I’m not sure I can properly parse this bit of news from Arthur.

Apparently Dick Cheney took the stage at CPAC to the tune of Howlin’ Rain’s song “Dancers at the End of Time,” a tribute, of course, to the Michael Moorcock book of the same name.

What in the… well, I suppose he’s laughing at all of us, isn’t he? SOMEBODY is. SOMEWHERE.

(Arthur: Dick Cheney, Dancer at the End of Time)

(The Dancers at the End of Time (S.F.Masterworks))

Excellent photo essay on Tijuana, Mexico from the Denver Post. I swear I met this guy once… In a drunken night of mayhem at four in the morning… I think he paid off the cops not to jank me or something. But it’s all too hazy to remember properly.

(Denver Post: Tijuana Mexico)

(Here Is Tijuana!)

Epic guitar duel between Neil Young and Stephen Stills in this blistering live version of Young’s Down By The River at the Big Sur Folk Festival on September 14, 1969.

 
Vivienne Westwood’s pointedly anti-consumerist remarks backstage at London Fashion Week after her big show were taken by some as more “dotty” remarks by the great British designer, but they didn’t seem that way to me. Yes, there is certainly a, uh, tension between showing a new collection of clothes and then telling everyone assembled not to buy them, but do you think Westwood doesn’t know that?

And besides, since when is the pure act of telling the truth, somehow dotty in the first place? Have I missed something here? The woman’s 1000% correct. She should be commended for her commitment to the future of mankind—and speaking with common sense—and not mocked.

I actually met her once about ten years ago and she was a trip. My close friend Oberon Sinclair was doing some PR work for the opening of the Westwood boutique in New York and there was a big sit down dinner for a lot of people. Westwood didn’t know a lot—if any—of the people present and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who I attended the dinner with, gallantly and sweetly, sat down with Westwood to put her at ease. So I was along for the ride and we sat across from her for about two hours and she was a delight, if a little non-sequitur at times. (Not a judgement, just a description. People must say that about me all the time…)

One-of-a-kind designer Vivienne Westwood Sunday night presented a gorgeous collection of autumn and winter outfits at London Fashion Week, then went backstage and told reporters she hopes people stop buying her clothes.

“Stop all this consumerism,” said Westwood, the former high priestess of punk who has increasingly used her catwalk shows to spotlight her concern about climate change.

“I just tell people, stop buying clothes. Why not protect this gift of life while we have it? I don’t take the attitude that destruction is inevitable. Some of us would like to stop that and help people survive,” she said.

 
Below is part one of Dame Westwood’s interview on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross last year. I thought she was fucking awesome when I saw this. Part II is here. Both parts are well worth watching. When is the last time you heard a public figure speak this passionately about something?
 

 
Westwood Condemns Consumerism After London Show (ABC News)
 
Vivienne Westwood meets James Lovelock on video (Dazed Digital)

 
Whenever the discussion of a “favorite” movie comes up, my eyes glaze over. I’ve seen so many films that when pressed, exactly none of them stand out as a particular favorite. Not one. But when the favorite album question gets asked, Nick Cave’s first post-Birthday Party solo outing, From Her to Eternity comes immediately to mind.

To say that this album was a significant soundtrack to my ill-spent youth is a bit of an understatement. I listened to this record obsessively. I was a huge Birthday Party fan, but From Her to Eternity absolutely captivated my imagination. It was the most intelligent, most literate, most criminally insane rock music I’d ever heard, a quantum leap past everything else that was happening at the time. At the tail end of the post punk era, when once great bands—like the Psychedelic Furs, PiL and Ultravox to name but three—had lost their mojos in disheartening ways, Nick Cave became the standard bearer of intellectual cool in my late teen years. Talk about a dangerous mind, I thought Nick Cave was the baddest motherfucker alive.

