Kenji Yanobe is a Japanese sculptor who has isolated a fascinating niche for himself. Inspired by the Cold War nuclear nightmares of Japanese kaiju cinema, he has in the past focused on huge statues of robots wearing brightly colored hazmat suits and his work also has been known to incorporate actual geiger counters. Some have called his work “cynical,” and when the subject comes up he tends to switch the parameter to “humor.” But somehow, actual fear constitutes the core impetus of his work. Yanobe has said, “I worry about things. I’m constantly thinking about people’s happiness.”

Yanobe has been identified as a member of the “Otaku Generation,” which consists of Japanese kids who grew up in the 1970s consuming robot shows, animated TV shows and movies, and comic books. Wikipedia refers to his art as “upbeat yet nightmarish,” which is definitely a cool place to be. For eighty bucks you can buy a curious keychain of a Yanobe person wearing yellow protective gear and a Hitler mustache. There are also a bunch of books about Yanobe.

“Ship’s Cat,” the artists most recent project, recalls his earlier work but with a patina of heroism and idealism. There’s another way to describe the new statues: they depict enormous cats wearing helmets, and that is awesome.
 

Yanobe at work on one of his feline creations
 
As far as I can tell, all of them are public artworks intended to be interacted with by the public; none of them are in a museum. The first one was installed as part of the glass entryway at the We Base hostel in Hakata, which is known as Japan’s oldest port town. Two of them are at the Tsutaya Books within the Ginza Six department store, and one of them is perched atop Nihonmatsu Castle in the northern Fukushima Prefecture.

The inspiration for the works comes from the centuries-old tradition of bringing a cat as a crew member for trips on oceangoing vessels, whether for trading, exploration, or military purposes. Cats have long been regarded as useful onboard ships because of their penchant for chasing mice and rats, which not only cause damage in ropes and wires but also are dangerous disease carriers.

Over time, as in bookstores, hostels, and communes the world over, cats became an accepted and even beloved part of the experience of working on a ship. Yanobe has drawn inspiration from these noble felines, leading him to create oversized sculptures of cats wearing protective gear and helmets.

An excellent touch is that the cat’s eyes light up at night.
 
a
 

 
More pics and a video after the jump…..
 

 
File under “K” for Quaint.

I took a wrong turning looking for the Surrealist Alphabet. I took a first left then a second right and went twice around the Bily Mill roundabout before traveling six-minutes-past-eight up the 1010 North. I got there eventually, but to be frank, it wasn’t the one I was looking for. This Surrealist Alphabet was like something that popped out of a Christmas cracker or maybe one of Alexa’s jokes. It was a comic skit performed by the English comedy double-act Clapham & Dwyer from circa 1934.

Their version of the “Surrealist Alphabet” was originally written in 1929 and was more a mix of the Cockney alphabet, World War One slang, and a comic play on words than anything “surreal” and some of it won’t make much sense to our younger readers, for example, “K for ancis” was Kay Francis—a Broadway and Hollywood star of the 1920s and 1930s. Or, “I for Novello” after Ivor Novello.

Clapham & Dwyer’s alphabet began with “A for Horses”:

A for ‘orses (Hay for Horses)
B for Mutton (Beef or mutton)
C for th’ ‘ighlanders (Seaforth Highlanders)
D for ential (Differential)
E for Adam (Eve for Adam)
F for vessence (Effervesence)
G for police (Chief of police)
H for respect (Have respect)
I for Novello (Ivor Novello)
J for orange (Jaffa orange)
K for ancis (Kay Francis)
L for leather (Hell for leather)
M for sis (Emphasis)
N for lope (Envelope)
O for the garden wall (Over the garden wall)
P for relief (Pee for relief)
Q for music (Cue for music)
R for mo (‘Arf a mo)
S for you (it’s for you)
T for 2 (Tea for two)
U for films
V for la France (Viva la France)
W for a fiver (Double you for a fiver)
X for breakfast (Eggs for breakfast)
Y for God’s sake (Why, for God’s sake)
Z for breezes (Zephyr breezes)

Clapham & Dwyer were William Charles Clapham (1894–1959) and Bill Dwyer (1887–1943), two white-collar workers who chanced their luck in comedy and went on to become the first British double-act to achieve national fame on radio. Clapham played the silly upper-class twit in top hat and monocle, while Dwyer was his long-suffering straight man. Together they co-starred in a few films and were a regular fixture on the BBC Light Program. Their humor was gentle ribbing, which has not dated well, though they were banned from the airwaves for making an allegedly “smutty” joke which went something like this:

“What’s the difference between a champagne cork and a baby?” asked Clapham. When his sidekick said he didn’t know, back came the response: “A champagne cork has the name of the maker on it.”

