Chandra Oppenheim was just twelve years old when her debut album, Transportation, was released. Until recently, I wasn’t familiar with Chandra, but when I did hear Transportation for the first time, I was immediately taken with it. The music is great, for sure, but what’s truly astonishing is the depth of talent displayed by the young singer/lyricist.
Chandra was a highly creative young person; encouraged by her father, artist Dennis Oppenheim, she was writing songs by age nine. In the late 1970s, members of the New York band Model Citizens were looking to start another group and approached Chandra’s father—who they knew through the art community—to ask if his daughter could join them. Rehearsals began when Chandra was just ten. In addition to singing, she was writing the lyrics and melodies for the group’s catchy songs. Four of their tunes would make up the Chandra band’s Transportation EP, released via the group’s own label, ON / GO GO Records.
Chandra proves herself to be a charismatic vocalist and a compelling lyricist on Transportation. Over a danceable post-punk/no wave backing, Chandra sings with confidence, her lyrics exhibiting a sophistication that is striking.
Writing for the group was like journaling for Chandra, a way to work through her thoughts. One song was about a classmate named Kate, who she had complicated relationship with. “We were kind of friends, but distant. I was envious of her, obviously,” Chandra told me recently. But she had sympathy for Kate, too, recognizing “the burden of getting that kind of attention (for being pretty).” Chandra’s empathy isn’t solely for her, but “for all of us (girls).” There are lyrically twists in “Kate” that would be impressive coming from any songwriter, but it’s also quite something that Chandra could express these complex feelings at such a young age.
The Chandra band began performing in clubs around this time, and it wouldn’t be long before the now twelve-year-old was well-known in the underground New York scene.
If you remember the eighties, you were probably there. Big hair, bad music, and terrible fashion. Or was it so bad?
This was the decade when no one dominant musical trend dictated the terms—as say the Beatles did in the sixties or as heavy metal, prog rock or punk did in the seventies. Pop culture atomized into many different groups and subcultures. New wave, new romantics, punks, mods, goths, emos, hip-hop, rap, and eventually acid house and rave—which symbolically broke music down into euphoric repetitive beats with little reference to song, substance or subtlety.
Everything was considered equally valid, equally worthy, equally saleable, yet completely disposable.
Pop music was a teenage rite of passage; an entertainment business that vied with rudimentary computers and video games for attention. The revolution was no longer about class war it, was televised concerts to raise money to feed the world and discussions about what kind of trainers to wear. There was nothing to fight for. Affluence was king, feigned poverty was chic (ripped jeans for $100), gangster culture fashionable, and existential angst labored under a ton of makeup and hairspray. The eighties were all about dressing up and having fun which is kinda borne out by these photographs of youngsters from the decade.
Does my hair look big in this?
It’s all about… me.
The pained look of teenage angst.
More teenage fashion victims (and a few fashion victors, too) after the jump…
Is I Love Lucy the real Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, the Vault of the Adepti, the Island Beneath the Sea? Robert Anton Wilson used to talk about “the sect of Fred Mertz, Bodhisattva,” and its adherents’ simple creed:
They believe that if you look at enough I Love Lucy re-runs when you’re really wasted, eventually you’ll hear Fred reveal the most esoteric Zen teachings. . . .
If that sounds far-fetched, consider this: Ricky Ricardo’s signature song was addressed to a fearsome deity in the Yoruba pantheon. For practitioners of Santería, Babalú-Ayé is the orisha who controls health and prosperity. You want to be very cool around Babalú-Ayé because he can cover you with boils or give you the Ebola. The next time a conga drum tempts you to do your impression of Ricky Ricardo singing “Babalú,” remember that you might be mocking the god who decides whether you catch leprosy. Ixnay on the abalúbay!