True story: For the better part of 1983 and all of 1984, I lived in the south London neighborhood of Brixton. Today it’s a trendy area, but then it was anything but gentrified, its residents consisting of mostly poor West Indian immigrants, dreadlocked rastas and a small subset of squatters and junkies from all across the globe. I loved it there. One night I was exiting the Brixton tube station with my friend Sam when we were accosted by none other than Nick Cave, looking very much worse for wear, who politely asked us if we could direct him to where he could find some smack, please. (In truth, Cave didn’t ask “us,” he asked Sam, who looked all gothy and weird while I looked like what I was, a preppy, 18-year old American kid. He wasn’t addressing me at all, I was just standing there.)

Sam kindly pretended not to know who Cave was—oh we knew—just shook his head no and kept going. When we walked up the stairs and out of the station, he turned to me and said “That’s the second time he’s asked me that.”

I have always prided myself on my ability to be at the right place at the right time…

Cut to 1986. CDs had been on the market for a couple of years, but at that time it was still all stuff like Billy Joel, Tina Turner and Phil Collins that got released on the format. I was stomping around New York City with a Sony Walkman clamped to my ears and I was slowly beginning to understand the concept of hi-fidelity audio. I was curious about CDs, but there wasn’t that much there to lure me in just yet. Finally things I cared about started slowly trickling in, but it wasn’t until Kicking Against the Pricks, Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s third outing, an all covers collection, came out, that I decided to bite the bullet and buy a CD player (which used to cost $500!). If Kicking Against the Pricks on CD could sound even better than it did on the cassette version I’d been listening to, then sign me up.

The first 3 CDs I bought were Kicking Against the Pricks, Nancy Sinatra’s The Hit Years comp and the first Psychedelic Furs album. Later that day, eager to hear more of this newfangled digital audio, I bought Marc Almond’s Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters, Julian Cope’s World Shut Your Mouth and John Zorn’s Morricone tribute, The Big Gundown.

Cut to December 2009. Since about 2002 I had been buying multi-channel SACD and DVD-A audio discs, but since I had only a stereo system—a really good one, I should add—I was just able to listen to the two channel versions of some of my favorite classic albums, but never the 5:1 mixes. Once again it was hearing that the Nick Cave catalog was coming out, remastered and in 5:1 that caused me to get antsy about upgrading the audio gear to a surround system. I’d managed to keep a lid on my once unparalleled ability to buy massive amounts of CDs for a good 3-4 years now and my lovely, but financially cautious wife, agreed to loosen the pursestrings for a major refurbishment of the home entertainment electronics.

Since it would be ridiculous for me to “review” an album I’ve already told you at the outset is probably my top, top favorite record, I’ll spare you the middle-aged fanboy rhapsodizing and instead concentrate (mostly) on the matter of the “Okay, I already own this CD, do I need to buy it again?” equation. In my case, in the past, I have purchased the album, the audio cassette and the CD of From Her to Eternity. The CD has always sounded amazing, how much better could it get?

Mute Records has been redoing certain major artists’ back catalogs (Depeche Mode, Can, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) with significant sonic upgrades in recent years. They do a consistently great job and these audiophile editions are quite good value for the consumer, especially ones with the high end audio systems to fully appreciate what’s on offer. It’s these consumers who are, let’s face it, just about the only dependable audience left anymore for the purchase of actual discs and it’s good business for Mute to cater to them. Aside from the new King Crimson releases (which sound amazing), Mute’s refurbishment of the Nick Cave catalog is one of the few major efforts in the audiophile arena, at least for pop music, this year or last. Jazz and classical see quite a few SACD, DTS and DVD-A releases each year, but the rock and pop category fewer and fewer. The pop marketplace seems largely to have abandoned the space. Even the Stones and Dylan SACDs have been replaced now with standard “red book” CDs. Considering that the Stones SACDs can rarely be found for less than $80 these days, used, it shows, once again, how short-sighted most of the record industry is. Then again it is the record industry, isn’t it? Visionary business practices are hardly what we’ve come to expect.