Hardly shocking let alone funny, but enough for “Auntie” to ban the pair. The past is a different country, everything is unbearable there…

What I find interesting about all of this is that two mainstream radio comedians could hitch a routine to then-nascent Surrealist movement and expect their audience to know what they were talking about and play along.

Broadcasting new comedy material was generally considered a no-no for comedians as many (like Clapham & Dwyer) only “had one act..and didn’t want to give it away to the thousands listening in.” In those days, one good routine could last a year or more on the music hall circuit.

Clapham & Dwyer made their “Surrealist Alphabet” skit last for around five years touring the provinces but they eventually put it onto disc around 1934. Now you too can hear (suffer through?) what André Breton and his pals all missed out on.
 

 
Though it was a massively polarizing movement, you can’t say straight edge didn’t have a lasting impact. It’s one of a handful of rock genres that’s distinguished solely by extra-musical criteria (see also: riot grrrl, queercore, Christian rock)—any given straight edge band sounds like any other hardcore music of its era, but it was set apart by an *ethos* expressed in the lyrics and lifestyle choices of its practitioners rather than any discernible musical difference, and you hardly needed to be an initiate to know what that ethos was: avoidance of drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and sex.

Brought into existence by and named for a song by Minor Threat—literally a 45 second laundry list of behaviors of which that band’s vocalist Ian MacKaye disapproved—the straight edge movement blew up in the early- and mid-‘80s, and depending on where you stood, either offered an exemplar and support system for clean living to hard luck kids who may otherwise have been lost to substance abuse, or offered a gang-like milieu from which holier-than-thou meathead boys could violently act out against people who weren’t like them. Obviously, Minor Threat never intended to spark an international youth movement, let alone be seen as guilty by association with its violence, and it’s interesting to see OG straight edge bands distance themselves from the sometimes appallingly judgmental later-wavers. Seven Seconds’ Kevin Seconds, for just one example, has articulated discomfort with the movement. Which makes sense, as his was one of the more positive bands—their “Walk Together, Rock Together” was a specific call for unity and tolerance.

Though it’s a smaller movement now than it was in the ‘80s and ‘90s, straight edge still persists, with consumption of animal-derived products often joining the list of prohibitions, and with social justice advocacy becoming more central to the code. It’s a long-lived, crucially important, and storied scene that deserves a deep dive, and fortunately, straight edge finally has its own Please Kill Me—the new book Straight Edge: A Clear-Headed Hardcore Punk History is a 350+ page oral history of the genre/movement, told in first-person by the scene’s movers, with a foreword by Gorilla Biscuits’ Anthony “Civ” Civarelli:

Straight edge isn’t something I take lightly—that’s why I’m thirty years into it. I still don’t need a drink to get loose or wild. I don’t need drugs to feel comfortable or fit in. Straight edge gives me strength to deal with things head on, with no buffers, crutches or masks. I have no clouded judgments or excuses to hide behind; just brutal, clear-headed reality. I guess that might be why I come off as an asshole sometimes, with little patience for bullshit, but I’m not perfect. I’m just Civ.

As a component of its exhaustive history of the scene, Straight Edge is profusely illustrated with performance photos and a metric shitload of classic concert fliers. The fliers, like the music, avail themselves heavily of various hardcore tropes—there’s a familiar cut-up ethos at work in the genre, and the distinctive crustiness of the era’s copy machines both dictated and dominated their overall feel. The book’s publisher, Bazillion Points, was extremely cool about letting us share a generous lot of them with you. Clicking on an image spawns an enlargement.
 

 

 

 
Much more after the jump…

 
I’ve been on a bit of a “70s Brian Eno kick” of late, scooping up all of the recent 2XLP 45rpm editions of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Here Come the Warm Jets, Before and After Science, etc. and then fanning out through some of his work as a sideman and producer, which was quite extensive during that decade. Aside from the obvious collaborations with Robert Fripp, Talking Heads, DEVO and David Bowie, Eno also made music with Nico (The End), he’s on both of Robert Calvert’s wonderfully loopy 70s solo albums and believe it or not, Genesis for whom he provided “Enossification for two tracks on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (”In the Cage” and “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging”). But the item I want to call to your attention here is the marvellously eccentric 1974 album—newly released by Mental Experience/Guerssen Records in a beautifully published vinyl version with extensive liner notes and lyric sheet—Lady June’s Linguistic Leprosy.

When she died of a heart attack in 1998 at the age of 64, her obituary in The Independent called “Lady” June Campbell Cramer “a great British eccentric and cosmic prankster.” That’s already a pretty good claim to fame, but the obit went on to say that her “most achieved performance was herself: she succeeded in turning her existence into living art, bristling with humour.”

