Hippie-exploitation paperbacks bring a smile to my face for a number of reasons:
1. Rarely do the hippies on the book covers look under 30. They look like illustrations from stagmags of swingin’ suburbanites.
2. Hippies are doped up and super-horny 24/7. Watch out!
3. Hippies buy their fashions from the “youth in revolt” section of the Sears catalog.
4. When they’re not covering their bodies in goofy slogans and day-glow butterflies, hippies are busy raping and pillaging and at least one in every rampaging gang looks like Frank Zappa.
Glamorous crate-digger Veronica Vasicka is the “musical detective” behind the Minimal Wave record label. She discovers and then promotes/advocates for the work of criminally overlooked, mostly European, underground musicians of the DIY late 70s/80s bedroom experimental synthpop scene, and exposes it to a new generation.
The genre, dubbed by New York-based Vasicka herself, is an electronic twin of the indie-rock “low-fi” movement and dates back to a time when synthesizers and 4-track home recorders were coming down in price and in the hands of more and more people (“Warm Leatherette” by The Normal—recorded by future Mute Records head, Daniel Miller on a $150 Korg 700S synthesizer in his apartment using two tape decks—would be emblematic of this sound). The music was often never even pressed on records, instead circulating on cassette tapes.
Veronica Vasicka’s East Village Radio show (she’s one of the co-founders) provided the initial focus for her archival endeavors, but soon her proclivities for turning up the rarest, most obscure tracks, led to her passion becoming a business and a career. Vasicka’s latest compilation, Minimal Wave Tapes 2 was recently released in conjunction with LA-based Stones Throw Records, best known for being the home to Madlib and MF Doom’s Madvillainy team-up.
D&C: Do you regard yourself as an archivist or a musical detective? Veronica Vasicka: A musical detective, for sure. A lot of the music was lost to particular places and locations. There’s a band called Aural Indifference from Melbourne in Australia on The Minimal Wave Tapes: Volume 2. He only made 30 copies of that tape, just 30 copies! I met his girlfriend by accident and it was such a surreal coincidence the way it happened. He went home and found a copy of the original master-tape in his parents’ basement and brought it to my show on East Village Radio. He was shocked anyone knew about it. In some ways it is such a small world as the people that have been collecting this stuff are connected, so in this underground way the connection already exists. Once people know what you are into, then they will make recommendations.
D&C: Are you surprised at how this sound has caught on? Veronica Vasicka: Yeah, especially because it is kind of like outsider music, and with outsider music you never know how the public will respond. It’s important not to think too hard about it, to just go with my intuition for this kind of band or project, and that is what I have been doing since the beginning: going with what I think needs to be heard.
Not everyone, apparently, is all that happy about seeing their work from three decades ago come back to haunt them:
D&C: What do people think when you get in touch and say, ‘I want to put out a record you made 30 years ago’? Veronica Vasicka: The general reaction is, ‘How the hell do you know about my music?’ or, ‘You really want to release that?! The music that I didn’t take seriously?’ Or, ‘Do what you want with it.’ Sometimes these artists don’t want to take it further and don’t want their music to be out there beyond the format that it’s in because it’s a reminder of a time that was maybe not the best in their lives. It just happens sometimes – they didn’t push it at the time so why would they want to push it now? It happens.
D&C: When this music first appeared there was massive unemployment and financial ruin around the world, and we are seeing the same again these days. Do you think bleak times foster the most radical musical creativity? Veronica Vasicka: Yes, there is certainly a parallel between what was happening economically during that time, the late 70s and early 80s, and what came out of it in terms of music, what people created during that time of struggle. I also think that’s another reason why people are attracted to this music once again, because we are living in a similar economic climate. I think there is a connection there. Great music and creativity always emerge out of times of struggle.
D&C: Do you ever feel like you are living in the past? Veronica Vasicka: No, I feel like I get obsessed with the past sometimes but in this case the music wasn’t given a platform in the past – yes, it was made in 1982, but how many people actually heard it? Not many. It just existed in a vacuum. I don’t feel like I’m living in the past, the music was just made there. The music was fully realised but its existence and purpose in this world was incomplete and so I am completing it.
