Thelonious Monk’s incredible advice for musicians, as compiled by saxophonist, Steve Lacy in 1960.

T.MONK’S ADVICE (1960)

JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT A DRUMMER, DOESN’T MEAN YOU DON’T HAVE TO KEEP TIME.

PAT YOUR FOOT & SING THE MELODY IN YOUR HEAD, WHEN YOU PLAY.

STOP PLAYING ALL THOSE WEIRD NOTES (THAT BULLSHIT), PLAY THE MELODY!

MAKE THE DRUMMER SOUND GOOD.

DISCRIMINATION IS IMPORTANT.

YOU’VE GOT TO DIG IT TO DIG IT, YOU DIG?

ALL REET!

ALWAYS KNOW… (MONK)

IT MUST BE ALWAYS NIGHT, OTHERWISE THEY WOULDN’T NEED THE LIGHTS.

LET’S LIFT THE BAND STAND!!

I WANT TO AVOID THE HECKLERS.

DON’T PLAY THE PIANO PART, I’M PLAYING THAT. DON’T LISTEN TO ME. I’M SUPPOSED TO BE ACCOMPANYING YOU!

THE INSIDE OF THE TUNE (THE BRIDGE) IS THE PART THAT MAKES THE OUTSIDE SOUND GOOD.

DON’T PLAY EVERYTHING (OR EVERY TIME); LET SOME THINGS GO BY. SOME MUSIC JUST IMAGINED. WHAT YOU DON’T PLAY CAN BE MORE IMPORTANT THAT WHAT YOU DO.

ALWAYS LEAVE THEM WANTING MORE.

A NOTE CAN BE SMALL AS A PIN OR AS BIG AS THE WORLD, IT DEPENDS ON YOUR IMAGINATION.

STAY IN SHAPE! SOMETIMES A MUSICIAN WAITS FOR A GIG, & WHEN IT COMES, HE’S OUT OF SHAPE & CAN’T MAKE IT.

WHEN YOU’RE SWINGING, SWING SOME MORE!

(WHAT SHOULD WE WEAR TONIGHT? SHARP AS POSSIBLE!)

DON’T SOUND ANYBODY FOR A GIG, JUST BE ON THE SCENE. THESE PIECES WERE WRITTEN SO AS TO HAVE SOMETHING TO PLAY, & TO GET CATS INTERESTED ENOUGH TO COME TO REHEARSAL.

YOU’VE GOT IT! IF YOU DON’T WANT TO PLAY, TELL A JOKE OR DANCE, BUT IN ANY CASE, YOU GOT IT! (TO A DRUMMER WHO DIDN’T WANT TO SOLO).

WHATEVER YOU THINK CAN’T BE DONE, SOMEBODY WILL COME ALONG & DO IT. A GENIUS IS THE ONE MOST LIKE HIMSELF.

THEY TRIED TO GET ME TO HATE WHITE PEOPLE, BUT SOMEONE WOULD ALWAYS COME ALONG & SPOIL IT.

 
Via Letters of Note
 

 
And I mean classy! None of that tawdry lizard erotica—this is art.

Henry Lizardlover, born March 27, 1954 as Henry Schifberg, is a herpetoculturist, writer, and photographer who has lived with as many as 60 lizards in his home. He poses his lizards in human positions on little lizard-size lounge chairs and they remain statue-still.

See also:
Henry Lizardlover Says Lizards Are ‘Chick Magnets’
 

 
Fascinating footage of a tattooing convention that was held in St Paul Minnesota in 1978. This was shot a good ten years before getting tattoos became such a common, fashionable thing to do (Believe it or not, giving someone a tattoo was illegal in New York until 1997). How times have changed.

In 1991, I did a piece for Showtime—very similar to this one—at what was then the very first “Inkslinger’s Ball” in Los Angeles (over 9000 attendees) and the topic was even then still considered somewhat “edgy.” (I even interviewed some of the same people. One of them, I won’t say who, was significantly worse for wear a decade later.)

At that time, the main reason people told me that they wanted to get heavily tattooed was to indelibly mark themselves as not being of mainstream society. One woman compared her tats to the warning markings on a black widow spider, letting people know to “back off,” which I thought was a good way of putting it.

Point is, even as recently as 22 years ago, tattooing was really only then entering the “acceptable” mainstream. Over and over again during the day I shot at the Inkslinger’s Ball, I kept hearing some variation on the theme of “tattooing is finally becoming socially acceptable,” the very same thing that was being said in 1978.

These days people seem to get tattoos, I think, for largely the opposite reasons as they did then: less to cordon themselves off from the rest of society, and more like “I want to be different, like everybody else.”
 

 
New York City-based artist E.V. Svetova (aka Katyok on deviantART), designs these oddly-beautiful David Bowie dolls. According to her page, she does “all of the customization and painting, as well as most of the garment design and construction.”

Some of these shots are based on iconic Mick Rock portraits of Bowie. Extra points for the mini Kansai Yamamoto knock-offs!

Unfortunately none of the dolls are for sale. My husband was crushed by this news.
 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
The work of the great American photographer William Eggleston focuses in on the mundane. Famous Eggleston images include the contents of his refrigerator, the ceiling of a friend’s house, parking lots, old trucks, old houses. Ordinary stuff.

The beholder of his art sees what Eggleston’s eye saw as he has gone about his grand five-decade project of documenting the American South, but his quirky choices (photography is as much about framing as editing, of course) become amplified by his hand-dyed magic in the darkroom. Eggleston’s work is all about capturing the vividly ordinary moment.
 