“Lady” June—the honorary title given to her due to her upper-crust, aristocratic voice (she sounded like a really stoned Judi Dench) and the fact that she was the de facto London landlady of many a progressive musician from the Canterbury set—was a sort of free-spirited hippie bohemian poetess and multimedia performance artist who ran with the crowd that included Gong and Soft Machine, who she first met in Spain in the early 1960s.
 

 
According to Daevid Allen, who was in both groups, June’s enormous twelve room Maida Vale flat was “London’s premier smoking salon”:

“She was ferocious in the mornings until the first joint arrived: she’d hover over you with a wet cloth demanding that you clean the stove.”

Amongst the other tenants in June’s apartment were Steve Hillage, members of Henry Cow, Hawkwind, Hatfield and the North, Tim Blake and David Bedford. Some of her tenants were more conventional types who were often dismayed by the likes of nine freaky members of Gong suddenly turning up to sleep on the living room floor.

Gilli Smyth of Gong was her best friend, and it was at a dual birthday party June threw for herself and Smyth that a drunken Robert Wyatt fell out of a window, falling four stories and leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
 

 
In 1973, June took part in the chaotic BBC Radio 4 series If It’s Wednesday It Must Be… with Kenny Everett and former Bonzo Dog Band member Vivian Stanshall. Later that year she recorded Lady June’s Linguistic Leprosy, her surrealist poetry set to music by her longtime friend (and longtime tenant) Kevin Ayers and Brian Eno, a neighbor who lived nearby. The recording was primarily made in the front room of her apartment with Ayers on guitar, bass and vocals, and Eno playing guitar, bass, Imminent, Linearment (sounds mathematical, right?), and something called “Lunar Lollipops,” with Gong’s drummer Pip Pyle and David Vorhaus of White Noise mixing. It is said to have cost just £400. A wary Caroline Records—the arty Virgin subsidiary set up to release things with little to just about zero commercial potential in the first place—pressed up only 5000 copies, but the album sold out quickly when news of her famous collaborators got around. June performed on bills along with Gong, Hawkwind, The Pink Fairies and Hatfield and the North.

“Lady” June Campbell Cramer returned to Spain in 1975 and became an active and creatively fulfilled participant in the artists’ community of Deià in Majorca. It is primarily for the company she kept—and this one remarkable album—that we remember her today. According to the reissue’s liner notes (and her nephew Tim Campbell Cramer) when June died at the age of 64 in 1998, she was cremated and guests at her wake tied little parcels of her ashes to helium balloons and let them go into the Mallorca breeze.
 

“Optimism,” music by Eno
 
More after the jump…

 
It’s been interesting watching people bid farewell to the year 2017 all week on social media. After 2016, in which we lost Bowie and Prince and we all had to stomach the gut-wrenching shock of Trump’s electoral victory, it hadn’t really occurred to me that folks were going to perceive 2017 in similar terms, but (of course) the nearly daily disgrace of Trump’s vomitous Twitter feed as well as emboldened Nazis all across the U.S. and Europe and the worst piece of legislation in a generation or more (I refer to the tax bill) and the very existence of Roy Moore as a senatorial candidate and on and on—all of it was cumulatively enough to get people expressing their loathing.

It would be understandable if two consecutive years of such arrant awfulness has you regarding the world in a “burn it all down” kind of mood—and if that’s the case, Tuxedomoon’s video piece “Ghost Sonata” might be just the thing for your current headspace!

Few American bands have been as staunchly “European” in tone as Tuxedomoon, who were originally from the San Francisco area. (Indeed, Winston Tong had been a mime and puppeteer before joining the band.) “Ghost Sonata” takes its title from a 1908 play by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, whose works are marked by a tendency to wallow in world-weary misery. I don’t know this particular play of Strindberg’s, but the conceit behind Tuxedomoon’s project is that it consists of several parts that are yoked together in that they depict the suicides of the various characters. Bruce Geduldig explains:
 

It all started when we were approached for a project by two different parties: Image Video in Brussels and In Teatro in Polverigi. We imagined creating a body of music and at the same time shooting an episodic story on video. We would then transfer the video to 16mm film for large live projection, and add taped musique concrete and an orchestra. I don’t exactly recall the inception, except that Winston liked the title “Ghost Sonata.” We skimmed a copy of the original play by August Strindberg and mentally tossed it in the trash, because it was a kind of traditional piece complete with a deranged grandfather, so we only kept the fin de siècle time frame and the title. Late one night before we’d actually started Winston and I were driving and he said something to the effect of letting each member write his own suicide, and that would be the text. I liked that immediately. At some point we all decided to do “an opera without words,” an idea that seemed pretty reasonable at the time, and only much later struck me as being strange.