Read more at Dazed Digital, plus they’ve got an exclusive Minimal Wave mix from Veronica Vasicka.
Hard Corps performing “Dirty” at The Fridge in Brixton in 1986, one of the tracks from Minimal Wave Tapes 2
While the 1987 BBC documentary The Confessions Of Robert Crumb lacks the intensity and insight of Terry Zwigoff’s masterful Crumb it is still an invaluable introduction to one of the world’s most fascinating and enigmatic artists. Fans of Crumb will find it short on revelations but initiates should be charmed.
Love him or loathe him, there is no denying that Crumb was way ahead of his time when it came to toppling sacred cows and shattering taboos. Discovering his comix as a teenager in the late Sixties was one of those formative events that fucked me up for life…in a good way.
“My role is that of a reporter.” – Mike Wallace on the debut of The Mike Wallace Interview
With the death yesterday of TV journalist Mike Wallace at age 93, we’ve already seen many remembrances of him as the man who—along with producer Don Hewett—created the American institution we know as 60 Minutes in the tumultuous American year of 1968. It’s impossible to short-change Wallace’s 38-year legacy as both gate-keeper of that show and pioneer of the “gotchya question” interview technique that defines much of our current news media landscape.
But it behooves us to also have a good look at the man’s stint as the host of The Mike Wallace Interview, the spartan and penetrating late-night program that broadcast nationally from 1957 through 1960. Wallace was 18 years into a broadcast career (mostly as a radio announcer and game show host) as he launched the show based on Night Beat, a similar and more groovily-named program he’d hosted locally in New York a couple of years earlier. During the show’s tenure, he brought a fascinating array of folks to the American public eye, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Pearl Buck, Eric Fromm, Lily St. Cyr, Aldous Huxley and many others.
Besides its solid bookings and now-surreal-seeming live-ads for its benevolent sponsor Philip Morris, TMWI distinguishes itself with a bare-bones visual setting to focus viewer attention on the substance of the personalities interviewed. Dare I say the only two journalists I can think of who’ve truly adapted the show’s black-background format with similar grace and talent are Charlie Rose and Dangerous Minds’ own Richard Metzger.
Do yourself a favor and check out the digitized collection of interviews from the first two years of the show that Wallace donated to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Meanwhile, here’s Wallace throwing down with a 54-year-old Sal Dali on death, religion, politics and the fact that “Dali is contradictory and paradoxical in any sense.”
Kinkade’s D.U.I. mugshot gets the Kinkade treatment
Shlockmeister artist Thomas Kinkade, self-proclaimed “Painter Of Light,” has died at the age of 54 of natural causes.
Dying at 54 doesn’t seem natural to me. Heart attack? Maybe. Despite his sanctimonious veneer, Kinkade was a boozehound with anger issues and a fat fuck so it is possible his heart attacked him.
Hugely popular among Christians, many of his paintings depict religious themes that border on self-parody, Kinkade claimed to be a devout Christian, but his behavior often mimicked that of another deeply religious celebrity, Mel Gibson.
The Los Angeles Times has reported that some of Kinkade’s former colleagues, employees, and even collectors of his work say that he has a long history of cursing and heckling other artists and performers. The Times further reported that he openly groped a woman’s breasts at a South Bend, Indiana sales event, and mentioned his proclivity for ritual territory marking through urination, once relieving himself on a Winnie the Pooh figure at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim while saying “This one’s for you, Walt.” In a letter to licensed gallery owners acknowledging he may have behaved badly during a stressful time when he overindulged in food and drink.
In 2006 John Dandois, Media Arts Group executive, recounted a story that on one occasion (“about six years ago”) Kinkade became drunk at a Siegfried & Roy magic show in Las Vegas and began shouting “Codpiece! Codpiece!” at the performers. Eventually he was calmed by his mother. Dandois also said of Kinkade, “Thom would be fine, he would be drinking, and then all of a sudden, you couldn’t tell where the boundary was, and then he became very incoherent, and he would start cursing and doing a lot of weird stuff like touching himself.” On 11 June 2010, Kinkade was arrested in Carmel, California on suspicion of driving while under the influence of alcohol.”