After the jump, Ricky puts on voodoo drag for a big number at the Tropicana, and the Ricardos and the Mertzes fly to Cuba…
I’ve been a big Rick and Morty fan ever since the show debuted on Adult Swim in late 2013. (For the big Science March last year I carried a sign emblazoned with the image of Rick Sanchez—who is a scientist and genius.) I was a big Community nut and continue to be a Harmontown devotee, and so I was eager to see where Dan Harmon would land after the lengthy demise of Community. In addition to creating that Joel McHale vehicle for NBC, Harmon was one of the main minds behind the legendary failed 1999 TV pilot Heat Vision and Jack, which a young Jack Black teamed up with a young Owen Wilson in a parodic reworking of Knight Rider directed by a young Ben Stiller.
Harmon’s heart always lay more with visionary sci-fi (à la Robocop) and not the relatively sober sitcom trappings of Community, so Rick and Morty represented a return to subject matter like Heat Vision and Jack as well as a chance for him and show co-creator Justin Roiland to have a shit ton of fun. Reflecting the evident creative fulfillment that Harmon and Roiland have enjoyed, the show has found a solid cult following.
Purhasers of the box set of season 1 (Blu Ray version only) of Rick and Morty, which came out in 2014, received an odd little pamphlet with the title “The Good Morty.” The 14-page story was a pitch-perfect parody of the Chick tracts once unleashed by the millions by evangelical nut case Jack T. Chick. “The Good Morty” made a brief appearance in the season 1 finale “Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind.”
“The Good Morty” tells the story of the “good” Morty and the “bad” Morty—the latter makes the poor decision to join Rick for an adventure that is identical to any number of Rick and Morty episodes while the “good” version of Morty stays home and obeys the strictures laid down in Sacrimortys 4:23 to worshipfully kiss his own toes and so on. Meanwhile, Morty’s sister Summer becomes a heroin addict and eventually the “bad” Morty is transformed into a cockroach by a vengeful deity. Such are the risks in deviating from the true path of Morty!
The tract ends with a little list of things to do in order to avoid getting transformed into a cockroach:
1. Draw five scantily-clad or fully nude girls every day.
2. Kiss your toes three times each night before bed. Imagine each toe is a crying Morty who needs love.
3. Say Jessica’s name seven times each morning. Never above a whisper. Never above audible levels. Use your “six inch voice.”
4. Play with toys daily. Action figures, building blocks, remote control type toys. Bonus points for yo-yos. They’re a classic that holds up. Just be careful with them. No fancy tricks in crowded rooms.
5. Refuse all calls to adventure from Rick. Be like your dad. Be like Jerry. A simple life.
6. Play video games. Bonus points for handheld games. Never play freemium games.
7. Don’t worry about homework. You’ll be fine. The global economy is going to collapse soon anyway. Learn survival skills if anything.
Anyone who has listened to Harmon discourse on Joseph Campbell will recognize the Campbellian note in the phrase “calls to adventure.”
“The Good Morty” was written by Roiland and Ryan Ridley, and the art was created by Erica Hayes. You can read the entire thing below:
Because parts of Brooklyn, NYC have culturally exploded to serve as an East Coast counterpoint to Portland, OR as the USA’s epicenter and incubator of all that is gratingly and ephemerally hip, it might be hard to remember that this phenomenon (and the shockingly rapid gentrification that followed quickly behind it) is a very recent development, and that it really wasn’t so long ago that the Brooklyn scene was not only nonexistent, but the very idea that there could be such a thing seemed unrealistic. Before 2000-2001ish, when bands like The Rapture, Radio 4, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Liars made Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood synonymous with a jagged and exciting post-punk revival, there was basically only Oneida.
Drummer Kid Millions and organist Bobby Matador moved to Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill area in 1996, and with guitarists Hanoi Jane and Papa Crazee, they began, in relative isolation, to explore a “psychedelic” music that was pretty much free of typical psych rock tropes—as Millions put it in a generously in-depth conversation, “We want to make something damaged, like an actual psychedelic trip. What does ‘psychedelic’ in music even mean, tape echo on a tambourine?”
