During the 1880s, Canadian Alex Ross photographed many of the First Nations people who lived around Calgary. In particular, Ross documented many of the men, women and families of the Blackfoot—mainly of the Siksiká Nation—and the Tsuu T’ina—or as they were originally called, Sarcee.
Ross started his photographic career as an assistant in Winnipeg, but decided in his early 30s to relocate to Calgary and establish his own studio. The practicalities of taking pictures in situ—carrying equipment out on location where one was open to the vagaries of the weather—led to a boom in such studios, where backcloths could replicate any South Sea island, summer palace, or traditional suburban drawing room. Add to this the possibility of owning a seemingly permanent portable reminder of a loved one, family member or even deceased relative made photography a very profitable business.
Unlike some of his business rivals, Ross took a growing interest in the local First Nations and between 1884-91 he started photographing as many of the indigenous peoples as possible. He also photographed various of their camps across the Alberta province.
In 1891, Ross unexpectedly closed his business down. He died three years later in 1894 at 43 years of age. The Glenbow Archives own 125 of Ross’ original photographs—from First Nations people to family portraits, country scenes and livestock which they describe as “a brief but important visual record of the last two decades of the 19th century.”
Today there are 634 officially recognized First Nations governments, or bands, spread across Canada, “roughly half of which are in the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia.” The total population is more than 850,000.
Blackfoot children, date unknown ca. 1886-94.
First Nations man and his wife, 1886.
More of Alex Ross’ photographs of First Nations people, after the jump…
I’m sorta speechless with this one. Not gonna lie.
Anyway, 45-year-old Queens resident Mike Drake collects his fingernail and toenail clippings and turns them into acrylic paperweights which sell for $300 - $500 a pop. It’s called ART, dammit. Try not to be so judgmental.
“I used to bite my nails, and I wondered how long they could grow. And then I wondered how much I might be able to accumulate.”
So he collected his nail clippings in a Ziploc baggie for about a year, and was about to throw them out when inspiration struck. He decided to do something ‘artistic’ with them.
“I realised I went to all that effort, and I figured, in for a penny, in for a pound. I already worked with acrylics as a hobby so I decided to make paperweights.”
Makes sense.
Drake only makes one paperweight weight per year using a greenish-acrylic tint because the jade color “gives off an emerald quality.”
“Eve of Destruction,” written by teenage Bob Dylan fan P. F. Sloan and sung by former New Christy Minstrel Barry McGuire, spent eleven weeks on the Billboard chart in 1965, reaching number one that September. Apocalyptic, adolescent and aporetic, it was loathed as only a hit can be. “Even at the time, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Paul Simon, Pete Seeger, Noel Stookey of Peter, Paul & Mary, and Manfred Mann lead singer Paul Jones all slagged the song in the press,” Richie Unterberger writes. I suspect most of these musicians just thought the song was not a very good Dylan ripoff, but some public-spirited citizens were seriously concerned that the protest number gave ground to the Reds. “How do you think the enemy will feel with a tune like that No. 1 in America?” future respected foreign policy analyst Rose Parade host Bob Eubanks asked in the pages of TIME.
Staying at the Hollywood Sunset Hotel in the late summer of 1965, Dylan provided his own response to “Eve of Destruction,” as biographer Howard Sounes reports:
‘Get P. F. Sloan,’ Bob demanded. ‘Let’s have P. F. Sloan up here.’
Sloan was duly summoned to the Hollywood Sunset Hotel where Bob played him acetates of Highway 61 Revisited. Sloan rolled about on the floor laughing when he heard ‘Ballad of a Thin Man.’ Bob laughed too. He slapped his knees as if it was the biggest joke in the world. Then he said, seriously, ‘I gotta big problem here. Columbia Records doesn’t have any idea what this song is about. They think it’s communistic.’ Before Sloan had time to digest this shocking piece of information, David Crosby of The Byrds entered the suite and he and Bob went into the bedroom, leaving Sloan on his own. What happened next seems to have been an elaborate stunt arranged by Bob to cause the already excitable Sloan to freak out. ‘Two women come in from the bedroom half-naked – topless – sit down like book ends on the couch, and they don’t say a word, just sit there,’ says Sloan. ‘In from the window, from the outside, comes a man, flying in from a rope wearing a Zorro outfit, with a black hat and black mask, wearing black silk pajamas.’ The man dressed as Zorro sat between the topless girls and stared at Sloan. ‘I can only imagine that Bob had set this up, but I don’t know. And he’s in the other room with David Crosby. About fifteen, twenty minutes go by. The girls get up. Nobody says a word.’ Zorro and the girls exited via the front door, leaving Sloan again on his own. ‘David Crosby comes out of the bedroom and shakes hands with me and Bob continues to play me the rest of the album.’