Well before Kinkade became a multi-millionaire selling his kitsch paintings, he worked as a background artist on Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta’s animated film Fire And Ice. In a 2008 New York magazine interview, Bakshi took an affectionate swipe at his old employee:
That son of a bitch! Kinkade was the coolest. If Kinkade wasn’t a painter, he’d be one of those cult leaders. Kinkade came into my office with James Gurney when I was looking for background artists [for Fire and Ice]. He’s a good painter, and he did a spiel. He made all these deals. How he went out and did what he did is beyond my understanding now. He’s very, very talented, and he’s very, very much of a hustler. Those two things are in conflict. Is he talented? Oh yeah. Will he paint anything to make money? Oh yeah. Does he have any sort of moralistic view? No. He doesn’t care about anything. He’s as cheesy as they come.”
Kinkade (far right) working on Fire And Ice. Photo via James Gurney.
Here’s a fascinating documentary on the making of Fire And Ice. Featuring art spun from the darker side of Thomas Kinkade.
Debbie Harry and Chris Stein interviewed by the very nearly hip Pierre Salinger, former press secretary for President Kennedy, on TV show 20/20 in March of 1980.
This is surprisingly good for network TV. Some cool live footage. Chris discusses his nervous breakdown after binging on LSD.
Among the many interesting aspects of Pierre Salinger’s career was the fact that he stuck to his guns after declaring “If Bush wins, I’m going to leave the country.” George W. won and Salinger moved to France.
Black Metal Satanica, as you might have already surmised from the title, is a 2008 documentary on the second wave of Scandinavian Black Metal music and its practitioners. Church burnings! Self-mutilations! Grave desecration! Suicide! Satanism! Murder!
Something here for the entire family. I wanna party with these guys…
Delve into the history of Black Metal with this comprehensive documentary covering the origins, the lore, the lifestyle and the contemporary scene of the Viking-based musical genre, from Scandinavian melodies to self-destructive behavior. Director Mats Lundberg’s interviews with key figures shed light on the different Black Metal factions. The film features music by bands including Watain, Vreid, Shining, Svartahrid, Rimsfrost and more.
Someone has posted the original, longer version of the Disinfo Nation (as the show was called in the UK) episode with my Grant Morrison interview from 2000. This is quite a bit longer than what appeared on the DVD and has some extended clips from Grant’s epic speech at the DisinfoCon. If this is the first time—or one of them—where he told the story of his “alien abduction” experience, I’d imagine that he’s really sick of recounting this tale by now!
When the second series of the show was originally transmitted, I was as pleased as pleased could be that the legal department at Channel 4 let the segment fly without any comments where Grant describes Austin Osman Spare’s theory of sigil magick. To get something like that on network television was a real coup for higher revolutionary mutation, I’d like to think…
The interview was taped at the Standard Hotel in Hollywood. We started on the balcony, but they made us go inside. Those are Andy Warhol print curtains behind Grant, btw.
There’s also a short segment about “The Picture” an amazing drawing/assemblage piece by artist Howard Hallis. Hallis didn’t finish the work until ten years later, when it was first exhibited at La Luz de Jesus gallery in Los Angeles in 2011 as “The Picture of Everything.” It was already a masterpiece back in 2000, and now it’s 5x more detailed and elaborate. Part II is here.
A truly fantastic idea by San Francisco agency Pereira & O’Dell to promote Snoop Dogg’s Kingsize Slim Rolling Papers: Rolling Words. Rolling Words is a book made entirely out of hemp where each page is a rolling paper with Snoop Dogg’s lyrics and witticisms written on them (in non-toxic ink of course). Also, the spine of the book has a match striking surface so you can smoke up on the run.
Folks attending Coachella this year will get to sample Snoop’s creation.
was recently released in conjunction with LA-based Stones Throw Records, best known for being the home to Madlib and MF Doom’s Madvillainy team-up. 