We had a bunch of different interests musically, like Krautrock, the Nuggets comps. We were into experimental punk like Pere Ubu because Bobby went to Oberlin and did a thesis on Cleveland punk, so he was aware of everything below the Pere Ubu tip of the iceberg. We were into glam, which was VERY uncool at the time, and we were coming across crates of electro records that were just left on the street in our neighborhood, like all these 12”s of Afrika Bambaataa and that kind of thing. And all that kind of—it wasn’t until the Brooklyn thing exploded that we realized that other people were into this stuff, and a lot of it, you’re not necessarily going to hear in what we do, but it’s all there.
Williamsburg, in terms of being hip, it was just a block near the Bedford train stop. There was a good Thai restaurant, there was EarWax records, which has moved since. There weren’t any venues except for the Charleston, which was a shitty gig, but it was the only game in town, so we did a lot of DIY shows, we played these parties at a few spots. Wolfy [pseudonym of poster artist Jef Scharf] introduced us to the people at Good/Bad, an art collective in Williamsburg closer to the Lorimer stop, but there was really nothing else there. A few years after we started to play around doing DIY shows, this made me laugh—the first time I came out of the L stop and saw somebody busking, it seemed like the dumbest thing I’d ever seen and I thought “wow, we’re fucked!” And then the other thing was when Northsix [now known as Music Hall of Williamsburg] first opened we refused to play there because we just did DIY shows, we didn’t want to play clubs. They got really upset and accused us of not supporting the scene, but if you walked towards the river from Bedford towards Kent, as soon as you stepped off of Bedford, it was desolation! Nobody was walking around, nobody was there, it was completely empty of people. When we were doing some of our earliest press photos the photographers said “we need to figure out a really dramatic photo” so we said well fuck, we could just burn a couch in the middle of the street, that’s what it was like!
When we started, there was no rock scene in New York City. There were no good rock bands, there was just sort of a hangover scene of what was left after New York bands like Girls Against Boys and Skeleton Key were being signed to major labels. New Jersey had Yo La Tengo, but, and I’ve said this before, but when we’d say, onstage, that we were from Brooklyn, people would laugh, it was so uncool to admit that you lived in Brooklyn. And by the time the post-punk thing started happening in Brooklyn, with bands like Liars, we were on our fifth album.
That album, Each One Teach One, not only crested with the Williamsburg wave, it made the band notorious. It opened with two songs, “Sheets of Easter” and “Antibiotics,” both of which surpass 14 minutes in length, and which use repetition to defiant levels. “Easter,” for almost its entire duration, is a one-note riff and a one-word lyric (“You’ve got to look into the light light light light light light light…”), and it would have probably come off like they were just fucking with people if the song weren’t so goddamn glorious. To this day it still feels like a treat when they bust it out in concert.
You don’t HAVE to listen to the whole thing. We understand it’s not for everybody.
Oneida were, for a long time, ferociously prolific. Though they lost Papa Crazee to the folk-rock band Oakley Hall, they gained, for a time, Trans Am/Golden/Fucking Champs guitarist Phil Manley, and they’re now a five-piece with synthesist Barry London and former Ex-Models guitarist Shahin Motia. Through all these transitions, they managed to release an album of consistently high quality every year or two from 1997 to 2012. Millions became a promiscuous moonlighter, in his own percussion project Man Forever (their last album, Play What They Want features contributions from Laurie Anderson), with Ex-Models, with London in the wonderful Jäh Division which is exactly what you’re thinking, and with Matador in a duo called People of the North. On top of all that, the band curated the Brah Records label for Jagjaguwar, releasing excellent albums by Pterodactyl, Parts & Labor, and Sightings. But since 2012, save for a collaborative album with seminal No-Wave figure Rhys Chatham, there’ve been a few Oneida singles and that’s that. That finally changes this year, when the band releases Romance.
Back before the intricacies of the thoroughly made-up ancient language of Dothraki in Game of Thrones entranced the more dorkish among us, that same sort of person spent his/her time immersed in Simlish, a language that was created for the world of the Sims, a popular franchise created by Maxis that was first released by Electronic Arts in 2000 in which users, in the act of ensuring that their anonymized suburb dwellers took out the trash on time, often ended up ...... neglecting to take out their own trash on time (that’s how I processed the experience of playing the game, anyway).