Musician Ian Whitcomb records how, in November ‘65, one Singing Swallow, then the program director at a radio station in Santa Rosa, California, interpreted the success of “Eve of Destruction.” Whitcomb, who had recently shared the stage with McGuire (“a perfectly charming man, very warm and gentle, not at all like his hate-filled song”) on a Pittsburgh TV show, was visiting radio stations to peddle his single “N-N-Nervous!” Accompanying him was George Sherlock, the subject of the Stones’ “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man,” who, in the excerpt below, has just spun the singer’s new disc. From Whitcomb’s Rock Odyssey:
Spinning his chair vaguely in my direction, [the program director] asked: “When you gonna make another record, son?” “But you just listened to a smash, Swallow,” said George with a boogaloo swing of his hips. “Naw—I mean one I can play.” Before I could answer, Swallow continued with: “Have you guys heard this ‘Eve of Destruction’ mother? It’s a stone fox smash!” And to emphasize his point, he burst open another can of beer, soaking my record. “A lot of the lyrics I can’t make out, but what I can is goddamn treason! Can you believe a guy who knocks our Draft, our senators, our church, our H-bombs—and all on a pop record?” “So I take it,” said George with a dismissive click of his fingers, “that the disc is negative as far as your big boss playlist is concerned?” “Not on your Hollywood scalp doily! It may knock the U.S.A., but I don’t knock success. I grab it by the balls and hang on tight. That ‘Eve’ disc is Dylan made commercial. It’s gonna open up a whole new area. It’s a new kind of loot music under the title of protest, remember that! Now, Whitmore, you got something I can play, something that fits the times and our format—and I’ll spin it like crazy. But until that time, it’s so long and have a happy day. Out!
As you can see, “Eve of Destruction” shocked and convulsed the nation with its radical message that everything might not work out so great. Here are five songs that strove to replace Sloan’s teenage “no” with a paternalistic “yes.”
The Spokesmen, “Dawn of Correction”
The most famous retort to “Eve of Destruction,” beloved of rock writers Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, came from Philadelphia’s Spokesmen, a trio formed by the partners who wrote “At The Hop” and a local DJ. The three rock professionals bent Sloan’s ungainly rhymes to the service of their relentlessly cheerful view:
You missed all the good in your evaluation
What about the things that deserve commendation?
Where there once was no cure, there’s vaccination
Where there once was a desert, there’s vegetation
Self-government’s replacing colonization
What about the Peace Corps organization?
Don’t forget the work of the United Nations
I’m not sure where the TV clip of “Dawn of Correction” below comes from, but according to lead Spokesman John Madara’s website, they performed the song on American Bandstand and The Lloyd Thaxton Show.
The Spokesmen, “Dawn of Correction”:
But you tell me over and over and over again my friend that you want to hear more ‘Eve of Destruction’ answer songs? There’s more, plenty more, after the jump…
“Mr. Wineberger, Dawn Davenport is eating a meatball sandwich right out in CLAESS!”
Divine’s official social media guru directed my attention, yesterday, to the work of sculptor Tyson Tabbert, who recently created a batch of “action figures” for John Waters’ masterpiece Female Trouble.
In Female Trouble, perhaps Waters’ best film, Divine plays Dawn Davenport, career criminal and fame seeker. An addiction to injected liquid eyeliner sends her on a berserk crime spree, ending in art/murder. In one of its most famous scenes, Dawn destroys the family Christmas when she doesn’t receive the gift of “cha cha heels” she is expecting. “Nice girls,” it turns out, “don’t wear cha cha heels.”
Tabbert has created an entire playset devoted to this iconic cinematic scene.
Unfortunately, according to Tabbert’s Instagram, the figures are not for sale. But maybe if enough people beg him? I know I’d throw down for the “Female Trouble Christmas Morning Playset.” It would have a place of honor every year, right next to the Nativity and Christmas shit log.
The late, great Blogspot site Bubblegum Fink bit the dust several years ago, but we can ensure that the Fink’s creativity lives on for future generations to appreciate. Last spring I brought you a set of fake trading cards that might possibly have been manufactured in an alternate universe for The Wicker Man. Today we have an similarly impossible set of trading cards for children to enjoy outlining the decidedly adult plot points of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
The Fink’s comments on this set, in part:
A Clockwork Orange is another set of trading cards, like The Wicker Man, that never could have existed at the time the film was released. But now, I would rush out to buy a box. Wouldn’t you? I’m happy with the card design, but less so with the Clockwork Orange font which I wish had been a little sharper. To do it over again, I’d just get rid of it. Of course, the cards represent a sort of edited-for-television version of the film, and it’s also the shortest set I’ve done at only 33 cards.
