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A one-of-a-kind saucepan with David Bowie’s face on it exists – and can be yours for $600
02.21.2022
08:27 pm
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This one-off David Bowie aluminum saucepan will run you $611.78. The only person I can conceive of who would use such a thing is the Maid of Bond Street (you know the fancy ones who drive around in chauffeured cars?) and even she threw a side-eye toward this exorbitantly-priced piece of glam rock cookware.

The person behind this 2020 creation is Japanese artist and graphic designer Teru Noji, a graduate of the Vantan Design Institute in Tokyo. Noji has lived and worked in Arles, France for the last dozen years, and cites the work of renowned Japanese psychedelic artist Tadanori Yokoo as his biggest influence. Exactly what inspired Noji to etch an image of Bowie (pictured with his astral sphere created by make-up artist Pierre La Roche) on the bottom of a 20 x 20-cm aluminum pan is a mystery. All I know is that it is the only one Noji ever made and you can buy it over at the online shop for the Bowie Gallery which is physically located in Totnes, Devon, UK.

As for the pricey pan, well, I’ll let the images of it speak for themselves. Cooking with Bowie! It’s a thing.
 

 

 

Posted by Cherrybomb
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02.21.2022
08:27 pm
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You can now own your own ‘Red Right Hand’ & other cool ‘Cave Things’ designed by Nick Cave
02.21.2022
01:20 pm
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Stickers featuring Nick Cave in his famous ‘Suck My Dick’ t-shirt.
 

“It’s the obsessive and dangerous end of granny-core. Fetishistic and deranged.”

—Nick Cave describing his newly launched Cave Things online store in 2020.

Nick Cave’s online store Cave Things has been offering up material possessions designed by Cave since 2020. This is good news if you, like us here at Dangerous Minds, are all about all things Nick Cave. Why use boring old No. 2 pencils when you can use Nick Cave’s Sex pencils? While I’m not sure when I might actually need to use a pencil these days if I had to, Nick Cave’s Sex Pencils would be the ones I’d want in my collection. If Satan is more your speed then Cave’s red Devil pencils with printed quotes by Cave on them should be more than evil enough for you. Do you still have hair and are in need of a fashionable comb? Look no further than Cave’s specially-designed Warren Ellis’ “Pure Exploitation” comb, named for Cave’s long-time contributor, the multi-talented Warren Ellis. There are so many ultra-cool items in the Cave Things store, from small delights like Nick Cave stickers (!!!), greeting cards designed by Cave, a dog sweater modeled after Nick’s famous “Suck My Dick” t-shirt, and even wallpaper with Cave’s illustrations of The Hyatt Girls. If you’re not familiar with The Hyatt Girls, here’s Cave explaining them to one of his fans via his Red Hand Files site:

“Just so that everyone knows what we are talking about, The Hyatt Girls are a group of beautiful and very naked women who live in my imagination and perform pornographic acts with each other, provided I stay at a Hyatt Hotel. For years I have drawn them, to the best of my ability, on the hotel’s notepaper whenever I have stayed at a Hyatt.”

Of all the covetable things in Cave’s store, if I had the money to blow, I’d be proudly wearing one of two necklaces designed by Cave—his eerie Red Hand chain and charm (in honor of his 1994 single “Red Right Hand”),  or his “Little Nick” necklace and charm, featuring a shirtless Cave flexing. So let’s take a look at some of the cooler Nick Cave things that could now be yours. You can see everything in the Cave Things shop here.
 

Little Nick charm (comes with necklace). Extra Cave points for the red right hand detail. $122 USD.
 

Devil pencils.
 
More Nick Cave merch, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
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02.21.2022
01:20 pm
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‘23rd Century Giants,’ the incredible true story of Renaldo & The Loaf!
02.11.2022
09:06 am
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Since much of Renaldo & The Loaf’s work experiments with time, it makes a funny kind of sense that, on 2017’s Gurdy Hurding, the duo picked up right about where they left off with 1987’s The Elbow Is Taboo. Perhaps, like all the tapes they’ve run backwards over the years, their music really does borrow from the future. In the early days especially, they liked to play songs unsinging themselves, the sound of speech sucking itself back up through the lungs to its point of origin in the brain. And wouldn’t it be wonderful, inhaling song and speech out of the environment into your nervous system?

You would be unlikely to mistake Renaldo & The Loaf’s music for someone else’s. The sound, an emergent property of Renaldo Malpractice and Ted the Loaf’s decades-long musical friendship, is entirely homemade, but ingeniously fitted together and sturdily constructed—each song a miniature feat of engineering, built to last. “Primitive modernism,” Ralph Records called it in 1981, announcing the release of Songs for Swinging Larvae.