The Sims was enough of a sensation that it spawned some sequels, such as The Sims 2 in 2004 and The Sims 3 in 2009. By the time those franchises got going, the concept of Simlish had gotten embedded in enough people’s minds that someone, most likely Maxis audio director Robi Kauker or EA music marketing honcho Steve Schnur, had the idea of enlisting some top music acts to record some of their songs in the language. (Noted spud Mark Mothersbaugh was also hired to compose the music for The Sims 2, but there was no Simlish component to his contributions.)
The expansion pack The Sims 2: Open for Business, released in 2006, featured songs by several well-known acts, all of which shared the trait of having their most fruitful period occurring well before the year 2000. Depeche Mode released a Simlish version of “Suffer Well,” off of 2005’s Playing the Angel. At least that was a new song at the time—joining them on the The Sims 2: Open for Business soundtrack were Kajagoogoo, with “Too Shy” and Howard Jones, with “Things Can Only Get Better.”
To get an idea of what a Simlish song would sound like, here’s a bit of “Na Na Na” in English and then the same portion in Simlish:
Drugs, gimme drugs
Gimme drugs, I don’t need it
But I’ll sell what you got
Take the cash and I’ll keep it
Eight legs to the wall
Hit the gas, kill em’ all
And we crawl, and we crawl, and we crawl
You be my detonator
Trubs nibby trubs nibby trubs
Weys a neeba
Westu nell anzu bar will enash and za weeba
Da megs eeba za
Mental ras gibba na
Ebwee ga ebwee ga ebwee ga
Du bas an doobie sa
In a press release, you can find the rather anodyne quotation from David Gahan, which runs, “Depeche Mode has always been open to new ways of sharing our music, but re-recording a Simlish-language version of ‘Suffer Well’ just sounded completely bizarre. Of course, that’s why couldn’t resist doing it.”
Here are some of the primary highlights from the Simlish songbook:
Set to the tune of Massive Attack’s “Angel,” Serena Bramble’s 2009 remix project “The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir” is a “video love letter that distills film noir movies into their atmospheric essence.”
Bramble, an editor and writer, had this to say about her work:
“After many long hours, this is my tribute to my favorite genre, to the dark shadows and the profound despair of the soul. I tried to include as many as I could get my hands on, though there are obviously some that I overlooked, some accidently (the absence of The Sweet Smell of Success and White Heat are the most obvious and shameful), some purposefully (save Sam Fuller’s 1964 pulp masterpiece The Naked Kiss, I decided to stay strictly within the 18-year period between 1940 and 1958, so absolutely no neo-noirs like Chinatown, and even more importantly, absolutely no colors).
“If this should be deleted for copyright infringement (this is for recreational use only, not for profit; all film clips and the music by Massive Attack belong to their respective copyright holders), I’ve had a hell of a time doing it. And just in case I glorified violence and smoking a bit too much, as a semi-pacifist, nonsmoking woman, I can only quote Samuel Fuller: “I hate violence. That has never prevented me from using it in my films.”
