From the creator of Airplane, A Melodrama!:
There is an apocryphal story of Groucho Marx meeting the Pope. On being introduced, the Pope said ‘Thank You Mr Marx for all the humour you have put into the world.’
Groucho replied ‘And thank you for all the humour you have taken out of the world’.
‘Airplane, A Melodrama!’ is a re-edit of one of the funniest films of all time with all the gags taken out.
(via BB Submitterator)
English occultist Aleister Crowley wasn’t merely a poet, painter and the Great Beast 666, he was also an aspiring chef! That’s right and if you’d like to make some magick in the kitchen tonight, The Master Therion’s recipe for his “famous” (or would that be “infamous”) curried rice dish, “Riz Aleister Crowley” has been posted on the Music is the Heart Tumblr blog, after being found among his papers at Syracuse University in New York.
Bon appetit! (Larger page 1 here, page 2 here)
Via Coilhouse
Earlier in his show, he talked about how he was going to be “out west” having a battery of tests done at a hospital next week. Then the above soliloquy took place. What’s going on?
Tomorrow night in Echo Parque with the incomparable John “Drumbo” French (pictured above in 1968) ! :
ECHO PARK FILM CENTER is proud to host MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon) with JOHN “DRUMBO” FRENCH on SAT, Oct 9 at 1200 N Alvarado St. (at Sunset Blvd.) Los Angeles, CA. 90026, 213-484-8846, $5 admission
7pm - CROW’S MILK - Rare MAGIC BAND documentary film (2003, 50 minutes)
8pm - Interview of JOHN FRENCH by Gerry Fialka.
10pmish - Book signing and more film of MAGIC BAND live in concert (London 2003, 80m)
The public is invited to this engaging Gerry Fialka interview of JOHN FRENCH, who will address the metaphysics of his callings and the nitty-gritty of his craft. He revolutionized drumming with Captain Beefheart and recently authored the book entitled Beefheart: Through The Eyes Of Magic.FILM INFO: Nearly twenty classic Beefheart compositions are rejuvenated on stage by five of the finest musicians who ever performed in The Magic Band. The playlist ranges from storming versions of such crowd-pleasers as ‘Moonlight On Vermont’ and ‘Big Eyed Beans From Venus’ to the intricate guitar work of ‘Evening Bell and the melodic ‘Alice In Blunderland’.
Especially interesting are the instrumental versions of songs such as ‘I Wanna Find A Woman That’ll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go’, ‘My Human Gets Me Blues’ and ‘Steal Softly Thru Snow’. Without Don’s voice, for Don is no longer performing, these compositions can be clearly heard as the mind and finger bending riddles they are.
The vocal parts in this Magic Band are taken by John French who comments “Don had a great lung capacity - he had a 50 inch chest. I have to breathe a lot harder and low frequencies take a lot more energy to push. I did a lot of training and exercise to get the most I could out of this puny 42 inch chest.”
This film of the London Shepherds Bush Empire concert in April 2003 (80 minutes) was directed by Elaine Shepherd who was also director of the BBC documentary ‘The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart’.
A second DVD ‘Crows Milk’ (originally titled ‘Like Bluegrass, Only Weirder’) is included in the package. This is a 50 minute documentary which follows The Magic Band rehearsals in California in February 2003, recording of the CD ‘Back To The Front’, the feelings of the band members about the project, rehearsals in London for the two 2003 UK concerts, plus concert and backstage footage from Camber Sands and Shepherds Bush. John Peel provides the narration.
There is also a short amount of recently found 8mm footage from John French’s home movie collection which shows Don sitting on a sofa and sketching and Don viewing a car in a garage while wearing a neck-brace and a ‘coolie’ hat. He had apparently had just had a crash in his other car which was a wreck. This material dates from the early to mid 1970s
Thx Cliff Martinez !
NICE! Watch the entire fantastic 45-minute set performed by Gorillaz last night after their David Letterman taping at the Ed Sullivan Theater. There’s a new thing called “Live on Letterman” where his musical guests hang out and do a complete set streamed live at CBS.com. Considering Letterman’s normal production values—no show on TV has better-sounding music—these ought to be a treat.
PWSNT posts examples of white people using the “N” word on Facebook. Check out the fool selling his blood for $ and bitching about the nurse as if she is the reason for his problems and the 18-year-old idiot, racist serviceman representing Americans abroad…
Thank you Chris Campion of Berlin, Germany!