So while the timbres and harmonies can be bracingly unfamiliar, Renaldo & The Loaf’s songs teem with earworms, and probably brain- and spineworms, too. In fact, let me take this opportunity to recommend that the songs themselves be classified and studied as new zoological discoveries. (These days, when I listen to Klanggalerie‘s pristine and greatly enlarged editions of the Renaldo & The Loaf catalog, I often picture the menagerie of intergalactic pilgrims in Clark Ashton Smith’s “The City of the Singing Flame.”)

Alex Wroten’s excellent new documentary 23rd Century Giants, out March 8 on Blu-ray and streaming platforms, tells how two teenage Tyrannosaurus Rex fans from Portsmouth became the weirdest band on Ralph. Along with Renaldo Malpractice and Ted the Loaf themselves, the documentary collects testimony from the Cryptic Corporation’s Homer Flynn, Jay Clem, and the late Hardy Fox; the visionary director behind Renaldo & The Loaf’s Songs for Swinging Larvae video, Graeme Whifler; veterans of the Ralph and T.E.C. Tones labels, and patient recipients of my adolescent correspondence, Tom Timony and Sheenah Spece; album illustrators Poxodd and Steven Cerio; and DEVO archivist Michael Pilmer, among others.

Some highlights follow from my recent conversation with director Alex Wroten and the two learned rotcods.


Renaldo & The Loaf, 1982 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)

Under the Lights

 
Is this the first time the two of you have been in front of the camera very much, Brian and David? The “Backwards Film Study” that’s in there seems to come from the early Eighties—

Brian Poole (Renaldo Malpractice): Oh, you’ve seen that, have you? [Laughs]

Well, I’ve just seen the little bit that’s in the documentary. I’m looking forward to seeing the full thing on the Blu-ray.

David Janssen (Ted the Loaf): That’s it. It’s only very short, that’s all there is.

Brian: Basically, yeah. Three minutes, that’s it!

David: And no, we’re not really used to being in front of the camera much. There’s that three-minute thing; there’s, I suppose, the filming we did for the “A Convivial Ode” video…

Brian: And that’s it, really, isn’t it?

David: I mean, unintentionally, the stuff that was filmed live. I mean, that was just, someone happened to film it, so we weren’t really conscious of being in front of a camera.

This is the Vienna show you’re talking about?

David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I suppose Alex’s documentary is kind of the longest we’ve ever been under the lights of movie cameras.

Brian: Yeah, that’s right. But of course, we didn’t have to do makeup or anything like that, or costumes. [Laughs]

Alex Wroten (director, 23rd Century Giants): Well, not totally true, ‘cause there’s the part where you’re wearing the glasses [designed by Poxodd], so you did a little costumes.

David: And the masks.

Brian: In answer to your question, no. We’re really not used to being the center of attention, if you like. There have been stills done. Up in the Eighties and that, we did sort of go into a studio and have some photos done of us, but apart from that, no. In fact, the material that Alex asked for—I mean, obviously, as the documentary was coming to fruition and that, he wanted to say “What visual material do you have?” And it was a very, very useful thing looking through the archive, which, fortunately, I’ve got it here, our stuff, because I haven’t moved house, and it’s just here. So I was able to find quite a lot of stuff, but, you know, there’s some creative stuff that Alex had to do in the film to illustrate certain things, let’s say.
 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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02.11.2022
09:06 am
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‘Anything Else’: Negativland asks ‘what is reality?’ (A DM Video Premiere)
02.10.2022
01:40 pm
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Today we’re privileged to premiere a wonderful new single and video from Negativland’s The World Will Decide concept album, which asks if actual reality reality is really still superior to the reality created by the Internet, computers and artificial intelligence.

Negativland‘s Mark Hosler sent along the following message:

Perhaps you’re on your way to work, listening to the gently calming sound of NPR to thoughtfully take in the morning news.  Or perhaps you’re so extremely online that you can’t even remember your last commute, and you’re actually listening to “Anything Else,”  the latest single from Negativland’s most recent album THE WORLD WILL DECIDE.  This video, directed by Ryan Worsley with visual animations by SUE-C, is filled with the kinds of questions that can help you remember. Based on a cassette recovered from band member Don Joyce‘s apartment after his death in 2015, this totally unedited conversation has been set to aggressively pleasant music written and performed by Negativland, and brought to a broadcast-ready state by their special musical guests: Kyle Bruckmann on oboe, Star St. Germain, Kris Force and Jackie Gratz on strings, and Drew Daniel on drum programming.  Whatever the real answers to these questions are, you might want to text ahead.  You’re going to be a little late to the office.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.10.2022
01:40 pm
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Nina Hagen’s ‘Nunsexmonkrock’: Greatest (and weirdest) unsung masterpiece of the postpunk era?
02.02.2022
02:06 pm
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Nina Hagen’s 1982 album NunSexMonkRock is one of the single most ground-breaking and far-out things ever recorded and it deserves to be considered a great—perhaps the very greatest—unsung masterpiece of the post-punk era.