Which is what makes the Mute Nick Cave reissues all the more worth savoring. To answer the question posed above, are they worth buying even if you already own them on CD, the answer is a strong yes. They did a fine, fine job on these reissues, each one a 2 disc set, consisting of the album on a regular CD to play in the car or rip to iTunes, and a DVD with fantastic multi-channel versions of the album, in both Dolby 5:1 and DTS. As objects, they’re quite sweet to unwrap. Each of the albums comes in an ultra glossy gatefold sleeve with intelligent liner notes by Amy Hanson and graphics faithful to the original releases, but better. There is a multi-part documentary spread out over the span of the catalog called Do You Love Me Like I Love You directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. Key members of Cave’s orbit, well-known fans and writers—everyone but Cave himself (and Anita Lane)—are interrogated under harsh lighting not unlike a forensics video. Watching this film before listening to the music really whet my appetite to hear it afresh.

For an album that had always sounded so amazing, no matter what format, the improvement in sound quality would have to go some way, by my own personal subjective standards, to move the needle much on my jaded audiophile reviewer’s scale. When I got to the choice of which surround mode to listen in, I chose the Dolby 5:1 because it generally sounds better to me than DTS. 

Simply put, the immersive aural experience of the multi-channel version of From Her to Eternity—supervised by Mick Harvey from the original recordings by Flood—blew my doors off. To stand inside the violent maelstrom of sound that is the Bad Seeds, with Blixa Bargeld’s anarchic slide guitar in that speaker, the skull-cracking thwap of the drums coming from behind, the rumble of Barry Adamson’s bass in the subwoofer, and hear it like you were in the studio with them, is something awesome and fearful to behold. The album is heavily percussive—whether the drums, piano, vibes or the guitars—there is a lot of banging on this record. If anyone knows how to record percussion, it’s Flood (who subsequently worked with U2 and Depeche Mode). The extra channels of audio give even more room ambiance and “air” around the various instruments. Far greater nuance is achieved here than would be possible in a stereo mix. The album is rife with moments where a sonic crack appears in the proceedings, and something crawls into your ear for a split second before scurrying off into the floorboards. Listening to From Her to Eternity in multi-channel caused me to think of the way Stockhausen often used a moment of dissonance to capture listener’s attention, although I doubt he was an influence here.

The real test came for me with the final song, A Box for Black Paul. An enigmatic narrative about the final resting place for a Baudelaire-esque character, when someone asks ‘what’s your favorite song?’ this one, like the album it’s from, comes in at my #1 spot. It’s the final tour de force on an album consisting of one wildly uncompromising tour de force after another. I stood in the middle of the room, in the multi-channel “sweet spot,” as it were, and listened. A Box for Black Paul is not a piece of music that anyone could listen to casually. It was stunning, exquisite. The sustain on Cave’s piano and the close-mike recording of his vocals truly sounded like you were in the room with him during the performance. By the time its nearly ten minutes long running time had elapsed, I was limp, exhausted and exhilarated.

And that brings me to my final point about the new version of From Her to Eternity and why it is worth acquiring this edition even if you already own the admittedly already great sounding earlier CD. Although I stated at the outset of this essay that it was the first thing that came to mind when someone asked me what my favorite album was, it’s not something that, after 26 years, I pull out and listen to all that much. By offering the consumer such a rich package, the documentary, the extra tracks, the substantial liner notes, it achieves what releases of this sort should achieve, and that is to say, it allows the deep fan the chance to really immerse themselves in the music again and to hear it with fresh ears, like the first time they heard it. I must have played this album 30 times all the way through since I got it and when you can hear new things in music that is meaningful to you personally, this is a fun, great thing and actually worth supporting with your hard earned dough. I find it pretty difficult to get a hard-on for buying a regular CD anymore—I don’t care who it’s by—but I do find myself actually returning to the record stores and Amazon these days to look for multi-channel releases. If the record industry gets smart and starts to look at Mute’s quality repackaging of its major artists back catalogs as a model to emmulate, maybe just maybe, they’ll coax more middle-aged rock snobs like myself back into the record stores. I wouldn’t bet on that happening or anything (!) but Mute should be singled out and commended for actually giving music fans a real value for their money.