Over at The Quietus blog, they’ve got a fun feature where they ask musical luminaries like Nick Cave, John Lydon, Iggy Pop, Mike Patton and Ennio Morricone what their favorite Miles Davis album is. Unsurprisingly, asking these iconoclastic fellas, the majority of the nods go to Miles’ incredibly far out 70s album (from Bitches Brew to Dark Magus basically), the ones that most jazz fans, and even staunch Miles Davis fans used to absolutely hate, but that have been reconsidered critically in recent years as the public caught up to them
For me, I started to get into this “difficult” spot of the Miles Davis catalog about ten-twelve years ago. I already owned Bitches Brew and Get Up with It (which features a incredible sidelong elegy to Duke Ellington, (“He Loved Him Madly”) improvised in the studio after Miles heard Ellington had died and cited by Brian Eno as the beginnings of ambient music) but it was A) getting a really good stereo system in 2002 and B) reading this amazing rant by Julian Cope about this period of Miles’ output that saw me really investigate the “horrible” racket Miles was making then. Wanting new music to listen to on my new toy, I bought Dark Magus, Pangaea and Aghartha in the space of three consecutive days. Once I started, I fell into a musical rabbit hole that I didn’t get out of for about a year or two later. I was not a very popular guy with the neighbors back then, I don’t think.
Not that I am saying anything here that hasn’t been expressed already in quarters like The Wire magazine, but if you ask me, the material that Miles Davis produced between 1970 and 1975 (when ill health and drug dependency forced him to retire for several years) is the absolute apex of his vast recorded output. Don’t get me wrong, I love Kind of Blue, In a Silent Way, Milestones, and many other earlier Miles Davis albums, but the ones I play loudest, most often and that I pay the most attention to, are the coke-out live albums, Dark Magus, Aghartha, Pangaea. These albums are… fucking unique and that’s putting it mildly. There is nothing else to compare them to, even remotely, in the history of modern music (Maybe Can meets Fela Kuti?)
With up to three electric guitarists (Reggie Lucas, Pete Cosey and Dominique Gaumont), Miles on organ and electrified trumpet (run through a wah-wah pedal) and a rhythm section consisting of the insane, propulsive drumming of Al Foster, Mtume on percussion and the most amazing Michael Henderson on bass holding the whole thing together, holy shit, these performances are AGGRESSIVE. Julian Cope wrote about notion of continental plates shifting to get across the power of the Pangaea set (recorded live in Osaka, Japan in 1975 on the evening of the day that Aghartha was recorded) and I’d say that’s about right. Every instrument which isn’t soloing is placed in service of THE GROOVE—even the guitars can be seen as adding a percussive element to the overall wall of noise-funk effect. At the proper volume, it can plow you down like a Mack truck. Interestingly, from the midst of this dank, swirling sonic maelstrom, every time one of the musicians steps forward for a solo, it reminds me of the odd noises and “squiggly” sounds that seem to come out of nowhere in certain Stockhausen or Xenakis compositions, cutting through the soupy din (At one point on Dark Magus, a drum machine is pulled out and used like a machine gun).
This 1973 clip is a pretty scorching example of what Miles and his band was doing live at the time. It MUST be turned up loud for the proper effect:
The complete and original Andy Warhol footage of The Velvet Underground and Nico from 1966. Richard Metzger posted a shorter version of this last year, and wrote an insightful piece about it, check it out here.
More clips of Warhol’s The Velvet Underground & Nico after the jump…
Wunderbar! If this guy was really running for office, I would vote for him!
Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter puts a new audio device in his high tech arsenal through the paces:
The Dirty-Carter Experimental Sound Generating Instrument uses a dual 4-stage shift register. Each register is controlled independently. Two oscillators are used per register: one as a clock, the other as input data that is cascaded through the four stages. The outputs from the stages are mixed together. A fast clock rate produces a crude form of wavetable synthesis, whilst a slow clock rate creates audible pulses and clicks. The clock speed and the data input’s frequency are controlled by touch electrodes/pads. By tilting the instrument, sound from both the 4-stage shift registers can be mixed together. Glitchy noise, deep drones and percussive peeps!