I’ll take it even further: To my mind, it’s on the same level as PiL’s Metal Box, Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica or Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Or The Dreaming by Kate Bush.

There I’ve said it.

Make no mistake about it, artistically NunSexMonkRock is a monumentally important recording.

It’s also something you can buy used for a single penny on Amazon. There is no mention whatsoever of the album in Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. The Allmusic review of NunSexMonkRock is but a single sentence. The Quietus doesn’t give a shit about it, nor does The Wire. In fact, there is almost nothing of any substance written about the album online anywhere. Hardly any music blogs have ever deigned to even mention it. Google the title, you’ll see what I’m talking about.

That doesn’t mean that NunSexMonkRock doesn’t have its hard-core passionate admirers—there are dozens of Amazon reviews and almost all of them are five-star raves—but we’re talking about something that was obscure 40 years ago when it came out. Even if you could easily pick it up at the local mall then—and for a while there, you could—few did. I would imagine that most people who have discovered the charms of NunSexMonkRock since it was first released have done so primarily because they saw it in a $1 bargain bin and it looked weird so they picked it up. (Every used copy of NunSexMonkRock on vinyl is pristine, it’s virtually guaranteed.)
 

 
Luckily for both of us, you don’t have to take my word for any of this, I can make my case for the epic holy/demonic genius of NunSexMonkRock with the music itself—thanks YouTube—which is neither wholly punk, nor rock, nor opera, nor really anything even remotely recognizable as any previously known genre of music. Already a category of one, NunSexMonkRock appears to have no obvious influences either. Reliable adjectives fall by the wayside when you are confronted with such an anarchic artistic anomaly. Because it’s so very much out on its own peculiar limb, it’s completely timeless. (Musically at least, but lyrically Hagen makes a cryptic prophecy about the then leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, who up and died the year the album came out.) NunSexMonkRock could have been recorded 40 years ago, yesterday, or a thousand years from now and it just wouldn’t matter.

The album inhabits a territory so utterly exotic and unclassifiable that the creator herself would never again venture that far out. NunSexMonkRock is a zany, oddball, sexy, freaky as fuck and totally revolutionary masterpiece of modern music. At the center of this evil maelstrom is Hagen’s multi-layered, multi-octave and gymnastically operatic voice, a unique hybrid of Maria Callas, Zarah Leander, Yma Sumac and Mercedes McCambridge doing the voice of the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist...

Rolling Stone called NunSexMonkRock the “most unlistenable” album ever made. Au contraire. It’s an incredibly weird album, let there be no doubt about THAT, but once you’ve gotten over the initial shock, NunSexMonkRock is as catchy as hell. “Most unlistenable”? Although that sounds like a dare I personally would be willing to take Rolling Stone up on, it’s not even remotely true.
 

 
Nevertheless(!), let’s ease into it, shall we, and start off with what is probably NunSexMonkRock‘s most accessible number, the unstoppable riff-driven rocker “Born in Xixax” that leads off side two of the album. This features the great Chris Spedding on guitar. Tell me this riff isn’t as good as “All Day and All of the Night” or “Jumping Jack Flash.”
 

“This is Radio Yerevan and this is the news…”

Much more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.02.2022
02:06 pm
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‘Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks’: Insane Christian cult video
01.27.2022
08:34 am
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“He’s a rewarder of those who seek him. Some say God is a punisher, but do you know what we do with child abusers today? We put child abusers in prison if we find out about ‘em. God is not a child abuser! God is a good god. Why don’t you just say that out loud with me right no? God is a good god, you always remember that! God is not gonna do you harm… (pause) There is a judgement coming someday…”

—“Mrs. Hook” from The Christian Pirates cable access show.

History will note that for a short period at the end of the 20th century, there was this “format” called “VHS” (“Video Home System” is what it stood for) that allowed people to do something called “videotaping” “off” their television sets (it didn’t work exactly like that, but it’s, you know, close enough). But what history might neglect to record is that certain things got passed around from hand to hand on this format samizdat style in what was then called the “VHS tape trading underground.” During the mid-1980s to the late 90s, traders and flea market dealers were making pirated copies of things like the banned Rolling Stones movie Cocksucker Blues, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, “Screaming Boy” (lunatic Dallas public access preacher Jonathan Bell, later made famous by The Daily Show), a tape of a groupie blowing out a candle with her pussy for guitarist Steve Vai and “The Great Satan At Large,” a satanic talk show, among hundreds of other things.

