut it short now?”

Curiosity piqued, I decided to hit the Google machine. There does indeed seem to have been such an incident. In a 2008 interview with exclaim.ca, Newman tells the following story:
 

Last night, before we went home, my wife and I were at the after party and I had to use the loo. And Kevin [Shields] was in there. There were three stalls and I was on one side and Kevin was on the far side and there was another guy, who was at the after party, but he looked like he was just a fan. Kevin said to me, “What do you think?” and I just said that it just “hurt my ears” and that the last song “went on too long.” He said, “Yeah, we’re going to have to do some work on that, it was something that we were just kicking around.” And the guy in the middle said, “I can’t believe you just said that! It was such a religious experience for me!” But to me it was just my friend being too loud.

 
It all reminded me of MBV’s cover of the Wire classic “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” which appeared on the 1996 album Whore: Tribute to Wire. By the way, did you know that 41°N 93°W correlates to a town called Centerville, Iowa? I didn’t even know it was about America. Here’s a gratuitous picture of Centerville:
 
Centerville, Iowa
 
My Bloody Valentine, “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W”:

 
Below, the little-known orginal music video for “You Made Me Realise” from 1989:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Seven Commandments of art punk: Wire’s rules of negative self-definition, 1977
My Bloody Valentine: Classic albums remastered, plus rarities, EPs

Posted by Martin Schneider
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11.13.2013
10:56 am
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The Mark E. Smith Guide to Writing
11.12.2013
06:59 pm
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htimsmarkfalle1.jpg
 
It’s time Manchester did the decent thing and honored its most celebrated son. If their Merseyside rivals can honor John Lennon by renaming their international airport after the sarky mop top, then Manchester should do something similar and at least rename its bus station after Mark E. Smith. 

But let’s not stop there. A local holiday should be adopted on his birthday, with street parties and free beer, with a statue erected in his birthplace of Broughton. Not much to ask for the man whose band The Fall have been essential listening over the past thirty-odd years.

Forty odd years indeed, with Smith the only constant in The Fall’s ever-changing line-up through a long, difficult, but productive, and brilliant career. How the great Mancunian has survived the bitter fights, spiked drinks, broken bones and riots says it all about Smith’s ambition and touched-by-genius talents.

Yea, let us rejoice, for we are alive in the days of Mark E. Smith.

This little gem is from Grenwich Sound Radio in 1983, when Smith gave his “guide to writing guide.” Not the kind of toss you’ll get from those writing-by-numbers courses, no, but something far more oblique and entertaining.

Here’s how it goes:

“Hello, I’m Mark E. Smith, and this is the ‘Mark E. Smith Guide to Writing Guide.’

Day by Day Breakdown.

Day One: Hang around house all day writing bits of useless information on bits of paper.

Day Two: Decide lack of inspiration due to too much isolation and non-fraternization. Go to pub. Have drinks.

Day Three: Get up and go to pub. Hold on in there as style is on its way. Through sheer boredom and drunkenness, talk to people in pub.

Day Four: By now people in the pub should be continually getting on your nerves. Write things about them on backs of beer mats.

Day Five: Go to pub. This is where true penmanship stamina comes into its own as by now guilt, drunkenness, the people in the pub and the fact you’re one of them should combine to enable you to write out of sheer vexation. To write out of sheer vexation.

Day Six: If possible, stay home. And write. If not, go to pub.”

I must remember this the next time I have writer’s block…
 

 

Bonus: ‘The Fall - The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E Smith.’
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Becoming a hermit solves nothing’: The Fall’s Mark E. Smith writes Tony Friel, 1977
‘No Place Like It’: Read a short story by The Fall’s Mark E. Smith
‘The Legend of the Fall’: A slapdash cartoon love letter to Mark E. Smith
Babies that look like Mark E. Smith
For H. P. Lovecraft’s birthday: Mark E. Smith reads ‘The Color Out of Space’
Mark E. Smith fabric doll
As far as Morrissey is concerned, what do Mark E. Smith and Robert Smith have in common?
The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith
Mark E. Smith, Morrissey, Tom Waits, Barbra Streisand and ‘Spinal Tap’ face cakes
Mark E. Smith: A brief tour of Edinburgh
Mark E. Smith As A Mancunian Jesus
Hip Priest: The Fall’s Mark E. Smith used to do tarot card readings for drugs

Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
11.12.2013
06:59 pm
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‘The Stately Ghosts of England’: Spooktacular documentary on haunted houses
11.12.2013
06:50 pm
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My grandmother could have been Margaret Rutherford, or even the Queen Mother, for she had the same type of eyes, smile and well-lined face. Maybe, they were all sisters? If they’d been lined up together, you might think they were some ancient showbiz troupe like septuagenarian Andrews Sisters. Or maybe, like babies, all old people eventually begin to look the same? (My grandfather had a hint of Stan Laurel.)

I quite liked the fact my old grandmother had the look of Dame Margaret Rutherford, as I loved this fine actress as Miss Marple, and it took years before I could accept anyone else playing that role. She was unforgettable. It was like Rutherford’s turn as Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit—no one could ever better her performance.

Dame Margaret was beloved by millions, and greatly praised for her various stage and cinematic roles, winning an Oscar for her scene-stealing performance in the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton movie, The V.I.Ps.

Yet behind all this talent and success was a woman terrified of inheriting the murderous mental illness that had destroyed her family.

In 1882, ten year’s before Margaret’s birth, her father, William, had battered his own father to death with a chamber pot. No matter the potentially comic value of murder weapon, it was a brutal and bloody crime, and let’s be honest, most working class killers would have been sent to the gallows for such an offense, but William was sent to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where he was detained for seven years. He was then allowed to return to his family.

In a bid to start a new life, her father changed his surname from “Benn” to “Rutherford” (The family were related to British Labor politician Tony Benn.) After Margaret’s birth in 1892, the family moved to India, where the mother suffered severe depression and committed suicide by hanging herself. The three-year-old Margaret was then entrusted to her aunt, who raised her in a comfortable lifestyle in suburban Wimbledon, London.

As Margaret grew-up happy and loved, her father had another breakdown and was re-admitted to Broadmoor. To shield her of this “blight,” Rutherford was told her father had died.

A few years later, the young Margaret was confronted by a strange, disheveled man who claimed he had a message from her father. The news devastated the impressionable girl, who on being told the truth of the matter by her aunt, was terrified that her father might escape and murder her.

The twelve-year-old Rutherford was sent to a boarding school, where she developed her talents for music and acting. She spent her twenties leaning her craft, and joined the Old Vic Theater company in her early thirties. Once established, her career blossomed with great and rapid success. She met and married fellow actor Stringer Davis, who became literally her dog’s body, looking after every aspect of Margaret’s life. This included nursing the actress during her long bouts of depression; her electro-shock therapy; and her “bad spells.”

Having no children of their own (it’s uncertain if the pair ever had sex with each other), Margaret and Stringer adopted a young man, Gordon Langley Hall, who was in his twenties and had started a promising career as a writer. Gordon later said he was born intersex, and had “an adrenal abnormality that causes female genitalia to resemble a man’s.” He changed his name to Dawn Langley Hall and began a long career as writer, eventually having gender reassignment surgery in 1968. Dawn then married a motor mechanic, John-Paul Simmonds, and wrote a biography of her adoptive mother, Margaret Rutherford: A Blithe Spirit in 1983.

Margaret Rutherford described herself as a buff of all things paranormal, and had an interest in ghosts, hauntings and things that go bump in the night. In 1965, Dame Margaret appeared in the NBC documentary film, The Stately Ghosts of England, alongside her husband Stringer Davis, and “society clairvoyant” Tom Corbett. This trio of ghostbusters visited three stately country houses that are claimed to be haunted, Longleat, Salisbury Hall, and Beaulieu. They interviewed the householders, and witnesses, and even captured a “ghost” on film. Based on Diana Norman’s book The Stately Ghosts of England, this is a beautifully made and thoroughly delightful film.
 

 
The remainder of Dame Margaret Rutherford’s ‘The Stately Ghosts of England,’ after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
11.12.2013
06:50 pm
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