In the coming weeks I’ll be discussing the rest of last year’s Nick Cave releases leading up to the releases of Tender Prey, The Good Son and Henry’s Dream by Mute this spring.
 

 
If ever there was a need for a trained actor, or to fill the bill for a really unusual role in 1970s porn, they’d usually call Jamie Gillis. You might say he was the Harvey Keitel of porno. Gillis died on Friday. From the obituary:

Adult film industry legend Jamie Gillis succumbed to a battle with cancer and died in New York City on February 19, 2010.  He was 66.

“Jamie was a magnificent spirit,” said author Larry “Ratso” Sloman, a close friend.  “He was a kind, gentle, compassionate soul with an insatiable thirst for experience – equally at home at the opera, the OTB parlor, an elegant restaurant, a hockey game or Plato’s Retreat. He was a Renaissance Jew.”

His live-in partner of seven years, the Manhattan restaurateur Zarela Martinez, was quickly able to separate the man from the myth, the person from the persona. “After my initial reservations about being involved with a notorious porn star, I got to know a cultured man of great depth and warmth.”

Another friend, Ashley Spicer, who was working with Jamie and others on a documentary about the birth of the New York adult film industry, noted, “While he became known for the darker roles he sometimes played, off-screen Jamie was a sensitive and loyal friend. He was a unique, irreplaceable person.”

Born Jamey Ira Gurman on April 20, 1943 in New York, Jamie Gillis was one of the adult film’s first genuine stars and one of the genre’s most recognizable, charismatic, and influential figures.

After graduating with honors from Columbia University in 1970, he became an aspiring theater actor and mime artist supporting himself by working part time as a taxi driver.

In 1971, he answered an advertisement in the Village Voice for a nude model; this lead to work performing in short films known as loops and subsequently in the first wave of explicit adult feature films.

He quickly established himself as the leading male performer and best actor in East Coast adult films during porn’s golden age, which lasted from 1972 to 1983. During this era, porn was shot on film, had reasonable production values, genuine story lines and aspirations to mainstream acceptance. Gillis starred in all the major productions at this time, including “The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann” (1974), “The Story of Joanna” (1975), “The Opening of Misty Beethoven” (1976), “Through the Looking Glass” (1976), “The Ecstasy Girls” (1979), “Amanda By Night” (1981), “Roommates” (1981), and many others. He was also an occasional performer in live sex shows in Times Square, where he recited Shakespeare soliloquies on stage ostensibly to give the shows a “socially redeeming purpose” and thus avoid obscenity charges.

In the 1980s when porn production moved to California where it was predominantly shot on video, Gillis relocated to the West Coast where his prolific acting career continued. He also appeared in a number of roles in mainstream films, including “Nighthawks” (1982) which starred Sylvester Stallone. In 1989, he turned director / performer, creating the series “On the Prowl” which initiated the “gonzo” style of porn videos – a genre which returned to the raw aesthetic of the loops he had made at the beginning of his career.

He continued to work in the adult film business until the early 2000s, increasingly appearing in non-sexual roles before announcing his retirement at the end of 2007 as a Christmas present for his partner Zarela. It is estimated that he appeared in over 500 feature films and loops over the course of his four-decade career.

A ubiquitous participant in New York’s sexual subculture of the 1970s, he appeared more recently in documentaries paying tribute to Plato’s Retreat (“American Swing”) and fellow adult performer Jack Wrangler (“Wrangler, Anatomy of an Idol”).

He is survived by his partner Zarela Martinez, three sisters (Phyllis Conley, Diane Lane, and Judy Caiati), two brothers (Wayne and Allan Gurman), and a daughter, Debbie Gurman.

