Lou Reed. P.M. - Pre-Metallica. A Night with Lou Reed, his performance at the Bottom Line, New York, from 1983.
Track Listing:
01. “Sweet Jane”
02. “I’m Waiting for the Man”
03. “Martial Law”
04. “Don’t Talk to Me about Work”
05. “Women”
06. “Waves of Fear”
07. “Walk on the Wild Side”
08. “Turn Out the Light”
09. “New Age”
10. “Kill Your Sons”
11. “Satellite of Love”
12. “White Light/White Heat”
13. “Rock & Roll”
Look out for an air-guitaring front row fan around 51.48 - a portent of things to come A.M.? (After Metallica?)
Director Darren Aronofsky, whose films Requiem For A Dream and Black Swan oozed visual style, can’t do much to polish the turd that is Loutallica. Grainy black and white, super slo-mo and lens distortion create a nightmarish quality that is undercut by the song’s ludicrous heavy handedness, ending up more silly than spooky.
In one of the best interviews with him I’ve read in some time, comics mage Alan Moore offers his views on the future of publishing, Occupy Wall Street and that sad tosser Frank Miller. He also comes up with an extremely appealing idea for wresting control back from the bankers and plutocrats: Change the currency!
Mull that over for a second, won’t you?
What do you think needs to change in our political system?
Everything. I believe that what’s needed is a radical solution, by which I mean from the roots upwards. Our entire political thinking seems to me to be based upon medieval precepts. These things, they didn’t work particularly well five or six hundred years ago. Their slightly modified forms are not adequate at all for the rapidly changing territory of the 21st Century.
We need to overhaul the way that we think about money, we need to overhaul the way that we think about who’s running the show. As an anarchist, I believe that power should be given to the people, to the people whose lives this is actually affecting. It’s no longer good enough to have a group of people who are controlling our destinies. The only reason they have the power is because they control the currency. They have no moral authority and, indeed, they show the opposite of moral authority.
In the sixth issue of Dodgem Logic, I remember doing an article and I was trying to think of possible ways in which our society might be altered for the better. I’m not saying that any of these ways would necessarily be practical but it’s important that we try to think these things through. It’s probably more important now than it ever has been. There is a sense that we don’t have an infinite amount of time to get these things right.
With politics at the moment seemingly determined to keep ploughing on their same destructive course because they can’t think of anything other to do, when we’re facing the possibility of an economic apocalypse, of potentially an environmental apocalypse, we don’t necessarily have an infinite amount of time. I think that since our leaders are not going to address any of these problems then we really have no choice than to attempt to wrest the steering wheel from them. If they’re aiming at the precipice with the accelerator pedal flat to the floor, then we don’t have any other choices left. Do it now, in this generation, because we don’t how many more there’s going to be.
The economic problem is a strange one…
Economics is always strange. You’re not talking about anything that’s actually real. Researching a chapter for Jerusalem, I read a couple of books on economics to see if I could get my head around the facts of the situation. I was astonished when I found out the value of derivative bonds, in 2008. These are bonds that have a value in themselves that were once connected to a real thing, there might have been a bond made for the sale of a herd of sheep, but that can be sold on and they gain in value. The notional value of the world’s derivative bonds was in the region of sixty trillion. Exactly ten times the economic output of the entire planet, which is around six trillion. That means that the gap between what economists and what the world’s economic forces and the banks thought they had to play with and what actually existed was fifty-four trillion. That would seem to me the depth of the hole we are in.
So something has to be done about that. I would suggest beheading the bankers, but while it would be very satisfying and would cheer us up, it probably wouldn’t do anything practical to alter the situation. Behead the currency. Change the currency, why not? It would disempower all the people who had bought into that currency but it would pretty much empower the rest of us, the other ninety-nine percent.
The Honest Alan Moore Interview – Part 1: Publishing and Kindle (Honest Publishing)
The Honest Alan Moore Interview – Part 2: The Occupy Movement, Frank Miller, and Politics (Honest Publishing)
More tales of music industry corruption and sleazy insider wheeler-dealing, with an outcome that is a major poke in the eye to the some very greedy bastards. And it’s more than likely that you, Dangerous Minds reader, could directly benefit.
If being a fan of Pearl Jam taught me anything (it was a looong time ago I swear), it was that TIcketmaster suck. They have monopolised the sales of event tickets in the States and made it very hard for bands and promoters to regulate their own pricing and promote independent gigs. Well, now Ticketmaster has been forced to “refund” all its “handling fees” to all of its customers from 1999 up to this year.
As the result of a class-action lawsuit, the ticket-pushing behemoth is going to be handing out $1.50 per ticket (up to 17) to everyone who used the site between October 21, 1999 and October 19, 2011. Those who chose the UPS shipping option will be getting a little bit more back: an additional $5.00 credit per order.
It seems Ticketmaster’s processing fees were deemed deceptive because they did not clearly state that Ticketmaster was profiting from them.
According to Business Insider, Ticketmaster will continue to have these fees, but must clearly label them as profit on their site.
Good news! However, I put the word “refund” in quotation marks here because, as some of the commentators on the HuffPo story have pointed out, Ticketmaster are not giving their customers money back, but money off their future purchases. And to a limit of just 17 transactions, maximum.
So while it looks good on paper, in effect every customer who used Ticketmaster is only due a $26 credit note. Unless you used UPS shipping to receive your tickets, in which case you could be due up to $85 in credit, which is quite tidy. But you still need to return to using Ticketmaster to get any value.