The films, dangerous ladies and toxic dudes seen during Bramble’s epic supercut are:
The Letter (1940, William Wyler. Bette Davis) The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston. Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor) Shadow Of A Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock. Joseph Cotten) Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder. Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray) Murder, My Sweet (1944, Edward Dmytryk. Dick Powell) Scarlet Street (1945, Fritz Lang. Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett) Laura (1945, Otto Preminger. Gene Tierney) Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulhmer. Ann Savage) Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman) Gilda (1946, Charles Vidor. Rita Hayworth) The Killers (1946, Robert Siodmak. Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster) The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks. Humphrey Bogart) The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, Tay Garnett. John Garfield, Lana Turner) The Lady From Shanghai (1947, Orson Welles. Rita Hayworth, Welles) Out Of The Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur. Jane Greer, Robert Mitchum) Brute Force (1947, Jules Dassin. Burt Lancaster) Force Of Evil (1948, Abraham Polonsky. John Garfield, Marie Windsor) The Set-Up (1949, Robert Wise. Robert Ryan) The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed. Orson Welles) Criss Cross (1949, Siodmak. Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo) Gun Crazy (1950, Joseph H. Lewis. John Dall, Peggy Cummins) In A Lonely Place (1950, Nicholas Ray. Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame) The Asphalt Jungle (1950, Huston. Sterling Hayden) Night And The City (1950, Jules Dassin. Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney) Sunset Blvd. (1950, Billy Wilder. Gloria Swanson, William Holden) Ace In The Hole (1951, Billy Wilder. Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling) Angel Face (1952, Otto Preminger. Jean Simmons) Pickup On South Street (1953, Samuel Fuller. Richard Widmark) The Big Heat (1953, Fritz Lang. Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin) Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich. Gaby Rodgers) Night Of The Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton. Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish) The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick. Sterling Hayden) Elevator To The Gallows (1958, Louis Malle. Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet) Touch Of Evil (1958, Orson Welles) The Naked Kiss (1964, Samuel Fuller. Constance Towers)
Watch “The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir,” after the jump…
Till Rabus is a Swiss artist who uses his work to ask questions about our existence. His paintings suggest it is no longer possible to solely rely on Descartes’ proposition “I think therefore I am.” We are more complex. We are what we do and what we have. Rabus fills his canvases with the detritus of our existence—discarded toys, plastic bottles, used condoms, garbage sacks—and asks how these objects represent us and what these objects say about our relationship to the world.
Rabus often “eradicates any signs of human presence in his paintings.” When he does paint the human form it is cropped or presented as a collage of limbs and movement engaged in a sexual act. These images relate to pornography and how intimate personal moments can become so overly objectified with their original meaning lost.
Rabus is the son of two artists. Born in 1975, he originally trained as an engraver of pocket watches before gradually moving towards a career in painting. His style developed more fully after he saw an exhibition of work by American Pop Artist James Rosenquist in 2004. Rosenquist had earned his living as a billboard painter. He went on to paint collages of consumer goods, iconic film stars and politicians on large canvases in a powerful graphic-style that helped define much of Pop Art.
Another influence is British artist Sarah Lucas who uses found objects to create sculptures such as “Au Naturel” (1994) which consisted of a mattress, a water bucket, melons, oranges and a cucumber, or “Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab” (1994) which were used to suggest a female form.
With his paintings, Rabus collects together the various artifacts he intends to depict. Once composed as an image he takes a digital photograph which he then uses as the basis for his pictures. Rabus has been described as:
...a hyperrealist with a keen eye for the beauty of banality. His subject matter ranges from fast food to porn, but all his works refer to, and are firmly based in Art history. … These playful pieces celebrate the seductive surface and almost convince the viewer to disregard their darker themes such as overconsumption, objectification and the steady dilution of local culture into global uniformity.
The resulting paintings are beautiful, surreal, make reference to art history, and strangely disconcerting as they ask more than they answer. See more of Till Rabus’ work here.
I’m sure that many readers of this blog are familiar with the legendary Plaster Casters, the Chicago groupies who made Plaster of Paris molds of rock star cocks, starting in the late 60s with Jimi Hendrix and later the likes of Jello Biafra and Ariel Pink. There’s even a KISS song about them. But did you know that Cynthia Plaster Caster and her friend Dianne (“the designated giver of blowjobs”) also had an album?
Well they did. Kinda. Sort of. Well not really… Apparently only their name is on it, not their actual voices. I doubt they even got paid for it. It’s a groupie-themed novelty record where unsurprisingly the actual music (a competent group of session players jamming on some highly enjoyable blues-rock) takes a backseat to the album cover and the nudge-nudge-wink-wink song titles which tend to promise a whole lot more than they actually deliver on.
For instance there’s “Lanoola Goes Limp” (referencing, apparently, an in-joke among the members of Paul Revere & The Raiders) or “Seven Foot Drummer From Fleetwood Mac.” And who wouldn’t want to listen to “Joint Venture” or “You Didn’t Try To Ball Me (For Frank Zappa)”? What about the intriguingly titled “Diane’s Blue Plate Special” (“plating” = “fluffing” in the Plaster Caster vernacular) or “Blues For Big Jimi”?