Gillis will be cremated at a private ceremony. He requested that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to the NYC Police Athletic League, an organization that assisted him as a boy and continues to aid New York City children. Donations can be made here.

Via Michael Simmons

 
Crazy, crazy music video for Machine Gun by Noisia. I swear the Smoke Monster makes an appearence at the 2:51 mark.
 
(via Nerdcore)

Over at 4chan’s /x/ forum, the kids are scaring the crap out of themselves by pretending there is a lost Simpsons episode from an alternate universe called “Dead Bart.” This would be a clip from it. Don’t ask me to explain. I don’t know.

 
Canada’s greatest export (if you don’t count Molson’s Golden, Rush or Pamela Anderson), the Trailer Park Boys, will be performing in Los Angeles for the first time on Feb. 25 at the Wiltern Theatre, with “The Ricky, Julian and Bubbles’ Community Service Variety Show.”

We caught up to Sunnyvale’s favorite residents and asked a few questions about their upcoming performance:

What in the world did you do that you have to do this community service tour?

Bubbles: I was with Ricky and Julian when they hijacked a truck that was supposed to be full of liquor that they wanted to give to Ray for his birthday. Instead, it was full of Rubik’s Cubes and Sham Wows. We got nailed selling them at the flea market.

I hear that you’re doing an anti-drugs-and-drinking puppet show. Isn’t that a bit hypocritical since drugs and drinking have made you the men you are today?

Bubbles: Ricky and Julian say there’s no way they’re gonna make it through the show without getting drunk and high, but I’m gonna make sure they don’t, because if we do, the three of us are gonna end up back in jail, and I hate jail.

Do you really believe one single solitary word of this anti-drugs stuff or is it just a big put-on for your parole officer and the courts?

Ricky: I love drugs, and I think this whole thing is stupid. I’m only doing it for Bubbles because he doesn’t like jail. I’d rather go to jail; I love jail.

How will you even get into the country? Aren’t you guys on some kind of no-fly list or something?

Julian: We are on a list, but we have two parole officers traveling with us that will get us in to the country.

Why come to America now?

Bubbles: I’ve been trying to talk Ricky and Julian into going for years, but they watch too much TV and thought American jails were too scary.

Have you been to Los Angeles before?

Julian: No, and we’re really looking forward to it. I might try and audition for a Clint Eastwood movie while we’re there and meet some hot strippers, see if they wanna come back to Sunnyvale with me.

I suppose you boys have heard that marijuana is legal in California. Any plans to visit any of our world famous pot dispensaries while you’re here?

Ricky: I plan on checking out every single one of them, maybe buy some seeds, start growing, open up a shop of my own and live down there forever.

Any messages for the ladies of Los Angeles?

Bubbles: L.A. ladies are the hottest in the world, and I’m hoping the show turns into a festival of toplessness. Prizes will be awarded to any ladies who show up in bikinis.

The Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., www.trailerparkboys.com

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
Well, he’s actually purchasing LA’s New Beverly Cinema, which was once a grindhouse, but is now one of the city’s finest revival theaters:

“As long as I’m alive, and as long as I’m rich, the New Beverly will be there, showing double features in 35mm,” Quentin Tarantino told the Hollywood Reporter.  He’s bought the 200 seat Fairfax District theater that has shown second-run double features since 1978 (Before that it was, appropriately, a grindhouse with live nude dancers, although it was built in 1929 and once showed first-run movies).  In the mid aughts, hearing operator Sherman Torgan was having trouble keeping the doors open, Tarantino started paying the monthly expenses.  After Torgan’s death in 2007, his son Michael took over operations, but the landlord had a buyer almost immediately.  Since the Torgans had the right of first refusal, Tarantino stepped in, and after some extensive haggling made a deal to buy the theater.

Well, that’s great news for LA, but if the New Bev can find its white knight in Tarantino, surely someone else both “alive and rich” can step in and save the Bodhi Tree?
 
(via Curbed)