One of the most heavily circulated items during the “VHS tape trading underground” days was a synapse-frying excursion straight into the dark heart of the most deeply disturbed, bat-shit crazy 80s TV evangelism titled “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks.”  When the tape began making the rounds in the early 90s, the jaw-dropping selection of low IQ buffoonery, superstitious insanity and wildly inappropriate kiddie shows made by people who should NEVER BE LEFT ALONE UNSUPERVISED WITH YOUNG CHILDREN was the centerpiece of many a weed and alcohol-fuelled viewing fest.

An unnamed Internet reviewer said this of “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks”:

Americans: See why the rest of the world thinks we’re a bunch of blithering idiots!

Rest of the world: See why Americans are a bunch of blithering idiots!

That pretty much sums it up in a nutshell.

One of the more perplexing things on exhibit in “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” is the clips from the no budget “Christian Pirates” cable access show where godless children are forced to “walk the plank” by one-legged Captain Hook and they sing songs about hoping that Satan gets paralyzed and has to use a wheelchair. There’s Jimmy Swaggart’s tearful confession of whore mongering (a masterclass in fleecing the faithful with the “I have sinned” ploy). A Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker press conference. There’s a lot of asking for money, natch, some racist Bible prophecy, preaching against something one of them calls “Marxism” and a “joyous” man with hands growing from his shoulders who, er, counts his blessings. It’s not just Christianity that takes a beating here. New Age beliefs are lampooned and there’s even an appearance by Queen Uriel from the nutty Unarius Academy of Science.
 

 
“Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” was produced by a Boston-based zine called Zontar. It came with an attached pamphlet that you can see reproduced here. Aside from being a masterpiece of video folk art (YES, this should preserved and elevated to museum status) it’s one of the single best things ever to get stoned and watch. I guarantee you’ll be blown away by “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” (and if you’re not, you’ll be issued a full refund...)
 

 
BONUS VIDEO: Disgraced—but still currently raking it in like a gangsta on BET—TV evangelist Robert Tilton in the infamous “Pastor Gas” video that has made the rounds on the Internet since the first days of MySpace. My VHS copy of “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” included this:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.27.2022
08:34 am
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A long, rambling blog post about my Nico obsession (+ some astonishing, seldom seen TV performances)
01.21.2022
08:12 am
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“I’m very interested in murder.”—Nico, 1970

Via an intense David Bowie fandom, and also from being an avid reader of CREEM magazine, I discovered the work of the Velvet Underground at a very young age, like ten or eleven. I bought one of their albums without ever hearing it, because I just knew it was going to be good. I had no trouble figuring out what the songs were about, the subject matter of “Venus in Furs” or “Waiting for the Man” was well understood by me. (I was not in the least an innocent child.) In the mid-1970s Velvet Underground albums were not difficult to come by in my backwater West Virginia hometown—unlike Iggy, whose albums had to be mail ordered—and post VU solo efforts from Lou Reed, Nico and John Cale could easily be found in the cut-out bins of white trash department stores, usually in the form of 8-track tapes. These sold for 99 cents!

One of these 99 cent 8-tracks that I picked up—which I still own—was Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. This inscrutable album presented me with a puzzle that I had to solve: Why do people like this? (Little did I know then that almost everyone hated it.) I played it endlessly AND ON HEADPHONES in an effort to figure out what it was. Eventually—I think—I did. The same could not be said of Nico’s The Marble Index. No matter how hard I tried—and I did try hard I promise you, I must’ve played it a hundred times at least—I simply could not wrap my brain around that album. In other words, ‘Metal Machine Music? Hey, no problem,’ but The Marble Index was just a bridge too far for my pre-teen mind. Obviously it’s not an album for everyone to begin with but especially not for a little kid who only the year before was listening to James Bond soundtracks and “Little Willy.” I finally gave up trying and never did get to the bottom of it.

The Marble Index flew completely over my head.
 

 
HOWEVER, when The Marble Index came out on CD in 1991, my fulsome familiarity with it some fifteen years earlier allowed me to “get it” instantly as an adult and from that moment on, I stand in utter awe at what I think, echoing both John Cale and Lester Bangs, is perhaps the greatest work of European avant garde classical music of the latter half of the 20th century. It’s a staggering, absolutely unprecedented work of genius. It’s a visionary masterpiece. It comes out of precisely nowhere. (The bowels of Hell?) It is of no musical tradition or recognizable genre. It doesn’t seem to have been influenced by anything and there’s nothing else that it can be likened to. The Marble Index is a singular artistic achievement. The best way to describe it to the reader who has not heard the album is to compare it to someone creating a ghostly new language from scratch. It really is that individual. A desolate psychic territory where no one else has ever ventured, before or since. And frankly why would anyone want to?