 
Many admirers of his work feel that Eggleston’s main strength is his use of color, that the colors are the most important thing, but I’m not one of them. Eggleston is much more than that, as his sprawling, deeply weird B&W 1974 video work, Stranded in Canton demonstrates. He’s the ultimate ethnographer of the South.
 

 
Shot using one of those (huge, by today’s standards) B&W Sony Porta-Pak units, the kind where the deck was slug over the operator’s shoulder, Stranded in Canton was basically just footage that Eggleston shot of people he knew. Eggleston equipped his camera with an infra-red video tube so he could shoot in dark places without lights, and this is what gives the handheld video its glowing, otherworldly quality.

The dreamlike 77-minute-long Canton achieves an accidental narrative as it drifts from one scene of Southern Gothic weirdness to another. Hard-drinking rednecks staggering around on Quaaludes, a low rent Memphis drag queen by the name of “Lady Russell Bates-Simpson” mugs for the camera, sauntering around a working-class bar; a couple loudly argues; Alex Chilton appears; so does blues singer Furry Lewis; a geek bites off the head of a live chicken. Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley even make cameo appearances. Stranded in Canton ends with a totally wasted Jerry McGill, the bank-robbing country singer, playing Russian roulette with his pistol as someone makes a guitar noise that sounds like Sonic Youth.

It’s a very strange trip, indeed. Obviously it was a huge influence on Harmony Korine (as he has said himself many times).

35 years after its initial screenings, the obscure Stranded in Canton, was revisited and remastered—with a wonderful anecdotal narration in Eggleston’s deep Southern drawl—for the Whitney Museum’s survey of his work in 2008. There’s a great coffee table book about Stranded in Canton, too, with a DVD of the film, extra footage, blown-up frames from the video and an essay by Gus Van Sant.
 

 
I’m going with “Sing Mew to Sleep.”

 
When he left the White House, 43rd president George Bush took up painting. Yesterday, The Smoking Gun reported that Bush’s sister, Dorothy Bush, and some other family members and friends of his and his father’s, had seen their email accounts compromised. Several things, including hospital photos of George H. W. Bush, were stolen in the breach.

Also among the pilfered items the hacker, who goes by the handle “Guccifer” (nice name!) obtained, was this curious nude self-portrait of the former president in the shower.

Apparently Bush sends snaps of his works-in-progress to his sister, which makes this even weirder.

I must say, though, I’d buy this in a heartbeat. Conceptually speaking, it’s a masterpiece! Does Bush have a gallery that represents him? Get in touch!

Below, another, even sadder view into the existential horror of Bush’s existence:
 

 
Via Salon

The more things change, the more they stay the same
 
The picture above is from a book called The Moment After the Show, a coffee table volume from photographer Matthias Willi and journalist Olivier Joliat, specializing solely in the sweaty, post-coital afterglow of musicians.

The photography feels almost invasive—and not just because we’re a centimeter from James Osterberg’s junk. The little details like unzipped flies, running make-up, and visible sweat-spots are so akin to pulling the curtain back. Looking at them offstage at a moment when they’re supposed to be human again, feels almost invasive.

Paul Laffoley, “Alchemy: The Telenomic Process of the Universe” (detail) (1973), oil, acrylic, ink, and vinyl lettering on canvas, 73 1/2″ x 73 1/2″

The gents at Imperium Pictures have put together this terrific short film of artist Paul Laffoley discussing his 1973 painting “Alchemy: The Telenomic Process of the Universe” in New York recently.

“Paul Laffoley: The Boston Visionary Cell” is at Kent Fine Art LLC (210 Eleventh Avenue, 2nd Floor, Chelsea, Manhattan) and the show will be up through March 9th. It’s getting rave reviews from The New Yorker, Art Forum and The New York Times. You can download a PDF of the catalog here.
 

 
For over 30 years, the so-called First Transmission video from Psychic TV, has been the stuff of, well, “snuff film” legend. It used to be that you couldn’t see this except through a fair amount of effort and now look, it’s on YouTube… like everything else. Just like normal things.

First advertised in the back pages of Thee Grey Book—the curious philosophical tract that aspiring members of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth got through mail order via a postal address listed on early PTV album covers—The First Transmission was an ultra weird touchstone of the underground VHS tape trading scene of the 1980s. (I dubbed my copy from the one they had for rent at the Magickal Childe occult bookstore, probably the sole copy anywhere in Manhattan and although it was a “legit” copy, acquired directly from TOPY I’m pretty sure, this was still a handmade item.)

Eventually I think there were three or four volumes of this material going around under the First Transmission title (this hour-long clip represents just a portion of it). Some of the participants were Genesis P-Orridge, Paula P-Orridge, Derek Jarman, Monte Cazazza, Peter Christopherson and David Tibet, with video of Brion Gysin and one of his Dream Machines, Jim Jones and some way fucked-up, er… “medical footage.”

A warning, this video is really not something that you want to watch at work. Maybe if you work at an S&M dungeon where ritualistic blood-letting is the norm... Don’t say you weren’t warned. The really gruesome parts, are, of course, faked, but they don’t look fake. The pissing, the blood enemas, the ritual scarring, they don’t look so fake, do they? I think those bits are, you know, real.

A secondary warning is that it’s a bit… slow moving. Still shocking after three decades, but a tad on the dull side. In defense of the project, Genesis told me that this material was more or less something that was conceived of to air on New York’s notoriously sleazy cable access station Channel J. The idea was for this weird, dreamlike footage just to appear on TV sets, sort of randomly, late at night, with no explanation whatsoever! On that level, and in the context of 1983, it becomes a minor prank masterpiece of sorts.