By the way, it’s almost entirely instrumental. Don’t get me wrong, it’s actually pretty good! If you like “groovy” sounds, I don’t want to scare you off, this might be for you.
The album was produced by music business veteran Bob Thiele and released on his newly launched New York-based Flying Dutchman record label, which mostly released jazz and blues, including important albums by Gil Scott-Heron, Gato Barbieri, Oliver Nelson, Lonnie Liston Smith and Thiele’s wife, pop singer Teresa Brewer. Flying Dutchman also released albums of speeches by Black radicals H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis and cultural critic Stanley Crouch, but nothing else that I am aware of quite like The Plaster Casters Blue Band.
The Girls Together Outrageously this is not. And who would have retailed something like this in 1969? Dirty bookstores? How anyone thought they would make a buck on such a product—I remind you that these are not songs with “dirty” lyrics, but instrumentals—is mystifying, but I applaud this misguided, weirdo effort.
Around 1974, Alice Cooper fully morphed from a group’s name to that of a solo artist. While Cooper’s fellow bandmates moved on to various solo ventures—guitarist Michael Bruce working on the album In My Own Way and drummer Neal Smith recording Platinum Gods—Cooper planned his own solo extravaganza Welcome to My Nightmare set for release in 1975. He was drinking heavily and getting a “buzz on” with the likes Harry Nilsson, Micky Dolenz, Keith Moon, John Lennon, and lyricist Bernie Taupin. This little group of legendary drinkers was known as the “Hollywood Vampires” due to their nocturnal drinking habits at bars and clubs along Sunset Strip in L.A. Being slightly inebriated might explain how Cooper became involved with a space-age rock opera called Flash Fearless and the Zorg Women Parts 5 & 6.
The title alone should have been fair warning that this might be a tad sub-par compared to his own classic work but something or someone—if only Cooper could remember exactly what or who?—led the singer to sign-up for the starring role as Flash Fearless. Perhaps it was the host of big name artists who were also happily roped into the project like the Who’s John Entwistle, who played bass on every track; or maybe boozing buddy Keith Moon who had a minimal speaking role as pirate Long John Silver; or perhaps Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues who played guitar; or maybe Elkie Brooks formerly of Vinegar Joe who (rather confusingly) sang vocals as both Flash’s crew member/girlfriend Dulla and head of the evil Zorg Women; or maybe Eddie Jobson of Roxy Music, or Jim Dandy, or Frankie Miller (who didn’t appear on the US album version), or Bill Bruford, or Kenney Jones, or Maddy Prior, or any of the highly respected talents who gave their name and time to the album.
Flash Fearless and the Zorg Women Parts 5 & 6 was the brainchild of Canadian songwriters/musicians Steve Hammond and Dave Pierce with contributions from Bonnie Pierce, Rick Jones, and Terence Hillyer. The musical was a parody of those 1930-style film serials like Flash Gordon. Pierce had been toying with the idea of a space-rock musical since around 1970 when he was writing songs in Canada with Rick Jones. Described as a “nostalgic musical of the 24th-century,” Flash Fearless “follows the soft-porn adventures of a spoof 1940s sci-fi superhero, Flash Fearless, on a planet inhabited by a race of Amazons, the Zorg Women’ who keep men enslaved and milked them for their seminal fluid. The story seemed a neat fit to the mood of the time with the hit musical The Rocky Horror Show, Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Glam Rock, the spoof sex movie Flesh Gordon, and even the Who’s star-studded misfire production of Tommy with the likes of Peter Sellers and Rod Stewart in the cast.
Flash Fearless and the Zorg Women Parts 5 & 6 was recorded in London and Los Angeles (Cooper’s tracks) in 1974 and released to much fanfare in 1975. This included a full-color comic strip published in the NME. Entwistle described the album to Melody Maker as “a breath of fresh air in rock music.” Fuck knows what the Ox was breathing in before but this wasn’t fresh air. It was great talent and production in search of good material. The album bombed.
More of Alice Cooper, John Entwistle and ‘Flash Fearless,’ after the jump…