Nico’s music can be too weird, even for weird people.

*****

There’s only one way to listen to Nico’s music and this is at an absolutely ear-splitting volume so that it sounds like you’re in a Gothic cathedral in Hell and she’s a strident, fifty foot tall Valkyrie, her voice declaiming right into your face like storm winds. This is music that absolutely demands your attention. It is decidedly not something to put on in the background, it really needs to overpower you for a full appreciation of what’s on offer. Nico’s music will never click for most people, but when it does, as The Marble Index‘s producer Frazier Mohawk put it, it’s “a hole you fall into.” I fell in pretty deep. 

Recently, for weeks on end, months even, I was playing Nico all day, every day—my wife is a good sport—and although I’m not doing that quite as much as I type this, her albums are still close at hand in my speed rack. During my Nico fever, I reread Songs They Never Play on the Radio, James Young’s archly drawn memoir about the distinctly unglamorous side of touring with the junkie diva during the final years of her life, Richard Witt’s excellent biography Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, rewatched Susanne Ofteringer’s engrossing Nico:Icon documentary for the tenth time (at least) and then I bought You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico, a new book by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike.
 

 
A commonality of all these books, and this is true of the movie as well, is that there is scant information about her songwriting or the actual recording of her albums. Very little about where her music came from or what inspired it. How it seemed to have been born fully formed very soon after her acquisition of a harmonium. The vast distance between the chamber folk of Chelsea Girl and everything that came after it. Nowhere can one read in depth about her creative process. What we do know almost always comes from John Cale, but even his accounts mostly dwell on the mechanics of making the recordings and of how he had to work around a wheezing, frequently out of tune harmonium (you can often hear Nico pumping its foot pedals) and her unconventional vocals. (Note the difference in her singing style from Chelsea Girl to The Marble Index which came out the following year. When Nico is singing her own songs, and not those written by others, only then do we hear how absolutely astounding her voice was. She had to be the one writing for that most idiosyncratic of vocal instruments, as no one else was capable of doing it for her.)

It’s known that Nico was an avid reader of the classics, with Nietzsche, Wordsworth—The Marble Index‘s title comes from a line in Wordsworth’s poem “Memories of Cambridge’’ where he describes a statue of Newton—and Tennyson being her favorites. Tennyson’s verse was perhaps her biggest lyrical influence with his pronounced melancolia and subject matter of kings and queens, medieval legends, and mythology. Nico’s cryptic lyrics evade elucidation, and her committed performance makes them seem even more mysterious. The entire package—including, of course, John Cale’s absolutely apocalyptic arrangements—has a remarkable purity. There is nothing else, nothing in all the world of music, that sounds like Nico’s so-called Marble Index trilogy (which includes 1970’s Desertshore and 1974’s The End…, both also with Cale.)

*****
 

 
The Inner Scar, or by its French title, La Cicatrice Intérieure, is an obscure art film from 1972 that Nico made in collaboration with her lover, film director Philippe Garrel, who was then considered a sort of cinematic Rimbaud. It was released in 1972. Although Garrel is credited as the director (the film itself has no credits) he has gone on record as saying it was entirely co-authored with Nico. In fact, she wrote all of the dialogue, much of it in two languages—she speaks French, German and English in the film—that Garrel himself couldn’t even understand.  The soundtrack is all her music and she is on screen for almost the entire time. (No other film directed by Garrel, either before or since, looks, or is anything even remotely like The Inner Scar.)

The Inner Scar is a truly weird and remarkable film but what strikes me the most about it is the sheer bloody mindedness of it all. The willpower it would have taken to make something like it happen on a low budget. The film, which has only 20 shots for the entire length of it, was shot in some seriously remote locations in Death Valley, Sinai, and Iceland. The tracking shots are LONG and in the days before Steadicam was invented this meant laying dolly track and in this case that meant laying track—and lots of it—in fucking Death Valley where it can get to be 120 degrees! Or on icy, freezing cold tundras. There is one spectacular—and obviously Godard-inspired—tracking shot where the unnamed sheep herder (Garrel) starts walking, and walking, and walking until he eventually arrives right back at his starting place. Imagine how much circular track and how large of an area it would have taken to create that sequence, seen in the below clip. All of the equipment, the crew, the trucks were on the inside of the track. It’s absolutely ingenious. How two junkies organized such a globe-spanning and logistically complex production is a miracle to begin with, but wherever did they score dope in Death Valley?
 
