Most of these flyers were designed by Buddy Esquire and Phase 2. Drawn by hand and using Letraset, Xerox, Exacto knives, graph paper, stencils etc. these are artifacts of the days before Microsoft Word and Adobe photoshop, real cut and paste. Old skool.
You can check out more of these groovy nuggets of hip hop history at Toledo Hip Hop
More flyers after the jump..
Tomfoolery unleashed the SNES game version of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Academy Award-winning film, There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano.
“Milkshake!”
Via Kottke
If it’s true that as Don Van Vliet said, “Everything goes with everything” then here’s everything thing by ABBA condensed into 10 minutes. Note how not random or jarring it is. I’m trying to write songs that sound like this collage.
How to make an embossed metal box from a soda can.
Via Atomic Shrimp. With thanks to Maria Guimil.
For your weekend viewing pleasure: The complete final Sex Pistols show at Bill Graham’s Winterland, in San Francisco, 1978. For years all I’d ever seen was the B&W Target Video-shot version of this show, then this improved color version popped up on a quasi-legit Chinese DVD about ten or so years ago. Everyone always rags on their supposed shitty last performance… au contraire, folks, they’re incendiary here.
After this show, the supernova that was the Pistols was no more. Say what you will about John Lydon’s later career, in his youth, the man changed the face of music twice, first with the Sex Pistols and later with Public Image, Ltd. Who else can something like that be said about? Miles Davis is the only person who comes to mind.
Tea With Duggie Fields is a beautiful and fascinating short film by Federico Fianchini, in which the Genius of Earls Court talks about his life, his art and his influences.
Fields has painted from the age of 11, when his earliest work, an abstract painting, was entered into a local exhibition amid incredulity that a child could paint so brilliantly. With an interest in structure and design, Fields briefly studied architecture, before he attended the Chelsea School of Art, between 1964 and 1968.
In the late sixties, as he established himself as an artist of note, Fields shared a flat with Pink Floyd’s crazy diamond, Syd Barrett. During the 1970s, he developed his brilliant day-glo style that inspired Marc Bolan, Stanley Kubrick, Derek Jarman and David Bowie, who was snapped with William Burroughs wearing Fields’ portrait of Malcolm McDowall.
Fields’ paintings have been variously described as Pop Art, Post Modernist and Minimalist, but in essence, Fields is very much his own art movement, one he termed MAXIMALism - “Minimalism with a plus plus plus.”
Iconic, unique and startlingly original, his work ranges from portraits of Michael Jackson, The Rolling Stones, Marilyn Monroe, Zandra Rhodes, the artist Andrew Logan, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, to potent images of sexual intercourse, landscapes and his own distinct interpretations of his favored artistic influences (Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian).
Today, the Genius of Earl’s Court continues with his brilliance as painter, digital artist, musician, writer and photographer.
Bonus clips including Duggie Fields on Syd Barrett plus ‘I Wonder Why’ after the jump…
Bisade Ologunde isn’t the only masquerading musician out there of course, but the Nigerian sax man and bandleader is definitely one of the most intriguing.
Lagos-born and Manhattan-based musician took the name Lagbaja (meaning “anonymous” or “faceless one” in Yoruba) when he started his career in the early ‘90s. Wearing a variety of masks onstage falls right in line with carnival tradition of his Yoruba tribe, and has enhanced his appeal among Nigerians. Ologunde’s hip-hop-era take on Afrobeat—he’s taken to naming his style “Africano,” after the title of his fourth album—takes in aspects of jazz and modern R&B. And as seen below in this excellently choreographed video, deals with some of the same issues…
After the jump: a clip from Lagbaja’s intense live show in Ife, near Lagos…
As a young man I grew up in the South and I hated country music. That changed when I first started hearing songs from The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Gram Parsons solo work, all of which seemed to me to be quite different from the hillbilly shit I’d grown up around. The West Coast country vibe had a wide-openness about it that was more in tune with my Jack Kerouac inspired desire to hit the road…a road that was as much a metaphor for spiritual yearning as a slab of tar and concrete. Gram Parsons’ western music wasn’t solely about blue collar blues, booze and bad women. Parsons was a romantic in the traditional poetic sense, a seeker of beauty in the coarseness of everyday life. Yes, it was honky tonk music, but in Gram’s world the honky tonks weren’t violent dives of retribution, they were a kind of cowboy cafe society that weren’t far removed from the cafes of the French surrealists in Paris of the 1930’s, where absinthe was drunk instead of tequila.
This interview with Michael Bates in 1973 was Gram Parsons’ last recorded conversation. 6 months after the interview Parsons O.D’d on morphine and tequila in a motel on the edge of the Mojave desert.
Bate’s connection to Gram is almost accidental. In 1973—while he was the host of a CBC radio show in Ottawa, Ontario—Bate was on a road trip when he happened to spot Parsons’ beaten-up tour bus by the side of the Massachusetts Turnpike, 90 miles from Boston. He stopped and arranged an interview, which he says turned out to be the final recorded conversation with Parsons, who died that September from an overdose of morphine and tequila.
Gram candididly talks about Keith Richards and The Stones, bad dealings with The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers and how Waylon Jennings had to walk around the block to smoke a joint during a recording session with Chet Atkins. In the beginning of the interview Parsons makes mention of being stuck in England and left penniless by The Byrds. Gram was fired by Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman when he refused to join them on a South Africa tour as he was was opposed to apartheid. Some of his friends at the time thought Gram actually quit The Byrds so he could hang out with The Stones in London.
It’s Gram’s birthday today (Nov. 5).
In 2005, Six Flags amusement park in New Orleans was temporarily closed in advance of hurricane Katrina’s assault on the Gulf Coast. Five years later, it’s still not open for business. The once thriving attraction is now a virtual ghost town. Sad and eerie.
The park is closed not only to the public but to photographers as well. The demise of Six Flags is not a source of pride for the city of New Orleans.
Music by MGMT.
Bill Barol at Boing Boing just posted a piece on the sad fate of Six Flags New Orleans. But the article’s video link has been removed from Youtube. The video below is the one formerly linked to the Boing Boing post. It was shot by photographer Teddy Smith.
Thanks to BB for bringing this story to my attention.
The Big Cube, a 1969 LSD exploitation flick starring a washed-up Lana Turner and West Side Story’s George Chakiris, is a miasma of nightmarish psychedelic cliches intended to scare kids away from LSD. This turkey is a blast from beginning to end. Highly recommended. Watch it while you’re high.