My favorite part is the PG, hamfisted, one might even say clueless captions (“Surprise Visit,” “Work of Art,” “Apology”).
She’s a Punk Rocker UK is a useful corrective to the male-dominated arena of U.K. punk directed by Zillah Minx, formerly of the day-glo anarcho-punk group Rubella Ballet. It came out in 2010 but hasn’t been available to watch online until a few days ago, when the filmmakers posted it on YouTube.
Rubella Ballet’s origins stem from a Crass gig in 1979 when the band called on audience members to join them onstage and play the instruments. So it’s not surprising to see Eve Libertine and a few other Crass-affiliated women interviewed here.
As a firsthand witness and participant of the original U.K. squat/punk scene, Minx’s credentials on this subject are unimpeachable. Perhaps inevitably, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex plays a central role in the story Minx is trying to tell (the musical bed for the opening credits is “I Am a Poseur”).
The movie, which clocks in at a crisp 68 minutes, features women punkers including, as already mentioned, Poly Styrene, Eve Libertine and Gee Vaucher of Crass, Gaye Advert of The Adverts, Michelle of Brigandage, and Olga Orbit of Youth in Asia as well as other figures like writers Julie Burchill and Caroline Coon.
The story is one of offhand marginalization, both as punks within society and as women within the punk scene. But what sticks with the viewer is the endless parade of vital, expressive, confident, funny women embodying the benefits of liberating self-discovery and defiance. Vi Subversa might have the most interesting story of them all, starting the radical feminist band Poison Girls as a mother of two in her 40s when punk landed in the U.K.
In February 1957, Orson Welles walked onto to Stage 19 at Universal Studios to begin directing his first Hollywood movie in almost a decade—Touch of Evil. The studios thought Welles was a risk—he was considered difficult, troublesome, a bad boy who just wouldn’t do what the studio execs told him to do. His last Hollywood feature had been the low budget Macbeth for Republic Pictures—a company better known for producing two-reeler westerns. At first Republic were keen on big old Orson bringing some high-falutin’ literary class to their stable, but after seeing the final cut, they took fright and delayed the film’s release for over a year.
Having his work held back or re-cut or burnt, encased in concrete and dumped in the sea—as happened to footage from his second movie The Magnificent Ambersons—was fast becoming the Hollywood norm for Orson Welles.
If Universal considered hiring him a risk—then it was a far greater risk for the writer, director and star to put his trust back with the studios—because no matter what he did or didn’t do, it was fairly easy money to bet that the no-neck Hollywood execs would royally fuck it up once again. And that, dear reader, is exactly what they did do.
Bad cop, good cop: Welles as corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan and Charlton Heston as Mexican drug enforcement official Miguel “Mike” Vargas.
There are different stories as to how Welles ended up directing Touch of Evil, a low-budget film noir of murder and corruption in a small border town. One goes something like this: lead actor Charlton Heston suggested Welles as director—which is a probable—only agreeing to star once Welles was signed-up to direct and appear in the film. As Universal wanted Heston—they were only too happy to oblige.
The other has Welles pitching ideas and looking for a script or a book or a story so bad, so obviously unfilmable that only a genius of Welles’ waist size could make it work.
Welles took one look at the screenplay based on a cheap pulp novel by Whit Masterson—the pen name of writing duo Bob Wade and Bill Miller—and decided he’d found his movie. Unlike say Alfred Hitchcock who always had his films worked out shot for shot long before a camera turned over, Welles wrote and rewrote the script throughout filming—often improvising and collaborating with the actors on dialogue. Welles also took the unusual approach of rehearsing the script with the cast prior to filming. Actress Janet Leigh—who played Heston’s wife in the film—later recalled:
We rehearsed two weeks prior to shooting, which was unusual. We rewrote most of the dialogue, all of us, which was also unusual, and Mr. Welles always wanted our input. It was a collective effort, and there was such a surge of participation, of creativity, of energy. You could feel the pulse growing as we rehearsed. You felt you were inventing something as you went along.
Mr. Welles wanted to seize every moment. He didn’t want one bland moment. He made you feel you were involved in a wonderful event that was happening before your eyes.
Even with rehearsals, Welles spent most nights rewriting the screenplay—bringing in new characters, creating new scenes. After one long night at the typewriter he called up Marlene Dietrich saying he had just written her a scene in his new movie and would she be so good as to come along tomorrow and film it? Of course, Dietrich was delighted to do so—as indeed were many of the other actors who were taking pay cuts or “guesting” in the movie—all because they recognized Welles’ genius and wanted to work with him.