Much more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.21.2022
08:12 am
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Telefís and Jah Wobble team up on ultra trippy ‘Donkey’s Gudge Dub’
01.19.2022
08:20 am
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Telefís—the Irish Gaelic word for television, pronounced Tele-feesh—is the name of a new musical collaboration between Cathal Coughlan (Microdisney, The Fatima Mansions) and producer/musician Jacknife Lee (who’s worked with everyone from Taylor Swift and Christina Aguilera to REM, U2, and Modest Mouse). The pair are aiming to update the synthpop duo paradigm with an album titled a hAon, which translates as “the first” or “#1” in, you guessed it, Gaelic. After February 11 you can stream the album at all the usual places, and the vinyl version will be in record stores on March 4. They’ve also been churning out videos at a rapid clip which you can sample at the Telefís YouTube channel.

Prior to the release of the album, Telefís teamed up with Jah Wobble for a series of collaborations. Their latest is a dub version of their earlier alliance, “Falun Gong Dancer.” I asked Cathal Coughlan for a statement about the video and this is what he sent me:

Near Dublin, the Capital City of the Irish Empire, a select group of religious tyrants are gathering together in a specially-constructed TV studio to create a media presentation which will end the Permissive Society of the 1960’s for once and for all. Meanwhile, in distant London, a group of smartly-dressed working emigrants from the Irish mainland assembles in order to socialize in a convivial environment. This is a place where they will not be derided for their manners and speech, which while both are imbued with a grace and elegance, are not shared in common with the majority of the host city’s population. An outbreak of set-dancing occurs, sending the dance floor into a controlled and courtly frenzy.

The music filling the space is the “Donkey’s Gudge Dub” version of the song “Falun Gong Dancer,” by the Irish expatriate group Telefís, a version heavily featuring the bass stylings of Jah Wobble, himself a son of the Irish diaspora in London. Jah Wobble is one of the most distinctive instrumental voices to have emerged in this neck of the woods since the punk era, a ferment which drew him into highly distinctive work with Public Image Ltd., the Invaders of the Heart, and a host of diverse and adventurous projects.

In fact, coincidentally, given the title of the tune, the dancers in London soon take a break from the dance and enjoy a psychotropic snack in the form of “donkey’s gudge” cake, a strange concoction originating in the homeland, on this occasion fortified with some of the mind-bending fungi which grow on nearby Hampstead Heath. After this, the dance assumes a supernatural glow, and the dancers are watched jealously via a Russian satellite link by the theocrats in Ireland.

Composure is retained by all, but Jesus the lights look peculiar, and why is that man’s elbow in three places at once? His elbow is the Holy Trinity, of course!

The debut Telefís album “a hAon” (“the first”) will be released on February 11, 2022. The vinyl version of a hAon will be released on March 4. Preorder here.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.19.2022
08:20 am
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Hypnotic, newly colorized footage of Pink Floyd on ‘American Bandstand’ in 1967
01.11.2022
04:22 pm
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Pink Floyd circa 1967.
 
Ten years ago, upon the passing of Dick Clark, a long-time contributor to Dangerous Minds Marc Campbell homaged Clark by posting footage of Pink Floyd’s appearance on American Bandstand. As Campbell pointed out, Clark would select acts for Bandstand and his choice of Pink Floyd in 1967 demonstrates how far ahead of the musical curve Dick Clark was. Now, with a hat tip to another long-time contributor for DM, Ron Kretch, let me treat your eyes to newly colorized footage of Floyd dreamily miming along to their third single “Apples and Oranges” on stage at ABC Studios in Burbank (or perhaps ABC Television Center studios as an intrepid DM reader has noted), California on November 7th, 1967.

Before we get to this nothing short of glorious colorized footage, I’d like to touch on the fact that it took nearly a year of work to recreate this moment and it shows. A YouTuber based in Sweden known as Artist on the Border has been creating their own visual representations of Pink Floyd for the last two decades. The colorization adds a dream-like appearance to the members of Pink Floyd who had just arrived in America for the first time a few days before their appearance on American Bandstand. So stop whatever it is you were doing and let the colorized chill of Pink Floyd wash over you. Also, beware the colorized version of Syd Barrett may give you a hell of a contact high. In the event the footage below becomes unavailable, click here to view it on YouTube. 

 

Pink Floyd’s performance of ‘Apples and Oranges’ on American Bandstand, 1967.

Posted by Cherrybomb
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01.11.2022
04:22 pm
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America Never Deserved Bowie
01.07.2022
10:55 am
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This is a guest post by Spencer Kansa, author of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Zoning and Out There: The Transcendent Life and Art of Burt Shonberg.