But still. Fuck them. It’s great that their very dodgy dealings have been called out in public for everyone to see. And as I mentioned at the start of this post, I’m pretty confident that a high percentage of our readership here at DM will have booked tickets through Ticketmaster at least once over the last twelve years (and very likely more than once at that). So Ticketmaster owe you - get on ‘em!
The anti-piracy group BREIN has been accused by a soundtrack composer of not having permission to use his work in their well known “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-downloading campaign. The image above is a still from the infamous advert, which has been satirised heavily (most famously by The IT Crowd).
You couldn’t make this shit up. Well no you could - but no-one would believe you. Which is why Melchior Rietveldt, the Dutch musician whose work was used on the huge international ad campaign after it was commissioned for a only one-off screening, wore a wire to record the conversations he had with his national royalty collection agency Buma/Stemra. As if it wasn’t bad enough that his music was used without permission (in a bloody anti-piracy campaign, of all things) Mr Reitveldt was then told by a representative of Buma/Stemra, Jochem Gerrits, that the issue could be resolved if Gerrits was given a 33% share of the possible million-Euro-plus pay out that Rietveldt was due. In effect, a bribe.
It all started back in 2006, when the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group BREIN reportedly asked musician Melchior Rietveldt to compose music for an anti-piracy video. The video in question was to be shown at a local film festival, and under these strict conditions the composer accepted the job.
However, according to a report from Pownews the anti-piracy ad was recycled for various other purposes without the composer’s permission. When Rietveldt bought a Harry Potter DVD early 2007, he noticed that the campaign video with his music was on it. And this was no isolated incident.
The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. According to Rietveldt’s financial advisor, the total sum in missed revenue amounts to at least a million euros ($1,300,000).
The existence of excellent copyright laws and royalty collecting agencies in the Netherlands should mean that the composer received help and support with this problems, but this couldn’t be further from what actually happened.
Soon after he discovered the unauthorized distribution of his music Rietveldt alerted the local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra. The composer demanded compensation, but to his frustration he heard very little from Buma/Stemra and he certainly didn’t receive any royalties.
Earlier this year, however, a breakthrough seemed to loom on the horizon when Buma/Stemra board member Jochem Gerrits contacted the composer with an interesting proposal. Gerrits offered to help out the composer in his efforts to get paid for his hard work, but the music boss had a few demands of his own.
In order for the deal to work out the composer had to assign the track in question to the music publishing catalogue of the Gerrits, who owns High Fashion Music. In addition to this, the music boss demanded 33% of all the money set to be recouped as a result of his efforts.
Unbelievable! I hope Mr Rietveldt rinses these bastards for everything they’ve got. Here’s the original BREIN anti-piracy advert:
I was so uplifted by Tara’s post of the little kids at The Sullivan School singing “Judy is a Punk” by The Ramones that I went to their Youtube site and found this sweet take on David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”
YouTube user bd594 says, “For this video I recorded each instrument separately with a decent stereo mic and I also used a mixer to adjust the audio levels. I would like to point out that absolutely no sampling or audio effects were used.”
‘Truly great men are those who combine contrary qualities within themselves.’
He could have been talking about the late, great Ken Russell, who mixed contrary qualities in his films, perhaps most brilliantly in his bio-pic on the composer, Lisztomania.
Russell had this incredible ability of presenting the truth of an artist and their work, while abandoning any pretense towards biographical realism. In 1975, he captured this perfectly with Lisztomania, presenting Liszt as the equivalent of a pop idol, with his screaming fans and over-indulged libido, in an intelligent, multi-layered imagining of the composer’s life, while using reference points from Charlie Chaplin to rock and roll, comic books to literature, philosophy to the horrors of Nazism.
At the time of its release, Russell described his process of making the film:
‘My film isn’t biography, it comes from things I feel when I listen to the music of Wagner and Liszt, and when I think about their lives.’
Lisztomania is a Pop Art movie with a Punk Rock sensibility - released the same year as Russell’s version of The Who’s rock opera, Tommy, and The Rocky Horror Show, on the cusp of the Sex Pistols formation.
I recall how the Observer Magazine ran a color spread on Lisztomania, in eager anticipation that then 48-year-old l’enfant terrible, Mr. Russell, had re-invented cinema with his marriage of pop stars and classical music - Roger Daltery as Liszt, Ringo Starr as the Pope, Paul Nicholas as Wagner - all surrounded by icons of Elvis and Pete Townshend. Of course, when the film was released, the critics recoiled in horror, and ran screaming for their mothers, or shared smelling salts in the back row of the cinema, to keep them from fainting.
Lisztomania is like no other movie, it is an art work that demands repeated viewing to pick through the cinematic and cultural references, and to appreciate the workings of the creative mind behind the camera. Ross Care in Film Quarterly said of the film:
‘Ken Russell is an intuitive symbolist and fantasist, a total film-maker who orchestrates his subjects in much the same manner that a composer might transcribe a musical composition from one interpretative medium to another (as, for example, Liszt himself did with certain works by Wagner and Berlioz and other composers of the period).”
Starring Roger Daltery as Liszt, Sara Kestelman as Princess Carolyn, Paul Nicholas as Wagner, and Ringo Starr as the Pope. Look out for (LIttle) Nell Campbell, Rick Wakeman, Georgina Hale, Murray Melvin and an uncredited, Oliver Reed.