 
As Geduldig noted, the work is billed as “an opera without words,” but that isn’t exactly accurate. There are no conventional operatic vocal parts, true, but the work does liberally use tape loops of people speaking and the thing is basically suffused in language. Much of the music has a mordant 19th-century feel, complete with cello, violin, oboe, etc. although intermittently it comes across as a cut-up version of Mahler or some cravat-wearing dude like that.

“Ghost Sonata” was the tenth release on Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision imprint. According to the liner notes of Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision Presents DVD (released in 2004), Doublevision was a communication company that was initially founded by Cabaret Voltaire and Paul Smith in 1982 in order to release the band’s program of the same name. People forget, but in the 1980s most VHS cassettes were quite expensive—around $100—and one of the goals of the Doublevision project was not only to make available content that would not appear on regular TV but to bring the price down to the $25 range.
 

 
Among the artists who released work on Doublevision were Throbbing Gristle, Derek Jarman, the Residents, and Einstürzende Neubauten.

In 2007 “Ghost Sonata” appeared on the 77o7 Tm, the 30th anniversary limited-edition box set consisting of rarities that came out with the release of Tuxedomoon’s album Vapour Trails.
 
Watch ‘The Ghost Sonata’ after the jump…

 
There’s not really much to say here except that Born Miserable replaced the real Donald Trump in photos with the Disney animatronic Donald Trump, posted it all on Twitter and the results are pretty funny.

There’s been some speculation that the robot Trump was hastily refashioned from a Hillary Clinton one they’d been working on, assuming she’d win. Take a close look at the face. Fake news? Who honestly cares?

Born Miserable touts that his Trump images seem to be an “improvement” over the reality of the actiual Trump. I have to agree. The Disney technicians and artists really did nice work with his neck wattle, didn’t they?

 

 

 
More after the jump…

The opening sequence of ‘The Donna Summer Special’ January 27th, 1980.
 
When I first saw The Donna Summer Special in 1980, I was excited to see that actor Robert Guillaume—the star of the popular television series Benson—was scheduled to appear along with Boston-born disco queen Donna Summer. Sadly, I was too young then to grasp the fact that legendary Andy Warhol/Halston muse Pat Ast and model/actress/cultural icon Twiggy were also a part of the special. Honestly, my pre-teen mind could simply NOT handle all that went down on the show which originally aired on January 27th, 1980. Even now my adult mind still can’t handle it—though at least now I can properly appreciate it.

The show was part live-performance showcase for the then 32-year-old Summer and part autobiographical variety show as it tells an abbreviated story of Summer’s life, how she became the “Queen of Disco” and one of the biggest musical stars of the 1970s. For the live musical segments, we get to see Summer strutting her hot stuff at the Hollywood Bowl in all her sequined glory. The other musical interludes are (mostly) not live but presented as short music video-style pieces—and that’s where things get weird, and also magically wonderful. As I mentioned previously, the show included several interesting casting choices—an unexpected highlight being a vocal performance by Robert Guillaume. Many people are unaware that Guillaume spent decades on Broadway showing off his impressive musical skills early in his long career. Of his many stage credits, Guillaume is also noted to be the very first black actor to ever portray The Phantom in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s longrunning musical The Phantom of the Opera. The choice to place Guillaume in the role resulted in a fair amount of controversy causing some racist-ass ticket holders to return their tickets, outraged that he would replace long-time Phantom, Michael Crawford.
 

A vintage newspaper ad for ‘The Donna Summer Special.’
 
Getting back to The Donna Summer Special one of the live musical segments included Summer banging out a version of her 1979 Grammy Award-nominated single for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance “Bad Girls” produced by Italian disco shaman Giorgio Moroder and English songwriter Pete Bellotte. The song (which was co-written by Summer and her often collaborators, Brooklyn disco band The Brooklyn Dreams) spawned a music video which the show reproduced as a live number on a soundstage with an audience in attendance. According to folklore, the song was allegedly inspired by a real-life incident involving a member of her staff. Here’s Summer on that:

“I was in my office in the old Casablanca building, and I sent my secretary to do something, and the police stopped her on Sunset Boulevard. She was dressed in business attire, but they were trying to pick her up. That ticked me off. I pondered why that would happen to innocent people—and then I developed compassion for the girls, working on the street.”

If you’ve completely forgotten the epic video (or were a tad too young to process it like I was), it is a fantastic disco adventure featuring Summer looking like a futuristic streetwalker flanked by her Bad Girls—Twiggy, Pat Ast, actress Debralee Scott (who famously played “Hotsi” Totsi on Welcome Back Kotter and the younger sister on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), and a cast of other characters. The Donna Summer Special does not disappoint nearly 40 years later and as a more enlightened viewer, it is all the more fun to watch. I’ve posted the one-hour show below and highly recommend you watch it as soon as possible to ensure your New Year gets off on the good foot.
 
Take a look, after the jump…