Is David Bowie’s musical legacy really only worth half that of Bruce Springsteen’s? This was the first thing that sprung to mind when I read the news earlier this week concerning the financial deal inked between the Bowie Estate and Warner Chappell Music, which handed the rights to the Duke’s back catalogue, including the “lost album” Toy released this Friday (on the eve of what would’ve been his 75th birthday), for the modest sum of $250 million, 50% less than The Boss received for his songbook from Sony. If accurate, these figures only confirmed what I’ve long suspected: America never really deserved Bowie.

Trawling back through the tsunami of US press coverage that broke out in the wake of his devastating death six years ago, it’s all too apparent that the Special Man remained a spiky and alien presence in the American psyche; an outlier who was never fully embraced into the mainstream bosom of a country that had fascinated him since boyhood. Bowie is conspicuous by his absence from the Kennedy Center Honors and it remains a mystery as to why, as a self-confessed gridiron fan, he never performed at the Super Bowl halftime show.(1)

His championing of bisexuality and use of dramatic make-up early on in his career certainly handicapped him in what remains a far more puritanical country than most in the West. But while it’s true he never had the same commercial clout in the US as he did in the UK, Europe, Australasia and Japan, his influence on popular music and culture in general—and the States in particular—dwarfs not only coevals like Elton John and Rod Stewart, but those colossi that went before him such as The Beatles, the Stones, Dylan and Elvis, and he continues to wield a transgenerational appeal like no other. Every four-year cycle in music over the last five decades has thrown up a whole new crop of Bowie-inspired clones and imitators, most recently with the arrival of the K-pop androgynes.

So while his passing was publicised far and wide Stateside, there was a definite lack of depth in analysing his all-encompassing significance. Time and again, obituary writers failed miserably to hit the milestones of his accomplishments, especially his crowning achievements: that astonishing sequence of albums he made between 1970-1983 that remains the greatest run of albums in pop music history, during which he revolutionised how rock music was presented on stage, on video and album covers. Or the fact that many sub-genres of popular music simply wouldn’t exist without him—from Glam Rock, Punk and New Wave to Synth-Pop, Art-Rock and Goth.

Putting to one side the fact that none of his classic albums from the 70s were even nominated for a Grammy, let alone won one (Bowie never put much stock into such award ceremonies anyway, and the Grammys have always been a notoriously middle-of-the-road organisation with a sketchy reputation for presenting awards based not on merit but backroom deals), and the surprising fact, for many, that Blackstar remains his only album to reach the top of the Billboard Chart, the American eulogies were often marred by faulty chronology, lazy clichés, and serious omissions. For instance: other than a sole mention by Tamron Hall on NBC’s Today Show, Bowie’s persona of Halloween Jack was MIA from Bowie’s roster of dramatis personae, quite an oversight considering that it was while performing in that incarnation—far more than Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane—that broke Bowie big in America, seeing him selling out arenas on the critically and commercially acclaimed Diamond Dogs tour of 1974. While in a widely syndicated paragraph that appeared in USA Today and other newspapers, readers were told that Bowie’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and his Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 were among the “few major honors bestowed on Bowie in his lifetime,” because whoever dreamt up with those lines couldn’t be bothered to read the Wikipedia page dedicated to the list of trophies he garnered over the years.(2)

Another egregious example was the truly abysmal write-up in the New York Times, where John Pareles found it fit to mention inconsequential factoids such as how ‘Under Pressure’ was sampled by Vanilla Ice while failing to cite Pauline Kael—acknowledged as one of the finest film critic of her time—who hailed Bowie’s presence in The Man Who Fell To Earth as “the most romantic figure in recent pictures.” 

While the journalist Bill Wyman chose his Bowie remembrance for Vulture as the moment to argue that Bowie had not written a major song since 1980 and to dismiss Low and Heroes as “overrated.” Though he did profess surprise that not one of Bowie’s landmark long-players of the 1970s made it into Robert Christgau’s annual Top 10 Pazz and Jop poll for the Village Voice, which aggregated votes from most of the leading American music critics at the time.(3) This only reinforced how completely out of step many American music critics were with Bowie’s fleet-footed manoeuvres during his Imperial Period. Some, like Lester Bangs, were openly hostile, but if you fancy a giggle, you should read up and see some of the forgettable dreck they did praise at the time, in his stead.

Furthermore, as most of the obits were penned by men of a certain vintage (Tara Bahrampour at the Washington Post was a rare exception), Bowie’s physical attributes, such as his shattering beauty, through all his guises, as well as his status as one of the major sex symbol’s of the 20th-Century, were barely touched upon; neither were all the beguiling sides of his prismatic personality. Indeed, the picture painted of Bowie as the High Priest of Glam was so overstated in the coverage it ignored the fact that, for the vast majority of his career, Bowie comported himself not like a polysexual vampire from Mars, but as the quintessential suave English gentleman, or “the Cary Grant of Rock” as his sometime sideman Adrian Belew once memorably dubbed him. Accounts of the mesmeric power of his stillness on stage and screen were also only sparingly touched upon, as were illustrations of the intellectual heft of his work, or how his stage name has become an adjective and byword for an artist or any creative work deemed to possess magical, supernatural qualities.