But the studios still didn’t trust Welles. They planted spies on set who fed information back to front of house. Welles was wise to their game. On day one of filming, he arrived on set at 9am and had the first set-up finished by 9:15. By 9:25 he had finished the second. By the end of the day, Welles had shot eleven minutes of script. To the studio finks it looked like Welles had been tamed, but he was actually playing them—the set-ups were mainly close-ups or long shot dialog scenes. After a few days of such phenomenal turn-over, the spies went quietly back to their desks and Welles was left to get on with the movie he wanted to make.
Don’t interrupt, genius at work.
This was all fine until it came to editing the movie. Welles didn’t get on with the studio’s first choice of editor. The next thankfully understood exactly what Welles was doing and the pair cut a movie that was based on rhythms and innovative non-linear juxtapositions of scenes. For example, one scene would be cut with another scene—either happening concurrently or slightly ahead of the narrative. It then cut back to the end of the original scene. The audience were being given knowledge of events to come and insight into the actions of the characters. The editing style was about a decade or so ahead of its time. When the studio execs saw a cut of the movie in Welles’ absence—they freaked, barred Orson from the studio, reshot some of the material, shot additional scenes, and brought in a do-it-by-numbers editor who recut the whole thing in linear form.
In other word, the studio fucked it up—which they probably realized after the fact as they released Touch of Evil as a B-movie support to the Hedy Lamarr feature The Female Animal. Still Touch of Evil had enough of Welles’ creative genius to make it a powerhouse of a movie—one that has understandably grown in critical stature since first release. However, the film effectively finished Welles’ career as a Hollywood director.
More from behind the scenes of Orson Welles’ ‘Touch of Evil,’ after the jump…
The only two “shoppers” at the Century III, November 29th, 2015
Editor and former photographer for her high school newspaper and yearbook, Meg Stefanac took a trip back in time just before Christmas last year and paid a visit to a mall where she and her friends spent countless hours, the Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. As it turns out, Stefanac was one of only a scant few people traipsing around Century III on Sunday, November 29th. Luckily, she took her camera with her and captured some pretty depressing shots of the mall that hasn’t changed much since it opened back in 1979.
The empty food court at the Century III Mall
Stefanac’s photos remind me of the Sherman Oaks Galleria from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, only without Damone trying his best moves on a cardboard version of Debbie Harry and without PEOPLE. Here’s Stefanac’s recollections of Century III, which sound pretty much like my own memories of being an 80s mall-rat:
This was THE place to be for those living in the South Hills of Pittsburgh in the 80s. We pitied those who had to live their lives without such a mall nearby. It was always crowded and bustling, and it was frequently difficult to quickly work your way across as you navigated through a sea of neon clothing and big hair held firmly in place with Aqua Net.
The saddest arcade in America in the Century III Mall
Sometimes if I close my eyes and listen to Winger, I can smell the ooze of the fabled Aqua Net Pink Can wafting a hole through the ozone. I don’t miss those days. Much.
In late August 1980, XTC spent an extended weekend at Richard Branson’s Manor Studio in order to lay down another version of “Towers of London,” a track that would eventually become the second single off of Black Sea, following “Generals and Majors.” Someone clever at BBC sent a camera crew along to document the proceedings, and the result is the delightful hour-long documentary “XTC at the Manor.”
The “Manor” in question was a legendary estate that Richard Branson purchased in 1971 and promptly turned into a recording studio. (The documentary repeatedly features the memorable image of Branson teetering on one of the building’s many precarious rooftops.) Many, many albums were recorded at the Manor, including Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, PiL’s Metal Box, and Radiohead’s The Bends. In 1995 it ceased being a recording facility.
XTC also recorded White Music and English Settlement at the Manor. An interviewer points out that the weekend ends up taking on “a bizarre quality.” Andy Partridge mentions that for the previous album, the sessions were rather “sleepy.” This 1980 stint features the band’s very own bouncy castle—acquired, of course, for the shooting of the video for “Generals and Majors.”
The late, great postpunk website Slicing Up Eyeballs refers to this documentary as airing on BBC2 on October 10, 1980. My info says it was October 8, but it don’t much matter.
Okay, folks, so we kind of have to make this happen: There’s a petiton on Change.org that’s tryng to get a newly discovered ‘heavy metal’ element named after Lemmy Kilmister. The suggested name? Lemmium. That works for me. You? Sign the petition!
Heavy rock lost its most iconic figure over Christmas with the sudden and unexpected death of Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister. Lemmy was a force of nature and the very essence of heavy metal. We believe it is fitting that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry recommend that one of the four new discovered Heavy Metals in the Periodic table is named Lemmium. An astrological object (a star) has been named Lemmy to meet the IUPAC naming recommendations.
I think they mean “astronomical,” but maybe not!
So far Change.org has amassed over 21,000 supporters. I think we can do better. A link to sign the petition is here.
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