I don’t know the exact provenance of these positively gorgeous stock film clips of the nearly-mythical Sunset Strip area in our beloved city that have been popping up in the last day or two via the Vintage Los Angeles FB group and Youtuber dantanasgirl. What an incredible treat, though. The building on the right in the first clip that bears the words Come to the Party would shortly become the Whisky a Go Go and further down the road Largo would become The Roxy. Certainly two of the more significant and beloved locations for my musical up-bringing! My Grandparent’s house was mere blocks from here, so these images really tweak some early childhood memories as well. Oh, internet….
In the spring of 1963, San Francisco poet, documentarian, and media activist Richard Moore accompanied and filmed author James Baldwin and Youth For Service Executive Director Orville Luster on a tour through the black-majority Bayview/Hunter’s Point and Fillmore districts of San Francisco. They sought to portray the real experience of African-Americans in what was considered America’s most liberal city.
That outing would result in Take This Hammer, and the footage of it was shot at a crucial time in Baldwin’s life. After 15 years in exile in Paris, the Harlem-born writer was back in the States at the peak of his renown and with political fire in his eyes. His turbulent novels from the ‘50s—especially Go Tell It on the Mountain and Another Country—had stunned the literary world with their exposure of racism and deeply developed queer characters.
During the same spring in which Take This Hammer was shot, Baldwin published the rather incredible essay Down at the Cross, and ended up on the cover of Time. That summer, he’d end his tour of the American South at the March on Washington with a quarter-million of his fellow Americans, with many other celebrities.
Baldwin’s observations certainly set The City’s white lib establishment into fits: “There is no moral distance ... between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. Someone’s got to tell it like it is. And that’s where it’s at.” Unfortunately, as seen in documents like Kevin Epps’s 2001 doc Straight Outta Hunter’s Point, not much has changed in SF over the generations…
From a one-off collaborative 1979 LP by Italian composer Roberto Cacciapaglia and American born singer Ann Steel, this is a wacky and wonderful clip and the song itself contains much to love. I’m mainly intrigued by her yellow canteen.
Here’s a couple of songs featured on the above pictured record for kids and distributed in U.S. schools in 1970 featuring the distinctive voice of many beloved Schoolhouse Rock classics, Bob Dorough and produced by noted jazzer Steve Swallow. The version of The Temptations Runaway Child, Running Wild is fairly out-there and truly does sound more than a little bit like Can, but with the Schoolhouse Rock guy singing. How can that possibly be anything but great ? Have a listen and see if you don’t agree.
The 44th Street Portable Flower Factory - Runaway Child, Running Wild
The rest of the E.P. are also covers, including this. Very straight ahead but again with that wonderful voice.
The 44th Street Portable Flower Factory - Blackbird
Our pals at Network Awesome bring together the varied and disparate artifacts of your favorite geniuses for your trouble-free enrichment. Here’s a swell multi-pronged tribute to visionary composer and inventor Raymond Scott including an interview with Jeff Winner of the Raymond Scott Archives
Jeff Winner is one of the chairmen of the Raymond Scott Archives, founder of raymondscott.com and co-producer of Manhattan Research, Inc., a 2-CD & book set of Scott’s early electronic work. That makes him totally the dude to talk to about Raymond Scott himself. And on top of being a total badass on Raymond Scott-ology, he was a nice enough guy to answer a few of our questions. The conversation goes everywhere - from Looney Tunes to Benny Goodman to Mark Mothersbaugh.
video playlist:
The Raymond Scott Quintette - War Dance For Wooden Indians
The Philharmonicas - Powerhouse
The Raymond Scott Quintette - Ali Baba Goes To Town (1937)
The Raymond Scott Quintette - Night and Day
Raymond Scott’s Electronium: The Restoration
Designs in Music - Dorothy Collins, Raymond Scott on the Bell Telephone Hour
Raymond Scott: On To Something (trailer)
An original painting done by the late Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett that was stolen from a London art gallery over the weekend has been returned, according to The Wire magazine.
Below, Syd Barrett and Roger Waters try to remain polite in the face of ridiculously uptight classical music critic Hans Keller, after the band play “Astronomy Domine” on BBC’s Look of the Week.
Thirty years ago today, the famous Brixton riot of spring 1981 brought the long-simmering issues of class, race and police repression to the front pages and TV screens of England.