Some American fans were also rightfully miffed that there was no official tribute paid to him by President Obama. (So much for the so-called “Cool President!”) (4) While it’s true Bowie remained a British citizen, his status was that of a global icon who’d lived in America, off and on, since 1974, permanently since 1995. And with millions of American fans, it would’ve been more than fitting for the president to say a few words or release a statement. But Obama wasn’t the only high profile political snub.

During the ‘90s, Bowie and Iman stumped for the Clintons. They were in attendance at the Democratic Convention in 1992 and were pictured in the company of “Bubba” several times since, yet no encomiums were forthcoming from him or his wife either. Actually, I could find no plaudits penned by leading Democrats at all; whereas in stark contrast, Bowie was praised by then-Republican presidential candidates John Kasich, Rick Santorum and, most notably of all, Donald Trump, who described Bowie as “a great guy” and “a great talent.” Bowie even wormed praised from right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, who conceded that Bowie was a “supremely talented rock ‘n’ roll crooner,” although the porcine bloviator couldn’t resist a jab at Bowie’s sylphlike frame.

Considering that, in the second half of his life, Bowie appears to have settled into a broadly Social-Democratic position on the political spectrum, it’s ironic that the most intelligent and insightful homages to him came not from left-leaning publications but from conservative periodicals, particularly the National Review, where, in a frank admission, Carl Eric Scott wrote: “Bowie mattered. And social conservatives, part of the reason he mattered is that he was our opponent. A classy, beautiful, intriguing, attractive, articulate, and poetically potent opponent, but all the more damaging to our vision of the good life because of those qualities.” Liberal outlets, meanwhile, whittled on endlessly about Bowie’s influence on transgenderism, a questionable claim, and something he scoffed at when the subject was raised with him in an interview with 60 Minutes Australia in 2002.

Which brings us onto the biggest Bowie slight of them all to occur during this shiva period. Although some of the US cable channels scrambled to put together tribute programmes dedicated to him, none of the network TV channel schedules were altered to accommodate his legacy or mark his passing, providing yet another example of how irrelevant traditional media outlets have become. However, 60 Minutes, the country’s flagship news magazine, did finally run an unaired profile of Bowie that they produced back in 2003 to promote the forthcoming Reality album and tour. But what was billed as a belated celebration for a cultural icon lasted all of three minutes—right at the end of the programme! And to add further insult, they consigned some extra footage, that could and should have been broadcast, to their website. The programme-makers not only squandered the opportunity to pay a substantive salute, but they provoked an unnecessary backlash that was completely self-inflicted.

Notes:

1)Of course, it’s possible that, like the Crown Honours Lists in the UK, Bowie was offered such enticements but discreetly turned them down.
2)This page is also missing several other notable achievements including Bowie’s award for Best Male Singer in the British Rock and Pop Awards of 1980; the Berolina Award for Commitment and Service to Berlin 1987; the World Music Legend/Outstanding Contribution to Music Award of 1990, and Bowie’s designation as the Greatest Entertainer of the 20th Century voted by the British public for the BBC’s Icons TV show in 2019.
3) Hunky Dory did in fact make the top 10, but only just, by taking the final spot. The Pazz and Jop poll went AWOL between 1972 and 1973, but although Christgau personally bestowed a solid B+ rating on both LP’s, there’s little confidence that either Ziggy or Aladdin Sane would’ve made it into the Top 10.
4) The Clinton Library Twitter account did release photographs of Bowie visiting the Clinton White House in 1995. One reason for the silence from the Obamas may have been due to comments made by Iman to Parade magazine back in 2009, in which she stated: “Mrs Obama is not a great beauty,” which garnered headlines, although her following remarks put that opinion in context: “But she is so interesting looking and so bright. That will always take you farther. When you’re a great beauty, it’s always downhill for you. If you’re someone like Mrs Obama, you just get better with age.” If this was indeed the cause for the absence of a presidential panegyric, then it suggests pettiness in the extreme on behalf of the First Family. When the subject of Bowie’s death was raised by the White House press corps, Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, admitted he wasn’t sure whether the president was a Bowie fan but opined: “There are a number of people all across the globe who have talked about how they had been inspired by (Bowie’s) life and his work… there’s no denying the impact of his contribution to art and music and film.”

 

A live vocal performance of “Heroes” on TOTP in 1977

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.07.2022
10:55 am
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