Thirty years ago this month, a new play opened in London’s National Theater that was to change legal and theatrical history. Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain contrasted Julius Caesar’s Roman invasion of Celtic Britain with the Saxon invasion of Romano-Celtic Britain, and finally Britain’s involvement in Northern Ireland during The Troubles of the late 20th century. Epic in scale, Brenton’s intelligent analysis of the effects of imperialism was sidelined when The Romans in Britain became center of a farcical court trial over a simulated act of buggery.
The son of a Methodist minister, Howard Brenton was born in Porstmouth in 1942, educated at Chichester High School, and at Cambridge University, where he won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for poetry. In 1965, he wrote his first play Ladder of Fools, described as an “Actable, gripping, murky and moody: how often can you say that of the average new play tried out in London, let alone of an undergraduate’s work.”
A highly talented and original writer, Brenton quickly proved he was unafraid to investigate controversial or contentious political subjects. His first big success as a playwright was Christie in Love (1969), which examined the public’s fascination with murderers through the life of John Christie, who had murdered at least 6 women at his home, 10 Rillington Place. The play opened with a monster-like Christie rising from beneath a grave of torn newspapers, and then masturbating in front of the audience. His next Brassneck (1973) followed the rise of an inner city family over thirty years, from radical politics to drug dealing. While The Churchill Play (1974) questioned the rise of state security against individual liberty, and opened with a dead Churchill rising from his catafalque in Westminster. The play briefly caused a national scandal, as it questioned Churchill’s actions as a political leader. Brenton followed this with Weapons of Happiness, an examination of a factory strike in London. In 1977, he was then commissioned to write The Romans in Britain.
Commissioned by Sir Peter Hall, director of the National Theater, a key establishment figure and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who formed an odd collaboration with the left-leaning, libertarian Brenton. The key to their relationship was Hall’s genuine respect for Brenton, and his belief that playwrights should deal with contemporary political issues, in particular, at that time, the situation in Northern Ireland. To direct the production, Hall brought in Michael Bogdanov, a young, imaginative director, known for his acrobatic and physical productions for the RSC.
It was soon apparent that a key scene in the play would be troublesome. This scene centered on the anal rape of a native Celt called Marban, by a Roman centurion, played by actors Greg Hicks and Peter Sproule. The action was symbolic, but its effect was literal. Both actors bravely agreed to play the scene naked, and it was decided that Sproule, as the rapist centurion, would grasp his penis and extend his thumb to simulate an erection. He would then jab at Hicks’ behind in a simulation of sodomy. During rehearsals word went out that alleged hardcore sex was being performed by the actors under Bogdanov’s direction. This led to a planned boycott by the theater’s ushers. To stop this, Bogdanov invited the ushers, and any other concerned parties, to an open rehearsal. Beer was suppled and the audience gave the performers and their scene overwhelming approval - a literal thumbs up, one might say.
In October, The Romans in Britain opened to mixed reviews, ranging from a disparaging “These ignoble Romans are a national disgrace” in Now magazine, to discussions of the play’s political content. Only one thing remained constant, the shock of the rape scene. Its effect was later compared to that of the news of John F Kennedy’s assassination.
Tipped off by a journalist, Mary Whitehouse, a busy-body President of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, an unrelenting campaigner for censorship, who wanted anything distasteful (i.e. that she didn’t like) off TV screens, raised her concern that the play would “over stimulate” men and incite them to bugger young boys. Though she refused to see the play herself, as she was too frightened it would lead to the “corruption of her soul”, she requested the Metropolitan Police to examine whether the play was “an offence against the Theaters Act of 1968” which outlawed performances “likely to deprave or corrupt.” After a brief investigation, the Attorney General, Lord Havers, decided there was no case to answer. But Mrs. Whitehouse didn’t agree and discovered that a private prosecution could be brought against the director on grounds that he had “procured an act of gross indecency by Peter Sproule with Greg Hicks on the stage of the Olivier Theater,” a law intended to stop men wanking in lavatories.
More on ‘The Romans in Britain’ plus bonus clips after the jump…
Bjork-esque, Camille Dalmais, at one time the “guest vocalist” of French “new wavers” Nouvelle Vague, performed on that band’s innovative bossa nova-styled cover of the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk To Fuck.” The song was used for the soundtrack of 2007’s Planet Terror, directed by Robert Rodriguez.
Here Camille, who incorporates burping and animal noises into her singing, performs the song live in Paris in 2008, taking it even further, with an acapella approach.
Why France loves Camille Dalmais (Times of London)