Brixton was definitely not the first sign of racial unrest in the Thatcher era. A police raid on the Black & White Café in Bristol’s economically hard-hit St. Pauls district the year before had led to a day-long riot among Caribbean youth. And police apathy in investigating a fire at a party on New Cross Road in early ’81 fuelled the notion in South London’s black community that their lives were perceived by the cops as worthless.
In the days before things jumped off in Brixton’s Lambeth area on April 10, cops had launched the charmingly named Operation Swamp 81 in an attempt to curb local robbery and burglary. Over a week, officers stopped almost 1,000 mostly black people—including three members of the Lambeth Community Relations Council—and arrested 118.
Combined with the extremely high unemployment rate among Brixton’s sons and daughters of the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants, and the rise of organized white racist activism, the community’s temperature was at peak. As one of the youths put it in one of the films below: “Jobs, money, then National Front…something was bound to happen.” Confusion and bad-faith rumors around police involvement around a stabbing incident was all it took to set off two days of fighting.
The implications of the multiracial Brixton riot unfolded throughout the subsequent summer of that year in Handsworth, Chapletown and Toxteth. Despite the improvements and gentrification that Brixton has seen since ’81, the place hasn’t been free of unrest.
In 2001, director Rachel Currie produced The Battle for Brixton, one of the authoritative video chronicles of the revolt, for the First Edition program.
Pete Townshend recorded this radio commercial for the United States Air Force while the Vietnam War was raging. U.S. troop levels had reached 463,000 with 16,000 combat deaths to date. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians had been killed by this point. Were any of them happy, Jack?
The upbeat tone of the music and Townshend’s inane and utterly clueless inducement to “fly the skies, touch the moon and reach for the stars” reduces the Vietnam nightmare to a fairytale vision out of The Little Prince. “It’s a great place to be”...unless you’re on the ground deep-fried in napalm.
I always knew Pete Townshend had his head up his ass I just didn’t realize how far.
Instead of worrying about things like, oh, the state’s economy, the battered tax base, the elderly, state roads or ANYTHING THAT MATTERS, dimwitted LaPage took it upon himself, nay made it his business—after what he described as “complaints” about the supposed “anti-business” atmosphere (which later he admitted consisted of one single anonymous letter!!!) —to remove an eleven-panel mural from Maine’s Department of Labor building depicting actual events in American labor history! He also directed conference rooms be renamed so they won’t honor labor leaders, including one named for Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor under FDR who helped established the first minimum wage laws (and the first woman at a cabinet level in US history).
Incredible.
Judy Taylor, the artist of the piece who was selected by the Maine Arts Commission, remarked of the mural’s removal: “There was never any intention to be pro-labor or anti-labor. It was a pure depiction of the facts.”
Aside from proving to his constituents that he’s a blustering buffoon—as if there was ever a reason to doubt it—now Tea party-inspired foolishness might cost Maine taxpayers more than $38,000.”>the Department of Labor who granted most of the money for the mural are going to send LePage a bill for violating the terms of the grant. This Tea party-inspired foolishness might cost Maine taxpayers more than $38,000.
Ultimately, this mural business, as annoying as it is, is a small matter because when LePage is defeated in the next election cycle—if he runs, he surely will be challenged by a fellow Republican—his Democratic successor in the governor’s mansion is just going to undo everything damned thing this buffoon ever did, including hanging the mural back up and restoring the names of the conference rooms.
In the meantime, temporary Gov. LePage, was bitch-slapped the other day by a guerrilla artist who projected Judy Taylor’s labor history mural onto the exterior of Maine’s Capitol building. Here’s a statement about the video:
We put this video up to remind our peers that you have a voice, as soon as you choose to use it. If your government takes a symbol away and tries to hide history, you can make the truth resonate a thousand times stronger with your own 2 hands.
This is a lesson the labor unions taught us all, though some have chosen to forget it. We will remind you.
The maker of the art is unimportant. What matters is that you see it, and you have the freedom to speak about it.
classics, 
, a 2-CD & book set of Scott’s early electronic work. That makes him totally the dude to talk to about Raymond Scott himself. And on top of being a total badass on Raymond Scott-ology, he was a nice enough guy to answer a few of our questions. The conversation goes everywhere - from Looney Tunes to Benny Goodman to Mark Mothersbaugh.
